Revolution and Reaction in Russia

It is a fascinating aspect of human society that in the year when the two Russian Revolutions of 1917 are being remembered there is also a furious lobby of individuals who oppose the screening of a film about the life of the last Tsar before he came to the throne. In rehashing a story that has been common knowledge since the events occurred, Tsarevitch Nicholas is show in the throes of a highly-sexed  relationship with a dancer from the St Petersburg opera. He was simply doing what many of the nobility did. The story has been made into a film, whose producers hope to cash in on releasing it to coincide with the centenary of the second revolution. Unluckily for the producers, since the collapse of communism the careless disposal of the imperial family's remains has been exposed, bones from most of them have been identified [with the help of DNA from the Duke of Edinburgh: a reminder that he is a very pukka royal prince] and the Orthodox church has deemed the Tsar to be a saint; if only because he died a 'martyr's death'. The consequence is that the film - though it tells [somewhat sensationally] a true story - has been condemned as blasphemous.

For me, this incident is a perfect vignette of what has happened in Russia in the past thirty years; when those decades are set against the grim background of the previous nearly-seven decades of increasingly bankrupt Marxist-Leninist dogma in conflict with the realities of twentieth-century existence.

The March Revolution saw the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of a Provisional Government. This group of liberal-conservative democrats struggled in vain both to establish a viable political system and to continue to fight the Germans. By this third year of the First World War Russian losses where huge, the significant capacity of Russian industry and railways had been stretched too far for too long and the soldiers were fed up of fighting under incompetent command with insufficient supplies. Mutinies were commonplace, even without the added stimulus to revolution that was added by the communists. The Germans facilitated Lenin's return to Russia, the Provisional Government recognised him as a potent enemy of their nascent state, he was able to escape arrest and begin to work with Trotsky, Stalin, Molotov and others to foment his more fundamental revolution.

The Provisional Government wanted to create a genuinely democratic republic; building up from the parliamentary institutions that the Tsar had created in 2005. Lenin was out to crush capitalism [including farming by free peasants] and recognised that the destruction of democratic institutions was a necessary step towards that end. Thus he was set to overthrow the state, capture all power for his communists and for the local trades councils - the soviets - that could be manipulated and 'educated' in Leninist dogma, and establish a pseudo-state that was wholly under the control of the party. The country descended into a half-hearted civil war. The Japanese sent troops to the Russian far east, without any particular objective, and they were later recalled home. The British sent a force to Archangel in northern Russia, but they never found sufficiently organised Russian democratic forces to align with in restoring some sort of democracy and they, too, were withdrawn.

Lenin and his gang were left to make what they could of the vast Russian empire. I will carry on with this account for a few days: at least, it will be a relief from Brexit and the collapse of UK political institutions.

Water off the Donald's Back

The pictures of yesterday's ceremonies in Paris feature two utterly bizarre couples. Wearing an almost-pristine Dior A-line dress of 1953, Melania Trump looked about the right age [but, certainly, not the right temperament] to be Mme Macron. Dressed for today, the real Mme Macron obviously made no positive impression on her near-contemporary, Donald Trump.

President Trump lapped up the limelight - it helped to correct the hassle he has been having at home - but it will be hard to find any evidence in the coming months that he actually feels any strong fellowship with a younger man who is trying to be monarchical while scrambling to assemble a sustainable government. Macron went home feeling that the day had been a success for French diplomacy: by the time Trump was in Air Force One the flattery had gone where the water goes off a duck's back. The net impact of the event was nil: except to reinforce the reflection in British minds that the French will never forgive the UK for saving them twice in the twentieth century. The French were thanking the US for entering the First World War in 1917, by which time hundreds of thousands of young Brits had been killed and wounded at the battle front in France.

Donald Trump is so used to apparent adulation from his TV audience, his minions in his patchily successful businesses, and the recent audiences at his campaigning rallies that he takes all such responses in the same way. He welcomes them, as reptiles welcome the warmth of the sun, because he needs them: but the impact of each day's intake is trivial in context of of the extent his previous experience. It has become apparent that he bridles - and twitters - at any critical comment that gets onto his radar; and this trait, too, seems now to have become ineradicable.

The progenitor of modern political campaigning in the United Kingdom, Benjamin Disraeli, was a magnet for criticism, much of it vitriolic. Some was easily turned aside as ignorantly antisemitic. For the more substantial venom of his many enemies [including much from his own party as he rose through the ranks] he had a well-studied display of contempt. He knew that success came to an outsider like himself by using his verbal facility and quick wit to pour flattery on those who could be useful to him. Once, when he was commended on this attribute, he responded on the lines of: "Everyone likes flattery; and with royalty I lay it on with a trowel". He showed the virtues of resilience and intelligence that have yet to be displayed by Macron, and which are apparently completely alien to Trump.

Another politician who combines indefeasible egocentricity with insensitivity to other people's opinions of him is Tony Blair. He has now imagined what shall happen to keep Britain in a 'reformed European Union'; or, perhaps, just within a European Economic Area where the continentals will surrender their 'red line' insistence on the free movement of peoples. It is sad that any newspaper would pay him for such tosh.

Politicians do almost nothing to deny to their fellow citizens the right to despise them.