Not the least of adroit Joseph Stalin’s feats is to sit year after year on the lid of the World’s No. 2 famine.*
For these mass Russian malnutritions the Dictator is serenely responsible. According to Red lights, his conscience is clear. First, the grain stores of the Red Army must be kept bumper full. Then the Proletariat or urban workers must have next call on Russia’s food. If, as often happens, there is not enough food left after the State’s forcible food collections to nourish properly the Russians who grew it, then Comrade Stalin must be sorry.
As the case may be, the grain or gold now goes where it does the most good—into government stocks. Last week, however, the Kremlin Dictatorship, clear though their consciences are, were humanly vexed when Hearst’s American Newspapers Inc. released a whole series of Soviet famine pictures. These should have been confiscated by Soviet frontier guards, some of whom may expect a wigging.
Archbishop, Cameraman. Discreet Cameraman Thomas Walker, who threw away his tiny $300 camera before slipping out of Russia last spring, confined his snapping to the Ukraine. Of that district, in the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury later said: “There was going on a famine of a degree of severity which has hardly ever before been known.”
Evidence of famine conditions continues to reach the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and Jewish rabbis in Central Europe in a wealth of letters penned by underfed Russian peasants to relatives abroad. Of these letters Soviet censors catch perhaps eight or nine out of every ten; but stupid, lenient or secretly anti-Red censors pass enough to make chronic malnutrition in the Soviet farm belt an imposing fact. For people who want to see starved and starving Russians, Cameraman Walker opened his portfolio last week. Samples:
DEATH FROM STARVATION IN A SOVIET HAY CART.
Although he worked on a community farm, where food was plentiful, this peasant died of starvation. He had crawled into his little hay cart to rest from his forced labor and never woke up.
LIKE A FROG
This younger child (see cut) crawled about the floor like a frog, and its poor little body was so deformed from lack of nourishment that it did not resemble a human being. Its mother had died of starvation when it was one year old.
ANOTHER OF THE 66 BODIES. . . .*
This man had been stripped of all clothing—by some living, miserable soul who figured he needed the clothing more than the poor corpse.
Such pictures prove nothing, since almost any picture could be made to lie. But served up last week by Hearstpapers to seeing-is-believing readers, Cameraman Walker’s snaps were a triumph in journalistic emphasis. They covered pages and gave point to sprawling headlines, whereas most famine facts (Soviet or Chinese) are usually tucked away in back pages.
“Farmers Celebrate.” To alert newsfolk the difference between what correspondents cable from Moscow and what they say off-the-record when out of Russia constitutes a piquant paradox. In the autumn of 1933 famed Walter Duranty, quizzed by his New York Times superiors in Manhattan, related grim facts. Previously, Mr. Duranty had cabled merely that he thought figures showing the death rate in the Ukraine to have tripled were “too low.” Last week honest Walter Duranty got off this normal Moscow dispatch: “The definite and striking success of the collective farm movement has been demonstrated at the second congress of 1,500 ‘shock-brigade collectivists’ from all parts of the U. S. S. R., which has just ended its session in Moscow. . . . [TIME, Feb. 25.] As the recent abolition of the bread-card system denotes, there are ample stocks for seed and food, if needed, in the hands of the authorities. Quite recently, however, there has been a fresh outburst of ‘starvation propaganda’ in the German and Austrian Press, with appeals for charity for ‘the unhappy victims of the Soviet famine.’ ”
As every Moscovite knows the “success” of Comrade Stalin in dragooning peasants on to collective farms where they are at the mercy of the Soviet Power has vastly increased the ease of forced grain collections. That “ample stocks for seed and food are in the hands of the authorities” neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor anyone else denies. It is rather because they are in the State’s hands that some 6,000,000 peasants starved in 1932-33, the State withholding tell-tale statistics until 1934 when they were no longer news.
Complete Soviet malnutrition returns for 1933-34, good, bad or indifferent, will scarcely be in before 1937. Last week a Times headline writer slapped above Moscovite Duranty’s dispatch the capitals:
SOVIET’S FARMERS CELEBRATE SUCCESS
* No. 1 famine is in China.
* Counted by Cameraman Walker in the Ukraine.
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