RUSSIA: Famine

Last year there were 22,000,000 hungry Russians whom the Soviet Government did not have grain enough to keep alive. The American Relief Association came to their rescue, and fed many of the starving. This year the American Relief Administration estimates there will be 13,000,000 hungry mouths that Russia cannot feed.

"Extremely unfortunate," says the Soviet government; "we have not enough farm implements or livestock to till the grain field." Then the American attaché at Berlin reports: The German government has bought 1,400,000 bushels of wheat from Russia. It is about to be shipped from Black Sea ports. Further reports indicate that thousands of tons of grain are being exported over the Finnish border and from Odessa and Novorossysk on the Black Sea. There can be but one conclusion—that the Soviet government prefers exporting grain to feeding its starving peasants.

This policy is slowly leading ten or fifteen million people—among them three million children—towards certain starvation. Accordingly the American Relief Association is between the devil and the deep sea. Choosing the sea, its members can cast off for America with the cries of three million starving ringing in their ears. Or they can remain to energize a nation which is financially fattening itself by exporting the life blood of its people. Either alternative is inhuman.