THROUGH SOVIET RUSSIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20603, 30 June 1930, Page 6

THROUGH SOVIET RUSSIA

MOSCOW TO SIBERIA. TIRING TRAIN JOURNEY. IN THE GRIP OF WINTER. ONLY SOUR BLACK BREAD LEFT. BY MAX MURRAY. (Copyright.) No. VI. Mr Murray continues his story of the wearisome railway journey from Moscow to Siberia. Ho gives a Batirical sketch of the occupants of the State car on tho train to which he referred in the previous articlo. The food on the train does not improve, but rather becomes worse us the journey extends. In tho State car, at the rear of the train, there aro several berths occupied l»y a committee of workers. They are on (heir way to inspect and report on something. Somo of the methods of the party are not without subtlety. These men are going in great state jfrom Moscow to sets that the farmers are doing their work properly, or to see what is tho matter with the timber industry. It is admitted that very much is wrong with both of these industries. Some of the men 0/ these committees can scarcely read or write, yet they may go and report on the most intricato plans and engineering projects. I saw the members of this committee in the dining car. They had eaten tremendously of what there was, and now they, were frowning and rolling their cigarettes reflectively about their lips, with a new air of authority. It is a tradition in Russia that a man must take himself seriously. It may bo that if one were to start laughing ho would laugh inordinately. " Serving the Party Well." It would insult these men terribly to . suggest to them that they have been sent on these missions to give them something harmless to do. ,If they suspect that they are.doing no real good they disguise tho fact well indeed. But they are serving the party well, for it must bo shown clearly to the worker that what is being done is being done by the will of the worker. He must realise that he is thinking of everything and doing everything. Hypocrisy in Russia may also be but a means to an end. These men are able to go to tho farms and see the land unploughed, and«know at once that it is the farm workers who have not ploughed it, and to the forests and see that the conscripted labourers aro not cutting down enough trees, and in each grave situation they are able to see that it is the fault of the workers on the spot, and not of the directors in the Kremlin. At niidnight last night I was dozing when we halted at a village. I was startled by a crash of broken glass. There was a scream, and a door opened, and then another door. There was another crash of shattered glass. Then our own door was flung open, and the German woman rushed in. She. snatched a heavy brass bowl, and was about to hurl it through the window when wo stopped her. She screamed that this was the station where she was to meet her husband, and sha was breaking the window to jump out to him. Woman Meets Her Husband. Two attendants dragged the woman back to her own compartment, and sat guarding her, one on either side. In this way •' she met her husband, on the borders of Siberia, at 2 o'clock in the morning. She had still two days to travel over a branch line. ' Every day some Russians paste up sheets of paper in the restaurant car, which they call the " Train Gazette." This morning it was filled with offensive references to the unfortunate German woman. /And so we go on. In four days this trans-Siberian train has made up three-quarters of an hour of the 20 hciurs we lost at the beginning of the journey. . On Thursday we go from the mingled dust and snow to the grip of winter again, and during the night somebody has forgotten to heat the carriages and nobody is able to sleep because of the cold. The snow is almost untrodden since the last fall," and it is beginning to fall again The endless forest begins to give up the country to wide expanses of clear land, and villages cluster close to the ground in the hollows. There are no fences and no boundaries to individual holdings. Peasants do not live each on his farm, but go out to them from the village. Collectivisation should be simple enough in Russia. It seems to have taken everything into, account but the temperament of the peasants. Last of the Brown Bread.

Once, in a station yard, I saw a collection of-new farming machinery, but I have not seen any in the villages. The cow and the horse still work side by side, and haul*the primitive wooden plough. I have Eeen one motor vehicle and not a single made road. Hour after hour we go on through this changeless country. The last of the brown bread has disappeared from the restaurant car. Wo are told that there is nothing but the sour black bread. An Austrian has taught me how to make chess men from this heavy black bread, so it has uses after all. He learned how to put it to this U3e when he was a war prisoner in Siberia. Once he escaped and walked 5000 kilometres to the Austrian border, but he was caught there and brought back. In the coarse of the revolution this Austrian was released by one faction and imprisoned again by another. He escaped again, and made his way to Vladivostock. Ho came back to take charge of a Japanese timber concession, and there were so many bandits that he had to take one band into his pay to protect him from the others. He was arrested by the police and the pay that had arrived for his men was stolen by them. Then the police were taken prisoner by other police, and the Austrian was released and arrested again as a Japanese ppy. He was given work in the office, and part of his duty was to take down the statements of his fellow prisoners who were to be shot that day. Most of them asked for something to eat. Train rood Getting Worse. We come to the capital of Siberia, Novo-Sibirsk. It looks no better than the other towns we have come to, but it is marked in larger type on the map, and it hud a good record in the revolution. It had a better record than Irkutsk, which was formerly the capital, and it is nearer to Moscow. The food on the train seems to get a littje worse at each meal. I would not criticise the food in a country where food is scarce if what we were given had been cooked properly. The waiters do not wear uniforms, their clothes are not very clean, and they have no collars. A shortage of sugar has come to-day. We pass alone an embankment and below us there are the tangled "remains of a goods train, so this afternoon I feel more reconciled to going slow over this light line. , But this afternoon the supply of cigarettes gave out. There is considerable talk of making this a. tourist route again, but there are 110 real tourists on this train. (To be concluded!.