48 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
quite unforeseen; and this could be for the most part acquired
only against exports of raw materials. This is the immediate
reason why millions of innocent persons had to starve in what
were formerly the richest agricultural regions in the world:
they were sacrificed to the export of foodstuffs.
Yet the chief cause of the human tragedy now being enacted
in these regions was the ruin of agriculture, in consequence
of collectivization carried out with excessive haste. It was this
alone which, as previously mentioned, brought about a state of
affairs in the south that makes the export of grain possible
only at the cost of the lives of millions of local producers. This
collapse of Russian agriculture—or, more correctly, of the
peasantry who are its mainstay—is perhaps best described in
the words of an eminent agricultural specialist who for years
was at the head of an important agricultural settlement holding
a State concession in the Northern Caucasus: "The decline of
agriculture was caused primarily by the great lack of experts.
The natural leaders of the village communities, the kulaks,
and with them all middle-sized holders, were destined to
become the victims of the terror and of the campaign against
class enemies." Only the economically weakest elements in
the village survived, which were willing to act as informers
against everyone possessing anything, and, consequently,-
everyone of any ability. The management of the collective
farms was generally handed over to party functionaries, and
it is a significant fact that, in 1931, the Moscow Centre of
Communist Trade Unions placed 30,000 young trade-unionist
factory workers at the disposal of the Commissariat for Agri-
culture as farm managers. The economic mischief done by
these officials in the collective farms can be properly appreciated
only by an agricultural expert. But it is proved by the lament-
able shrinkage in cultivation, and hence of the harvest, and also
by the destruction of approximately half the Russian livestock.
The lack of farm managers, combined with all the results
of Stalin's agricultural policy, is one of the chief reasons of the