Lex Anteinternet: Friday, December 12, 1924. Soviet Gun Control.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, December 12, 1924. Soviet Gun Control.: 

Friday, December 12, 1924. Soviet Gun Control.

The Central Executive Committee of the USSR issued a decree prohibiting the possession of almost all firearms, with the exception of shotguns for hunting, although much hunting in much of Russia, which was fairly common, was in fact done with rifles by necessity.

Following 1933, the penalty for violation was five years imprisonment.  In 1935 knives were added to the list.

During World War Two the ban was expanded with all firearms being required to be turned over to the state, although following the war, the USSR was awash in captured German weapons.  

Presently, rifles may be registered for hunting.

The USSR/Russia we might note, shares this status with Ireland, in being a country whose freedom, if you will, was brought about through the private exercise of arms, that then went around banning them.  In the USSR's case it isn't too surprising, as armed resistance against the Communists continued on into the 1930s in some areas and revived during the Second World War, to continue on until nearly 1950 after the war.

Truly, there's a lesson here.

1931 vintage Soviet hunting travel poster. Russia had a very vibrant hunting culture until the Communists came in.  Knowing that an armed populace would overthrow them sooner or latter, the Communists banned possession of rifles and pistols, which the Czar's government had not.  This poster shows a hunter taking on a grizzly bear with a double barreled shotgun, which might well end up in a bad result for the hunter.  Based upon the travels of a fellow I once knew who had hunted in the late stage USSR, later on you could hunt with a rifle, but it was a crappy rifle that belonged to the government you had to check out.  Interestingly, shotguns remain the one firearm produced in Russia which are somewhat good, although they are peculiar.

The first issue of the weekly Saudi Arabian newspaper Umm Al-Qura, the official newspaper of the Saudi government, was published

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.: 

Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

Farm in Louisiana, 1940.

A few weeks ago, with John Pondoro Taylor, on our companion blog Going Feral, we made a controversial entry.  Keeping with that theme, we do the same here.

If a person has agrarian interests, there's no escaping The Southern Agrarians as there is not escaping their magnum opus, I'll Take My Stand.  It is one of the great, if highly flawed, works of modern agrarian thought.

The irony, I suppose, of the work and the group needs to be mentioned from the onset. They did not make their living from the land, although it's not necessary to do that in order to be an agrarian. Rather, they were twelve men of letters who wrote what amounted to an agrarian last stand, which they were very conscious of it being at the time.  They were:

• Donald Davidson, from Tennessee, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian. He was also a segregationist.
• John Gould Fletcher, from Arkansas, poet and historian.  He was the first Southerner to win the Pulitzer Prize
• Henry Blue Kline, a writer educated at Vanderbilt who taught at Tennessee, before ironically taking government employment for the rest of his life.
• Lyle H. Lanier, an experimental psychologist from Tennessee.
• Andrew Nelson Lytle,, also of Tennessee and also of Vanderbilt. a poet, novelist and essayist
• Herman Clarence Nixon, of Alabama and a political scientist.
• Frank Lawrence Owsley, also of Alabama and Vanderbilt. a historian
• John Crowe Ransom, of Tennessee and Vanderbilt poet, professor, essayist
• Allen Tate, poet, and of Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
• John Donald Wade, of Georgia, and a professor at Harvard and Columbia, biographer and essayist
• Robert Penn Warren, of Kentucky, and who was a university professor in a variety of universities, and a poet, novelist, essayist and critic, later first poet laureate of the United States
• Stark Young, of Mississippi, a novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright

What marks them is their monumental work, which was a Depression Era, anti-New Deal, strike against the modern world and capitalism. It is flawed, in that its view of the American South was highly romantic, and frankly they were not bothered by its inherent racism and manged to basically not even see it.  The work, while important, includes muted strain of Lost Cause yearning which are not admirable at all.  Indeed, it's hard not to notice that they didn't notice that the class that was hurt the most by New Deal farm policies were African American tenant farmers.

Still, as noted, there'rs no escaping this work.  It remains the magnum opus of American Agrarianism.