Over the last few days Putin’s storm troopers… sorry, I mean law enforcement agencies, have destroyed almost 350 tonnes of food. Meat, fruit, poultry, cheese, vegetables were bulldozed into the ground, incinerated, dumped to fester outside.
These were the Western foods covered by Russia’s countersanctions, yet imported into the country illegally. And of course, Russia has a rich tradition of law abidance, a foundation on which the present KGB/FSB junta has built a temple to legality.
The temple doesn’t quite reach up to the sky, what with Russia’s rank in the rule-of-law category currently standing at Number 92 out of 97 countries rated. That’s one rung below Belarus and one above Nicaragua, but hey – no temple has ever been built in one go.
As a champion of legality myself, I’m all in favour of upholding the law. By all means, the Russians must confiscate the contraband and fine (imprison, shoot) the smugglers.
But why burn the food? Surely, once the unscrupulous importers have been punished, the food could have been distributed to those who need it? It’s not as if no such needy persons existed.
According to the junta itself, 22.9 million Russians are living below the poverty line. That’s 15.9 per cent of the population, higher than in such economic powerhouses as Albania, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and Tunisia.
The poverty line in Russia isn’t drawn in the same place as in the West. Russian agencies define poverty not by the low number of I-pads per family member, but by the ability to survive.
That’s why they eschew the relative term ‘poverty line’ in favour of an absolute and more honest ‘level of subsistence’. This is defined as monthly income of just under £100 a month per person.
Depending on where you are in Russia, the cost of living there is roughly 10-20 per cent on either side of ours. So do the sums and ask yourself if you’d be able to subsist at or below this level of subsistence.
And, one way or the other, wouldn’t you be happy to get some free food? A pork chop or a slab of cheese? Some apples or tomatoes? In a country where no food banks exist?
To any denizen of a civilised country, apart from those who have homoerotic longings for a ‘strong leader’, destroying food in a country where millions starve can only be described as monstrous.
But, thanks to their history, the Russians aren’t particularly impressionable. They know that, since 1917, the government has been using food as a political tool.
From the moment the Bolsheviks took over they began to create artificial famines either to punish any resistance or to make the people too weak to resist. This was done with malice aforethought documented in numerous decrees and letters, such as this 1922 one from Lenin:
“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy…”
The Russians, much given to macabre humour, mocked the Bolsheviks’ Marxist cant. “Cannibalism,” they’d say, “is the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.”
This wasn’t a figure of speech: cannibalism was rife throughout the 1918-1922 Civil War and again in the early 30s, when another famine had to be created to educate the recalcitrant peasantry on the benefits of collective agriculture.
Mothers were eating their children, orphans and street urchins whose parents had already died were being eaten by passers-by, baby fingers were being found in meat pies… – all to the accompaniment of the Wellses, Webbs and Shaws of this world, bleating about the daring social experiment Britain should emulate.
In the less carnivorous times of Khrushchev, Brezhnev et al, most Russians went undernourished, but not so many starved to death or ate their offspring – that’s progress for you.
But the government retained its monopoly on food, again using it for political purposes. The more trusted comrades were given access to special shops and distributorships unavailable to hoi polloi, who had to subsist on stuff that would make our dog food taste like a delicacy.
Those privileged shops existed on several levels, each reflecting the man’s value to the state (my father was allowed to use the lowest level for a few years). Similarly, some areas were supplied with food better than others and, when the underprivileged protested, they were machine-gunned en masse – as in Novocherkassk, 1962.
Putin’s kleptofascist junta is at present tightening the screws, somewhat loosened during Yeltsyn’s tenure. This means, mutatis mutandis, reverting to the rich legacy of Bolshevism, including its food policy.
Putin’s response to the sanctions came in the shape of a call to ‘imports replacement’ (importozameshcheniye). Considering that Russia imports 80 per cent of her food, much of it from the countersanctioned countries, that’s an awful lot to replace – especially since central Russia shows no signs of agricultural activity.
In effect, the new policy is a leap towards re-establishing the state monopoly on food, which – as Russia’s history proves – will include famines as an inevitable constituent.
Even that, I’m sure, will have no effect on today’s useful idiots. When Lenin coined the term, he applied it to Western lefties. Alas, today’s idiots come mostly from the right.
Putin, they say, ‘looks after his people’. He is ‘the strong leader we should have’. Speak for yourself, idiots. I for one wouldn’t like to find a tiny finger in my Cornish pasty.