THE REAL RUSSIA

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 513, 22 April 1933, Page 6

THE REAL RUSSIA

HORRIFYING PICTURE peasants starive while soldiery feeds layishly. FAMINE IMMINENT. i London, Saturday. After a toiir of the northern Caucasus and the IJkraine, studying «the effect of collectivisation, the special representative of the Manchester Guardian paints a horrifying picture of starving villagers whose produce has been seized to feed the cities or i for export. i He instances a market town in the Kuban district, in the Caucasus, which'' is overrun by well-fed soldiery, while civilians are starving. i The latter have practically had noI thing to eat for weeks, the scanty . food offered for sale being unfit even for animals, j A crowd wandered backwards and forwards, wistfully eyeing, but too j poor to buy, miserabldi fra'gments of chesee and half-rotten potatoes. "Taken Everything." Peasants, questioned, replied: "We have nothing. They've taken everything away." It is impossible, the correspondent says, adequately to describe the town's desolation and hopelessness, not merely on account of famine, but becaue the population of whole villages has been uprooted and exiled to the North Caucasus. "I was shown a piece of bread made from weeds and straw and a little millet," he writes. "It 'seemed inconceivable that anyone would eat it, yet it was considered a rare delicacy." "In the Ukraine, the Government seized the grain with such thorough-nes-s that there is no bread anywh'ere — only bewilderment and despair. Only Misery Now. "The Ukraine, before the revolution, was one of the world's great peasant areas, with the people tolerably comfortable; but now there are only wretched towns and villages. The correspondent believes that conditions on the Volga are equally bad, and declares that unless the decay of agriculture is stopped, famine will extend throughout the country. Russia, he says, is becoming a slave State, as not 5 per cenjt. of Russians have >a 'standard of life which' approaches to English unemployed on the lowest scale of relief.