“WHAT A HOPE!”

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20086, 4 November 1939, Page 2

“WHAT A HOPE!”

SOVIET AID TO NAZIS ENGLISH WRITER’S VIEW EXPERIENCES IN RUSSIA SHORT OF EVERYTHING Hitler ought to meet Ivan Wassilievich, a railway ganger of Zagorsk junction, near Moscow, writes Sefton Delmer in the London Daily Express. He should meet him .if Comrade Ribbeptrop, in his new enthusiasm for Red Russia, has convinced him that he only has to wait for the moment when Nazi and Soviet soldiers swap salutes in mid-Poland for all Germany’s problehis of supply to be solved. Ivan could prove to Hitler in three minutes that even if Hitler and Stalin shake hands'across a common frontier, that doesn’t mean that the Russians are going' to be able to supply the Germans with the raw materials and the food they will need if they mean to carry on the war. The chaotic inadequacy of the wornout Russian transport machinery is unable to provide the Russians themselves with as much food as the Germans are getting now on their war rations.

Ivan told me what Russians have to eat -when I was sitting with him at a table in a dirty little workmen’s tavern in Zagorsk last April. It was not one of those Moscow hotels where tourists and the big party bosses get a 7s 6d dinner at £5 a head. No. This was the kind of eating house at which you can find that vast unprivileged proletariat whose wages, compared with current prices in Russia, are so small that there is no need for ration cards.

Their poverty rations them. Two hundred roubles a month (£8) was what Ivan was getting as a railway ganger. Fifty of these roubles he was forced to give up to the State for the maintenance of his small boy. The remaining 150 went on food—mainly bread and water. “For breakfast,” said Ivan, "I have a little lea and sugar, a hunk of dry bread, and a cigarette. For my midday meal I have what I am eating now." I tasted it. A plateful of watery soup with a bit of macaroni and tiny morsels of meat floating in it, a kind a cereal called kasha, and a hunk of bread on which he had spread some mustard and salt.

For supper, he told mo, he had -more tea, sugar, bread and another cigarette.

Not a Poor Man His wages did not permit him to buy clothes or pay any rent. Now Ivan is by no' means a poor man compared with other Russians. The official Soviet statistics state that the average wage in Russia is 300 roubles a month— £l2 at the official rate. And there are many—for instance, the postman who brought my letters to the hotel—who receive only eighty or one hundred roubles a month.

Which —when you realise that butter, even in the large co-operative stores attached to the factories costs 10s a pound, margarine Cs. and frozen meat is even more expensive—explains why I found people buying in ounces where in Britain they would be buying in pounds. Even so, I found queues standing outside vegetable shops for cabbage, that old Russian stand-by. I found queues for dried herrings, for frozen meat. 1 also saw queues for paper, shoes, calico, clothes. If Stalin wants to help Hitler with supplies he can only do so by straining his already strained enonomy to breaking-point. Hitler needs petrol. Russia is a petrol-producing country, but her production, experts tell me. is so antiquated that she is only just able to meet her own needs.

The German Charge d’Affaires, Ilerr von Tippelskirch, himself told me last April —and his view was confirmed by an American oil man—that if Russia were to pul a mechanised army into the field she would have to sacrifice her mechanised agriculture. There is not enough petrol, to feed tractors and tanks at the same time..

The Russians, have realised this themselves. They have been making great efforts to purchase and breed draught cattle ‘to replace the tractors in the event of war.

As for high octane petrol needed for high-powered air engines, they are unable to produce that at all. They must import it. Another thing that Hitler needs is rubber, but Soviet Russia only goes in for synthetic rubber, and they don’t seem to have hit the right recipe for

making it. I watched lorry after lorry rolling through Moscow with the rubber peeling in great flakes from their tyres. And no Russian car, they told me, runs for more than 100 miles without a puncturo. Scarcity of Clothing Cloth and clothing and textiles you certainly will not be able to obtain from Russia, Herr Hitler. In the Moscow stores I discovered that the very rumour of tire possible arrival of a consignment of massproduced frocks was enough to produce a queue of patient women. In the official pawnshops, the socallcd “commission stores," where the C.P.U. policemen sell off the confiscated furniture and effects of their victims, tattered mattresses, worn-out garments that would not find a buyer in the Caledonian Market, command prices which you would pay here in England for the same thing new. I remember seeing a shabby old squirrel fur and a dinner-jacket suit in the commission shop round the corner from my hotel. The fur was £3O, and the dinner jacket £ls.

Even broken furniture fetched a good price.

Every kind of manufactured article is scarce, and when you tell a Russian like the good Ivan that there is no scarcity of these abroad, he thinks you are putting over propaganda.

The German military experts certainly were not impressed with Russia's industrial capacity. The Militaer-Wochenblalt, the official weekly of the Reichswehr, pointed out in some articles this year that the reason lor the lagging of Russia’s aircraft industry lay in her inability to produce the complicated metal amalgams needed to-day. The Russians are “unable to produce big guns or armour plating because they lack high-quality steel.” But even supposing that Stalin is willing to yield up to Herr Hitler the raw materials and other resources which he himself needs so badly, it is not going to be easy for him to send them cut of the country in any great quantity, for the Russian railway network and road system, even now, is unable to meet the ordinary demands of internal Russian distribution. The mobilisation of the Russian armies to the western frontier wil. 1 have put a considerable strain on it. This strain must continue, for Stalin will not be able to demobilise bis treop's and set his transport machine free for ordinary commercial traffic. Stalin will have to watch most anxiously the next German moves on his western frontier—particularly in the direction of Rumania.

“Hitler’s One Chance” Hitler’s one chance to make n useful ally of Russia would be for him to send Stalin large quantities of German machinery, German engineers and German organisers. Their job would be to make Russia economically efficient once more.

It. would take years to do this, even if isolationist Stalin would let the Germans into Russia. By the lime the Germans had trained a new stall of Russian skilled workers, you can bo quite sure that either the war would be over or Stalin would decide to kill them all off in a new purge.

All this may sound fantastic to you. You may even think it is one-sided propaganda. It is not. It is exactly what I found when I went to Russia this April. It corresponds to the views of responsible foreign experts whom I talked with in Moscow—Germans, British, Americans, French and Poles. Russia help Hitler? What a hope.