Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

He was on the road almost every week, traveling by train, plane, and occasionally in those junkies that bounced so much on rural roads that it felt like his insides were shifting—from Moscow to Leningrad to Minsk to Smolensk to Kiev to Tbilisi, shuttling back and forth between every newly built or under-construction information hub.

The site selection and equipment plans for the first batch of fifty public computing centers have been submitted, and he needs to personally inspect the actual situation at each location.

Is the site big enough? Is the power supply stable? Are the communication lines connected? Are there trained operators...?

These issues are always vaguely described as "basic conditions" in reports, but they often present a different picture on the ground.

Basic execution, basic success, basic stability, basic leadership... in the end, it all turns into basic disintegration!

But he soon discovered a problem that was even more unsettling than the development of information technology.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The cause was Decree No. 4719-XI issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on May 23 – “On Strengthening the Struggle Against the Acquisition of Non-Labor Income”.

Above this decree were two supporting documents: a resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on May 15, which was not publicly released but was issued to party organizations at all levels as a policy framework directive to convey the spirit of the meeting.

Every civil servant knows that the so-called "conveying the spirit of the meeting" must not only involve receiving the spirit, but also implementing it.

Also produced on the same day was Council of Ministers Resolution 401, which was at the administrative level and mobilized the Ministry of Home Affairs, the tax system, the Ministry of Trade, and the Ministry of Agriculture.

The three-tiered document was a combined punch, simultaneously striking the same target from three directions: the Party, the government, and the law—the Soviet Union's "non-labor income."

The decree was scheduled to officially take effect on July 1st. However, the news had already spread to the grassroots level through internal communication within Party organizations at all levels as early as mid-May.

According to communication studies, "internal communication" and "rumors" always travel faster than official announcements, because every cadre who hears the news will immediately tell their relatives and friends to stop immediately so they don't get arrested.

By the time Slava began his rural work in early June, the decree had not yet officially taken effect, but its influence had already spread throughout the grassroots economy of the entire Soviet Union.

June 1, Smolensk Oblast.

Slava's purpose in coming here was to inspect the newly established information node of the agricultural production and research consortium, which is one of the first pilot projects to be promoted to Russia based on the model he developed in Ukraine for a year.

The node is located in an agricultural technical school under the consortium, where two large computers allocated from the Ministry of Electronics Industry have been installed and are undergoing joint debugging and testing.

The air conditioners in the computer room started running earlier than the machines themselves, and the powerful blasts of cool air from the industrial fans kept many workers in the computer room to cool off.

Slava glanced at the information node in the morning and found that the progress was in line with expectations, but the communication lines had not yet been connected. The KGB, which was supervising the construction on site, said that they would have to wait for the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to come and lay the lines next week.

Slava called the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications again to ask what they were doing, and they were told that they were maintaining and updating the lines of several other industry-research consortia.

Well, that's it. Let's try looking elsewhere.

So he decided to visit an agricultural breeding site under the consortium. It used to be a collective farm, but now it has been merged into the agricultural production and research consortium.

He learned a lesson from his experience over the past few years: the quality of a policy ultimately depends on how well the people it serves are doing. If people's lives are getting worse, then even the most impressive data reports are meaningless.

His original intention was to enable people to live a good life, and he firmly believed that no one would be forgotten.

The agricultural breeding site is located on the outskirts of the town where the consortium is located. A large factory building with a sign on it clearly indicates that it belongs to a collective breeding household. There is also a large herd of cattle grazing on the grass outside the factory building.

The village is right outside the factory. Due to the self-operated policy, each house has its own vegetable garden/livestock pen behind it, which is more or less owned by the agricultural workers.

Slava first went to see the collective farm, chatted with the farm manager, and then went to check on the condition of the cattle and pigs.

The factory is not yet connected to the terminal, and the so-called workers' committee established in his pilot state is nonsense, but being included in the production and research consortium at least ensures a continuous supply of raw materials, and production can be maintained normally.

So he came to the village and saw a row of low brick pigsties scattered on a muddy open space, the air filled with the smell of pig manure and silage.

Accompanied by the village secretary, Slava entered a farmer's home. While touring the pigsty, he suddenly noticed that the farmer accompanying him had a strange expression on his face.

"No, that's not right."

The faces of grassroots officials when welcoming inspections from higher authorities are completely different from the expressions on the faces of farmers.

He glanced into the pigpen again—a few half-grown pigs were rooting around the feeding trough, which contained a mixture of cornmeal and chopped hay, and didn't seem particularly special. But he noticed a few white fragments scattered on the muddy ground around the edge of the trough—irregularly shaped, but with a texture distinctly different from the surrounding soil and feed scraps.

Bread crumbs?!

The village secretary and farmers accompanying him all looked very nervous; clearly, this was no secret to the people in the village.

“What is this?” Slava frowned.

He crouched down to take a closer look, then stood up and walked to another feeding trough—this one was covered with a layer of straw, which looked like it was being kept warm.

"Wow—"

Slava picked up a pitchfork from the side and lifted the straw—the trough was covered with a layer of black bread torn into small pieces.

Some of the bread chunks had already been rooted up by the pigs and mixed into their feed, while others still retained their shape. Slava knew it all too well; that dark brown state-owned bread factory produced millions of standard black bread chunks every day.

Slava stared at the bread for a few seconds.

"How can you feed bread to pigs?! Do you mean I'm still half asleep, and when I wake up the Alliance is already incredibly wealthy and has already entered a communist society?!"

Slava was both shocked and furious. Even in his previous life before he transmigrated, feeding livestock with bread was a huge waste!

"How many people in the world are starving to death right now? The Alliance's food self-sufficiency rate is not even 100%. A few years ago, we even had to use our gold reserves to import foreign food! Is this how the Alliance's food is being wasted? Hmm?"

Bread was the most basic symbol of dignity in Soviet culture. Bread and salt were the highest form of hospitality. During the Siege of Leningrad, a ration of 125 grams of bread was the difference between being alive and dead.

The secretary of the consortium following behind was a man in his forties dressed in cadre attire. He quickly recovered from his panic and began to reprimand the farmers in a manner very typical of grassroots cadres: "They are proactive when their superiors are around."

"What kind of behavior is this! Wasting the country's food!"

The government-subsidized bread is for humans, not pigs! A new law is about to take effect: feeding livestock with flour products will result in fines for first-time offenders and confiscation of livestock for repeat offenders, with criminal charges! You—”

"Stop! I said stop!"

Slava was initially shocked, thinking it was an isolated case, but he had been to the grassroots level so many times in the past two years that he was very familiar with this kind of rhetoric!

As soon as the village secretary opened his mouth, he knew that feeding pigs with bread was an open secret, at least in this village.

Slava quickly regained his senses. If it was an isolated incident, then punishment was still possible, but if it was a mass incident, then the reasons should be reflected upon.

“This is definitely not an isolated case,” Slava’s voice regained its calm. “We need to figure out why this is happening.”

Only by getting to the bottom of the matter and being realistic can we stop this phenomenon.

Simply relying on laws to identify and stop phenomena is merely treating the symptoms, not the root cause, and is a one-size-fits-all policy. Wasn't that the same thing that the central government issued last year regarding the prohibition of alcohol?

He looked at the consortium secretary, whose enthusiastic performance froze as he was interrupted, like an actor reciting lines who was suddenly told the script had been changed.

It seems that the local officials are not used to this pragmatic leader.

"Investigation and research are the most important methods for governing at the grassroots level. We Communists must never become detached from the masses."

Slava turned to the farmers whose faces had turned pale, patted them on the shoulder, and reassured them:

"Don't worry, comrades, don't be nervous. I'm not here to impose fines or arrest people. I'm here to solve your problems!"

Tell me—why feed pigs bread?

You can't possibly not know that bread is more expensive than animal feed, so there must be some reason why you think buying bread is more cost-effective than buying animal feed, right?

The farmer's eyes gradually changed from evasive to hesitant, and he remained silent.

In their grassroots experience, when a cadre from the central government suddenly says, "Tell the truth," it often means, "Once you tell the truth, I'll know how to punish you!"

Therefore, the farmers' first reaction is always to remain silent.

But Slava had a knack for putting people at ease; he was 1.65 meters tall, had a somewhat round face, and occasionally spoke in a casual tone that didn't quite sound like that of a high-ranking official...

All of these things combined made him look more like a distant relative visiting than a ministerial official on an inspection tour.

"You may not know who I am, but you all remember the central government's alcohol ban a while back, right? The first version was terrible, but it was changed in just a few days—that's right, I was in charge of it!"

So please rest assured, comrades, I am here to solve the problem, not to deal with the person who raised it.

An older peasant woman was the first to speak. Perhaps it was because women were more outspoken than men in such situations, or perhaps she simply couldn't hold back any longer:

"Comrade Minister, it's not that we don't know bread shouldn't be fed to pigs, but please hear us out first—"

This is the story she told.

Her son, Alexei, was just over thirty years old. After graduating from high school, he learned a trade in the city—repairing electrical appliances.

Everyone knew the quality of household appliances on the Soviet market: electric fans produced in state-owned factories wouldn't last a year, leaky drain pipe joints were standard in washing machines, and the lifespan of television picture tubes was getting shorter and shorter, just like the average tenure of a general secretary.

So her son's business is booming. Neighbors all ask him to fix things, and he has even taught himself to make furniture. He does a great job with his carpentry, and his orders have been piling up for more than a month.

Slava also occasionally cracked jokes to lighten the mood:

"That's so true! I can totally relate to the electric fan thing! When I first came to Moscow, I queued for half an hour to buy a domestically made electric fan. I left it for the whole winter, and when I turned it on the following summer, it started shooting sparks. I was so scared that I almost threw it out the window!"

Finally, it was Comrade Ivanova—my partner—who bought me a West German electric fan while she was on a business trip to Europe. It's been almost two years now, and it hasn't had a single problem. I haven't had to pay the repairman a single ruble!

Upon hearing that this high-ranking official had such an experience, the tense atmosphere eased considerably, and everyone chimed in with their own stories.

Some people say their refrigerator compressor is louder than a tractor; some say their sewing machine pedal broke after only a few months of use; some say their village only has one telephone...

The unique atmosphere of life at the grassroots level, a mix of complaints and self-deprecation, spread across the muddy ground of the pigsty.

The farmer continued, saying that once the law was enacted, everything her son did—repairing appliances, making furniture, doing carpentry—fell into the scope of the "unauthorized individual labor" penalty.

According to the 1976 Council of Ministers' list of restrictions, individual labor could only be engaged in tailoring, shoe repair, and seal engraving, and a certificate was required—her son had neither a certificate nor was he among the permitted categories.

"The police have come three times! Each time they came they fined me. The first time they fined me 25 rubles, the second time 50, and the third time they said if I didn't stop operating, they would file a case for speculation and profiteering, which carries a maximum sentence of five years!"

What does my son, an appliance repairman, have to do with speculation and profiteering? Every ruble he earns is earned through his own skills! How can it not be considered his hard-earned money?

Her son's business failed, so he had to return to the countryside to help sell agricultural products to the collective farm market in the city: cucumbers, tomatoes, and some potatoes grown on their private plot.

But in the last two days, another problem has arisen—inspections have begun in the market, requiring each stall owner to prove on the spot that the products they sell are "grown on their own land".

"My son was clearly selling things from our family's private plot of land!"

Our family has been farming this land since the year the Soviet regime was established! But the police said we need proof. What proof? A certificate from the collective farm!

The accountant said that although our family was a member of the collective farm, the things we sold fell under the category of individual businesses, and they had no jurisdiction over our affairs.

Now they're just passing the buck and nobody cares. In the end, my son's income was classified as non-labor income at the market, damn it! He got fined by those blue-skinned dogs again!

Her voice grew louder and louder, and Slava sighed while patting her shoulder to comfort her.

"The matter of feeding the pigs with bread—" Slava steered the conversation back.

“That’s why!” the farmer’s husband chimed in. “Our pigs are individually raised, but the feed for the cooperative is from the government and can only be given to collective farmers. We used to be able to ‘get’ a little bit from the cooperative—”

He spoke a little softer, a gray area that everyone does but everyone knows shouldn't say.

"Now that the law is in effect, the enforcement is strict, so we don't dare to take it anymore. We have to buy the feed ourselves. But feed is so expensive—35 kopeks a kilogram of mixed feed, and bread? A loaf of black bread in the state-run store is only 16 kopeks! Bread is half the price of feed!"

Slava understood completely at that moment.

For decades, the Union provided huge subsidies for bread, a necessity of life, making its retail price far below the cost of production, with the aim of ensuring that every Soviet citizen could afford bread.

This well-intentioned policy worked reasonably well under normal circumstances, but after the anti-non-labor income law blocked other income channels for self-employed individuals—farmers couldn't afford market-priced feed, couldn't "obtain" feed from the government, and still needed to fatten up their pigs to sell to cooperatives for cash...

The cheap bread subsidized by the government became the only affordable alternative to animal feed.

The government spent billions of rubles subsidizing bread to ensure people had enough to eat, but a portion of this subsidy was transformed into a disguised feed subsidy for individual farmers through the chain of bread-pig trough-pork-individual farmers' cash income.

The "non-labor income" that the law wants to prohibit has not disappeared; it has simply continued to exist in a more difficult and absurd form that the state can no longer monitor.

Before bidding farewell to the farmers, Slava said something to them:

"Alright, I understand your situation. This isn't your fault, comrades. No one should be fined for trying to support their family. I'll take this issue back to Moscow to raise, and until then, continue with your lives as usual—"

He thought for a moment and added:

"Forget about feeding the pigs bread; bread is for humans, after all. If you can think of other feed alternatives... could the consortium open up some feed quotas for individual farmers? I think a little subsidy would be helpful. I'll have someone look into it."

...

After returning from Smolensk, Slava did not go directly back to Moscow; instead, he changed his itinerary and made temporary trips to Leningrad, Kiev, and Tbilisi.

What he saw in these three cities angered him even more than the pigsties in Smolensk.

In the markets of Leningrad, on a morning in early June, plainclothes and uniformed police officers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs were checking each stall. Every vendor selling fruit, vegetables, and flowers was required to produce on the spot proof that the goods they were selling were "products from their own land."

A middle-aged Georgian man was surrounded by two plainclothes officers at his flower stall. In front of him were hundreds of wrapped carnations, arranged pleasingly in colors ranging from deep red to light pink. The officers demanded that he produce "certificates of origin" for the flowers.

The Georgian man explained haltingly in heavily accented Russian: “These flowers were grown by my family in Batumi. We’ve been growing flowers for three generations. It’s our tradition to transport flowers from the South Caucasus to northern cities to sell in winter—”

"Tradition is not proof. Do you have a certificate of origin issued by a collective farm?"

"I'm not affiliated with the collective farm; I'm an individual business owner—"

"If individual businesses don't have certificates of origin, they are engaging in illegal speculation. Since they didn't grow the produce themselves, they must have bought it from someone else and resold it."

"I told you I grew them myself!"

Where are your supporting documents?

These individual farmers need to prove that they grew the flowers themselves, but since they are not members of the collective farm, the collective farm will not issue certificates. Therefore, without certificates, they are presumed to be reselling, which is equivalent to speculation.

The burden of proof to prove innocence rests with the defendant—and the only way to prove innocence is through a document that is not legally available to him.