Problematical Poods

One of the least desirable jobs in Russia is that of the People's Commissar for Agriculture. Among his many nightmares: Supposing ignorant peasants in Siberia leave their shiny new tractors out in the snow? Supposing collective farmers begin to act like rugged individualists in the Ukraine? In these or many other possible cases, his probable fate will be that of a Fascist-Trotskyist wrecker. Ivan Alexandrovich Benediktov, latest to gamble his life in this advanced post, took over the Commissariat last autumn. According to the Moscow Pravda he immediately set about "eradicating" his predecessor Robert Indrikovich Eikhe's "left-overs." Comrade Eikhe, who quietly disappeared last summer, had done the same to the "accomplices" of his predecessor, Commissar Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov.

Administrative efficiency was near an all-time low when Comrade Benediktov took office. One reason: officials, lest they appear to lack revolutionary fervor, stayed at their offices 24 hours a day, were consequently too sleepy to tell a kulak from a zemstvo. Last week the Commissariat of Agriculture predicted, as a result of new good management and the good luck of fine spring weather, a bumper wheat crop of seven to eight billion poods (4,213,183,333 to 4,815,066,666 bushels). The wheat is not yet cut and threshed, and there may be a big discrepancy between grain in the fields and grain harvested, for the Russian peasant is currently in the worst dither since the forcible collectivization of the land.

Five years ago, to dissipate the blue funk into which collectivization had thrown the peasantry, each farm worker was granted his own small private piece of land on which he might raise a few cows, pigs, fruit, vegetables. The decree provided that the garden plots must adjoin the owner's cabin. Because in many villages houses are crowded close together, this stipulation could not always be followed, and the private plots in many cases were well away from the village, scattered around the collective fields. The peasants have worked like demons on their tiny pieces of private property, and now this small fraction of Russia's agricultural land supports 13% more cows and pigs than on the collective farms. This scandalous situation became increasingly more scandalous: peasants tried to stretch their legal inch of private property into an illegal ell. Some local throwbacks actually hired comrades to work their required stint on the collective fields while they devoted all their time to their own acres.

Last May Commissar Benediktov started out to get these counter-revolutionary individualists. Thousands of commissioners, many of whom could not tell a hawk from a handsaw, are now swarming over the U. S. S. R., measuring each peasant garden. Abuses, declared Benediktov, will be rectified. All far-from-home plots will be replaced by land adjacent to villages, where officials can keep an eye on them. To millions of hard-working peasants this meant the loss of painfully wrought improvements. And some collective-farm managers, with a characteristically Russian excess of zeal, have confiscated all private plots, legal or not, and ejected counter-revolutionary cattle from communal pastures.

The Russian peasant is a stubborn lad, and all this made him extremely unhappy. His unhappiness may well have a withering effect on Russia's bumper wheat crop. For when Ivan is unhappy, as the Soviet Government learned during 1932, he sits and sulks and watches the grain go to the devil.

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