ment which has kept in its hands the entire industry and trade of the 
country, and of the villages where private ownership prevails; and the 
process of “dekulakisation’’ acquires rather definite and active forms. It 
can be said without reserve that, as regards efficiency, the more delicate 
method of “stripping” the peasants now applied, is not very far removed 
from the compulsory “State regulation of the peasant economy”, as 
contemplated by comrades Ossinsky and Teodorovitch. It is true that there 
is now no coarse and direct coercion in its naked ideological purity, but 
as a result of the complex interaction of the purely political interference 
of the Soviet Government in the peasants’ life through the Soviets and 
various village institutions subordinated to Communists, and the economic 
interference through the policy of taxation and prices, the Soviet Govern- 
ment is able to exercise most decisive influence on the peasant economy 
and to confiscate its surpluses. 
As regards the taxation politicy, everything that could be at all taken 
from the villages, has been already taken. This has been very conclusively 
shown by the ruling majority of the party in the explanations it gave in the 
Soviet press, both last and this year, in reply to the opposition’s proposal to 
get new and important resources from the village “kulaki”. Alongside with 
this implacable taxation press, there exists a still more implacable buying 
and trading mechanism of the Soviet Government which is in almost mono- 
polist possession of the village market. Nearly all the produce of the 
peasant economy that is marketed, gets into the hands of the official buyers 
who by means of outward coercion try to become monopolists, and who 
pay comparatively low fixed prices. Often the very correlation of prices 
paid by the buyer to the farmer determines certain changes in the peasant 
economy. Thus, we know that an adverse combination of prices last year 
led to a sharp decrease in the sowing area of several technical plants! 
Simultaneously with stripping the peasant (in the legal form of voluntary 
purchase!) of his produce at arbitrarily low prices, the Soviet Government 
imposes, as a virtual owner of nearly all the industry, arbitrarily high 
prices on all goods sold to the peasants. The effect of such a sale of goods 
indispensable to the peasantry, practically amounts to the alienation from the 
peasant of the surplus of his produce (in order to buy from the State 
expensive goods, the peasant has to sell to the State his produce, but at a 
cheap price!), and thus it differs little from the procedure practised prior 
to the inauguration of the new economic policy. This is admitted by the 
Bolshevics themselves. Thus, the well known Communist Milutin in a debate 
in the Communist Academy declared (on February 26, 1926): “If, in the 
period of War Communism we involuntarily created a hindrance to the 
development of agricultural production, and even brought about its decay 
owing to the tithe, by requisitioning the surplus of produce, in the period 
5