TERRIBLE PICTURE

Hokitika Guardian, 3 April 1933, Page 5

TERRIBLE PICTURE

RUSSIA OF TO-DAY

HORRIBLE PLIGHT OF PEOPLE.

(United Press Association —By Electric Telegraph—Copyright).

(Received this day at 10.26 a.m.)

LONDON,

April -2

Th e “Manchester Gmxrdii/n’s” special correspondent in Russia, after a tom of North Caucasus, and Ukraine studying the effect of collectivisation, paints a horrifying picture 0 f starving villagers, whose produce is seized to feed the cities, and for export. He instances the market town, of Kuban, in the Caucasus, which is overrun by well-fed soldiers, while the (civilians are starving, having bad practically nothing to eat for a week. The scanty food offered for sale is unfit for animals. The crowd is too poor to buy the miserable fragments of cheese and half-rotten potatoes. It is impossible to adequately describe the town’s decollation and hopelessness, r.ot merely on account of the famine, but because, the population is uprooted. Whole villages have been exiled. , North Caucasus is ninety per cent. collectivised. Jt almost resembles , a wilderness. Th e fields are choked with weeds, and tlm cattle are dead, “I was shown a pieC e of broad made from weeds, straw and, little millet. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would eat jt, yet it was a rare delicacy, Similarly, in the cattle and horses a r e dead and 1 the fields are neglected, the harvests being meagre. The Government seized the grain w' rn s uc,h thoroughness and brutality that there is no bread anywhere. Unices the decay of agriculture is stopped, the famine will extend throughout the country. Russia is becoming a ,slave state. Not five per cent, of Russians enjoy the standard of life that approaches that of the English unemployed on the lowest scale of relief.