Days of Wrath

(See front cover)

With stark, brutal candor the Soviet State announced, last week, through its official news organ Isvestia, that savage and murderous resistance to the Soviet Power is now being made by members of the Kulak or "Rich Peasant" class--the class most relentlessly taxed by Moscow's sovereign Proletariat.

"Telegrams are pouring in from numerous parts of the Soviet Union," declared Isvestia, "with the news that deeds of arson and murders of active Communists are being perpetrated by the Kulaks. . . . Soviet farms, village libraries and Soviet bureaus have been burned down by the Fists* in their fierce opposition against all measures undertaken by our Communist Party and our Soviet Government. . . . Murderous attacks have been perpetrated against Communist village school teachers and social workers, women as well as men. . . . Seven murders and four attempted murders took place in public assemblies or in Soviet bureaus. The roll of our Communist dead contains the names of four Chairmen of local Soviets and one Secretary. ... A destructive blow at the Kulaks must be delivered immediately!"

Doubled was the gravity of this grim account when it appeared how widespread are the areas where red flames reared high, last week, and crude Kulak butcher knives carved the white flesh of "women as well as men." Named as trouble centers by Isvestia were Irkutsk in Siberia, Minsk and Smolensk in White Russia, Kiev in the Ukraine, and three important towns on the upper, middle and lower Volga River -- Yarosalve, Samara and Stalingrad. The latter and famed town is not the birth place of Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin but a strategic base which he valorously defended against the "White Armies" during the Bolshevist Revolution. Son-of-Ivan. The Kulak murders of last week did not foreshadow a revolt of the peasantry as a whole, in the expert opinion of veteran New York Times Correspondent Walter Duranty; but unquestionably they troubled the minds and frayed the nerves of the statesmen who rule Russia from Moscow's thick-walled and tall-towered Kremlin. Perhaps, of these resolute rulers, the most anxious and sick at heart was Michael Son-of-Ivan Kalinin, the President of Russia -- for he is himself a peasant (see cover). A good, a simple and a noble man is Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin. Open house is still his rule to all whom he feels are his brother tillers of the soil. A poor peasant or a rich "Fist" despised by Communists can trudge or journey to Moscow and be sure that, having waited his turn, he may speak his grievance to the Comrade President and warm his stomach with scalding tea from the never-out presidential samovar. Each peasant knows that he may address the President of Russia familiarly as "Tovaristch" and that the kindly, bearded face of Kalinin will wrinkle in a warm, genuine smile when he greets the humble guest "Tovaristch" in return. No wonder the Son-of-Ivan has been steadily reelected President* since 1919. No wonder his heart was sore, last week, when Dictator Joseph Stalin proposed in Isvestia to deal at "Rich Peasants" a ruthless "destructive blow."

The prestige of President Kalinin with even "Political Boss" Stalin is due largely to his influence with the great mass of peasants and secondly to his long and impeccable record as a revolutionary. At 14 he began to work intermittently in a cartridge factory at St. Petersburg, during the slack winter season on his father's farm, and was almost at once fired with the pure flame of Revolution. His success in interpreting citified Marxian doctrines to peasant friends at home was phenomenal. Soon enough, however, the Imperial Police transformed his life into a long, incessant struggle punctuated with arrests and finally with banishment to Tiflis and later Reval. Thus the President of Russia is of the honored Revolutionary Old Guard--a paladin of 53 whose sufferings have given him the look of 65, unless one notices that only his beard and not his hair is white.

Significantly enough the more urban and proletarian members of the Communist Party dominated by Dictator Josef Stalin suspect that the Son-of-Ivan does not even now fully realize what the class struggle is all about. They are bent upon feverish proletarianization and industrialization of all Russians--including peasants and Kulaks. Having taxed the town capitalist out of existence, they would do the same with the rural "Fist." Against this policy the Peasant President of Russia stands firm, patient and unalterable. Recently he said: "The Government of the Soviet Union must not and does not aim to crush the richer peasants, but simply to stop their undue aggrandizement at the expense of their poorer brethren."

Reasons for Arson, Murder. One essential fact is the key to understanding of the present days of wrath between Agrarians and Proletarians in Russia. The fact is that Dictator Stalin is straining and perhaps overtaxing the resources of the country to get money for his industrialization program. He has turned the screw of direct taxation on the Kulak. With varying harshness in varying districts he has forced peasant and Kulak to sell their grain to the State at prices fixed by it--low prices. Most of this grain is consumed in Russian cities, but Stalin's policy is to sell as much as possible abroad. Profits from grain and nearly all other kinds of export sales to go, of course, entirely to the State Monopoly--entirely into the State Treasury--and thus provide cash for such vast industrialization projects as the $25,000,000 contract just let to the International General Electric Company of New York (TIME, Oct. 29) for electrification in the Soviet Union.

During the past twelvemonth the Dictator tried to increase grain production by creating enormous state farms (worked by proletarians) and by sending Communist instructors to coach small farmers in methods for increasing the yield of their arms. Naturally this procedure threatened to undermine the locally monopolistic position of the Kulaks and tended to force down still further the price at which the State could compel producers to sell grain. The arson and murder of last week are very largely explained by the despair of the Kulaks at this new situation. They burnt fields and barns of State-grown grain. They murdered Communist workers who were teaching the peasants and proletarians-turned-farmers to grow bigger crops. Naturally their fury grew at times indiscriminate, inconsistent, wanton, mad.

Robbing Russian Markets. Enters at this point the fact that, despite the intensive grain growing of this year, unfavorable weather conditions brought down the national crop to a bare sufficiency for Russia's own grain needs. There were even scareheads in the U. S. press, last fortnight, that the Soviets faced a famine and would have to start buying U. S. grain. To spike this rumor up rose potent Saul G. Bron, Super-Purchasing & SuperSelling Agent of the Soviet State in Manhattan. Mr. Bron is large, untidy, jovial, shrewd and bland. He is a University of Zurich Ph. D. He served apprenticeship to his present post of huge responsibility as Minister of Foreign Trade for the Ukraine. With all the emphasis at his booming command Saul G. Bron said: "Regardless of all difficulties and obstacles, one thing is clear to me, and that is that the harvest of 1927-28 has supplied the Soviet Union with a sufficient amount of grain, and therefore every necessity for grain imports, such as has been alleged in some reports is precluded.

"Furthermore, . . . the total Soviet exports of every sort for 1927-28 are slightly in excess of those for 1926-27. This was made possible by an increase in the exports of practically all exportable commodities other than grain, especially oil, timber and, in particular, of articles which thus far have been of secondary importance in the export trade of the Soviet Union."

Thus strikingly Mr. Bron called attention to a new world trade trend. Supplementary information from Moscow indicated that Soviet oil production has been speeded up this year to reach 12,500,000 tons--with an export total of 3,500,000 or nearly three times the largest export figure ever reached under the Tsars. A new Soviet "cracking plant" on the Black Sea is delivering refined gasoline to tankers at 8-c- a gallon. The Soviet textile industry is up to an export total of 140,000,000 meters of textile goods for the past twelve-month--as against 192,000,000 meters exported in the record year 1913. These figures indisputably show that Dictator Stalin is rapidly putting Russia back on the map as a country of huge exports-- but is there any kind of joker in this indicated trend?

From the standpoint of the world market there is none; but from the Russian internal market standpoint there is a cruel joker indeed. The facts, as confirmed from Moscow, are that ruthless Comrade Josef Stalin is deliberately robbing the Russian market of things that Russians want to buy, in order to sell those things abroad and reap foreign capital. Thus correspondents humorously described a recent paper famine" in Moscow, although the Soviet Monopoly was even then shipping paper to Persia in thumping shipload lots. The deal was put through by His Highness Timoor Tash, favorite Courtier of the Shah of Persia, on a recent visit to Moscow. It was thought politic to start a paper chain of commerce between Moscow and Teheran, then and there--even at the cost of robbing the Russian paper market so drastically that when Moscow schools opened for the Fall term little or no paper could be allotted students to scribble their sums on.

Instances similar to the above can be almost indefinitely multiplied. A large Turkish order for overshoes and a flood of foreign orders for butter caused these wearable and edible staples to disappear from the Soviet Stores in Moscow for weeks. Naturally the provinces fare even worse, and the shortage of urgently needed goods in rural districts has unquestionably increased the irritation of peasants and Kulaks. They grumble, justly, that the State forces them to sell their grain cheap and then offers them not even the small comfort of being able to buy at high prices the staples that they want.

For the present the State holds the whip hand. The loyalty of the well-paid Red Army to the State is a byword. The Communist Party is organized with marvelous efficiency to insinuate and impose the Bolshevist Ideal. According to all correspondents the regime is absolutely stable, and supreme is the man STALIN. No grafter, but a cold, fanatical, unswerving master, he is unquestionably doing his patriotic best for Russia. Last week he provided a hearty and hopeful greeting for onetime U. S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Schuveldt Dewey, now Financial Adviser to the Bank of Poland, who arrived in Moscow "as a tourist" with Mrs. Dewey, and children. In Soviet circles it is hoped that this may be an unofficial feeler toward Hoover recognition of Red Russia.

Such recognition by the U. S. would likely depend upon recognition by the Soviet State of the Tsarist Debt, and an agreement looking to repayment of U. S. creditors. It is still an article of Soviet faith that no such "capitalistic" hangover from the Tsarist regime can possibly be recognized; but "Boss" Stalin has found a weasel way around the difficulty. In referring to the arrangement whereby France has loaned certain sums to Russia, with expectation that they will be paid back together with the Tsarist Debt to France, Stalin recently weasled: "We regard the payments made to France as supplementary interest on the credits France is granting us and not as recognition of our debt."

This can only mean that if the Hoover Administration chooses to enter into a similar arrangement, Soviet Russia stands ready to repay the Tsarist Debt sub rosa as the price of recognition.

First Woman. People who are lofty about Mrs. Alfred Emanuel Smith are still loftier about Ekaterina Ivanovna Kalinin, wife of the Peasant President. Exceedingly lofty was the refusal of Charles Evans Hughes, in 1923, when Secretary of State, to grant the First Woman of Russia a U. S. visa. Perhaps his reason was that Ekaterina Ivanovna is no lady--as befits a good Communist. She was once a nurse girl, then a factory girl. On the dented silver cigaret case which she always carries is engraved the likeness of Karl Marx-- rampant. She scorns all titles but one, "The Best Neighbor in Russia." In her own right, and by the electoral will of the people, she is President of a local Soviet in Tver, and thus directs the destinies of 54 villages.

The First Woman has said: "I suppose at heart I am a bourgeoise,* because I have always wanted just to have a home and my husband and children (3) with me. It is hard being so much away from them, but in Russia now we Communists are all needed, and we cannot think of ourselves.

Still more outspoken is the President's aged mother--no Red, she. Once, when President Kalinin visited the log cottage where he was born and where his mother still lives, he asked her what she had done with her oldest pig.

"Hmp! I gave him to the priest."/-

"Why, mother? Why to the priest?"

"Because the priest is a man of God, and God is no Communist!"

Of her son she recently said: "I used to ask Michael when he was a young fellow, 'Why do you read all night? Don't you know I have to pay for the oil?'

"He only said: I must read much to understand all the history of all the world, and how to make the peasants less unhappy.'

"When he was 20 they put him in prison and I cried much, like a mother. But then I stopped, because after all he was a man, and it was his own affair. Now I know that he did right, for he is the President of Russia. I am just a peasant who has a good son. When I go to Moscow I never ride in his automobile. Such a woman as I should walk.

* i.e. "Tight Fisted Peasants"--"Fists" being Bolshevik slang for Kulaks.

* Technically he is "Acting Chairman of the Central Executive Committee" but by courtesy and in fact "President of Russia."

*In Russia a scandalous admission, equivalent to remarking in the U. S.: ''I suppose I am a Bolshevik."

/-Equivalent to a U. S. wife's remarking, "I gave him to the village sot."