RUSSIA AS IT IS

Wairarapa Age, 31 May 1928, Page 5

RUSSIA AS IT IS

DESPERATE SITUATION DEVELOPING. COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN PROSPECT. PERSECUTION AND DISCONTENT. United Press Association.—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. (Received Wednesday, 7.15 pan.) LONDON, May 29. The “Daily Express” publishes the first of a series of articles from a special correspondent who has made a tour of Russia. The correspondent says that Red Russia is faced with the gravest crisis since the revolution, which may come to a head in a few months if the harvest is bad, or it may be postponed if the harvest is good, but the end must be the same. Communism will either have to ac- . knowledge defeat or sensationally change its policy. Outstanding features are a shortage of money, which has practically forced officers and men of the Red Army and Civil Servants to take part of their pay in loan stocks. The Kremlin is struggling hard to support the rouble and trying to force from business men and small holders higher payments, though they now pay 62 per cent, of the taxes. Lenin had to acknowledge a partial failure of the Marxist theory and permitted and encouraged private trading. *Stalin, however, changed all this. Within the year ended last October 103,000 private businesses closed. Out of 11,000 private shops in Moscow, four thousand closed in the last six months. The peasants are dissatisfied. They claim they cannot obtain goods at rural co-operative shops in exchange for their wheat. The Government has gone to the length of putting barricades between villages and markets to prevent peasants selling wheat to speculators. It has imprisoned thousands of peasants and confiscated their lands. It has even executed some. The rupture of Anglo-Russian relationships to Russia is very hard, and the Soviet is using the economic situation to stir up the bitterest hatred against Britain, which is represented as a villain trying to ruin Russia.—(Australian Bress Association.)