What kind of crops do they raise in the towns? Only Grand Dukes, Bolsheviks and drunkards!
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.
One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.
The Bolsheviks started not just on the killing of private property; they were trying to abolish money itself.
For what were all these country patriots born? To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn?
The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.
After World War II, a lot of people moved to the cities for work and abandoned the old vineyards. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, wineries were paid to produce volume at a cheap price. That's when the Lambruscos and bad Chianti were popular.
When I visited Vietnam for Oxfam, the thing that really struck me was how the local farmers had to prepare to evacuate or climb to their mezzanines with their valuable family possessions.
Strip the proud nobility of their bloated estates, reduce them to a level with plain republicans, send forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the workshops or handle the plow, and you will thus humble proud traitors.
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.
I am a Bolshevik.