The Soviet workers who were given the old-age pensions in 1939 were college professors. This was still the pre-WW2 mentality where people of intellectual professions were a higher social class. It was unthinkable, for instance, that a woman with higher education should do her own laundry or wash the floors in her living quarters. It was a matter of course that uneducated women would serve her.
And the very last people to get old-age pensions were peasants, i.e. collective farm workers. Farmers were considered the most retrograde class under Soviet doctrine. They were always the last to get any of the rights that other Soviet citizens had. For instance, while everybody else had their own passport in possession since the 1930s, the farm workers still had to beg and bribe to lay hands on their passports well into the 1960s.
Clarissa's Blog 
Aha! I get it, old school traditional Europeanish values (respect for scholars) still had some sway in 1939 and but later the system fell into typical barking Soviet madness (and just happened to resemble the Tsar more than anything the Soviets actually said they stood for).
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“Aha! I get it, old school traditional Europeanish values (respect for scholars) still had some sway in 1939 and but later the system fell into typical barking Soviet madness (and just happened to resemble the Tsar more than anything the Soviets actually said they stood for).”
– Yes. Stalin gradually brought back many of the trappings of the tsarist regime for which he obviously felt a great affinity.
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Languages are a funny thing. I just realized that, had this post been into my native Romanian, I’d have answered it immediately. Since we’re using English to communicate, there’s enough of a gap in assumptions that I had no idea how to even start guessing.
Off-topic, but I remember you mentioning that Spanish was the language in which you learned to express emotions. For me, this was English. I don’t think there’s any way to establish a deeper, more lasting love for a language than this.
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Were Hell other people
And not myself I could willingly
Diagnose the scratchings at the other side
Of the door.
The telephone rings: from the other end of the line
My name and voice introduce themselves: Poet.
Finger-fat delusions wash themselves
In the dish of dollars
And proceed to eat liberation’s sadza and stew.
Bullet-proof brains
Take cast iron pains
To maintain their ignorance;
Their wide bellied and Castro beards
Are the matter of many a snide joke.
What can violet flowers not do
Their perfume Baptist to Thrones of Bayonets?
I came out of the Harare barber shop, my hair white
And bright like icecream melting.
A single finger traces on the sand
The simple design of death
Whose centre is everywhere
Whose circumference is nowhere.
The sight of blood makes me hunger
After raw tomatoes
After the cream and rose complexion of Nordic
Girls,
Makes me thirst for the Masai’s bull-wrought
Resilience
And perhaps a glass of Gerac, that savanna sundowner
Of redneck modalities.
Were regrets basket chairs
We’d be condemned to sit for life,
Or sit still passionately; the Siamese cats
Nuzzle against my ankle, purring.
In the garage of the imagination
Quietly sparkling, A Rolls Royce, Pulsar, an
Alfa Romeo..
I will smear my face with soft lanoline,
With American Girl Hand Body Lotion
With Ambi skin-lightening cream—
With pasteurized and bionised dung.
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Communist (post-liberation) Zimbabwe.
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Peculiar. Next you’ll be telling us they hated the colour red and couldn’t stand industrial workers.
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There was a long debate in the party as to how to treat the farm workers. Eventually, the point of view that they should be screwed prevailed. Stalin killed everybody who opposed this approach, then he killed everybody who supported it as well, and proceeded to collectivize by force.
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