RUSSIA: Above & Below with Stalin

Much that only Soviet statesmen knew while the Moscow trials of Old Bolsheviks for "Trotskyism" were being prepared (TIME, Feb. 8 et ante) came out last week as the Russian Cabinet or Council of People's Commissars issued its annual spring orders to the entire nation, a batch running to thousands of words.

The Commissars, for example, told the average Soviet freight train at what average speed it is going to run this year, decreed such things as how many gallons of milk per week the Cabinet plans that the average Russian cow shall give. On Jan. 1, 1937 there was nationwide Communist celebration of the State's announcements that every producing commissariat except that for Timber had "overfulfilled its production quota for 1936"—this quota having been set under the Second Five-Year Plan, which now has only eight more months to run. Statistics released last week with the Cabinet's new orders showed that the commissariats managed to "overfulfill" their total quotas in many cases by grossly underfulfilling certain subsidiary categories. The Commissariat for Food, for example, went over the top as a whole, while insufficiently supplying Russians with sugar, fruit, vegetables, butter and margarine. Coal, electricity and oil went statistically over the top. But last week the Cabinet sweepingly ordered all Soviet organizations to reduce their consumption of coal, electricity and oil by 10%. disclosing a breakdown of planning in the commissariat in which they are pigeonholed.

In any country it makes people who have tea and bread angry to find there is no sugar or even margarine to go round.

Sagacious Joseph Stalin showed in a speech made public last week that he knows what millions of Russians are thinking—namely that the Dictator and his Communist henchmen have been making too many mistakes. In a tactically sound proclamation J. Stalin gently beat his breast as he cried: "We should not think that if we are members of the Central Committee of People's Commissars we possess all the knowledge necessary to give correct leadership. Rank in itself gives neither knowledge nor experience. We must listen attentively to the voice of the masses and of the rank and file of the party, to the voice of the so-called little people.