Reality Or Nostalgia

Occasionally I stumble upon a Romanian social media post that is entertaining and educational as it reveals a lot about the current culture trends in that country and how much people’s views have changed since I left more than four decades ago. Not unlike here in the U.S., total strangers with skewed, limited, and often nostalgic viewpoints, under the perceived cloak of anonymity, fight vehemently on diverse topics they know little about but are convinced they are experts on the topic.

This time an exceptionally large and belligerent group was fighting over tomatoes grown in developing countries on an industrial scale which taste like cardboard versus the home-grown varieties that taste like heaven and are juicy. It appeared that such a mundane topic would be simple and non-confrontational, yet it devolved into fighting and name-calling pretty fast.

Some posters were nostalgic over the tomatoes grown during the communist regime which one said tasted divine because they never used any pesticides or fertilizers. I know that they used massive amounts of DDT on everything to kill many pests, including the Colorado beetle which loved potatoes and tomatoes and could destroy a crop quite fast. Gardeners and co-operative farms also used sacks and sacks of other pesticides and fertilizers to promote plant growth and higher crop yield.

I do not think there was one household in the 1970s that did not own a Flit gun filled with pesticides against flies, mosquitoes, and other pests.

Home gardens in the country used manure as fertilizer. The huge downside of home gardens was the nearby location to the unsanitary outhouses with flies buzzing everywhere. There was no plumbing or running water in the country during Ceausescu’s communist regime.

City residents did not have gardens as they lived tightly packed in concrete grey apartment complexes. A few people raised geraniums or tomato plants on the balcony of their tiny apartments. If they had relatives living in the nearby village, they had a chance at some fresh produce or buying them at the farmers’ market where prices were much higher than the state-owned stores.

Fruits were generally full of fruit fly worms and flies were everywhere. We actually had paper fly swatters made with long shredded strips of paper that made a swishing noise when shaken and dangling glue boards for the flies. If we did not, we could not even eat without being attacked by swarms of them. The buzzing was annoying, and they could fly into your mouth if you were not careful. Apartments did not have screens on windows to protect us from flies.

My friend, Joe Keller, has a “delightful” story about wormy cherries he bought in a local farmers’ market in Bucharest, Romania, when stationed at the Embassy there. They were trying to have snacks during the intermission of the Friday night movie viewing, and, to their horror, the worms decided to escape the cherries and were crawling all over the kitchen table.

It is true that a tomato grown organically in a private garden tastes divine but today the actual varieties of tomatoes sold are hybrids engineered to resist drought, pests, and fungi. They stay fresh and tasteless for a long time in the fridge or on a shelf. The tomato varieties of four decades ago were quite different than those grown today.

Then the discussion diverged from tomatoes to cancer-causing foods today. Apparently, the nostalgic ones remembered incorrectly that “cancers were unknown then and nobody stood in line at pharmacies to buy drugs like they do today.”  I was not surprised that some of these people seemed to have selective memory, historical ignorance, or bad cases of misplaced nostalgia.

I know many people and relatives who had died of various cancers or simple treatable illnesses because there were no drugs on the market, no chemo, no radiation, no insulin, no antibiotics except on rare occasions penicillin, and the compounded pills if the pharmacists had the proper ingredients in powder or liquid form to make the drugs.

Surgeries were performed by doctors with little or no hospital training, just theoretical knowledge, and hospitals lacked a lot to be desired in terms of a septic environment.

People took their lives into their own hands when admitted to a hospital and, if they did not carry “walking around bribe money” for doctors, nurses, lab assistants, and radiologists, they were as good as dead unless God intervened, and they survived against all odds. Mom used to call those outliers, “God’s people with years left to live” despite adverse circumstances.

Lack of antibiotics or lack of access to a doctor or nurse killed many. Nobody lined up to buy drugs in pharmacies because the pharmacies were empty, the shelves were bare, they did not even carry simple vitamins. When the pharmacy received shipments, the drugs were sold quickly on the black market, to friends, or under the counter for a bribe.

 

Chemically Nucleated Storms

Can someone explain to me, how is it possible to have such heavy snow falling from the sky when the outdoor temperatures are above freezing?

These are chemically nucleated storms of geoengineering.

Chemical manipulation through cloud seeding? They were doing it yesterday and the clouds looked very weird. It did not snow here because temps were above 50s F, but it sure rained a lot.

They are chemically nucleated clouds, and the mainstream media is twisting in pretzels using CGI to try to explain how snow is coming down in massive amounts in 40F temperatures.

They are using surfactants (soap) as binders in clouds (they use surfactants in pesticide sprays too, so they stick to the crops and kill the bugs that eat them) and the snow is extra slippery when you drive on roads covered by such soapy snow.

These man-made flash freezes by seeding clouds with surfactants are destroying the soil, trees, and compromise the crops in the early spring which can potentially result in severe food shortages.

They are even spraying trees with defoliants in order to achieve their global warming narrative and population reduction through food shortages and famine.

Pam McKinney had this to say in a Facebook post yesterday.

Here are some photos I took after a two-day rain in our area. The clouds should have been empty by now and not so perfectly parallel.

Here are some articles discussing cloud seeding:

Weather news: Scientists in the US are flying planes into clouds to make it snow more | CNN

Geoengineering Watch | Exposing the climate engineering cover-up

The Climate Change Industry Is About Population Reduction Not CO2

Big Tech, Mainstream Media, and the Green Lobby are working together to achieve the same goal; it is not real science, and it is serving the interests of a few power-mad individuals who want to reduce population to numbers they are “comfortable” with by any means necessary.

Predictive climate models used as scientific “consensus” don’t work. Real science is not based on “consensus,” it is based on facts that can be proven correct time and time again.

Climate models don’t work because climate is a very complex issues due to the fact that there are so many factors that influence climate – the sun, the oceans, volcanos, the clouds, the earth’s orbit, and pollution made by humans in various activities.

Climate models eliminate factors that might skew their predetermined results and create simplified computer equations that can be manipulated to yield the desired results in order to prove their predetermined narrative. The input data are carefully chosen to create the desired and chosen output of the Green Lobby.

Every climate prediction of the Green Lobby in the last 30 years has been wrong.

-         NASA scientist James Hansen advised the public to be ready for long, hot summers, and more and more regional droughts in the 1990s. Temperatures would be 6 to 7 degrees hotter by 2050, the strength of hurricanes would increase by 50 percent, and the oceans would rise by 1-6 feet, “putting the islands of the nation of the Maldives underwater by 2018.”

-         Pentagon told President Bush in 2004 that “climate change was going to destroy us,” as a greater threat than terrorism. “Climate change would plunge major European cities beneath rising seas by 2024, while Britain would find itself into a Siberian climate by 2020 . . . nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine, and widespread rioting would erupt across the world.”

If famine is to befall us this year, it would be because of the insane governmental policies in regard to farming, the interdiction of fertilization of crops, withholding water for irrigation, and the interdiction of fossil fuels which creates skyrocketing energy prices.

-         The same scientist Hansen told the Associated Press at a luncheon in 2008 that “The Arctic would be free of sea ice in the summer by 2013 or 2018.

-         Al Gore predicted that the polar ice cap would be gone.

-         Prince Charles reported back in 2009 that “we had just 96 months (eight years) to save the world.”

The reality is that CO2 is the gas of plant life. Crops grow when they are turbocharged by the “CO2 fertilization effect.” Green nurseries add CO2 in order to increase their plant yield.

All the “climate literacy” organizations that distribute literature to schools, universities, and the general public are actually “distributing false climate indoctrination” that is factually incorrect.

The radical environmental green agenda is targeting children and students under the guise of education, and it is funded by our own tax dollars.

The green fearmongering groups are telling students and the public that increasing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere via industry, fossil fuel car use, agriculture, recreation, building, travel will lead to catastrophic consequences that are not going to be reversible. The planet is warming, and we are all going to die.

In reality, people should be more afraid of cold, not warming.

Our Earth’s atmospheric temperatures have warmed by about 1 degree since 1850. This trend occurred long before the first Model T came off the assembly line and more than 200 years before significant amounts of carbon dioxide were added to the atmosphere in the 1950s.

Modest warming and rise in atmospheric CO2 were actually beneficial to humanity and the Earth’s ecosystems:

1.     “Deserts are shrinking, and the Earth is greening. NASA satellite data shows 1982-2009 fifty percent increased vegetative growth on Earth’s surface with less than 4 percent had a decrease in vegetation.” Sahara is showing a desert retreat and growing of plants and grasses.

2.     “Extinctions are declining. IUCN Red List reported that extinctions since the late 1800s and early 1900s have been in decline.”

3.     “Natural disasters have been declining. According to the Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters’ EM-DAT database, natural disasters declined by 10 percent since 2000. Severe weather-related deaths have declined nearly 99 percent since the early 1900s.”

 The Green Lobby narrative across the world is not about saving the planet from imminent danger due to global warming and increased levels of carbon dioxide, the gas of plant life, it is about population control by a few elites who claim they know what is better for the planet; and that better is to reduce humanity from its current 8 billion to a “comfortable” half billion. Ultimately, they want to reduce the civilized world, all the progress humanity has achieved, to a state of feudal existence controlled by a few.

***Credit to the CO2 group in Virginia, dedicated to proper education of Americans about the climate and the benefits of carbon dioxide on our planet.

Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside

Communists across the globe, loyal to Lenin and the ideology of Marx, have ruled by propaganda, indoctrination, ruthless violence, and armed, well-organized groups. The explosion of communism started with the revolution in Russia.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolutionary and Sabotage), under the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars). Cheka’s role was to crush all opposition to the Bolsheviks.

For over seventy years in the former USSR, Cheka was the symbol of terror and had the power to arrest, imprison, and execute anybody at will. By February 1918, Cheka agents could shoot “counterrevolutionary agitators” on the spot.

When Lenin spoke at a factory in Moscow in August 1918, he was shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was wounded but survived. Because of this assassination attempt, Cheka rounded up many non-communists and executed them.

After Cheka became the terrorizing arm of the Soviet regime, the Russians feared its power and trembled at the mere mention of its agents.

Even though the Communists were defeated in the first election of 1917 under the Bolshevik regime, it did not stop them from eventually consolidating power over a large country that was in great confusion during the overthrow of the czarist regime and its replacement with the Provisional Government.

The first election was scheduled for November 25, 1917. But the Bolsheviks took power on November 7, 1917. The Bolsheviks were ruling at the time of the election, but they were defeated when they received only 25 percent of the vote and had 175 of the 700 deputies. The Russian people did not want the Bolsheviks, but the Bolsheviks wanted power and control at all costs.

Lenin’s will to establish a dictatorship had to overcome the will of the people. When the Constituent Assembly was scheduled to meet on January 18, 1918, Lenin was prepared. He packed the meeting hall with heavily armed soldiers and sailors. When the meeting opened, the 175 Bolshevik deputies began pounding their desks and interrupted other speakers non-stop. Appeals to order were met with more disruptions. When other deputies tried to speak, the soldiers and the sailors pointed loaded rifles and pistols at them. But despite all the disruptions, the Constituent Assembly rejected the Bolsheviks and their political platform. The Bolshevik deputies walked out in protest.

The scheduled next-day meeting of the Constituent Assembly never took place. Lenin and his Bolsheviks issued a decree that abolished the Constituent Assembly. The new and democratically elected government of the Russian people ended after one day.

But the Russian people did not like the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. By the summer of 1918 military resistance to the Bolshevik rule emerged and turned into a civil war which lasted through 1920. Lenin went into hiding.

After his return from New York City where he worked as a journalist, Leon Trotsky stepped in to become the “elected” Chairman of the Petrograd soviet and “organizer of the actual insurrection.” As commissar of war, Trotsky reorganized the Red Army.

Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia proclaimed independence from Russia at the time but Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijanian nationalities were unable to establish independent states and were suppressed.

The economic collapse that followed under the Bolshevik rule gave rise to many rebellions, the most notable being the sailors at the naval fortress in Kronstadt. The rebellion failed and all those participating were killed in battle, executed afterwards by the Cheka, or imprisoned.

While this revolt was taking place, Lenin’s communists stopped the practice of requisitioning grain from peasants and authorized a “limited return to private enterprise” as a New Economic Policy. A partial economic recovery took place in 1921. But the Bolsheviks’ unrealistic policies destroyed agriculture and caused a terrible famine which took the lives of 5 million Russians by 1922.

By the time Lenin died in 1924, the dictatorship of the proletariat had absolute power and control over everything, including strict censorship of all means of communication. Labor, with its trade unions in which membership was forced of anyone in the labor force, became an arm of the state.

“Even though Lenin was dead, Marxism-Leninism, the merger of his practical action with the theory of Marx and Engels, still lived to guide the world Communist movement.” (J.E. Hoover, p.89)

European Communism went underground after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to re-organize and re-emerge in a new form with help from the media, western academia, and NGOs.

One individual, who jumped from perestroika to the green movement, is the man credited with “dismantling” the Berlin Wall, the former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In 1993 he became the founding president of the newly organized NGO, the International Green Cross, “the world’s first all-encompassing global environmental group.” Communism became green and the conscience of a new and frightened generation of Marxists beholden to the environmental agenda. Environment : The Greening of Gorbachev : The former Soviet leader now heads a new environmental group, the International Green Cross. And he has his critics. - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

Other well-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sprouted around the globe in no time, all promoting a form of green collectivism that is in urgent need to save the planet from an imaginary anthropogenic Armageddon called global warming. And western academia resonated even louder the same mantra of environmentalism, “the sky is falling fearmongering,” in their indoctrination of students.

Even though communism is now green on the outside, it is still red on the inside and adheres to the creed of force and ruthless violence and oppression, the hallmark of communist power and control. Technology and the Internet make it all possible.

 

 

 

Our Globalist World

Our modern world is changing fundamentally in a very short period of time, and we are becoming global citizens. We are closer than ever to a new world order, no borders, no national identity, digital currency, Chinese style social scores (rewarding and punishing behavior of all citizens), 15-minute cities, sustainable everything in life, no national language, global citizens shaped and controlled by billionaire globalists and their worker bees in various NGOs (non-governmental organizations), generously funded by said billionaires, central banks, central governments, and heads of state who share their agenda.

For the first time in history, the modern world which owes its existence to Europe, is not shaped by geography, i.e., mountains, peaks, rivers, valleys, oceans, seas, and large lakes. It is shaped by irrational fear, a bioweapon, governments, two proxy wars, and especially the false global warming/climate change narrative.

Tim Marshall, in his book, Prisoners of Geography, argues that geographical features explain “why there are so many nation states,” cultures, and languages, not just in Europe but all over the world.

Marshall theorizes that the Danube basin and the Danube River (1,771 miles long), originating in Germany’s Black Forest and flowing into the Black Sea, “affects eighteen countries and forms natural borders along the way,” a potential explanation why there are so many small countries in Europe. He explains that the Danube even formed natural borders during the Roman Empire, later during the Ottoman Empire, and during the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Physical barriers such as tall mountains and peaks have prevented countries from going to war, a strong deterrent against military invasions. Ethnic and religious divisions have been marked by rivers which created a border.

Topography, i.e. navigable rivers, flatlands, deserts, the absence or existence of high mountains, ignoring harsh climates, very cold, dry, or extremely rainy, have been recipes for disasters across history.

One example of a very large country which has been invaded multiple times from the west (Poles, Swedes, French, Germans, to name a few) in the last 500 years is Russia. It is six-million square miles huge; has eleven time zones; it takes six days to cross by train. It has vast forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppes, taiga, and mountains.

But things are changing now in the twenty-first century. Many countries today have powerful drones, western technology, and smart weaponry on their side.

Who is controlling the modern world then if “borders, language, and cultures” are no longer significant in the existence of a nation? For a short answer, it is the United Nations, NATO, World Health Organization, European Union, World Economic Forum with its enslaving Great Reset, World Bank, central banks with digital currency, technocrats, the Bilderbergers, and the Council of Foreign Relations. For a longer answer, add power mad billionaires of all stripes, corrupt politicians of all parties, heads of state, academia, mainstream media, and Hollywood.

How are these globalist entities and individuals accomplishing the fast conversion of the traditional world, formerly limited by geography and made up of 195 countries, into a one world government and open borders?

-         Health control manipulating fear and mass hysteria (WHO, UN, and governments)

-         Water control manipulation (UN and climate NGOs)

-         Weather manipulation (governments and their military)

-         Purposeful desertification (UN, governments, environmental NGOs)

-         Global warming transformed into climate change industry propaganda (UN and all its myriad of organizations, governments, media, heads of state)

-         Technology manipulating how we live (technocracy, UN, EU, governments)

-         Space technology (military, governments, heads of state)

-         Creation of artificial shortages through governmental polices (all of the above)

-         Interdiction of plentiful fossil fuels use (presidential decrees and executive orders, all of the above)

-         Destruction of thriving economies by forcing them to adopt insufficient wind and solar energy at all levels (UN, EU, heads of state, billionaires, and all environmental NGOs)

-         Destruction of the supply chain of goods and services (all of the above)

-         Deliberate famine through control of food production and distribution (UN, WEF, politicians, heads of state, NGO propaganda)

-         Population reduction through faulty and untested vaccines (WHO, UN)

-         Radiation from 5G technology, smart meters, and Wi-Fi (UN, technocracy, governments, EU, WEF)

-         Indoctrination to accept global tyranny without any protest (media, academia, Hollywood)

-         Digital currency controlling everything we do, with the ability to steal wealth, deny wealth accumulation, freedom, travel, food, health care, denying fertilizer use, education, housing, electricity, fuel, heat, air conditioning, access to cars, entertainment (central banks, World Bank, UN, WEF, technocracy, heads of state, governments, EU, NGOs, agriculture departments)

The red reset button (an emergency stop button in industrial equipment) which Hillary Clinton had awkwardly presented in translation to Russian Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on March 6, 2009, was meant to be a symbol of political reset between the two nations’ diplomacy.

In retrospect, was this uncomfortable gesture much more than that, could it have also symbolized the coming dangerous reset of the world as we know it?

 

The Traditions and the Families We Take for Granted

As far as I can remember, Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations were depressing for kids unless it snowed heavily and they could go sledding, ice skating in the streets, and having snowball fights with all the children residing in the apartment complex. Being stuck in a cold apartment, layered to the hilt to stay warm, with nothing to do except read, was really miserable for most kids. We wanted to be outdoors.

It was depressing to watch our parents struggle to find food to cook a special meal for Christmas, for the New Year, and to make ends meet on small state salaries. We were too young, but we understood the word “no” and the phrase, “we can’t afford it.” There was more food in the stores provided for the masses, but the lines were still endless.

Dad always found a small Christmas tree which brought into our small apartment the fragrant essence of fir, bright, shiny colors, and cheer. The kitchen smelled like roasted chicken and pork chops, potatoes, fried sausages made by grandpa, mamaliga (polenta made with yellow corn meal), and mom’s special cornulete (little horns) baked with walnuts, cocoa, sunflower oil, and powdered sugar.

When mom could find beef, she made us a special salad called salata de Boeuf, boiled chopped beef, boiled and chopped potatoes, green peas, and mixed with homemade mayonnaise. The job of mixing the eggs until the mayo took shape was mine on account of my young hands and arms which did not get tired and achy as quickly. We did not have a mixer and frankly, I had never seen one until I came to the United States as an adult. I had never seen any other kitchen appliance or vacuums that most people in the West took for granted.

Mom also made a special Christmas bread, cozonac, with Turkish delights and chopped walnuts folded in cocoa. The loaf was drizzled with a mixture of egg and butter, and it smelled divine while baking in the gas oven.

We were not drinkers, but dad brought home for the holidays two bottles of wine and some plum brandy or rum. It was a tradition to toast the New Year with a full glass of wine in hopes that life in the coming year would be easier and good health and luck would prevail.

We went to grandma’s Orthodox Church in the village on Christmas Eve. When the mass ended, the congregation circled the church three times with burning candles in celebration of Jesus’s birth. The church was empty throughout the year, save for the older ladies in the village who attended regular services, but during Christmas and Easter the church was always full. Those who mustered the courage to attend came to church to praise the birth of Jesus and to pray for a better life.

People shared their extra holiday food with the less fortunate, those alone, sick, widowed, or left without any family.

Christmas time was for families to be home with their loved ones and New Year’s Eve was the time to have a party with the extended family, usually in the country where food and drink was more plentiful. People had gardens and canned a lot, and some raised pigs to feed many at Christmas. It was the time of the year when we had the most protein and everyone shared in the bounty.

Holidays became more sedate as the years flew by and we got older. We have plenty of food now but fewer and fewer people to share it with. The Christmas tree seems lonely without the laughter of children. There is no Bogart to drink the tree water and to sleep under the low hanging ornaments and the twinkling lights. He crossed the Rainbow Bridge five years ago.

Mom died a year and a half ago and her loss changed our lives fundamentally. She was our matriarch, the super glue that kept our small family together. Her happy spirit is always with us. She is finally reunited with my dad in Heaven.

Our people have scattered around the world, with their own families, unable to visit their loved ones. Many passed away. Gone are the times when the children remained in the same village or even the same town with their parents. They have dispersed everywhere for better opportunities and to build their own homes, seldom returning to the place they were born in or spent their formative years.

It is true, you can never go back home, you will not find what you were looking for because life has moved on, but the Christmas traditions we once took for granted will endure no matter where we are, and so will the memories.

Chilly Air, Draft, and Other Superstitions

My people are a superstitious sort. It goes back to our ancestors, the Dacians, to their culture, and the influence that the Romans had upon them when they were colonized and brought into the vast Roman Empire fold. The Dacians had been a thorn in the Roman Empire's side. 

Trajan defeated Decebalus, the king of Dacia, in 105 A.D. and reduced the Dacian capital Sarmizegetusa to ruins in 106 A.D., absorbing some of Dacia into the Roman Empire.

The superstitions and strange beliefs they held have traveled across the centuries into our modern society, i.e., turning around when a black cat crosses one’s path, not walking under a ladder, sprinkling salt over the left shoulder to blind the bad spirits at the dinner table, spitting three times to ward off evil and a bad fate, avoiding the “evil eye” of a blue-eyed or green-eyed person by wearing a red ribbon, not returning home to retrieve a forgotten object once one left the house, not stepping on the threshold when entering a house, and not stepping between cracks of tiled floors, just to name a few.

The one superstition I never understood was the placing of a large and sharp knife under the mattress of an unbaptized child. The knife was to protect the newborn from evil spirits while they breathed the air on earth without the blessing of a baptism. I have no idea how far back this superstition went.

One deeply ingrained belief, still alive today, is that a person with wet hair and without socks exposed to chilly air and draft can become sick. We are not talking about hypothermia as the result of spending hours in the cold and windy elements, just a short exposure to draft and chilly air. And pushing the irrational boundaries even further, eating ice cream or drinking cold beverages with ice cubes would certainly cause a sore throat; my people believe that to be true.

It was not just the occasional nurse, teacher, engineer, doctor, or other professional who held such beliefs, it went all the way to the top of the hierarchy.

After the first President of the socialist republic returned from a Moscow visit with a sore throat, those surrounding him determined immediately that he must have gotten sick from a draft during his travels or from eating ice cream. Only later did his doctors establish that it was a rapidly developing form of throat cancer. The next president that followed him after his death was convinced, according to his Gen. Pacepa, that the Russians had him radiated for insubordination.

The next president took precautions to preserve his voice and throat and drank lots of chamomile tea, an herb containing traces of a mild antibiotic. His irrational fear went as far as to avoid and prevent all drafts and chilly air indoors, including fans and air conditioning. The modern conveniences were specifically banned and removed from all his residences and offices. He went as far as removing the central air conditioning in all public buildings.

On every foreign visit the dictator requested that all air conditioning systems be turned off for the duration of his stay. His employees had to seal off leaky and drafty windows and air vents everywhere that he happened to lodge, sleep, and hold meetings.

Drafts could come under doors, so the doors were plugged if they did not reach the floor. The president and his wife wore silk and cashmere socks, suede slippers, and hunting boots with warmers in them. No chance that the president and his demanding wife, their collective pampered feet, hands, and heads would ever get cold.

They wore the warmest clothes, gloves, finest astrakhan hats, smooth calfskin boots, finest cashmere in every winter garment, while the rest of the population froze in the concrete Soviet era apartments.

Both the dictator and his wife had a wardrobe of 365 suits, 365 dresses for her, 365 pairs of shoes each, 365 purses, hosiery, one for each day of the year. Once they were worn, every item of clothing was incinerated. They even traveled with their own sheets, towels, and food, to cover all bases.