Plans and Bullets

Many an honest Communist believes the dogma that Russians attained the goals of their First Five-Year Plan (1928-32), are now attaining the goals of their Second (1933-37). Last week the Moscow censor passed certain statistics, pertinent though belated.

In the following much-publicized star turns of the First Five-Year Plan, the official record stands thus:

Steel: The revised First Five-Year Plan goal of 19,500,000 tons yearly in 1932-33 has not yet been attained. For 1934 production reached 9,600,000.

Motor vehicles: The Plan called for 175,000 tractors, 250,000 cars yearly. In 1934 (again two years late) 90,776 tractors, 72,458 cars were built.

Crude oil: Plan--46,000,000 tons yearly by 1933; performance--25,500,000 tons in 1934.

Electrical output: Plan--19,000,000,000 kilowatt hours in 1932-33; performance --13,500,000,000 kilowatt hours in 1934, much of which could not be absorbed for lack of sufficient motors to be driven, lamps lighted.

Most crucial and significant of Soviet plan "unfulfillments" is the continued lag in haulage by Russia's worn-out railways. For reasons best known to himself, Joseph Stalin, while spending billions for hydro-electric power and such, still refuses to buy the thousands of new locomotives, tens of thousands of cars and millions of rails which Russia desperately needs. Instead, the Dictator's policy is to menace Russian railway men with firing squads, goad them to achievements of despair in making antique rolling stock roll on. Goader-in-Chief is the Dictator's dear friend Lazar Kaganovich. About this time last year Comrade Kaganovich thundered, "The railways of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics must and shall load 68,000 cars every day in 1934!''

Last week's sheaf of statistics showed that in 1934 by superhuman efforts the loading rate was screwed up to 53,000 cars per day for a time, then relapsed to 48,000. Among Soviet railway men slated for shooting last week were six survivors of one of the worst major collisions in years on the Moscow-Leningrad run, crack line of the entire Soviet Union. To clear the wreckage last year took 13 hours. Few details passed the censor, except that the wreck was a rear-end collision, the dead, 23. With the thermometer at -25DEG, corpses hacked out of the wreckage were rigid icicles.

In urging that the engineer of the overtaking train be "drastically punished" (i. e. shot), the government newsorgan Izvestia conjectured that he had run past a stop signal to earn a bonus for being on time, added, "During 1934 there have been 63 proven instances of engineers passing closed semaphores on the Moscow-Leningrad line to earn such premiums."

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