Wretched and abundant,
Oppressed and powerful,
Weak and mighty,
Father of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik State
by David Remnick
"They think to order all things wisely;
but having rejected Christ they will end
by drenching the world with blood."
The Brothers Karamazov
"Revolutionaries who take the law into their own
hands are horrifying not because they are criminals, but because they
are like machines that have got out of control, like runaway trains."
Red Star Rising:
Soviet Power and the 1917 Russian Revolution
The Bolsheviks and the beginnings of Commissar culture
"...men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and an iron
armed with means of intimidation and revolvers, who shaved little and slept
Everywhere there were new elections: for the running
of housing, trade, industry and municipal services. Commissars were
being appointed to each, men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited
powers and an iron will, armed with means of intimidation and revolvers,
who shaved little and slept less. They knew the shrinking bourgeois
breed, the average holder of cheap governmental stocks, and they
spoke to them without the slightest pity and with Mephistophelean
smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act. These were the people
who reorganized everything in accordance with the plan, and company
after company, enterprise after enterprise, became Bolshevised.
"This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching.
And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it."
...I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful
outlook of the last century. It was taken for granted that you listened
to reason, that it was right and natural to do what your conscience
told you to do. For a man to die by the hand of another was a rare,
an exceptional event, something quite out of the ordinary. Murders
happened in plays, newspapers, and detective stories, not in everyday
And then there was the jump from this
peaceful, naive moderation to blood and tears, to mass insanity,
and to the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter.
I suppose one must always pay for such
things. You must remember better than I do the beginning of disintegration,
how everything began to break down at once - trains and food supplies
in towns, and the foundations of the family, and moral standards...
it was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main
misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was the loss of confidence
in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out
of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing
in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were
being crammed down everybody's throat. And then there arose the power
of the glittering phase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.
This social evil became an epidemic.
It was catching. And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched
by it. Our home, too, became infected. Something went wrong in it.
Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we
began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy,
artificial, forced, crept into our conversation - you felt you had
to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes.
How could Pasha, who was so discriminating, so exacting with himself,
who distinguished so unerringly between reality and appearance, how
could he fail to notice the falsehood that had crept into our lives?
"Now It's Happened"
by D.H. Lawrence
One cannot help thinking,
how much better it would have been
if Vronsky and Anna Karenin
had stood up for themselves and seen
Russia across her crisis,
instead of leaving it to Lenin.
The big flamboyant Russia
might have been saved, if a pair
of rebels like Anna and Vronsky
had blasted the sickly air
of Dostoevsky and Tchekov,
and spy-government everywhere.
But Tolsoi was a traitor
to the Russia that needed him most,
the clumsy, bewildered Russia
so worried by the Holy Ghost,
He shifted his job to the peasants
and landed them all on toast.
Dostoevsky, the Judas,
with his sham christianity
the last bit of sanity
left in the heft bodies
of the Russian nobility.
So our goody-goody men betray us
and our sainty-saints let us down,
and a sickly people will slay us
if we touch the sob-stuff crown
of such martyrs; while Marxian tenets
naturally take hold of the town.
Too much of the humbly wet-leg
and the holy can't-help-it touch,
till you've ruined a nation's fibre
and they all loathe feeling as such,
and want to be cold and devilish hard
like machines - and you can't wonder much -
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