"No Cannibalism"

Newspaper correspondents have steadily stressed the fact that Russians are harvesting bumper wheat crops this year (TIME, July 3). But they believe that there is still famine, left over from last year's poor crop. Nervous, the Soviet Government last week bottled up all foreign correspondents in Moscow, refused to permit them to travel in the provinces unless it could be certain what they are looking for.

From Berlin, fortnight ago, famed Correspondent Walter Duranty of the New York Times cabled a dispatch which the Soviet censors would scarcely have passed: "Except in the largest cities and the most important industrial centres the food supply has been reduced below what are generally regarded as the minimum requirements, and even in the favored localities there has been much distress. The almost inevitable consequence has been an increased death rate from such maladies as typhus, dysentery, dropsy and various infantile disorders."

Last week Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Vienna's archbishop, appealed to the world to rescue "millions" in Russia from famine which he predicted would be at its peak in four months. Declared he: "Famine conditions there are accompanied by such cruel phenomena of mass starvation as infanticide and cannibalism."

Tartly retorted a Foreign Office official in Moscow: "There is no cannibalism and, I may say, there are no Cardinals in Soviet Russia."

Nevertheless, last week without warning or explanation the price of bread was doubled in all Russian Government stores.

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