Another remarkable glimpse into the Soviet experience thanks to Albert Rhys Williams, here writing several years after the Civil War-era famine on harvest season during the N.E.P., and the meaning of bread to the Soviet people.

‘Comrade Harvest’ by Albert Rhys Williams from New Masses. Vol. 3 No. 6. October, 1927.

I.

“How are things in Russia?” I called out of the car window to the Red Army patrol at the Riga frontier. For answer he pulled out of his pockets two loaves and holding them aloft, waved them laughing. Bread to him was the symbol of prosperity.

With all workers and peasants I soon found it was the same. It was likewise the measure of value. Invariably into all our conversations would be injected the questions:

“How much is it a pound in America?” “How many poods for an arsheen of cloth?” By bread they sought to get at the real conditions in America.

To the young giant striking north through the Archangel forest with three 15 pound loaves strapped to his back, bread was a measure of time. Usually, he explained, he told time by the sun.

“But there is no sun. There’s been none for a week,” I said.

“Then I tell it by the black bread in my belly. When I eat one pound I am hungry in three hours. Two pounds, and in four or five hours the worm demands to be fed.” He was a sort of human time-glass with bread instead of sand running through him.

Most illuminating of all, the attitude of the rain-drenched man in Samara taking refuge from a June storm in my doorway. To my condolences over his wetting he replied:

“Neechevo! Neechevo! This isn’t rain. It is gold coming down from the sky. It means bread for us all.”

In such contacts I got an insight into the significance of bread in Russian life. It grew with my growing knowledge of the language. “Bread-ploughing”, is the Russian word for agriculture. “Bread-bearing”, the word for fertility. “Bread-bearer”, another term for peasant. “Bread and salt”, (khleb-sol) means hospitality. Always I was finding new words for bread, the cereals from which it was made, the processes of its making.

The Russian not only lavishes on bread every term of affection, he waxes lyrical over it.

“Only the golden wheat fields know
The secret of their love.
Stand up erect bright ears
And hide the sweethearts true.”

Thus goes on the favorite song of the village youth, the Peddler of Nekrasov. Bread appears in hundreds of songs and proverbs and in legends like this: “Fair and rosy did our Buckwheat grow. They invited her to visit Tsargrad. Off she set with Honorable Oats and Golden Barley. Princes and Boyars met her at the high stone gates. They set her on the oaken table to feast. As a guest has our Buckwheat come to us.”

Not only in legends but in life bread receives homage as a personage. At the peasant’s board it occupies the place of honor. Never must it be laid upon its side or top, always it must be placed upright. Thus, “Bread turns the table into an altar.” The piece that falls upon the floor is picked up by a peasant who may even kiss it reverently. The children are warned that every crumb swept from the table means one less golden apple for them to pick in Paradise. Even the drops of kvas must not be tossed out of a glass for it is made of bread. The loaf must be always cut to the right. Some peasants will only break bread,—to cut it with a knife would be disrespect.

Not only the peasants pay honor to bread but with bread they pay honors to others. It is in the hands of the relative welcoming the soldier home from the front. It rides at the head of the wedding procession. It is set on the table in front of the house as a tribute to the dead. With gifts of bread and salt the boyars greeted the tsars, and today in the back villages Kalinin is met by mujiks bringing him a great trencher with these ancient symbols of hospitality.

The American says “give me the luxuries of life and I can dispense with the necessities.” When he prays “give us this day our daily bread”, he means meat, eggs, cake and ice-cream. Not the Russian. He means literally bread.

“Six days without bread. Six days I starved!” exclaimed the shipper of a watermelon boat ending his tale about the big storm that stranded him on a sand bar in the Volga.

“But you had some 4,000 watermelons on board!” I pointed out.

“Yes,” he replied, “and we had fish and eggs. But no bread!” So he was starving.

If this seems far fetched, spread your table with the most ravishing dishes, but no bread. Then watch the eyes of your peasant guest constantly hunting about for bread. “Without bread,” says the Russian proverb, “the palace is a prison. With bread it is Paradise under a pine tree.”

Bread is the only thing he cannot do without. In famine years a ten pood cow he will trade for two poods of flour.

II.

Bread is the life of the Russian peasant. It is likewise the life of the Russian state. Hard bent are her statesmen in building the industries. But for decades yet her riches will come not from her iron and textile factories, but from her bread factories; not from the gold fields of Siberia, but from the vast grain fields, spreading a cloth of gold over the Russian land. In them reposes the might and power of the state. On them hangs the weal and woe of the nation.

“May the stalks be like reeds, the grain like peas and from every grain sown may we gather a thousand!” This prayer of the heathen Chuvash around the kasha kettle in the fields of Yeromkhin is the prayer of all Russians at the time of sowing. From the day the seed is put in the ground until the crops are gathered in, a close and anxious watch is kept upon it. Its general condition from infancy to maturity is telegraphed to Moscow from all parts of the country. Its symptoms are carefully diagnosed by specialists, like a board of consulting physicians recording pulse, temperature and blood-pressure. Its state of health is daily bulletined by the newspapers with space and captions worthy of the first citizen of the republic.

These bulletins begin in the fall with the sowing of the winter cereals:

–Kharkov, October 10. Abundant warm rains are falling throughout the Ukraine, East of the Don and along the Black Sea Littoral. Winter wheat stands at 5 balls.

–Irkutsk, October 15. Continuous dry weather through Siberia had been extremely unfavorable and winter rye is rated as low as 2 balls.

–Tambov, November 1. Heavy snow falling over the Central Districts had laid a protecting cover on the fields. All crops went under the snow at 3 balls.

In the five-ball system, the peculiar standard which Russians use in various fields, 5 means excellent, 3 average, 1 poor, etc. It is on this making that the cereals are rated in the bulletins even in their infancy and first early growth, until they disappear under the snow. But even then they do not disappear from the newspapers. Now there are bulletins upon the snow blanket and the cereals sleeping under it.

–Odessa, November 10. Strong sun has melted away the snow, leaving the fields exposed to freezing winds.

–Smolensk, March 15. An early thaw followed by bitter cold has spread an ice film over the ground. Winter wheat which went under the snow at 3 balls is coming out at two.

As spring moves on into an early summer, the bulletins come thicker and faster, taking ever more space in the papers. The public watches the crop scores with the same keen interest that it watches the baseball scores on the boards in front of the big newspapers in America. Always there is a series of disasters to record. August frosts in Archangel, blighting the oats. Cloudbursts in the Kuban laying low the wheat, preventing its flowering. Floods on the Kama. Hail the size of duck’s eggs in Vladimir. Ground-fleas and pea-elephant in Yaroslav. Gophers and marmots in South Siberia.

All quite normal. It spells loss but not disaster. Only when some great scourge looms up does the public become tense and excited. Then the bulletins take on the language of war. Bread, backed by all the resources of the republic, fighting against the destroying forces. Thus in 1926 the battle is recorded:

THE GRASSHOPPER FRONT.

–Rostov-on-the-Don, July 15. The general situation in all sections is worse. Two new grasshopper armies are reported flying out of the Kalmik steppes. Favoring winds expediting their advance. In the Terek the spring crops were decimated by the first army which is moving up on the right bank of the Volga.

Stavropol is declared in a state of siege. Troikas with extraordinary powers have been organized and all civil and military forces mobilized. Scouting aeroplanes and cavalry patrols are reporting new movements of the enemy. Special trains with the chemical command and anti-grasshopper “artillery” rushed to the Don section have been delayed by in sect masses clogging the rails. Telegrams marked “Grasshop per” take precedence over all others. All efforts are concentrated on reaping the crops of the poor peasants.

At last the invaders are expelled. But behind them is a devastated area as big as Belgium. The same year there is drought in the Tartar Republic. Unprecedented hail lays an ice-coating a foot deep over tens of thousands of dessyatines. The Volga flood smothers 200,000 dessyatines.

Even so, 1926 is a banner year and the papers break out in extravagant cartoons of Comrade Harvest and Comrade Peasant dancing a roundelay of joy together. There is not enough twine and hemp to bind and bag the grain, not enough cars and elevators to carry and store it. So vast is Soviet Union, it can well stand the shocks that would break a small country.

III.

It is only when disaster is piled upon disaster that the catastrophe becomes nation-wide, and famine stalks over the land. This has occurred in the history of Russia at not infrequent intervals and each time has left its impression on the oral tradition.

Every epoch in which the country has been stirred to its depths—the troubled times of Boris Godonov, Stenka Razin, Peter the Great, Pugatchev—has brought forth a host of curious tales and legends. The hunger years have particularly incited the folk-imagination to the creation of these weirdest legends in the weirdest, most fantastic forms. The famine of 1912 produced the black cow, the bull and deer speaking with human voice. Still more prolific was the last and most terrible famine of 1921-22. One widespread tale, a prediction of the coming horrors crops up in various places and guises. Here is a Siberian version of it:

In the spring of this year a mujik was driving his empty wagon to Tuloon. On the way he caught up with an old baba who cried out from the roadside:

“Give me a lift, little uncle!” “Don’t you see,” replied the mujik, “the horse is tired. Twenty versts we’ve gone already and it’s heavy going.”

“Anyhow,” repeated the baba, “give me a lift. I’m light as a feather.” So insistently did she beg that at last the mujik told her to climb on. They drove ahead, but in a short time the horse was panting, all covered with foam.

“Eh!” exclaimed the mujik, “you said you didn’t weigh anything, but you’re as heavy as a cow. The horse can hardly drag us.”

“Neechevo (never mind),” said the baba. “Just look over your left shoulder.” The mujik looked and turned white with horror. All around lay droves of cattle, dead and dying.

“Now,” said the baba, “take a look over your right shoulder.” The mujik looked and saw great stacks of corn and wheat, but all drooping and without ears.

“And now glance upward,” said the baba. So he did and there was a long black procession of people with coffins and lighted candles.

“Here I get off,” said the baba. “Have a care. I warn you to say nothing to anyone or I shall trample you to death.”

The mujik turned around and saw beneath the skirts of the baba not a woman’s feet, but the hoofs of a cow. Thus according to popular legend was prophesied the widespread famine of 1921-22.

Hardest hit of all were the bread bearing provinces of Saratov and Samara. Here all depends upon the caprices of the sky. Here is special significance to the peasant proverb. “It is not the earth that gives the harvest, but the sky.” This year it flings down abundant rains and the crops spring luxuriant from the rich black loam. Next year only sunshine, and the crops shrivel and vanish before the eyes. One may read the story of these dread dry years in the Old Chronicles (Letopis) preserved in the parish churches. Thus from Ivanovka on the Volga:

1880. Blue skies all summer, the harvest was from two to six poods a dessyatine. Complaints about hunger more and more increase. Our answer to all those asking for the sake of Christ: “We ourselves are beggars.”

1890. A cloudless spring. The hunger-wounded after four nonharvest years took heart, but from May 22nd, seventy days, not a drop of rain. Again despair.

“Blue sky.” “Cloudless blue sky.” These are the fair words that always preface the story of crop disaster in the Volga Basin. So it was in the horror year of 1921. The blue skies of May and June turned blazen in July. Ninety rainless days. The crops burn to the roots. The cattle turn into bone-racks. The camel humps—reserve foods—shrink to flapping bunches of skin. The granaries stand empty-bellied like the people. The last grain is blown from the cracks. The last bread, mixed with grass, sawdust and horse-dung, is eaten. Despair seizes the villages. They sell their houses and horses for 10 poods, 5 poods, even a few pounds of flour. Panic drives them into flight to Moscow, Siberia, the Ukraine. On top of hunger, plague and typhus. No lights in the town. No wheeling flocks of pigeons. The stricken fall dead in the streets. Frozen corpses are corded in front of the hospital. The death wagons cart them away to trenches.

One of those death wagons now brings me wood to Kvalinsk from the island, and I ask the driver to tell me about the famine.

“There is nothing to tell,” he replies. “We ate our bread. When that was gone we ate rats, cats, grass and weeds. When they were gone, we ate each other—then we died.”

There, in brief, is the story of 1921. The living that one meets are survivors of a holocaust. All of them have a soul-shriving story of that hunger hell through which they passed—all these peasants thronging the bazaar today, shouting, trading, singing, scolding, offering their products to the passerby.

I turn to the izvoschik row and listen to the story of Inazarov, the Tartar:

“One morning Tagir, my son, drove down by the mosque to sell a load of birch leaves. He didn’t come back by night. I went up and down the bazaar a hundred times, there was no trace of him. Next day a peasant said he saw him driving off towards the big white church.

“I got the militia and following tracks of Tagir’s lapti in the snow we came to the house of a man from the Eternal Khutor. We burst open the gate. The man swore he had never seen my son. But we found birch leaves in the courtyard. Then my horse’s bridle. Then fresh horse meat salted away in barrels. Finally, we pried up the kitchen floor, and there under the boards, was Tagir and another boy, their heads hammered in. ‘Allah! Punish him!’ I cried. Before the militia could stop me I nearly brained the Shaitan, devil, with a duya. They bound his hands and with a rope around his neck led him to the jail while we rushed on him and beat his back with knouts. Three days later he died, but the judge let me go. ‘Any man would have done the same,’ he said.”

A few months later not only the horse, but the boys would have been salted away in barrels. To such desperation were people driven by starvation—to corpse-eating and cannibalism. Out of bushes human wolves sprang on the defenceless and killed them. Eight corpses were stolen at night from the morgue that Tsibooshkin, the Mordvian, was guarding. Fingers and ears were found in the meat jelly sold in the bazaar. The meatpies at the wharf had unusual sweetness—human flesh. A taste for it developed. Brothers devoured sisters. Parents their children. Mothers the babies at their breast. Secret instructions came out of Moscow to be lenient with the flesh-eaters. In the jail they were put in separate cells to keep them from tearing each other to pieces.

The triumph of Hunger over Man! Maddened by starvation he sinks below the level of the beast.

But the record is not all grisly and ghastly. If the famine year showed the depths to which human spirit may fall it showed likewise the heights to which it can rise. The triumph of Man over Hunger. Men starving themselves to death to save others from starving. Not only dying for family and children, but for society.

There was the story of the grey-shubaed, deep eyed man crouched up on the wharf awaiting the night steamer.

“I was still in the cavalry at Kazan when news of the famine came. With eighty rubles collected by my comrades, I bought two bags of flour and hurried on to Buzuluk. Everything, everybody had a shrunken starving look. I didn’t know my own home, no red geraniums in the windows, no straw on the roof. A strange, gaunt woman answered my knock.

‘Come and sit down,’ she said. But a sudden fear came over me, and I could not. I asked for my mother.

‘Died on the way to Kazan for flour,’ she replied.

‘My father?’ I questioned.

‘Died of typhus.’

‘My four brothers?’ I named them each in turn. Three were dead from hunger. The youngest in the hospital. I covered my face with my hands and said, ‘I will sit down while you tell me again, that I may believe what you say is true.’

“I got up and went up to find my brother. I found him dead. His head was swollen like a tub. In his mouth was still the grass he had been chewing. I ran out on the street, ran into an old woman, knocking her down. One bag of flour was still in my arms, I threw it at her and ran on and on in the face of a storm. The snow was blinding me, a fire within was burning me and I fell.

“I woke up in a typhus barrack. From a skeleton on the next cot I learned how my eldest brother had died. He was a Communist in charge of an American Relief Kitchen. The food was rationed out for children only. Those were his orders, and that was the way he carried them out. He died of starvation. A week later came the order to ration the staff-workers as well, but it came a week too late!”

“You too are a Communist?” I asked.

“Yes, the world needs happiness.”

“And your job now?”

“I’m an agronomist. The world needs bread.”

IV.

“The world needs bread!”

Well, the world has bread. The Volga Basin is full of it. Nature has relented. Bread once more in the bread basket of the world. These fields, burned bare in the famine of 1921, and the half-famine of 1924, are staggering with the biggest harvest in decades.

Bread! Bread! Bread!

It pours down from the hills in long files of creaking wagons, and in camel caravans out of the steppe under the harvest moon. It pours into cavernous maws of the big elevators along the river front, into the roaring mills grinding away night and day. It pours life into the veins of the Russian state, loosing the tides of trade and commerce. It puts shining new shoes and dresses upon the girls. It sets forges glowing and anvils ringing in the blacksmith shops. It calls the pigeons back from the dead and sets them in blue flocks wheeling above the bazaar. It brings up deep welling songs from the new recruits rolling in from the villages. It puts laughter and hope into the masses of peasants crowding into the autumn fair.

This year it is a Harvest Festival. A Carnival of Bread. For it the bakers have turned out tens of thousands of loaves. They are stacked up all over the place.

Bread in bags! waiting to be carried on steamers.

Bread in cords! ready to be loaded into wagons for the workers on the new irrigation dam across the Volga.

Bread on legs! long files of it marching into the Tartar Children’s Home. That’s the way it seems, so enormous are the loaves borne on the heads of the little laughing Tartar boys. The beggars’ sacks are crammed with bread, and the bazaar dog, that goes from stall to stall standing on his hind legs a-begging, has grown so fat, he wobbles. An Epicurean now, he wrinkles his nose at the black bread—White bread, or none at all.

As for the peasants there is no holding them in. The harvest has gone to their heads, and with the help of vodka, all peasant caution and concealment are thrown to the winds. Today no lamentations about taxes, high prices on city products, low prices on village products. Today the peasants are boasting.

“I tell you, Victor Mikhaelovitch 150 poods from every dessyatine.

“Believe me or not, Ivan Petrovitch, I got 200. I don’t know where to store it.”

This is solemn truth. The teacher Matvey of Yershovka tells me, if there were no debts and taxes to pay, his wheat would suffice for 20 years; from this one harvest the village could eat white bread for seven years.

In the samovar tent by the grain kiosk the peasants packed three deep around the tables are in deliriums of delight.

“Hey, there, American!” They cry beckoning me with vodka bottles. “Come in and drink a toast to the harvest and Little Mother Earth.”

“Two more years like this and we can dam up the Volga with it, we’ll build up a wheat mountain to the moon,” says Red Beard Borodin of Popovka.

“Yeh Bogoo! We’ll flood up Europe with it,” exclaims another. “American wheat has had its way too long in the streets of Europe. Now Volga wheat is coming on and boost him off the sidewalk. Like this!” He made a long lunging kick. I made as if to write this down in my note-book.

“No! No!” interrupted Peter Ivanovitch. “American wheat was good to us in the famine year. He saved our lives. Put it down this way: When American Wheat meets Volga Wheat in Europe, he will take his cap off and say ‘Oh, good morning, Volga Wheat! So you are here also. My high respects to you!’ Like this!” He made a low sweeping bow.

Laughter. Another samovar. More vodka. The clapping of hand’s marking the clinching of bargains in the cattle market. Songs from the mogarich drinkers out of the tavern windows. Clatter of hammers* and boards on new buildings going up. Crowds of buyers ten rows deep at the all cooperative counters. The rumble of tractors taking the hill back of the town.

And this is Kvalinsk, the volost hardest hit by the famine on all the right bank of the Volga; and across the river is Pugachev, in all Russia no district so faminescourged.

Travelling along the highroads one still finds marks of that famine: Here the white trunk of willow peeled of its bark for food. There a nailed up house whose owner never returned from his long pilgrimage after bread. A coughing mujik with the city disease—tuberculosis—off to the peasant palace in Livadia. Deepest of all the famine mark on the budget—a third of all volost expenditures going to the five orphanhouses.

But all these scars are healing. Healing fast. Deep and fertile is the black Volga soil. Deep and mighty the virility of the Russian peasant. Tremendous the recuperative forces of the Soviet lands.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1927/v03n06-oct-1927-New-Masses.pdf