THE CATASTROPHE	99
to the mortality in various places in the south. In the settlement
of Ust-Labinskaya the population had declined from 24,000 to
io3ooo in the course of the winter; at Timishbek from 15,000
to 7,000, and at Dimitrievka from 6,000 to 2,000. Other settle-
ments, such as Irbilnaya, Kainmenogradska and Losovskaya,
were completely deserted. At Stavropol the loss of life was
50,000 and at Krasnoda 40,000. The terrible mortality in the
latter place is confirmed by accounts given by employees of
the German Drusag concession.
The judgment of Mr. W. H. Chamberlin, the Moscow
correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, who spent
twelve years in Moscow, and is an undisputed authority on
Russian affairs, is particularly valuable. In an article of May
29;, 1934, he wrote: "Some idea of the scope of the famine, the
very existence of which was stubbornly and not unsuccessfully
concealed from the outside world by the Soviet authorities,
may be gauged from the fact that in three widely separated
regions of Ukrainia and the North Caucasus which I visited—
Poltava and Byelaya Tserkov and Kropotkin in the North
Caucasus—mortality, according to the estimates of such respon-
sible local authorities as Soviet and collective farm presidents,
ranged around 10 per cent. Among individual peasants and
in villages far away from the railroad it was often much higher."
In his book, Russia's Iron Age, published towards the end
of 1934, Mr. Chamberlin, while plainly anxious to make a
cautious estimate, puts the number of victims in the famine
area at three or four millions.
That millions of people have died of starvation in Russia is a
fact which, I am sure, no one can any longer seriously dispute;
in fact, po effort to deny it is now made even in Moscow1.
1 The Ukrainian People's Commissary, Petrovsky, speaking on October
6, 1933, at Kharkov, stated that the population of the Ukraine in 1933 was
31,6873000. In 1932 the same mart estimated the poplilation at 32,122,000
j£F*$£y, November % 1932) and also stated that the increase in population
for 1933 would probably amount to 622,000.
Unfortunately, I am not in a position to print the contents of a document
which I have had the opportunity of seeing, dated February I5> 1923.