Stomach Crisis

Whether enough food got into Russian stomachs was an academic question to Walter Duranty and other Moscow correspondents until last week. Suddenly Dictator Josef Stalin returned, robust and vigorous, from a two-month holiday in his native Caucasus. Two days later the "Man of Steel" announced, for the first time, short food rations for not only all foreign correspondents but even for previously pampered foreign engineers.

Worse still, the price of rationed food was drastically upped. Egg prices rose 250% overnight. Meat prices almost doubled. This winter the only foreigners in Russia to eat well will be the diplomatic corps, privileged to bring in food duty free under diplomatic seal.

Clearly Dictator Stalin, on reaching Moscow, had studied Russia's vital statistics, deciding at a glance that the Soviet Union faces a food shortage this winter which will bring back memories of her dread Famine Year, 1921. Correspondents, soon to feel the pinch, filled their despatches last week with stomach-crisis facts.

P: For the moment green vegetables remained plentiful in Russian cities, peddled by peasants under Dictator Stalin's decree of last spring permitting limited resumption of private trade (TIME, May 23).

P: Autumn grain sowing throughout the Soviet Union is "highly unsatisfactory," with only 7,000,000 acres sown this year as compared to 15,000,000 last year (to Aug. 25).

P: The Tractor, sensationally publicized symbol of the Five-Year Plan, has been breaking down badly this summer. Thus, even near the industrial centre of Odessa where repairs can be quickly made, 30% of all tractors in the region were reported by the Soviet Press last week "disabled."

P: Industrial production, while continuing to fulfill the Five-Year Plan in quantity, has fallen so scandalously low in quality that Soviet newspapers raged, cited "typical examples":

1) Of 15,000,000 metres of cloth woven in seven Moscow mills which once belonged to Tsarist Millionaire Morozov, over 7,000,000 metres have had to be discarded as "spoiled and useless."

2) By way of experiment the manager of Moscow's "Proletarian Victory Shoe Factory" gave a friend a pair of shoes. In six days the soles had worn through. Within 19 days the friend had worn out three pairs of "Victory Shoes." End experiment.

Significance. Every Russian food shortage is produced by the same cause: a failure of sufficient goods to reach the peasantry in time to stimulate them to grow more food than will suffice their own needs. Lazy and shrewd, the Russian peasant will not pile up a food surplus which the Government may seize from him by force.

To break this rural habit Dictator Stalin forced the peasants into "collective farms" which the State supplied with tractors. It was thought that with a State-appointed Communist in charge of each farm the peasants would produce, produce, produce. For a time they did. But this year the State's failure to ship sufficient goods to the mechanized collectives is producing a new and most ominous "collective strike."

Paradoxically the Soviet State could probably have obtained enough goods to send to the farms but for the world capitalist crisis--at which all proletarians theoretically rejoice. Depression, by forcing down world commodity prices, has catastrophically reduced the revenue of the Soviet State from what it sells abroad --chiefly raw materials.

Official Soviet statistics, released at Moscow last week, admitted that Soviet exports for the first five months of 1932 were one-quarter less than in 1931. This forced the State to cut its much needed purchases from abroad by almost one-third. Even so Russia's official adverse trade balance for the period is 100,018,000 rubles (nominally $50,000,000).

These facts, together with the "collective strike" and the "poor quality scandal," faced Josef Stalin last week with enough awkward, onerous problems to break any statesman less tough than Russia's "Man of Steel."

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