For a long time I was fascinated by Russian culture. I'm still a rather huge balletomane -- that means "fan" of ballet. Such a unique and peculiar group of folks, we deserve our own strange, French-sounding label. (Though ballet apparently originated in Italy, and was greatly promoted in France, when it hit Russia via a French company, a small group of Russian balletomanes once requested a dancer's shoes, so that they could boil them and eat them for dinner.)
At any rate, I never could quite conquer the Russian language or the cyrillic alphabet, and never got the pronunciation right, so I just read everything I could in translation. Sometimes different translations of the same thing. Sometimes it was the same book, but with the title translated differently. Anyway....
I read all of Dostoyevsky by the time I was about 18 years old. (Net result, I never read all of one author's works anymore, because I find that makes me feel lonely -- Ah, he's gone now. It's all over.) I've read a lot of Turgenyev, Tolstoy -- who I think is over-rated. War and Peace is very long. That's about the most remarkable thing about it, even if Tolstoy forswore his family's wealth and walked around barefoot or whatever. I was not terribly impressed. I like Dostoyevsky better. You can usually depend on the fact that at least one character in any Dostoyevsky novel will come down with "brain fever." Not sure exactly what that is, but it certainly makes for lots of drama. And Pushkin was rather strange, romantic in a rather old-fashioned way. Also perhaps a balletomane; he was supposed to have had a foot fetish. I don't know. Who else?? Boris Pasternak, Solzhenytsyn....
Anyway, my fascination with Russia led to my absolute revulsion for communism. Beneath the very regulated calm surface, Russia is sort of a cauldron of very rich passions. In addition to the literature, you can hear it in the music -- beautiful, beautiful music. Think of Tchaikovsky for one. And with a tradition of intellectual discipline -- I mean real discipline, and a capability of sorting out the garbage from the authentic. If you've ever argued with a Russian about anything, you know what I mean. And they're all a little crazy, too.
But what I really want to get to is that Russia -- under a calm surface totally regulated by ruthless Cossacks, among others -- was preparing for some sort of revolution for decades before it actually happened. See, the czars and the Cossacks kept beheading every protest movement. They'd kill the leaders or send them to Siberia, and that tended to discourage anti-czarist political activity. Lenin was successful because he fled Russia and did all his organizing and rabble-rousing from Switzerland or someplace. And too bad it was Lenin and communism that took over Russia. The tight clamps of political control remained, just given another name.
Like, got involved in a discussion about today's "anarchy." Like the idiots who turn up at the G-something conferences to run wild through the streets and break windows. Who've been helping the Greeks and the British disillusioned labor movements throw temper tantrums? Those anarchists.
I argue, if they want socialism, they can't be anarchist. Anarchy, literally, means "no government." None. For socialism, you need lots and lots of government, because only the profoundly committed are willing to abandon private property, and eventually you need a really strong government -- preferably with Cossacks -- to "redistribute the wealth." And threaten, intimidate, humiliate, and eventually incarcerate people who never liked the idea, along with those who become disenchanted with it when they've seen it in practice. And this last group almost always is made up of about 95% of the population.
So anyway, the so-called "anarchists" who are tearing through Europe right now, aren't "anarchists" at all. They are, more accurately defined, "nihilists." That is, they just want to destroy everything.
Odd, too, Turgenyev mentions them, and so do many other Russian authors. If you read the fiction, rather than simply political monologues and dry definitions of all the various "isms," you'll get an idea of what it really means to live with all this, and inside of it, annihilated by it. Not a pretty picture. Just something to think about.
Save the Republic.
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