* Peasant Non-Cooperation

       In 1965, Soviet Russia farmed 75 per cent more crop land than the United States, using four times as many farm workers, and produced less than half as much grain, for a population nearly 20 per cent larger. More than 35 per cent of the labor force of the USSR is on the land, compared with about 7 per cent in the United States, but the Soviet problems are those of deficits, the American those of surpluses. Grain production in Soviet Russia per inhabitant is at about the 1910-1914 average.

       An American specialist who has studied the problem on the spot in the USSR, John Strohm, wrote in 1964: "A good Illinois farmer can work ten times the acreage, feed twenty times as many hogs, take care of thirty times as many chickens as Russian collective farmers. (212)

       One U.S. farmer feeds himself and twenty-seven others with a high protein diet; one Soviet farmer feeds only himself and four others with a 75 per cent starchy diet. This low productivity in Russia is approximately what prevailed in the United States around 1870. Soviet agriculture is thus nearly a century behind America."

       This decidedly does not imply that Russians are hopelessly inferior farmers. Before the revolution, scratching the soil with primitive plows, they were able to feed their country and generate huge exports. Now, despite considerable mechanization, they do neither. Yet they have not lost their ancient skills: on their small private plots, as we shall see, they are diligent and productive. The difference is not in the peasant but in the collectivization. His work on the socialized fields is at best indifferent, at worst deliberately harmful. The general apathy, amounting to passive resistance, is not always conscious, but the effects are as devastating as if it were knowing sabotage.

       Farming is a creative process, calling for deep interest and loving care. But the peasants have never resigned themselves to their communized fate. They work for the state as little and as indifferently as they can get away with, dreaming of a family farm of their own.

       The press perpetually inveighs against sloppiness and delay in harvesting, in transporting crops to collection points, in maintenance of equipment. Weeds choke growing crops. Soviet agronomists have estimated that 25 per cent of fertilizers, which are in short supply, never reaches the fields; much of it remains near the railroads where it is dumped, congealing to the hardness of stone. State elevators receive what Khrushchev once described as "mud, ice, snow, and unthreshed stalks." Year after year, dry "volunteers" must be rushed to the farmlands to help salvage crops, but vast amounts of produce always remain on the ground to rot and freeze notwithstanding.

       All the ills of bureaucracy and central planning known to industry afflict agriculture as well, often in worse forms. (213) The ratios between the administrative-managerial personnel and the productive farmer are shocking to Western farm experts. Falsified bookkeeping by collectives is universal. Farm officials have been known to buy tons of butter and milk through distributing agencies and pass them off as their own production.

       At the same time theft on state and collective farms is of epidemic dimensions. At a plenary session in 1961 Khrushchev charged angrily that in his native Ukraine "half of the cultivated corn was pilfered and plundered as it stood." In most villages party officials have to mobilize "activists" to guard the fields day and night, and in some places peasants are searched as they leave for home.

       A few years ago the Soviet economic journal, Voprosy Ekonomiki, calculated an annual loss of 250 million man-hours through absenteeism by some 700,000 collective farmers. It disclosed that in the Russian Republic and four others, sheer neglect caused the death of nine million sheep and millions of cattle. In 1964, as reported by Pravda, the chairman of the Union Agricultural Technical Facilities complained that labor is done manually "while at some warehouses the most valuable machinery and equipment, particularly milking machines, corn harvesting combines, cotton harvesting machines and others have been piling up for a long period." A year earlier the Economic Gazette reported that "at the beginning of 1962 more than 100,000 tractors and about 30,000 harvest-threshers could not be used because of lack of spare parts," and added blandly, as if it were a familiar fact of life, "no improvement is expected this year."

       The Kremlin makes little effort to hide this passive resistance. It lives with the knowledge of peasant hostility. Scolding the farmers for their petit bourgeois nature is a staple of the official oratory. Long ago feudal lords learned-that serf labor is grudging at best, and the Soviet lords are in no better case.

       Lenin had referred to the "diabolic" side of the peasant. Nearly two generations later, speaking in Rumania in June, 1962, Khrushchev declared: "There will always be a psychological problem in the peasant's soul: no one is born a communist. (214) In the Soviet Union, farmers keep looking into the barn for their horses, even after they have given them to the collective." He did not add that the problem could readily be solved by returning the expropriated horses and land to their owners. On May 22, 1963, the Moscow Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote, in connection with farm troubles: "It is easier to wipe out the malaria-bearing mosquito than the virus of individualism, the irrepressible cult of property." To the peasant, "revolution" has always meant a farm of his own—and he feels that he has been cheated.

       But beyond that, communism has built-in deterrents to good farming. It may be possible to run a factory or mine with regimented labor, but not a farm. There are far too many on-the-spot decisions to be made that cannot be foreseen by planners. A true farmer has a feel for the land and an instinct about animals that the communist directives cannot possibly substitute. Even when local people are authorized to use their own judgment, the habit of obedience to the center is too ingrained to overcome. Ideas inherently good, like the emphasis on corn after Khrushchev's visit to the United States, are fouled up by indiscriminate imposition on the whole country.

       An unusually good harvest, as in 1966, does not mean that the basic agricultural system has suddenly improved. It reflects primarily exceptionally favorable weather. The official claim of 170.8 million tons of grain in 1966 refers to "weight in the field." On the basis of long experience with Soviet figures, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, after discounting excess moisture and foreign matter in the field count and crops that will not be fully harvested, has adjusted the estimate to 135 million tons. Other crops important to the individual consumer appear to have done less well than grain. The potato crop, second only to bread in the national diet, was below the previous year. The livestock industry, too, has not matched the record in cereals; the growth in cattle numbers was only about one-third of what it was in the preceding year and the number of pigs has declined by 3 per cent. (215)

       For propaganda reasons related to the impending golden anniversary, Soviet spokesmen made the most of the good grain harvest in 1966. Yet they did not go so far as to suggest that the chronic ills of collectivized farming have been cured. That this restraint was wise became plain quickly in strong indications that the "jubilee year" was not likely to match the 1966 record. As of mid-January, the portents for grain in 1967 were discouraging. "Preliminary evaluations" of winter grains, which account for a large part of the bread crops, were pessimistic.

       Nature is not overly friendly to agriculture in Russia. Only 10 per cent of the cultivated land, it has been estimated, is truly arable. The rest calls for exceptional energy and care. Great expanses are too cold, too arid, too shallow. For that very reason Russian farming, in particular, demands the wholehearted attention, high incentives, flexibility to operation that only a devoted individual farmer can provide—the kind that he does provide on the thin margins he is permitted to work as he pleases.

° The Private Sector

       Stalin, having conquered the peasantry and instituted new versions of the serfdom abolished by Alexander II, made one concession fortunate for the country. He gave the socialized peasant the right to cultivate a minuscule plot— averaging two-thirds of an acre—around his own hut on a private basis, to own a cow and a few other animals, and to sell his produce in the open market at free prices. Intended as a temporary sop, it proved so dramatically productive that it has remained to this day.

       Unwittingly, the regime has thus provided a sort of laboratory test of the vitality of private as against public farm work. This private sector, as it is called, is lowest on priorities for equipment, fertilizers, and insecticides. Denied modern machinery, it must rely almost entirely on hand labor. It has been taxed and until recently was forced to deliver set portions of its production to the state at fixed prices. Nevertheless, it has out-produced the collective fields on a spectacular scale. (216) The peasant who performs wretchedly on the public land performs amazingly well on his own plot, and he derives more income from it than he earns on the state's farms.

       According to the government's own figures (Voprosy Ekonomiki, 1966), private plots with a mere 3 per cent of the nation's sown acreage accounted for 30 per cent of the gross harvest, other than grains; 40 per cent of all cattle-breeding, 60 per cent of the country's potato crops, 40 per cent of all vegetables and milk, 68 per cent of all meat products. Their fruit yields, according to another official source, are double those of state orchards for equivalent areas, its potato harvest per hectare two-thirds higher than on collective farms. Even in grain, which is a very minor element in the private sector, it produces one-third more per sown unit than an average socialized farm.

       Except for bread, the same magazine cited above shows that the peasant family draws its food—90 per cent of its potatoes, 80 per cent of its vegetables, almost all of its milk, eggs, and meat—not from the socialized farms but from its own plot. Had it not been for the despised and deprived private sector, most of the farm population would have died of hunger long ago.

       Any inclination to blame the failures of Soviet farming on the laziness or inefficiency of the peasant is thus negated. When his self-interest is engaged, he shows himself to be both competent and hard working. His entire family puts all its free time—and some stolen from the collective—into its own plot. This 3 per cent of private enterprise supplies most of the non-cereal needs of a hundred million people in the countryside and in large measure supplies the urban population, especially in small and middle-sized towns. For more than thirty-five years now it has been responsible for staving off hunger in its more extreme forms.

       In the early 1930's a political anecdote went the rounds. A large airplane building program having been announced, people asked, "Why do we need so many planes?" The cynical answer was; "So we can fly anywhere in the country where there is something to eat." (217)

Thirty years later, the sour joke has in a measure come true. Private growers in the Caucasus or Crimea regularly fill a few suitcases with oranges, lemons, cauliflower, spinach, or some other product and fly to Kharkov or Moscow, at times when these items are in great demand. They earn enough on the private sale of their cargo to pay for the round trip and leave a profit.

       The contrast between the two modes of farming is visible to the naked eye. Professor Ellsworth Raymond of New York University has visited Russia several times to observe the agrarian economy. Reporting on one of the trips, he wrote:

       The same story has been told about other communist countries. In every East European nation, the peasant dawdles on the state's fields, but works with zest on his own. Whether in Russia or Bulgaria, in China or Cuba, the indisputable record by this time is that communism and effective farming do not go together.

• Hell in 70,000 Villages

       To gauge the magnitude of the agrarian tragedy, we must look again at the monstrous costs of collectivization. (218) Of all Soviet innovations, this is the one for which the people paid most and received least. Stalin told Churchill that collectivization took more Soviet lives than the war. Compulsive killers boast of their scores: he was exaggerating, but not by much. His decision to turn the peasants into state-controlled proletarians, too, touched off a fearsome war, a war of aggression against a population larger than Germany's. The defenders were unarmed and unorganized, so that their defeat was a foregone conclusion. Yet they never wholly capitulated. Moscow treated them as an "internal colony to be mercilessly exploited to provide "primitive capital accumulation" for industrialization, and their attitude to this day remains that of colonial subjects who hate their foreign masters.

       The word collectivization has a harmless, technical ring, giving no inkling of the monstrousness it covers. In the twelve years before 1929, under constant official cajoling, less than 2 per cent of peasant families entered any type of commune voluntarily. This is the measure of the duress that was needed to stampede them into joining. The first draft of the Five-Year-Plan set 10 per cent as the portion to be collectivized. In the intoxication of the all-out drive the sights were raised to 50 per cent, and in the main grain-growing regions to 100 per cent.

       On December 29, 1929, Stalin issued the slogan of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." Kulak originally meant an affluent peasant, with overtones of usury. Now the term was redefined to fit anyone who owned more than two cows or the equivalent. Average peasant holdings were then about fifteen acres, and the upper five per cent of the "rich" kulaks averaged only about thirty acres. But in practice, the kulak label was stretched to cover any peasant who insisted on holding on to his own parcel of land.

       The slogan was an imperious command to smash and disperse between twenty and thirty million men, women, and children as quickly and rapaciously as possible, in order to make the others see the virtue of sinking their farms, animals, and equipment into collective estates called kolkhozes. (219) Sixty-five days later, on March 2, 1930, the slogan was revoked, damping down the madness it had ignited. Actually the ruthless campaign had been going on before December and was to continue for years after March, but the brutalities reached their peak in those nine weeks.

       Raw force had rarely been applied so massively in such a brief period. Hell broke loose in seventy thousand villages. At least a million families, which means five million people, were deprived of everything, even their clothes and household utensils, and carted off into harshest exile. They were herded at gunpoint into cattle cars and dumped weeks later in the lumber regions of the frozen north, the deserts of Central Asia,

       Tens of thousands died of exposure, starvation, and disease in transport, and no one dared guess the death-rate in the wilderness where this humanity was scattered. Some of the human wreckage was merely flung beyond the limits of their native villages. Hordes of little children, with the help of their parents, escaped to shift for themselves. Great numbers of the panic-stricken victims, to evade deportation, left their goods and homes to seek refuge in the cities, where they were once more corralled, stuffed into disease-ridden cars, and hauled away to the dumps. For those of us who saw the "liquidation" at close range, the experience is freighted with horror.

       The outside world seemed barely aware of die catastrophe. It was a time of know-nothing Stalin-worship, particularly among Western intellectuals. The British Fabians, Sidney -and Beatrice Webb, who had never met a real Russian peasant, in their two-volume glorification of Soviet communism expressed frank abhorrence for the creature. They wrote of the Russian villagers with their "characteristic peasant vices of greed and cunning, varied by outbursts of drunkenness and recurrent periods of sloth"— "stubborn" and "formerly servile" but "now becoming rebellious." With that purblind appraisal established in Volume I, they could accept complacently the crimes of forced collectivization in Volume II. Let no one underestimate the fury of the "rebellious" peasants. (220) Collectivization officials were afraid to venture out in the dark, and for all their caution hundreds were murdered. Men and women slated for exile managed to set fire to their own homes and barns. Brigades arriving to remove church bells and icons sometimes found believers armed with sticks and pitchforks to prevent the sacrilege. Fruit farmers uprooted their trees. Red Army and GFU troops were ever on the move putting down uprisings; resisting villages were surrounded and literally shot into the blessed new collective life.

       The most startling act of sabotage and the most hurtful to the national economy was the frantic slaughter of millions of animals by their owners. By 1929 the losses of the civil war had been made up; there was more livestock than in 1916. Now the peasants hastened to kill their animals rather than relinquish them to the state. The death penalty was decreed to halt the thing: one human life for the life of a pig or goat.

       By the end of the Five-Year Plan the country had lost half of its cattle and horses, two-thirds of its sheep and goats, two-fifths of its hogs. Much of the food difficulties from that day to this can be traced in part to that gesture of defiance. When Khrushchev, in September, 1953, bewailed the fact that there were eight to nine million fewer cows in the USSR than at the beginning of 1928—before the First Five-Year Plan, that is—he was attesting to continuing effects of the peasant resistance twenty-five years later.

       When the pressure was eased, more than half the families that had "voluntarily" joined collectives resigned. But at a somewhat slower pace the coercion continued and by 1932 close to 80 per cent of the national acreage had been feudalized. And in the autumn that year came the second great famine in the Soviet epoch, concealed at the time but since then officially admitted.

       What makes this famine unique in history is that it was man-made, deliberately allowed to take its course in order to chastise and humble forty or fifty million citizens. Having put on the harness of collectivization, the peasants proceeded to sabotage the new system by planting and harvesting only enough for themselves. It was the most extensive example of mass non-cooperation in all history. (221) But they underrated the savagery of the enemy.

       The Kremlin saw what was coming. Grain was then cheap in the world market and a few million dollars diverted from foreign purchases of machinery might have prevented the calamity. Stalin instead decided to seize the whole harvest from the recalcitrant peasants by force, leaving them to starve. Every bloated baby belly, every cadaver that cluttered the country roads, was his purposeful doing. It was an act of war as surely as if he had killed those millions by gunfire or poison gas. In the most stricken regions cannibalism spread.

• Communism Breeds Hunger

       What did Soviet Russia get in return for this inhumanity? A farming system that has never worked. By 1939, agrarian production was from 5 to 8 per cent lower than in 1928, although more and more land had been brought under cultivation. The country was strictly rationed until 1935, and on a miserably low diet thereafter. When war came, hunger might have proved Hitler's best ally, had not the United States funneled in millions of tons, of foodstuffs (part of a total of eleven billion dollars in lend-lease that Moscow still refuses to repay).

       When Stalin passed to his reward, his heirs hastened to disown what one writer called "the awkward legacy of unharvested crops—wild exaggerations of production claimed by Stalin's coerced statisticians. His lying totals during two decades, Khrushchev disclosed, had exceeded reality by 50 per cent. In Stalin's last year of life, 1952, for instance, grain production came to 80 million tons, not the 120 million he reported.

       Once in power, however, Khrushchev was soon engaging in falsification on his own account. The U.S. Department of Agriculture figured that over-estimates on grain from 1956 to 1962 added up to 137 million tons. In the bad harvests that followed, those full granaries to which Khrushchev had alluded turned out to be empty.

       The USSR has had good crop years and bad ones, but it has never attained true self-sufficiency. (222) Its emergence as the second largest industrial nation is made meaningless, is human terms, by the fact that it ranks low among the world's economies in the output of farm products per inhabitant. Let them eat industrial statistics, the leaders might say if they dared. Even in the best harvest years, long and sullen food queues are part of the human landscape in some regions. Prices (except for bread, which is subsidized) are so high and earnings so low that three or four times more of the average family budget goes into food than in advanced Western countries.

       A correspondent for Newsweek reported in May 1966, that "rural Russia, which begins only a few miles outside Moscow, seems at first glance scarcely changed from the Russia Tolstoy wrote about." At the first touch of spring, roads become rivers of sticky mud; thousands of more distant villages are virtually cut off by mud. The living standards of the 108 million people in the rural areas, he went on, are far below those in the cities, which in turn are dismally low. In the villages, "more often than not, fields are worked by one wheezing tractor and phalanxes of stoop-shouldered women. Running water, gas, plumbing, or more than one paved street in a farm village is the exception rather than the rule. Western experts estimate that a third to half of the USSR's farms are still without permanent electricity."

       The Party Congress in 1966 projected a number of measures to fortify the nation's agriculture. Larger capital will be put into it. The collective farmer's monthly income, now at around 30 rubles, it was promised, will be raised by 1970, on a guaranteed basis, to 60 rubles. Not many believe that this can be done: the additional payments would take more billions than the total military budget. But if all the measures were successfully carried out, Soviet farming would still be the least productive among the major nations. The most that can be hoped for is some marginal improvement that leaves the underlying maladies untouched, since they all derive from the sacrosanct collective system.

       Proposed remedies, along with assertions that the patient is recovering anyhow, have marked the whole career of socialized farming. (223) Announcements that the grain problem had been "solved" were made by Molotov at the Seventeenth Party Congress, by Stalin at the Eighteenth, by Malenkov at the Nineteenth. "The grain problem, formerly considered the most acute and serious problem," Malenkov said in 1952, "has been solved, solved definitely and finally in the Soviet Union." The transcript notes "prolonged and stormy applause."

       Khrushchev began his reign in 1953 with the glad tidings that the country had already become self-sufficient in grain resources. Six years later he had to correct himself: the 1953 results had been about the same as in 1913—now with 55 million more mouths to feed.

       The record of proposals that would "definitely and finally," a favorite official cover-phrase, restore agriculture to health and vitality is grim and gloomy. There was the plan for agrogorods, agrarian towns, announced with great hoopla by Khrushchev in Stalin's time. The idea was to uproot the peasants from their villages, settle them in town-like barracks, and thus bring them closer to working-class psychology. The program never got off the ground, but it made good, self-deluding conversation for the harried upper classes.

       An array of new laws expected to win the loyalty of the collective farmers was promulgated after the passing of Stalin. That they failed of their objective was evident in the new schemes advanced year after year. The most spectacular was Khrushchev's so-called Virgin Lands program, to bring huge sub-standard areas under forced cultivation. More than eleven million new acres were plowed up in two years, mostly in Kazakhstan. Hundreds of thousands of young people were badgered into moving to the Virgin Lands, where they lived under wretched conditions, mostly in dugouts, some in tents, summer and winter. There was a bumper crop in the new lands in 1956, a good crop in 1958, after which erosion and other chronic defects of the terrain began to show up—as they had in tsarist times, when similar experiments were undertaken. The hopes for the program withered along with the crops, leaving many dust-bowls in their wake. (224)

       A. Polish journalist who visited Kazakhstan reported in the Cracow Zycie Literackie (November, 1965): "The whole idea proved a great and painful fiasco. The epic adventure fell flat on its face. Its result was not only a deficit of grain but also a deficit of faith, which cannot be imported." Among the young people driven from their homes and schools to the primitive Virgin Lands, he said, the disappointment is expressed in one bitter sentence: "They have fooled us again."

       As the program of reclaimed land fizzled, Khrushchev in the early sixties unveiled a new savior of agriculture: plans for gigantic immediate expansion of fertilizer production. "This is the end of our economic backwardness," he declaimed in anticipation of the miracle. But again little came of it. The chemical industry was and remains in bad shape, and little is heard any more of the ambitious program. The farm economy, indeed, would have been unable to use effectively the fertilizer planned—if was wasting the limited tonnage already available.

       "A panacea per plenum" someone has called the continuing attempts to make the unworkable collective system work. The fever chart shows occasional improvement, especially when the weather is kind, only to sink again. The crisis appears to be permanent. The only feasible solution, as the leaders know full well, would be to return to some form of private farming. This they will not, because they dare not, undertake. Totalitarian industry and political life, they have ample reason to believe, could not survive side by side with a free agriculture.

       Virtually all foreign visitors to the Soviet countryside have remarked on the startling preponderance of middle-aged and old people, especially old women, on the farms. Younger people are conspicuously few in number. The flight of youth to the cities is a universal fact everywhere in the modern world, but in the Soviet Union it has assumed alarming and in some regions catastrophic proportions. In other industrially developed lands, though this exodus may rate as a problem, full mechanization and high output per farm worker make up for the loss of manpower. In Russia, where 35 per cent of the work force is still in agriculture and modernization of farming is inadequate, the effects are infinitely more damaging. (225)

       Under the law farmers are tied to the land by the simple device of denying them a passport, without which one cannot live or work in industrial communities. But young people get around it in a variety of ways. Children under sixteen can get work and residence passports in towns on demand; having finished elementary school, they rush to some urban area before the deadline. Within one year after completing their four years of military service, also after graduating from intermediate schools, colleges, and universities, the rules permit young people to decide to settle where they please—most of them do not return to the unappetizing villages. Even without passports, too many millions are deserting the impoverished, drab, and painfully boring rural life to be driven back even by a police-state.

       The gravity of the problem was recently emphasized by a study in what is obviously one of the hardest-hit areas, the Smolensk province. The study was conducted by the Laboratory of Labor Reserves of Moscow University and published in two articles in Literaturnaya Gazeta in July 1966. The findings begin by pointing to the low productivity per hectare—one fifth of what is produced on the same kind of soil in Western Europe—then ascribes it primarily to shortage of farm-hands, especially young farm laborers.

       The whole Smolensk region, it appears, has been steadily losing population but the decline in its rural areas is especially sharp: from 1.62 million before the war to 0.65 million now. That much of this is due to the flight of the young is clearly indicated by the falling membership in the Komsomol or Communist Youth organizations. In 1960, there were still 33,700 Young Communists on the Smolensk kolkhozes and sovkhozes (farms operated directly by the state, like factories); by 1965 their number had dwindled to 10,000. In some villages, the study shows, young people of working age have practically disappeared. The last wedding in the village of Pomogailova took, place in 1961, the last birth was registered in 1963. There are villages, if the researchers are to be believed, in which the voices of young children have not been heard for years. (226)

              The natural growth of the rural population in Smolensk —surplus of births over deaths—has dropped to less than 6 per cent of what it was in 1950. "The members of the village Soviet of Kardimovsk," a plaintive statement reads, "affirm that in their bailiwick it had never happened that the passport regulations in force had prevented a young person from leaving the village." Among those graduating intermediary schools and not continuing further education, only 4 per cent of rural Smolenskers return to their home villages. Already there is not enough farm labor to bring in the flax and potato crops and to maintain the herds of cattle and pigs.

       Obviously Smolensk is an extreme case; presumably that is why it was selected for the inquiry. Elsewhere, especially in Central Asia, the population is growing, though the increase is nowhere as big proportionately in the farm districts as it is in industrial regions. Smolensk is not typical, yet in magnified terms it describes a nationwide situation, reflecting the low living and working conditions for peasants.

       A careful analysis of the speeches and decisions on food and farm affairs at the last Party Congress was made by experts of Radio Free Europe. "The long catalog of shortcomings, losses and failures in the government operation and performance of Soviet agriculture is all too familiar," it concluded. "The Soviet system of socialist agriculture is the antithesis of a model of abundance and efficient, let alone equitable, agrarian order for the developing nations to follow."

       Unfortunately it is precisely in the underdeveloped areas, in the hungry nations, that the myth of communist agrarian magic appears to exert its strongest appeal. This is surpassingly strange, now that the collective system and its realities of dire want and chronic crisis are so clearly on view. A conference with a few typical Soviet kolkhoz farmers, under conditions that guaranteed their safety and candor, would soon enough erase the delusions held so 'grimly by certain leaders and opinion-makers in the backward areas, Asia, Africa, Latin Americans—and some North Americans, too—might look with profit on the experience, nearly 350 years ago, in another underdeveloped area: the Plymouth colony on the shores of what was to be New England. (227)

       The settlers had paid heavily in life for several disastrous crop years under a communal system of farming. But the turning point came after the 1623 harvest. What had happened is set forth in the memoirs of Governor, William Bradford. After much debate and searching of conscience, the colonists went over to private farming. The Governor ordered "that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves." It was a panacea that worked.

       Communism breeds hunger. This is the plain truth that must be brought home to new or old nations flirting with the idea as a road to agricultural reform.