"Searchlight Backward"

A blanket decree signed by Dictator Joseph Stalin last week ordered corrected some abuses typical in Soviet collective farming which have been fully described by Soviet officials who have fled Russia, have never been mentioned by dispatches from Moscow. Promptly the New York Times, which has been growing more & more aroused at the difficulty of getting straight news out of the Soviet Union, editorialized last week: "Once more the outside world learns what has been happening in Russia only when a Government decree stops or reverses a Government policy. The present edict forbidding further expulsions of farmers from collective farms is like a searchlight thrown backward over a dark road. It admits that expulsions were carried out on a large scale by 'callous and arbitrary' party functionaries, that the majority of these expulsions were unjustified, and that families were driven from the farms when the fathers had been recruited by State agents to take temporary jobs in industry.

"It admits further that the measures taken have broken up many collective farms and condemned the members to starvation. The purge of the peasants must end. Stalin orders, and by his order illuminates the lot of the poor muzhik under a gigantic trial-&-error system that, from his point of view, supported by periodic turnarounds in the Kremlin, seems to be mostly error.

"First there was the wholesale liquidation of peasants in the process of collectivization of the land. Now it is revealed that collectivization did not render the peasant secure; he is still being purged. No wonder, as the new decree reveals, that 'this artificially creates discontent and wrath and makes many collective farmers uncertain of their position.' No wonder, despite all the discriminations against them, that individual farmers are described as having advantages over many collective farmers. Henceforth it is ordered that members of the collectives must receive at least 60% of the money income of the enterprise. All this reveals more than the lot of the peasant; it suggests his widespread and dangerous dissatisfaction with his lot."

Censors permitted to pass the estimate of Izvestia, official Government organ, that the now collectivized peasants have resisted this year to the extent of sowing only 35,463,792 acres up to last week whereas the State had ordered them to sow by then 48,705,881 acres. Thus far, according to Izvestia, 17% of the total sowing scheduled for this spring has been done. Thus, despite all censorship, the main fact came out that Dictator Stalin, having suddenly realized how much trouble is up, has leaped in with concessions which he hopes will persuade the peasantry to start sowing seed full blast this spring, before it is too late.

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