Alarm at Tummies

Round Russian peasant tummies now contain almost twice as much bread and liquor made from grain as in Tsarist days. So said, last week, both kindly Soviet President Michael Kalinin and ruthless Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin.

Reasons for Alarm. Production of grain in the Soviet Union is now almost up to the pre-Revolutionary level, yet there is an acute shortage of grain in the cities, and so little is left for export that that figure now stands at less than one twentieth of the 10,000,000 tons exported in average Romanov years.

Explanation may lie in the fact that Tsarist landlords underfed their peasants and sold abroad what the hungry would have liked to eat. Today, with the peasant master of his Fate and Farm, rural tummies are full to bursting, and urban workers are experiencing a slight vacancy under the belt.

Most alarming from the Soviet State's point of view is the loss to Russia of the immense revenue formerly incoming from foreign buyers of grain.

Remedies. "Must we turn back?" cried President Kalinin. "Some people are drawing that inference. . . . We must remedy the situation! After ten years of our present policy we have reached a point where we must realize that the shortage of grain for urban or export consumption is not the result of accident or poor crops."

"I can see but one way out. We must organize the poor and other citizens into farming groups, which can supplant the function of the former bourgeois landlords in producing an exportable surplus of grain."

Dictator Stalin, scorning to toy even rhetorically with such questions as "Shall we turn back?" outlined a forward looking four-year program. Keynotes: 1) Larger importations of tractors and farm machinery; 2) Devotion of huge State grain farms to the sole purpose of producing an exportable surplus; 3) Education of the peasants to rotate crops and produce a surplus even above full-to-bursting tummy needs; 4) Speeding up of production by urban workers of goods desired by the peasants but not yet available to them in quantities or at prices sufficiently tempting to seduce canny husbandmen into raising and selling a surplus.