I52 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
present, this mechanization can be carried through only at
the cost of agriculture. It may involve the death of millions;
but in the eyes of the Soviet rulers this simply does not matter.
This attitude also finds expression in the ruthless brutality
with which the Government cuts off imports even of the first
necessities required by the peasantry. There is, too, the fact
that most of the victims of the famine represent primitive or
unskilled labour. And of unskilled labour the Soviet authorities
even to-day have such reserves that the deaths of millions do
not sensibly reduce them.
Governing circles have consequently only to work out a
simple sum to arrive at the conclusion that not even the
slightest sacrifice of a material kind on behalf of the threatened
peasants is justifiable, if what would be sacrificed is needed for
the maintenance of the industrial plan, etc. Indeed, granted
the necessity of realizing the Soviet ideal, such a sacrifice of
material values, at a moment when the Soviet plans are in the
gravest danger, would be an act of culpable irresponsibility.
For in this way some millions of lives would be saved—but at
the cost of endangering the "historic experiment" embodied
in the Russian economic structure.
This view is well characterized by statements made by a
Soviet official called Sklar to an American Communist, Andrew
Smith, who recently returned to the United States after a
three years' stay in Russia.1 Sklar said: "Suppose 6,000,000
more people die from hunger, what of it? It is still worth the
price of Communism.*. .**
This explains not only why grain is being exported at a
time when numbers are dying of famine, but also why Moscow
is infinitely more anxious to preserve and even increase the
number of draught oxen than to render aid to a suffering
population* And, indeed, from the point of view of Russian
interests, the real catastrophe is not the mortality from
starvation, but the unexpected loss of draught oxen due to
York Evening Journal, May 39,1935.