THE CATASTROPHE 97
which prohibits local investigations if the number of the
starved cannot to-day be accurately calculated. I emphasize
this because., in my opinion, this questioning of the number of
victims has as its sole object to throw doubts upon the severity
of the famine and thus to relieve the questioners of the duty to
help. Yet, even if the number of victims were to be arbitrarily
placed at a much reduced figure, the fact of the catastrophe
cannot be disputed.
There are, however, data enough which indicate the enor-
mous mortality during the first period. The facts are perhaps
best characterized by the statement of a foreign journalist1 in
Moscow well known for his knowledge of Russian conditions—
a correspondent who has tried for years to make the tone of his
despatches as favourable to Soviet Russia as possible. His
comment on the optimistic accounts of the 1933 harvest is,
"the collectivizing campaign cost at least as many lives as a
great war," What a terrible admission these few words
contain! The lives destroyed by weapons of all kinds during
years of war succumbed to famine in Russia in a bare eight
months! The correspondent of the Kolnische Zdtung^ to prove
that the position was becoming somewhat easier, quoted a Mos-
cow report that the bread in the provinces would in future be
distributed"amongafewmillionfewermouths." Mr.Malcolm
Muggeridge, previously referred to, says that by March 1933
as many as 24 per cent of the population had died of famine in
certain regions, e.g. Kazakstan. This statement was also in-
directly confirmed by the Kazakstan representative, Mirsoian,
at the seventeenth Communist Party Congress. According to
his statement hundreds of thousands of persons had left their
farms up to 1933.
In effect all these accounts say the same thing. The Neue
Zurcher Zdtung expresses itself more definitely when it gives
Jhe loss of life in the Ukraine alone at six million. It adds
that even Soviet circles talked of a loss of a million or two of
1 The representative of the Neue Freie Presse.
G