I have never visited Russia but its people, its culture and its history has been an influential part of my being. I felt an empathy with the plight of the people, like no other land to my own. I cannot remember how my interest came about because as a Catholic child Russia was regarded as the enemy. One of my earliest political recollections is the standing for Parliament in the area of my childhood, a socialist, who appeared in the main street in his working clothes as a miner, and listening to the priest at mass advising the congregation about the threat of communism and the choice which parishioners faced at the General Election between candidates who were Christians and those who were not. Russia, communists, socialists were the threat, the wicked witch of the North, the Big Bad Wolf and the Giant of Jack and the Beanstalkland. Even at the height of the cold war, the blockade of Berlin and the development of ballistic nuclear missile to obliterate mankind, I had this feeling which applied to Tsar and fellow aristocrats, the landed and educated gentry and the mass of the 170 million peasants.
Nor can I remember when I first read or saw a play by Chehkov, the Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and the Seagull but did see a play on TV in my prolonged adolescence and it had an effect similar to those of Ibsen as echoing what I felt and thought without being able to express what I thought or felt to anyone else, in anyway. This attraction led to buying a volume of the plays and two of short stories. While I was also interested in American, French and Italian literature, it was the Russians whose literature I immersed my psyche: some unknown, some internationally, Bulgakov, nine volumes of Dostoevsky, two of Gogol, four of Gorky, Lermontov and Leskov, two Nabokov two Pasternak, Popov and Puskin Schdedrin two Solzhenityan, seven Tolstoy four Turgenev. These books are primarily about a landed gentry, an aristocracy, a middle class before revolution and the overall feeling is a kind of melancholia about unwanted and unavoidable change, and a sense of loss which is never leaves one, whatever subsequent circumstances and fortune.
When studying Political Theory I tried to read Daz Capital, and I have a Moscow edition of Marx and Engels Manifesto, A Lenin work on Materialism and Empiro Criticism and a monster primer on the Fundamentals of Marxism Leninism, but as with the Bible, the Koran, and everything else I did not progress beyond a page or two before questioning and disagreeing. I also have a translated and edited view of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky and Alan Moorhead's view, together with a background volume, The Rise of Russia through to the time of the Peter the Great.
And then there is has been the pictures with the most influential Dr Zhivago, full of tragedy, the sense of loss, of a brief period of adult happiness, knowing it would not last, but never anticipating the pain of what was to come. Images from the film haunt me, Rita Tishingham, the child of the revolution, describing the moment when her mother let go of her hand, the love of his wife as she sent him off to the love of his life, knowing she would never see him again as she went with his child/children and her father to America, the moment he is taken from his family to work in the war, the moment he knows their future is not together and that moment when they nearly meet once more in the streets of Moscow after years of separation. This film, like no other work, communicated one of the great dilemmas for the creative artist, the drive and need to self express freely, and to love and to experience all aspects of life, pleasure and pain, the good and the bad, but how can any one life matter when set against the plight of the general population.
At the time of Great War, the fate of the millions of Russians was held by one man, the Tsar, whose wife was German born and a niece of Queen Victoria, and under the influence of Rasputin. He and his Ministers and Generals are believed to have led between five and eight million men to their deaths, although no one knows, especially as hundred's of thousand are believed to have abandoned the front line, many to join in the revolution and to perish subsequently or change their identities and memories.
Great works have been written by great men and women about the cause of what many regard as one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and I hope that I am right is stating that the revolution was foremost against the war and poverty and autocratic rule. Brave poor people of no education or prospects went to fight for their homeland, their families and for each other but after their experience between 1914 and 1917 they had had enough. Unfortunately as often the situation in life they were then used and exploited by two interest groups in direct conflict. Lenin saw the war as a waste of Russian blood on behalf of Capitalists and Imperialists and tried to reach an agreement which would enable a revolution in Russia as the first stage in world revolution.
He was therefore willing to negotiate a peace which would remove German troops from Russian borders because Germany needed their forces to accomplish a victory in the West. However it was political, capitalist and military men of the middle classes who deposed the Tsar and took power, and they wanted to control a strong and powerful Russia, and to do that they needed to win the war against Germany, so from the viewpoint of the Western front allies, if these forces within Russia were not going to win, then the longer the civil war went on, the longer German forces would be tied down in the East. Moreover because of the allied blockade the first priority of Germany was food and in the absence of a settlement with Russia and separate peace was negotiated with the Ukraine, which together which issues involving Rumania and Finland further delayed the extent of the transfer of Germany forces from the East to the Western Front. On the Western Front a new life and a new land had been created.
It was a land 480 miles in length, which alternated between a sea of mud filled craters in which man and beast could disappear for ever, or sun dried landscapes of pink or white blanched mud which those with an artistic eye could find beautiful. It was as if a rift had opened and divided the earth. It was a life separate from the rest of humanity which you shared with others, including the enemy, but which you could not share when back at home, and back home you felt a stranger, an alien, and longed to return to what had become your home. You dreaded being there at the front, knowing that your time was short, hoping for a wound which would not hurt too much, heal and not debilitate for life, and yet you were happier here than when you returned home, because of the comradeship of those like you stripped to essentials of being, there was no place for pretence, for one man considering themselves better than the other because of their education, their previous work, their wealth, their family and friends and way of life. All that did not matter, and does not matter when you walk with death, witness its call on others, and you know it is only a matter of time when the call is for you.
But although many felt this alienation with those at home, as it was to be with those returning from POW camps three decades later, or those who disappeared into the American countryside after their ordeals in Vietnam, the people of the respective homelands were being moved from the cheerleaders proudly sending their sons to a foreign field, issuing white feathers to any male left who they considered should be with them, into populations starving to feed the front, those in war production and their children and which in turn led to more and more horrific ways to avenge the deaths and mutilations on men and non combatants as no one seemed able to break the stalemate of the Western Front.
At the front poison gas was tried and then in 1917 mustard gas, a little of which on a shoe could destroy those around in the trench, there was then flame thrower and then the tank, then the Zeppelin and hen the fighter bomber. But if the will of the will of the men and their generals at the front could not be broken, attention was directed to the civilian population. The more the blockade of allies prevented food supplies reaching the German population, the greater the effort on destroying any vessels approaching the shores of the United Kingdom and the ports of allies, 100000 thousands tons a month sunk turned into 250000 and then 500000 until the allies worked out how to detect and destroy. Then a dozen Zeppelins monster craft hundreds of meters in length with bombs to drop on civilian populations brought a new kind of war and fear to the population, and then when there were blown burning from the skies, the aero plane brought the sound of the siren which was the significant memory of my childhood and more fear. Then there were explosions in Paris, but how was this possible until it was revealed the German's had created three huge guns capable of delivering a shell a distance of seventy five miles.
And then the daughters, the wives and the mothers went to war, the Wrens, the Wrafs, the Waacs, as well as working in industry, driving public transport, getting the vote and being able to stand for Parliament. In the factories, the canteen became established as a means of ensuring the workers were mutinously fed within the limits of availability and wages rose with production to overcome the shortages in the changing priorities. Everything and everyone on both sides became more determined and committed to an all out victory as the battle lines and defences of the Western Front appeared to have become invincible and God was on both sides as was the devil.
Nor can I remember when I first read or saw a play by Chehkov, the Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and the Seagull but did see a play on TV in my prolonged adolescence and it had an effect similar to those of Ibsen as echoing what I felt and thought without being able to express what I thought or felt to anyone else, in anyway. This attraction led to buying a volume of the plays and two of short stories. While I was also interested in American, French and Italian literature, it was the Russians whose literature I immersed my psyche: some unknown, some internationally, Bulgakov, nine volumes of Dostoevsky, two of Gogol, four of Gorky, Lermontov and Leskov, two Nabokov two Pasternak, Popov and Puskin Schdedrin two Solzhenityan, seven Tolstoy four Turgenev. These books are primarily about a landed gentry, an aristocracy, a middle class before revolution and the overall feeling is a kind of melancholia about unwanted and unavoidable change, and a sense of loss which is never leaves one, whatever subsequent circumstances and fortune.
When studying Political Theory I tried to read Daz Capital, and I have a Moscow edition of Marx and Engels Manifesto, A Lenin work on Materialism and Empiro Criticism and a monster primer on the Fundamentals of Marxism Leninism, but as with the Bible, the Koran, and everything else I did not progress beyond a page or two before questioning and disagreeing. I also have a translated and edited view of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky and Alan Moorhead's view, together with a background volume, The Rise of Russia through to the time of the Peter the Great.
And then there is has been the pictures with the most influential Dr Zhivago, full of tragedy, the sense of loss, of a brief period of adult happiness, knowing it would not last, but never anticipating the pain of what was to come. Images from the film haunt me, Rita Tishingham, the child of the revolution, describing the moment when her mother let go of her hand, the love of his wife as she sent him off to the love of his life, knowing she would never see him again as she went with his child/children and her father to America, the moment he is taken from his family to work in the war, the moment he knows their future is not together and that moment when they nearly meet once more in the streets of Moscow after years of separation. This film, like no other work, communicated one of the great dilemmas for the creative artist, the drive and need to self express freely, and to love and to experience all aspects of life, pleasure and pain, the good and the bad, but how can any one life matter when set against the plight of the general population.
At the time of Great War, the fate of the millions of Russians was held by one man, the Tsar, whose wife was German born and a niece of Queen Victoria, and under the influence of Rasputin. He and his Ministers and Generals are believed to have led between five and eight million men to their deaths, although no one knows, especially as hundred's of thousand are believed to have abandoned the front line, many to join in the revolution and to perish subsequently or change their identities and memories.
Great works have been written by great men and women about the cause of what many regard as one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and I hope that I am right is stating that the revolution was foremost against the war and poverty and autocratic rule. Brave poor people of no education or prospects went to fight for their homeland, their families and for each other but after their experience between 1914 and 1917 they had had enough. Unfortunately as often the situation in life they were then used and exploited by two interest groups in direct conflict. Lenin saw the war as a waste of Russian blood on behalf of Capitalists and Imperialists and tried to reach an agreement which would enable a revolution in Russia as the first stage in world revolution.
He was therefore willing to negotiate a peace which would remove German troops from Russian borders because Germany needed their forces to accomplish a victory in the West. However it was political, capitalist and military men of the middle classes who deposed the Tsar and took power, and they wanted to control a strong and powerful Russia, and to do that they needed to win the war against Germany, so from the viewpoint of the Western front allies, if these forces within Russia were not going to win, then the longer the civil war went on, the longer German forces would be tied down in the East. Moreover because of the allied blockade the first priority of Germany was food and in the absence of a settlement with Russia and separate peace was negotiated with the Ukraine, which together which issues involving Rumania and Finland further delayed the extent of the transfer of Germany forces from the East to the Western Front. On the Western Front a new life and a new land had been created.
It was a land 480 miles in length, which alternated between a sea of mud filled craters in which man and beast could disappear for ever, or sun dried landscapes of pink or white blanched mud which those with an artistic eye could find beautiful. It was as if a rift had opened and divided the earth. It was a life separate from the rest of humanity which you shared with others, including the enemy, but which you could not share when back at home, and back home you felt a stranger, an alien, and longed to return to what had become your home. You dreaded being there at the front, knowing that your time was short, hoping for a wound which would not hurt too much, heal and not debilitate for life, and yet you were happier here than when you returned home, because of the comradeship of those like you stripped to essentials of being, there was no place for pretence, for one man considering themselves better than the other because of their education, their previous work, their wealth, their family and friends and way of life. All that did not matter, and does not matter when you walk with death, witness its call on others, and you know it is only a matter of time when the call is for you.
But although many felt this alienation with those at home, as it was to be with those returning from POW camps three decades later, or those who disappeared into the American countryside after their ordeals in Vietnam, the people of the respective homelands were being moved from the cheerleaders proudly sending their sons to a foreign field, issuing white feathers to any male left who they considered should be with them, into populations starving to feed the front, those in war production and their children and which in turn led to more and more horrific ways to avenge the deaths and mutilations on men and non combatants as no one seemed able to break the stalemate of the Western Front.
At the front poison gas was tried and then in 1917 mustard gas, a little of which on a shoe could destroy those around in the trench, there was then flame thrower and then the tank, then the Zeppelin and hen the fighter bomber. But if the will of the will of the men and their generals at the front could not be broken, attention was directed to the civilian population. The more the blockade of allies prevented food supplies reaching the German population, the greater the effort on destroying any vessels approaching the shores of the United Kingdom and the ports of allies, 100000 thousands tons a month sunk turned into 250000 and then 500000 until the allies worked out how to detect and destroy. Then a dozen Zeppelins monster craft hundreds of meters in length with bombs to drop on civilian populations brought a new kind of war and fear to the population, and then when there were blown burning from the skies, the aero plane brought the sound of the siren which was the significant memory of my childhood and more fear. Then there were explosions in Paris, but how was this possible until it was revealed the German's had created three huge guns capable of delivering a shell a distance of seventy five miles.
And then the daughters, the wives and the mothers went to war, the Wrens, the Wrafs, the Waacs, as well as working in industry, driving public transport, getting the vote and being able to stand for Parliament. In the factories, the canteen became established as a means of ensuring the workers were mutinously fed within the limits of availability and wages rose with production to overcome the shortages in the changing priorities. Everything and everyone on both sides became more determined and committed to an all out victory as the battle lines and defences of the Western Front appeared to have become invincible and God was on both sides as was the devil.
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