Word: muzhik
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...work had brought him face to face with one immutable fact that plagues Communism the world over: that Marxism is and was the creed of a city dweller, with little place in it for the land-loving peasantry. In their writings, Communist thinkers (e.g., Engels) sneer at the muzhiks as "a class of barbarians" with an "anti-collective skull," condemned by history to inexorable extinction. Communist bosses (e.g., Stalin) have consistently endeavored to make the prophecy come true, and the result is a never-ending war between the muzhik and the commissar...
...Russian countryside. Peasant families nibbled at the state farms, decollectivized an estimated six million acres. They hoarded the grain and refused to give it up to the commissars. At first they got away with it. Fearful of massive famine in the wake of war, the Kremlin temporized with the muzhik's lust for land that he could call his own. The Council of Ministers agreed to let the state farms be worked by family groups or by ex-soldiers, banded together in "links" of eight to ten men apiece. Many of the "linkers," explained one of them who escaped...
...mere animal, condemned by nature to acquire the characteristics of his environment. Khrushchev tested the theory in his agrogorods. Just as the Soviet factories had produced a "new Soviet man" (e.g., Khrushchev), so he believed that the agrogorod environment would develop a new agrarian robot divorced from the muzhik's "old village backwardness...
Like Voronov, Stalin liked cannon. This was no new-fangled weapon: the gun was strong and dependable, like the Russian muzhik who handled it. The cannon, Stalin said, is "the god of war." Voronov made a good high priest. Beginning in 1938, he began to call at the Kremlin to make personal reports to Stalin. When Voronov needed help to put his ideas across, he now knew where to look...
Common wisecrack of super-cynical Russian Bolsheviks is: Russki muzhik vsyo zuplatit-the Russian peasant will pay for everything. Last week it looked as if workers and peasants both were going to pay as the Kremlin cracked down on labor, banned all party, trade union and social meetings during the workday, frankly stated it meant to get less "chatter" and more work out of workers. Thus ended one more visible manifestation of Russian proletarianism...