THE CAUSES OF FAMINE IN RUSSIA 49
famines of 1933 an<i I934- The same applies to the Soviet
farms. The Schachty trial of 1928 had put an end to the
authority of all the managers on the farms who had received
a scientific training in time of peace.
To replace these experts as managers of big farms there
came Communist directors, most of whom knew only the
agricultural slogans of party politics, and possessed the
scantiest information about cultivation, stock rearing and farm
management. It was., too, the ambition of the Moscow officials
to introduce "100 per cent mechanization" into Soviet agri-
culture, a measure which could only accelerate its ruin. The
new managers were seized with a mania for Americanization;
machines were introduced into agriculture without due pre-
paration, while horses and oxen were described as "obsolete
factors" which should give place entirely to tractors and
lorries.
The fundamental miscalculation of these attempts at
Americanization was undoubtedly this. American workers
are mostly very intelligent, but few in numbers, and therefore
command high wages; or, to put it better, the American fanner
who, with his children and a few good employees, works large
areas with the most up-to-date machinery and exploits them
pretty thoroughly, is in a quite different position from Russian
agriculturists, who dispose of unlimited quantities of unintelli-
gent but correspondingly cheap labour. These people could
be used for cultivation with horses and oxen, but not with
modern machinery like tractors and mechanical reapers.
The collapse of the Soviet agricultural organization was
inevitable.
It seems to have been realized at the eleventh hour that the
root evil of the Communist economic apparatus has hitherto
been the removal, indeed the extirpation, of personal respon-
sibility, initiative and interest. It has now been realized that
the collapse of the industrial plan is primarily due to the failure
of the entire system of organization, to the misdeeds of officials>