Author: D. Duffy
The greatest curse of the recent 20th century has been the power exercised by utopian ideologues who would remould humanity to mirror their warped visions. Under their systems, people are expendable and all of society becomes a mere laboratory where the inconvenient can be disposed of.
Such a one was Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870 – 1924), and writing of him, Maxim Gorky (1868 – 1936) had said that “to Lenin, the proletariat is as ore to a metalworker.” Thus, they comprised a mere “component” and disposable when not wanted. The effect of such systems in practice has been to deprive people of their humanity and their lives. The novel “We” (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, describing just such a system, was banned in the late, great “Soviet Union” for 60 years. It may have had some influence on George Orwell’s “1984.”
But the very real Orwellian nightmare of the first Soviet years, from 1917 to 1924, had its very real human victims; numbered amongst them were the “Besprizornye.” These were seven million homeless urchins who roamed across Russia in those times. Their parents had died or had been lost, liquidated, imprisoned, or had simply thrown them out as “surplus mouths.” They lived in the empty houses, vacant land, rubbish dumps, derelict factories, and warehouses. They formed criminal gangs with their own rules and leaders. They even got married and had children. They were aged from 8 to 18 and would attack almost anyone, anywhere.
They were described as the most tragic and nightmarish community in the history of man, such as the spin-off of those ideologues who would remould humanity.
