RUSSIAN PEASANTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21586, 2 September 1933, Page 11

RUSSIAN PEASANTS

DRASTIC TREATMENT WHOLESALE BANISHMENT Times Cable LONDON, Auk. 31 The Riga correspondent of tho Times says tho Soviet has prepared a vast new agricultural and cattle breeding scheme designed to supplement the collective farming system, besides organising the settlement of remote regions, particularly Siberia, and bringing virgin soil into cultivation. The plan effects the entire peasantry and aims at absorbing refractory peasants banished from their home lands, also at dispersing, or destroying, tho recalcitrant national minorities that have been resisting the socialisation of agriculture. Tho latter part of tho plan already has been enforced against the Cossacks in the North Caucasus on a scale that is only now being revealed. The populations of entire villages in the past year have been ejected from their homes and transported to the remoto north and Siberia. Train loads of Cossack fanners, crowded in cattle trucks and scantily clothed, have been despatched to unknown destinations.

New populations have boon imported into some villages, while others have simply being burned and fugitives shot. Thousands of male Cossacks have been sent to prison camps.

The prisoners who constructed the canal connecting the White Sea and tho Baltic have begun to dig a canal from Moscow to tho Volga.