Evening star., 1928-11-18

it means communism these people seem
strangely unaware. They are tuil-
dedged pragmatists, and as far as Rus
sia is concerned that is important.
One of the men has brought in a
sheaf of wheat from a farlying field.
| The manager shells a handful OF ker-
nels, splits one carefully with knife,
and examines it under a small magni-
flying glass He turns it awkwardly
in his great blunt fingers. His final ver-
dict to reap or not to reap may depend
much more on the other kernel that
he is slowly chewing while he peers
into the glass, but the peasants are
seeing a new world in the action, n
world that is made up Of tractors and
reapers and irrigation and schools and
ell the other things that have been
INpromjsed them for the first time in his
| tory and some of which are actually
coming true.
It is thus uplifting Of the Russian
| peaSantry from naive obscuranttsm and
material backwardness that lies at the
| basis of the agricultural future of
| Soviet Russia. and how important that
Is any good Communist knows only too
we'll. Oriental, medieval farming
methods. hand-Sowing, wooden ploughS,
| strip cultivation on the tilree-f1eld sys-
/ tenn. these are going at last. Mechan-
/ iZation. Standardization. rationaliZa-
/ ton. these are the catch-wordS of the
! Moscow orator on the Russian farm
| problem, and they are as fatuous as
political catch-wordS anywhere. But
| that there is an agricultural revolution
abroad in the Russian land is fact,
once seen, to be believed in.
Maize and millet are being introduced
in the great Volga dry-farming dis
tricts, tractors are to be seen, few and
far between, but they exist, FordSons
and InternationalS and new product
of the Putilov works in Leningrad.
There is an altogether new orientation
toward the market and a recognition
Of industrial values. There are state
experts to give free advice, there are
state bureaus to lend money for the
establishment of co-operativeS and
communes. there are state farms to
distribute stock and trees and seed and
good examples.
Pre-War Village Gone.
Underneath this technical change
there is another, no less important, but
harder to analyze, and less certain, per-
hapS, to endure. The pre-war Rus
sian village of literature, of Turgenieff,
OF Cork, of Mackenzie Wallace, is
definitely gone in the heart of Russia
The substitution of one heritage for an
other is not the work of a decade nor
OF two, and there are parts of Russia,
and parts of any Russian village, which
can hardly have improved in the last
ten years. But for the greater part of
European Russia, there is something
new to be reckoned with something
that goes far beyond Communism or
capitalism, something that comes when
ever the mental horizon of a commun-
tty is extended beyond the weather.
The Russian orthodox church, the
KaoaE or tavern, the village usurer,
devil worship and black magic, whole
log OF enforced ignorance has been
lifted from the great mass of the peas
antry. Great numbers of the peasants,
perhaps the majority of the older
peasants, cannot or will not see, but for
the new generation there is at last a
future.
The observer who saw only the pro-
uucerS' meeting on Russian farm
would have hopelessly inadequate i'm
preston of the real situation. To COM
plete it one must go out into the fields
and see the work, one must analyze
the budget of the farms, one must
watch the dust eddy out of the bins
in the grain mill and, most important
Of all, one must leave the state farm
and live with peasants themselves in a
village. And it is in this more direct
tangency to the fundamentals of life
that enthusiasm becomes tempered and
qualifications become inevitable. For
the problems that are still to be solved
are colossal
Many of these, 1t must be said, are
natural problems or inherited ones.
They rise from the niggardliness of the
So1l outside OF the great black belt, from
drought, from ignorance and Supersti-
tlon and from the bankruptcy of ma
ton. Machines cannot be bought and
products cannot be sold. One district
Will have famine and bread lines this
Winter, where thousand miles away
the grain market is glutted. The rail-
roads are few and the rolling stock pitt
fully inadequate. 1t is rare grain pro-
oucer IN Russia who does not face
transportation OF 20 to so or 60 miles
before his produce is marketable.
Every penny of foreign credit must
be squeezed for the import of machines.
and home production cannot begin to
equal demand for manufactured COM
moditles. In a system where the law
OF supply and demand has, at least in
part, been superseded by arbitrary fix
ing of prices, the whole task of capital
accumulation must be shouldered nv
the peasant, and the consequence is
not only often but usually economic
hardship and possible ruin for him.
Taxes Produce More Resentment.
Other problems are not so easily as
signed to nature or the Gear. There are
several features of Soviet administration
that seem fraught with peril to the out
slider. Perhaps the more basic of these
concerns the birth rate. Redistribution
of land is effected at regular intervals
of from to II years, depending upon
local option. All the details are left to
local decisions, but in one of the gen.
eral regulations lies a great slice of the
Soviet future. Redistribution is to be
made upon upon basis Of souls" or
mouths; for every addition to his
family the peasant gets another frac-
ton of hectare of land. AS a spur
to increase the birth rate, it is a device
that should recommend itself to other
countries where such a goal is more
desired. But IN Russia, where the birth
rate of AZ to 1000 is already almost
twice that Of any other European coun-
| try. it is another matter.
Taxes in the countryside are produc-
! tive of more open resentment, natu-
rally. They are, in fact, the one in
justice that was openly and freely
pleaded to me by farmers wherever I
went in Russia. They are graduated in
such way as to ruin the kulak, or rich
! peasant, to tolerate the middle peasant,
/ and to help the poor peasant. 1t is
, comparatively easy to arrange such a
| graduation within a city, where the
possession of a private store is a sign
| of bourgeois activity But on farm.
; it is harder to sort the sheep from the
goats, and the definition of a kulak
differs widely. The word really means
fist" and it is an epithet as oppro-
| brious as 1t is dangerous.
"Kulak?" said one peasant near
Tamboy to me- That's bad word,
| and il is bad husinecS To ,,cn it