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PARTISAN REVIEW
him to go harvest corn in his neighboring state . He'll send the presi–
dent himself you know where on the spot, and no one will take him
to court for it, because of the indifference of the organs of justice to
the condition of American agriculture. And the president won't have
anyone to complain to . He can't complain to himself! Five years ago
I once told regional secretary Fedkin to go to a certain indecent place,
and he telephoned Tambov right off and ordered the investigator to
come for me to roast me in the cooler for five years or so . Lucky that
the very same day the secretary himself went to jail for driving into a
herd of yearlings in a drunken state and wounding the shepherd with
a crank handle. But okay . ..
As you know , the party permits the kolhoz workers to produce
their own potatoes for additional nourishment and sale in city mar–
kets , since 70 percent, so they say, of government-produced vegeta–
bles go to waste for nothing from poor storage and inhuman trans–
port. The pigs don't even get it , let alone Soviet people and capitalist
diplomats who often turn up in the markets of the city of Moscow
and engage you in provocational discussions in Russian and some–
times in other foreign languages . We're used to it .
But what do the party and the president say to the harvesting
gathering? They say : "First we will fulfill our harvesting plan. We
will provide our motherland with potatoes so that it won't have to
import them from Poland and inflame the Polish scourge of Solidar–
ity and other enemies of socialism.... Only then will you attend to
private agriculture and market speculation. He who puts himself
above the party and the people for the sake of his own material ego–
ism will be as a wolf unto people, and we will take away his land and
give it to the outstanding workers . The land was given into the hands
of the people in 1917 not so that they could do anything they liked
with it while giving the government the finger on the sly . This is no
America where the landowner farmers blackmail the president; he
even lifts the boycott on selling wheat to the motherland of socialism,
which our country never would have done; it wouldn't trot in the
reins of the kulak, if we, of course, were feeding bread to America
and not they to us, in light of the inevitable pressure on the luminary
of communism and the guarantor of world safety for the production
of bombs and rockets and such-like solidarity with the enemies of the
U .S .A.... Everyone to the fields .... We will not permit the har-
vest , I mean the loss of the harvest . . . . We will put 25 percent more
than the plan demands into the granaries of the motherland...."
But what sense is there in all this blab if the city people consider
