The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

Almost half of its Imperial standing, Russia managed to avoid revolutions. Yes, riots, pretenders, peasant wars took place, as anywhere, yet only after the French Revolution the revolutionary virus expanded globally penetrating not only politics but other areas as well, hence industrial revolution, sexual revolution, revolution of… well let it wait till next Political Study Classes.

The germination of revolutionary activities in Russia is dated as early as 1825. Russian military who visited France in the course of the international campaign to rout the Napoleonic Empire got exposed there to the contemporary revolutionary virus. On the return to their unsuspecting Homeland, they started arrange revolutionary parties – to play cards, drink wine, and recollect those whores from Mullen Rouge. «They know how enjoy their lives there! Eh, bro?—Yea, bro.—And here, bro?—Green blues, bro.—Ew! Rassea-a…”

And suddenly, as if responding to an online order, the Emperor kicked the bucket on the Azov sea shores, an unmistakable revolutionary situation. The infection mixed with hangover, abusing their status of SS officers, the aristocratic dunces ordered the subordinate personnel out to the Senate Square of the Northern Capital. The soldiers were kept all day exposed to the December frost. The general who rode his white horse to the square with admonishments was shot at and killed by a civilian revolutionary. In the dusk of approaching night the government forces brought a cannon, fired it, the soldiers ran to their barracks to get warm at last before the lights-out.

In short, 5 Decemberists were hanged (13? what 13? I tell, you 5 Decemberists got capital punishment!), the frostbitten soldiers got their whipping to feel warmer, the infected taken to the Siberia, like, to do hard labor, yet allowed to hire houses and live with their wives coming from Russia. That way the Spook of Revolution began to roam not Europe alone. After the aforesaid kick-off those subjects to the Russian Empire prone to blues and having nothing better to amuse themselves with got a modish plaything – the struggle for bringing nearer the just bright future without any oppressed and suffering individuals but with immense compulsory happiness instead.

By the end of the 2

century its acting on the stage of History, Russian Empire obviously fell short of breath selling a sizable swathe of its territories in Northern America to the USA for 9 million rubles, some transaction incongruent with the Empire rank. And when even the toy state of Japan won the day in the war against the giant Russia, Messrs. Obolensky, Rzhevsky and scions of divers other aristocratic families were faced with oncoming Great October Revolution (GOR), to wit, stepping down and giving up the job of hegemonic class and subsequent obliteration at hands of uncouth masses of plowmen headed by fiery revolutionaries from the Jewish national minority.

On the 4

year of the WWI, in February 1917, the concluding Emperor of Russia abdicates his throne. The power passes to the Interim Government which at ones get in the coma of parliamentary bickering between a whole bunch of political parties old and new. The IG announces that Russia still will keep loyal to its allies in the war. “The War Till the Victorious End!” was not good news for German Empire fighting against the alliance of Russia, Great Britain and France. Even under the burden of war efforts, German leadership finds time and means to contact V. I. Lenin in the neutral Switzerland and offer him a long tourist trip in a special “sealed” train by the route thru all of Germany, neutral states of Scandinavia, then via Finland to the destination railway station in Petrograd (previously St. Petersburg). Why? Well, another example of German notorious propensity to philanthropy, they saw a man who pines away in Zurich, Switzerland, could those sentimentalists not take him over to his Homeland, eh?

A nondescript before Lenin’s arrival to Petrograd, the party of Bolsheviks gets notably energized, he makes speeches calling for the Global Revolution, writes his famous April Theses of practical instructions how to do the job. There appear means by the party to purchase the necessary equipment for holding armed demonstrations in July. Yet, whenever they kick up shooting, Lenin happens to be in some other place due to his health conditions and he even is late for the Great October Revolution so that it has to be headed by Trotsky, aka Bronstein.

Busy as he is, Leo Davidovich still finds a spare room for Lenin in the Smolny Institution of Noble Maidens (the seat of the putsch coordinators, hired because of…well, yes, maidenhead might incite weird wishes and reactions, it’s hard to propose a wholesome explanation here, no, you never can tell what urges to expect because of the membrane) teeming with lice-peckered crowd of hitmen full of revolutionary enthusiasm. The forked out room has a window presenting a view on the adjacent alleys in the park and truckloads of departing mission groups to seize Telegraph, Telephone or another Railway station. Yes, the State Bank is already secured (as advised in April Theses). Then the Interim Government gets arrested and the historical round of decree-promises—Land to Peasants! Factories to Workers! Peace to Peoples!—fired off. Russia enters 5 years of the most atrocious Civil War.

The revolutionary government (multi-partied as of yet, each of the parties split by internal frictions) moves to Moscow. Trotsky boards an iron-clad train and choo-chooes off to command (strategically) divers fronts of the flaring up war (“Peace to Peoples!»). Lenin stays back to tune up paper work in the newly created bureaucratic apparatus (the 58 volumes of Complete Works still not amassed.)

Some young and full of revolutionary romanticism hit-girl, a certain Kaplan (what’s in the name? nothing until you learn to read the names) from the especially unsatisfied fraction of the Social-Revolutionary party (SRs), visits a meeting where Lenin makes another of his speeches. She shoots and hits his shoulder. SRs had enough grounds for dissatisfaction, their party was always there before the Bolshies’ maiden making their bones. The royal family was SR’s traditional hunting grounds, a Czar or 2 scored, not to mention a slew of ministers. How not to be jealous of the green horns whose main, if not the only, asset is close connections among the criminal world? In the beginning of their political career, so as to keep the party’s accounts well balanced, Bolsheviks specialized in robbing banks by hands-on instructions from the underground advisors (young Stalin, freshly from the Tiflis seminary, was notably proficient in that line). The activity grew obsolete because of the huge grant from an anonymous friend by the end of the WWI but the connections remained.

The shot by Kaplan marked the start of establishing one-party political system in the country taking course towards building of Socialism with Human Face. She was arrested at the crime scene and taken to the Kremlin, put against the fortress wall of ancient brickwork and executed. The case of Kaplan indicated the end to soft czarist times of prolonged court sessions and talk-work of attorneys at their competitions in eloquence. Technically, it took 2 slobs, 1 shot fired thru her head and 1 barrel full of lime to dump the body into. Not what you call gentlemanly attitude, however, the act (and many other of the sort) efficiently prevented appearance of any revolutionary-minded clandestine groupings in the oncoming USSR, with proper timely repetition of the proceedings.

Who won in the GOR? An interesting question, yet, given the invisibility of some parts it’s easier to see who lost. Gentry and bourgeoisie were wiped away as classes, the church never managed to built non-secular state in Russia, they always were a go-between, not builders. 6 – 1 – 1 – 1 = 3. Yes, Classes 4 thru 6 remained of whom They announced workers and peasants the winners (much later the formula was added with “working intelligentsia” all sorts of doctor-engineer-writer-composers, you know, which never were considered a class but inter-layer between classes).

But what was then? Regaining their senses after the bloodbath in the Civil War, the plowmen saw that the land still did not belong to those who worked on it. They tried at uprising a couple of times, however, without the hereditary military around (gentry were wiped out already) what could they do against the regular Red Army, eh? The uprisings were quenched with poison gas stockpiled at the WWI times and nobody wanted any more to go up against the collectivization, the people were fettered to land by the workingmen sons donned in the Red Army uniform. That way the winning class (invisible) neutralized the basic force that secured the GOR victory.

As for the revolutionary ferment, all those commissars and the rest of heroes of other nationality affiliation they were an easy crack. Great Purge was set off. The peasant-proletarian fists were deforming the arrested, crushing teeth, beating out the ear drums and, eventually confessions of collaborating with 3 different imperialistic intelligent services as minimum, while the officiary kept his hands clean piling up another file of documents. Because you cannot go against the nature and execution is not so painful… Anything still live and thinking was systematically taken, in millions, to the camps within the Polar Circle where the Arctic Nature conditions did their job with no less efficiency but cheaper, than gas chambers. The class of workers, naturally absolutely forgot that factories were theirs…

Now, below the disguising red placards about the victory of workers and peasants They gained absolute power. What secured the victory of Class 6? Subtle calculations and flawless execution of strategical planning? Fuck, no! Do not make yourself an idol. Class 6 is just a class having as many idiots as any other, they hang on an elementary plagiarism. Even such Genius of Strategy as I. V. Stalin needed an instructive master-class-for-dummies “Night of Long Knives” from advanced Germany to aid him in planning the assassination of S. M. Kirov before the New Year night.

Now, after 7 decades of keeping people at the level of mental activities framed by turnkey-prisoner relations, the great nation turned into the 1/6 alcoholic part of the world where master-thieves and ministers are corporately doing their mutual business while those who can understand it dream of fleeing behind-the-hill. But it does not work. It won’t work because over there the power is in hands of invisible, invincible other-Siders and They since long pushed forward the slogan “Bureaucrats of the World get Globalized!”… Your read your Pynchon more attentively, not only passages about generative orgies and scatological excesses…

– Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, and what’s the meaning of “excesses”?

– Fuck you! You’re still here? On-duty detail! Take the motherfucker to the clink!

~ ~ ~

My the small kitchenette provided a lofty crow’s nest of a good vantage point to observe the big-big world about it. And in that same kitchenette, I felt the need for some sort of a plan to say my gentle “good-bye” to Konotop…

~

~

The Postscripts

The decision to part with Konotop became irreversible when I saw that everything was repeating itself… Over again I walked along a tunnel cut thru the stratum of night darkness with batteries of floodlights on the pylons in the classification yard over my usual short-cut marked by the dim glitter of railheads in the dampish rows of tired tracks.

The tunnel was higher and wider than the galleries in the mine "Dophinovka" and, unlike to the scanty pair of narrow gauge rails, the mighty tracks were bifurcating, multiplying, flowing alongside each other crammed with freight cars, cisterns, platforms with all sorts piled up, covered and uncovered, overall and small, cinched and loosely poured, stuff. Clanging at the railway points, the rolling cars rolled down the hump in strings, in pairs, singly, to find their way in the bowl and, with the pitched screech of wheel chocks, come to a halt at their destinations. The classification yard has no weekend breaks. On and on sounded the round-the-clock rumbling, clanging, screeching, shouts from the loudspeakers reporting about the numbered tracks and marshaled trains. Yet, all that went on in a tunnel, in one huge tunnel. Would the roof withstand the weight of the night?

In that autumnal, like in lots of other nights, darkness I crossed the railways following the all-too-well-learned network of service paths, bypassing the maze of the stilled trains and dodging the cars rolling down the hump across my route to the ever open wide breach in the wall around PMS-119. I cringed in anticipating disgust at the mud and puddles lurking in that hole which was already at a stone throw because I now walked already alongside the meter-tall letters in the inscription on the concrete wall. Made with ever-black tar over the light gray concrete of fencing by the assured strokes of a brush in the hand of master, it advised the passengers on trains that passed by in the daylight: "Konotop – the city of nondrinkers!"

The floodlights from behind transfixed my moving shadow over the calligraphic graffiti. The closer to the hole, the smaller the size of the silhouette with swaying hat brims until all of it got swallowed by the pitch-black darkness in the breach… The time machine is a nice invention, yet if you can't afford it try traveling the time on foot. Now, following my disappeared shadow, I'll get in such medieval swamps and darkness that…

"Sophocles! Aeschylus!"

Hell! Seems like I’ve taken a too wide stride and glided by down to the antiquity, ain't I?

"Aeschylus!"

A black shadow about 20 meters from the breach roared hoarsely in the muddy darkness of the PMS backyards. Mine? No, this one shorter and plumper. And in a leather cap, the coat's also of leather. "Why pulled up? Who called you? As if you may have the slightest notion of Sophocles."

"Right you are. I never went deeper than Aristophanes."

He hiccupped and, slightly rolling but resolutely, stepped in my way. "Who are you?" demanded he with the hooch on his breath.

"A passer-by. And what brought you here?"

He seemed to miss my question. "Sophocles… Aeschylus.." he kept echoing softly. "Yes, yes… Aeschylus… Aristophanes! And who else?!"

"Well, there also is some Euripides."

"Right! Euripides!" cried he out with tears in his voice and then again devotedly groaned out, "Sopho-ocles!"

We stood to face each other like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote meeting after the separation. Sancho gave out a despondent sob and dropped his head. The peak of the leather cap pecked me in the bridge of the nose. Damn it, Sancho! Look out! My visor’s up…

"I'm an artist," he plaintively imparted, raising his head. "They gave me 2 months here…" Another nod with the pesky peak…

I see, 2 months from Narco-2 for eradication of all alcoholic inclinations. And now I also knew whose masterpiece in tar was out there. Eh, Sancho, Sancho!. Anyone would turn a drunk if there's no one to talk to of Sophocles!. Armfuls of pearls and no one to scatter them before… No, no, no! I do have to leave…

…to go there, beyond the horizon, to the faraway—as childhood—seashore by the smooth azure waters, and a mighty sacred Oak tree with its hollow for whispering into it the quotations hardly needed by anyone along with the names of sages forgotten ages ago…

The plan was perfect. But what about the details? For instance, where to? Well, firstly, it should be some warm place, enough of frostbites for me, and secondly, it has to be provided with the sea and mountains. The Crimea, whose mountains are not that tall, does not fit, besides, it's taken up by Olga, maybe…

The finger slides over to the next sea on the map… Yeah? Okay, to Baku then. What’s the difference?.

Getting my vacation from the Construction Workshop Floor at the "Motordetail" plant, I also applied for dismissal. Yet, before moving away I still had one unfinished business on my hands. It was my promise to the 3 strangers at the station restaurant to visit the city of Lvov…

The closer to Lvov the slower the train traveled along the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains with dark tall Fir trees, yet in the late evening it still arrived at its destination… In the automatic storage cell, I left my briefcase in which, besides the hygienic necessities, there also lurked a gray cap of thick woolen fabric, so that to travel thru the city lightly and in my inseparable secret agent's hat.

Lvov always was a beautiful city with lots of monuments and landmarks of ancient architecture on streets with cobblestone pavement. No wonder that the 4-sequel Soviet adaptation of "The Three Musketeers" was shot in that city. They only needed to keep the camera away from the streetcar rails in the road.

I did not use any kind of transportation in Lvov but walked. Where to? To the Opera House, of course. My promise was fulfilled, I did come to Lvov, but I had no intention to run about its streets demanding of the passers-by, "Were you, by any chance, in Konotop 2 years ago, after you served your time in Zone?" No, I am from a different category, and I strolled in a well-bred manner to have a good time because the train to Kiev was leaving exactly at midnight…

The Opera House in Lvov was a magnificent sight, simply a palace; well done the Poles who built it. However, as for having a good time my guess was premature. There was an opera on, a creation by a local classical composer about the peasant unrest in the 16th century. A piece of trash in the style of "they'll lap it up!" Anyway, if a job is once begun, never leave it till it's done, and I sat tight thru all of it to the final bell which set me free…