12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

their new leaders purveyed were possible. The decayed social order of the
late nineteenth century produced the trenches and mass slaughters of the
Great War. The gap between rich and poor was extreme, and most people
slaved away in conditions worse than those later described by Orwell.
Although the West received word of the horror perpetrated by Lenin after the
Russian Revolution, it remained difficult to evaluate his actions from afar.
Russia was in post-monarchical chaos, and the news of widespread industrial
development and redistribution of property to those who had so recently been
serfs provided reason for hope. To complicate things further, the USSR (and
Mexico) supported the democratic Republicans when the Spanish Civil War
broke out, in 1936. They were fighting against the essentially fascist
Nationalists, who had overthrown the fragile democracy established only five
years previously, and who found support with the Nazis and Italian fascists.
The intelligentsia in America, Great Britain and elsewhere were severely
frustrated by their home countries’ neutrality. Thousands of foreigners
streamed into Spain to fight for the Republicans, serving in the International
Brigades. George Orwell was one of them. Ernest Hemingway served there
as a journalist, and was a supporter of the Republicans. Politically concerned
young Americans, Canadians and Brits felt a moral obligation to stop talking
and start fighting.
All of this drew attention away from concurrent events in the Soviet
Union. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Stalinist Soviets sent
two million kulaks, their richest peasants, to Siberia (those with a small
number of cows, a couple of hired hands, or a few acres more than was
typical). From the communist viewpoint, these kulaks had gathered their
wealth by plundering those around them, and deserved their fate. Wealth
signified oppression, and private property was theft. It was time for some
equity. More than thirty thousand kulaks were shot on the spot. Many more
met their fate at the hands of their most jealous, resentful and unproductive
neighbours, who used the high ideals of communist collectivization to mask
their murderous intent.
The kulaks were “enemies of the people,” apes, scum, vermin, filth and
swine. “We will make soap out of the kulak,” claimed one particularly brutal
cadre of city-dwellers, mobilized by party and Soviet executive committees,
and sent out into the countryside. The kulaks were driven, naked, into the
streets, beaten, and forced to dig their own graves. The women were raped.