When you chop wood, chips fly

When you chop wood, chips fly is a proverb for treating casualties as an unavoidable price of achieving a larger purpose. The book traces its political force from Bolshevik justifications for collectivization, famine, and purges to the market transition: the proclaimed future changes, but the logic that some people must be broken for it persists. Its recurring significance lies in the challenge that follows: those cast as the chips are no longer silent, and competing political camps fight over who may speak for them and what their suffering means.

A proverb inherited by new reforms

The narrator recalls that the Bolsheviks used the saying to justify collectivization, famine, and purges, as well as the claim that the people themselves were the enemies of the people. The proverb makes violence sound like a practical consequence of work: the wood is chopped for a purpose, and the chips are incidental. Its familiar equivalent, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” gives the same logic an air of common sense, shifting attention from the people harmed to the project said to require their harm.

After the free market replaces the dictatorship of the proletariat as the horizon of a radiant future, the same proverb still serves the chefs of Yeltsin-era shock therapy reforms and those close enough to power to benefit. The political promise has changed, but the image of necessary breakage has not. The passage’s sharpest distinction is that people who see themselves as broken eggs are no longer afraid of being sent to Siberia and now speak out. The proverb therefore does not close the argument; it helps explain why an old justification has become newly contestable.

The people left to bear the cost

The book gives that protest a varied social face. In Moscow, retirees reduced to begging, unpaid soldiers, nationalists angered by the liquidation of the empire, Communists mourning a time when everyone was poor but equal, and people disoriented by the loss of a comprehensible history all appear among the demonstrators. They do not share one program. Their conjunction instead shows how the costs of the new order gather people with different grievances into the same public space.

Eduard Limonov attends the demonstrations whenever he is in Moscow. Readers of his articles in Dyen recognize him, congratulate and kiss him, and bless him as someone with whom Russia is not lost. Invited onto a platform by Viktor Alksnis, he denounces the supposed democrats as profiteers who have betrayed the blood shed by their fathers in the Great Patriotic War. He says that people have suffered more in one year of supposed democracy than in seventy years of communism and urges them to prepare for civil war. The crowd applauds after each sentence. The episode reverses the proverb’s usual emphasis: instead of asking the injured to accept their losses for a promised future, Eduard makes their suffering an accusation against those claiming to deliver one.

Competing claims to legitimacy

During the confrontation at the Moscow White House, the proverb’s political world becomes more confused, not less. Several thousand patriots gather outside a building that had recently symbolized Boris Yeltsin’s victory and that of the democrats. Some of the crowd are fascists, yet they present themselves as guardians of constitutional order and accuse the democrats of preparing dictatorship in democracy’s name. The rebel assembly declares Yeltsin deposed, names Alexander Rutskoy president, and occupies the building, claiming to act by the people’s will. The book does not make the sides interchangeable: it shows how the language of popular suffering and constitutional legitimacy can be claimed by factions whose histories and aims remain in conflict.

Eduard joins the occupation and spends the night moving between meetings as its supporters discuss, shout, drink, write communiqués, and form a new government. At three in the morning he reaches Rutskoy, addresses him as “Comrade President,” and asks which side the army will take. When the general seems shaken by Western governments’ support for Yeltsin, Eduard argues that the West wants Russia on its knees and that the parliament is resisting dictatorship. He insists that the decisive contest is inside the White House and asks whether they have weapons. The movement from political argument to the question of weapons makes the stakes of the proverb tangible: claims about necessary sacrifice are made amid a crisis in which violence is no longer a distant metaphor.

The proverb's afterlife in political memory

The discussion of Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya adds a different test of political language. In the novel, a teacher finds the National Bolshevik paper Limonka, its name, flag, and slogans unsettling, but is prepared to see them as deliberate provocation. He regards militants’ stunts—tagging trains, unfurling banners on difficult-to-reach monuments, and throwing tomatoes at a governor—as immature, yet also courageous, because disturbances that might bring a fine in Western Europe can lead to prison in Russia. The teacher warns that talk of the fatherland, imperial greatness, and sacred causes can lead to trouble; he hopes instead for ordinary life and a middle class seeking comfort and protection from history’s spasms. The hero wants something beyond that prospect. The episode does not repeat the proverb, but it sharpens its underlying question: when is disruption treated as a necessary cost, and when does that account become a way of excusing the next injury?

The return of Communist electoral strength makes that question material again. Five years after Yeltsin declared the party illegal, polls indicate that people angered by democracy, the market, and accompanying injustice are ready to vote for it. Gennady Zyuganov campaigns less on restoring the dictatorship of the proletariat than on fighting corruption, national pride, and Russian Orthodoxy; he promises that the rich will become less rich and the poor less poor. The oligarchs, meanwhile, have reason to fear a victory that might undo their loans-for-shares arrangement, through which loans to the state could give them claims on major natural-gas and petroleum assets. The people’s losses and the powerful’s prospective gains are not incidental details here: they expose the distribution concealed by talk of unavoidable breakage.

The book later places this struggle over political memory beside Vladimir Putin’s defense of the Soviet past. Putin acknowledges that terrible things were done under communism, but rejects treating communism as equivalent to Nazism and emphasizes its grandeur, heroism, beauty, and association with childhood. This appeal speaks to people who do not want their parents’ and grandparents’ beliefs, sacrifices, and lived world dismissed as worthless. Against that appeal, the proverb’s history remains unsettled: it has served those who justify damage in the name of a future, while the people who remember the damage continue to contest the judgment that it was merely the price of progress.