12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

Their belongings were “expropriated,” which, in practice, meant that their
houses were stripped down to the rafters and ceiling beams and everything
was stolen. In many places, the non-kulak peasants resisted, particularly the
women, who took to surrounding the persecuted families with their bodies.
Such resistance proved futile. The kulaks who didn’t die were exiled to
Siberia, often in the middle of the night. The trains started in February, in the
bitter Russian cold. Housing of the most substandard kind awaited them upon
arrival on the desert taiga. Many died, particularly children, from typhoid,
measles and scarlet fever.
The “parasitical” kulaks were, in general, the most skillful and
hardworking farmers. A small minority of people are responsible for most of
the production in any field, and farming proved no different. Agricultural
output crashed. What little remained was taken by force out of the
countryside and into the cities. Rural people who went out into the fields after
the harvest to glean single grains of wheat for their hungry families risked
execution. Six million people died of starvation in the Ukraine, the
breadbasket of the Soviet Union, in the 1930s. “To eat your own children is a
barbarian act,” declared posters of the Soviet regime.
Despite more than mere rumours of such atrocities, attitudes towards
communism remained consistently positive among many Western
intellectuals. There were other things to worry about, and the Second World
War allied the Soviet Union with the Western countries opposing Hitler,
Mussolini and Hirohito. Certain watchful eyes remained open, nonetheless.
Malcolm Muggeridge published a series of articles describing Soviet
demolition of the peasantry as early as 1933, for the Manchester Guardian.
George Orwell understood what was going on under Stalin, and he made it
widely known. He published Animal Farm, a fable satirizing the Soviet
Union, in 1945, despite encountering serious resistance to the book’s release.
Many who should have known better retained their blindness for long after
this. Nowhere was this truer than France, and nowhere truer in France than
among the intellectuals.
France’s most famous mid-century philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was a
well-known communist, although not a card-carrier, until he denounced the
Soviet incursion into Hungary in 1956. He remained an advocate for
Marxism, nonetheless, and did not finally break with the Soviet Union until