RUSSIA: Collective Congress

Imagine sombrero-wearing William Randolph Hearst editing with Communist zeal the Great American Farm Newspaper and you begin to have some faint idea of Comrade Yakov Arkadevich Yakovlev.

Since 1923 this Big Red has controlled The Peasants’ Gazette, the State’s mouthpiece to the vast majority of Russia’s population and the only newsorgan most Soviet farmers ever see. For twelve long years Hearstian Yakovlev has been stuffing Russian peasants with exciting stories. Today he is more than Commissar of Agriculture, his job in 1929-33. Promotion has carried him to the Soviet agricultural top: Chief of the Agricultural Department of the All-Union Communist Party which is above the State. From this eminence last week Comrade Yakovlev stuffed the third Ail-Union Collective Farm Congress in Moscow.

“Do you know, Comrades,” he shouted, “that Germany and Japan are plotting war on our Soviet Union in order to sell our women into lives of shame? I am here to tell you, Comrades! Statistics reveal that in Japan from 30,000 to 40,000 young girls are sold by their parents every year into lives of shame. Monstrous! It is no secret that the Japanese and German imperialists are preparing to make war on the Soviet Union to re-establish serfdom in Russia and sell Russian women into lives of shame! If they try, Comrades, we will meet them with invincible forces! Our glorious Red Army. . . .”

To people who read nothing but the Soviet Peasants’ Gazette this sounded like the acme of sound facts and good sense, yet Hearstian Yakovlev drew loudest cheers, a veritable acclamation, by another part of his discourse. In this he announced as undramatically as he could Joseph Stalin’s most sensational retreat on the agricultural front thus far.

The Dictator, who has been from 1930 onward a merciless exterminator of Russia’s more prosperous peasants or kulaks, is now ready, announced Comrade Yakovlev, to readmit “repentant kulaks” to cultivation of Russia’s farm lands. Since Stalin has exiled some 1,000,000 kulaks to Siberia, where many have died, Russia can now count on the return of the remainder in the guise of “repentant kulaks” to her most fertile lands. Originally these folk were the Soviet Union’s most able soil tillers. “These former class enemies,” cried Comrade Yakovlev last week, “will now receive lenient treatment as vanquished foes!”

Leaping up in joy, the whole Collective Farm Congress huzzaed. Before the day was over Comrade Yakovlev had put his hearers in still better humor, had announced modified capitalistic concessions to the State’s own collective farms.

Collectives Capitalized. No Communist in Russia considers Russia to be Communist. Similarly, very few of the

Soviet Union’s famed collective farms have ever been true collectives of the type called by Soviet experts the commune.

In a Soviet commune every grain of wheat, every horse or chicken, indeed every toothbrush and handkerchief is jointly owned by all members of the commune who own individually nothing outside their skins.

Much more common is the artel, a modified collective farm existing in several types which have in common the principle that certain property is not shared. Today in Russia the commune is vanishing as peasants continue to demand and get more and more capitalistic types of artel. Last week Comrade Yakovlev undertook to set the present limits of this Soviet retreat to peasant capitalism.

For advancing capitalistically “too far” in the last two years, enormous numbers of peasants were punished by expulsion from the State’s collectives. Comrade Yakovlev said last week that “hundreds of thousands” were thus punished in 1933-34. “They were expelled from some collective farms unjustly,” he admitted. “Hereafter expulsions will be carried out only by decision of collective farm memberships themselves, without interference from local Party authorities [Cheers’].”

New Status, According to Soviet Agriculture’s Yakovlev, collective farm property will be held mainly as follows, until such time as the Dictatorship again changes the rules:

Farm Land: this the State continues to hold in principle but “permanently assigns” land to members of each collective “so that they may know they will reap the benefits of improvements they may make.” Comrade Yakovlev avoided saying whether the “permanent” assignment will be hereditary.

As a popular concession, the State will permit a collective to rent horses and carts to one of its members “for the festivities of a wedding procession”—this concession to eternal Russian mores being decidedly significant. Tractors, Oil & Gasoline remain 100% State property. Under this shrewd Stalin system the iron horses are stabled at “tractor stations” invariably in charge of a trusted member of the Party. Work Animals other than iron horses are defined as “Socialized Property” assigned to the collective.

Private Property for Personal Use was defined by Comrade Yakovlev as including the collective farmer’s house, cattle, poultry,, furniture. Each collective farmer’s household may own without molestation one cow, three calves, two sows with all their offspring, 14 head of sheep and goats and “unlimited beehives, poultry and rabbits.”

Since Bolshevik farm policy has always been exploitation of the peasantry for the benefit of the proletariat, Soviet agriculture has usually been directed by Moscow’s smartest spies and most ruthless secret agents. Typically, Comrade Yakovlev who was in 1918-20 Chief of the 14th Red Army’s OGPU, carved himself a brilliant, bloody career exposing and having shot officers and soldiers found to be lukewarm toward Bolshevism. A modified OGPU called the Workers’ & Peasants’ Inspection was later formed—partly to spy upon the regular OGPU—and of this Comrade Yakovlev was Assistant Commissar in 1926.

-According to Stalin, the Soviet Union is “building Socialism,” upon which it will build Communism.