2023 year of the Rabbit will avenge all the hares killed in the hunt by the Soviet General Secretaries

In Zavidovo for Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, schoolchildren were forced to drive hundreds of “oblique”

The Year of the Rabbit is upon us. A cute eared one should replace the brutal Tiger in 2023, and this seems to promise favorable prospects. However, the symbol of the eastern calendar “taking over the watch” has a “brother” – the Hare, who certainly has the right to give advice to his close relative. But with the “oblique” we in Russia may have difficulties. Enlisting his favor, which is good, will be prevented by the insults inflicted on the hare tribe by some of the former leaders of the country.

One hope is that “ears are long and memory is short”, and the zodiac Hare will not create unnecessary problems for us in revenge for the oppression of his relatives by representatives of the Russian authorities under the previous socio-economic formations.

This eared beast, as you know, has long been considered one of the most popular hunting objects in Rus’. The last Russian emperors, including Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, “dabbled” in it. Here, for example, is data from the “Report of the Imperial Hunt” for 1896. Then a team led by the young Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich shot “… Rusakov 193, whites 1082.” And this is just one fragment from the diary of the sovereign for 1906: “October 5. Thursday. Returning home, changed clothes and went on a motor to the round-up … Finished in the dark. Total killed … by me: … 2 hare and 7 whites.

However, imperial Russia is a very distant past. Perhaps those “sins” of the Russian tsars-hunters against the “oblique” calendar Hare will forgive after the statute of limitations has expired. But after all, the successors in power, the Bolshevik-Communists, picked up the baton from the monarchs. From them, the hare tribe also got fairly.

During his Siberian exile, Vladimir Ilyich was an ardent exterminator of the long-eared. Here is what the wife of the leader, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, wrote in the book “Memoirs of Lenin”, published in 1932: “Late autumn, when sludge (shallow ice) was going along the Yenisei, we went to the islands for hares. The rabbits are already turning white. There is nowhere to go from the island, they run around like sheep. A whole boat would be shot, it happened, by our hunters. Vladimir Ilyich was not embarrassed that hunting for such “sheep” does not look very sporty. But she got bored of him pretty quickly. “Zaitsev,” he wrote to his relatives, “here I beat in order in the fall, “there are a lot of them on the Yenisei islands, so we quickly got tired of them” … “

However, in fairness, it should be noted that, according to researchers, the episode of absolutely cruel treatment of animals – when, supposedly, Lenin did not even shoot them, but killed dozens of them on the islands with the butt of a gun, is still a figment of someone’s imagination.

The next Bolshevik leader, Comrade Stalin, was not such an avid hunter. However, he (especially in his youth) devoted time to the gun trade.

Eyewitness accounts have been preserved that in 1913-1916. during his stay in the deaf Siberian machine tool Kureika, the political exile Iosif Dzhugashvili regularly went hunting. Kurey old-timers recalled: the future Secretary General brought from hunting mainly hares, ermines, partridges.

Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were big fans of “getting game”. They performed the main part of their hunting exploits on the territory of the Zavidovo special reserve, a hundred kilometers north of the capital, on the border with the Kalinin (Tver) region. Both NA and LI came there many times a year. And among the trophies of these Kremlin hunters were numerous hares.

For example, one of the prominent party leaders, who was present at the “highest” entertainment, recalled: “In mid-January 1964, Nikita Khrushchev … came to hunt … The hunt was a success, as they say, to glory. Khrushchev killed two big boars, two goats, four birds with one stone…”

In the early 1960s, already at the end of his leadership of the USSR, Nikita Sergeevich took a guest from distant Cuba, the local leader Fidel Castro, to Zavidovo. To ensure successful, productive winter hunting, the leaders of the two states decided to bring additional hares to the reserve near Moscow. Many eared animals were caught for this in the Rostov steppes. Students of local schools were used as beaters in the implementation of such a special operation. One of the participants recalled: “…We gathered eighth-graders and older boys… We were given white camouflage robes and taken to the steppe, where the huntsmen had already pulled the nets. With rattles and hooting, we walked along the snow-covered steppe and drove the hare towards the rangers … Then we drove hundreds of hares … “

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had a whole arsenal in his dacha – almost 90 magnificent guns. Of this number, several “trunks” were the most beloved. Including – pieces of 3-4 smooth-bore, with which the Secretary General hunted small animals, including hares.