Superfluous Peasants

Russia has no strike troubles (workers who strike have a way of disappearing the same night), but the Russian peasant is the Kremlin's chronic headache. His food is needed to feed the proletariat, his sons are needed for the Red Army. Even collective farms have failed to turn the mulish muzhik into a village Bolshevik. Wily as any Communist, the peasants long ago wrung from the Kremlin permission to till personal plots on collective farms, sell their produce in the open market.

Last week Pravda claimed that wayward peasants had increased their personal plots until they had no time left for collective farming, were letting hay rot in the collective meadows. Others were renting their plots, breaking the first Communist commandment by turning landlords. More serious was Pravda's admission that peasants were deserfing many farms. Furious at the never-ending tug-of-war, the Kremlin thundered a rigid new decree restricting all peasant garden plots, setting drastic penalties for collective farm managers who leased land illegally.

Most ominous was Pravda's comment: "Superfluous collective farmers" will be shipped to regions where farm labor is needed. Peasants, who know too well that this means the arid lower Volga, the Siberian Far East where the Soviet Union finds it difficult to tempt settlers by normal means, trembled in their greasy hip boots, wondered if this was the first shot in a new war against the peasants.

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