THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1930. RUSSIA AND MARKETS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20678, 25 September 1930, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1930. RUSSIA AND MARKETS.

Behind the cutting of Russian wheat prices and the Soviet Government's chartering of numerous ships for this export trade there is an urgent national need. Tho Soviet leaders decided, two years ago, that they would industrialise Russia within five years. In this design they were prompted by the fund a-' mental theory on which they based their revolutionary programme. Being Marxians, they remembered that Karl Marx insisted that the social revolution needed the conditions of an industrial country, and yet they found themselves committed to their cause of revolt in the most completely agricultural country in the world. To change these conditions seemed, therefore, a first duty. But they have addressed themselves all tho more devotedly to it for a reason of a very practical kind. Until Russia becomes an industrial country she cannot take a place among the great Powers. Without munition factories and military railways—so the Soviet reasoning runs —she will not be duly feared; to be heeded in the international struggle for commercial supremacy, she must have ample implements of manufacture. In short, the Five Years Plan is a bid for power. But Russia is without financial resources for this aggressive development. Her foreign credit is bad. She must therefore pay for what she wants in the export of her chief natural commodities—wheat, timber and coal; and her peculiar position, as a country having national ownership and control of all sources and means of production, enables her to thrust her goods into every available market at an immense advantage. They are harvested from fields, forest and mines nationally owned and managed, the work being done by what is really serf labour, dragooned mercilessly and paid a mere pittance. Hence she can undersell other countries. It matters little, in 'the eyes of the Soviet leaders, whether the price got be much or little below what other countries demand at the dictates of their economic necessities. Russia needs money—in other words, factories, tractors, trains, machines, "tools to make tools"—and a few extra millions of bushels of wheat, or millions of i'eet of timber, or thousands of tomi of coal, given in exchange, are neither here nor there.

It is this desperate hurry to lay hold! of means to industrialise Russia that; actuates the Soviet leaders in their "drive" to capture foreign markets for wheat and other characteristic products of their country; and in their haste they callously disregard the elemental needs of the people they compel to produce these things. The Russia they would make powerful is not composed of men and women whose happiness is of much concern to commissars in Moscow; rather is it a Russia able to force their revolutionary programme on the outside world. For the sake of this programme—more malevolent than benevolent—they subject 180,000,000 people, living under most primitive conditions, to abject poverty. It adds to their crime against humanity that they give these people schools and theatres, taking care to make these amenities serve a particular outlook on life suited to Bolshevik purposes, and taking care also to hamper religious freedom lest it lead to an outcry for political liberty. These are but "gifts of the Greeks," meant to turn thought from deprivations enforced in the interests of the Five Years Plan. There has been a prodigious expansion of wheat acreage —sown and harvested under compulsion ; factories have multiplied; new mines have been opened. But, by a strange irony in a land declaredly Communist, the dragooned workers have not been permitted to consume anything like a fair share of what they have produced. They have been given doles by way of paltry subsidies, assurances of pension and some medical care; but these things cannot hide the stark injustice of a low wage-scale, fixed by a heartless Government, bent on being able to sell cheaply in foreign markets. A portion of the wheat compulsorily grown is given back in bread severely rationed ; the abundant remainder goes to swell exports for the sake of the Plan. So timber goes abroad that ought to have been used in replacing squalid huts,, and millions suffer cold for lack of fuel sent away in payment for things required in the industrial scheme. It is a pitiful, pernicious business, made more horrible by the deliberate spreading of the notion that this suffering will make great the Russia these millions love with an innate intensity of sentiment. The clumping tactics now in progress, particularly with respect to wheat, are creating a situation fraught with very serious consequences. What is reported from the corn exchanges of London and Liverpool is but part of the untoward effect. It is known that the officials of the United States Consulate in London take a very depressing view of the probable outcome. In some countries in the British Empire, notably Canada and Australia, the outlook is clouded, as it is in the Argentine, where considerable British capital is invested in wheat-growing. Consequently, it in not surprising to learn that

representations have been made to the British Government suggesting an embargo on Russian wheat, and that the proposal of a Grain Imports Board, having power to exclude at discretion any shipments of grain, whatever their country of export, has found favour. There is a probability of consequences in international politics. Difficulties arise when any exclusive policies are adopted. To hamper the economic development of Russia is to check to some extent universal recovery of industrial and commercial prosperity. But, in view of all the circumstances, the challenge thrown out by the Soviet Government is not one to be lightly regarded or patiently suffered.