86 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
tragedy which is still being enacted in the Soviet agricultural
districts?
One cannot help asking why it was necessary to use force,
if in fact it were only the peasants5 surplus grain that was to be
collected, as the Soviet authorities always claimed. No, the
object of this military offensive is not the collection of a sur-
plus; the peasants are being deprived by force of the mini-
mum necessary for existence. That the peasants should offer a
desperate resistance is a matter of course: they are fighting for
their existence, for their bare lives. But resistance is in vain, for,
as Mr. Denny rightly states, Moscow knows no compromise
and no mercy. The result is that Moscow is in a position each
year to celebrate the victorious conclusion of the grain campaign,
a victory which makes it necessary to deprive the peasants of
the agricultural districts of their supplies the same autumn,
immediately after the harvest, and thus to leave them at the
mercy of hunger and distress.
It sometimes happens that local officials, despite their
devotion to the Communist party, cannot bear to see the
peasants deprived of the minimum remnant of their crops
which they need to keep themselves alive, and thus condemned
to death by starvation. What is done with such officials?
They expose themselves to the severest persecution. Mr.
Denny himself refers to the persecution of local officials, and
that in a passage in which he speaks with profound admiration
of the strength and energy with which Moscow is wagering the
bread war. He quotes the removal from his post of Tsetkov, the
representative of the all-state committee for the collection of
agricultural products in the Crimea. His crime was that he had
protested against the full collection of the grain quotas laid
down by the State in the regions afflicted by the drought. Mr.
Denny also mentions that similar events are reported in the press.
By the autumn of 1934 the authorities found the success of
the grain collecting campaign gravely menaced. A large part
had akeady been destroyed by the drought. In some regions