RUSSIA: Stalin’s Harvest

Pravda jeered at Communist inefficiency. Pravda railed at the Five-Year Plan. What about the trousers, made at Moscow Factory No. 1, with one leg black and the other blue? What about the padlock with keys that didn’t fit, the cups with holes in them, the baby dolls with grey hair and crooked legs?

Russia’s papers and magazines have lately been so jampacked with accounts of shortages, mismanagement, blundering, that exiles reading it from afar wondered if violent anti-Communists had got control of the controlled press. As last week’s news of the German-Russian Pact left the world gasping, urgency of the reports suddenly became understandable. As correspondents speculated on where, when & how Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler got together, the Russian picture of Russia’s condition suggested that more than high politics egged Stalin on. Not theories, which could be changed, or political opponents, who could be liquidated, but shortages of shoes and rolling stock made approaches to Berlin, or Berlin’s approaches to Moscow more palatable. Pieced together, reports looked like this:

Industries. There was less consumer goods per capita than in 1913; the Gorki Paper Plant, accounting for 15% of Russia’s newsprint, filled only 20% of its quota, hundreds of freight cars were needed at once.

Army. With thousands removed, imprisoned, or shot in the purge (including 213 commanders and commissars), Russian soldiers were still sufficiently bewildered at the about-face to win an explanation from Marshal Klement Vorshilov himself. Said he: military staff talks with British and French officers were broken off because Poland refused to permit Russian troops on her soil. Pontificated the Marshal: “Just as the British and American troops in the past World War would have been unable to collaborate with the French armed forces if they had no possibility of operating in French territory, the Soviet armed forces could not participate in military collaboration … if they were not allowed access to Polish territory.”

Agriculture. Russian peasants were worried last week, but not about the Pact. They were “greatly unnerved” at something going on in their own back yards. Land-measuring commissioners were prowling around checking up on the small garden plots, on the collective farms, where peasants produce food for themselves. The wheat harvest dropped about one billion poods (602,000,000 bushels) below estimate. There was the usual 25% loss of grain between reaping and threshing, because the stalks lay in the fields for weeks, because too many combines were broken down. But this year both Dictator Stalin and Premier Molotov had said it could not happen again. It happened.

At best peasants could look forward to another forcible “transplanting” to the East—a trip likely to make the trek of migratory farmers in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath seem like a quiet vacation. At worst they could expect another hurricane like the uprooting of the peasants in 1930, when 5,000,000 families had their property grabbed. Up to last week what happened to them had depended on one man—Joseph Stalin, who had always been held up to them as the friend of the toiling masses. Now it also depended on a second—Adolf Hitler, who had always been held up to them as their worst enemy.

Adolf Hitler was once a friend of the masses; so was Benito Mussolini. But they were sandlot revolutionaries beside the “hall sweeper” of the red revolution, the tough from the Caucasus, Joseph Stalin. Once Joe Stalin was proud of his exploits, proud of the way he darted into Armenian stores, stole what he wanted, fired some shots and ran, leaving men puking blood behind him; proud of the holdup of Tiflis —20 dead; proud of having the guts to toss bombs from a lamppost at fully armed Cossacks; proud of the holdups on mountain roads; proud of inflaming the doubters (he had his picture painted doing it); proud of the mail-train robbery near Rostov, when he hacked his way through the side of the mailcar and had to jump for it with the train still in motion. Joe Stalin could take it. When his hovel-mates accidentally set fire to some stolen stuff he had hid in the stove, he put a hand in the flames, salvaged only one 500-ruble note. When he was captured and was told to run a gantlet of soldiers swinging riding crops, he walked through, head high, holding a book under his arm. Last week this man was trading in empires.