Cossacks Punished

If 46,000 citizens of Florida had been ordered to grow & deliver to the U. S. Government a certain number of oranges; if they failed to do so; and if they were punished by being shipped in freight cars from Florida to Alaska, their fate would be no harder than was that of 46,000 Cossacks last week in Russia.

Dwelling, as their forbears have dwelt for centuries in the fertile, balmy Kuban adjoining the Black Sea, the 46,000 Cossacks farmed a rich area around four towns: Poltavskaya, Medvyedevsky, Urupskaya, Umanskaya. They may or may not have tried to grow & deliver as much grain as the Five-Year Planners thought they should. Last week with no exception every Cossack man, woman and child in the area was bundled off "to work near the Arctic Circle" in unspecified mines and lumber camps.

Not a mention of this mass punishment appeared in Moscow newspapers. Details reached Russians and foreign correspondents in the Capital only with the arrival of newspapers from Rostov-on-the-Don, largest city in the Kuban. Tass, the Soviet official news agency, carried not a line. According to Rostov editors the lands, homes and property of the 46.000 "socially undesirable" Cossacks were distributed, as soon as they were shipped off, among "loyal proletarians" and Red Army veterans.

Rewards as well as punishments are part of Soviet technique. Last week Soviet Premier Molotov and Secretary Stalin of the Communist Party signed a joint decree putting into effect the recently rumored "fixed farm produce tax" (TIME, Jan. 9). Up to now the more a Soviet peasant grew the more he had to deliver to the State. Hereafter his quota will be fixed by Feb. 15 each year and will stay fixed, thus encouraging the peasant to grow as large a surplus as possible for his own use and to sell at sky-high open-market prices. Peasants who do not fulfill their quota "will be treated as criminals" according to the decree.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.