Steel Epigrams

Religion is opium for the people.

--Lenin.

In Moscow grim Nikolai Lenin's grimmer successor, Josef Stalin, showed last week that he too can coin mirthless epigrams, as hard as the nickname, "Steel," which Lenin gave him. Samples:

Individualism must be drugged that Communism may succeed.

Villages do not follow towns to Communism. Towns must drag villages to Communism.

These cold, metallic conceits were fired at the tousled heads of a delegation of Marxist agrarian workers (i. e., farmers), whom Dictator Stalin was addressing on the stirring topic: Destroying the Kulak or Rich Farmer as a Class.

Since in any country rich farmers are always the most conservative not to say reactionary class, it has been obvious from the first that they must be destroyed in Soviet Russia, but recently this has not seemed practical. "It is now," said Stalin with quiet menace last week. He launched into an argument which may be summarized thus: 1) Even two years ago the Government was largely dependent upon the kulak to produce what is called the "export surplus" of Russian grain. It is this surplus which the Government sells abroad, using the gold received in exchange to buy foreign manufactured goods. Since foreign manufacturers will not take their pay in Russian rubles, the surplus grain which equals gold is vitally important; 2) During the past two years thousands of kulak estates have been confiscated and turned over to collectivist farm workers for intensive cultivation under the direct supervision of the State. It is now found that in 1929 these collective farms produced a greater export surplus than did the kulak farms in 1927; 3) Ergo, argued Stalin last week, the Government is no longer dependent upon the kulak and will proceed to destroy him as a class, confiscating his lands but allowing him to exchange the stultifying sloth of wealth for hard, invigorating work as a collectivist farm hand, perhaps on what was once his own estate.

For the present, according to Dictator Stalin, the Government is still too dependent on the Nepman (Businessman) to exterminate him as a class. But Stalin served fair warning that this will be done as soon as the Government's collectivist industries reach a point of efficiency at which the businessman can safely be converted into the collectivist business worker.

"If we retain the Nep,"* said the cold Man of Steel, "it is because the Nep, in its way, serves our cause. But when the Nep ceases to do that then we shall throw the Nep to the Devil!"

Moscow children under 16 were forbidden, last week, to attend the ancient Douglas Fairbanks cinema Don Q, Son of Zorro "to protect their immature minds from the contamination of its bourgeois ideology."

*i.e. the "New Economic Policy" announced by Lenin when he found it advisable to allow a certain amount of private business to be carried on by persons who are called in Russia with abysmal contempt "Nepmen."

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