I heard shouting from the street, and then a shower of vigorous knocks on the door.\u00a0 “Quick, Victor Lvovich, open up!”\u00a0 Bobrov was coming back from the bakery, with two huge four-kilo loaves of black bread on his shoulders.\u00a0 He was surrounded by a swarm of hungry children, hopping after the bread like sparrows (Serge\u00a0records seeing\u00a0these hoards of abandoned, starving children wherever he went), clinging on his clothes, beseeching:\u00a0 “A little bit, uncle, just a little bit!”\u00a0 They were almost naked.\u00a0 We threw them some morsels, over which a pitched battle promptly began.\u00a0 The next moment, our barefooted maidservant brought boiling water, unasked, for us to make tea.\u00a0 When she was alone with me for a moment, she said to me, her eyes smiling, “Give me a pound of bread and I’ll give you the signal in a minute… And mark my words, citizen, I can assure you that I don’t have the syphilis, no, not me…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The maidservants story was hardly unique.\u00a0 Tens of thousands of young girls, starving and desperate, could find no other way to survive than by selling themselves.\u00a0 Periodically, they were rounded up and shot, or disappeared into the camps.\u00a0 Serge describes many other such scenes.\u00a0 Here are some more instances of “socialist realism” from his time in Orenburg:<\/p>\n
One ruble got you a bowl of greasy soup in the restaurant where little girls waited for you to finish eating so as to lick your plate and glean your bread crumbs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Among the ruins of churches, in abandoned porches, on the edge of the steppe, or under the crags by the Ural, we could see Khirgiz families lying heaped together, dying of hunger.\u00a0 One evening\u00a0I gathered up from the ground of the deserted marketplace a child burning with fever; he was moaning, but the folk who stood around did not dare to touch him, for fear of contagion.\u00a0 I diagnosed a simple case of hunger and took him off to the militia post, holding him by his frail, boiling wrist.\u00a0 I fetched him a glass of water and a morsel of bread from my place; the effect on the lad was that of a small but instantaneous miracle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My wife witnessed the following piece of thievery; a housewife had just bought a pound of butter costing fifteen rubles (three days wages for a skilled worker)\u00a0when an Asiatic nipped it from her hands and made off.\u00a0 He was pursued and caught easily enough, but he curled up on the earth like a ball and, for all the blows from fists or stones that rained on him from above, ate the butter.\u00a0 They left him lying there, bloody but full.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
At the rationing office a poster announced:\u00a0 “Grandparents have no right to food cards.”\u00a0 All the same, people managed to keep those “useless mouths” alive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
These incidents were repeated countless times in all the cities of the Soviet Union.\u00a0 Serge describes them for us, resolving terms like “mass famine” and “widespread starvation” to the level of individuals, as if under a microscope.\u00a0\u00a0He wasn’t the only one reporting them at the time.\u00a0 Hundreds of others who had experienced the camps and seen similar things were publishing substantially the same things in the West\u00a0in a continuous flow of books throughout the 20’s and 30’s.\u00a0 The western intellectuals averted their eyes.\u00a0 Those who bothered to visit the Soviet Union looked no further than Stalin’s Potemkin villages, and then returned to report in glowing terms that they had “seen the future, and it works!”\u00a0 A typical example of the genre appeared in a letter written in 1927\u00a0by the famous American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, to her fiancee, Sinclair Lewis, published in the book Dorothy and Red<\/em>, by journalist and left wing intellectual Vincent Sheean.\u00a0 Thompson was on her way to Moscow to witness the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.<\/p>\n
We’ve just passed the Russian border – marked by a huge, glowing red star over the railroad track – my companions say “Now thank God we are safe<\/em> in our own country,” and all are singing the Internationale<\/em> at the top of their lungs as I write this note.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and, a bit later, from her comfortable hotel in Moscow,<\/p>\n
As far as I can see, everybody in Russia is writing something, when he isn’t talking, and everything written is published; a sort of literary diarrhoea which may or may not be the beginning of a renaissance.\u00a0 I feel as though there were a book inflation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This giddy nonsense was already miles from reality\u00a0long before Thompson wrote it.\u00a0 Serge knew better.\u00a0 He wrote,<\/p>\n
All legal means of expression were now closed to us.\u00a0 From 1926 onward, when the last tiny sheets put out by anarchists, syndicalists, and Maximalists had disappeared, the Central Committee had enjoyed an absolute monopoloy of printed matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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