“SLAVE STATE”

Southland Times, Issue 21982, 4 April 1933, Page 5

“SLAVE STATE”

CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA CIVILIANS REPORTED STARVING AGRICULTURAL DECAY (United Press Assn. —Telegraph Copyright.) London, April 2. After a tour of North Caucasus and the Ukraine studying the effect of collectivization, the Manchester Guardian’s special correspondent in Russia paints a horrifying picture of starving villagers whose produce has been seized to feed the cities and for export. He instances a market town in the Kuban district of the Caucasus which is overrun by well-fed soldiery while the civilians are starving, having had practically nothing to eat for weeks. The scanty food offered for sale is unfit for animals, and the crowd is too poor to buy miserable fragments of cheese and half-rotten potatoes. It is impossible to adequately describe the town’s desolation and hopelessness not merely on account of famine, but because the population has been uprooted and whole villages exiled. North Caucasus is 90 per cent, collectivized and almost resembles a wilderness, the fields being choked with weeds and the cattle dead. “I was shown a piece of bread made from weeds, straw and inadequately little millet,” he stated. “It seemed inconceivable that anyone would eat it, ypt it is a rare delicacy. Srniliarly, in the Ukraine cattle and horses are dead, the fields are neglected and the harvests are meagre. The Government seized the grain with such thoroughness and brutality that there is no bread anywhere. Unless this decay in agriculture is stopped famine will extend throughout the country. Russia is becoming a slave State, and not 5 per cent, of Russians enjoy a standard of life that approaches that of the English unemployed on the lowest scale of relief.”