Children of the Crown

Post #14 of 365

The Interested Observer cannot close this mini-section on the last Romanov tsar without devoting a page to his children.  It might well be said that they were the first victims of Communism.  Those children, aged 22 to one-month-shy-of-14 at the time of their murder, were completely innocent; as with the children of the Nazi Holocaust, their “crime” was who they were.  Even their parents, regardless of their shortcomings as rulers, did not deserve the deaths they died, especially when their reign is compared to the terror decades of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and every other Communist leader.

The children of Nicholas and Alexandra began each new year behind the yellow walls and white colonnades of the Alexander Palace built by Catherine the Great for her grandson Alexander I in the gated village of Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles south of St. Petersburg.  Their days were marked out by the steady routine of education in the morning, an hour outdoors to build and play on ice slides before lunch, then afternoon lessons and teatime, after which Nicholas received visitors until the family supper at 8:00.  After supper, Alexandra listened to Alexei’s bedtime prayers while Nicholas and the girls convened to the drawing room or Alexandra’s mauve budoir to read or sew, often joined by one or more of their pets, which included a multitude of dogs, cats, horses, even a donkey and an elephant.  Every family member dearly loved animals.  The children kept a pet cemetery in the park adjoining the palace, which they frequently visited with flowers.

Circumscribed by their role as daughters of a reigning Tsar, the girls shared an uncommon sisterly bond and adored their little brother.  They signed letters collectively with the first initial of each name, “OTMA.”  As they grew, the two oldest were called “the Big Pair” and wore matching dresses, likewise the two youngest, “the Little Pair.”  Each girl was the colonel-in-chief of an elite military regiment and attended reviews in skirted uniform on horseback behind Nicholas.  Alexei was Hetman of All the Cossacks, a title bestowed at his birth.

The family had a wealth of nicknames for each other.  Alexandra always called her husband “Nicky”; he called her interchangeably “Alix” or “Sunny.”  Olga was “Olishka” or “Olya”, the diminutive forms of her given name.  Tatiana, a natural leader and organizer, was “the Governess” to her siblings.  Maria was called “Mashka” or “fat little bow-wow” for her tendency toward chubbiness, and lively, irrepressible Anastasia was “Shvybzik”, the imp, a moniker with which she wryly signed her correspondence.

From spring to fall, they traveled to their residences scattered throughout western Russia.  Easter found them in the mild climate and lush scenery of the Crimea’s Livadia Palace, where Nicholas gave Alexandra the elaborately designed eggs of master jeweler Peter Carl Faberge.  

They spent two weeks in June sailing along Finland’s coastline in the Imperial yacht Standart, whose sailors they knew on a first-name basis.  In late summer and early fall they repaired to Nicholas’ hunting lodge in Poland, and in November they returned to the capital for their winter’s routine. 

The children were educated at home by private tutors in mathematics, history and geography, the semantics of Russian grammar and three other languages.  Nicholas and Alexandra both spoke the King’s English; indeed, this was the language in which they conversed with each other.  The children spoke Russian to Nicholas and English to Alexandra.  The tutors on most intimate terms were Pierre Gilliard of Switzerland, who taught French, and English teacher Sidney Gibbes.

Olga (born November 15, 1895) 

Olga was the daughter closest to Nicholas and most resembled him with her shy, softspoken kindness.  She loved long walks and talks with her father and attended church beside him in Alexandra’s health-related stead.  She often clashed and sulked with Alexandra, who expected her oldest child to set the example for her siblings and take them in hand when they misbehaved.  The shrewdest and most intellectually astute of the children, Olga nurtured a dreamy inner life cultivated by avid reading of fiction and poetry.  She was an accomplished pianist and learned languages with ease.

As Olga neared age 20, there was talk of a possible marital union between her and Prince Karol of Romania.  Olga said of this to French tutor Pierre Gilliard, “I am a Russian, and I mean to remain a Russian.”[i]  (This was probably a diplomatic way of saying she did not like Karol, who turned out to be a fortune-seeking, womanizing bastard.)

Throughout World War I, Olga read newspapers daily and recorded in her diaries her growing concern about the political situation as Russia turned against her beloved father.  During the family’s imprisonment first at the Alexander Palace and then in Siberia, she was often seen staring silently into the distance.

Tatiana (born June 10, 1897) 

Tall and willow-wand slender, small-waisted and proud of bearing, Tatiana looked the part of royalty.  She was closest to and most like Alexandra and showered her mother with care and attention when she or Alexei was ill.

Tatiana was a natural manager and decision maker, organized, purposeful and energetic.  Her technique at the piano was more refined and stylish than Olga’s, even though she did not care as much for music and consequently spent less time practicing.  She enjoyed needlework and other handicrafts.

Romantic and idealistic, Tatiana was anxious to enter the social world.  She loved fine clothes and Coty’s Jasmin de Corse perfume.

Although Tatiana was more assertive of personality than the gentle, timid Olga, who often deferred to her, the “Big Pair” was a loyally devoted unit.

Maria (born June 26, 1899) 

If Tatiana was the sisters’ “head”, Maria was their “heart.”  Nicholas and Alexandra’s third daughter is the one who most often falls through history’s cracks, but she is the one most praised among those who knew the family well for her loving heart and angelic behavior.  Happy, flirtatious and friendly, she had a natural gift for winning hearts.  Even the guards in Siberia later said they liked her best.

Maria possessed a voluptuous broad-boned beauty, with apple cheeks and deep blue eyes, called “Maria’s saucers” that earned her a lot of compliments.  Although she was too lazy to be adept at schoolwork, she had a talent for watercolor painting.

She had a merry, carefree demeanor with young men and talked freely to the soldiers and sailors of her family’s retinue.  She loved small children and had an earth-motherly way with them.  She looked forward to marriage and the large brood she herself hoped for—a brood that was never to be.

Anastasia (born June 18, 1901) 

Though the youngest and shortest of the sisters, witty, mercurial wild-child Anastasia took a back seat to no one.  She could scramble to the topmost heights of a tree every bit as nimbly as any of her male cousins.  Every experience was high adventure to her except sitting still in the classroom, which she detested.  Anastasia would far rather mimic the voices and facial expressions of people around her and enact theatrical productions impersonating the vivid characters that peopled the creative world of her imagination.

All four girls enjoyed the youthful friendship of Nicholas’ sister Olga Alexandrovna, but she was especially close to her goddaughter Anastasia.  Every Saturday morning they climbed aboard a train for St. Petersburg; after luncheon with their paternal grandmother, Olga A. took them to her home for several hours of tea, games and dancing with other young people of the urban nobility.  Olga A. survived the Revolution and later wrote of Anastasia, “The girls enjoyed every minute of it, especially my dear goddaughter.  Why, I can still hear her laughter rippling all over the room.  Dancing, music, games—why, she threw herself wholeheartedly into them all.”[ii]

Anastasia remains the most famous Romanov daughter, mainly because of the claims made on her identity by one Anna Anderson until the latter’s death in 1984, claims later proven by DNA to be false.

Alexei (born August 12, 1904) 

The Heir to the Throne of Russia was a boy to love.  All his life long, he fought bravely and gallantly against the ever-menacing disease of hemophilia.  He would not let his limitations define him and challenged the bounds of his body whenever he could.  He could be spoiled and capricious at times, but his inherent heart of gold w0n the day.

In appearance, Alexei most favored his mother and his sister Tatiana, with straight auburn hair and striking blue-gray eyes.  He grew to be 5’6” at age thirteen; entering his adolescent growth spurt, he could have grown quite tall.

His exalted rank, together with the perils of hemophilia, conferred on Alexei an intensity of care experienced by few children in the human race.  His room was full of elaborate toys, like a railroad track complete with a station, buildings and signal boxes manned by doll passengers.  From age five on, he was given into the companionship of two sailor “uncles”, Andrei Derevenko and Klimenty Nagorny, who kept watch to catch him before he could fall and bruise, carried him when he could not walk, and amused him through long hours of confinement in bed.  At age seven, he climbed onto a table at a party and leapt wildly from that tabletop to the next.  When his sailor-guardians moved to stop him, he laughingly shouted, “All grownups have to go” and tried to push them out of the room.[i]

From the beginning, his clever mind continuously plotted boyish pranks.  When he was four he crawled under the dinner table and removed a shoe from the foot of a lady guest.  He put it back, but not before inserting a large ripe strawberry into the toe, evoking a startled shriek from the guest![ii]

Although he had a curious and precocious mind that took in minute details of the world around him and asked questions beyond his young years, he, like his partner-in-mischief Anastasia, hated the quietude of lessons too often forestalled by stints of illness.  He did, however, sit still long enough to learn to play the balalaika well.  One summer’s afternoon when he was 10, his sister Olga found him lying on his back gazing at the blue sky.  When Olga asked him what he was contemplating, he answered, “I like to think and wonder [about] so many things…I enjoy the sun and the beauty of summer as long as I can.  Who knows whether one of these days I shall not be prevented from doing it?”[iii]

He shared Nicholas’ love of military pageantry, and his many photographs show him in a sailor suit of the Imperial Navy, which in World War I he cast aside for a genuine army uniform when he accompanied his father to General Headquarters.

The Interested Observer has personally known individuals who grew up with childhood disabilities whose parents, though loving them fiercely, nevertheless let it be known that their limitations present a burden and who, therefore, question their place in the family.  Whatever may be said about Nicholas and Alexandra as rulers, they never for 0ne moment gave Alexei reason to doubt how deeply they treasured him.  I do, however, wonder how he felt about the “hush, hush, hide it” mantle surrounding his hemophilia.  Did he ever think his disease must be shameful to merit such secrecy?  Did he wonder as a prisoner of the Revolution if it was his fault?

He desperately wanted to grow up and experience manhood, and his sufferings inculcated a genuine empathy for the sorrows of others.  He said that when he became tsar, no one would be poor or unfortunate.  He wanted everyone else to share the joy-of-life that was inborn in him despite his pain.

Could Alexei have lived to see the throne?  Maybe, or maybe not.  Speaking for myself as a survivor of an incurable childhood disease (Type I diabetes since age 4), I can testify that the most difficult and dangerous time in such diseases is the period of childhood.  Humans are naturally most active during childhood, and children lack the capacity to clearly understand the reasons for their limitations.  As Alexei matured, he would have learned to manage his disease on his own terms and to avoid episodes.

The first transfusions of plasma occurred in 1936, when Alexei would have been 32.  Had he lived until then, as a reigning monarch he would have been among the first to benefit.  His first cousin, Prince Waldemar of Prussia, lived to be 56 and would have lived longer had he not suffered a bleeding episode while running from the Red Army’s advance into Germany at the tail end of World War II, when available medical resources were being utilized to treat the survivors of a nearby concentration camp.

Alexei had the strength of character and the empathy to be a history-shaping world leader, however long he lived.  But we’ll never know that, will we—not after July 17, 1918, when a Communist marksman riddled him with bullets, stabbed him with bayonets and ended his life with two shots fired point-blank into his ear as he clutched his already-dead father’s jacket with his last ounce of fleeing strength.

That is a far greater tragedy than any disease.

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Massie, Robert K., Nicholas and Alexandra (New York, Random House) c1967

Rappaport, Helen, The Last Days of the Romanovs:  Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (New York, St. Martin’s Press) c2008

Rappaport, Helen, The Romanov Sisters (New York, St. Martin’s Press) c2014

PHOTO CREDITS:

http: // cdn.history.com/ sites /2/ 2015 /02/ ask-romanovs- 464434205 -E. jpeg

By Branson DeCou – Courtesy Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30231223

http://humus.livejournal.com/3904595.html (direct link), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34912138

By greenacre8 – Faberge Egg Kremlin April 2003, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3228739

https://alchetron.com/Grand-Duchess-Olga-Nikolaevna-of-Russia-1303313-W

Google Images site.gov, public domain.

https://www.pinterest.com/kendakirkendall/a-tsars-life-in-color/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/13440498858237122/

Google Images site.gov, public domain

ENDNOTES

[i] Massie, Robert K., Nicholas and Alexandra, p. 251 (New York, Random House), c1967

[ii] Ibid., p. 134-135

[iii] Ibid., p. 140

[iv] Ibid., p. 138

[v] Ibid., p. 142

HEROIC HIGHLIGHT: Alexandra Fedorovna Romanova

Post #13 of 365

Don’t Take the Boy

There are some who will look at this Heroic Highlight and think, “Her?!  She fell for that crazy monk Grigory Rasputin and jumped when he said jump!”

Of all the participants in the Romanov tragedy, Alexandra is the one the Interested Observer deems most worthy of empathy.  Every lie she believed and every action she took was viewed through the goggles of a chronic, excruciating life crisis.  Alexandra did the best she could with the hard hand of bezique cards she was dealt.  For this alone, even if there had been no revolution and no imprisonment and shooting by the Communists, she deserves a Heroic Highlight.

As I sketched out a rough draft for this post, I watched my niece the Curly-haired Hugger clambering all over the living room furniture and looking to Auntie with long-lashed blue-gray eyes and a dimpled smile.  Climbing is her favorite activity, and she does it well with her gymnast’s physique.  She’s had her share of toddlerhood bumps and bruises, but most of the time she and her sister the Blonde Princess are robustly healthy.

However, the Hugger has been seriously ill three times in her just-turned-two years.  The first incident happened when she was five months old.  She developed a fever that topped out at 104.7 before the pediatrician diagnosed an E. coli urinary tract infection.  She took antibiotics for ten days and bounced back quickly.

Four months later she woke with a temperature of 102◦F after being fine the night before.  The urinary tract infection had recurred, and this time a specialist diagnosed vesicoureteral reflux, in which the valves of the bladder do not close properly and urine flows backward toward the kidneys.  Most babies with vesicoureteral reflux outgrow it without medical intervention, which, if necessary, consists of a minor surgical procedure at age three.  Unfortunately, in the meantime the child remains E. coli-prone, and so it proved last April when, at age 14 months, her temperature spiked again.  That worst-illness-yet left us thanking God that we still had her.

In that first babyhood incident when her fever climbed higher and higher and we had no idea why, I implored Jesus for my little treasure’s life.  Too scared to think up an original prayer, I quoted country singer Tim McGraw.  “Take the very breath you gave me/Take the heart from my chest/I’ll gladly take her place if you let me/Make this my last request/Take me out of this world, God, ple-e-e-ease don’t take the girl.”  I identified in a small way for one afternoon with the anguish endured by Alexandra Fedorovna Every.  Single.  Day.

I’m about to take you for a walk in her shoes.

Seated, L-R:  Marie, Alexandra, Alexei, Nicholas, Anastasia.  Standing, L-R:  Olga and Tatiana

You’re a 31-year-old wife and mother of four beautiful daughters.  You live in an opulent palace in a gated community 15 miles from your nation’s capital, where your husband’s position as the national leader keeps him and yourself always in the public eye.  After 10 years of marriage the two of you are still deeply in love, your daughters are happy and charming, and your family is loving and close-knit.  In all things life is ideal, except one.

In your culture your foremost wifely duty is to present your husband with a son and heir.  Time and again, you’ve disappointed him.  He’s been genuinely joyful with the birth of each daughter, but his joy is shadowed.  All that is needed is his signature on a decree changing the law of succession, but it is not in his nature to rock the boat, especially when so doing risks the ire of his uncles and male cousins, who stand to inherit if no son comes from your womb.  But lately it’s looking like you have another chance.  You’re sensing in your body the now-familiar symptoms of pregnancy.

Nine months later you lie back on your pillows, exhausted but radiant.  After your shortest and easiest labor yet, you’ve delivered a solid, strapping eleven-pound son!  It’s the smile of God on your marriage and nation.

You’re that same mother six weeks later.  Your baby has been bleeding from the navel all day long.  The doctor comes and applies a bandage, but the bleeding continues for three days, and an icy lump of fear grows in the pit of your stomach.

You know about the bleeding disorder that stalks your family.  You were a year old when your brother fell from an open window and died of a brain bleed.  Your shattered mother never recovered and followed him to the grave when you were six.  Then there was your uncle, the favorite son of your beloved grandmother, who died when you were twelve.  Two of your sister’s four sons have the disease, and her 4-year-old died shortly before your son’s birth.

As he experiences the tumbles of toddlerhood, his bruises become hematomas that inflate the skin.  The capital’s best physicians hand down their incurable diagnosis:  Hemophilia in medical parlance, “bleeder’s disease” in the vernacular of your day.

Feel the devastation.  Experience the apprehension.  Taste the metallic fear that never for one moment goes away.

It is absolutely imperative that his condition be kept secret.  It would never do for your people to know that their future ruler is an invalid.  What a bar of gold that would be to the violent revolutionaries who bled your husband’s grandfather to death!  Even some members of your extended family do not know the exact nature of his ailment.  His absences from public events are explained away as head colds or sprained ankles.

Your husband, God bless him, could not be more devoted to you and your son.  He carves out time in a full schedule to spend with him, adjusting their activities together to work around the parameters of his condition.  He suffers the bleeding episodes as severely as you and your son, at times running from the sickroom weeping openly while you stay at the bedside.  You know he is remembering the bleeding that felled his grandfather.

If only your grandmother were still alive, but the woman you loved most dearly has been dead for three years.  You long for a friend with whom you can share your heart, but the friends of your youth were left behind when you married and moved north.  You’ve never fit well into a social circle that thrives on parties and scandals and now appears doubly insensitive as it blithely goes about its normal routine with its normal children.  You’d much rather organize and oversee charitable activities, a venue in which you would shine if given the chance.  You’ve heard the way your peers gossip; you know they’re shredding you as soon as you’re out of earshot.

Feel the isolation.

In his weeks or months of health, your son is as lively and active as the next boy his age, but you must limit his interactions with the sons of friends and relatives, who either play too roughly or prefer hardier playmates.  You shower him with pets and expensive toys, but there’s so much you must deny him.  He asks for a bicycle, and you sadly say no, even though you would give anything to watch him happily riding one.  He wants to play tennis, and again you have to say no.  He bursts into tears.  “Why can other boys have everything and I nothing?”[1]  This reminds you of the people in your capital who pass your palaces and sniff, “She has everything.”  There’s that great Syrophoenician word again—baloney.  When you don’t have your child’s health, you don’t have anything.

Feel the frustration, yours and his.

Alexandra and Alexei, 1913

Even during his healthy intervals you can never fully relax, because they always end.  Any given morning may bring the plaintive call, “Mama, I can’t bend my elbow” or “Mama, I can’t walk today.”2  You may or may not know the cause of his injury, but you do know what’s coming, and so does he.  The joint flexes as its socket fills with blood that presses on the nerve endings and corrodes the bone and cartilage.

To get a small idea of the pain he endures, whack the tenderest part of your “crazy bone” against the nearest wall with every ounce of strength you can muster.  Do it again, six or seven times.  Multiply the sum of that pain times ten and picture it in your thigh or in your knee going down your calf, worsening every hour and lasting days at a time.  He lies in bed moaning and crying, “Mama, help me!”

Feel the helplessness.

When the doctors pronounced his disease incurable, they meant that literally.  All that your day’s medical science can do is let each bleed run its course, which may take him to or over the line of demarcation between life and death.  Morphine is available, but you dare not allow any strong narcotic.  With the frequency of his hemorrhages necessitating regular large doses, he will unavoidably become addicted.  Even aspirin, the new wonder drug that alleviates pain without forming dependence, carries its own curse; it lessens his pain but, as an antiaggregant, it increases the bleeding that caused the pain.

All you can do is pray.  Kneeling in the palace chapel when he’s well or sitting by his side when he’s ill, you implore an unanswering God to deliver your darling from the tortures that, worst of all, you know came from your own genetic code.  If you didn’t know that before your marriage, you can’t escape the knowledge now.

The autosomal recessive hemophilia gene is carried on one of your X chromosomes.  You, having received at conception your father’s perfect X chromosome and your mother’s faulty one, can pass the gene to your offspring without showing symptoms because you have another X chromosome that cancels out the effects of the gene.  Any, or all four, or none of your daughters may be carriers like yourself.  But your son, having received his father’s Y chromosome, has no second X to neutralize the gene and so bears the full brunt of the disease.

Feel the guilt.

As year follows year and hemorrhage follows hemorrhage, you begin to feel unworthy before God’s throne.  You transmitted the gene; therefore you must be ineligible for healing.  Maybe someone else, blameless in God’s sight like the “holy fools” who roam the length and breadth of your land and whose adventures fascinate you, can by their inner purity plead your case and receive the miracle.

Hear the deafening divine silence that compels you to clutch and cling to the traveling mystic who shows up in your capital with reports of faith-healing powers.  He has visible food particles caked into his long, scraggly beard and smells like a billy goat, but he helps your son.  You don’t know how he does it, but your own eyes witness it repeatedly.  Sometimes he does it from a vast distance.

You enjoy a peaceful but busy summer the year your son turns eight.  Your benefactor is out of the capital, having been sent to his hometown by your husband to quench escalating rumors of assaults on women, but your son has been so healthy all summer that as you pack for a month-long vacation at your family’s hunting lodge, you dare to hope God has acted on your prayers for permanent healing.

The lodge is at the end of a winding, rutted road in a deep forest.  During the day your husband bags big game and your daughters ride horses; in the evenings you play bezique.  All goes well until your son jumps into a rowboat and hits his groin on the oarlock.  The small swelling subsides after a week, and the incident ends just like so many others.  You hate to see him cooped up in the forest-darkened lodge all day while the girls have fun, so you take him out for a carriage ride.  As you bounce and bump down the road, he flinches and groans with each jolt.

The nation’s best physicians hurry to the lodge but cannot stop the pour of blood from his torn thigh vessels.  If it were his elbow or knee, the growing pressure would arrest the flow more quickly, but this is his hip joint, the largest in his body, and his suffering goes on and on for eleven days of nightmare-made-real.  The surrounding tissue stretches to a blue-black balloon over his pelvis and lower abdomen until there is no place for the still-flowing blood to accumulate.  As his fever rises, the doctors talk darkly of blood poisoning and peritonitis.

Lying contorted on his side, all your eight-year-old can do to ease his pain is draw his leg up to his chest and feebly cross himself, mumbling “Lord have mercy on me” between screams and wails.  He begs you to help him.  He says it won’t hurt anymore when he is dead and asks you to build him a pile of stones in the woods.  All you can do is sit beside him day and night.

On one such night when the doctors have given up and death is imminent, you send a desperate telegram to your faith healer.  He replies, “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers.  The little one will not die.”3  A day later, the hemorrhage ceases.  Recovery will be prolonged, but he’s alive.

Feel the agony.  Grasp the flicker of hope.

This life of unrelenting tension drastically affects the health of your heart muscle, which beats irregularly and causes shortness of breath.  You can’t walk far without pausing for rest; as the years pass, you rely increasingly on a wheelchair.

Feel the slow ooze of vitality.

Yes, feel her pain, and feeling it, can you possibly judge her?  You readers who are parents, can you honestly say you wouldn’t have done the same thing?

Keys to Rasputin

The birth of Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov on August 12, 1904 was Alexandra’s supreme moment.  His diagnosis stripped away forever any semblance of security from her life.  Security is a precious thing; most people have no idea how precious until it’s gone, and when it is, they grasp at any straw they can find.  For Alexandra, the largest straw was Gregory Efimovich Rasputin.

Rasputin

Precisely what he did to help Alexei can only be known in part.  He did do something; those who loved him and those who loathed him have unanimously testified to that.  Alexei’s parents always sought medical help first and turned to him when medicine failed.  He seemed to have a pattern of showing up at the point of crisis and claiming credit when Alexei turned the corner toward recovery.  He did calm Alexei and lessen his pain with the gaze of his magnetic eyes and his tales of Siberia, and this may have slowed the bleeding.  He lived in St. Petersburg proper and actually appeared at the palace infrequently; when there he was polite and humble, quoting Scripture and proverbs.  Alexandra had no occasion to see him in any other light.  The loudest shouts for Rasputin’s removal were the same voices that had gossiped about her failure to produce a son.

All Nicholas needed to do to keep everyone happy was to tell Alexandra that she could keep Rasputin as her private priest but he must have no involvement in affairs of state; that, as tsar, Nicholas had his advisors and would act according to their counsel.  It is essential to comprehend the double bind in which Nicholas found himself.  How could he live with himself if he sent Rasputin away and Alexei died—which did indeed very nearly happen at the hunting lodge of Spala in 1912.  After that crisis, it was easy for Rasputin to manipulate Alexandra to believe that he alone could guarantee Alexei’s life, and only if he remained close by.  Alexandra’s health was a wreck; the death of Alexei would have killed her too.

What Alexandra needed was a wise woman to gently put her arm around her shoulders and assure her that, come what may, “you’ll get through this”, reminding her that as Alexei left childhood behind, he would learn how to best manage his hemophilia on his own terms.  What she got instead was a bevy of backbiters and Anna Vyrubova, a rabid Rasputin disciple who looked like and had the intellect of an overgrown tea cake.  To her credit, Anna was a devoted and loyal friend, but she herself was deceived.  (Considering the tenor of her writings about Rasputin, the Interested Observer has always suspected Ms. Teacake of having a bad case of “the hots.”)

If there is any blame to be placed for the Rasputin disaster, it belongs squarely on the shoulders of the Russian Orthodox Church, who should have done a better job vetting its prophets before they came anywhere near the royal family and disfellowshiped those proven by their lifestyle to be false.  An excommunication would have been a difficult, if not impossible, social handicap for Rasputin to overcome no matter what his powers.

Hemophilia today remains a beast, but a much easier beast to tame with the advent of plasma transfusions and, later, artificial clotting factors.  These came about as a result of the bleeding of wounded soldiers in World War II, nearly three decades after Alexandra and Alexei both died with their family in a hail of Communist bullets in a Siberian cellar.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Alexandra, http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/alexandra-feodorovna-6582.php.  Public domain.

Romanov family, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3002829/Remains-Russian-Emperor-family-massacred-1917-revolution-exhumed-amid-doubts-authenticity.html.  Public domain.

Alexandra and Alexei, http://romanovrussia.com/antique/vintage-photograph-tsarina-tsarevich/.  Public domain.

Rasputin, http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Grigori_Rasputin.  Public domain.

[1]Massie, Robert, Nicholas and Alexandra, p. 139 (New York, Random House) c1967.

2 Ibid, p. 137

3 Ibid, p. 185

The Spineless Autocrat

Post #12 of 365

A Look at the Last Tsar

The name of Nicholas Romanov II has become synonymous with weak will and ineptitude.  This is true, but it is only a part of a larger, more complex story.  Nicholas was a product of the system he inherited and the times in which he was fated to live.

Nicholas II

Fated.  A good word for the boy born on May 18, 1868, the day of Job in the Orthodox liturgical calendar.  His mother was the outgoing, gregarious Princess Marie Fedorovna of Denmark; his father was the harsh, domineering Alexander III, then heir to the Russian throne.

Nicholas was 12 years old when his bomb-shattered grandfather was carried up the stairs of the Winter Palace, dripping blood all the way.  He stood at the foot of the death-couch as Alexander II bled out of this life.

Alexander III was an ultra-reactionary tsar to whom preservation of autocratic rule was paramount.  Alexander II had been a reformer, but all efforts at liberalization were strangled in his namesake’s iron-handed grip.  His tall, imposing size and enormous physical strength inspired reverence in his quiet teenage son.  In 1894 no one dreamed that by year’s end the 26-year-old Nicholas, having completed an excellent education and toured Europe and Asia, would ascend the throne, a position he dreaded.  But Alexander developed kidney disease and died on the first of November, having done little to prepare Nicholas for statecraft.

Nicholas took his father’s death hard.  His only consolation was the German princess who had won his heart.

Alexandra Fedorovna

Alix of Hesse-Darnstadt was the favorite granddaughter of England’s Queen Victoria, the child of Victoria’s daughter Alice and Grand Duke Louis.  Alix’s mother died when she was six, and throughout her childhood she spent a lot of time in England with Queen Victoria, where she too received a stellar education.  She visited Russia at age 12 and met the future Tsar Nicholas at the wedding of her sister Elizabeth to Nicholas’ paternal uncle Grand Duke Sergei.  Five years later they met again.  In a day when royal marriages were often made to form or solidify international alliances, theirs was a true love match of a quality rarely seen.  Arriving in Russia ten days before Alexander III’s death, she was baptized Alexandra Fedorovna in the Orthodox church.  They married one week after the deceased tsar’s funeral.

Alexandra was never a popular consort.  Her German birth raised suspicion in Russian eyes, and her shy, reserved nature gave her the appearance of aloofness.  Alexandra loved to discuss politics, church history and other abstract topics and never fit in with the women of the court, whose raison d’etre revolved around who was giving the next ball, who wore the lowest neckline at last night’s soiree, and other juicy sociosexual affairs.

After a year of national mourning, Nicholas’ coronation got his reign off to an unhappy start.  The day after the ceremony, five hundred thousand people gathered at Moscow’s Khodynka Field to see their new sovereigns and to imbibe free beer in enameled souvenir cups engraved with the Imperial seal.  A rumor circulated that there was only enough beer to serve those nearest the front.  Hundreds were killed and injured in the stampede that followed.  Nicholas’ presence was expected at an evening ball hosted by the French ambassador.  He wanted to suspend all coronation festivities, but his father’s brothers insisted that Nicholas’ absence would offend France.  Nicholas gave in and appeared at the ball with Alexandra, giving an appearance of uncaring.

(The Interested Observer has no wish to appear judgmental, but the people of Moscow had no one but themselves to blame for the Khodynka fiasco.  Hundreds of irreplaceable human lives for a glass of beer?  Really??  If the French had had any tact, they would have postponed or canceled their party the moment they knew what had happened.)

This caving to other people was a pervasive problem for Nicholas.  All he needed to do was remind his uncles that as Tsar he outranked them and had the final say, but he was not willing to buck them.  The Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias governed like a spineless jellyfish.

The Russo-Japanese War

One of the strongest family influences of Nicholas’ first decade was Alexandra’s bullying cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who used Nicholas to manipulate Russian foreign policy to serve Germany and undo Russia’s alliance with France.  Wilhelm urged Nicholas to expand Russian influence into Asia.  Russia’s only Pacific Ocean port was frozen solid during winter.  When Japan captured the warm-water port at Port Arthur from the doddering empire of China, Russia moved in and seized Port Arthur for themselves.  Under Wilhelm’s persistent goading, Russia went on to occupy Manchuria and set its sights on the Korean Peninsula.  In February 1904, Japanese destroyers launched a surprise attack on the battleships in Port Arthur, and the Russo-Japanese War began.

The war was an unmitigated catastrophe for Russia.  Japan gained the upper hand from the get-go.  It culminated in a 45-minute naval rout in the Strait of Tsushima in May 1905.

In the first ten years of Nicholas’ reign, he and Alexandra were blessed with four beautiful, healthy daughters in two-year stairsteps.  On August 12, 1904, in the midst of the calamitous war with Japan, the long-awaited male heir was born.  But even as cannons and church bells spread the joyous news, within the body of the baby boy lay hidden the seed of Nicholas’ greatest tragedy, which will be discussed in detail in the next post.

Bloody Sunday

The early years of the 20^th century saw waves of labor unrest throughout the Western world, much of it ugly in all countries.  On a Sunday morning in January 1905, a St. Petersburg priest named Gapon led a 120,000-strong workingman’s march to the Winter Palace for an anticipated dialogue with the Tsar about the concerns of working people.  The mood was lighthearted, jovial and nonviolent until the St. Petersburg garrison opened fire, leaving the blood of 92 people staining the snow.  “Bloody Sunday” touched off a year of riots and assassinations that erupted all over Russia; by October a general strike halted the economy.  Against his inclination, Nicholas signed a manifesto granting freedom of speech and assembly and an elected parliament, the State Duma.

The Duma

The first two sessions of the Duma met and were quickly dissolved, and understandably so.  The elected deputies rose out of turn to shout wild accusations of repression and calls for overthrow at the army and Nicholas’ cabinet of ministers.  Then, in 1906, Russia’s most admired political mind was appointed Prime Minister.

Pyotr A. Stolypin

Pyotr Stolypin changed electoral law to shift the balance of power to the gentry class.  The Third Duma was a decidedly c0nservative legislature, but it got results that benefited Russia.  Decisive, energetic and astute, Stolypin had everything Russia needed that Nicholas lacked.  He introduced effective land-reform measures that created 9 million peasant property owners.  Five years of mild weather produced bumper crops.  Coal and iron production became increasingly efficient, and the railroad expanded.  Businesses from Western Europe and America opened branch offices in Russia.  Free elementary education was introduced, as was freedom of the press.  Nicholas developed first a grudging, then a growing respect for the Duma.  Revolutionary violence dwindled, but it did not cease.  In September 1911 at a theatrical production in Kiev, Stolypin was shot to death by a revolutionary gunman before the eyes of Nicholas and his two oldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana.

In 1913 Russia celebrated the 300^th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.  Half a year of ceremonies became a last hurrah on the eve of doom.  World war and revolution were on their way.

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Massie, Robert K., Nicholas and Alexandra (New York, Random House) c1967.

Warnes, David, Chronicle of the Russian Tsars (London, Thames & Hudson, Ltd) c1999

PHOTO CREDITS:

Portrait of Nicholas II, public domain, courtesy of Saint-Petersburg.com via Google Images site.gov.

Nikolai Kornilyevich Bodarevsky, portrait of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, 1907.  Public domain, courtesy of Google Images site.gov.

Pyotr Stolypin, public domain, courtesy of History Today via Google Images site.gov.

 

Culture of a Colossus

Post #11 of 365

The Interested Observer is back after a 2-week hiatus spent rereading and reviewing several hundred pages of Russian history in preparation for this and future posts.

The Geography

In the beginning was a swath of land lying across the far northern reaches of Europe and Asia and conjoining those continents at the natural boundary line of the Ural mountain range.  This colossus stretches eastward from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean and southward from the treeless arctic tundra through a vast spread of densely forested taiga with coniferous growth in the north giving way to deciduous woodland further south, to a broad spread of flat grassy steppe.  The nation of Russia encompasses one-sixth of Earth’s total land mass and covers eleven time zones.  While dawn is breaking over the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific coast, the previous day’s dusk is gathering in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The first humans to populate Russia were nomadic tribes who settled the southern steppes.  The Slavic forebears of today’s Russians moved north from the area now comprising Ukraine and Belarus and eventually became the dominant people group.

The Rurik Dynasty

In the ninth century of the common era, Scandinavia’s Vikings pirated the waterways of the north, making raids as far inland as the ancient city of Novgorod.  A Viking chieftain named Rurik was invited to take control and establish order among quarreling Slavic tribes.  Rurik’s sons migrated south to Kiev and brought the Slavs together in a single state known to history as Kievan Rus.

According to a legend of 988 A.D., Prince Vladimir of Kiev received a succession of foreign emissaries representing the religions of Europe.  After discoursing with a Greek philosopher, Vladimir sent emissaries of his own to Constantinople to visit the cathedral of Hagia Sophia.  They were overwhelmed by the gold mosaics that shimmered in candlelight and the mystical beauty of the liturgy.  Vladimir was baptized and declared Eastern Orthodox Christianity the religion of Russia.  His people received Christianity with joy, and hundreds of churches were built in Kiev and its surrounding towns and villages.

The next two centuries were a golden age for Kiev, which drew artists and craftsmen from all over Europe.  Kiev’s legal system ranked among Europe’s most liberal, with peasants free to live where they wished and to worship side by side with knights and princes.  In the fiercely independent city of Novgorod, most citizens were thoroughly literate.

But the Mongol horde of Genghis Khan was on the march.  In 1236 they swept like a flood up the Volga River, burning everything in their path and littering the countryside with bones; four years later they laid Kiev waste, melted down the gold of the churches and took the artisans as slaves to ornament the courts of their khans.  Novgorod fared better because of the heroism of Alexander Nevsky, who through tributes and direct negotiation kept Novgorod from being destroyed.  For two hundred years the Mongols, also called Tatars, rode through the countryside in the summertime, killing two-thirds of the population and carrying off young children to sell to the Turks.

The Mongols exercised tolerance toward all religions and spared the lives of monks and wandering holy men who traveled far and wide, offering comfort to the survivors who had fled to the sheltering taiga.  It was the monks who staged the first open defiance against the Mongols and urged the Russian princes on to their first victory at the Don River.  As Mongol power waned and the center of Russian spiritual life shifted from Kiev to Moscow, a great revival of Christian spirituality began.  Moscow called itself “the third Rome”.  The creation of icons, tempera paintings on wood depicting saints and religious scenes that decorated the interiors of churches and occupied their own corner in each humble peasant izba, became an act of religious devotion requiring prayer, fasting, and immersion in sacred texts on the part of the artist, of whom the best known was Andrei Rublev.

At Moscow’s heart is the Kremlin, where to this day Russia’s leaders keep their residence.  The Kremlin is an unparalleled architectural feat built on the orders of Grand Prince Ivan III (“the Great”) on the site of a citadel destroyed by the Mongols.  Ivan hired architects from Italy who worked in the Russian tradition of design.  Upon completion, the Kremlin’s sixty acres contained five palaces and four of Russia’s most magnificent cathedrals behind fortress walls with twenty towers pointing skyward.

The first Muscovite ruler crowned as tsar, a Russian word derived from “Caesar”, was Ivan IV (Grozny, “the Terrible”).  This word actually means “thunderer”.  Both of Ivan’s parents died by the time he was eight, leaving him in the care of feuding boyar (noble) families who treated him cruelly.  Upon coming of age, he married the beautiful, intelligent Anastasia Zakharina-Romanova.  Ivan was head over heels in love with Anastasia, perhaps the only true friend of his lifetime.  His 51-year reign was the longest of any tsar.  Ivan wrote several hymns used in the church and brought the first printing press to Russia.

Thirteen years into their marriage, Anastasia died of a wasting disease.  Ivan never recovered from his intense grief.  He turned to drink for comfort and grew suspicious to the point of paranoia, which he expended on his people, slaughtering tens of thousands in brutal purges.  In an argument with his firstborn son, he struck him a fatal blow with his iron staff.

Ivan’s death left Russia without a competent heir for the first time since ancient Kiev.  Court advisor Boris Godunov assembled a ragtag mob demanding his coronation.  His seven-year reign was marked by a famine that sent hungry peasants pouring into the cities and forced the enaction of laws binding peasants to the land, the first stage of serfdom.  The near-decade after Boris’ sudden and suspicious death is called the “Time of Troubles”; roving robbers pillaged the hinterland and men claiming to be Ivan’s dead son Dmitri appeared at the head of invading armies from Sweden and Poland, which occupied Moscow.  Desperate for stability, in 1613 a representative council was formed to select a new tsar.  They chose Mikhail Romanov, the teenage nephew of Ivan’s wife Anastasia, and thus began the 300-year Romanov dynasty.

The Romanov Dynasty

Mikhail and his son Alexei (“the Mild”) each ruled for 30 years.  Under Alexei trade was opened to China and tea became the favorite national beverage.  Alexei appointed a patriarch who ordered changes in the ritual of the Orthodox service that were met with heated opposition by many people who held every word of the prayer book as on par with Holy Scripture.  These self-styled “Old Believers” departed the church and created their own fellowships; many suffered martyrdom and others were forced into exile abroad.  Scattered Old Believer communities still can be found spanning the globe to this day.

Tall, strong Peter the Great came to the crown on a mission to bring Russia out of the dark ages by introducing Western ways.  He abolished the mandatory seclusion of women behind palace walls and closed carriages.  He created an army and navy that fought a war with Sweden and dealt them a resounding defeat at Poltava, Ukraine, that established Russia’s role as a power to be reckoned with.  He created the first Russian newspaper and founded schools and libraries, but his most significant achievement was the construction of a new westward-looking capital on the marshy delta and archipelago at the conjunction of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland.  Thousands of men were pressed into service to build the city on wooden piles sunk into the earth; their bones lie buried where they fell in the marsh.  Eleven years after Peter’s own hands laid the first sod, his city contained 34,000 buildings.  St. Petersburg became one of Europe’s most beautiful capitals.  Many foreigners who came there to work or study made it their permanent home and became more Russian than the Russians.  Indeed, Peter’s reforms created a climate where any Western trend of cultural fashion was seen as modish while anything Russian was tacky and inferior.

The eighteenth century saw the eras of Peter’s exuberant, colorful daughter Elizabeth and her ambitious German-born daughter-in-law Catherine.  Elizabeth loved parties and entertainment, and in a reign called the “Age of Song”, opera and ballet became popular, as did the making of jewelry.  The foremost figure of Elizabeth’s time was Mikhail Lomonosov, a multitalented man of science who founded the University of Moscow in 1755, a researcher in thermodynamics and physical chemistry who also wrote poetry, history, and drama and was an expert in Russian linguistics.

Elizabeth designated as heir her sister’s weak-minded son Karl Peter of Holstein and married him to his second cousin Sophia, rebaptized Catherine.  Less than a year after Elizabeth’s death, Karl Peter was murdered and Catherine installed in a coup which she undoubtedly knew about and probably masterminded.

Catherine II is called “the Great” today because of her annexation of Poland, the Crimea, and parts of Turkey.  She doubled the size of Russia’s armed forces, and her era saw the exploits of some of Russia’s most fabled soldier-heroes.  Women in Catherine’s Russia enjoyed civil liberties equal to those of men.  The girls’ school she founded at the Smolny Convent featured a program of natural science that placed it ahead of most girls’ schools of its time.  The first Russian-language dictionary was compiled at the behest of a princess named Catherine Vorontsova-Dashkova.  Catherine the Great was loud and proud about her sexual liaisons, which were legion.  The most famous of these was the prince-soldier Grigory Potemkin, ten years her junior, whom she gushed over in letters as “my golden pheasant”, “my peacock”, “my lion of the jungle”, even “my kitten”.  Even after Potemkin left the imperial bed, he remained her closest friend and advisor and handpicked all but one of her future lovers, who totaled at least 12 and possibly many more.

Catherine had some real problems with other interpersonal relationships, none more so than Paul, the only son of her union with Karl Peter.  She kept him far from the court, only contacting him when she wanted something, and her tightfistedness with him matched her lavish provision for current and former lovers.  Paul’s very first act as tsar was an edict that no woman would ever again assume Russia’s throne.  That was the only notable thing he did.  Paul was an inept leader whose dislike by the people equaled his antipathy for his mother.  Just five years into his reign, he was killed in a midnight overthrow by a cabal of army officers who installed his son Alexander.

Alexander I was everybody’s golden boy, a tall blond physical specimen with statuesque features and proud bearing.  In his early years he abolished censorship, encouraged the establishment of schools and the publication of books, and corresponded with Thomas Jefferson about the particulars of the U.S. Constitution.

Then came the war of 1812.  In June of that year, Napoleon’s 600,000-strong Grand Army invaded Russia and struck straight for Moscow.  The courage of the Russian people’s defense of their homeland is a story for the ages, immortalized in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Nobles fought side by side with peasants, who flocked to fight from all corners of Russia.  At Borodino, sixty miles from Moscow, General Mikhail Kutuzov made a heroic stand that ended in retreat after staggering losses.  Within a week the French were in Moscow, and the Russians set fire to the city to keep its massive store of supplies and foodstuffs out of French hands.  This strategy proved effective as, cut off from resupply and reinforcement, the French had no option but retreat into the face of a pitiless oncoming winter.  The Russians chased them all the way to Paris and were greeted as liberators.

After the victory, Alexander became increasingly conservative and religious-minded.  He traveled to the Black Sea in 1825, where he died of a fever.  Because his body was not publicly displayed at his funeral, rumors persisted that he had secretly abdicated to pursue the itinerant life of a “holy fool.”

Mere hours after proclaiming himself tsar, Alexander’s brother Nicholas I quelled a revolt by a secret society of intellectuals and army officers demanding a constitutional government modeled on the United States.  This “Decembrist uprising” set a repressive tone for the “Iron Tsar.”  It was under Nicholas that young Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested for conspiracy and sentenced to death by firing squad only to have Nicholas commute his sentence literally at the last second to four years in a Siberian penal colony.  It was also the era of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s most beloved poet, a dashing figure who loved gambling, women and duels.  His life was tragically cut short at age 37 by just such a duel over a taunt about his wife’s infidelity.

Nicholas’ son Alexander II knew that Russia would always be a step behind Europe unless it modernized.  The “Tsar-Liberator” abolished serfdom in 1861 without a shot being fired two years before Abraham Lincoln freed American slaves in the midst of a civil war.  He launched unprecedented reforms in the legal system, introducing trial by jury.  He also introduced elected self-governing regional councils (zemstvos).  Alexander’s education reforms opened the universities to all classes and gave rise to a burgeoning intelligentsia.  The most celebrated of the new intellectuals was the passionate libertarian Alexander Herzen, who operated a newspaper called Kolokol (The Bell), officially forbidden but which the tsarist ministers and Alexander himself regularly consulted.

During the second half of the nineteenth century Russia saw a flowering of achievement in all venues of the arts.  Count Leo Tolstoy wrote of country-gentry marriage and infidelity in Anna Karenina, and Dostoevsky explored redemption through suffering in novels like The House of the Dead (based on his Siberian exile), Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot.  Ivan Turgenev described the thought-life of nihilistic students in Fathers and Sons, and Anton Chekhov entertained audiences with his bitingly witty plays and short stories.  Composers whose names were Mikhail Glinka, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, just to mention a few, made an everlasting mark on music.  Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky’s Ballet Russe brought the dance to worldwide prominence.  The paintings of Ilya Repin and others were collected by merchant Pavel Tretyakov and displayed in his Tretyakov Gallery and other urban art museums.  Slavophiles and Westernizers debated the nature of Russia’s role in the wider world.

But the growing intellectual class also spawned thought of another kind.  Violent socialist/anarchist revolutionary groups like Narodnaya Volia (The People’s Will), devoted their purpose to political terrorism and mounted several attempts on Alexander’s life.  On a Sunday afternoon in March 1881, Alexander went riding through St. Petersburg when a bomb flew under his carriage.  He stepped from the damaged conveyance to assist the wounded, and a second bomb-thrower aimed between his feet.  In a blinding flash Alexander II’s left leg was broken and his right leg ripped off entirely, his stomach torn open, his face gashed and fragments of his shattered wedding ring driven into the flesh of his hand.  In his final whisper, he asked to be taken home to his palace to die.  In a sad twist of fate, Alexander had just approved the formation of a national legislative body, the first step toward a parliamentary government.

This was quickly and soundly reversed under Alexander III, who in reaction to his father’s assassination governed from a position of absolute autocracy.  Russia had long been notorious for unjust treatment of its Jews, forced into a “Pale of Settlement” and restricted in their livelihood, but Alexander III was a rabid anti-Semite under whom the occurrence of swift, bloody pogroms increased drastically.  At the apparent peak of his vitality he died of glomerulonephritis, leaving his sensitive and unprepared son, Nicholas II, to take his place in a gathering geopolitical storm.

Creativity and culture abounded in Russia.  They could have produced so much more in the twentieth century had not the Communists come to power and frozen that land into the barren lifelessness of the tundra itself.

Sources:

Massie, Suzanne, Land of the Firebird (New York, Simon & Schuster) c1980

Warnes, David, Chronicle of the Russian Tsars (London, Thames & Hudson, Ltd) c1999

WEEKLONG SPECIAL: It’s the Ideology, Stupid – Day 7

Post #10 of 365

Judging History

(Happy birthday to the Interested Observer…happy 48^th birthday to me…)

Writers of history are expected to present both sides fairly and objectively, withholding moral judgment for future generations to decide.  But there are times when atrocity is so vast in its magnitude that not to judge it makes light of the suffering and adds to the tragedy.

Jesus said, “Judge not, lest you be judged” (Matthew 7:1).  However, fifteen verses later in the same chapter he warned his listeners to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.  “By their fruits you will recognize them.  Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?  Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:16-18).  Jesus here is instructing his followers to make a judgment about the quality of the fruit they see in others’ lives.  His earlier words were therefore not a command against all judging but a caution that one will be held to the same standard s/he sets for others.

If this blog sits in judgment on history, so be it.  It is intended not as dispassionate retelling of facts but as a memorial to the innocents who suffered and died.

Karl Marx’s character, and so much more the ideology that sprang from that character, was full of thorns and thistles.  He had no physical disabilities to keep him from gainful employment.  With his doctoral background he could have found work as a professor or a librarian behind the desk of one of the libraries he frequented.

There are some who say that the extremity of Marx’s views made him a pariah in the academic world.  There’s an excellent Syrophoenician word for that—“baloney”.  Universities have never been bastions of reactionary thought.  If there was any place Marx could have easily found work, it was in the classroom.

Speaking of which.  He could have stood outside the factory door at the end of each shift, holding up the reading textbook that would have been the workers’ ticket out of the factory.  He could have gathered ten or fifteen working families in his home and taught them to sound out letters and string them together into words and sentences, which they in turn could have passed along to others.

He could have gotten a factory job.  What a golden opportunity to observe the situation firsthand!  Yet he never spent one day in factory, warehouse, mill or mine.

He could have invented the lightbulb 30 years before Thomas Edison did and set in motion the technology that ended the Industrial Revolution.

Yet for thirty-four years, he sat on his nondisabled duff and did nothing.

Then there’s the stinking fruit borne by his ideas.  Violent revolution, terror-famine, forced labor, beautiful ancient cultures destroyed—the Interested Observer has enumerated all this before.

Even if these things had never happened, there is still one overriding reason Marxism can never work.  The very first life lesson an architect’s child like myself learns is that no building can stand long on a flawed foundation.  Marxism operates on the faulty premise that human nature is inherently good as soon as the economic determinants are removed.

Human nature is not and has never been inherently good.  If you want this proved, watch the behavior of small children, especially those who live in comfortable environments and are too young to process financial need.

I remember the first time the Blonde Princess lied to me, a month past her third birthday.  (She told me that she had not taken one bite apiece from several apples Grandma had left on the counter, when she knew I was there and saw her do it.)  No one taught my niece to lie.  It came to her naturally.  Why, if human nature is so inherently good, do her parents have to put her in “timeout” to teach her that lying is bad?

If you’re still not convinced, take a cursory look at ancient history.  That was the time when all mankind was basically equal and everyone wrested a living from the earth by plowing ground and/or herding animals.  Yet Cain murdered Abel, and mankind slaughtered each other in territorial wars or sacrificed children the Blonde Princess’ age to impotent idols of wood and stone.  That anyone educated beyond fourth grade could possibly believe in inherent human goodness completely mystifies The Interested Observer.

Quite frankly, I’m weary of Karl Marx as a topic of discussion.

And so…on to Russia.

 

WEEKLONG SPECIAL: It’s the Ideology, Stupid – Day 6

Post #9 of 365

The Creative-less Society

As we approach the close of this dissection of Karl Marx’s ideology, it serves us well to look at the final stage of history that he envisioned and what it would mean for humanity.

The ultimate state of absolute equality is sameness.  Is that really what anyone wants?

One of my favorite novels from childhood is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.  I first read it at age nine, and even now I reread it every five to seven years.  Its protagonist, Meg Murry, is a high-school girl who does not fit in with her peers—she’s plain, awkward, and gifted in math.  Both of her parents are scientists experimenting with space and time travel.  Her father is away on a top-secret government assignment, and no one has heard from him in over a year.

Meg, her five-year-old genius brother Charles Wallace and their friend Calvin are called on an interplanetary adventure to rescue her father, held prisoner on a planet governed by IT, a disembodied brain that sits soullessly on a dais and ticks an unending pulse.  L’Engle named this benighted planet Camazotz.  I’ve wondered if this was a play on “Camelot”, a mockery of an idealized kingdom.

At first glance Camazotz looks a lot like Earth, with similar trees and topography.  Meg and her comrades quickly notice that all houses and apartment buildings look exactly the same down to the number of flowers in the identical square yards.  All the children skip rope and bounce rubber balls in rhythm, and at a single simultaneous handclap by their mothers, they put away their toys at the exact identical second.  When a boy is found bouncing a ball out of rhythm or tossing it into the air, this is considered an “aberration.”  There is no unhappiness on Camazotz, but there is no happiness either.

If merely bouncing a ball badly is an “aberration”, where would a truly creative mind fit on Camazotz?

A Wrinkle in Time would never have been published.  Such a story would have “jammed the mind”[1].  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, arguably the best novel ever written, would have been scattered far and wide on windblown ash.

Same with The Lord of the Rings.  J.R.R. Tolkein would have been “reprocessed”, as a Camazotz inhabitant hinted darkly to Meg and her companions.

There would have been no Bach, Mozart or Peter Tchaikovsky piped into the offices of Camazotz.  Bob Dylan and Bono and their second-to-none lyrics would have shared the same cell where Meg and her friends last saw the errant ball-bouncer, this time bouncing in perfect rhythm and screaming in pain each time the ball hit the ground.

There would have been no Marie Curie working in her lab late at night, discovering radium and incorporating it into the treatment of cancer.  On Camazotz, as Meg and her friends would learn, it was easier to simply annihilate the sick.

Don’t think it can’t happen in real life.  It has happened.

In the Soviet Union, creative minds were locked in psychiatric hospitals and injected with numbing drugs.  In Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution, all women had to wear their hair the same length and style and the same uniform-type outfit, day after day.  They were punished if they wore their hair half an inch longer than the government-dictated regulation.  In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, people were shot for wearing glasses to correct their vision.  Even now, in North Korea, anyone one millisecond late in saluting the “dear leader” is imprisoned and starved in a concentration camp.  These three examples are the logical extreme of a system whose goal is sameness.

Free societies can provide equal opportunities but cannot and should not guarantee equal outcomes.  They can provide equal rights, not equal results.

I happen to believe that a Divine hand designed the universe.  But if there is one thing evolutionists and creationists can agree on, it’s the fact that no two people are exactly alike.

Because of this, maybe a little “inequality” is actually a good thing.

 

[1] L’Engle, Madeleine, A Wrinkle in Time (Crosswicks, Ltd) c1962, p. 130

WEEKLONG SPECIAL: It’s the Ideology, Stupid – Day 5

Post #8 of 365

HEROIC HIGHLIGHT:  Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

Thomas Alva Edison

 

I’m about to slay a sacred canard.

I have heard it said (and not all that long ago) that if we don’t embrace some of Karl Marx’s ideas, the mean old factory bosses will take over and we’ll all be back in the Industrial Revolution.

I’m only going to tell you this once.  The Industrial Revolution is over.

It’s never coming back, either, for the same reason The Interested Observer’s nieces, the Blonde Princess (age 3) and the Curly-Haired Hugger (going on 2) no longer consume breast milk and baby food.

We/they have grown beyond it.  Just as nobody and nothing is going to send Auntie’s favorite girls back to infancy, so the human body of knowledge has grown beyond the Industrial Revolution.

The primary reason we’ve outgrown it is due to the feats of the two men portrayed in today’s post.  This post will not dig too deeply into the details of their lives but will focus instead on the world-changing impact of their inventions.

The Masses’ Greatest Heroes

Thomas Alva Edison was born in the town of Milan, in the great state of Ohio (woohoo!) in 1847.  When he was seven his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where he spent the remainder of his childhood and was educated at home by his mother.  Edison, who struggled with a hearing impairment all his life, began his storied career working as a Western Union telegraph operator, where he learned about electricity.  His first invention was the stock ticker.

When Edison was a nine-year-old boy in Port Huron, Nikola Tesla was born to Serbian parents in the town of Smiljan, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Croatia.  He was educated at the Higher Real Gymnasium in the central Croatian city of Karlovac.  He enrolled at Austrian Polytechnic but did not graduate due to a gambling addiction.

Edison married twice and had three children by each wife but spent the bulk of his time in his lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey.  His first invention to gain national fame was the phonograph, patented in 1877.  It gained him celebrity status and earned him the lifelong nickname “the Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Edison is best known, of course, for the invention of the first commercially practical electric light bulb, an incandescent lamp utilizing a carbon filament connected to platina contact wires.

In 1884, Nikola Tesla immigrated to the United States and was hired by Edison as an electrical engineer to redesign and improve Edison’s direct-current generators.  The two men could not have been more different.  While Edison was buttoned-down and bow-tied, Tesla gave off a mustached mad-scientist persona, complete with his thick Serbian accent.  A rift occurred when Edison, who had a reputation as a miser, offered Tesla fifty thousand dollars to redesign the generators, then treated the pledge as a joke when Tesla completed the task.  Tesla went on his own and was hired as a consultant by Edison competitor George Westinghouse, who licensed Tesla’s alternating-current induction motor and transformer.  He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1891.

Edison’s advocacy of a direct current (DC) power distribution system brought him into conflict with Westinghouse and other companies who favored an alternating current (AC) system such as that designed by Tesla.  DC required lower voltage than AC, but AC covered longer distances.  Edison believed the high voltage used in AC was dangerous.  This “war of currents” raged for a decade, but by 1892 Edison was losing stock revenue and eventually lost control of his company.  The company became General Electric, which is still, in the words of an old commercial, “bringing good things to life.”

Tesla went on to work with X-rays and radio and pioneered wireless power transmission but remains best known for his work in perfecting the modern AC system.  Edison perfected fluoroscopy for commercial use and invented the movie camera.

Edison died at his home in 1931 of complications of diabetes.  Tesla never married and died in his room at the New Yorker Hotel of coronary thrombosis in 1943.

Let There Be Light

The Interested Observer is of the firm and settled opinion that Labor Day should be celebrated not on the first Monday of September or May 1, but on October 21.  On that day in 1879, electric light leaped to life, and the industrial revolution was overcome.

No event has had a farther-reaching impact on working men and women from that day to this.   The increase in production efficiency enabled by quality lighting made the eight-hour workday possible.  This unprecedented growth of the overall economy’s productive power created a vast across-the-board wage increase.

The urban infrastructures adjusted to the population growth.  Public health laws were passed, improving urban housing and curbing the spread of communicable disease.  Life expectancy rose dramatically along with a steep decline in infant and child mortality.  Child labor was restricted and eventually abolished.  The proliferation of roads and railroads eased transport and distribution of foodstuffs.  For the first time in history, population and per capita income grew side by side.

Workers banded together to form trade unions and guilds that pressed for their interests.  Strikes were the most frequent and effective tactic of group protest.  Other workers learned skilled crafts and trades such as carpentry or metallurgy.

Let There Be Literacy

This was occurring simultaneously with the other great development of the century—the rise of widespread public education.  Throughout Marx’s lifetime, the nations of Europe were becoming literate.

You say you want a real revolution?  A catchy slogan might be “hee-hee, how-how, stop illiteracy now!”  It is no secret that wherever illiteracy goes, abject poverty always goes hand-in-hand.  They’re Siamese twins joined at the heart.  Poverty cannot be defeated without literacy.

The literacy rate in Great Britain was 50% in 1820 and rose to 80% by 1900.  In France it was under 40% in 1820 and 75% in 1900.  In Germany, the land of Marx’s childhood, the literacy rate in 1820 was 50%; in 1900 it was 99%, the highest in Europe.  For a chart tracking the rise of literacy in Europe, click here.

Most importantly, a growing middle class of educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers and merchants created an environment of upward mobility.

The hardships of the Industrial Revolution’s early days were the passing growing-pains of a movement in its infancy.  We didn’t need Marxism.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Public domain, courtesy of Google Images site.gov.

Public domain, courtesy of Library of Congress via Google Images

 

WEEKLONG SPECIAL: It’s the Ideology, Stupid – Day 4

Post #7 of 365

In His Own Words

A word of warning to my readers:  Today’s post contains some chewy brisket.  Stay with it.  This meat is tough but essential.  The Interested Observer promises that s/he who endures this post to its end shall be rewarded; this is Post #7, and it’s time for some Seventh-day Satire!

No one can deny that the tendency of human beings to exploit others for their own gain has been with us since the Garden of Eden.  Because of this, certain turns of phrase in Karl Marx’s outcries have power to move the hearts of decent people.

There has arisen a perception of Marx as a gentle bearded scholar sitting in a reading-room chair contemplating philosophy.  To criticize him is to abandon the “little guy” and align oneself with his bosses and landlords.

It’s also easy to conflate Marx with today’s socialist governments that allow their citizens to lead peaceful lives and own property.  All Marxists are socialist but not all Socialists are Marxist/Communist; many well-known socialists such as author George Orwell (Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four) have loudly opposed Communism.  The ever-present concept of struggle repeated over and over throughout Marx and Engels’ writing is the key difference.  Socialism calls for government involvement in economic life with free education and health care and a heavy social-net policy for the disadvantaged.  Marxism is a trenchant call for class hatred and open warfare.

To those who protest that surely the violence done in Marx’s name is not what he intended, that hotheads like Lenin and Trotsky added their rage to his ideas, this is true.  That’s how it became Marxism-Leninism.  Others hoped that after this Five-Year Plan or that collectivization campaign, the Communists would silence the guns and live in the classless society Marx did envision.  That, for now, is beside the point.

The point is this:  Violence is written into the ideology by the hand of its founder. 

Even a superficial reading of Marx shows that in his ideology there are two poles and no equator.  All bourgeois people and families are vile bloodsuckers and all proletarians are essentially goodhearted, or would be if it weren’t for those wicked evil bourgeoisie.  Marx never raised the question of what the proletariat could do to improve their situation, such as classroom education or learning a specialized skill or craft.  Nor did he address social ills like illegitimacy of children or the impact of widespread alcohol abuse; oh no, the bourgeoisie must be simply eliminated.

The general tone and tenor of Marx’s writings  expresses a sneering contempt.  Consider this, from The Communist Manifesto:

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. … In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.[1]

Karl Heinzen was a utopian socialist who disagreed with Marx’s definition of “class”.  In an 1852 letter to his friend and fellow revolutionary journalist Joseph Wedemeyer, Marx wrote of Heinzen:

“Ignorant louts like Heinzen, who deny not merely the class struggle but even the existence of classes, only prove that, despite all their blood-curdling yelps and the humanitarian airs they give themselves, they regard the social conditions under which the bourgeoisie rules as the final product…they are only the servants of the bourgeoisie. And the less these louts realize the greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself the more disgusting is their servitude.”[2]

Marx was equally cruel to his friends.  “When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.”[3]

Of the worldwide followers of Jesus Christ, who since Christianity’s inception have fed the poor, cared for orphans, and built and worked in hospitals, Marx said, “The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable…The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed…The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble… The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.  So much for the social principles of Christianity.”[4]

All this would be incendiary enough in the always-heated context of sociopolitical revolution.  But then, there were Marx’s direct calls for terror:  “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”[5]

He goes into more detail in The Communist Manifesto:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State…Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.  These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.[6]

This is not Lenin or Trotsky speaking.  This is Marx.

But the most damning indictment of Marxian violence lies in the historical event he most applauded and affirmed.  His writings throughout express an intense admiration for the French Revolution, and in a letter to Engels in 1849, he wrote, “Once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to reenact the year 1793…When our time comes, we shall not conceal terrorism with hypocritical phrases. . . The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envisage it.”[7]

The average American reader, two centuries and an ocean removed from that date, may or may not remember reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities or Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel in high school.  In 1849, any European would have immediately grasped Marx’s meaning.  Everyone alive was touched by the shadow of the French Revolution and its subsequent Reign of Terror.  In 1793 the guillotine, dubbed the “national razor”, fell 17,000 times within one year while others were beaten to death by street mobs.

In 1849 the Reign of Terror was not yet 60 years past.  In today’s terms Marx’s call for a reenactment of 1793 would be equivalent to a call for a renewal and escalation of the Nazi Holocaust.

This violence written into the ideology was an easy foundation for Lenin, Trotsky and others to build upon.

All Communist revolutions have been bloodbaths, everywhere and always with no exceptions.  Everywhere and always the body count totals not in France’s tens of thousands, but in the millions.  Does this not say something about the tone and tenor of the ideology?  If it “just hasn’t been done right,” why not?  Why has not one Communist revolutionary ever found a noble way to implement it?  Why do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?  Isn’t that how Albert Einstein defined insanity?

Seventh-day Satire

Whew!  After all that, The Interested Observer could use some levity. During the Soviet era, the people under its control used acerbic humor to keep their sanity.

I’ve heard this joke in a few different forms—don’t know where it originally came from.

After many longsuffering years in London, waiting for her husband Karl to man up and get a job, Jenny Marx finally calls it quits and returns to her family’s estate in Germany.  Karl is feeling bummed, so he walks by Friedrich Engels’ place to cry on his shoulder.  After patting him on the back for a few minutes, Engels suggests that Karl go to the nearest tavern and drown his sorrows.  Karl is on his second or third beer when a tall, slender woman walks in alone in a form-fitting coat and hip-hugging skirt with dangly diamonds at her earlobes.  Energized by the alcohol, Karl strides up to her and says, “Hello, baby, you are looking bour-geo-sie, and I’m feeling a need to utilize my means of production.”

[1] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, pdf, p. 23

[2] Marx to Joseph Wedemeyer in New York, March 5, 1852, found here.  http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm

[3] Quoted in Pettis, Michael, Avoiding the Fall:  China’s Economic Restructuring (Washington DC, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) c2013

[4] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, On Religion

[5] Marx, Karl, “The Victory of the Counterrevolution in Vienna”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, November 1848.

[6] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Frederich, The Communist Manifesto, p. 26

[7] Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-505, final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 18, 1849.  Quoted in Thomas G. West, Marx and Lenin, The Claremont Institute

WEEKLONG SPECIAL: It’s the Ideology, Stupid – Day 3

Post #6 of 365

Opiate of the Faux Intellectuals

That’s stupid, man.  That’s totally stupid.

That was the Interested Observer’s initial gut reaction as a high school senior upon hearing my American Government teacher explaining the doctrine of class struggle.  I knew that the Communists did not like us and we didn’t like them, but until now I did not know what the draw of their system was.

My father, of blessed memory, was an architect who, at that very moment, was working at his own firm ten minutes from my school.  He usually employed 3 to 10 people, but at the firm’s zenith, which lasted about 5 years in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were closer to 20.  I had met most of these men and women.  I knew their spouses’ names, where they lived, and how many kids they had.  All were professional architects with equal education levels.

We had our share of financial difficulties.  Getting the business off the ground in the years of OPEC and stagflation was a struggle for my parents.  When the winds of the national economy blow in blustery weather, architects feel the first chill as clients rethink their plans to build, and the recession of the early 1990s hit us hard.  At home in the evening after laying off his first employee, Dad wiped his glasses and said, “I feel so bad for Mel tonight.”  When he died, we received a beautiful sympathy card from Mel and his wife, saying that my father was “the best boss I’ve ever had.”

Now Mrs. Rodenbaugh was implying that the Communists would consider my father “petit bourgeois” and an enemy because he designed buildings rather than constructing them.

Stupid.  Totally stupid.

She moved on to the next concept.  “Marx spent several pages in Das Kapital on the labor theory of value, which says that the intrinsic value of any given item or commodity can be determined by summing up the cost of the raw materials and physical labor put into its production.”

I raised my hand and asked her to repeat that sentence.  I wanted to be sure I had heard her right.

I had taken other classes with Mrs. Rodenbaugh, so she knew me well enough to explain this in a way to which I could relate.  “What that means in practical terms, Shannon, is that the surgical equipment used to extract congenital cataracts from a baby’s eyes are less valuable than the tearing down of a rotted shed because making the instruments requires one or two people sitting at a table with small tools, but the shed requires three or four men with heavy machinery.”

Be still my beating heart.  I was that baby.

I was blessed enough to be born in America.  While I retain some visual impairment after six operations, a baby of my age born in the Soviet Union with my disability would have grown up functionally blind and unable as an adult to join the workforce.  Soviet surgeons had the knowledge of how to perform sight-saving cataract operations, but the instrumentation was not available to them because the central planners deemed it of less labor-value.  So much for that comforting Marxist maxim “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.”

That is as stupid as it gets.

At age seventeen I could clearly see the stupidity.  Why were so many grownups blind to it, especially those who hold advanced degrees?

Faux Intellectualism

Why indeed?

It would appear natural that a set of ideas railing against exploitation of labor would attract an immediate grassfire following by working people.  Yet from the beginning, Marxism’s most fervent supporters have been drawn from the academic stratum.

If Marx were to rise from his tomb today and show up on a university campus, he would appear as a buttoned-down professor rather than a motorcycle-riding Che Guevara.  His writing is not for the fluff reader.  His was a verbose, heavy-handed sentence structure full of arcane language that made his ideas more accessible to intellectuals than to workers.  This talking-above-their-heads accentuates the condescending disrespect for the proletariat he already shows in treating them as helpless victims of profit.

The words of Marxism were a balm to those who nurtured a sense of guilt about the privilege they enjoyed.  It cloaked itself in scientific terms and offered an evangelist’s sense of certainty, spoken in their language, about the future of a secular world.

A deep despondency about the human condition engulfed Europe in the 1920s, with a century of onward-and-upward progress brought to a screeching halt by one pointless world war and the Great Depression hard on its heels, casting doubts about the workability of the capitalist system.

But as the truth seeped out, the praises and excuses began to smell cloying.

“I have been over to the future, and it works!” gushed reporter Lincoln Steffens[1] after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919, the same year Vladimir Lenin butchered the Cossacks who made their home in the vicinity of the Don River.

The Interested Observer loves the musical version of My Fair Lady.  As a kid I would sashay around the house belting out Eliza Doolittle’s songs, cockney accent and all.  But I cannot in good conscience read the play that inspired it.  Pygmalion is written by George Bernard Shaw, who said as Stalin’s millions mounted, “We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.”[2]

Same with H.G. Wells, of War of the Worlds fame, who interviewed Stalin in 1934 and said of him, “I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him.”[3]

God bless Albert Camus.  In response to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s caution to keep silence about the existence of the Gulag lest workers be demoralized, Camus said, “The truth is the truth, and denying it mocks the causes both of humanity and of morality.”4  The Interested Observer will pour a cup of hot chocolate tonight and curl up with The Plague or The Stranger.

Don’t even get me started on Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist who denied repeatedly in print that the three-year-old children of Ukraine were starving to death in a man-made terror-famine.  How did he sleep at night?

Now the death tolls are in.  Those numbers don’t lie.

Yet there are those in university classrooms to this day who teach Marxism to students as a valid and even preferred system.

In the face of what we know, that is faux intellectualism.

It had a very different antithesis in the first country governed by Marxism.

The Genuine Article

Several hundred leading Soviet dissidents risked their careers, their freedom, and their lives to oppose Communism.  Let’s look at who these people were and are:

• Andrei Sakharov was the soul and center of the dissident movement.  He was also the inventor of the Soviets’ first hydrogen bomb.  His wife, Yelena Bonner, was a pediatrician.
• Before beginning his public literary career, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn taught physics and mathematics.
• Yevgeny Zamyatin was a writer of science fiction and political satire.
• Yuri Orlov is a nuclear physicist.
• Ludmila Alexeyeva is a historian.
• Valentin Turchin was a cybernetician and computer scientist.
• Alexander Men was a priest who wrote dozens of scholarly books on the Bible.
• Alexander Ginzburg was a journalist and poet.
• Anatoly Koryagin is a psychiatrist.
• Joseph Brodsky was a poet and essayist.
• Vladimir Bukovsky is a neurophysiologist.
• Natan Sharansky is a childhood chess prodigy who studied mathematics and cybernetics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a school lauded as the Soviet equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And the list goes on.  Now, that’s brain cred.

[1] Hartshorn, Peter, I Have Seen the Future:  A Life of Lincoln Steffens (New York, Harcourt-Brace, p. 315), c1958.

[2] http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/opiate/opiate.html

[3] Wells, Herbert George, Experiment in Autobiography:  Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Philadelphia and New York, J.B. Lippincott) c1967, available here.

4.  Todd, Oliver, Albert Camus:  A Life (New York, Alfred A. Knopf) c1997

 

WEEKLONG SPECIAL: It’s the Ideology, Stupid – Day 2

Post #5 of 365

Taking Apart the Tenets

The last post provided a bare-bones summary of Marxist thought.  This post will examine its key concepts and terminology.

Marxism Under a Microscope

The theory of Marxism revolves around the premise that the driving force of all history is class struggle between the bourgeoisie (the moneyed interests who privately own and invest in business enterprises) and the larger but poorer proletariat who work at these establishments and sell their labor for wages.  Every individual’s class status is economically determined solely by his/her ownership or non-ownership of the means of production.

Marx charged that profits from the working man’s labor lined the pockets of the bourgeoisie and resulted in exploitation that alienated workers from the value of the commodities they produced.  Marx’s interpretation of the “labor theory of value”, a term coined by earlier economists such as Adam Smith and which he himself called the “law of value”[1], stated that the economic value of a commodity is socially determined by the amount of physical labor required to produce it[2] rather than the usefulness or pleasure it affords to the customer.  More on that later, especially in the next post.

Marx theorized that capitalism would produce progressively severe financial panics and depressions.  As workers’ conditions worsened, the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie in a violent worldwide revolution.  He exhorted the proletariat to speed that process by forming an international workers’ union, supporting whatever existing political party best served proletarian interests, and raising class consciousness through propaganda.

After the proletariat became the ruling class (the dictatorship of the proletariat), they would centralize all means of production under state control.  With classless society achieved, the state would wither away, as would societal pillars such as family and religion, and history would end.  Marx was deliberately ambiguous in his writings about what means the dictatorship of the proletariat would employ, or how the final homogenized lump of humanity would look.

The Key to Marxism’s Origins

Every lie, the sages say, comes wrapped in truth, and so it is with Marxism.

Karl Marx’s Europe was the Europe of the Industrial Revolution, which unfolded around 1750 in Britain and spread through Germany and France with its peak lasting approximately 100 years.  It began with the discovery of water power and the consequent invention of the steam engine, developments which transformed Europe from an economy of agriculture and home-based “cottage industry” such as sewing and spinning to one of large-scale manufacture.  Factories multiplied in the cities and larger towns, where ease of travel facilitated the transport of heavy machinery.  Work was plentifully available and guaranteed a constant salary unaffected by the vagaries of crops and weather and attracting job-seekers by the thousands.

In his poem “Jerusalem” (1804), William Blake wondered what Jesus would think if he visited England and beheld its “dark Satanic Mills”.[3]  The mills of Europe’s cities were, indeed, dark and satanic.  In those pre-electric light days, factories were poorly heated and lit by gas and kerosene, which often caused fires. Smoke from dense concentrations of industrial chimneys smogged the air.  Urban populations grew as much as sixfold over a span of fifty years.  Infrastructures responsible for food and shelter were unable to adequately handle the influx.

Workers’ settlements were hastily-built shantytowns.  Sanitation was nonexistent, and with a dozen workers packed into a single small, damp room, water-borne diseases like typhoid and cholera spread like wildfire, with small children hardest hit.  Child labor was an accepted fact even on the farm, where each child was expected to help with chores and animals from toddlerhood on, and so it carried over into the city.  Working families depended on all members’ collective wages and sent children as young as 8 into the factory or the mill.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Europe had no distinct middle class.  While workers put in twelve to fourteen hours per day under strict rules at a pace set by mindless, merciless machines, the mansions of the bourgeoisie stared down stonily over the rooftops of workers’ hovels.

There were problems in the Europe of Karl Marx’s experience that were unique to that point in history.  Yes and amen.

But Marx proposed an oversimplified cure.

Deconstructing “Class”:  A Tale of Two Straus(s)es

There are facts of life that are chiseled in stone from birth.  A person cannot change his/her DNA of racial or national origin or the identity of his/her biological parents.  Other aspects of the human condition (level of education, place of residence, marital status) are open to change.  “Class”, or socioeconomic status, is just such a changeable construct.  People have been changing their “class” since the beginning of time and will continue to do so until its end.

In treating “class” as a static situation, Marxism shows a condescending lack of respect for the very people Marx purported to want to help.  It treats the six-foot muscle-bound steelworker as a helpless victim.  The wage system, despite its shortcomings, was not a system of slavery.  That disgruntled steelworker could walk out the door to seek a different job, or return to the farm, or use his mind and experience to invent instruments that would make his job easier.

Many did exactly that and created the middle class, the most lasting outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution.

Pan the lens across the ocean to the U.S. West Coast.  In 1849 Levi Strauss was an immigrant from Bavaria, Germany, who supported himself as a traveling peddler.  He followed the Gold Rush to California, carrying on his back his stock of tent canvas, but once there, he could find no buyers.  Levi decided on a whim one day to ask a tailor to sew a pair of pants from the tent cloth, which he sold to a miner.  The miner was so satisfied with Levi’s pants that he told his friends, who all came clamoring for a pair of their own.

Today everyone knows about Levi Strauss & Company.  Out of that humble mining camp arose a corporation that employs 12,500 people worldwide.[4]

Levi’s next challenge soon became where to sell his new product on a wide scale.  On the other side of the country, another Bavarian immigrant named Straus was soon to provide the venue he needed.

Lazarus Straus drove a horse and buggy through the streets of Talbottom, Georgia, where he later opened a shop.  He sent passage money for his three sons to come and help manage the store.  This family business became R. H. Macy’s.[5]

Levi Strauss and Lazarus Straus are only two men, both of whom rose to great wealth.  But for every two of them there were hundreds of men-on-the-street unknown to history who utilized their resources and creativity to achieve a comfortable life for themselves and their families.

I close with a challenge to my readership:  Next time you shop for clothes, stop by your nearest Macy’s outlet and purchase a pair of Levi’s.  Put your money on two men who showed the world that “class” can be conquered.

[1] Schumacher, E.F., Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (New York, HarperCollins), c2010.

[2] Marx, Karl, Value, Price and Profit.

[3] Quoted in Harmon, William, The Top 500 Poems (New York, Columbia University Press), c1992.

[4] http://www.levistrauss.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LeviStraussCo2016-Fact-Sheet.pdf

[5] The tale of the two Straus(s)es is told in Blech, Benjamin, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jewish History and Culture (New York, Alpha Books) c2004.