THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS TUESDAY, JULY 38, 1933 HOW FARES IT WITH RUSSIA?

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21546, 18 July 1933, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS TUESDAY, JULY 38, 1933 HOW FARES IT WITH RUSSIA?

It is suggested by a recent visitor to Russia that the strictest censorship cannot long hide the truth about economic conditions there. That there is a strict censorship of the news officially sent abroad needs now no proof: it is one of the things known with certainty. But this care is strangely nullified by the dependence of the Soviet Government on press propaganda among its 160,000,000 subjects, and in its use of this vehicle of appeal and threat it must needs make reference to plans gone wrong and other failures. Thus, from the columns of Pravda, Isvestia and other official newspapers —there are no independent papers in Russia—it is easily possible to find contradictions of almost every authorised statement of economic achievement —even after discounting severely every one of these revelations as possibly exaggerated to inspire redoubled efforts to achieve industrial prosperity. Those eager to admire llussian methods and accomplishments are awkwardly placed by these official admissions. Lately, too, there has been so much making of scapegoats for misfortune that the logical deduction of considerable failure is inevitable. If further authoritative evidence of this measure of failure bo required, it will be found in the feverish haste with which the Government promulgated a second Five-Year Plan before the first had run its full course. There was no thought of a second when the first was instituted | the country was to be brought in the stated period to a unique level of material and cultural development. Agriculture, in particular, was to provide financial means to give the whole land an industrial prosperity, served by vast technical and mechanical activity, and in the process every section of the population was to have better food, better housing, better conditions of work, better remuneration and a better standard of living in all respects. It has not happened. This fact cannot be explained away by any argument of the Soviet leaders about causes of disappointment, for every such argument admits the fact and is nonsense apart from it. And over against all claims of triumph, in whatsoever measure, stands the rigorous administration of another dose of the economic physic that was confidently prescribed as sufficient for the restoration of complete national health. The details given to-day concerning food supplies add to a voluminous body of facts fully authenticated. They illustrate the steady progress of severe rationing from the stage of depriving the peasants for the sake of the workers in secondary industries, to the eventually crippling restrictions on these workers themselves. The collectivist peasantry are worse off than ever, and the people of the "socialised" cities are suffering from an appallingly steep rise in prices of food, in token of the spreading scarcity. It has been claimed that tho Five-Year Plan raised wages by 67 per cent, and its announced intention was to increase the purchasing power of the rouble by 20 per cent. But real wages have sunk, in terms of agricultural products, to a mero fraction of their former value, and the rouble is worth in Moscow only a few pre-war kopeks. Against this lowering of the material standard of living may be put certain cultural advances—Mr. Monkhouse, one of the Vickers engineers recently on trial in Moscow, made reference to them a few days ago—but this looks like giving a stone to those craving for bread, and it makes the situation no better to call the substitute a precious stone. Not long ago Mr. Maurice Hindus, whose books on Russia reveal him as markedly proSoviet, said in a published article that "tho Five-Year Plan ends with the cultural standard of the Russian masses higher than it has ever been in Russian history, but with their standard of living lower than it has been in a decade, and in food appreciably lower than at the beginning of tho plan. Cruel indeed has been the price Russia has paid for the first Five-Year Plan." Incidentally, there is reason to doubt sweeping assertions about the lifting of the. cultural level, for in February last the Soviet Government announced its decision to overhaul its education system completely—because of the lack of culture in the younger generation. However, there is not tho slightest reason to doubt the shocking shortage of even simple food. Nowb of revolt is therefore not surprising. The official press says little of this, although it is possible to read the fact clearly between the lines of threat. Pravda had in its columns a short time ago a statement to the effect that only by the vigour of the Government and the central committee of the Communist Party was it "possible to break the ribs" of the peasants in the Caucasus. Ribs are all the more easily broken, of course, when they are in a 'starved body. The sowings for the next wheat harvest in Russia are to-day announced as only 2 per cent below tho area planned, and particulars aro given -of the harsh punishment of farm officials charged with under-estimating crops; but the purpose is export for means to create factories, not the allaying of the growers' pangs of hunger. And that industrialisation is proved to be breaking down. Mr. Monkhouse, with good means of knowing, added to his description of the failure of agriculture a statement of the shortcomings of the heavy industries, such as iron and steel and coal, and there is proof that the electricpower development of which so much has been heard is likely to be largely unharnessed for lack of technical intelligence. "Sabotage" is a word much on Moscow's lips: apparently the culprits mainly responsible for the threatened breakdown of economic plans are to be found in the Kremlin aud other high places.