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.