@DaseindustriesLtd comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model 2yr ago · Edited 2yr ago

I pity Marx: his legacy

fell into the Russian font

Where ends justified the means

And means shat on the ends.

– The legendary dissident poet Igor Guberman

Please Inform comrade Stalin that there has happened a monstrous mistake!

– popular paraphrase of the 2nd NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov's words on his trial

Bluntly: yes, they think it was all going perfectly well, or at least there was no credible indication of the opposite, until Stalin got possessed by the inherent Russian reactionary spirit and started purging them.

People are driven by status and animosity. While their individual and dynastic power and prestige rose, they were assured of the morality of Communism and the wretchedness of its enemies. Their prestige was rising, in large part, due to extermination of Imperial era elites, mainly middle and higher-class Russians and Germans. Seething provincial mediocrities or outright lumpens overnight became intellectuals, lauded creators, and inept but inimitably cruel managers of a great enslaved human mass.

Galkovsky:

A sleight of hand is committed: the Soviet intelligentsia is contrasted with the Soviet authorities. In reality, the relationship was different: the Russian people and the Jewish upper classes, which, in turn, were divided into the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia and the powers that be – roughly speaking, the Russian village and the Jewish city. At the same time, the connection between the remnants of the Russian urban classes and the Jewish intelligentsia was much weaker than the connection between the Jewish intelligentsia and the Jewish bureaucracy. The latter were simply relatives (cf. Mandelstam's family). They were "their own".

Osip Mandelstam's wife Nadezhda Mandelstam-Khazina admitted with brazen naivety [while proving her dissident creds]: «We all 'went to someone'. Pilyniak went to the Yezhovs, my husband and I 'went' to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. […] We still belonged to a privileged class, albeit of the second rank. … Sometimes Mandelstam was mistaken for one of their own, and he, too, received a gobbet. From '20 until his arrest in May '34 we received our groceries at a lavish distributor, where there was an advertisement at the cash register: Narodovtsy served out of turn»*.

Bunin wrote on the victory of the Revolution in Moscow:

«All obstacles, all barriers divine and human have fallen - the victors freely took possession of her, every street, every dwelling and were already hoisting their banner over her stronghold and sanctuary, over the Kremlin. And there was no day in my whole life more terrible than this day, - God knows, indeed so! … Left alone at night, naturally being quite disinclined to tears, I finally cried, and wept such terrible and abundant tears, which I could not even imagine.»

And this is how Nadezhda Mandelstam met the Revolution:

«We (a group of young artists) got pelted with piles of cheap Kievan roses, and we came out of the theatre with huge heaps… We were busy, then with theatre productions, then with posters, and it seemed to us that life was playing and boiling … my little herd was to the left of the left. The boys loved Mayakovsky's 'Left March' and no one doubted that he had a drum instead of a heart. We yelled rather than talked, and were very proud that we were sometimes given night passes and walked the streets at forbidden hours.»

Bunin wept in Moscow, and Mandelstam laughed in Kiev. (She made «garlands of fruit-like phalluses» for the revolutionary theatre there, with Isaac Rabinovitch). This is youth. «The morning greets us with a chill». Not just physiological youth, but a metaphysical one: Russia's new elite.

Of course, Mandelstam's life also developed quite tragically, but the Russian Soviet tragedy and the Jewish Soviet tragedy are very different (even chronologically). It is only now that everything merges and gets confused in the past. The text of the play has been lost and all that is known is that at some point Prince Hamlet and his uncle die.

While immoral Slavic thugs like Yezhov of Molchanov who reached the top were uprooted individuals and lost the plot completely, perishing in gulags or dissolving back into the commoner class – Jews like Mandelstams or the Eichenwald/Gorb family and, to a degree, other active minorities quickly rolled back to their ethnic solidarity. Thus, disillusionment and gradual pivot into «human rights activism», tryhard dissident poems and such.

Same happened, with nary a lag, to their fellow travelers on the West, like Arthur Koestler, Richard Hofstadter and other «thinkers». Many in the public sphere, however, remained wedded to Socialism, just without Russian (and Georgian) shit. Completely uneducable fools like Jean-Paul Sartre even remained pro-Stalin.

I've translated pieces from another memoir not long ago, one of a Fields medal winner Sergei Novikov. I'll add a bit more, straight from the opening pages; it's an interesting contrast to Eichenwald's narrative, touching on the pre-1937 period – and to the current American «coalition of the fringes» dynamic. There's plenty of such reports, just not promoted like those of «dissidents», and my own family stories, which I am unwilling to share, corroborate as well.

My father Peter Sergeevich Novikov (1901-1975) was a renowned mathematician, famous for his ability to solve unusually difficult problems. His famous works (chronologically) relate to Descriptive Set Theory, Inverse Newtonian Gravity Problem, Mathematical Logic, Algorithm Theory and Combinatorial Group Theory. He descended from a Moscow merchant family: his great-grandfather the merchant Podyakov went bankrupt, but his five sons made a fortune building Orthodox churches around the Kerzhenets and Vetluga Rivers, probably after driving out the Old Believer teachers from there. They (the sons) were nicknamed "Noviks" there. They returned to Moscow. Their children were already Novikovs. Of these, Sergei Novikov - my grandfather - lost all his property with the arrival of the Bolsheviks (1917). His eldest son, my father, was drafted into the Red Army from the University; his youngest son Boris too, but later. Boris shot himself in the army. Apparently, his psyche could not endure the hardships of those "Cursed Days" [Bunin's diary book]. My father, on the other hand, served in Taganrog, where the army played the role of police. He told amusing stories.

A new «policeman» joined them, a career beggar. It was a hungry time. The new member of the squad suggested the following: let someone take turns leading him around town, going into houses with «look, we don't have food for this convict. Give him something if you can». Then he would share it with the guide of the day. Father's turn came. They went to a house and he was horrified to see that their company commander's family was living there. But it was alright: the man was not present, and his wife shared. They were mainly fighting moonshine there – partly via consuming it.

In 1922 my father got tired of waiting and deserted, as many did then. The whole regiment packed his stuff for him: «Petya is leaving to study». He went back to Moscow, to the University, to PhysMath. At times, he got weeded out as being of «non-proletarian origins» - but the campaign subsided, and he returned. There were also raids on deserters; they went to hide in the Alexandrovsky Garden. Finally he was caught and put on trial. His friends told him that the Bolsheviks loved talent. There is a professor who is ready to help everyone. (I wish I knew who it was.) – ask him, he'll give a glowing review; go to court with it. That's what my father did. Got 3 years probation, but released from the army. Immediately after Lenin's death, the new regime abolished the «Dry Law» and all deserter's convictions too. […] In those years, when my uncle shot himself and their father died of grief, father stayed with their mother. […]

After Lenin's death, the Jews were squeezed out little by little, starting at the top of Bolshevism. This process was a long one. Their expulsion from the punitive organs was completed in 1949, during the struggle against cosmopolitanism. The Bolsheviks spread the false message that they had given equal rights to Jews and other peoples. In fact, equal rights were given by the February Revolution. Many Jewish Mensheviks and SRs were elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1917e, for example. Bolsheviks disbanded it; they had only 13% of the vote. What is true is that Lenin and Trotsky, shortly after the October coup in 1918, called for «peoples oppressed under Tsarism» to take power. The Latvians, the Chinese (there were many of them in Russia, then Stalin evicted them), the Jewish community, excluding the rich and rabbis, as my Jewish friends told me, and a number of other ethnic groups - all joined the commissars, the ideological and punitive bodies – Cheka, Revolutionary Military Councils … It was a mighty force. My student Andrey Maltsev made an interesting historical observation. Please note that the “voluntary” going to work on weekend was then called Subbotnik. Why? Christians have always worked on Saturdays. The answer is simple. Apparently it was aimed at Bolshevik Jews, a symbol that they were renouncing their rabbis and sticking to the Party. In our era of late Bolshevism, the source of this has been forgotten; often Subbotnik was already called Voskresnik [Sundaywork]. The White gentry saw the Bolshevik power as Jewish. An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine once expressed to me his dismay that there were many Jews there. But in fact they were called, promised, «This is your power…» - so they rushed to it, as they should have. And then, in the next stages that started after Lenin's death, they were thrown out.

So it went.

Context

DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model DaseindustriesLtd 2yr ago

Bonus @6tjk:

Throughout that period there were portraits of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky hanging everywhere. The quarrel between the two leaders began in 1921-1922. The Lenin-Trotsky revolution cost our people at least 10 million lives between 1917 and 1922. The destruction of the entire order and economy, civil war, hunger, military communism and mass disease were followed by uprisings, which were brutally suppressed. The Antonov uprising of the peasants was gassed by Tukhachevsky. The revolt of the Kronstadt garrison particularly spooked them, Lenin and Trotsky decided to manoeuvre and temporarily return to a market economy, introducing the NEP. They tore off the gilded roofs of churches and created fixed ruble. […] As a result of disagreements with Lenin in 1921-22rr. Trotsky found himself isolated among the Bolshevik upper class. Shortly after Lenin's death, Trotsky fell. The renowned monarchist Shulgin came secretly to the USSR in search of traces of his disappeared son; I have read his books describing these visits. In his book «Moscow, 1925» he quotes this anti-Semitic White Guard poem about Lenin's death: «To the noise of honks and cries of Jews they bury the new Messiah. And the grateful Rossiya, to the thunder of cannons and mortars, flushed Lenin down the latrine».[…]

My father entered his PhD program in 1927. This was the first year when new postgrads were not sent abroad. The old ones were still going – by the way, not with Bolsheviks' funding. Rockefeller and other patrons were paying. The process of building the Iron Curtain was gradual. A new phase of intense revolution came in 1929. This is nothing but a «permanent» revolution, in following with the teaching of Trotsky; Stalin destroyed Trotsky and changed the terminology, but certainly believed in his theory, as the facts show. He implemented its bloody aspects, hidden behind beautiful general formulations, with cold calculation. Collectivisation. Trials of the intelligentsia. The admission of only «record workers» to the universities. Teaching illiterate people for 8 hours a day – you had to work «like workers». This went on until 1933, when there was a particularly terrible famine in the countryside. My father told me that corpses could sometimes be seen right from the train, especially in Ukraine and other agricultural areas. This period could hardly have cost the country less than 10 million people in total. We must add to the victims of the, as they now say, Holodomor kulaks and sub-kulaks who were resettled into intolerable conditions and died there gradually; as well as the millions of street children who mysteriously disappeared. The then widely publicised orphanages were set up under the auspices of the NKVD. They were the subject of glowing moral writings and brilliant films, but it is unlikely that the orphanages accommodated more than a few tens of thousands before 1935. No one knows where the orphans who filled undersides of the cities suddenly went.

The Keldysh family and its history deserve special attention. The most conscientious and complete historical information is collected in the article of my aunt Vera Vsevolodovna Maykopar-Keldysh. (see [1]) This article was written for the 90th anniversary of her brother Mstislav (1911-1978) and reprinted in the collection for his centenary.

This family descends from Foma Simeonovich Keldysh, who was a low-ranking Orthodox clergyman in a church in Warsaw (a sacristan), in the second quarter of the 19th century. He married Aleksandra Josifovna Michomlom in 1839. Legend has it that she spoke little Russian, with an accent (I wonder which one?). Among their children was Mikhail Fomich Keldysh (ox.1840-1920).

(Mikhail had brothers, as we have now discovered on the internet. […] Motchane, founder of the Institute of Mathematics near Paris, IHÉS, left Red Russia in the early 20s. His family was (or became) wealthy in France. He was influential in post-war France as an active member of the resistance against the Germans. I remember him well in the IHÉS. He was about 90 years old and liked to recall St. Petersburg, the name Leningrad he did not recognize, asked me about his nephew, the famous theoretical physicist Ales Anselm. He had once told my Israeli friend Vitaly Milman: We knew the Keldysh family well. We Karaite families knew each other. – This wasn't known in Keldysh family, apparently their grandfather hid it, or maybe Mikhail did. He had a brother in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Fomich, director of a medical hospital. They (Michael and Vsevolod) married noblewomen from military families. Were Foma and Alexandra Karaites? It is possible. By the way, looking around the internet for the surname Keldysh, my wife found Rabbi Vadim Keldysh, now in Berdichev. His ancestors are unknown to us).

Foma became a military doctor, promoted to general. He especially distinguished himself during the conquest of Central Asia, and allegedly compiled valuable medical notes. His appearance in the photos is not of the Russian type. He married a real noblewoman, N.N.Brusilova, a cousin of the famous future General Brusilov. […] Trotsky took Brusilov to plan operations. His position - chief of a special meeting under the Commander-in-Chief - I learned from an address by Lenin, Trotsky, Kalinin, S.S. Kamenev and Brusilov (with the title above) to the soldiers and officers of the White Army in 1920. This was before the assault on Crimea (see [3]): «Come over to our side, we will accept you into the Army». Then everyone was shot. After Lenin's death, Stalin arrested Brusilov, but not for long. Apparently he quickly realised that Brusilov was far removed from Trotsky and politics in general. He was released and sent off to die in Karlsbad. There he made excuses, writing that his signature was forged. […]

M.F. Keldysh died in 1920, reportedly in Crimea. He had several children. Two were officers (Iga and Giga). They were taken into the Red Army in the Civil War and disappeared. Apparently they went over to the Whites. A trace of one of them was found in Paris after World War II, in the 1950s and 60s. His French widow somehow found out about his relatives in the USSR: She needed their renunciation of their inheritance and it was given to her.

Two children – a daughter Ksenia and a son Vsevolod – lived in the USSR. They resembled their mother in appearance and were fair-skinned. We are descended from Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh (1878-1965). He was an outstanding civil engineer, the founder of concrete construction in our country. Khrushchev recalls him in his memoirs. He became a professor in Riga before World War I. In 1915, he was evacuated to Ivanovo-Voznesensk (the Bolsheviks removed the word Voznesensk [Ascension Town] from its name). In 1921, he received a rather large (due to 7 children in the family) semi-basement flat in Moscow, behind the Museum of Fine Arts, in the side street that was then called Antipievsky. There he lived with his family until the end of his life in 1965. I knew this flat very well. His university and department became a military institution in the 1930s. His first military rank was that of Lieutenant Colonel. He became a General and a member of the Party during the Second World War. Even in the early 1930s he grumbled that nothing would work out for the Bolsheviks. His wife, my grandmother, was arrested around 1933-34, when Yagoda was the head of NKVD. They thought they were hiding a treasure and wanted to take it away. Then they let them go, disappointed. I don't know the details. In 1953-54 I saw him as a Stalinist, gradually turning into a Khrushchevist. In the 30s, however, he had the courage to help arrested students. He never talked about his kinship with Brusilov, about his disappeared brothers, as if he was afraid of that. Their generation was afraid of everything - not without reason. There was much to be afraid of.

V.M. Keldysh married my grandmother Maria Aleksandrovna Skvortsova […] in 1903.

[…] Misha was a graduate student of history, chattering recklessly. He must have hurt Stalin's feelings too. Lèse-majesté in the case file was the worst case, but it did not get recorded in the court opinion. He was arrested in 1938 and disappeared. Apparently he starved to death «there».

And finale:

Alexander had the genius for mathematics. Alas, he despised science, especially pure math, as many did in the 20s (including their father, an engineer): 'you are too far removed from life,' he would say. His career as a theatre administrator did not go well. He was arrested during Yezhovshchina period, with grave accusations, and was awaiting trial. Luckily for him, Yezhov was declared insane and shot at the end of 1938, as it became known much later. He got replaced by the new «liberal» NKVD Minister (i.e. Commissar) Beria, who was allowed to stop the arrests. The new investigator removed heavy charges and put the case on trial with only the charge of anti-Semitism. Shura had two wives. The second one (Aunt Dina) I knew well – she was a pretty lady. Both Jewish. The things one can say when fighting with loved ones! At the trial, his first wife was a witness, and testified that he was not an anti-Semite. He was acquitted. His children by both wives were successful; both son and daughter became PhDs. Son Seva, named after his grandfather Vsevolod, became a good literary critic; daughter Marina became a doctor of agricultural sciences. Uncle Shura was painfully jealous of Mstislav's success, it was hard to watch. He probably thought he could have done just as well if he had made the same choice.

Yuri's fate is curious. He became a professor of musicology, a party lapdog. His wife Aunt Sima was ugly - as ugly as Jewish women can be; he was ugly too. But both his daughters Tania (1931- 1999?) and Lara (1937) were attractive. He attacked Shostakovich and other "modernists". Quarrelled with my father over Hungary'56.

6tjk DaseindustriesLtd 2yr ago

Thank you for the reading. I always enjoy your translations.

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