"Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Polemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well—to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned. his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Poremkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then. working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL1.
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