FARMING AND TROTSKYISM

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20248, 17 July 1937, Page 9

FARMING AND TROTSKYISM

CROP-WRECKING IN RUSSIA. THE LATEST PURGE. (Times Air Mail Service.) LONDON, June 17. The “enthusiasm” aroused by last week’s executions shows no sign of abatement, and still provides the chief theme in the Soviet Press anil at meetings throughout the country, says the Riga correspondent of the Times. The trial of several high Communist officials on charges of creating discontent among .the peasants of the Ukraine was announced from Moscow yesterday, and further Communist agricultural “wreckers” have now been discovered in other parts of Russia, particularly in the Crimea, the Moscow district, and South Russia, and in the chief grain and sugar-beet centres. The alleged ringleaders of this agricultural “wrecking” are Malinoff, secretary of the Black Sea Committee of the Communist Party, and two other Communist officials named Kovaleff and Grushevsky. According to Izvestia they are all “Trotskyists, Bukharinists, bandits and wreckers working for Japan and Germany.” They are alleged to be attempting ultimately to wreck the spring sowing campaign and to destroy the crops. Possibly these men are scapegoats, for it is certain that the spring crops are not everywhere satisfactory. There is no real excuse for this, as the weather has in general been unusually favourable, and the true reason why the crops are poor in some districts appears to be that the grain collectors last autumn left too little food in the countryside and that the peasants were obliged to eat part of their seed grain. Disease Germs. The authorities have also announced that agents are now being sent from abroad to spread disease deliberately among the Soviet crops. The announcement mentions in particular a “foreign spy, subject to a capitalist State,” who came into the Soviet Union through Leningrad as an ordinary tourist under the protection of Intourist, the Soviet travel agency. In his luggage was a packet containing 51b. of cotton seed infected with rose worm, the most dangerous of cotton plant diseases, and it is alleged that he was sent to destroy Soviet cotton crops. Other disease germs destined for the Russian fields have, it is alleged, been brought by tourists across the Far Eastern frontiers, particularly the germ of potato cancer. There have been thousands of such cases, says the announcement, and to combat this insidious attack on agriculture by foreign agents the Soviet Government have now organised a special “internal and external quarantine section” to be attached to all Customs Houses. These are to pay special attention to persons bringing into Russia, fruit, seeds, or bunches of flowers, or even wearing buttonholes. As a further measure to combat these “agricultural Trotskyists” the Government have given orders to extend and develop the Stakhanovist movement in the countryside, which must in particular teach the peasants to watch one another and discover hidden “wreckers” in their midst.

The authorities in Moscow have today promoted three officers, Velikanoff, Kulik, and Berzin to the rank of general, apparently to fill vacancies caused by the executions.