As things turned out the Communist directors were sometimes incompetent or corrupt; the agronomes, despite their scientific training, were in many cases a failure in dealing with the actual problems connected with producing food; horses died off for lack of fodder much faster than tractors were manufactured, and the tractors were mishandled and broken; the attitude of the peasants varied from actual sabotage or passive resistance to mere apathy, and was generally, to say the least, unhelpful; altogether in the qualitative sense, collectivisation was a failure. The immediate result was, of course, a falling off in the yield of agriculture as a whole. Last year this falling off became acute. None the less the Government quota had to be collected. To feed the cities and to provide even very much reduced food exports it was necessary for the Government’s agents to go over the country and take everything, or nearly everything, that was edible .At the same time, because the policy could not be wrong and therefore individuals and classes had to be at fault, there took place a new outburst of repression, directed this time not only against the kulaks but against every kind of peasant suspected of opposing the Government’s policy; against a good number of directors and the unfortunate agronomes. Shebboldaev, party secretary for the North Caucasus, said in a speech delivered at Rostov on November 12:
‘But, you may urge, is it not true that we have deported kulaks and counter-revolutionary elements before? We did deport them, and in sufficiently large numbers. But at the present moment, when what remains of the kulaks are trying to organise sabotage, every slacker must be deported. That is true justice. You may say that before, we exiled individual kulaks, and that now it concerns whole stanitzas (villages) and whole collective farms. If these are enemies they must be treated as kulaks. . .The general line of our party is to fight dishonesty by means of the extreme penalty, because this is the only defence we have against the destruction of our socialist economy’.
It is this ‘true justice’ that has helped greatly to reduce the North Caucasus to its present condition.
***
My train reached Rostov-on-Don -a fairly large town, capital of the North Caucasus - in the early morning before it was even light. I had been travelling ‘hard’ and trying to find out from some of the peasants in a crowded compartment where they were going and why. Many appeared to have no particular object in view; just a vague hope that things might be better somewhere else. In Russia, as in most other parts of the world, there is much aimless movement just now from one place to another. One peasant however had a specific object; he wanted to join the army because, he said, one was fed in the army. On the platform a group of peasants were standing in military formation; five soldiers armed with rifles guarded them. They were men and women, each carrying a bundle. Somehow, lining them up in military formation made the thing grotesque - wretched looking peasants, half-starved, tattered clothes, frightened faces, standing to attention. These may be kulaks, I thought, but they have made a mighty poor thing of exploiting their fellows. I hung about looking on curiously, wanting to ask where they were to be sent - to the North to cut timber, somewhere else to dig canals - until one of the guards told me sharply to take myself off.
In Rostov I had a letter of introduction, which I presented, and found myself in a large car with a guide. ‘There we’re building new Government offices, eight stories high; there a new theatre and opera house to seat 3,000,with living quarters behind for the actors; a new factory that three years ago didn’t exist, blocks of flats for the workers, the latest machinery and sanitation’ .I began to forget the group of peasants being lined up in military formation on a cold railway platform in the very early morning. Showmanship - most characteristic product of the age - worked its magic.’Have you got bread here in Rostov?’I asked weakly.’Bread? Of course we’ve got bread; as much as we can eat’. It was not true but they had a certain amount of bread. One might go all over Russia like this, I thought - on a wave of showmanship. It explained something that has so often puzzled me.
How is it that so many obvious and fundamental facts about Russia are not noticed even by serious and intelligent visitors? Take, for instance, the most obvious and fundamental fact of all.There is not 5 per cent of the population whose standard of life is equal to or nearly equal to, that of the unemployed in England who are on the lowest scales of relief. I make this statement advisedly, having checked it on the basis of the family budgets in Mr. Fenner Brockway’s recent book Hungry England, which certainly did not err on the side of being too optimistic.
In the evening I joined a crowd in a street. It was drifting up and down while a policeman was blowing his whistle; dispersing just where he was and re-forming again behind him. Some of the people in the crowd were holding fragments of food, inconsiderable fragments that in the ordinary way a housewife would throw away or give to the cat. Others were examining these fragments of food. Every now and then an exchange took place. Often, as in the little market town, what was bought was at once consumed. I turned into a nearby church. It was crowded. A service was proceeding; priests investments and with long hair were chanting prayers, little candle flames lighting the darkness, incense rising. How to understand? How to form an opinion? What did it mean? What was the significance? The voices of the priests were dim, like echoes, and the congregation curiously quiet, curiously still.
I dined with a number of Communists. They were so friendly and sincere. ‘About this peasant business?’ I asked. They smiled, having an answer ready. ‘As the factories were in 1920 so now the farms. We’ve built up heavy industry; the next task is agriculture. Fifteen collective farm workers have gone to Moscow to a conference. Comrade Stalin will address them. This year we will plant so many hectares, which will produce so many pounds of grain. Then next year...’
‘Are you quite sure’, I wanted to ask, ‘that the parallel is correct - factories and land? Isn’t agriculture somehow more sensitive, lending itself less to statistical treatment? Will people torn up by the roots make things grow, even if you drive them into the fields at the end of a rifle?’ It is, however, as impossible to argue against a General Idea as against an algebraic formula.
The Ukraine is more a separate country than the North Caucasus. It has a language of its own and an art of its own; southern rather than eastern, with white, good houses and easy-going people. Even now you can see it has been used to abundance. There is nothing pinchbeck about the place; only as in the North Caucasus, the population is starving. ’Hunger’ was the word I heard most. Peasants begged a lift on the train from one station to another, sometimes their bodies swollen up - a disagreeable sight - from lack of food. There were fewer signs of military terrorism than in the North Caucasus, though I saw another party of, presumably, kulaks being marched away under an armed guard at Dnipropetrovsk; the little towns and villages seemed just numb and the people in too desperate a condition to even actively resent what had happened.
Otherwise it was the same story -cattle and horses dead; fields neglected, meagre harvests despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the Government; no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment. The Ukraine was before the Revolution one of the world’s largest wheat producing areas, and even Communists admit that its population, including the poor peasants, enjoyed a tolerably comfortable standard of life; now it would be necessary to go to Arabia to find cultivators in more wretched circumstances. Here too, there are new factories, a huge new power station at Dnieprostroi, a huge new square at Kharkov with huge Government buildings - and food being exported from Odessa.
In a village about 25 kilometres from Kyiv (old capital of the Ukraine - enchanting town - now Kharkov is the capital) I visited a collective farm worker or kolhoznik. His wife was in the outer room of their cottage sifting millet. There were also three chickens in the outer room, and on the wall two icons, a bouquet made of coloured paper and a wedding group, very gay.
‘
How are things?’ I asked.
‘Bad’, she answered.
‘Why?’
‘Only potatoes and millet to eat since August’.
‘No bread or meat?’
‘None’.
‘Were things better before you joined the collective farm?’
‘Much better’.
‘Why did you join, then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know’.
She opened a door leading to an inner room to call her husband. He was lying on the stove, but got up when she called and came in to us carrying one child and with another following him. Both children were obviously undernourished. I told the man that I was interested in collective farms, and he was ready to talk. ’I was a poor peasant’ ,he said, ’with a hectare and a half of land. I thought that things would be better for me on the collective farm’.
‘Well, were they?’
He laughed, ’Not at all; much worse’.
‘Worse than before the Revolution?’
He laughed again. ‘Much, much worse. Before the Revolution we had a cow and something to feed it with; plenty of bread, meat sometimes. Now nothing but potatoes and millet’.
‘What’s happened, then? Why is there no bread in the Ukraine?’
‘Bad organisation. They send people from Moscow who know nothing; ordered us here to grow vegetables instead of wheat. We didn’t know how to grow vegetables and they couldn’t show us. Then we were told that we must put our cows all together and there’d be plenty of milk for our children, but the expert who advised this forgot to provide a cow shed, so we had to put our cows in the sheds of the rich peasants, who, of course, let them starve’.
‘I thought you’d got rid of all the rich peasants?’
‘We did but their agents remain’.
‘What about the winter sowing?’
‘Very bad’.
‘Why?’
‘Again bad organisation. People lost heart and stopped working. Weeds everywhere, and, with the cattle dead, no manure; no horses to transport fertiliser, even if it was available’. He hushed his voice, ‘There are enemies even on the Council of the collective farm. Now, they wouldn’t elect me to the Council’.
‘Some grain must have been produced. What happened to it?’
‘All taken by the Government’.
‘It’ll be better in that respect this year. You’ll only have to pay tax-in-kind - so much per hectare - and not deliver a quota for the whole district. When you’ve paid the tax-in-kind you’ll have about two-thirds of the crop left to yourselves’.
‘If we get as big a crop as they estimate. But we shan’t - not with the land in such a bad condition and with no horses. They’ll take everything again’.
He showed me his time-book. His pay was seventy-five kopeks a day. At open market prices seventy-five kopeks would buy half a slice of bread. He said that for the most part he spent the money on fuel. Sometimes he bought a little tobacco. Nothing else. No clothes, of course, or boots, or anything like that.
‘What about the future?’ I asked. He put on a characteristic peasant look; half resignation and half cunning.
‘We shall see’.
***
When I got back to Moscow I found that Stalin had delivered himself of this opinion to a conference of collective farm shock-brigade workers:
‘By developing collective farming we succeeded in drawing this entire mass of poor peasants into collective farms, in giving them security and raising them to the level of middle peasants . . . what does this mean? It means that no less than 30,000,000 of the peasant population have been saved from poverty and from kulak slavery, and converted, thanks to collective farms, into people assured of a livelihood. This is a great achievement, comrades. This is an achievement such as the world has never known and such as not a single State in the world has ever before secured’.
All the available evidence goes to show that conditions in the Upper, Middle and Lower Volga districts are as bad as in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine; in Western Siberia they are little, if at all, better. No one knows what supplies of grain the Government has at its disposal, but as I have already pointed out, the food situation cannot improve before the summer and is likely to deteriorate. The spring sowing will be a critical time; all the resources of the Government and the Communist Party are to be used to make it a success. Already intensive propaganda is being carried on, and ‘political departments’, manned chiefly by the military and the G.P.U., have been brought into existence in all parts of the country. These will be responsible for executing the Government’s policy and, of course, vigorously carrying on the class war.
Even so, will it suffice? Will it suffice, even assuming the best possible conditions - good weather, the peasants propagandised, cajoled and coerced into working well, sufficient tractors repaired and properly handled to make good to some extent the lost horses, everyone, including town populations, mobilised for clearing weeds, enough seed made available and so on? As one says complacently of so much else in Russia, it will be an interesting experiment - interesting, that is, for the onlooker; for the actual participators often more disagreeable than interesting. In any case, it is certainly true that, unless the decay of agriculture that began when the collectivisation policy was first started and that has gone on at an increasing rate ever since, is stopped; unless, that is to say, the Government is able to produce a better crop this year than last, there will be famine not merely in certain districts but throughout the country.
It was strange in a way to return to Moscow, where the General Idea reigns supreme and where you have no alternative but to take it for granted. There can seldom have been in the history of the world a more curious tyranny than the Soviet regime - not just personal, based on an individual’s or a group of individuals’ appetite for absolute power; not an autocracy like, for instance, the British Raj in India, based on expediency, on there being no other way of dealing with a particularly confused set of social circumstances; but a tyranny that developed inevitably out of a General Idea and that can, by its very nature, only become more and more absolute. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has come to mean the Dictatorship of the Communist Party; and the Dictatorship of the Communist Party has come to mean the Dictatorship of the Polit-Bureau; and the Dictatorship of the Polit-Bureau has come to mean the Dictatorship of Stalin; the Dictatorship of Stalin has come to mean the Dictatorship of the General Idea with which he is obsessed. If the General Idea is fulfilled it can only be by bringing into existence a slave State.
The tendency in Russia is towards a slave State. First the old aristocracy and bourgeoisie were enslaved. Who cared about that? They had their day, abused their privileges, and it was fitting that they should cut timber and dig canals for the proletariat they had tyrannised. But when the old aristocracy and bourgeoisie had been enslaved the General Idea was as far from fulfilment as ever. It can only be fulfilled when it dominates the lives of the whole population. And since the vast majority of men resist such a domination they must be forced to submit. Fear forces them -fear of losing their bread rations; fear of being driven from where they live; fear of being informed against to the police. The present battle is between the General Idea and the peasants.
I arrived back in Moscow to find the newspapers full of reports of speeches by various members of the Government about the agricultural situation that had been delivered to a Conference of the Collective Farm Shock-Brigade Workers. It is impossible, through the censorship, to comment on these speeches, which bear no relation at all to the realities of the situation. To say that there is famine in some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth; there is not only famine but - in the case of the North Caucasus at least - a state of war, a military occupation. In both the Ukraine and the North Caucasus the grain collection has been carried out with such thoroughness and brutality that the peasants are now quite
without bread. Thousands of them have been exiled; in certain cases whole villages have been sent to the North for forced labour; even now it is a common sight to see parties of wretched men and women, labelled kulaks, being marched away under an armed guard.
The fields are neglected and full of weeds; no cattle are to be seen anywhere, and few horses; only the military and the GPU are well fed, the rest of the population obviously starving, obviously terrorised. There is no hope - at least until the summer - of conditions improving. In fact they must get worse. The winter sowing has been neglected. Only a small area has been sown at all, and that badly.The general condition of the land and the lack of transport make it unlikely, whatever efforts the government may make, that the spring sowing will be much better.
At the conference there were violent outbursts against the kulaks. Where failure existed they were responsible; they had falsified the accounts, hidden grain, broken machines, organised sabotage and passive resistance against the Government. But for them the peasants would have faithfully yielded up all they had produced and then have waited patiently through the winter, with little or nothing to eat, to do the same things again this year. Our new slogan, Stalin said, must be to make every collective farm worker well-to-do. It is an admirable slogan; to judge, however, by the facts of the case, the Government’s slogan would seem to have been hitherto to take from every collective farm worker everything he had - even the minimum amount of food required for his own and his family’s consumption.
In any case, the Government’s policy is based not on persuasion or concession but on force. ‘Political departments’, manned chiefly by GPU. and military, have been set up all over the country, and these will be responsible for raising and collecting a harvest. They will drive the peasants into the fields; they will make them work; they will collect most of what they produce. If necessary they will mobilise town populations for work on the land, as by a decree published in an Archangel newspaper, the whole population in that district was mobilised to cut timber because the export quota was unfulfilled. The spring sowing will be carried out, if at all, as a result of coercion. The Government realises at last how serious the situation is, and, to deal with it, employs its familiar tactics -speeches, slogans, enthusiastic conferences in Moscow; in the villages, ruthless, organised force.
Time and Eternity Page 3
