52 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
funkziowlka. It must be emphasized, however, that even after
the renovation things cannot improve. Moscow rulers and the
Soviet papers are obliged to admit that the root evil of the
system—lack of interest and responsibility—still remains.
Izvestia concluded an article on the work of the agricultural
organizations by admitting that the agricultural apparatus must
be reconstructed. "Conditions must be created"—note the
following words—"in which, both in the provinces and at the
centre, concrete persons shall be responsible for every task."
The unusual term "concrete" was first used by Izvestia and
was meant to give striking expression to the real need of the
moment—concrete men, i.e. living men of flesh and blood.
Stalin himself has declared that 90 per cent of the agricultural
collapse is due to the breakdown of the organization and
economic system as it has existed hitherto, in other words
to communization. This remarkable utterance of Stalin's
disposes of the false statements as to the cause of the collapse
of agriculture—the bad harvest, intrigues of the kulaks, sabo-
teurs and enemies of the Government.
The whole fault lies in the illusion that, in a country with a
largely illiterate population, a grandiose State Socialist apparatus
could be swiftly improvised and a system created which would
render the country independent of all foreign imports.
It is not my task here to answer the question whether
Stalin will ultimately succeed in renovating the entire Russian
economic apparatus by introducing new men at Moscow. But
the statements of the Government and the press at least justify
the assumption that some time must necessarily pass before
this work of renovation is completed—given that it does
succeed. But until this is done there can be no decisive change
in the conditions I have described. If this inference is correct,
famine and malnutrition will-—at least for a long time to come—
be a permanent and not a transitory phenomenon. It was
possible for people to die in multitudes in 1933, although the
1932 harvest, as expressly stated by the Soviet Government,