Return: Russian American raises farming in Russia
Recently, our correspondent visited Moscow, where he met with the president of the Russian Farms group of companies, the head of the National Union of Milk Producers, Andrey Danilenko. Andrey was borninSan Francisco and in 1989 returned to the homeland of his ancestors, where he is very successfully engaged in the restoration of agriculture.
Question: Andrei Lvovich! Allow me to greet you on behalf of your countrymen in San Francisco. Tell me, please, do you have any relatives in our area?
Answer: Yes, they stayed, though not in the city itself, but in Marin County, north of San Francisco, while the other part of the family moved to Southern California. I can honestly say that of all the cities outside the Russian Federation, San Francisco is definitely my favorite city, and I am very sensitive to it. When I am in America and I can get to this city for a day, I will definitely use this opportunity. Every time I visit, I always go to Giri Street, where the Cathedral is located. Holy Mother of God All Who Sorrow Joy, and where there are still Russian shops.
I always treat your newspaper with trepidation, although I was not a regular reader of it. Nevertheless, I know about it and I think that it is very valuable when people living outside their historical homeland continue to be interested in affairs in Russia.
Q: Please tell us about your roots. In which part of the Russian Empire did your ancestors live?
O: They came to America from the Saratov and Tambov provinces. Their roots were peasants. If you look deep into our centuries-old history, then these were runaway serfs who fled from the arbitrariness of the landowners, but they were all engaged in agriculture. The other part of the family belonged to the rural intelligentsia, that is, to prosperous peasants. The family also had priests and even one bishop. Their roots were peasants. I never thought that genes play any role, but now I am inclined to believe this - after all, I grew up in the city, and while I was growing up, I had nothing to do with agriculture. As a child, I used to listen to my grandparents' stories about how beautiful fairy tale about the history of my family and did not think that it would be relevant to me and my activities.
I think that emigrants are divided into two categories. The first is those who came to a foreign country and stopped at the thought that it is good that they left Russia and no longer live there. Another category of emigration is white emigration, which has always considered the host country as a refuge, and not as a permanent place of residence. I grew up in just such a family where there was a firm conviction that the time would come when the situation in Russia would change and there would be no danger of returning.
Q: When did your family return to Russia?
O: The first time we returned was in 1975. I have a rather unique story, because my family has maternal immigrants. My mother, in love with Russia, first went on a tourist trip to the USSR in 1965. And my future father then worked as a guide in Intourist. They met, after which this complicated story began. For my father, this was a rather risky step, because in those days Intourist employees had good prospects and opportunities, and deciding to marry an American without a desire to go to America was risky for a career. This difficult story ended with the fact that I was born in the United States of America, and first came to the USSR in 1975.
Our family received a permanent residence permit on the territory of the Soviet Union when I was seven years old. In San Francisco, I went to the parochial school at the cathedral, where I studied the basics of Orthodoxy and absorbed the patriotic attitude towards Russia from representatives of the white emigration.
Arriving in the USSR, I was sent to a school, which gave me the perception of a different patriotism, which took shape after the Second World War. This patriotism was built not only on respectful attitude to Lenin and the Communist Party, but also to pride and respect for Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Suvorov, Nakhimov. Therefore, I believe that I absorbed the indigenous Russian patriotic atmosphere, which very well laid down on my upbringing, laid down in childhood.
At the end of the eighties, the collapse of the Soviet Union began. The year of the Chernobyl disaster was for me the last straw of patience and disappointment in the existing system. I packed my bags and went back to my relatives in San Francisco with an absolutely rigid and firm intention not to return to the Soviet Union again. Went to San Francisco College. Professionally involved in sports. Taught Russian. He created his own private school for teaching the Russian language. Financially, I felt safe, and all sorts of prospects opened up for me.
in San Francisco after Russian life, I began to yearn greatly for Russian culture, for communication and friendly gatherings in the kitchen. In America, a very narrow circle of Americans can carry on conversations on a wide range of topics. But with a Russian person, everything is different - a plumber who comes to you to repair a tap, lingering, can easily express his position on the political situation in Zimbabwe. Due to the lack of such communication between people, it became difficult for me in America. The beginning of Gorbachev's perestroika aroused my admiration. And in 1989, I decided to go to Russia for six months to check the situation and try my hand. As you can see, I still can't go back. Time passed, I took root here, which I do not regret at all.
Q: How did you start your entrepreneurial activity in Russia? After all, in the early nineties you were engaged in the treatment of patients with alcoholism, a very useful thing for Russia. Why don't you continue this activity, and began to engage in agriculture?
O: I haven't stopped doing it. I continue to be chairman of the board of directors of a non-profit organization called Recovery. Initially, I created a clinic where I established a certain infrastructure. But in later stages, my participation became routine, as I did not become either a doctor or a psychotherapist. I was a manager. However, I continued to do this, and while I was doing this, I got a call and was offered to participate in the coordination of the project by one American delegation, which was interested in establishing humanitarian food supplies to Russia. It was in 1991-1992 when there were serious food shortages.
I did not mind, and even became very interested in this work. It was a Christian organization that gave all the help to the Russian Orthodox Church. My task was to transfer the cargo to representatives Orthodox Church, and then report that everything arrived at its destination.
After a year of work, representatives of this organization came to Russia to sum up their activities. They were invited to the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation, where they expressed their deep gratitude. In response, the Christian organization expressed a desire to continue cooperation in the form of the development of other programs. They honestly admitted that Russia is an agrarian country, but is dependent on imported food, and this is a shame. Therefore, a proposal was made to invest in agriculture as further humanitarian assistance.
As for me, I acted as an interpreter at this meeting, and I didn’t think at all that this had anything to do with me. And, nevertheless, I was asked to become a coordinator again, but already a coordinator for specialists who arrived from America, who organized training courses for farmers.
Slowly but surely, I became more and more involved in the development of agriculture, while continuing to work at the treatment center. To be honest, dealing with alcoholism and drug addiction is a serious social project, and I am proud that I did it. This helped me a lot in understanding the Russian soul and human psychology when I started doing business. On the other hand, this is a very difficult activity, because you have to deal with people who are in a difficult emotional state.
My opinion is that the genes in me woke up, and I was drawn to the earth. This is magic, a fairy tale, when you sow, and it grows, and then you take it away. They bought it all and ate it. It's a nice creative process.
Q: What difficulties did you face in developing your farming?
O: The most difficult thing for me was to win the trust of the locals. Because agriculture, unlike most industries, for example, factories, where there is security and a fence, the territory is open, people drive through these fields, walk, trample, etc. Therefore, your success is possible only when the local community is interested in you were a success. The communal system of Russia as it was, so before today and continues to exist. It was very difficult for me to acquire this trust. And the fact that I was young and pretty didn't matter. The fact that I had money meant nothing to the local population.
The second difficulty is to find a formula for mutual understanding with the authorities, because the state and business in Russia are much more closely intertwined than in the United States. Business in Russia is much more dependent on bureaucracy than in many other countries of the world. I was lucky that I was engaged in agriculture, and not oil wells. And agriculture is in many ways a social activity. I found a compromise - I take on the social problems of local authorities. I did not immediately manage to find this solution, I gradually built it. Despite all the difficulties, I am very glad that I had to overcome them, because each lesson - hard, painful - at the beginning of my activity saved me enormous funds at subsequent stages, more serious financial investments.
Q: At present, how many farms do you have?
O: Today I have six dairy complexes. In total, I have about six thousand heads of cattle. By the end of the year, I plan to reach more than ten thousand heads. I have a fairly fast growth rate, despite the fact that dairy farming is now in a very difficult situation everywhere in the world, including the United States. I have more than sixty thousand hectares of land, but I would like to note that I started my business during a period of great risks. In times of political and economic instability, great opportunities arose in Russia. Few risks - few opportunities, many risks - many opportunities. Of course, in the US, a more stable country with less political and economic risks, I would not be able to develop so quickly. Even today, having started at that age with the same idealism, I would not be able to do what I did during that specific period of the “wild” nineties in Russia.
Q: At the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned the white emigration, part of which was waiting for their return to their homeland. What do you think, if such people were found in the USA - the descendants of the emigration who would like to return, what kind of activity would you offer these people in the current situation in Russia?
O: Despite the fact that I am by nature an optimist, an idealist and definitely a Russian patriot, I believe that each person should determine for himself where he is comfortable and where he should live. And it all depends on what the person is looking for? If he is looking for acquaintance with his historical homeland, then it may make sense to come to study, or find an American company that has a representative office in Moscow or in Russia in general. Or try to find a job just to get to know each other and decide for yourself whether it is compatible or not compatible. For example, in my case, I have been most of my life, and with enough early age, spent in Russia, I got accustomed here. My mother has lived most of her conscious life in America and, unfortunately, with all her great love for Russia, she feels more comfortable in the USA.
If we talk about life in Russia, I believe that any person living in the country should know the language of this country. Therefore, for normal functioning in Russia, knowledge of the Russian language is fundamentally important. As for activity, today I can safely say that a good specialist in Russia can receive wages slightly less than in the US. I believe that if you separate the factor of love for your historical homeland, for Russian culture, simply move away from this factor, Russia is a country for people who are looking for new creative and unique opportunities, while understanding a certain degree of risk that for a long time there will be no turn out the way you want. But the reward for this patience can be very good. Ranging from financial to peace of mind.
America is a country where people are protected in terms of stability and rules of the game, and the conditions are clear, but limited in terms of creative possibilities.
But there is another side of the issue - I am a third-generation Russian emigrant, I feel better here than in America. This question is individual. I know Americans who don't have any Russian roots and live here and love this country. In my case, I “staking out”, I made my decision, and now I am building my house.
Q: In your difficult task of developing agriculture, is there any state support?
O: Definitely there is! For example, we created the National Union of Milk Producers. And the government supported its creation. We are attracted as participants in various events, issues in the field of agriculture are now resolved simply. So, for example, the Ministry of Agriculture, as a representative of the government, concludes a cooperation agreement, which means that you are recognized. In our case, our union was recognized and given a certain carte blanche. Now the question is how do we use it.
Q: You are involved in the revival and strengthening of the traditions of charity. Are there prospects for the development of patronage, as it was in pre-revolutionary Russia?
O: They will inevitably be. The international economic crisis, and as it is fashionable to call it in America, a recession is not a consequence of problems with the economy, but problems of a particular person and human character, nature. This problem, unfortunately, has moved into a phase where consumption has become significantly higher than what a person invested and did.
I believe that the more you give, the more you grow. One very clever man he once said to me: "The charity that I do is carried out by me for selfish purposes." I have a question - what is the benefit? And he answered: “Self-interest is in my colossal moral and emotional satisfaction that this charitable activity brings me.”
We must take care of others without creating dependents. Charity, as it is said in the same Bible, is not to give a fish, but to give a fishing rod to make it possible to catch this fish. My position is that if life has given you success, then share these successes with others. It is impossible to live well if people around you are bad. I'm starting from this position.
Thank you very much for being able to answer questions. I wish you continued success in your endeavors.
When the slaves come to power
They are much scarier than gentlemen.
Igor Guberman
The fact that an honest, intelligent and courageous journalist Yulia Latynina (http://www.novayagazeta.ru/economy/61907.html) shares the misconception about America with stupid, vicious and illiterate colleagues is, alas, a shame to see. She is not alone in this delusion.
As an American (San Francisco) tour guide who worked with rich, famous and many later killed tourists from Russia, I listened to Latynina’s thesis over and over again: “At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia and America were quite comparable - they were two young, countries rich in nature and people with rapidly developing economies and a good scientific and technological background. But by the beginning of the 21st century, we paid for communism, the Gulag - with a total, shameful, incomparable backlog.
On the same topic, the picturesque (is it really still alive?) Igor Kolomoisky, standing on Union Square in San Francisco, spoke out: “America is such a young country, and how it got around us!”
Smart, famous and educated Russian tourists they constantly said this, not wanting to understand that comparing and equating Russia with Great Britain, Russia with America is stupidity.
Ivan the Terrible, in this delusion, even wooed the English Queen Elizabeth in 1562, and when she was refused (she was surprised that a married man was wooing), he called her a “vulgar girl” in a preserved message. Mutual understanding between Russia and England, Russia and America, from matchmaking to insults, is still at the same level.
What does England have to do with it and what does Elizabeth have to do with it?
Yes, despite the fact that America was born, built and developed as a PART of Elizabethan ENGLAND. The first (disappeared) ENGLISH COLONY Roanoke was established in 1585 at the initiative of Elizabeth, with her money and under her patronage, and the first child born there was named Virginia in honor of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
The first surviving American English colony of Jamestown, Virginia (Virgin) was founded in 1607. On the 400th anniversary of its discovery, the English Queen Elizabeth II came to the United States. Where is the young country?
At the time of the legal, for economic reasons, separation of the American colonies from England (they did not want to pay taxes without representation) in 1776, the population of the English colonies in America was 2.5 million people, a third of the population of England itself. The country was very populated and developed for those times.
The biblical covenant “Be fruitful and multiply” was perceived as a religious duty, and, despite the high mortality of the colonists at the beginning, the population grew incredibly rapidly, but not due to, as is commonly believed, emigration. A family in the American colonies often consisted of a husband and three wives in succession (the first two usually died in childbirth). Benjamin Franklin's family had 24 children.
But the main thing is that in this America there was an absolutely unique mentality and morality of the population. This is something that the Russians who are at war with the phantom of America, which exists only in their sick imagination and the Russian press, do not know and do not understand at all. They are fighting a phantom that has nothing to do with the real US country.
Coronation portrait of Elizabeth I
To understand America, one must see the moment of the coronation in 1558, when the young Elizabeth ascended the throne and the eyes of all England were directed to which Bible she held in her hands: Catholic in Latin or Protestant in English. Her Bible was Protestant.
To understand America, one must understand the monstrous religious wars - a solid St. Bartholomew's night between Catholics and Protestants that tormented Europe. The Catholic Church fought to the death with the Reformation, which abolished the institution of the church and allowed a person to independently communicate with God and be responsible to God through the Bible. A Catholic priest who interpreted the Latin Bible was no longer needed. The man who translated the Bible into English, William Tyndale, was strangled and burned at the stake as a heretic, and possession of the English Bible was punishable by death.
But the era of Elizabeth, the printing press, came, and already every family could read the Bible in English. Fans gathered around the Bible who wanted to build New Jerusalem, New Israel, create a righteous society that would live according to the biblical commandments. They dreamed of religious freedom. And here comes the New Earth - America. And the first colonists went there not for the sake of gold, but for the sake of a righteous life according to the Bible. Read "Scarlet Letter" by N. Hawthorn.
The Russians, in order to justify their banditry, nod at America, arguing that America was created by bandits, the Wild West during the Gold Rush. Delirium from ignorance of American history, from watching Hollywood Westerns. The Wild West (the Pacific West of America, as opposed to the Atlantic East Coast with its puritan states) will happen a couple of centuries later, already during the development of California. Bandits will indeed come for gold, but only after 200 years, mainly from Europe.
America began with a puritanical morality, with daily Bible readings in the morning and at night, and on Sundays in church.
This is the main reason why comparing America and Russia is pointless, and even doubly so. Leskov once said that Christianity was not preached in Russia. It is difficult to preach Christianity to the illiterate. Christianity is the Bible, and a Christian who does not read, but only listens to an often semi-literate priest is very superficial. This is a Mexican criminal who goes to rob on the road, baptized on the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In England, at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, 30% of men were literate, and with the spread of Protestantism, direct reading of the Bible (previously strictly limited to Latin) became a religious duty. Literacy became a religious duty.
More than 300 years later, in 1898, only 10% of those recruited into the army were literate in Russia. As a person who taught not in an elite mathematical school, but in a school for the workers of the Nevsky district of Leningrad, I can say that in 1974 half of the seventh graders there could not read.
Almost all literate people, devoted to the fanaticism of the Bible, went to explore America. We're talking about the 1600s. It was not a country in the usual sense. All of America was the book club around the Bible, where people learned morality every day. Cities were built around Protestant (there were others) religious communities, where people verified their behavior, each other's behavior and their decisions according to the Bible. It was a country where everyone quoted the Bible and where it lay in every hotel in the bedside table, and where every president and candidate began his speech with a quote from the Bible and ended with it. Knowledge of the Bible was a prerequisite for employment.
This very Bible said, "The righteous nations will rise up." Emigrants from the Union, who arrived in the 70s and 80s, still managed to see the biblical righteous America, where houses were never closed, where people left the ignition keys in expensive cars and went shopping, America, where they took everyone’s word and did not require documents.
Paradise is not a country rich in nature, not a climate. This is the behavior of the people around you. Honest, biblical human behavior has created a unique atmosphere in America for business development. Thousands of transactions between strangers, the speed of the turnover of money that no one hid in a mattress, but immediately and with confidence invested, created huge wealth, unattainable in societies where lying and theft lead to poverty.
If Russia and America can be compared anywhere, it is the slave-owning South, described in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book scribbled and monstrously altered in a Soviet translation. In the original, the book is all about Christianity and faith, and at the end the main characters leave to preach Christianity in Africa, which is not in the Soviet version.
Remember how Miss Ophelia, St. Clair's cousin, comes from Boston to look after his dying daughter. She is an example of classical Protestant morality, where work is a virtue, idleness is a sin, and hands that do nothing are the cause of all disasters. She is the personification of the Protestant principle "Be honest to your work" ("Be honest in your work").
Harriet Beecher Stowe
And next - lazy spoiled slaves and their spoiled lazy masters. For black slaves - Ophelia - "not a real lady." SHE WORKS. They learn from each other how to dodge work, shirk, how to steal unnoticed, how to use the master's for themselves. Well, just Soviet people.
Because the behavior of today's dark-skinned people - former slaves in America - is so familiar to Soviet emigrants, that we lived under the rule of slaves, and we ourselves were slaves.
The explosions of hatred from the slaves are understandable, because, as Ayn Rand said, "addiction breeds hatred." So they gather in crowds in order to spew out hatred for themselves from themselves on someone: dark-skinned people - on the police, on whites and on the rich; Russian slaves - for Ukrainians, Georgians, Jews, and for the rich, of course.
What always betrays slaves, both black and white, is the attitude towards other people's property. See images of black shops and liquor stores being looted and vandalized in Baltimore. An absolute repetition of the robbery by a crowd of liquor stores in Petrograd in 1917-18 (pictures at the Hoover Institution). Hatred of other people's property and its owners. Take and plunder.
This is another of the differences between the mentality of Russian slaves, which did not have centuries of education by property. Even the Russian nobles received property from the hands and by the grace of the sovereign, but this could be taken away, and taken away instantly.
The tiny time of “underdeveloped capitalism” (Lenin) in Russia accustomed very few to the right and a sense of ownership, and the right to property in Russia was not particularly guaranteed. And about Soviet years and there is nothing to say: the man with the second cow was guilty and was subjected to destruction with his family for the kulaks, and under Khrushchev they tried to take away the first cow.
Probably, nothing testifies to the complete absence of not only the idea and understanding of property among the people (do not forget that the right to property is the only guarantee of freedom), but the absolutely slavish and completely accepted idea of a person as public property, which led to the creation of the Soviet empire. state slavery.
Recall the decrees of the Soviets on the socialization of women, adopted quite seriously in the uyezds shortly after the revolution. We are talking about the 20th century. In California in the 19th century, married women had the right to keep their separate property after marriage, which protected them from husbands who were gamblers and drunkards. The status of a woman is incredibly different from the Anglo-American Protestant civilization from the semi-Asiatic position of a woman in Russia. The attitude towards women there and their terrible attitude towards themselves is somewhere in the middle between European and Palestinian-Arab.
Centuries ago, Russian slavery was well seen by people observing Russia from the West. The Marquis de Custine, with his acid description of Russian manners, is well known. But Sir Phillip Sydney, the most brilliant courtier of Elizabeth, who valiantly died in the battle of the Protestants against Spain in 1587, who wrote sonnets before Shakespeare and much better than Shakespeare, in love lyrics used the word Muscovite (resident of Muscovy) as a synonym for the word "slave ".
“... that step on the ladder of lost freedom
Is vanished, and like a Muscovite born to love slavery,
I call undergoing tyranny something worthy of praise:
“And, as a resident of Muscovy, born to love slavery, the tyranny that I am subjected to, I praise” ...
Sir Phillip Sydney
“Like slave-born Muscovite” - “like a resident of Muscovy born as a slave” - and this is in the love sonnets from the Astrophil and Stella cycle. The poet who wanted to say to his beloved “I am your slave!” Said “I am your Muscovite!”. Russian slavery, alas, was known to Western diplomats and educated people already in the 16th century.
It is painful and ridiculous to compare America and Russia in terms of citizens' rights and legal proceedings. America inherited from England all the rights recorded in the Magna Carta of 1215: “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wisely destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.” ("No one free man cannot be arrested, deprived of property and freedom, outlawed, exiled or exterminated in any other way .... or condemned, as soon as by a legal sentence of one's equals under the Law of the Country.”) Judicial errors have been and are being committed, but the English and American laws that existed with the Magna Carta of 1215 are not implemented in practice in Russia today.
What else is pointless to compare Russia and even America, which is already decaying today - the level of honesty and corruption. There are international indices of the level of corruption. There is a comparable country: Mexico is almost as (slightly less) corrupt and criminal as Russia. Just like in Russia, there is a corrupt and monstrously criminal police, the victims of which are many American motorists. In Moscow, my traveling American teenage son and French nephew were the victims of a police robbery.
In Mexico, too, mass illiteracy and superficial, purely ritual Catholic Christianity, with parishioners who did not understand what the priest was talking about, and purely external, almost pagan, ritualism without any connection with morality, reigned for a long time. One of the reasons for the sharp deterioration in the quality of life in America is that it was flooded, as the mayor of the first capital of California, Monterey, said in 1846, "an illegal Mexican." Along with honest workers, there are millions of illegal criminals.
Interestingly, about 15 years ago, Reader's Digest magazine, in published tests on the honesty of the population, nevertheless found a general level of honesty in Russia and America. It was about the city of Atlanta, Georgia, where mostly black people lived. Unlike Seattle, Washington, a predominantly white city, where the honesty rate was 98%, in Atlanta, like in Russia, it was 40%.
Slaves who seize power cannot create anything but slavery. They can only turn all their subjects into slaves and, pretending to be masters, rob them and mediocrely destroy them by the millions. Not ennobled by the Judeo-Christian dogma with its prohibitions on lies and murder, with an undeveloped embryo of morality that turned into a miscarriage, slaves who seized power, like any pagans, very quickly slipped into idolatry and its extreme form - human sacrifice. What happened in Russia in the 20th century is a classic example.
In a Russian fairy tale, there was an image - a rotten idol. The word "filthy" is of Latin origin: pagan - pagan, non-Christ. The pagans always first create an idol - a filthy idol, and then they begin to bring human sacrifices to it. Mandelstam's image of Stalin is just a filthy and bloody Idolishche:
Cockroaches laughing eyes
And his bootlegs shine ....
Whatever execution he has is raspberry.
And the broad chest of an Ossetian.
Crazed with fear of being thrown into the sacrificial fire of idol worship, people grab and throw others who are close by. Four million denunciations written Soviet people on their friends, colleagues, relatives, the processes of condemnation, cleansing, where the victim was first destroyed morally (which meant later physically) by those who yesterday sat at the same table with her, were a friend of the groom at the wedding, stood at the grave of the child - only from animal horror , the desire to delay their unjudicial and senseless death. In a spasm of survival, people pushed others ahead of them to death. How not to go mad with fear when in Leningrad, after the assassination of Kirov in 1934, on some days 4,000 people were shot.
It was when I smiled
Only the dead, happy with peace.
And dangled with an unnecessary pendant
Near the prisons of their Leningrad.
A. Akhmatova
In Irkutsk and other regions, they lowered the limit on execution for no reason at four thousand people a month, and local authorities, wanting to please, asked to increase the limit.
Decrees were signed with Stalin to shoot crowds of innocent Malenkovs, Kaganoviches, Mikoyans, Zhdanovs. At the throne of Idolische, deceitful and cowardly servants with pagan contempt human life.
Mandelstam, having written the above lines, died in the camp, not having lived to see the more terrible time of the war, when the ghouls who had seized power had to bear real responsibility. In a military situation, their deceitful, cowardly slavish nature and contempt for human life were multiplied by illiteracy, incompetence, suspicion, dooming tens of millions of people who trusted this power to monstrous death, widowhood, orphanhood, disability.
Joseph Stalin. Drawing by Vladimir Mochalov
When Latynina writes that Zhukov lied to Stalin, I would like to recall the famous Zhukovsky order: “Do not feel sorry for people, women still give birth!”
Another half-man, the owner of Leningrad Zhdanov, lied to Stalin, wanting to curry favor and trample his rival Mikoyan. Mikoyan tried to deploy and send to Leningrad trains with food that went to Germany before the start of the war, Zhdanov, in defiance of him, sent a telegram to Stalin that there would be enough food in Leningrad for three years. There was enough food in the city for three days.
It was forbidden to talk about the horrors of the blockade, where mothers fed frozen meat of one dead child to another, still alive (out of 3 million 100 thousand people during the blockade, 600 thousand remained) even many years after the war. Stalin, with the hands of Hitler, killed the population of the rebellious city hostile to him, condoned this destruction (correspondence with Zhdanov).
The leader did not need evidence of the tragedy of the blockade, the courage of the blockade runners and his complete lack of Stalinist merits. The blockade museum was destroyed. The director was arrested. Many exhibits of the museum, which were an indictment not only to Hitler, but also to Stalin (in the second blockade winter, he initially banned evacuation from the city) were destroyed.
Tour guides were allowed to broadcast only about heroism. As a young tour guide girl, according to the training manual, I carried to the tourists on the bus: “And the muses were not silent in besieged Leningrad!” The elderly driver looked at me reproachfully: “Girl, what are you talking about! What muses? In the market, human jelly cost 400 rubles. ”And at Zhdanov’s in Smolny, a confectioner baked cakes.
Even after the war, Stalin continued to destroy Leningrad, where the best in Russia was still collected intellectually, morally and creatively, just as Ivan the Terrible destroyed free Novgorod. Fearing the spark of freedom and self-government that appeared in Leningrad during the military isolation and blockade from him, he, on the denunciation of Abakumov, shot Kuznetsov, who had done a lot to save the city, and with him almost the entire Leningrad party organization, deporting relatives to Siberia. (Remember Magna Carta?)
Power in a vast country over millions of people was seized by a non-human who behaved according to the saying of the ancient Romans: "The worst people are freedmen."
The fact that a slave is deceitful and criminal by nature was well known to the inhabitants of the South of America who dealt with slaves. The problem is that the descendants of slaves in Russia in behavior are not much different from the American descendants of slaves. The pre-revolutionary nobility, clergy, and tiny intelligentsia, raised in the pre-revolutionary period, were all but wiped out after the revolution in the decades of red terror.
What Beecher Stowe did not say in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which beautifully describes the propensity of slaves to lie, steal and laziness, is the complete absence of the Christian "Thou shalt not kill" in their minds and complete contempt for the cost of human life. Murders in black neighborhoods (Detroit, Oakland) are off the scale in terms of statistics and monstrous records: the murder of the oldest person in the world, the most frequent calls to 911 (police - ambulance), the largest number of murders per day, per week, in year. More people have been dying there for a long time than in car accidents and in military operations.
In one, Latynina is right. Russia needs to constantly look at America and carefully observe what is happening in it for one simple reason. Here, by the will of providence, an almost unparalleled social experiment took place. The behavior of American slaves is a model of the behavior of that social group that seized power in Russia almost a hundred years ago, and now these slaves, with the help of stupid liberals who train them, arm them with propaganda and induce them (as was the case in Russia), gradually seize power by blackmail and extortion in the USA. By carefully studying the behavior of these slaves (regardless of their skin color) in America, one can diagnose the Russian tragedy and begin to work on a prescription for a cure.
Alas! In fact, it is the Americans who must constantly compare Russia and America, constantly look at Russia and learn from it, understanding what awaits them. Because, having allowed false cunning slaves to power, they have already begun to sip with a full spoon Soviet life. Already trains, as in the Union, are derailing, and theft has already appeared at the state level. People in the USA get places in universities and city and judicial positions according to the color of their skin (affirmative action), as in the Union they took “children of workers and peasants” to the institutes and gave positions according to social origin. Court decisions are already being made on IDEOLOGICAL grounds. Chosen for the color of his skin in a fit of idolatry, the president puts pressure on the judges, explaining that the black criminal could be his son. And the head of American justice orders the release of blacks convicted of minor crimes (remember how after the revolution in Russia they released criminals from prisons as “socially close”7)
Already the quality of service is below the floor, because the population does not reach for perfection, as under American meritocracy, but works somehow, focusing on the lowest common denominator. Equality, understood as the right to get everything without doing anything - what the new government promises and, having robbed the minority already working, as in California and some other states, gives it to its electorate for free, leads society to slow down and stop the economic engine. When a neighbor, not working, receives from the state better life than working, the latter loses interest in work, slows down the pace or stops working altogether. Economic gangrene begins. In the Union it was called stagnation.
What about human sacrifice? So far, our president is only playing golf, when the severed heads of his subjects fly right and left. So far, he only throws into the fire of destruction and betrays the millions of allies into the hands of enemies. So far, the deceitful and cunning demihumans around him only blackmail, steal, extort and get rich on racial hatred. But Americans need to think seriously about the Soviet experience. With slaves in power, there is always a chance that human jelly will appear in the markets.
Tatiana MENAKER
Travel notes, day 8
Made it to San Francisco, my favorite city in the USA! San Francisco, or rather Silicon Valley, is a place where people from all over the world go to change this world. There is a lot of money and a lot of opportunities here. In the following posts I will tell you more about how they get here and how our guys live here.
San Francisco is being criticized for the weather. The climate here is unique. In the morning it can be 10 degrees and a strong wind blows, and by the afternoon the sun can reach +30. The weather changes very quickly, so even in summer without a hat and jacket on long walks better not to go out.
And everything here is expensive. This is one of the most expensive cities in the US. Expensive housing, expensive food and restaurants. Many people come here, spend all their money and leave. Some succeed and stay. But we will take a closer look at all this in future posts.
01. On the way we get into a traffic jam due to road repairs... A question for experts... What do you think, if we had such a traffic jam, how many assholes would try to go around it on the side of the road? 
02. Despite the wide paved roadside, in the States, not a single driver drove onto it. For 20 minutes everyone stood quietly and moved slowly. Without nerves, clouds of dust and chaos. This is just one example of how people treat each other and what country they live in. Why can they in spiritually unspiritual America, but we can't? Why do we not respect ourselves or others? 
03. In the morning I go to the Mission District, my favorite area of San Francisco. It was named after the Catholic mission that appeared here even before the creation of the city itself. The region is divided into two parts: prosperous and relatively unfavorable. In the prosperous part, high prices for housing and office rent. Like me, it happened because "rotation" buses of cool companies from Silicon Valley pass through the area. 
04. Cat 
05. They knew how to make cars before. Interestingly, in 50 years our grandchildren will also collect modern cars and admire their design? 
06. Uncomfortable, but insanely beautiful housing. 
07. Life is in full swing! 
08. It's cold in the morning... Only 15 degrees and a strong wind, the sky is covered with clouds. The homeless wake up at the tram stop. In a disadvantaged part of the Mission District, there are homeless people with mental disorders who appeared on the streets after the US authorities abandoned mental hospitals. 
09. Here the homeless settled well) They even got a table somewhere. Nobody drives homeless people. 
10. Outdoor bedroom. 
11. A person literally sleeps in a box. 
12. Who said that there is no garbage in San Francisco?) Yes! In general, American cities are dirtier than ours. 
13. I love San Francisco very much for public transport. I already wrote about him ... There is a subway, trolleybuses, and buses. 
14. The San Francisco trolleybus system is very old (opened in 1935), large (second largest in the Western Hemisphere after Mexico City) and respected. 
15. One of its main features is that, due to the local terrain, trolleybuses often climb very steep slopes. 
16. Public transport in San Francisco is shortly called the word "Muni" (short for "municipal"). Once, only the tram and light metro systems were designated this way, but then the word was transferred to all public transport. 
17. When you want to make a beautiful painting on a car, but your hands are crooked. 
18. I got acquainted with the local street art, I will make a separate post about it. 
19. The column got fat from posters 
20. View of downtown San Francisco from Mission Dolores Park 
21. A good playground was also built here. At the entrance there is a sign with the names of the donors. 
22. Learn to do from the Americans! 
23. Different play areas for children of different ages 
24. Where are my 10 years and such a slide!!! 
25.
26.
27.
28. Barrier-free environment 
29. Vacuum cleaner. 
30.
31. Beautiful. 
32. The best car chases are filmed in San Francisco) Remember cars jumping up hills? It's all here! 
33. San Francisco has very expensive housing. Renting a one-story house in Daly City with three bedrooms will cost $4,000 per month. 
34. In general, finding a two-bedroom apartment for less than $3,000 is almost impossible. 
35. Ocean 
36. You can’t swim here without a suit even in summer. 
37.
38. But you can ride the board. 
39. And sunbathing on the beaches. 
40. People and dogs. 
41.
42. Spent the afternoon talking to wonderful people in Silicon Valley. From here there will be many stories about startups and people who earn millions of dollars without oil, gas and privatization. Here, by the way, is just a great Russian-speaking community) 
43. Russian brains flow here. 
44. Sergey is a geologist, came here to work for a company that does something secret for oil production. Sergey has organic milk in his hands. You can return a glass bottle from him for $2. Yes, people here hand over bottles) 
In the restaurant, the waiter persistently hints at a tip) A very modest dinner for four with a tip will cost $ 265. 
I'm flying to Seattle tomorrow! 
Previously on the trip:
Surely in your homeland you rarely read newspapers, but here in California it is pleasant and useful to do so. Moreover, no one has yet canceled the feeling of nostalgia! About the Russian printed press, about what they write in it and where to get it - read in our material!
"Echo of the Week"
The Echo of the Week newspaper is a weekly free publication, where world and local news, articles, tips and advice are placed on several dozen pages. Interesting Facts, auto news, advertising and private announcements. Materials of completely different directions are offered: from analytical articles and practical advice experts to the news of show business, technology and sports. Scanwords and jokes are traditionally placed on the last pages. Advertisements will help you, for example, find a realtor, a photographer, a dentist, a Russian food store or a kindergarten. In the section of private ads there are job offers, real estate rentals and even dating. In addition, the advertising company EchoRu LLC is engaged in publishing the one-of-a-kind Russian Yellow Pages business catalog, and also provides a wide range of printing services from business cards to catalogs and has a special publishing department engaged in design and web design (development and construction of web -sites and mobile applications) For everyone.
"West East"
"West-East" - an international weekly for the Russian-speaking population. In the fall of 2000, when the newspaper was first published, it was called the Denver Courier and was published in Colorado. Now it is published in several states of America and a couple of cities in Canada. In addition to articles on political and economic topics, the weekly contains interesting facts, advice from specialists in a particular field, culinary recipes, anecdotes, language materials and crossword puzzles. From advertisements, you can find out, for example, where to get farmer's cottage cheese, where to go to get Russian television or buy Russian products.
"By the way"
Kstati (or, as translated for "dull" Americans - To the Point) is a Russian-American weekly free newspaper published in San Francisco. It covers the cultural life of San Francisco, publishes the latest news, a calendar of interesting events in Northern California, articles and analytical materials on politics, economics, business, travel and sports, book reviews, congratulations and obituaries. Offers for the provision of services predominate among advertisements (Russian-speaking realtors, notaries, doctors, etc.). There is also a section for the sale of real estate and private ads.
The building of the Russian Center in San Francisco
Photo: Lenta.ru
The Russian Center of San Francisco organizes an active cultural life for the Russian-speaking community of the city.
About how there are dance classes, told the publication enta.ru.
In 2019, the Russian Center will celebrate the 80th anniversary of its work. It was founded in the 30s of the last century by immigrants from Russia. Russians settled in California in the middle of the century before last. San Francisco still has a roller coaster Russian Hill- at the beginning of the 20th century, religious refugees from Russia settled there, in particular the community of Molokans. (Molokans moving to California, by the way, was partly sponsored by Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky.)
Since 1899, statistics on migrants appeared in the United States, and it turned out that the Russians of those years came to America literally beggars - in 1910-1914, only 5.3% of immigrants from Russia had more than 50 dollars with them. Even before the powerful wave of “White emigration”, which brought orders overseas, family photo albums, ball gowns, icons and nostalgia, immigrants from Russian Empire in the USA there were more than one and a half million (according to 1910 data).
An employee of the center proudly speaks about the local Russian community, that it is the oldest and largest in the United States and, in general, one of the largest Russian communities abroad.
Those Russian immigrants who come to California now are mostly young programmers, techies, living in the present, not the memory of the past, so the center, which holds old-fashioned ideals, does not appeal to them. In addition, the history cherished by the "White Guard" communities that formed in the United States after the revolution is not family history for modern Russians. This is not their story at all, for that matter - it is the story of those whom their ancestors once defeated in civil war and kicked out of the country. And now, 100 years later, the descendants of both of them meet in San Francisco and nothing happens - these different “Russias” have little contact with each other.
A bright building with a large inscription on the facade "Russian Center" on Sutter Street is immediately noticeable. Inside there are several halls for sports and dance classes, up the stairs - a museum and office rooms.
Located in the Russian Center, the editorial office of the Russkaya Zhizn newspaper became famous for interviewing Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky in October 2012 - the very one in which he told the whole world that Russians have an "extra chromosome."
The museum is undergoing a period of reorganization: too many exhibits have accumulated. While they are practically piled in several small rooms. All this looks like an amateur, but the museum does not pretend to be academic, it works at the expense of enthusiasts. All exhibits are family. First Russian historical society, which stood at the origins of the museum, was created in 1937 and immediately began to collect various items of the outgoing Russian life. After World War II, in 1948 a group of emigrants organized the Museum of Russian Culture and included exhibits collected by the Russian Historical Society.
“Today, the descendants of the old emigrants are third or fourth generation Americans. They don’t need these things and they don’t understand them, but they don’t want them to disappear,” the museum employee explained.
In a small hall on the ground floor there are photographs of the leaders of the first organizations that united the local Russian youth. In 1923, a Russian football team was created, which won the silver cup in the first season, and the Russian sports club "Mercury" was founded (1924). In the early 50s, the Russian Falcon sports society appeared. Children were called "falconers", boys - brothers, girls - sisters.
The Russian Center in San Francisco preserves the memory of tragedies that are absent in the minds of modern Russians. For example, about "how the criminal red regime tore apart innocent Cossack scouts near the city of Verny, now Alma-Ata." About the forced repatriation of the Cossacks in Lienz - the extradition of the Cossacks by the allies to the Stalinist emissaries: “Let the heroic death of the unconquered Cossacks forever remind future generations of the atrocities of communism and the betrayal of the occupying authorities in Austria. The Lienz genocide is the grief and pain of millions of people. We cannot allow their martyrdom to be forgotten!”
The Russian Falcon Society in San Francisco holds an annual meeting of "brothers and sisters in the Falcon". The program of the meeting includes “a prayer for the still living, litia for the departed”, an exchange of views at the “carefully set table by our sisters”, reports from the board and resolution of current affairs.
Otherwise, the Russian Center in San Francisco is similar to the classic House of Culture with clubs for children, which are found in all cities of Russia. Here children are taught to dance and sing, festivals are held in winter and autumn. Choreography classes are classic, nothing changes here either because of revolutions or because of emigration.