As Winter Comes

More than 100 million Soviet civilians, faced cold and hunger as winter's first heavy snows fell last week. Russia has lost more than half its coal mines, 23% of its cultivated land. Fuel, food and clothes go to the Red Armies first. From Leningrad to the Pacific, women, oldsters and schoolchildren were cutting peat, hauling logs, straining every muscle to make good Russia's losses. Their achievements:

> Siberia's harvested area increased by 2,100,000 acres over last year. In Kazakstan and central Asia land sown to winter grains increased by a half-million acres; in the Black Earth region, by 1,250,000 acres. The ratio of men to women in Russia's fields was about 3-to-100 (prewar average: 50-50).

> Immense Siberian slaughterhouses and Pacific Coast fish canneries throbbed night & day, turned out millions of tons of food for Army and people.

> Siberian and Ural miners worked twelve-hour shifts digging coal for Russia's railroads and metallurgical plants. North of Moscow 80,000 city officeworkers felled timber for firewood. Logs were transported by barge, train, bus and trolley car to the capital. After classes and on Sundays pupils and teachers toted firewood to their schools.

> Textile mills, powerhouses and other industries burned peat and wood instead of coal. Thousands of civilians were mobilized to wield spades in the inexhaustible peat bogs of the Urals and central Russia.

Throughout Russia an estimated 20 to 30 million civilian refugees from occupied areas squeezed into odd corners of already crowded rooms. Valenki (knee-high felt winter boots) and beds were used in rotation by people working on different shifts. Bread rations in central Russia are two pounds of black bread per day for heavy workers, one pound for children. In besieged Leningrad men get 150 grams (5 oz.) of bread a day and little else.

Russia's millions faced a comfortless, bitter winter, but probably few would actually freeze or starve. The people rejoiced that the Red Armies were well supplied with food, clothing and fuel, that the 20DEG and 30DEG frosts only a few weeks off would freeze the thin blood of the German invaders more quickly than their own.

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