UNHAPPY RUSSIA

Hokitika Guardian, 4 February 1932, Page 8

UNHAPPY RUSSIA

WORKER SLAVE TO STATE

THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Tiio lot of the Russian populace under the Rive-Year plan, as lie saw it in Leningrad and Moscow last August, seemed singularly unhappy to Mr R. A. Laidlaw, general manager of the farmers’ Trading Company, who returned to Auckland last week from a world tour.

“The Five-Year Plan is not a myth, it is not in itself propaganda, but is an earnest effort to co-ordinate and rationalise a whole nation, as Henry Ford has a: single manufacturing plant,” said Mr Laidlaw. “In other aords, Stalin proposes to make a capitalist State of which he himself is to be the ruthless dictator, and the Russian people are to be the forced workers, at whatever Communist wage or standard of living he decides they shall have. This wage at present is extremely low, so that his capitalist State may be able to undersell its other capitalist competitors in wheat, oil and timber. “We hear much about the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it is a misnomer, for there is no such thing. In Russia it is a dictation to the proletariat. A "mu is told were he shall work, how long he shall work, and what wages he shall receive. The work, man is more a slave to a ruthless State under Communism than any man is or ever has been to capitalism, in spite of the fact that the term ‘wageslave’ is so often used by agitators in other countries.” FACTORIES WORK ALL NIGHT “Coming hack to our hotel about midnight, attracted by much hammering, I looked through the windows of the basement we were passing, and saw it was • lambing workshop, employing about a dozen men in the manufacture of spouting brackets, etc., by hand. All factories in Russia work right through the night, although no extra pay is given for night work. “At one end of the factory were eight beds, on which lay asleep intheir clothes, so 1 asked our guide why they were sleeping- there. ‘Oh,’ sue said, ‘they are men drafted in from the country, and so they live and sleep where they work.’ As the beds were in full view of the street, the floor of the basement being about six feet below the pavement, and there were no blinds, they could not possibly undress, so I suppose they simply wore their clothes for six months until they were allowed to return to their farms again. This would bo quite in order, as cleanliness is by no means parts of the Communist doctrine in R ussia. ABNORMALLY HIGH PRICES. “In spite of Stalin’s iron dictatorship, human nature is such that the clumsiness of bureaucratic control is seen in all its vividness in Russia today. Long queues wait outside shops to get the commonest necessities of lift*. Almost all shops are closed, and goods are mostly unprocurable, while the few things available are very high in price. The shops open are owned and operated by the Government. Some of them supply workers only in exchange for bread and vegetable cards but one or two sell for cash. Here are some of the prices in August. 1931, which I personally noted : —Bacon, 8s lid a lb; butter, 17s 9d a lb. The shop from which these prices were taken was the best food shop in Leningrad/yet it was filthily dirty, and the total assortment of goods was deplorably poor—sausage, cheese, bacon, some wizened vegetables, one line of canned fruit, and eight or ten different packet goods. “In what had once been a fashionable department store owned by a Frenchman in Moscow, there was a miserable assortment of poorly-kept stock. A child’s woollen jumper was priced at £2 4s fid and was not nearly as good quality as one we purchased for our little girl in New York for two dollars (8s Id). A pair of ordinary kid gloves was marked at £2 4s fid, and a lady’s feather hand-bag at £3 2s fid was worth not more than I.os in any London shop. INEFFICIENT HOTELS. “The hotels are just as inefficiently run ;uul as dirty as the shops,” said Mr Laidlaw. “At the Grand Hotel, Moscow, we waited 37 minutes after giving our order before our soup was served. The following prices, which are typical of Russian hotels, were taken from the menu-.—Roast beef 10s. chicken Ids. mushroom 12s, peas 7s. cauliflower 7s fid, fish 8s fid, sardines os, salad Ills, soup /s, omelet 'S> ice cream 3s. fruit compote 3s fid, small bottle of soda water 2s fid. Rut the Russian people never see such luxuries, their staple diet, being sour black rye bread and vegetable soup, and yet they look remarkably healthy.

“We siivv no huielier meat whatever on suit* nor did we son n hnteliers shop in nil Russia. Milk is iiviiiliihlo only if there arc rhildren who need it. No poods of any kind arc delivered, and people imisl stand in line and wail out, side the Government shops lor their bread and vegetables, owing to the poor serviie One man said his hardest day’s weak was on his day oil going round trying to find a few in high he might; need.

DUMPING SURPLUS SUPPLIES “In view of the tremendous shortage of clothes, boots, and all the manufactured goods, it appealed to me as strange that the working day was being cut from eight hours to seven, but it seems Russia is already running short of raw materials and cannot raise the necessary credits to keep importing them. After leaving, 1 saw by the commercial columns of a leaning English paper that Russia’s exports for the past twenty months were £30,000,000 less than her imports and that the rations of her workers were to he cut 25 per cent., so as to leave a greater exportable surplus. “Meantime, Russia is devoting the larger part of her Five-Ybar plan to the development of what she calls the heavy industries—iron and steel plants, which can he quickly turned into armament and munition factories. By compulsory service she is inculcating militarism into 150,000,000 peo, le, and with Stalin’s autocratic control he can keep down the standard of living of her people far below that oi the workers in other countries, and thus be able to dump her surplus supplies on the world’s markets, so that Russia as at present controlled, is an economic and. in a lesser degree, a military menace to the rest of the world."