I have used Serge in general many times, and here his ‘novel‘ is instructive…but, let’s be real, none of this (above) is really all that surprising:
So began the black years. First, expropriated, then deported, some seven per cent of the farmers left the region in cattle cars amid the cries, tears, and curses of urchins and disheveled women and old men mad with rage. Fields lay fallow, cattle disappeared, people ate the oil cake intended for the stock, there was no more sugar or gasoline, leather or shoes, cloth or clothes, everywhere there was hunger or impenetrable white faces, everywhere pilfering, collusion, sickness; in vain did Security decimate the bureaus of animal husbandry, agriculture, transport, food control, sugar production, distribution . . . The C.C. recommended raising rabbits. Markeyev had placards posted: “The rabbit shall be the cornerstone of proletarian diet.” And the local government rabbits — his own — were the only ones in the district which did not die at the outset, because they were the only ones which were fed. “Even rabbits have to eat before they are eaten,” Markeyev observed ironically. … – Page 111
Some ideologies just have a knack for destroying economies:
… The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them: Empty Boxes. Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curves of weekly sales. … – Page 10
That leads nicely into the third in this series from the novel that describe the road ahead for fools like this:
… “The horses are all gone, cholera! What will people do now? First they took the best horses for the collective, then the township co-operative refused to furnish fodder for the ones the peasants had been left or had refused to give up. Anyway, there wasn’t any more fodder because the army requisitioned the last of it. The old people, who remembered the last famine, fed them roof thatch—imagine what fodder that makes for the poor beasts after it’s been out under rain and sun for years! Cholera! It made you weep to see them, with their sad eyes and their tongues hanging out and their ribs sticking through their sides—I swear they really came through the hide!—and their swollen joints and little boils all over their bellies and their backs full of pus and blood and worms eating right into the raw flesh—the poor creatures were rotting alive—we had to put bands under their bellies to hold them up at night or they’d never have been able to get back on their legs in the morning. We let them wander around the yards and they licked the fence palings and chewed the ground to find a scrap of grass. Where I come from, horses are more precious than children. There are always too many children to feed, they come when nobody wants them—do you think there was any need for me to come into the world? But there are never enough horses to do the farm work with. With a horse, your children can grow up; without a horse a man is not a man any more, is he? No more home—nothing but hunger, nothing but death. . . . Well, the horses were done for—there was no way out. The elders met. I was in the comer by the stove. There was a little lamp on the table, and I had to keep trimming the wick—it smoked. What was to be done to save the horses? The elders couldn’t even speak, they were so sunk. Finally my father—he looked terrible, his mouth was all black—said: ‘There’s nothing to be done. We’ll have to kill them. Then they won’t suffer any more. There’s always the leather. As for us, we will die or not, as God pleases.’ Nobody said anything after that, it was so quiet that I could hear the roaches crawling under the stove bricks. My old man got up slowly. ‘I’ll do it,’ says he. He took the ax from under the bench. My mother threw herself on him: ‘Nikon Nikonich, pity . . .’ He looked as if he needed pity himself, with his face all screwed up like a murderer. ‘Silence, woman,’ says he. ‘You, girl, come and hold a light for us.’ I brought the lamp. The stable was against the house; when the mare moved at night we heard her. It was comforting. She saw us come in with the light, and she looked at us sadly, like a sick man, there were tears in her eyes. She hardly turned her head because her strength was nearly gone. Father kept the ax hidden, because the mare would surely have known. Father went up to her and patted her cheeks. ‘You’re a good mare, Brownie. It’s not my fault if you have suffered. May God forgive me —’ Before the words were out of his mouth Brownie’s skull was split open. ‘Clean the ax,’ Father said to me. ‘Now we have nothing.’ How I cried that night!—outside, because they would have beaten me if I’d cried in the house. I think everybody in the village hid somewhere and cried . . .” – Pages 9-10
The “Clean the ax … Now we have nothing” part gets me every time.
This last passage I used in a post over at Ricochet in May 2016 called Horse Tales from the Abyss (sorry, no link). In that post I quoted from The Power of the Powerless: ‘Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.’ Seems about right (for what little I know about what is really going on over there)…I suspect there is more of this story to come. none of it will be good. Stay tuned.
the philo t. custis institute 