On November 28, 1978, I arrived in Rome with other émigrés from the USSR, and I was stunned by what I saw. The entire city was covered with portraits of Lenin, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, and decorated with red flags—even more so than Moscow on the anniversary of the October Revolution. An endless procession of beautiful Italian nurses walked along Via Veneto, Rome’s main street, carrying giant banners: “WE WANT FREE MEAT TWICE A WEEK, LIKE IN THE SOVIET UNION!”

We fresh émigrés from the USSR looked at each other in amazement. Since 1917, only prison sentences had been free in the USSR. Before we left, they took away our passports and citizenship and even charged us 500 rubles (about $600) for our incarceration!

However, at that time, not only were all the grocery stores in the USSR empty, they were empty absolutely —except for cans of Bulgarian “lecho in tomato,” there was nothing on the shelves! At factories and government offices, workers and employees were given coupons allowing them to buy no more than two kilograms of bones with some meat on it. This was called “to give meat.” Whenever food went on sale somewhere, we would run there with money and bags, telling our neighbors, “They’re giving buckwheat at the store!” Or, “They’re giving sugar!” In the Soviet lexicon, the word “to give” meant selling at the state price. We only used the word “to sell” in reference to the market, where the same products were five times more expensive. However, foreign journalists living in Moscow didn’t delve into such details. They heard people running to the store and shouting, “They’re giving potatoes!”, and wrote that in their newspapers….

In May of 1979, I flew from Rome to New York. There were no portraits of Lenin or Che Guevara on the streets. In fact, street names were invisible because garbage bags were piled up to the level of second-story windows, even on Broadway. During the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), New York was completely bankrupt. High taxes had driven businesses to New Jersey, and the mayor’s office wasn’t paying wages to garbage collectors, subway workers, or bus drivers. They were constantly striking, and when their strikes coincided, the city was paralyzed. Fights erupted in the long lines at gas stations for fuel.

It was then that Sam, the owner of a small store on the corner of 179th Street and Broadway, told me, “Yes, we made a mistake electing Carter as president. But in two years, we’ll throw him out of the White House, and everything will be fine….”

After Carter came the great Ronald Reagan, who said, “We are Americans; we can do it!”, and rescued America from bankruptcy.

Today, I want to tell all New Yorkers born after 1980 who are planning to vote for the socialist Mamdani that everything I described above awaits you if you make the mistake of electing the socialist-Islamist Mamdani as mayor. But who will raise New York after him? Lenin also once promised, “Power to the people! Land to the peasants!” In reality, no one received power or land. Instead, they received the forced confiscation of all food products, the Gulag, and Stalin’s repressions. This is true everywhere and always — as soon as socialists come to power, they strangle the economy and agricultural production with taxes and plunder. The rest are forced by repression to remain silent or glorify their wise leadership.

This is what Mamdani will do if he is elected mayor of New York. Do you want to see portraits of Iranian ayatollahs on Broadway and Fifth Avenue?

P.S. The Jews will have to flee because Mamdani will blame them for the empty city treasury and allow anyone to loot them. This has been happening everywhere, starting with the Alexandria pogrom in 38 CE. But will the Jews have time to escape? In 1939, after witnessing the rise of Nazism in Germany, Vladimir Jabotinsky came to Warsaw and urged Polish Jews to resettle in Palestine urgently. “I have come to you with a last attempt. I call on you. Wake up!” At the time, Polish Jews only woke up in Buchenwald. Will New York Jews wake up today, or will they wait for the Muslim Brotherhood and HAMAS to resettle there?

Image: Ivan Radic, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.