"The Russians" II

(This images shows Russian troops taking Samarkand in 1868, which is appropriate here because, in SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), the Russian Empire has relocated to Samarkand just as the British Empire has relocated to India, Africa and Australia, a decade later.)

The previous post stated two social consequences of the Fall but there was a third. I summarized what some of the post-Fall cannibals did but what of the others? Here again, there is a social distinction:

in societies where, for one or two generations, men hunted each other to eat, trust ceased and savagery resulted;

in Samarkand where the Russians ate their Asian subjects, the elite was horribly united by cannibalistic rituals which they subsequently continued in order to maintain their rule, thus generating not miserable savagery but sophisticated barbarism, helped in its war against civilization by an uncanny prescience that is intensified by an enforced inbreeding that could only be practiced by such a barbaric dictatorship - so maybe the two apparently disparate premises fit together quite well?