FARM SLAVES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18528, 15 October 1934, Page 5

FARM SLAVES

STARVED IN RUSSIA TO PROVIDE EXPORTS DAMNING REPORT LONDON, August -Hi. Food shortage among the Russian peasantry is hound to continue in existing circumstances, stales a monograph on Collectivised Agriculture in tin' Soviet Union published by the School of Slavonic, and Ea.-t European Studies in ihe University <>t London. A section of the monograph devoted to social and labor conditions on Russia comes to the conclusions:— That the legal status of the members of eolleteivc farms is for all practical purposes equivalent to bondage; That the taxation and other impost? levied on the collective farms and their members are so heavy as to tiepress the standard of living to the lowest conceivable level; and That social and labor conditions in both State and collective farms are extremely bad. The report states that although the harvest of 103.1 was officially stated to be of record magnitude, the an th.Orities themselves admitted thtr. official estimates are carelessly arrived at, and heavy allowances have to be made for losses and seed purposes. Since 101.1 the population has increased from 139 to nearly 170 millions, but the amount of grain available per head is not, it is stated, so much as it was before the war. Bread still remains the staple diet of the overwholminging majority of the Russian people. The decline in live-stock is partly due to the fact that the peasants, having little grain with which to feed their animals, proceeded to kill off large numbers of them.

A table shows that the number of cattle fell from fiS.l million head in 1020 to ,18.6 million in 10.1.1, and the number of sheep and goats from 147.2 million to 50.fi million in the same period. PLANNED FAMINE. The author of this section of the monograph—Mr. Lancelot Lawtojiconics to the conclusion that under collectivisation grain exports have been possible only because large numbers of people were continually deprived of a sufficiency of food. “ The Soviet Government,” he writes, “does not conceal that it. is forced to export grain and other agricultural commodities irt order to meet its foreign obligations. It argues that,, broadly speaking, the consequences are beneficial to the country ns a whole. Surely (the writer adtt's)it cannot be beneficial to the Country that large numbers of its inhabitants should perish from famine ” The section of the monograph viewing social and labor Conditions (signed by A. V. Baikalov) declares that in practice the collective farms have no independence arid no gohittiiie co-operative organisation, and that the laws and regulations bind the peasniPs for life to a collective farm. “The collectivised peasants,” it states, “have now no better chance of escaping from the villages than their forefathers had before Ifffil. “The hotlsing conditions in many State farms are a constant subject of the severest criticism in the Soviet press. ”