PEASANTS’ VOICE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 605, 6 March 1929, Page 6

PEASANTS’ VOICE

SOVIET EXPERIMENT IN JOURNALISM PERILS OF CORRESPONDENTS The “Krestyanskaya”, or ‘‘Peasants Gazette,”, a little newspaper which appears twice a week, is an interesting experiment in Soviet journalism. It serves the double purpose o£ providing a forum for the expression of rural ideas and impressions and of being an important link between, the Government and the peasants. It combines the varied functions of a newspurveyor, a journal of practical husbandry, and a court of appeal against local abuses and injustices, reports the “Observer’s” Moscow correspondent.

The circulation of the “Krestyanskaya Gazette” fluctuates with the seasons, because the Russian peasant has more time for reading in winter than in summer, but it has been as high as 1,000,000. Probably the most interesting feature of the paper is the number of letters which it receives from readers. They pour in at the rate of 1,500 or 2,000 a day, written on leaves torn out of school notebooks, on bits of wrapping paper, often scrawled and mis-spelled, but giving convincing proof that the peasant has awakened to a point where he has ideas and desires to express them. GIRL CRITIC OF BOYS These epistles are on the most diverse subjects, ranging from politics and economics to reflections on marriage and family life, and the future chronicler of the post-revolutionary Russian peasantry may look to them as a valuable source of first-hand information. By running through a few dozens of the letters (only a few of which can be printed, due to space limitation, but all of which are preserved in the archives of the newspaper) one may obtain a fair idea of what the more articulate part of the peasantry is thinking. Prom a village in the wooded northern province of Vologda a girl writes that the local branch of the Union of Communist Youth consists of two girls and four boys. The girls would like to read and study; but the boys prefer to dance and play and drink. From another place in this province a peasant complains that his son can go to school only four years, and conse quently will remain all his life “a half-dark man”; he calls for more and better schools. Letters of criticism are far from infrequent. So citizen Nazar Misik, from the Slavgorod region of Siberia, offers the following economic computations: “Before the war we got three arshines (a measure equal to 2.4 feet) of cloth for a pood (36 poundsl of wheat, and now we get only one. We also have to pay three times as much for iron.” A Leningrad peasant criticises the introduction of the sevenhour working day in industry, complaining that the peasants already work 16 hours a day. HIDING THEIR IDENTITIES

Some of these letters come from casual writers; others sent in by the 15,000 syelkors or village correspondents whom the newspaper has at its disposal. These village correspondents, of whom there are several hundred thousand in the country, constitute a valuable intelligence service for the Soviet Government in the rural districts. Their occupation is far from a safe one, because the syelkor, who exposes the embezzlements of the local officials or becomes unpopular with his more prosperous fellow-villagers by accusing them, individually or collectively, of evading their proper share of taxation, is likely to be found in a remote spot with a bullet or knife wound in his body. As a rule the village correspondents hid their identity by signing their letters with numbers, and sometimes their communications are not printed, but simply used as a source of confidential Information for the higher authorities. The newspaper claims that in the course of a year it has caused the removal of about 1,000 corrupt and tyrannical local officials on the basis of letters from syelkors and peasant readers.