HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
CHAPTER I
THE CAUSES OF FAMINE IN RUSSIA
ALL serious observers of conditions in Soviet Russia are of one
opinion as to the causes of the Russian famine. In their view the
real cause is to be found not in any natural events, but in the
fiasco of the collective system which was introduced with such
excessive haste. Even official Soviet reports referred to the
1932 harvest as of medium quality: poor results or failure were
never mentioned, and in January 1933 Stalin proudly declared
that 61 per cent of all the peasants' farms had been socialized—
220,000 as collective farms and 5,000 as State grain and cattle
farms. But although his plan of campaign seemed to have
succeeded, the facts were the reverse: the foundation of all
these thousands of collective farms had collapsed. The experi-
ment, which consisted in forcibly detaching the peasantry from
their soil, and converting them into proletarian workers in a
large-scale State concern, had failed.
A leading expert on Soviet Russian agriculture, Dr. Otto
Schiller, who was attached to the German Embassy at Moscow
in that capacity, has produced an extremely carefully written
scientific work1 on the subject of collectivization—that unique
saaeasure which was carried through, without any preliminary
investigation, in a territory with nearly 160,000,000 inhabitants.
This is his verdict: "In the work of collectivization one factor
of production failed completely: the human factor."
In the author's opinion Dr. Schiller's statement provides the
key to an understanding of the present position in the Soviet
Union; and it also explains why, as a recent eyewitness
1 Cf. Die Krise der sossialistischen Landwrtschctft in der
Reports on Agriculture, No. 7,1933.