Taiwan Today

The Republic of the Philippines is one of the few countries that have successfully suppressed a Communist rebellion and put the Communist rebels under control. While it may not mean that the Philippines have settled the Communist problem for good, it does mean a signal success on the part of the Philippine government and the personal triumph of Pres­ident Ramon Magsaysay and the vindication of the policies he has initiated in fighting the Communists.

Dr. Staff starts his work with a chapter tracing the development of the Huks, an abbreviated form of the longer word Hukbalahap, as the Com­munists in the Philippines have come to be called. In this" the reader will find that the early developments of the Huks bore close resemblance to the growth of Communists in other Asian countries and he is justified in coming to the conclusion that regardless of the climate in which they are reared Communists the world over bear the same brand—made in Moscow.

His belief would be strengthened as he reads this book further and notes how closely the Chinese and the Philippine Communists were related. In 1924, an American, William Janequette, invited the labor unions in Manila to send representatives to the First Congress of the Oriental Transportation Workers to be held in Canton, China. Five delegates headed by Domingo Ponce attended the sessions, which were discovered to be Communist-organized. On their return, Domingo Ponce organized a "secretariat" in Manila under the direction of the Third International of Moscow. In the next year, 1925, an invitation was extended to the Philippine Labor Congress to send delegates to the Red International Labor Union meetings to be held h Canton. Among the participating organizations were the All-China Labor Federation, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Trade Union League of the United States, the Indonesian Labor Federation, the Confederation General du Travail Unitaire Francais, Nippon Rodokumai Hyegikui Tsitsy Domie, the National Minority Movement of England, the Korean Workers and Peasants Federation, the All-Rus­sian Council of Trade Unions and the Congress de Obrero de Filipinas. These organizations either were at th:1t time or were to become the channels of Communist activities h the organized labor movement in these respective countries. After the return of the delegates from Canton, at the first convention of the Philippine Labor Congress in May, 1927, the issue of Communism was openly debated. The convention finally voted to affiliate the Philippine Labor Congress with the Red International Labor Union.

In the thirties, Communism received a great fillip in the Philippines. Through exploiting the grievances of the farmers, the Communists and Socialists gained control over a large part of Central Luzon, a thing which bore a close parallel to the emergence of the Communist army in Central China. On the eve of the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Communists in the Philippines adopted the united front tactics employed by the Chinese Communists in the Sino-Japanese war under the pretense of fighting the Japanese. Just like their Chinese Communist brethren they were more interested in consolidating their own position in Central Luzon than fighting the invaders. Organized under the name of People's Army against the Japanese, they sought to achieve their objective of gaining control of the country by appealing to the patriotic feelings of the people.

When the war came to an end, the Huks had a pretty sizable army practiced in the art of fighting guerrilla warfare. At the height of their power, the Huks had 100,000 members with as man y as 12,000 armed, active soldiers in the field. With the unsettled condition coming on the heels of the war, the government WJS at a loss as to what to do with them. It first tried armed suppression, then conciliation. Both failed. Then by a stroke of luck, President Quirino appointed Ramon Magsaysay Secre­tary of the Department of National Defense in September, 1950. Magsaysay had fought the Japanese as a guerrilla leader, so he knew the kind of war he had to fight.

The method he introduced to fight the Huks was part military pressure and part social reform. It would be idle to pretend that Com­munists anywhere could be successfully com­bated without a show of force. But Magsaysay realized that the Communists had cleverly exploited the economic grievances of the popula­tion to start subversion and raise a following. So he proposed to light the Huks along the economic front also. By a system of Economic Development Corps (EDCOR) farms, he would rehabilitate ex-Huks on the newly reclaimed government farms and offer a strong inducement for others to surrender.

Scaff devotes a great portion of his work to a description of this brilliant plan and how it worked. There is no question that the work­ing of this plan took away the popular sup­port of the Huks and gave a chance to the peo­ple who were forced by circumstances to join the Huks to come to the government side.

The end of the Huk open rebellion came on May 17, 1954, when Luis Taruc, the Huk leader, gave himself up. Before that he had tried to negotiate an amnesty which would permit the Huks to come down out of the hills and operate peacefully as a legalized Communist party. Taruc stated that he would be willing to help in Magsaysay's program of barrio improvement by organizing the peasants. Fortunately, the Philippine government did not snap at this bait; otherwise the infiltration and sabotage from within could be much worse than the armed struggle in the field. The government had learned, during its long dealings with the Huks, that negotiations for surrender were always used by them for their own ulterior purposes.

It is still too early to think that the Republic of the Philippines has rid itself of the Huks for good. The experience of China during the twenties and thirties, when the Communists were uprooted from their Central China strong­-hold and Mao Tse-tung fled to the Northwest with but a handful of followers to stage their later comeback, should serve as a strong warn­ing to those Filipinos who are inclined to treat the Huk question lightly. This warning was also sounded by General Jesus Vargas, Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, when he said: "We would be far from wise if we thought, as many would like to think today, that our Communist problem here had ended with the surrender of Taruc or will end with the capture, death, or surrender of the other Communist leaders. Communists are Commu­nists. They have a way of shifting with ease from surface activities to underground move­ment, depending on the exigencies of the situation they are in. There is such a thing as a bloodless revolution, and that exactly is what the Communists always pull on innocent democracies whenever they are not in a position to overthrow an enemy government militarily." Such an understanding of the Communists can only be gained through long struggles with them. It is probably through leadership like this that the Philippines was saved from the scourge of Communism. The victory the Philippine peo­ple have gained and the lesson they have learn­ed should not be lost to the present world that is locked in struggle with the Communists.

EDWARD Y. K. KWONG

THE HISTORY OF A SOVIET COLLECTIVE FARM
by Fedor Belov
Published for the Research Program on the U.S.S.R Frederick
A. Praeger,
New York. US$6.00.

An iron curtain escapee, who was for three years chairman of the kolkhoz (Soviet collective farm) in his native Ukrainian village, gives here an intimate and detailed account of the collective farm system and life of the col­lectivized peasant in Soviet Russia.

Though the book is intended as an academic and objective study for students of Russian affairs, author Fedor Belov succeeds also in showing his love and concern for those simple Ukrainian pea­sants whom he had come to know. "Their griefs were my griefs, their joys my joys," he wrote, "and this has given me an affinity with these simple country workers whose fate it is to lead a very hard life."

It is this touch of human sympathy and the dry humor, at times probably unintended, that make the book entertaining as well as informative. The reader cannot help but smile at the story of the kolkhoz which had to change its name three times, each time because the party leader after whom it was named had fallen into disgrace with Stalin. And he feels the same sting of pain when the peasants, after collectivization, cracked that "now the land is ours, but the product of it is yours."

Indeed, almost, all the jokes in this book are told with tears. There is the guard who was surprised by two "Banderists" (anti-Communist Ukrainian bandits) in the middle of the night while guarding the grain on the kolkhoz thresh­ing floor. The two declared that they wanted to burn down the houses of the chairmen of the kolkhoz and the village soviet. The unsuspecting guard showed them the place, and even sug­gested that they also set fire to the house of the Communist Party secretary who is "a Party scoundrel." The two turned out to be masqueraded MVD agents on loyalty checks.

There is also the time when the secretary of the county Party organization, after sending 2,000 peasants to the People's Court in one year for non-fulfillment of labor days, told a conference of kolkhoz chairmen in all seriousness that this could not go on, "for in the end every peasant would be convicted and there would be nobody left to work."

These stories are not made up as some of the iron curtain jokes in circulation were. This book is based mainly on the diaries which ex-Captain Belov of the Red Army brought with him when he made his dash for freedom in 1951 while stationed in East Germany. The diaries, a selected part of which is translated and printed as an appendix to the book, also included such statistics as the kolkhoz sowing plan and the amount of bribes its author had to offer to county officials in one year.

The latter is particularly revealing for they illustrate that in the workers' paradise, the know­ ledge of what strings to pull and whose palm to grease is even more important than one's training in Marxism and Leninism. "If you don't grease, you don't travel," says the Soviet proverb, and indeed it was constantly necessary to grease to get anywhere at all.

Kolkhoz chairman Belov achieved some spectacular feats through bribery and influence, among which was a 50-kilowatt hydroelectric station for his kolkhoz. All equipment and construc­tion material came by illegally, either through the black market or back doors of government offices. He traded a truck-load of watermelons with the Administration for Village Electrification for a brand new generator. Yet at the gala opening of the station, the director gave a straight­ faced speech, declaring that it was only thanks "to the solicitude of the Party and the govern­ment, and especially to that best friend of the collectivized peasantry, Comrade Stalin, that 'the lamp of Il'ich (Lenin's first name)' had been lit in the homes of the peasants.'

No wonder a woman grumbled that the bare­ ness and poverty of her shed "weren't so noticeable before, but now, with the 'light of Il'ich,' they are easy to see." With many families living in dugout shelters left over from the last war, and others in houses no better than chicken-coops, the hydroelectric station seemed entirely out of place in that Ukrainian village.

The peasants under Belov's pen, like the farmers everywhere, are patient, gifted with a home­-spun sense of humor, and as deep-rooted to the land as they ever were after twenty years of collectivization. They have given up the hope of ever seeing their life bettered or being liberated from the kolkhoz system. Life of the peasants could be summed up in the remark of one: "you will live, but you will be very, very thin."

To keep on living, they steal. The author recalled "the farmers stole singly and in groups; they stole grain, beets, potatoes, hay, and even straw. Seeing that the kolkhozes surrendered almost all their produce to the state, some kolkhoz members made stealing their main source of existence. The stolen beets were used for home-brew, which the peasants either sold or drank to drown their sorrows. When drunk they would curse the kolkhozes and Stalin for creating them."

Bootlegging is often referred to in the book. The peasants in that region named their home-brew "Maria Demchenko," after the first Stakhanovite in the Ukraine in the field of sugar beet cultivation. Her slogan was "More bee s for the country!" If there were more beets, the peasants reasoned, it would be possible to steal more and there would be more home-brew, so they christened it in her honor.

The overall picture is one "in which high of­ficials tried to squeeze as much as possible out of the kolkhozes, both for the state and for themselves; in which the peasants tried to give up as little as possible, in terms both of efforts and of goods; and in which people like the kolkhoz chairman were pushed to the limit of their ingenuity to strike some sort of balance between the two."

It was exactly what happened to author Belov. In 1949 there was a good harvest, and he got into a quarrel with the Party for refusing to make more compulsory grain deliveries to the government. Probably in deference to his war record, no reprisal was taken against him but he was shanghaied out of his job. Handsome bribes failed to work for once with the military commis­sariat which ordered his recall into uniform.

Totally disgusted and disillusioned with the Soviet regime, he escaped to West Germany in 1951 and is now living in the United States.

I-CHENG LOH

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Yang Pu, brother of Yang Chu, went out in a white garment. When it rained, he took off the white garment and came home dressed in black. His dog did not seem to recognize him and barked at him. Yang Pu became angry and wanted to neat the dog. "Please do not beat him," Yang said to him. "You would have done the same thing yourself. How could you help being astonished if your dog had gone out in white and come back in black?"

Translated by Edward Y. K. Kwong