Grain for Goods

"The success of the Spring grain sowing campaign will determine the progress and tempo of our whole economic structure for the next two years."

Dictator Josef Stalin caused this blazingly frank statement to appear, last week, in the State news organ Pravda, "Truth."

It meant that an acute stage has been reached in the crisis of agriculture v. industry. The peasants have refused to sow and sell a surplus of grain above their own needs unless offered manufactured goods in exchange. They have not been offered these goods in sufficient quantities, because not even Dictator Stalin has been able to spur Russian industry to adequate production. Therefore the Soviet State has recently fallen behind in its efforts to buy grain from the peasantry by poods. *

Last week Dictator Stalin, speaking through Pravda, strove to warn both peasants and industrials that they imperatively must increase sowing and production if economic Russia is not to perish in a dwindling vicious circle. By way of striking a note of cheer, Pravda observed that the peasants are not hoarding as obstinately as in the years of extreme crisis, 1920 and 1921. The additional fact that grain collections have considerably speeded up since the first of this year prompted Pravda to detect "a marked change for the better in the relations of the important mass of the peasantry toward Soviet methods."

* A pood weighs 36.113 pounds.