Mirrors (66 page)

It was said, is said: social revolutions under attack from the powerful within and from the imperialists without cannot afford the luxury of freedom.

Nevertheless, it was in the first years of the Russian Revolution, when it was beleaguered by enemy harassment, civil war, and foreign invasion, that its creative energy flowed most freely.

In better times later on, when the Communists controlled the entire country, the dictatorship of the bureaucracy imposed its sole truth and condemned diversity as unpardonable heresy.

Painters Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky left and never returned.

Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put a bullet through his heart.

Another poet, Sergei Yesenin, hanged himself.

Writer Isaac Babel was shot.

Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had made a revolution with his bare theatrical stages, was also shot.

Shot too were Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, revolutionary leaders from the beginning, while Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, was assassinated in exile.

Of the revolutionaries who began it all, not one remained. All were purged: buried, locked up, or driven out. And they were removed from official photographs and from history books.

The revolution elevated to the throne the most mediocre of its leaders.

For what you did or what you would do, as punishment or just in case, Stalin sacrificed those who cast a shadow on him, those who said no, those who did not say yes, those who were dangerous today, and those who would be dangerous tomorrow.

PHOTOGRAPH: ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

Bolshoi Theater Square, Moscow, May 1920.

Lenin addresses Soviet soldiers before they depart for the Ukrainian front to fight the Polish army.

At Lenin’s side on the dais above the crowd are Leon Trotsky, the other orator on the program, and Lev Kamenev.

The photograph by G. P. Goldshtein becomes a symbol of the Communist revolution around the globe.

A few years later, Trotsky and Kamenev would be gone from the photo and from the world.

A little retouching erased them and put five wooden steps in their place, while executioners did the rest.

THE INQUISITION IN STALIN’S TIME

Isaac Babel was an outlawed writer. He explained:

“It’s a new genre I’ve invented: silence.”

He was imprisoned in 1939.

The trial lasted twenty minutes.

He confessed to having written books in which his petit bourgeois outlook distorted revolutionary reality.

He confessed to having committed crimes against the Soviet state.

He confessed to having spoken with foreign spies.

He confessed to having contact with Trotskyites during his trips outside the country.

He confessed to knowing about a plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin and not going to the police.

He confessed to feeling attracted to the enemies of the fatherland.

He confessed that all his confessions were false.

They shot him that very night.

His wife learned of it fifteen years later.

ROSA

She was born in Poland, lived in Germany. She dedicated her life to social revolution, right up to the day at the beginning of 1919 when the guardian angels of German capitalism broke her skull with their rifle butts.

Not long before, Rosa Luxemburg wrote an article on the first years of the Russian Revolution. The article, penned in her German jail cell, opposed the divorce of socialism and democracy.

• On the new democracy:

Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of the socialist economy are laid. It does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism.

• On the people’s energy:

The remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.

• On public control:

Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only within the closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable.

• On freedom:

Freedom for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

• On the dictatorship of bureaucracy:

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and of assembly, without a free struggle among opinions, life withers in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life in which the bureaucracy remains the only active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, as a few party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading, and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously.

ORIGIN OF TWO COUNTRIES

They say Churchill said:

“Jordan was an idea I had one spring at about four-thirty in the afternoon.”

The fact is that during the month of March 1921, in just three days, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and his forty advisers drew a new map for the Middle East. They invented two countries, named them, appointed their monarchs, and sketched their borders with a finger in the sand. Thus the land embraced by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the clay of the very first books, was called Iraq. And the new country amputated from Palestine was called Transjordan, later Jordan.

The task at hand was to change the names of colonies so they would at least appear to be Arab kingdoms. And to divide those colonies, to break them up: an urgent lesson drawn from imperial memory.

While France pulled Lebanon out of a hat, Churchill bestowed the crown of Iraq on the errant Prince Faisal, and a plebiscite ratified him with suspicious enthusiasm: he got 96 percent of the vote. His brother Prince Abdullah became king of Jordan. Both monarchs belonged to a family placed on the British payroll at the recommendation of Lawrence of Arabia.

The manufacturers of countries signed the birth certificates of Iraq and Jordan in Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel, and then went out to see the pyramids.

Churchill fell off his camel and hurt his hand.

Fortunately, it was nothing serious. Churchill’s favorite artist could continue painting landscapes.

UNGRATEFUL KING

In 1932, Ibn Saud completed his long war to conquer Mecca and Medina, and proclaimed himself king and sultan of those holy cities and of the vast surrounding desert.

In an act of humility, Ibn Saud named his kingdom Saudi Arabia after his own family. And in an act of amnesia, he gave the country’s petroleum to an American company, Standard Oil, forgetting that between 1917 and 1924 he and his family had eaten from the hand of the British, as the account books attest.

Saudi Arabia became a model of democracy in the Middle East. Its five thousand princes waited seventy-three years to hold the first elections. In that vote, for municipal offices only, no political parties took part since they were all outlawed. No women either, since they too were outlawed.

THE AGES OF JOSEPHINE

At nine years old, she works cleaning houses in St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi.

At ten, she starts dancing for coins in the street.

At thirteen, she marries.

At fifteen, once again. Of the first husband she retains not even a bad memory. Of the second, his last name, because she likes how it sounds.