Peters

A man who killed.


There are some classic phrases that will be alive and fresh even 200, or 500, or 800 years from now.

For instance:

"Vanquished peoples should be spared only their eyes, so that they may cry," said Bismarck.

"The State, that's me!" exclaimed Louis XIV.

"Paris is worth a Mass," decided Henry IV, exchanging one faith for another.

However, that king also showed his good side with a more altruistic statement:

"I would like to see a chicken in every pot."

We do not know what Lenin and Trotsky would like to see in each of their subjects' pots; but the famous Cheka bigwig, Peters, expressed himself on the subject pretty clearly, and we consider his utterance to be no less remarkable than Henry's.

Namely: according to newspaper reports, when representatives of the Rostov-on-Don workers came to see him -- as the official in charge of the city -- and told him that the workers were hungry, Peters replied:

"Do you call this hunger? How can this be hunger, when your rubbish-bins are full of various scraps and refuse? Now in Moscow, where the rubbish-bins are totally empty -- as if they'd been licked clean -- that's hunger!"

Thus, the Rostov workers can exclaim, like the old Cossacks:

"Lo, there is still powder in our powder-kegs! We still have the rubbish-bins, those breadbaskets of the Soviet government!"

For some strange reason, Peters' phrase went fairly unnoticed; nobody paid any close attention to it.

This is unjust! Such statements should not be forgotten...

Were it up to me -- I would print it on huge billboards everywhere, carve it in marble, paste it in as a separate page into all children's textbooks; I would have town criers loudly proclaim it on all squares and street corners:

"As long as the rubbish-bins are full, how can the workers complain of hunger?"

I wonder whether H.G. Wells, during his stay in Moscow, examined -- along with the Soviet government's other miraculous achievements -- the local rubbish-bins?

If he did, he was probably highly impressed:

"Now there are sanitary conditions! Now there is real cleanliness! You could dance the fox-trot on the bottom of this rubbish-bin, just like on a parquet floor. In England, our rubbish-bins are filled with all kinds of nonsense: bread crusts, bits of fish, cigar stubs, chicken entrails, dried-out sandwiches, cheese rinds... Truly, the Soviet government has a great future, if even in dirty, messy Moscow it has managed to produce such neatness!"

I would also like to know -- exactly how is Comrade Peters planning to organize food aid drawn from rubbish-bins? Will it be rationed? But rations usually come in three or four categories.

Obviously, the first admitted to the sumptuous banquet will be the Communist workers, category number one. After they have reaped the cream of the crop -- fish heads and sausage casings -- category number two, the ordinary workers, will timidly approach. They will pick out the potato peels and horse bones; the rest can be left for category number three, the bourgeois saboteurs.

Were I not a writer but a warden, and if Peters happened to land in my jail, I would arrange a great life for him. I would serve him all he could eat. Every day, I would treat him to a seven-course meal, dessert included.

He would never go hungry -- since, as he himself so wonderfully put it, "As long as rubbish-bins exist, there can be no hunger."

Here's what his menu would look like: