Russia's Internal Problem
Step by step it becomes plainer that the internal difficulties of the Soviet Union are widespread and acute. For a long time a few highly-placed persons outside Russia have known it, and more per- spicacious observers have suspected it. Now a decree of the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, aimed at removing serious abuses of the collective farm system, makes it everybody's business. Every country involved in the war has its post-war problems. It would be most surprising if Russia, interrupted in the full flow of sweeping social and economic change and subjected to tremendous devastation, should have none. Yet such are the effects of Russian secretiveness and anti-Russian pre- judice that this first revelation that all is not well will be greeted by some with shocked surprise and others with jubilation. It calls for neither. What appears to have happened is that some persons have misapplied the reserves of collective farms to their own use and others have simply failed to work steadily and willingly for the farms. The latter problem at least is not new, particularly in the Ukraine, where most of the recent troubles have occurred. The new
decree is meant to remove the abuses and begin a new drive to make the farms efficient and prosperous. A plentiful supply of tractors would probably do as much as any decree to that end. All the outside world can do is to hope, in the interest of the common welfare, that the change succeeds in increasing production without dangerously reducing personal liberty, and that the Soviet authorities will not court further international misunderstanding by concealing inevitable difficulties from a potentially sympathetic world. It can also hope that the demand of Culture and Life, the organ of the Communist Party's Administration of Propaganda and Agitation, that the Soviet central Press should include more propaganda material, will not be listened to. What the world wants from Russia is facts.
