Foreign News: Days of Wrath

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(See front cover)

With stark, brutal candor the Soviet State announced, last week, through its official news organ Isvestia, that savage and murderous resistance to the Soviet Power is now being made by members of the Kulak or "Rich Peasant" class—the class most relentlessly taxed by Moscow's sovereign Proletariat.

"Telegrams are pouring in from numerous parts of the Soviet Union," declared Isvestia, "with the news that deeds of arson and murders of active Communists are being perpetrated by the Kulaks. . . . Soviet farms, village libraries and Soviet bureaus have been burned down by the Fists* in their fierce opposition against all measures undertaken by our Communist Party and our Soviet Government. . . . Murderous attacks have been perpetrated against Communist village school teachers and social workers, women as well as men. . . . Seven murders and four attempted murders took place in public assemblies or in Soviet bureaus. The roll of our Communist dead contains the names of four Chairmen of local Soviets and one Secretary. ... A destructive blow at the Kulaks must be delivered immediately!"

Doubled was the gravity of this grim account when it appeared how widespread are the areas where red flames reared high, last week, and crude Kulak butcher knives carved the white flesh of "women as well as men." Named as trouble centers by Isvestia were Irkutsk in Siberia, Minsk and Smolensk in White Russia, Kiev in the Ukraine, and three important towns on the upper, middle and lower Volga River — Yarosalve, Samara and Stalingrad. The latter and famed town is not the birth place of Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin but a strategic base which he valorously defended against the "White Armies" during the Bolshevist Revolution. Son-of-Ivan. The Kulak murders of last week did not foreshadow a revolt of the peasantry as a whole, in the expert opinion of veteran New York Times Correspondent Walter Duranty; but unquestionably they troubled the minds and frayed the nerves of the statesmen who rule Russia from Moscow's thick-walled and tall-towered Kremlin. Perhaps, of these resolute rulers, the most anxious and sick at heart was Michael Son-of-Ivan Kalinin, the President of Russia — for he is himself a peasant (see cover). A good, a simple and a noble man is Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin. Open house is still his rule to all whom he feels are his brother tillers of the soil. A poor peasant or a rich "Fist" despised by Communists can trudge or journey to Moscow and be sure that, having waited his turn, he may speak his grievance to the Comrade President and warm his stomach with scalding tea from the never-out presidential samovar. Each peasant knows that he may address the President of Russia familiarly as "Tovaristch" and that the kindly, bearded face of Kalinin will wrinkle in a warm, genuine smile when he greets the humble guest "Tovaristch" in return. No wonder the Son-of-Ivan has been steadily reelected President* since 1919. No wonder his heart was sore, last week, when Dictator Joseph Stalin proposed in Isvestia to deal at "Rich Peasants" a ruthless "destructive blow."