FAMINE IN RUSSIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 516, 20 November 1928, Page 9

FAMINE IN RUSSIA

WORKLESS LIVE ON APPLES HUGE MEAT CONSUMPTION (Australian and N.Z. Press Association) Reed. 9 a.m. LONDON, Monday. The “Daily Mail” correspondent at Riga says people with relatives in Russia are posting thousands of packets of flour, rice and lard thither weekly, owing to the famine. In Moscow and < Leningrad, the unemployed are living almost exclusively on apples. The Riga correspondent of “The Times” says the Russian newspapers allude to the extraordinary influx of livestock into the cities as "queues of swine awaiting slaughter.” The authorities complain of the .importation into Moscow, Leningrad and the principal central towns of 10 times the normal quantities of livestock. The newspaper “Pravda” says hundreds of livestock die every day because they are overcrowded in the stalls adjacent to the slaughterhouses, where the employees are working two shifts a day, but the queues increase. At Moscow the slaughtermen normally kill 1,000 a day, but the queue contains 14,000. At Leningrad 500 are normally killed, Ijut there are 8,000 in the queue. The Soviet Press says disaster is certain because the peasants in all the dairying districts are selling dairy cows and pedigree cattle for slaughter owing to the scarcity of fodder. The people of Moscow and Leningrad are consuming double the normal amount of meat because of the scarcity of other foodstuffs.