cinemas and prisons. “I havé recently seen at Kostroma a chapel turned 
into a hairdresser’s shop and another into a public house.” Mr. Fink 
waxing reminiscent, recalls the day when Rus (ancient Russia) was baptised: 
“the kind and meek Slavs celebrated the dismissal of their Perun (god of 
Thunder) by publicly drowning in the Dniepr the said Perun tied to the 
tail of a stallion. So is the cry “down with the cupolas” a thoughtless 
and reckless whoop at the over-turned past.” Such behaviour towards the 
past forbodes little good. When the “enlightened” communist village-girl 
Sarubina asks the local judge to throw out of their house her father because 
“his presence prevents her from developping freely on communistic lines” 
such a fact does not uplift at all Russian village life from the whirlpool 
of cruelty, wildness and ignorance, in which it sinks, no matter how hard 
certain literary enthusiasts try to create the figure of a new “red moujik”, 
a figure which in their works seems made of wood and paint. In reality 
the red moujik’s mind is dark, Anti-religious propaganda has but deepened 
that darkness. He is still more superstitious than formerly. In order to put 
an end to a long spell of dry weather he digs a hole in the grave of a 
man who had hanged himself and laboriously pours into that grave forty 
barrels of water. On the other hand he lets his village burn. “He uses 
water for bringing on rain; he does not waste it against fire.” “What 
does the village want” in the long run? Its chief want, it appears, is 
“home brewed vodka and plenty of it; young and old women and children, 
— all drink, spending on drink hundreds of poods of corn.” And though 
in a certain God-forsaken village progress is so swift that for the first 
time a civil marriage took place and an enlightened peasant got married 
without the help of a priest; still it all ended in the young couple and 
relatives and guests being dead drunk. So much for Soviet culture in 
villages. Indeed, vodka is now being sold by the State, the Bolshevics having 
restored the reign of vodka banished by the Tsar. So let Trotsky proudly 
mix his metaphors: “the liquidation of public drunkenness has been entered 
in the iron books of the Revolution.” 
Thus Russian culture has been cut down by Russian Bolshevics. At first 
they opened a number of mock universities, but then had them closed 
again. 
In the year 1924 they drove out of the old real Universities thousands 
of young men and women and not only first year students, but students 
who were in the full swing of their university career. These young people 
where sent out of Moscow and Petersburg to their respective home towns; 
and such was the blow that shattered their lives, that many did not survive 
it. Numerous suicides, such was the consequence of this new insult to 
humanity and common sense; new victims were sacrified to the god of 
absurdity and crime. But the logic of life demanded from the Bolshevics 
INQ