Starvation & Surplus

Between Pope Pius XI and Dictator Stalin I yawns an abyss on a major issue of fact: Did millions of Soviet citizens starve in 1933 or did they get enough to eat?

"Our country never knew such a harvest as that of 1933!" exulted the Dictator's official Moscow newsorgan Izvestia last week. Russians safely harvested, according to Izvestia, more grain than in any previous year in Soviet or Tsarist times, a grand and overflowing total of 89,800,000 metric tons (3,323,000.000 bushels). In wheat, again according to Izvestia, Russian production was nearly double that of the U. S. in 1933 and almost equal to the 1915 U. S. wheat bumper of bumpers.

Contrariwise, His Eminence Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, was perfecting last week a "Save the Starving Russians" drive understood to have been directly inspired by the Supreme Pontiff. German Protestants have pledged co-operation through their Union of Evangelical Churches. As Executive Secretary the Cardinal has picked Dr. Ewald Ammende. administrator of Catholic famine relief in Russia during the years 1920-22, years now admitted by Soviet leaders to have been among the hungriest in Russian historv.

"The Russian Government then, as now, denied that starvation existed," said Dr. Ammende in Vienna. To correspondents his staff showed pictures of Russians dead and dying of starvation, reputedly snapped in the Ukraine last spring by Catholic investigators "at the risk of their lives."

When Cardinal Innitzer first began to charge that Soviet citizens were starving, a spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Office remarked. "In Russia, I am happy to say, we have no famine and no cardinals" (TIME, Aug. 28). Soon afterward, on a goodwill visit to Russia, French ex Premier Edouard Herriot toured the regions of alleged starvation, pronounced Soviet famine a myth (TIME, Sept. 11). Moscow correspondents, denied free access to the areas in question at the time, were inclined to conclude from later visits that some starvation there had been. Driving ahead in Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer, just before Christmas, secured the adoption by an informal congress of Jewish, Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic churchmen from all over Europe of a resolution which was being printed into pamphlets last week, along with His Eminence's more gruesome pictures. Excerpts: "In spite of all efforts to minimize and deny that catastrophic starvation condi tions ravaged the Soviet Union in the days previous to the harvest it is herewith emphatically declared and certified that in the course of the present year (1933) millions of innocent persons, many of whom were residents of the richest and most fruitful parts of Russia such as the Ukraine and the North Caucasus, died of starvation. Also, it is incontestable and undeniable that in connection with this mass starvation there were fearful accompaniments typical of all mass starvations--including even cannibalism. "These lives could easily have been saved. While this starvation tragedy was taking place in the Soviet Union, other lands overseas were suffering from a superfluity of grain. World conferences engaged themselves with the problem of a cut in the production of grain. Huge quantities of foodstuffs were destroyed. Within a short space of time this surplus foodstuff could have been shipped to the starvation areas in steamers which, meanwhile for lack of cargo, were rotting away in the various world ports.

"A further increase of the starvation is just around the corner. The comparatively good harvest of the autumn (1933) will alleviate the situation only temporarily. If further mass starvation is to be prevented a large scale relief action must be put into effect."

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