As Hadger Did

Ffadger Corgiladze, like other peasants of proved efficiency, was paid a piecework wage instead of a standard rate per week in this year of Russia's greatest need. Vigorous, patriotic Hadger toiled with other women workers through the rows of leathery green tea plants that flourish in Caucasian Georgia. Last week she had run up a startling record. Somehow she crammed the labor of 300 work days into one 24-hour period of tea-leaf picking. Her reward: 2,250 rubles (about $400). Hadger gave most of her small fortune, 2,000 rubles, to the Soviet War Fund.

What Hadger Corgiladze did, millions of other peasants were doing throughout Russia: fighting a desperate battle of food. The 1942 harvest was in full swing. In southern Russia wheat-threshing machines hummed within earshot of tank battles. Near Stalingrad harvesters toiled around the clock to bring in ripened grain before the Nazi blight grew closer. Flax fields near Kalinin, rye fields around Kuibyshev, the great grain fields waving across the U.S.S.R.'s broad fertile land between northern forest and southern desert into the heart of Asia, all were black with hurrying harvesters. Thousands of new nurseries were opened to free mothers for tractor-driving. On the largest collective farms, dormitories were thrown up so that workers would not lose time by going home to sleep. Around Moscow 75,000 students spent their holidays harvesting.

Though approximately one-fourth of Russia's 240 million acres of farmland had been overrun by the Germans, there were about 40 million fewer mouths to feed (those left in occupied areas and those who had died). Final harvest figures were far from complete, but they seemed the best in years, assuring Russia of at least as much food as last year. Beamed the Moscow News: "The Soviet countryside succeeded not only in coping with the increased state plan for grain, vegetables and industrial crops, but also in topping it on a scale in excess of the most optimistic expectations."

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