THE METHODS OF COMMUNISM

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 257, 29 October 1937, Page 5

THE METHODS OF COMMUNISM

CATHOLIC SOCIAL GUILD LECTURE.

At the meeting of the Catholic Social Study Club in St. Josehh’s Hall on Wednesday, Rev. Father L. Brice spoke on the subject of Communism.

“We have read the recent report of the impressions of the Minister of Finance on the May-day parade in Russia and his hopes that Communism would make a real contribution to human welfare. But this report, like so many others, gives only one side of Soviet Russia. These parades are merely a part of the Soviet’s elaborate scheme of window-dressing. The bookshops and libraries of the world have been flooded with literature extolling the great achievements of Communism in Russia, representing that country to be a paradise for the worker and the peasant. Those who study only this propagandist literature are naturally filled with enthusiasm. But in order to gain a true perspective of Soviet Russia we must consider also the other side of the question. Undoubtedly the Communist leaders are idealists, undoubtedly they have accomplished much for a backward people. But to imagine that Russia under the Soviets has been anything like a paradise for the worker and the peasant—as so many Communist supporters do imagine it to be—is a great mistake. “During the first five-year plan I read many reports of the wonderful advantages to the Russian peasants which the new system of collectivisation of agriculture had brought. To judge whether this system is a success or not is as yet impossible. Time will tell. But what we can know at least is that the price the peasants paid for collectivisation was extremely heavy, perhaps too heavy. Even the workers in the Soviet cities believed that the collectivisation was being accomplished voluntarily, even gladly. They did not know that it was effected by the Communists with a ruthlessness and a tyranny which makes the story of the collectivisation of agriculture in Russia one of the darkest in history.’’ It is certainly true, as Lawton reported in his Economic History of Soviet Russia” that at first persuasive methods were tried to induce the peasants to abandon their private Holdings and to go into the collective farms; but these methods failing, those who resisted were arrested, their children taken from them and placed in State farms, and their property was confiscated. Any peasant who resisted, or who was a little less poor than the average was treated as a “Kulak,” i.e., a rich peasant who nad exploited the others, and was sent into exile.

“It will never be known how many were arrested and exiled in the far north and east,” says Lawton, “where they were put to forced labour. Day by day trains consisting of truck-loads of prisoners passed over the railways. “in the towns almost hourly,” he continues,” black motor vans, closely packed with peasants, rattled over the cooblestones on the way to the gaols. No laws prevailed. The State sanctioned anarchy whenever it suited its purpose to do so. Arrests were made at the whim of officials; in some instances for no other offence than having spoken disparagingly of the Communists. Eacn oay the Communists shot a number of peasants. Whole families fled across the frontiers. It became necessary to strengthen the guard in order to prevent a mass migration out of Russia.”

“It is not without question,” reported Mr. Mark Patrick, M.P., who revisited Russia in 1933, “that enormous numbers of Kulaks (falsely socalled as well as real) and of other prisoners of the G.P.U. (Soviet Secret Police) have been forcibly transported to the forest areas of the north, and once there have no alternative but to work at such wages as the authorities choose to give them. I have reason to know that in some cases no wages were paid at all. No lists of figures are needed to confirm the fact that the liquidation of the kulaks brought unnumbered tragedies to innocent men and women.”

Ellery Walter in his “Russia’s Decisive Year,” declared that in four weeks he saw 17 trainloads filled with peasants who were not kulaks, but were being transferred to Siberia because they woud not adapt tnemselves to the Government’s collectivisation policy. “These train-loads were grapnic and pitiful evidence,” he says, That collectivisation had not been voluntary. Wholesale arrests were taking place all over the soviet union and inhabitants of village after village were being transported to distant lumber camps and industrial camps

Of the 35,000 steel-workers at Kuznetz, 11,000 were prisoners. They were for the most part peasants from the collective farm areas and were kept within a barbed wire enclosure. . . . .Of the 40,000 workers at Magnetogorsk, 15,000 workers are prisoners.” In the third year of the Fiveyear Plan, U 931,” millions of peasants were still resisting the collective movement .... an internal war was being waged. G.P.U. militia were everywhere, and the atmosphere seemed tense and bristling with revolt.” The collective farm movement was vital to the success of the first fiveyear plan. The Government had to nave grain for export with which to buy machinery. Peasants were froced to sell their grain at about one tenth the price they had formerly received in the open market, and this, although they had not enough to feed themselves. Seeing that everything they grew was practically confiscateu the peasants reiused to grow more. In consequence, whilst the Soviet Government was exporting grain from Russia an area having a population of 65,000,000 was in the grip of famine. Whilst the Communists were exporting grain to Europe, at least five to 1U million of their own people died of hunger. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in the Times in 1933: “You will discover if you question them (the people of the Ukraine and North Caucasus) that they had no bread at all for three months past, only potatoes and some millet; they will tell you that many have died of famine, and that many are dying every day; that thousands have been shot by the Government and hundreds of thousands exiled; that it is a crime punishable by sentence of death without trial for them to have grain in their houses.” The many Communist sympathisers with whom I talked in Sydney in 1933 and 1934 laughed at me when I mentioned the famine. The literature which they received regularly from Moscow filled with glowing accounts of the happiness and prosperity of the Russian peasants under the collective system never mentioned a word about

it. What their one-sided propaganda did not allow them to realise was the fact that although the Communist leaders may be men who have great ideals for the benefit of humanity, they are also men who are absolutely ruthless in their determination to attain their ideals, men who in order to carry out their collectivisation policy did not scruple to impose on the peasant population a system which was little better than slavery, and who in order to carry out their plan were prepared to sacrifice not only the peasants’ liberty but even their lives. The situation was summed up in a nutshell by Litvinov’s statement, when questioned about the famine at the London Economic Conference, “The sacrifice of 15 to 20 million more people would be readily agreed to by the Soviet Government in order to transform Russia into a real ist state.”