"Prodigious Famine"

Felix Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the Supreme Soviet Economic Council, emitted last week a poignant wail.

"There exists unquestionably," he declared at Moscow, "a most immense and prodigious famine of all manufactured goods in Russia."

M. Dzerzhinsky's speech followed hard upon a Soviet decree to the effect that the retail price of all manufactured goods must be reduced 10 per cent. Even at that figure the Russian peasant must pay, according to despatches, slightly less than 15 dollars' worth of grain for an ordinary pair of work shoes.

M. Dzerzhinsky explained with notable frankness last week the manner in which this exalted scale of manufactured goods' prices has been wrought.

The whole apparatus of Tsarol industry, he declared, is being utilized to the limit without sufficiently rapid replacement of worn out machinery, is being used up. The influx of half a million untrained workers into the factories has further slowed production, greatly lowered the pre-Revolution standard of production per man per day. On the contrary, the peasantry's production of foodstuffs per man has somewhat increased. Ergo, plentiful bushels of grain have sunk in value before scarce, manufactured products.

The remedy?

M. Dzerzhinsky demands the immediate training of an army of skilled workers. The peasantry must not be antagonized by being further taxed to support this army while it is being trained. The funds needed must come from "improvements in the administrative machinery of industry itself."

Significance. It may be postulated that M. Dzerzhinsky's logical and politic scheme of industrial re-organization will encounter all but insuperable resistance at its fulcrums, the tousled heads of Soviet industrial managers. Despatches from Moscow report that the average tourist should allow a week in which to accomplish the formality of obtaining a pass to view the Kremlin. Similar to this are the often "well meaning" delays which are notorious in Soviet industry and were deemed characteristic of the Tsarol regime. Up to the present time no large group of Russians has ever been brought to abandon the dilatory ways upon which rests like a full blown lotus their universally undoubted charm.

M. Dzerzhinsky's remarks are most notable for their implication that the present Soviet regime persists in its announced determination not to increase the burdens of the peasantry. Firmly entrenched against this view are the "economic opposition," a not unimportant group inspired by Professor Alexander Preobajensky and countenanced by Trotsky who demand that the peasantry support the re-organization of the urban proletariat.