Lukashenka And Pioneers-Patrols

Iryna Khalip
16.08.2019, 8:42
56,780

How soon will they start jailing people for rye spikes in Belarus?

Sometimes I watch what the authorities are doing - all this stuff, countering “parasitism”, abolishment of the army service postponements, school tours to the special police units, the battle for the harvest, subbotniks … So I watch all this, thinking, when will they finally start jailing people for spikes? It seems that everything is going according to the scheme, but no one is in jail for spikes yet. This is contrary to the laws of the genre, the order is broken.

So at last we have it. They reached the spikes issue, fathers and grandfathers can be proud.

“Discipline is very low. I do not want to say that everyone is bad. But thievery is flourishing. As president, I am even ashamed to talk about it. People steal everything, starting from diesel oil and petrol. For example, some people have recently tried to steal grain. And they don't feel ashamed at all, they don't even hide it. They take it as if it is their own. We will root such things out,” this is the quotation from Lukashenka’s speech that he made during his visit to the Mahiliou region. Do these words ring the bell for you? For me personally, they do sound familiar.

“The looting of the kolkhoz bread has started, people take the grains in the buckets, in the pockets, in the bootlegs, in the sacks.” This sounds exactly like the continuation of the chieftain’s speech in the Mahiliou region. As if he stopped for a second to gulp a breath of air, drank some spring water, and continued the unmasking of the people’s enemies. But this is not Lukashenka. This is a quote of an article published in the Pionerskaya Pravda in January 1933, urging pioneers to keep an eye on the kolkhoz fields and rat out those who steal the grains from there.

Now I understand why they needed to bring back pioneers and create the BRYU in Belarus - for the same thing. Denouncements, with the subsequent sitting in some presidium. To rat out those who pick some spikes for eating, because it’s these enemies of the people who are to blame for the defeat in the battle for the harvest from year to year.

Pay attention to Lukashenka’s speeches and compare them with the speeches of non-educated state figures of the 30ies. The same rhetorics, the same hypocrisy, the same methods of looking for the guilty, and the longing to involve everyone in this state filth, including those whose heads are still above it, including children, so that indeed, one half of the country would be in jail, and the other would guard them, and then they would change places.

Our appointees are as incapable of recognizing own non-professionalism and obscurity as their predecessors from the Soviet 30ies. That is why they are looking for the guilty, as in the past. Just recall: in these 25 years, the blame for the failure of the Belarusian economy was shifted on the Americans, the Poles, journalists and entrepreneurs, the opposition and Zianon Pazniak personally, human rights defenders, automobilists - this list can be prolonged and expanded. Now those who steal spikes were added to it. However, they will be “unrooted”, as the ruler promised. Just like comrade Stalin once said: “No need to look for the enemies far from the kolkhoz - they are sitting in the kolkhoz itself.”

The story of those “spikes” executions comes to my mind. In the early 30ies, not only Ukraine was starving in the USSR. The Volga region, Chernozemye, the Urals, the North Caucasus, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Crimea suffered from the Famine-Genocide. Over 7 million people died of hunger in the great Soviet country. Meanwhile, Stalin’s talentless bootlickers blamed those who stole spikes from the fields, and urged children to rat them out. As a result, the Pionerskaya Pravda newspaper became the center of children’s squealing, under the patronage of good guys commissars. Letters-denunciations arrived there in sacks, and were forwarded to the NKVD. The photos of young rats were published in the newspaper, and the luckiest ones were even sent to the Artek camp, to the congress of pioneers-patrols. For example, the whole Soviet Union read articles about heroic boy Pronya Kolybin, who rat out his own mother. She picked up some fallen spikes and grains in the field, but the boy was vigilant. The mother was jailed for ten years, and Pronya-the-hero was sent to Artek first, and then to the orphanage. Another pioneer Mitya Gordziyenko caught his neighbours doing the same in the kolkhoz field - they were picking up the fallen spikes. As a result, the neighbour was shot dead, his wife was sent to the camp for ten years, while Mitya received a watch engraved with his name, and an annual subscription for the Leninskie Vnuchata newspaper.

Lukashenka And Pioneers-Patrols

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