98	HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
lives in the Ukraine. The inquiry undertaken in the autumr
of 1933 by the Manchester Guardian correspondent in various
places in the south—the Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus, etc
—is extremely instructive. He tried to ascertain the decline
in the population of these places in accordance with exad
figures supplied by the local Soviet officials. He gives the names
of the places and the officials, and com,es to the conclusion
that in some villages the decline amounted to 10 to 15 per cent,
Thus in the village of Kazanskaya only 7,000 people were left
out of an original 8,000. The correspondent adds that thewintei
and even more early spring must have been quite terrible in
this region. In order to check the statements of the inhabitants,
he went to the president of the local Soviet, Nemov, who
confirmed that the population had declined from 8,000 to
y3ooo, i.e. by 12-5 per cent. Similar effects of the catastrophe
were found to exist in other places. These discoveries of the
Manchester Guardian correspondent in the autumn of 1933
confirm the reports sent by Malcolm Muggeridge to the same
paper in March. This is important in view of the controversy
about the existence of a famine which was carried on for
months in letters to the editor of this paper. Harry Lang1
estimated that in certain parts of White Russia and the Ukraine
up to 40 per cent of the population, including a large number
of Jews, had been victims of the famine in 1932-3. Similar
figures are quoted for the various German settlements in the
Northern Caucasus, etc., by the German relief organizations.
They put the total of deaths of Germans in the Soviet Union
at about 140,000 in 1933 alone.2
Another eyewitness who published his impressions in the
English press at the end of August 1933 czmt to far gloomier
conclusions than the Manchester Guardian correspondent. Like
Malcolm Muggeridge, this writer had stayed for some time in
the famine areas. He gives the following details with regard
1 Referred to elsewhere: of the New York Jewish paper Forward.
.     a Cf» Nation und Staat> No. 40,1934.