The Agrarian Crisis in Russia T HE expulsion from Russia of
Herr Paul Scheffer, the accomplished correspondent of the Berliner Tage- blatt, has made possible a vivid illumination of Russian affairs of which we should probably have been deprived if he had been allowed to stay in Moscow. Last Sunday the Observer reproduced from the Berliner Tageblatt a survey of the Russian situation by Herr Scheffer, which is the most brilliant that we have read for a long time. It is clear, judicial, closely reasoned and, above all, restrained in a presentation which is economic rather than moral. The heart of the situation, as Herr Scheffer explains it, is that M. Stalin is using agriculture as his means of arriving at Communism.
So far the vis inertiae of the peasants-130,000,000 of them—has defeated Communism. Soviet Russia has never yet come within sight of being a Communistic State. The peasants, without any definite policy or any coherent thinking, simply held up Communism by refusing to produce food in order to sell it at prices fixed by the State. Nevertheless the Communist Party has never been in any danger of supersession because there was no alternative. The peasants, though they could place a highly effectual obstruction in the way of Communism, were much too simple to organize themselves against their rulers. " White Russia " also was impotent. Herr Scheffer says, and we have no doubt that he is right, that the only threat to the Communist Party will come from within itself. There have already been several Soviet splits, but he thinks that the most serious of all is now in existence. This is in some ways contrary to all appearances, for M. Stalin has lately enforced the recantation (and heard the penitential confessions) of his three chief opponents, M. Rykoff, M. Bukharin and M. Tomsky. The defeat of the " Troika "—as the three leaders of the Right Wing of the Communist Party are nicknamed after the team of three horses abreast which is a common sight in Russia—has left M. Stalin nominally supreme.
Now what is he doing with his apparent victory ? Evidently he is committed more deeply than ever to the Socialization of agriculture as the only way of getting Communism. It was for this purpose that he thought it worth while to humiliate his enemies. Herr Scheffer thinks that he might have had some chance of succeeding if he had been able to proceed cautiously step by step, but his agricultural movement is going much too fast for him. It has got out of control. The country has, of course, always been sacrificed to the towns and the personnel of the Soviet machine. When, however, the peasants refused to produce to their full capacity merely to get the prices allowed by the State, the administration broke down so far as to allow many peasants to persist in their defiance and to prosper on it. There appeared a class of " stronger," or more prosperous, peasants—the Kulaks—who are specially obnoxious to the Soviet. M. Stalin's scheme is to expropriate all the peasants, beginning so far as possible with the Kulaks, and to force them into collective farms.
It is not that there is anything wrong in principle in the formation of larger agricultural units. The 16,000,000 peasant holdings of 1917 have grown to 27,000,000 holdings to-day and many of them are so tiny that they do not support those who cultivate them. Even a Conservative Government would probably be trying now to enlarge the holdings. The trouble is that when once the remedy of Socialization had begun to be applied the peasants either rushed to the collective farms in order to get a footing in them before they were " sold up " as private cultivators or, remaining on their land, they deliberately neglected it.. " Each," as Herr Scheffer says, " foresees his fate. He will be damned for a Kulak." The Kulak is loathed by his poorer neighbours for having focussed attention upon an improper individual prosperity. He is often denounced ; and for fear of losing his property, if not his life, he drops the standard of cultivation long before any collective farm is ready to receive him. As for the poorer peasant, he dare not raise his standard for fear of being suspected as a " middle peasant," or even as a Kulak.
In fine, while the collective farms (with a few excep- tions) are not yet equipped with machinery, or horses, or efficient managers, the demoralization of private agri- culture is becoming steadily greater. All this is a short cut to famine, and Herr Scheffer says that the shortage of food is incomparably worse now than it was this time last year. He quotes a peasant woman as having said to him, " Would we ever have believed that at harvest time we should have to quench our thirst in hot water without tea or sugar ? " The woman omitted all mention of bread. She knew that there was a shortage of that, too, but, as Herr Scheffer says, " In Soviet Russia people do not say everything that is in their minds."
Naturally the agricultural exporting districts have much less grain than usual to export, and the Govern. ment, in order to cover a part of the essential imports, are compelled to make up the balance by exporting manufactures. But production in the factories is ex- pensive and many manufactured goods are exported at less than the cost of production. Thus the agrarian crisis reacts upon the towns and may bring ruin to the grandiose plan of the five-year period of intensive produc- tion. Of all mad principles for the improvement of agri- culture surely the maddest since the beginning of the world is to say in effect to the farmer, " The more you produce the greater will be the insecurity of your property and yourself." M. Stalin, however, as Herr Scheffer keeps on insisting, is a perfectly logical Communist. He knows that if he is really to make Russia a Communistic State he must impose his will on the peasants. Once grant the Marxian premiss and the great gamble appears as an indispensable syllogism. The trouble is not with the sequence of the argument, but with the premiss. Probably that arch-realist Lenin would have been terrified by the truth, but M. Stalin goes on from one tactical triumph to another over his enemies in the rigorous pursuit of the letter of the Marxian law.
Herr Scheffer shares the general conviction that none of the exterior intrigues against the Communist Party need be considered. Collapse, if it comes, will come within the Party itself. It may not be caused by the Right Wing—not by a revived Troika—but it may be caused by the " Young Russia " element. The youth of Russia is on the Left because it has been trained to that position. " It is," says Herr Scheffer, " ultra- revolutionary, ultra-theoretical, greedy for power, only half civilized." It need not be supposed that there is any likelihood of an immediate crash. M. Stalin s Pyrrhic victory over those who dared to dally with capitalistic ideas will last him some time. Meanwhile the demonstration of how Communism works, or tries to work, goes on and those who are not Communists ought to be grateful for it. All the propaganda that has ever been printed against Communism and national- ization has not a tenth part of the cautionary value of the demonstration being given year by year by the Soviet Government of Russia.
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