Stalin's Old Lesson

Over drinks in his Kremlin apartment one night in 1942, Joseph Stalin told Winston Churchill about the forced collectivization of the Russian peasants in the early '30's, in which some 5,000,000 died of starvation. "It was fearful ... It was absolutely necessary for Russia . . . We took the greatest trouble to explain it to the peasants. It was no use. After you have said all you can to a peasant, he says he must go home and consult his wife and his herder. After he has talked it over with them, he always answers that he does not want the collective farm."

Last week in Communist Yugoslavia, Tito was learning Stalin's old lesson, the hard way. All over Yugoslavia, peasants were on a slowdown strike against Tito's collective farms and Tito's forced deliveries of grains to the state. The peasants had harvested the grain last month on schedule. Yugoslavia's breadbasket was full; for the first time in years, the government prepared to offer wheat for export at the annual Zagreb Fair in September. But farmers were threshing only a fraction of it. On the collective farms (which cultivate 25% of Yugoslavia's farm land--the richest 25%), the peasants alibied that the threshing machines had broken down. Their three-year hitches on the collectives would be up this fall, and many were signing petitions to get out.

Meanwhile, the peasants who own their own farms (kulaks, in the Soviet lexicon) balked at selling grain to the state at a loss. Farmers, asked why wheat was still stacked on their fields, shrugged and said they just had not got around to it. Said one blandly: "We have plenty of time."

For Tito there was not plenty of time. Unthreshed grain was rotting. His whole long-range program rested--as had Stalin's--on the premise of more & more grain for a growing city proletariat and the army. Communist Tito last week warned lawyers who drafted peasants' petitions for release from collectives that they would be considered "enemies of the people." Newspapers appealed to peasants to get their grain in, but also admitted that the government's "weak organization" had been at fault too.

So far, Tito had not ordered peasants shot and starved to death by the thousands, as Stalin had done. Tito's peasants were still able to go home and consult their wives and herders, and obviously had.

Tito himself was busy being friendly with visiting Americans, and hoping thereby to impress Stalin that any aggression against Yugoslavia might be the spark for World War III. W. Averell Harriman, on his way home from Iran, stopped over at Belgrade. He and Tito agreed, said Harriman in the purposefully indirect words of diplomacy, that a principal danger of war would come from the possible miscalculation by the Kremlin of the West's reaction to local aggression.

To the New York Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins, Tito flatly said that his country would fight on the side of the West against a Russian attack anywhere in Europe. Tito was plainly anxious to enter an unwritten mutual defense pact with the West.

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