THE CAUSES OF FAMINE IN RUSSIA 33
The first reason is to some degree ordained by Nature. Half
the territory of the vast Russian State (the entire north and
almost all the industrial regions) have always lived on the
imported surpluses of the agricultural south and east. Every
year, in spring and autumn, hundreds of trains and barges
transport grain from the agrarian into the consuming regions.
The whole existence and the future of the Communist State
depend on assuring these regions, and especially the industrial
centres, the necessary minimum of food supplies. Hence the
axiom that the feeding of the industrial districts is the primary
task of Soviet Russian economic policy. In practice this means
that whether the harvest is good or bad, the minimum of grain
needed by the consuming centres must be extracted from the
"surplus areas," however great the dearth may be in the latter.
It is otherwise with regard to the second reason. It is no
natural catastrophe, but the inadequate fulfilment of the five-
year plans, which has led to the requirements of foreign goods
and hence of foreign currency far exceeding the estimates.
Other causes, too, contributed to burden agriculture. To grasp
this fully we must here deal with the Government's policy of
industrialization and the effects of its collapse.
The aim of the five-year plans was perhaps most effectively
summarized by Ordjonikidze in his speech at the 1934 Com-
munist Congress in Moscow: "He [Stalin] wanted us not only
to produce the material for our clothes; he wanted us to produce
the machinery necessary to turn out the material. His object
was to make us industrially independent of foreign countries.
We were to manufacture, in the shortest possible time, not this
or that article, but everything we required. In another place
and in another connection Stalin put in the foreground Lenin's
motto: cTo catch up and pass' \ and it was on this that he built
T^p his concrete plan of action." This, Ordjonikidze continued,
was based on the idea "the devil take the hindmost/' and on the
Assumption that any "slowing down of the tempo5' was out of
the question. He summarized the fundamental idea of this plan