"Save Texas. It's the last." Words of warning.

Vanity | 01/10/2013 | houndofthebaskervilles

[ExSoldier]

A lot of the stuff is anecdotal personal tidbits about splitting life between a nice apartment in Moscow and the vast estate in the Ural mountains. Dad told me he had a pack of Russian Wolfhounds he used to walk on a single multi-strand leash. Their job was to protect him from both wolves and bandits on the estate. He said when he was really small, he'd have to keep his hand in the air to hold the leash up because the dogs were so huge, towering over him. His dad kept a Siberian Tiger but had to shoot it dead with an old Webley .455 revolver when it licked him one day and drew blood with it's raspy tongue. Made a great fireplace rug. Then there was the Golden Bear cub dad was given and kept as a pet until it waddled into the Great Hall where a dinner for 300 was being prepped and that ol' bear took a clawful of the tablecloth and pulled the entire 300 place setting and crystal dinnerware off the table! Bear disappeared thereafter.

But as far as the awful political stuff, well, dad's favorite movie in the world was Dr. Zhivago he said that it was pretty accurate to his story. Especially the events of "Bloody Sunday" when the Czars soldiers rode down the protesters on horseback, trampling babies into bloody puddles. The Czar didn't play games with the commies. They gave it all back in spades and many times more when they took power. Many of the Reds rode from estate to estate throwing out the owners and giving the land and buildings to the masses which proceeded to move in many times the ability of those buildings to comfortably house them. If you've ever seen the movie Soylent Green with Charlton Heston as a cop of the near future, you'd have a pretty good idea, I think. Any landowner resisting was often summarily executed and maybe his family too. The one thing I remember so well from my father's stories was the intense hatred he had for the communists -- his eyes would just smoulder like fire and his voice would get all choked up and he'd growl with this deadly intensity. He never lost that attitude, even when his mind began to go as his Alzheimer's advanced... Even when he no longer recognized me, I would hear him in his room, crying for Mother Russia.