Chapter XIII

XIII

I have already introduced Soso, and those familiar with Russian history probably already know who he is.  But for those who do not, it may come as a shock that I am painting this man as a victim in history, and not the super villain.  And so I must pause the tale to give some reasoning behind this.  First of all, in the U.S.A. especially, there has been a fear of communism since the end of World War II.  I recently helped my wife(yes, this has taken me so long to write that I am now married) apply for a Permanent Residency visa, and one of the questions she had to answer tucked away amidst questions of whether or not she was a terrorist was whether or not she had ever been affiliated with a communist organization or had leanings towards one.  The question blankly states that if you are a communist, you’re not welcome in the country that is supposed to be a shining representative of political freedom.

But the U.S.A. isn’t alone in its distrust of communism.  My new father-in-law(who happens to be French) had no reason to dislike me until he found out that I had studied in Russia, and spoke Russian.  And wouldn’t you know it, because he grew up during the Cold War he, being French, hates the Russians more than the Germans, which quite frankly, is saying something.

I bring this up because there seems to be this blanket of distrust and hate of the communists in the west.  It seems we have tried to eliminate the good done by the communists and the bad done by the west.  But just as Crabites view of Hitler in 1935 is different than ours, so was the west’s view of Joseph Stalin.  Yes, our little Soso is Ioseb Stalin.

One example of this comes from Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, something that one encyclopedia says is an honor, but sometimes it is chosen more for the influence of the man than his mark of humanity.  It then cites Hitler being chosen in 1938, and Stalin being chosen in 1939 and 1942 as proof that sometimes it could be a pejorative award.  But what it doesn’t say is that when Stalin was chosen in 1942 the appellation Time Magazine gave him was Uncle Joe, an obvious comparison to Uncle Sam.  Why?  Because the Soviets were fighting with the U.S.A.  They were our ally.  Three years and 21-28 million men, women, and children later the Soviets were still our allies.  We let them march into Berlin first because their country bled and died to stop the Nazis, so that my grandfather and countless millions of others in the west didn’t have to.

I bring this up because history has a tendency to be one-sided.  While I will not focus on Stalin, whenever I do write of him, I will present him as a man, not as the super villain he is normally portrayed as.  Just a man…and a victim.  And who knows, in real life maybe he was just a victim, a victim of history.

Chapter XII

XII

Soso stood there trembling, clutching the folds of the cloak around his mother’s legs.  “Momma, he…he’s coming again and he’s drunk.”  Keke reached out her hand and gently held her sons head against her leg.  She bent down and gave him a kiss and a smile.

“Thank you Soso, come get me when he’s fallen asleep.”  Soso nodded back in between his tears and he sprinted away to his small room.  Keke acted quickly.  She ran outside to her neighbor Iakop’s, Soso’s godfather, who was really the only one keeping their family together.  Soso heard his father’s thick thumping outside and began to play as he normally did as if he was the great Arsena, the Georgian folk hero that fought against serfdom, and in front of him rolled up in the carpet was Kuchatneli the horrible fiend that eventually killed Arsena.

His father walked in, and ignoring Soso, collapsed on their old worn out couch.  Beso hated Soso.  He was his boy, he was supposed to learn the trade of his father, but instead his mother had insisted Soso enter Church school.  Beso was furious, he had said his boy would be a great cobbler, he was a natural craftsman, but his mother wouldn’t listen.  She dreamed her boy would be learned.  And so after a lot of work on her part she convinced the local priest to allow Soso to attend Church school, but the already tense relations between Soso’s parents were becoming unbearable.  A few days prior, Beso had forced him to come to the shop with him where he yelled at him to start sewing a shoe.  But his guardian angel of a mother had once again come to the rescue with one of the teachers and a few friends convincing Beso that this was better for his son.

Soso knew his father wouldn’t last much longer.  He was well-liked by everyone when not drunk, but that was rare now.  And he was right, within a week, Beso would be gone, and it would just be Soso and his mother.  And it would be in that bitter Georgian landscape where Soso would grow up, learning faster than his pupils and learning firsthand of the harsh realities of life, and learning that immortality was the reward of rebels like Arsena, those who fought for life, and for Georgia.

Chapter XI

            “A man without a woman

            Is like an engine without steam

            Valves missing from a clarinet

            Or a pistol you can’t aim...”

            The young Kolya stopped as her mom started shouting at his father Ivan.  “Stop that nonsense, what foolishness you try to teach your son Vanya!”  Kolya turned to run but not before he caught that befuddled sheepish look in his father’s eyes as his wife bore down on him.

            Kolya didn’t care, he hated his father.  Emblazoned on his memory like a hot iron were all those times his father had pulled down his pants and whipped him like a common animal, until he, bleeding and screaming had run out behind the house pulling his hands up and weeping in the smallest corner he could find.

            It was there deep in those incandescent corners, where he discovered the colonies of larva.  It was there that he became infatuated with the dark crawling motions of the lowliest worm and caterpillar.  From the earth he looked to the sky, and his infatuation grew daily.  He read book after book on birds and biology.  And even though his parents were both school teachers, in his own haughty words, “he learned to read virtually by himself.”  And perhaps it was among those quiet animals that he learned to control his hate.  Perhaps if he had pursued this course of study longer, the Soviets would have had a different master of biology than Lysenko.

            But regardless, when he ran outside that day, he didn’t cry.  Sorrow had been replaced in his heart.  What was left was hate.

Chapter X

            Tocqueville once wrote of the necessity a society had to see the poor, to be reminded of their poverty, and the differences between us.  Just this year I found myself standing in a long line outside a massive cathedral in Sevilla,Spain.  It was, as it so often is in Spain, hot as Hades.  I had had a bad night’s sleep as I had slept in a parking garage the night before and was somewhat irritable to boot, when all of a sudden the line rounded a corner and I saw an old woman, her face more wrinkly than a prune.  Her hollow cheeks like rough basalt stone.  I could tell she was poor, but this alone was not what struck me.  It was her withered arms that came to two ends as wizened stumps uprooted, torn, and beaten by the sands of time.  Shrunken by the sun, her skin clung like a brown spider to her bony arms.  Between these two almost useless knobs she squeezed a small ragged hat, which she stared steadfastly at, hardly daring to look up from the shame she probably felt from begging.

            My heart stopped as I stared in pity at this old warrior, for a moment I wondered on the social injustices of life.  I felt a longing to do something for her, to take her away from her lot of begging, but I couldn’t.  I left with the sad reality that sometimes life just isn’t fair.

            I can imagine a similar feeling pricked the heart of a young Karl Marx one day after seeing the condition of the working class; except, unlike me, he decided something could and should be done.  And thus the idea of communism was born; it was a way to force life to be fair.  And it was a belief that made millions’ hearts burn.

Chapter IX

There was a time in the Roman Empire when Christians were hunted and slaughtered in throngs.  For many it would not have been hard to bow down to the pagan idols, or even just practice their own religion in secret.  But that was the problem with Christianity, it made men’s hearts burn within them.  They became committed and converted to it so much that they were willing to die for it.  And many were not only willing but they eagerly sought a martyr’s death.  The same was true during the middle ages for heretics and reformers, even some atheists.  Why?  Because that’s what belief can do to a man.  Many feel that by their death they can really accomplish something.  They can show the world the veracity of the thing they believed.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case, some martyrs’ names have been lost to history; their ideas really were stamped out by those who persecuted them.  This is perhaps, the single hardest thing to fathom in dealing with Soviet history.  How many millions believed and died martyrs for their belief-Communism?

Chapter VIII

“The Golden boy of the revolution” the “favorite of the entire Party” and its “biggest theorist”, these titles were given to a hero of the revolution, someone who helped to build communism with his own hands.  He was one of the youngest members of the party leadership during and after the revolution.  He was able to staunchly defend communism not only from the west, but he also defended Leninism from foreign Marxists.  He was a favorite of the party and became one of the greatest theorists of this Leninist-Marxist theory.  And his great acts eventually perished with him.  This is our protagonist, and it will be your job to either convict or acquit him of his evil deeds by the end of the novel.  This man’s name is Nikolai Bukharin.

Chapter VII

Have you ever heard of the app Tinder?  It’s this preposterous app that allows you to connect with people you’ve never met that you might like because they’re cute.  In effect, I guess it works like any other dating site, it allows you to meet people you probably wouldn’t meet otherwise, but it seems a bit creepier than other programs because it not only shows you people and their pictures and allows you to text them, but it tells you how close approximately you are to them.  Creepy right?  My girlfriend had it for a little while purely to mess with people.  It was somewhat disgusting the vigor with which people would change purely to find common ground with her.  For example she told one guy that she would castrate him for asking about prior relationships, to which he responded that he was so sad that it hadn’t worked out and that she should text him on his phone number.  I guess this could be called conformism.  In government matters it rears its ugly head under the name of populism.  It’s this dastardly practice of conformity that gives power to tyrants, usurpers, oppressors, and bellicose warmongerers.  Why?  Because each of us appreciates security more than freedom in most matters.  In every imaginary line that’s been drawn up, these nation states that offer us some sense of belonging and security, some freedom is taken.  But how much is too much?  How much can we justify?  And how many of us even care?

Chapter VI

In all tragedies there must be a victim and a villain.  Unfortunately in our story the victims are numberless, their tragic place in history has been largely forgotten, slighted by chance and circumstance and most of all by our villain, their names have been dumped into the dustbin of history, but their deeds and their very ideals live on.

            Our most important victim’s tale begins in the year 1878 on the 18^th of December in a small town in Georgia.  I’m sure the cold was biting that morning as our soon to be born-Soso’s alcoholic father walked to work.  He was a cobbler and this morning had brought bad news.  The fresh snowfall had caused a part of the roof of his workshop to fall in.  Cursing his bad luck, he wandered slowly to the workshop carrying his meager supply of tools.  He arrived to see his apprentice pointing out the small break in the roof to his friend.  Besarion greeted him methodically before deftly climbing the sides of the wooden shelter.  His movements were a little clumsy today; his head was throbbing like a pounding drum.  Normally, he went to work hungover, but today was especially bad.  They had already lost two sons, and his wife’s agony the night before was driving him insane.  He needed a son, a man to carry on his trade after him, for all he knew this could be his last shot.

            The roof was slick; it was iced over underneath the heavy sheet of fresh snow that hovered on the roof like a cloud.  He brushed off the snow around the intrusion trying to gauge the size of the hole.  A voice from underneath of him barked at him in Russian.  He slid softly off the roof landing gently on his feet.  He turned around to see his apprentice holding out the small pieces of wood that had shattered on the roof.  Beso mumbled a quick thank-you before getting back on the roof.  He began hammering away and found he was short a sliver of wood.  He cursed under his breath as he surveyed the rest of the roof for a piece he could cannibalize.  He saw on the corner a small piece jutting out over the edge.  He crawled to the edge like a sloth and began sawing off the corner.  “Just right” he thought to himself.  Just then a boy came running along the path; he paused from his work as the young boy daintily plodded along the beaten path leaving footprints in the prior-night’s snow.  There was something entrancing about the scene.  It made Beso think of his life long gone by; back when he was without care, back before his fiery self rose up in rebellion against his lord.  Back before he spent years in jail.  “Awww yes” he thought to himself “There really was something to be said about being a carefree young boy.”

            The boy approached the house and looked up into Beso’s gaze.  “Sir” the little boy piped “Your wife just gave birth to a son”.  Besarion dropped his saw.

Chapter V

Many years have passed since the show trials of Stalin’s Great Terror, but the faces of the victims have forever captured the youthful vibrancy of the budding revolution.  It was thought by many to be the ushering in of the new world.  The revolutionaries themselves saw it as a creation of a new world, which they were bravely forging as Huxley would probably agree.  It was a new time and a dangerous time in Russia.  Chaos ensued leading up to the revolutions of 1917 and followed the revolutionaries determinedly like a vulture.  The revolution was an experiment, one which we can look back on post factum and judge rather harshly for lacking cohesion and direction, but the crux of it is that the revolutionaries had never done this before.  They were trying to put their ideals, their brainchilds into something of matter, something material.  They were trying to give shape to the immaterial.  And they were trying to do it within a very short span.  Following the ideals of Modernism they reached to rip apart and break down the existing society and replace it with something new, but how can you replace in a day, in a year, in a lifetime-the build-up of human civilization of centuries before?  Can one just replace or fix the past?  In effect, chaos did not just cause the revolution, chaos was the revolution.

Chapter IV

It was a cloudy spring day.  Ivan peered outside his small home scratching his head haphazardly.  A scream broke his frantic thoughts, and he snapped his head back around.  It was his wife; their firstborn son was being borne into the world.  He had walked out of the room too frantic to help himself.  He knew that of all births the one child most likely to live was the firstborn, thoughts flew threw his mind like witches on broomsticks planting their evil doubts in his mind.  What if this was the only child they had?  What if his wife didn’t make it?  What if the child died or was maimed or what if his firstborn was a girl?  All these thoughts rushed through his head as he struggled to maintain sanity.  Something inside of him made him want to scream with his wife.  He wanted it to end.

            And then just as quickly as it had started, the screaming stopped and was replaced by a strained, yet happy voice.  He cleared his throat and ran a finger through his disheveled hair before slowly striding back into the room.  He stopped short as he looked into the room.  There on the table being slowly cleaned by the mid-wife was a baby boy.  A feeling of joy overwhelmed Ivan as he looked down at the small quiet boy.  His firstborn was a boy.  “I think we’ll call him Vladimir” he thought to himself, Vladimir, the quiet, commonplace boy whose name, in true Marxist fashion, would be the only thing remembered in the laconic writings of his arrogant brother.

Chapter III

I have wanted to write this for awhile now, ever since I read that beautiful masterpiece of HHhH by Binet.  He really did write a masterful work of history, gripping, agitatingly accurate, but there was also something that rubbed me the wrong way.  It was his incessant talk of his girlfriends, one by one he would talk about how they loved him and how perfect they were together and then they would just be gone, or worse he’d add how things ended, which is never a pleasant matter.  As maddening as his arrogant commentary on his love life was, it illuminates the hope that like moths to the flame we cling to.  He and all of us seem to be so dependent on these fickle relationships.  Our hope is that it’s going to “work out” and all will be hunky-dory. 

We try to force life to work, we try to force history to conform to our whims and will.  We all want our stories, our very own histories to turn out well, to end “happily ever after”.  Many of us realize that life is tragic, and so we do all we can to avoid turning our lives into a tragedy.  But perhaps life doesn’t work like that, perhaps it’s not just choosing between a tragedy and a fairy tale.  Perhaps, we try to coerce fate to meet our wants because we see our story as being something that we alone can change.  We want a grand narrative, at the helm of which we are.  But history’s not just a grand narrative told by one being, indeed it is a collective project worked on and never finished, in fact maybe it’s unfinishable.  An unfinished portrait, a scene on a Grecian Urn that never plays out, like Rodin’s Michelangelo’s Slaves, a sculpture reaching towards nothingness never taking shape, in a sense being formless, but at the same time being worked on by countless hands each building and destroying until it takes a form?  That is history.

Chapter II

Ok, I may have romanticized that a bit.  That’s not really how it happened.  There may have been a party to welcome in the new teacher, and it would have almost definitely been held in the school, but I can almost be 90 percent sure there was no sleigh.  The teachers lived in a building just behind the school.  I sincerely doubt Ivan would have arrived in a sleigh.  Nor do I have any evidence to support the idea that it happened in the winter time.  There are few references to it indeed.  Our autobiographer himself merely states that they met at work.  Maybe they went for a walk a few times after work, or perhaps on her first day at work Ivan saw her walking awkwardly through the hallway.  Maybe it’s just the hopeless romantic deep inside me, but regardless of what actually happened-I like my story.

Part II Chapter I

Our story begins in the years leading up to the year 1888.  Oh that woeful year, in which mediocrity begat bestiality.  At some point in those years prior to our fateful year, the young woman, Liubov Ivanovna Ismailova, took up residence and began teaching in a primary school in Moscow.  She was described as being a very sensible woman of rare honesty and diligence.  Her beauty has been lost to history-her dark silky hair, her unblemished round face, but her penetrating blue-gray eyes live on, forever to be remembered in the personage of her own personal monster.  The other culprit of the story is yet another Muscovian schoolteacher, Ivan Antonovich, a graduate of Moscow University.  He was a staunch Orthodox believer, conservative, and eventually a liberal when that became fashionable in politics, he was a mathematician by trade and remained that until 1893, but now we’re getting ahead of the story.

            I’m not quite sure how it happened, the details are rather obscure.  But I imagine it happened on a cold winter’s night.  The end of the year had finally come, and the different primary schools in Moscow were holding a modest party for their teachers.  A small sleigh appeared in front of the brazen school doors, and a young man with patches of red hair sticking out of his bowler hat alighted tossing the driver a coin as he flew up the steps.  Ever so punctual, it was not like him to be late.  He glanced up at the dark sky above him as he opened the door.  The swirling snow angrily met his defiant glance, “yes” he thought to himself, “it was this accursed storm that made me late”.  He removed his bowler hat and shook his snow dusted head as he opened the door, the rushing light dazzled him for only a moment as he slipped inside the door closing quietly behind him.  He looked around many of the teachers were already there.  He knew most of them by name.  He suppressed a grin as he caught sight of Lev Nikolaevich, the ancient teacher of Tsarist history, his long white beard was testament to his aged wisdom, and worked as well as any broom as he walked the corridors of the small school.  Off to his right was Aleksei Mikhailovich, the director of his school, timidly perusing the slim choice of wine the party had to offer.

            No one noticed his entry; he slipped off to the side of the room to avoid being spotted.  He was a good-natured fellow, but tonight he had better things to do than talk to old acquaintances.  He was late, but he had arrived just in time.  The ball was just beginning.  He looked down sheepishly at the shabby drivel that was supposed to be his pantaloons.  Most in the room were much better dressed than he, but “no matter” he thought to himself.  Tonight was his night.  He surveyed the room, the band was just preparing to play its first song of the night, and partners were being chosen, off to his left a young woman caught his eye.  Her dress was hardly better than his hastily mended pants and petticoat, but he noticed she had a certain rich air about herself.  She was poor but so was he.  He walked up to her and in his beautiful baritone voice recanted:

I am perhaps of love unworthy! ...
But if feigned love, if you would
Pretend, you'd easily deceive me,
For happily would I, believe me,
Deceive myself if but I could! 

Liubov blushed a little as she smiled.  The soft glow from the chandelier reflected dully off her red cheeks.  Her response shook Ivan:

My soul attained its waking moment:
You appeared before my sight,
As though a brief and fleeting omen,
Pure phantom in enchanting light.

And now, my heart, in fascination
Beats rapidly and finds alive:
Devout faith and inspiration,
And gentle tears and love and life.

“You know your Pushkin!” he said in a daze as she let him take his hand.  They danced the whole night together.  Ivan was entranced by those penetrating eyes.

Chapter 14

Recently I read a book called “Benes, Statesman of Central Europe” by Pierre Crabites.  It was a book that came out in 1935 on the eve of World War II, and it was a book that was focused on the qualities of Edvard Benes, the Czechoslovak president at the time.  But the book came with a foreword from the author.  He stated that he saw war brewing in Europe.  He thought another great war would come, and he predicted it would come out of Germany.  I could summarize but his words have a bone chilling potency.  He said “His[Hitler’s] energy, his eloquence, his excoratiations have unleashed passions that he may be unable to master.  I fear that when a generation of Germans who knew nothing of the horrors of first-line trenches has assumed control at Berlin, Hitler may be brushed aside as completely as was Kerensky.  When that hour sounds, terrible will be the toll which it will exact.  It is Hitlerism and the consequences of Hitlerism that I fear, not Hitler… I am obsessed by fear of another war.”  He was right, war did eventually come, but he was also wrong.

Or was he?  He makes a bold distinction between Hitler and Hitlerism.  Hitlerism was the monster that Hitler created from his speeches and laws.  Hitlerism was the monster that people clung to, ridding themselves of poverty and oppression created by the Allies after World War I.  Crabites saw a very different world than we do now.  He saw a tragic victim in World War I in Hitler, someone who knew the uselessness of war, and he tried to separate him from the monster of revenge that was encapsulating Germany.

Crabites saw war as inevitable.  He thought Germany was already ready for war, and only Hitler held it back.  Most would dismiss this theory without a second thought, but perhaps we would do so because we are biased.  From birth we’ve been taught to hate Hitler and Nazism identifying them as one single thing.  But as Hitler can be blamed for much of Nazism, he was not it.  And it begs the question-what if Hitler had fallen from power?  Would there have been a Second World War?  Crabites would say yes.  Why?  Because as he saw it, Europe was sick with a disease, one incurred from the past century of existence, and the only way to cure it, was to remove it.

Chapter 13

In 1848 our demagogue published his most incendiary work-“The Communist Manifesto.”  1848 was the year of revolutions throughout Europe.  France was the first to revolt, next a loose confederation of states in Germany followed suit.  Then the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell into flames, and eventually the revolution spread as far south as the Papal States in Rome.  It appeared as though the age of monarchies was coming to an end.

Most Americans have probably never even heard of these revolutions, and that’s because in the end they all just petered out.  But for the age of men at the time this meant progress, it made men like Marx bold and brash.  He was sure change was coming to the world, and he wanted the communists to be at the forefront of it.

And therein lies two important things to know about Communism.  Firstly, Marx and his followers believed that the workers from all over the world would join in their revolution, because it was a human struggle, it was every man’s struggle.  Secondly, because of that Marx called for a violent revolution in every country in his Manifesto.  He called for a violent, worldwide revolution, and he expected it to happen.

This terrified industrialized countries.  Marx had just called on the entire class of proletariats to revolt and to do it violently.  Marx made a huge gamble.  He thought he could instigate insurrections throughout the rest of Europe, but instead, as peace was restored, he found Europe turning a hostile eye towards Marxism.  Communists had been labeled, and they had been labeled the enemy.  And it would be this label that would feed the fascist movements nearly 100 years later.

Marx was right, a specter was haunting Europe, and war and change were coming.