Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS The Omelette' Didn't Jell By William Henry Chamberlin Some twenty or so years ago, a cynical Moscow newspaperman with a vastly inflated reputation discovered a formula that...
...According to Khrushchev, in the Soviet Union in 1953 there were 56.6 million head of cattle of all kinds, 24.3 million cows and 15.3 million horses...
...The answer to this question, based on the recent testimony of high Soviet officials, is an emphatic No...
...What this means for the Russian people's food supply, and for such raw materials as leather and wool, is obvious...
...For proof of the dismal failure of collective farming, one need only look at the livestock figures presented in a recent report by Nikita S. Khrushchev, one of the inner circle of top Communist bosses, who was recently charged with the task of reviving lagging agriculture...
...This correspondent would start every dispatch touching on such subjects as the mass uprooting and economic extermination of the peasants, wholesale starvation, and slave-labor camps with a soothing comment that ran something like this: "The Kremlin knows there are hardships and privations in connection with the big new schemes of industrialization and collective farming...
...Plenty of human eggs were certainly broken...
...No wonder the Soviet Government, as Bertram D. Wolfe showed in the November 30 New Leader, has halted almost all statistical publications...
...Has a strong agriculture been created, capable of adequately feeding the city population and giving the peasants themselves a better standard of living...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS The Omelette' Didn't Jell By William Henry Chamberlin Some twenty or so years ago, a cynical Moscow newspaperman with a vastly inflated reputation discovered a formula that made him the toast of every fellow-traveler cocktail party and was also very popular with Soviet censors...
...No wonder factories and collective farms are barred to foreign visitors as if they were top-secret atomic installations...
...In a quarter of a century of collective farming, however, the supply of livestock has declined everywhere except in pigs, where the small increase is far behind the growth of the population...
...On a per capita basis, therefore, these figures are even more damaging than they appear on the surface...
...It is high time that the Big Lie of a miraculous improvement of productive efficiency under collective farming was exposed for what it is...
...The long trains that carried innumerable kulak families to slave labor in the frozen North were epics of human anguish, like the trains a decade later packed with unfortunates from Eastern Poland and the Baltic States...
...But what of the perfect omelette that was supposed to emerge from the breaking of all these eggs...
...4 million would be a moderate estimate of the number of persons who perished in the great famine which devastated the Ukraine and North Caucasus (normally the granary of Russia) in the winter and spring of 1932-33...
...Indeed, collective farming may fairly be considered one of the greatest economic and productive failures in history, quite apart from the fact that, for the Soviet peasants, it has meant a reversion to the serfdom from which they were liberated by Tsar Alexander II in 1861...
...This is still more evident if one takes 1928, the last year when the peasants were able to farm their land on an individual basis, for purposes of comparison...
...In grain, the situation is a little, but only a little, better...
...Even more striking is the contrast with Turkey, a country which operates under an even greater educational handicap than Russia...
...The average grain yield per acre increased by about 6 per cent, as against 20 per cent in the United States for the same period...
...During these 37 years, the population increased substantially...
...The corresponding figures in 1916, under the last Tsar, were 58.4 million head of cattle, 28.8 million cows and 38.2 million horses...
...But the desired "omelette," an agriculture able to provide a decent standard of living for the Soviet peoples, will only appear when the serfdom of collective farming is a hated memory and the peasants of the Soviet Union are cultivating their land either as free individual owners or as members of voluntary cooperatives...
...The human eggs have been broken...
...The figures for 1928 and 1953 (expressed in millions) are as follows: 1928 1953 All rattle 66.8 56.6 Cores 33.2 24.3 Pigs 27.7 28.5 Sheep and goats 114.6 109.9 Horses 36.1 15.3 In other words, when the Soviet peasants were allowed to work their own land after the New Economic Policy was introduced in 1921, they more than made up in seven years all the loss of livestock caused by the Civil War, the brutal and stupid requisitioning of War Communism, and the great famine of 1921-22...
...But it also knows that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs...
...The area sown to grain in 1952 was 14.4 per cent higher than in 1913, but this lags well behind the increase in the population...
...In the last five years, Turkey has increased its output of cereals by 50 per cent—and without expropriating, tormenting or murdering a single Turkish farmer...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 1
