Accent on Youth

Acting on his latest hunch, Joseph Stalin was busy last week regearing Russia's whole economic machine with a drastic accent on Youth. Only 28 years old and only a candidate for membership in the Communist Party, a machinist named Yakob Yusim had just been promoted straight from the lathe to be director of the Kaganovich Ball Bearing Plant ("Largest in the World") at Moscow, made boss of 20,000 of his former fellow workers. Straight from the cab of his locomotive an engineer named Peter Krivonos, according to Moscow dispatches last week, was promoted manager of the Slaviansk Railway Repair Shop ("Largest in Russia"). A 21-year-old girl, Nagimla Arykova, hitherto the editor of an unheard of provincial weekly in Kazakhstan, found herself installed as the Commissar of Public Welfare of the Kazak Soviet Socialist Republic.

Selected young nobodies like these who have just become somebodies had their pictures front-paged in the Soviet press day after day. In several cases a promoted youth was astonished to find his picture almost as big as the one appearing of the Dictator. Joseph Stalin ordered the traditional celebration of Youth Day in the Red Square, but a furious downpour of rain forced the Dictator to postpone it for six days when roughly a million youths, calling themselves the "Stalinist generation," paraded before the khaki-coated, pipe-smoking Dictator. Meanwhile Stalin had his Government triumphantly announce that:

1) More than 43% of the present population of the Soviet Union are so young as to have been born after the Bolshevik Revolution;

2) More than 30% of the workers employed in Soviet heavy industry this month are less than 23 years old;

3) More than 20% of all operating chiefs in Soviet coal mines are less than 34 years old.

Meanwhile, in guarded fashion Moscow correspondents received from well-connected Russian friends last week hints that "our great leader Stalin, observing how machines wear out under the swift 'Bolshevik tempo' of our Five-Year Plans, has found that many of the human cogs have also been worn until they need replacement, and for this Stalin is wisely turning to our Youth."

Biggest human cogs dropped from the machine which Stalin is trying to make of Russia were last week the Commissar of Light Industry, Comrade Isidor E. Liubimov and his vice commissars. In the heavy industry sector, just two weeks after being appointed its Commissar, big-nosed Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was furiously turning the Soviet coal industry upside down last week. He fired both Ivan Fesenko and Zhuravlev, respectively the chief and assistant chief of the coal industry for "failing to clean up the last vestiges of sabotage by wreckers and thus, in effect, assisting the Trotskyist-Bukharinist wreckers in their contemptible work." According to Comrade Kaganovich, he will now reshuffle coal's whole personnel, consistently give better jobs to younger workers.

Latest figures showed that, temporarily at least, Stalin's sudden ousting of thousands of experienced executives in favor simply of Youth--which the Dictator considers more loyal to himself than older Russians with memories of how things used to be--was gravely slowing down Soviet industrial production last week. The Moscow censor even passed a dispatch announcing: "Bolshevik leaders no longer deny that the drop in industrial output is a result of the extensive replacements of personnel. They assert, however, that the drop is temporary and that the replacements were necessary to regear the apparatus thoroughly."

Although Soviet industry is thus limping, Soviet agriculture seemed last week about to surpass this year in grain harvested and threshed the previous alltime Russian record of 105,000,000 metric tons. All Soviet grains have done well in 1937 with the possible exception of corn. In Rotterdam grain traders were glum as the Soviet Union reopened its selling agency, apparently ready to unload on Europe this fall enough produce to depress prices seriously. Within a few hours Russia's Rotterdam agents were selling wheat and barley in such volume that the Soviet Union's offerings were virtually setting the European market prices for these grains. In the Ukraine, "Granary of Russia," Soviet secret police last week swept into Zolochev, hunting for "wreckers." Soon the chief of the regional agricultural department, the chief of a tractor station and a collective farm chairman were lined up and shot--with prospects bright that they will be replaced by members of Stalin's favored Youth.

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