The average Russian peasant does not taste meat more than a few times a year. He is able to live on this diet because his black rye bread contains everything necessary for complete nutrition save fat, which he gets from a meager ration of salt pork. His relationship to the collective is the relationship of serf to master. The serf under the Czar could be punished by his master; so can the Soviet serf be punished by the NKVD, without trial, and whereas under the Czar the landowner had no power of life and death over his serfs, the NKVD has that power not only over the peasants but over every human being in the Soviet Union except Stalin himself and his immediate cohorts. Q. _If the peasant is such a serf, why has he not revolted now that the advance of Hitler’s armies has given him a chance to do so?_ A. It may sound flippant but it is the sober truth that the Russian peasant serf does not know that he is a serf; he is convinced that he lives better than any farm hand in the world. He has utterly no standard of comparison. He is as incapable of judging his position in the world as the Eskimos in _Kabloona_ who had never seen a white man until Gontran de Poncins visited them. The Russian peasant is as shut off from the outside world as an inhabitant of old Japan before Perry. Within his world he has no neighbors better off than himself. This makes him a happier man than if he were able to observe and become envious of more pleasant ways of life. Q. _What is the NKVD?_ A. That is the name given the Soviet Political Police in 1934. It has had three names, first the Cheka, then the G.P.U., pronounced Gay Pay Oo, and now NKVD, pronounced En Kah Vay Day, which is an abbreviation for the _Narkomvnudel_, itself an abbreviation of four Russian words meaning Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Whenever the Political Police has accumulated too much blood on its name, it is changed, but its functions remain the same: to administer the Terror. Q. _Are the people in the collective farms better off than when they were individual farmers?_ A. I did not know the Russia of the Czars, but the peasant himself gave a very good answer to that when he refused to go into the collectives, and rather than enter with his livestock, killed it by the thousands of head, until within a year more than half the cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep of the country had been slaughtered. The Soviet Union has not yet entirely recovered from this animal massacre. The peasants slaughtered their livestock because once collectivized, the livestock passed completely out of control of the peasants. Stalin later conceded each collective farm peasant the right to own one cow and one pig as his private possession. Otherwise the members of the collective may not dispose of the product of their own toil. Q. _But isn’t that precisely the nature of a collective, for all members to pool their resources and labor and then draw the dividends?_