72 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
as hostile slander due to enemies of the Soviet regime. Indeed,
both the political and the trade propaganda abroad had con-
tinued to enlarge on the economic advance the country had
made thanks to the abundant harvest of the previous year.
Now those are proved right—among them were almost all the
foreign agricultural specialists who had worked in the Soviet
Union in the last few years—who declared as early as the
autumn of 1933 that the yield of the harvest was about equal
to that of the previous year—i.e. only 55,000,000 to 60,000,000
tons.
Moscow had meanwhile succeeded admirably in spreading
the story of the record harvest. Its journalistic friends reported
an amazing superfluity from various regions. They claimed,
indeed, on the basis of the improvement which actually took
place after the harvest, that the danger of famine in the future
was now removed. Their thesis was that things had been bad
(a retrospective admission), but that now all was for the best.
But this was not how things turned out. Hunger and distress
reappeared—in many places almost as severe as before—in
the Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus, on the Volga, and this
time above all in the west, too—in White Russia and Volhynia.
This had been predicted as long before as the spring and
summer of 1933 by a number of foreign observers who had
travelled through Soviet Russia. They reported unanimously
on the neglected fields, the astonishing masses of weeds, etc.—
things which were bound to have an adverse effect on the
harvest over wide areas—quite irrespective of good or bad
weather and the natural condition of the 1933 crops.
I will quote some of these observations. An Austrian agri-
cultural expert, who had lived for many years in Russia and
in the summer of 1933 travelled through various Russian
districts, including the Ukraine^ found that even at that period
a large part of the fields was in an extremely bad condition
owing to inadequate sowing. He added that in certain districts,
e.g. along the Volga, this fact was partly due to the complete