AUGUST THE THIRTEENTH

By CONSTANTINE FITZG.IBBON What lies, behind Ulbricht's Wall? First, of course, the dingy ruins of East Berlin, their dinginess only accentuated by the wedding-cake pomp of the Stalinallee. And beyond Berlin, between the even dingier cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Magdeburg, is shat used to be the great farming belt of Germany. The farms there have now been organised into what are called, in the Communists' jargon, `Landwirtschaftliche Produk- tiongenossenschaften,' usually abbreviated into 'LPG,' which is rendered into English simply as 'collective farins'—a process which has led to a massive flight from the land, to food shortages and to further large-scale flight to the West; it was one of the causes of the building of Ulbriclit's Chinese Wall on August 13, 1961, and the current international crisis. It would seem. worth while, therefore, to examine why this collectivisation was carried out, and how.

S usual when dealing with Communist affairs, semantic confusions must first be cleared awaY. A Russian collective farm or ko/khoz is not a farm worked collectively by a group of Peasants, with their own equipment, in their nwh interest. It has nothing whatever in common with a co-operative venture. The peasants are ecimpelled by representatives of the State and the party bureaucracies to sacrifice the greater Part, or all, of their land, livestock and tools. I he farm is run by State bureaucrats, with orders 1° produce a certain quota, or 'norm': failure i° Produce this leads to punishment, success very often to an increase in the 'norm.'

It is generally accepted that an absentee land- , be is a burden on the land unless his affairs "e administered by an extremely competent and wascientious bailiff; for in farming matters, ,ilintigh broad policy can be laid down effectively '1°M on high, spot decisions have to be made 1110Y times in the year. There are, of course, a 11"Mber of extremely well-run model kolkhozes I° the Soviet Union. Foreign politicians and Journalists have been visiting them regularly for quarter of a century. There were a number 'r extremely well-run farms in Ireland 120 years ago. But in both cases the results of distant con- trol have also produced a fantastically high level tif inefficiency and muddle and misery. , Indeed, the resemblance to Ireland before the 1. unme is quite close, nor is it entirely fortuitous. l'ti both cases a landless peasantry bore upon its back a huge structure of persons interested Solely in what they could get out of the land, tri°I. in how it should be got out; in both cases h e method used to compel the peasantry to living food for the market, while themselves IvIn close to a starvation level, was cruelty 1tond threats—by the absentee landlord's 'bailiffs 1,‘c by the State agronomists; in both cases there i„ere vast flights from the land, semi-voluntary ‘1,kIlte case of the millions of Irish countrymen ,,"° fled to the cities of America and England, s,attrety compulsory in the case of the millions of :\,111,14s moved to forced-labour camps in Siberia nil' the Arctic; and in both cases the agricul- tural economy was more or less wrecked. Productivity in Ireland remains to this day though below what it could and should be, even h °1-1gh all the old abuses have been removed th „es.e many years; the best of the peasantry took shb`lr traditions and talents abroad, to waste in of the And in Russia today over a third les Population work the land and produce s teed than the 8 per cent. of the smaller American population who farm--though the Ukraine should be the richest farming land in the world.

That Russian agriculture is an Augcan stable of inefficiency, corruption and waste is accepted by everyone, including Nikita Khrushchev. At- tempts at a miraculous solution to this man- made problem—such as the massive application of Lysenko's weird notions or the fantastically wasteful 'virgin lands' experiments—have only made for more confusion, and increases in food production have been temporary and undepend- able. Because it is the basic system that is wrong, and has been proved wrong over and over again in history whenever attempts have been made to insert decisions made at a distance between the farmer and the land he farms, and to ignore the organic unity that must prevail between the soil and those who till it. It was proved wrong• once again in Poland, and in 1956 80 per cent. of the land was decollectivised, with an imme- diate and startling increase in productivity. Yet this is the system that was imposed 'voluntarily' on East Germany in 1960. Why?

In Russia, which was 80 per cent. agri- cultural in 1918, Lenin won the support of the peasantry by giving them land previously in the possession of the expropriators. Whether he re- garded this as a temporary political expedient is neither here nor there. Ten years later Stalin collectivised. The cost, as he told Churchill, was the lives of 5,000,000 kulaks, mostly in the Ukraine, where Khrushchev served as one of his principal lieutenants in the later stages of this item of social engineering.

Stalin collectivised the land for at least two reasons, both connected with the forced indus- trialisation known as the Five-Year Plans. On the one hand, the Plans needed a huge labour supply for the mines, factories and the con- struction of utilities, and in Russia this could only be drawn from the land. (Peter the Great had done the same,, when the populations Of whole villages were designated 'factory serfs,' moved to the factory and ordered to get on with it.) Mechanisation was to replace the missing men, and the great tractor factories were built. But mechanisation was not then believed to be economically possible on small or even on medium-sized farms. Hence the creation of the kolkhozes and soi'khozes, which are State farms theoretically even less independent than the others. And since the peasants would not voluntarily surrender their farms—as no peasant-farmer ever has or will, unless he be so inefficient or so lazy as to be quite useless— they were starved into it or just carted away.

A second reason for this extermination of the yeomanry was that concentration on heavy in. dustry meant a drought of consumer goods: the peasants were therefore reluctant to surrender their produce against non-existent commodities: and the cities were short of food. Therefore the peasants must be forced to work for nothing. And, according to the Kremlin's logic, so long as they had partial independence they were not susceptible to the full rigours of the State.

The immediate result of Stalin's policy was to increase the food shortages in the cities, while creating famine in the villages. The starving peasants ate their seed potatoes and their seed corn and slaughtered their remaining cattle and pigs. This constituted sabotage, for they should have quietly starved in the interests of Stalinist planning. Millions more were deported. The farms that the State took over were in a con. dition of ruin. And the long-term result has been the deplorable condition of Russian agri- culture today.

So chaotic was Russian agriculture as a result of Stalin's social engineering that the Red Army would have starved to death had it not been fed by the Americans. And after the war Russia was saved from an even worse famine than that which actually prevailed by the massive food shipments sent in by UNRRA.

It might be thought that IA ith these grim ex- periences behind them, the ruling group within the Kremlin would have gladly altered their agricultural policy, either after the war or after the death of Stalin. But Stalin never seems to have doubted the virtues of collectivisation, while Khrushchev, in his famous 'Secret Speech' to the Twentieth Congress, went out of his way to exclude the agricultural debacle and the kulak Massacre from his list of Stalin's crimes—per- haps because be was personally so deeply im- plicated in both? Both dictators have pursued the goal of total collectivisation in their own country and in the countries occupied by the Red Army. So have the Chinese Communists in the vast territories they control, and with similar results, though this may be more a parallel than a repetition. In the occupied countries of Eastern Europe it has been a case of simple repetition. Why should they have wished to do so?

A number of explanations are possible. One is that the Byzantine dogmatism of the Russian Bolsheviks ties them to Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist collectivisation like Ixion to his wheel. There is probably some truth in this, though other elements of Marxism-Leninism, such as econo mic egalitarianism, higher educational policy and indeed the whole metaphysic of the gradual dis- appearance of the State—which would appear to be at least as important—have gone by the board.

But if the collective farm fixation makes little sense historically—and even less economically— politically it has a great deal to be said for it, So long as over half the population of Russia could at least feed themselves, their subservience to their masters was not and could not be total. They might be reduced to, and kept at, the level of those peasants whom La Bruyere saw toiling in the fields of Louis X1V's France, 'and when they lift their heads, we see that they are men.'

But a few generations later they did lift their heads, and those of their masters and exploiters fell. One of the purposes, probably the main pur- pose, of totalitarianism is to make such rebellion' not merely impossible but actually unthinkable. Therefore the peasant has to be effectively atomised by being deprived of even the mini- mum of independence that goes with agricultural life and the decisions of the farmer's calendar. He must not only be totally dependent on his masters for his food, housing and the basic necessities of his livelihood: he must even accept their orders as to where and when to sow, to reap, to graze his cows, no matter how foolish such orders may be (and indeed the more foolish the orders he has to obey, the more he will be alienated and atomised): he must, in fact, become a 'factory serf' working the land.

If this was true of Russia,. with an already subservient peasantry, it was even more so in the more highly developed countries occupied by the Red Army, and in East Germany above all.

Russian agricultural policy in their zone of Gerniany has, in all important matters, been a repetition of what happened in Russia between the wars. First the big estates, most of which were in Mecklenburg, were split up in 1945, when the first collective farms were also created. East Germany became a country of over 600,000 farms, most of them of fifty acres or less. Many of these farms were given to farmers expelled from East Prussia, the areas east of the Odcr-Neisse line, or from the countries of Eastern Europe where their forebears had lived as Volksdeutsche.

This redistribution of land entered its second phase in 1948-49, when the larger (fifty or more acres) farms were broken up in their turn. The smaller farmers lacked the necessary economic strength to resist the pressures that were to be put upon them when the third phase, collectivi- sation, began. Meanwhile the infra-structure for the total collectivisation of the land was being laid by the creation of Tractor Stations, the complete control of the farmers' banking and credit system, the creation of a State monopoly of artificial fertilisers and similar essentials and the introduction of the quota system.

Almost as soon as the big farmers had been broken (normally by being deprived of their labourers) the Russians set about collectivising the others. They had two reasons for wishing to do this with all speed: it was anomalous that independent farming should go on in Eastern Germany while forced collectivisation was pro; ceeding ruthlessly in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria; and there were the events of 1948-49---the failure of the Berlin blockade and the West Germany cur- rency reform, which meant that Russia had failed to seize all Germany and that West Ger- many must soon emerge as a strong and pros- perous State once again.

It was at this point that Stalin decided that the permanent division of Germany was the best solution he could hope for. He decided to re- engineer East Germany so as to ensure that thi two halves of the apple would no longer fit. Ig noring the totally different conditions prevailin in the two countries, Russian methods were to b' applied in East Germany, with forced collot tivisation supplying the manpower for the ne mines and factories and public works. Tht) political expediency, too, encouraged them t repeat the same disastrous agricultural polio„' pursued twenty years earlier in Russia. The he was put on the peasants; by 1953 approximate' one-quarter of German agriculture was direct! controlled by the State, 13.8 per cent. of th land being LPGs and 3.8 per cent. sovkhoze1' (State farms), the remaining 8.4 per cent. bein:t accounted for by the Tractor Stations, etc.

But this policy inevitably led, as usual. 1” a generally lowered standard of living. An this in turn produced the rebellion of June 17. 1953, when close on 40,000 farmers fled !non' East to West Germany, mostly via Berlin. Tim; very large figure not only constituted 12 Pc' cent. of the refugees, but some 10 per cell!• of the independent farmers or peasants (it difficult to know precisely how to translate tile word Bauer which applies to both these) then working the land of East Germany.

Even after the rebellion the Communists well' on with the mild relaxation of policy start after Stalin's death. During the period of 111c Kremlin's internal struggle for power, the perioLl of the so-called 'thaw,' pressure remained le" than it had been or was to become. Only Mien Khrushchev was firmly established in Stalin seat, and had gathered into his hands alnli° all the reins and whips that Stalin had once held, did Russian policy become overtly aggres- ive once again. This was, roughly, in mid-1958. The Poles had taken advantage of this phase of comparative Russian weakness to decollectivise their agricul- ture. In East Germany meanwhile 'voluntary' collectivisation had gone on, though at a much slower rate. In early 1958 65 per cent. of all P.ast German agriculture was still privately "'fled and the independent small farmer (or Einzethauer, to use the Communist jargon) was doing comparatively well. Even the 10 per cent. increase in collective farms that took place be- tween 1953 and 1958 is largely accounted for by a simple administrative redesignation, whereby the farms abandoned by their owners who had fled to the West, previously designated 'local farms,' became LPGs.

buring this comparatively happy period food Production in the Russian zone increased to the extent that open rationing could be abolished. Indeed, it seemed to Khrushchev, and perhaps even to Ulbricht, that East Germany might after all become an economically viable entity despite (arced industrialisation. But during these years the so-called 'economic miracle' had taken place West Germany. And when, by late 1958, khrushchev was in a position once again to Pursue Stalin's. aggressive policies, he was all the more anxious to make the division of Ger- many permanent. The pressure was applied to the Western powers—to make them get out of erlin; and a year later to the East German peasants—to make them join the LPGs. In November of 1958 Khrushchev had issued his six-month Berlin ultimatum.

have various reasons, which may or may not ve included Mr. Macmillan's hasty flight to I, Moscow in early 1959 and President Eisen- hower's conciliatory attitude at Camp David ,tiring the summer of that same year, Khrush- eboev seems to have believed that he could brow- beat the West into giving him what he wanted.

Summit first step, he had succeeded in having a 1,11,111rnit Conference scheduled for the spring of '0. What exactly he hoped to win at this con- ference we do not know, but it does seem likely that he was prepared, in certain circumstances o Red his own choosing, to move most or all of the Army out of East Germany. d. We do know that he was then pressing for a l!s.arrned German Confederation, in which brieht's wretched rump would share all- u`Ji ertlian sovereignty equally with the Federal Republic. Perhaps he even believed that . the Western powers would accede to this fantastic cgenland. the preliminary to an eventual, all- r,°Mnlunist Germany. But to ensure that such a confederation should be pointed in the Com- 4tinist direction, it was essential that certain :..'eguards be applied in East Germany to "o_revent the zone from simply slipping under its „71) economic weight into the arms of the capitalist Federal Republic. In fact the zone must th Made into a very prickly item indeed, which ,e West could not swallow without drastic and b could administrative reforms, which the Russians o`tlid veto. And one way to do this was by means of the total collectivisation of East Ger- ,f4a agriculture, as part of the total socialisation Pubt,he zone laid down in the Seven-Year Plan, iished on October 1, 1959. Here the Ulbricht junta found itself con fronted with the sort of dilemma for which 'Marxist' dialectic was especially invented. On the one hand, the legal statutes of the German Democratic Republic had proclaimed, as re- cently as April 30, 1959, that 'entrance into the co-operatives is voluntary.' On the other, the peasant-farmers showed, as always, a marked disinclination to volunteer. The answer was to compel them to volunteer. Under the Seven- Year Plan the independent farmers were allotted impossible quotas and intolerable farm- ing conditions were imposed upon them. Such a wearing-down of the farmers' resistance must, however, take some time.

In February, 1960, an agricultural conference of the Communist Parties of the Eastern bloc took place in Moscow, where it was decided that collectivisation must be proceeded with at all speed. This decision was not, however, ap- plied to Poland (though Poland's turn will un- doubtedly come once again, if and when the East German problem is ever solved to Russia's satisfaction); nor was much done to ginger up the slow rate of re-collectivisation in Hungary, where the system had broken down in 1956. But in East Germany the heat was turned on again. Ulbricht received his orders: all East German agriculture was to be directly controlled by the State by the time of the Summit Meeting, then scheduled for mid-April.

In January, 1960, approximately half of East German agriculture was still free. This, it must be recalled, means that half the peasant-farmers had steadfastly, for close on twelve years and under considerable pressure, refused to hand over their farms to the collectives. Yet three months later, by April 14, 1960, they had all 'voluntarily' joined the LPGs, except for some two and a half thousand who had fled to the West during the eight weeks' campaign.

It is indicative of the importance which the Communists attached to completing the collec- tivisation before the Summit that they were pre- pared to take the most drastic measures precisely during the vital period of the spring sowing, with the consequent inevitable effects upon the autumn harvest. But such brutal indifference to the demands of nature has long typified Com- munist activity, and is indeed the basic cause of the repeated failure of their agricultural policy. In addition to the great economic pres- sures to which the East German farmers were already subject, direct social pressure was now added. Teams of agitators were sent from the towns and cities into the villages and the coun- tryside to 'persuade' the recalcitrant peasantry that they should voluntarily join the collectives.

The agitators were drafted to the job—though some preferred to flee to the West via Berlin rather than take part in such a campaign. They came from government and party offices, some of which temporarily ceased to function, since their entire staffs were out 'persuading' the peasants. School teachers were sent to the vil- lages to argue. Others came from the 'Workers' Battle Groups' in the factories, thus partly dis- locating production there. They appeared in groups of two, four, eight or even more. There were always policemen among them, whose presence was intended effectively to add to the weight of their arguments. Sometimes whole villages were sealed off by the police for days on end while the agitators got down to work. Few of these people knew anything about the land. They did not need to.

Their arguments were curiously irrelevant. A farmer would be asked if he wished to create, or join, an LPG—that is to say, surrender his land and his livestock to the State. He would usually reply that he did not. They would then ask him his reasons. Here was an immediate trap—If he were to reply that the LPGs were inefficient and did not pay a decent wage, or merely that he loved his land, he would be told that collectivisation was the policy of the 'democratic' government under which he lived, and formed indeed an essential part of the Seven-Year Plan. Was he against the govern- ment and the Plan? Was he, in fact, an enemy of the people? These farmers had lived under one totalitarian regime or another for twenty- seven years and had few illusions concerning the fate that befalls 'enemies of the people.' The police car was waiting outside. A farmer who attempted to argue with the agitators soon ended by 'voluntarily' signing away his farm.

A slightly more fruitful line of resistance was the simple repetition of the statement that the law did not require him to join an LPG. Indeed, it was specifically laid down in the Bauertifibel, an elementary farmers' manual published by the SED itself, that: `Anyone will be called to account and punished who tries to compel far- mers, no matter how, to join the LPGs.' Many farmers, wise in the legalistic ways of dictator- ships, simply reiterated that they did not wish to join and gave no further reason.

This usually routed the first group of agita- tors; but they were soon back, with reinforce- ments. They would force their way into the farmer's home and for six, eight, ten hours they would question him, using the 'conveyor' system as practised on the prisoners in the political gaols. Their standard line was: 'Are you in favour of Socialism and peace, or are you for Adenauer and war?' When the poor man gave the only possible answer, he was immediately told that he was lying. If he was against joining the local LPG, it meant that he was against the Seven-Year Plan, and therefore that he was in favour of Adenauer and war.

This is dialectic in action. Many farmers hid in their barns or their woods to get away from this torment, which was repeated day after day and night after night. They were hunted down, and the interminable, senseless barrage of questions and insults began again. Still some stuck it out. Loudspeaker vans were then parked outside their homes, announcing day and night that Farmer So-and-so was an enemy of the people, a warmonger and a supporter of the Nazi-revanchiste government in Bonn. The nerves of many of these men, and of their wives, broke under the strain. They signed, often solely in order to get the papers that would enable them to travel to Berlin and escape.

And yet still some held out. The Summit was coming close, and time was running short. If a stubborn farmer had children attending a uni- versity he was told that they would not be per- mitted to continue their studies. The electric- light cables to their farms and dairies were cut. There were cases of the agitators bricking up chimneys. And, of course, these people were con- stantly in the farmer's house, shouting their inane either/or questions at the poor man and his wife. If the doors were locked against them, they simply smashed them in.

Then, even more brutal threats were applied. The recalcitrant farmers were summoned to the office of their local mayor or chief of police.

proportion of these were and are former Nazi officials, whose methods have, of course, been well known in the locality for many years. Others have only acquired their reputations ,sinee the war. Here the farmer would be in- formed that a criminal prosecution was pend- ing against him. It was alleged that he had not Paid his taxes in full, or even that he had com- lnitted arson (the evidence of a smouldering compost heap would suffice, and arson is a capital offence in Eastern Germany). Unless he agreed to join an LPG at once, he Would be sent for trial. There are no illusions about the course of justice in East Germany. lias not the Minister of Justice, Hilde Benjamin, herself said: 'There can be no judge who is not Partisan. A judge must not allow himself to be led I. uY objectivity'? An independent peasant- farmer who faced trial for arson in March of 1960 would, in fact, be being tried for his re- fusal to join an LPG. The judge knew this, and also knew that if he failed to hand down an "emplary sentence he would himself be facing trial in the very near future. And the farmers Knew that the judges knew. Subjected to this final and inescapable alternative. 'volunteering' for the LPGs or accepting death, prison or Siberia, there was really no choice. Between March I and April 14, 1960, the last 140,000 independent farmers signed away their farms. In many cases these had been in their families for generations. On April 14, 1960, the Ulbricht government could announce that the last region, the Chemnitz Bezirk, was 'fully socialised.' 'hrushchev's time-table had been met.

Some farmers hanged themselves, many more fled to the West. This, however, was difficult. The People's Police had orders to take men !ravelling towards Berlin off the trains, if their identity cards gave their profession as farmer °I• farm labourer. Nevertheless, many thousands got through. Agricultural production fell rapidly, and in the summer of 1960 Ulbricht had to in- troduce open rationing once again. This was a humiliating admission of failure, and even Ulbricht could no longer pretend that East Germany was on the way to becoming an economically viable unit. What had been all Germany's granary could now no longer even feed itself. Cattle were slaughtered for lack of feed while the harvests were not gathered in to the bureaucrats who had sent the tractors tn the wrong LPG vented their rage and fear on the hapless and now landless peasantry. More and more joined the workers and profes- sional men in the flight westwards until, on August 13, 1961, Ulbricht, fearing the total and final disintegration of his miserable satrapy, ?lit his celebrated Chinese Wall across Berlin. And what the outcome of that will be . . .