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"Will there be soup?" That is a question which the men and women of the Soviet Union are asking anxiously, dreadingly (sic), when they think of the rigours of the coming Russian winter. It is a question which is being asked, not only in Communist Russia, but also in Capitalistic America: but in Russia the voices of the questioners are fraught with greater fear, because the harvest is failed and the food is not there. 

I have before me a copy of the Izvestia, the organ of the Soviet Government, a newspaper which often openly criticises failures in the Five-Year Plan.  This is what I read in the number of October 5^th, in an article on the Donetz Basin (the Glamorgan of Russia) which produces coal, iron and steel. 

In the shops of Makeysvka [Makeyevka] (the Pontypridd of the Soviet Union) the wives of the workers are waiting for vegetables.  Now and then a loaded lorry passes by. A thin autumn rain is falling monotonously.  The housewife waits … The shop attendant tries to calm her.  "Now don't get excited comrade housewife!"  But she looks at a empty basket, thinks of the winter, thinks of the cabbage, potatoes and tomatoes and asks one question:  "Will there be soup?" 

That is the Soviet Government's greatest problem in the last year of the Five-Year Plan which ends on December 31^st. 

Why is there little soup?  Why is meat short?  Why is bread beginning to be rationed again?  

In search of answers to these questions I went to the Russian countryside, talked to numerous peasants in the Russian language, lived in a wooden huts and slept on their bug infested floors. 

I used to take a train, not knowing my destination, drop out at some small station and walk for miles until I was in Real Russia.  And then I learned from the mouths of the peasants themselves why there is not enough soup.  It was quite a different picture from that which the Communist had painted to me in Moscow.  A keen, well-built young Bolshevik said to me in the Commissariat of Agriculture: 

"Under the Five-Year Plan we are going to socialise agriculture.  We're going to sweep away the private farmer.  By the end of the plan no peasants will own land anymore.  The villages will be turned into collective farms where land and the cows and the horses and the pigs will be owned in common and the land ploughed in common by tractors. Private property is a curse and we will abolish it in the villages.  Our new methods are increasing harvests and are producing a happy and healthy countryside." 

It was certainly not a healthy and happy countryside that I found when, after a long tramp across fields; I marched at night into the village near the Volga about 1000 miles from where the well-built young Communist had talked to me.  

The sun had set in a deep red glow: below the steppes which stretched away to the East had grown blacker and gloomier.  I saw a light in a window of a wooden hut, knocked, went inside and saw a group of shaggy, rough peasants 

They stared at me in amazement and soon all gathered around.  "Where did I come from? Was it true that there would be a Bolshevik Revolution in England? Could one get meat in America?  Would I stay in one of the huts? 

They bustled around me with questions and offered hospitality.  Before long I was seated in a simple peasant’s hut, and talking to the peasant’s wife with ragged, blotchy-face children crawling and running about. 

"Is there enough food in Russia?", I asked.  She grew excited and said: "Of course, there isn't.  How could there be?  They've taken the land from us to make these Communist collective farms.  We want our own land and look what they've done to our cows.  My husband and I had a fine cow.  They took it away and put all the cows of the village together and now cow is thin and scraggy and we don't get enough milk." 

There was a rap at the door.  In came a handsome blackheaded peasant with flashing eyes and prominent white teeth.  He hesitated to talk first of all, but soon had confidence and said:  "It's a dog's life now, ever since they've forced us into collective farms.  1926 and 1927 were fine years when we still had our own land.  But it will be better to be under the earth than to live now.  Land, cow and bread they've taken away from us.  Nearly all our grain-and it was little enough-has been carted away and sent to the towns and we're afraid to speak.  What will we do during the winter?"  He ended with a groan of despair 

That is what I heard from the mouths of peasants in many parts of Russia.  "Why should we work?" they asked, "When our land and cow have been taken away from us.  Give us our land back." Therefore they do not cultivate the land so thoroughly. 

- - - -

[Quoted in the Western Mail was also a Times telegram from Riga:  "As a result of increased food difficulties the Soviet authorities have decided to reduce the rations of certain grades of professors and scientists by about 25 percent." 

* * * * *

In my first article on present-day conditions in Russia in Saturday's Western Mail, I referred to the failure of crops under the Five-Year Plan. 

One reason why the harvest of all crops, vegetables as well as grain have failed is that a couple of million of the most energetic kulaks (the richest peasants) have been exiled.  An account of this I heard in the morning after a night on the wooden floor of the stuffy room which I shared with the whole of the peasant’s family. 

I walked along to see the Communist president of the village Soviet, a sharp, square jawed young man in a green military cap. 

"Jump into my carriage," he said and in a few minutes we were bumping over the fields of the collective farm. 

"We have had a great victory here," he said as we looked back on the several hundred huts in the village.  "We've defeated the kulaks, those peasants who had a lot of land and employed labour.  We exiled 14 families from here and now they’re cutting wood in the forests of the north or working in Siberia.  We must root them out because they are of the enemy class.  We sent the last kulak a month ago." 

"What had he done?"  I asked. 

"He was very religious and had a sect of his own.  He used to collect the peasants in his hut and tell them that the Communist wanted the peasants to starve but that there would be a war and when there was war the Pope of Rome would come to their village and hang all the Communists.  That was counter-revolution.  So we send him away.  These kulaks are terrible.  It was they that urged the peasants to massacre their cattle."

And he told me how killing the cattle and horses throughout Russia was another reason why food was scarce.  Stalin in his speech in June 1930 estimated that one-third of the cattle and at least 1/5 of the horses of Russia had been massacred by peasants who did not wish to give up the animals for nothing to collective farms 

Some days after my conversations in this village I was seated in a slowly moving train which six days before had left Tashkent in Central Asia and was now carrying me from Samara to Moscow. 

I glanced out of the window and suddenly saw a mass of debris-shattered coaches torn up rails.  There had been an accident and a goods train had obviously rattled down a slope.  It gave me another clue as to why food was so short, and that is bad transport. 

Under the Five-Year Plan courageous efforts of been made to improve the railway system.  Miles of new railroads have been laid, numbers of new Soviet locomotives have been built, yet the railways are still in a most unsatisfactory state and it hinders the carrying of the grain and vegetables. 

It was the same in old Russia of the Tsar's where there might be grave famine in one region and abundance in another.  Today the railways are crowded and goods train are held up for days, while the food inside the wagons gets bad. 

If the trains run badly, food is badly distributed. Vegetables and fruit have to wait days for a train.  On Friday October 7th Isvestia had an example of that.  I read: "Last autumn, in the town of Kaluga, mountains of cabbages were being heaped up in the centre of the town in Lenin Square.  The green and white pyramids grew bigger and bigger every day.  Then it started raining and only when the cabbages began to go rotten was anything done about it.  It was taken as fodder for the cattle and to feed the pigs.  In a word there was a regular ‘cabbage panic’ in Kaluga."  Such mismanagement is a great hindrance to the fulfilment of the Five-Year Plan. 

It is no wonder that the chief organ of the Soviet Government contains news of the shortage of the harvest, that it reports that the grain collections in Ukraine where there has also been a drought.  North Caucasia and the lower Volga (the chief grain areas) have been exceedingly unsatisfactory and that only 40 percent of the July Grain Plan and 60 percent of the August Plan was carried out. 

The government paper states that instead 25,000 tons of potatoes the vast Ukraine has only produced 9000.  It gives figures showing that the industrial plants such a sugar beet and only fulfilled a small proportion of the plan. 

It reveals the winter sowing of grain had been in a far lower scale than last year.  It shows that the amount of vegetables in the chief towns is disastrously small.  It states that shelter is lacking for 1,500,000 head of cattle. 

In short it forecasts that in this the last winter of the Five-Year Plan the question will still be: ‘Will there be soup?’