Part 1. On the “First Russian Revolution” and Terrorism
Part 2. Long traditions of Anti-Russian lies
Part 3: Bloody Sunday
Part 4: Gapon
Part 5:10: Rampage of Terrorism
Part 5:11-12: Rampage of Terrorism
13. Information Technologies Related to Terrorism
A mandatory condition of terrorism is the loud and widespread reaction of society to a terrorist action. A terrorist act that remains unnoticed or classified loses all meaning. The greater the resonance a terrorist act acquires, the more strongly it stimulates and pushes terrorist groups to commit new crimes. The role of the media becomes a key element in the tactics of terrorism. Liberal and opposition newspapers and magazines were viewed by terrorists as the best accomplices in their activity. And about one thousand such media fully justified the terrorists’ hopes: during the civil war against terrorism, they opposed the government in all its undertakings, discredited the sovereign’s policy, verbally tormented ministers and military leaders, drew attention to terrorists, praised them for self-denial, fearlessness, the struggle for “justice” and their “faith in the people,” presenting them as heroes; and, on the contrary, mocked monarchists and patriots in anecdotes, caricatures and satirical verses, demonizing them.
An obligatory condition of terrorism is a loud and widespread reaction of society to a terrorist action
For example, the first attempt to assassinate Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov by I. Kalyaev on February 2, 1905, was allegedly halted because the grand duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna and their adopted children were in the carriage. However, two days later, Kalyaev carried out the sentence of the Combat Organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries without any pangs of conscience. This moral “hitch” of Ivan Kalyaev, on the one hand, and on the other—his strength of self-sacrifice and conviction in the idea of “justice”—became the occasion for artistic reflection on this event by some writers of that time: Leonid Andreev, Mikhail Artsybashev, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Grin, Alexander Kuprin, and later Mikhail Prishvin, Alexei Remizov, Yuri Nagibin, Boris Vasilyev, Yuri Davydov, and even the French “existentialist” Albert Camus.
V. S. Svarog. “I. P. Kalyaev Throws a Bomb into the Carriage of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in Moscow in 1905,” 1926. Museum of Political History of Russia.
It was precisely at this time that a wave of semantic shifts began in the opposition and liberal press, when evangelical words—love, good, kindness, truth, life, death, peace, law—lost their metaphysical dimension and their Christian meaning and were profaned, in order later to be completely devalued and made convenient for demagogic manipulations, turning into simulacra.
Conversely, the ideas and actions of terrorists lost their negative connotations and were implanted in public consciousness as legitimate and lawful: for example, the idea of regicide in liberal circles was morally justified and legitimized.
There exists a historical anecdote, attributed to Anna Akhmatova, that during the times of famine in the early nineteen-twenties, in the premises of the “Society of Political Convicts” on the Neva embankment, there hung an announcement: “Jam for all, but preserves for regicides.”1
A telling example of aiding terrorism can serve as the activity in 1902–1906 of Russian liberal politicians, representatives of the zemstvo movement, intelligentsia, publicists and journalists close to the “Union of Liberation”—an organization that dreamed of democratic freedoms, parliamentarism, constitutional transformations and strove to follow the path of British legislation. In this situation, the hope of Russian liberals in their opposition activity for all-round support from Europe seemed natural. It is indicative that among the active members of the “Union” one can find such thinkers as S. N. Bulgakov, E. N. Trubetskoy, N. A. Berdyaev, S. L. Frank, V. I. Vernadsky. The political wing of the “Union” by the autumn of 1905 created the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). Quite popular in these years (1902–1905) among liberals was the emigrant journal edited by P. B. Struve, “Liberation” (seventy-nine issues were published).
Neither the “Union of Liberation” nor the Kadets condemned terrorism. The journal Liberation during the Russo-Japanese War took a defeatist position, and during the Gapon rebellion not only reprinted all sorts of lies from English newspapers about January 9, but itself was a supplier of blatantly false information to the Western press.
Another vivid example and blind victim of newspaper propaganda was the American writer Mark Twain, who in 1905 published a satirical pamphlet on the Russian autocrat, “The Tsar’s Soliloquy.” Here he recognizes the right of Russian revolutionaries to terror and regicide. He also mentions the events of January 9, when “a thousand unfortunate unarmed demonstrators, humbly appealing to kindness and justice,” were shot. The writer puts such reasoning into the mouth of the tsar:
“We do what we want. For centuries we have done what we wanted. Crime is our habitual craft, murder our habitual occupation, blood, the blood of the people our habitual drink. Millions of murders lie on our conscience.”
It is curious that just before his death, Mark Twain compiles from various notes a blasphemous book, Letters from the Earth, in which there are eleven letters from the fallen archangel satan (1909), into whose mouth the writer puts devastating criticism of the Old and New Testaments, as well as his liberal views on the social transformation of society. This was an attempt to legalize satanism, which the author regarded as a humanistic project.
Alexander Blok. Photograph from 1903. To generalize the attitude of Russian liberals toward terrorism, let us cite lines from Alexander Blok’s letter to V. V. Rozanov (1909):
“I myself am not a ‘terrorist’ if only because I am a ‘literateur.’ As a person, I will shudder at the news of the murder of any of the most harmful state animals, be it Plehve, Trepov or Ignatiev. And yet, the (collective) bitterness is so strong and the inequality of positions so monstrous—that I really do not condemn terror now. <…> Now, how can I condemn terror when I see clearly, as in the light of a huge tropical sun, that the revolutionaries about whom it is worth speaking (and there are dozens of such), kill like true heroes, with the radiance of martyric truth on their faces. <…> The modern Russian state machine is, of course, vile, slobbery, stinking of old age, a seventy-year-old syphilitic who with a handshake infects a healthy youthful hand. The Russian revolution in its best representatives is youth with a halo around its face. Let it even be immature, let it often be adolescently unwise—tomorrow it will mature. After all, this is clear as God’s day.”
It is noteworthy that at this very time Blok writes to his mother about Europe as his “other homeland.”
“October 17, 1905.” Artist: Ilya Repin.
Another document of this era is I. E. Repin’s painting “October 17, 1905,” which in our eyes looks like a caricature of liberal society; but contemporaries, by the admission of V. V. Rozanov, saw in it a “‘secret investigation’ of what was and what is in Russia.” Viewers recognized their contemporaries in its characters (the philologist M. Prakhov, the actress L. Yavorskaya, the critic V. V. Stasov and others). In his essay, Rozanov prophetically characterized the people in the painting as “cannon fodder” of the revolution. Repin himself wrote:
“The painting depicts a procession of the liberation movement of Russian progressive society… mainly male and female students, professors and workers with red flags, ecstatic; singing revolutionary songs… They have lifted an amnestied person on their shoulders and a crowd of many thousands moves across the square of a large city in the ecstasy of general jubilation.”
The mythologization of the “First Russian Revolution” was engaged in not only by pre-revolutionary liberal journalists and Soviet historians, but also by writers.
The mythologization of the “First Russian Revolution” was engaged in not only by pre-revolutionary liberal journalists and Soviet historians, but also by writers. For example, Boris Pasternak’s path to comprehending the history of the twentieth century was long and tormenting, until after the war of 1941–1945 he wrote such Christian lines:
But the book of life has come to the page
Which is dearer than all holiness.
Now what is written must come to pass,
Let it come to pass. Amen.
You see, the course of centuries is like a parable
And can catch fire on the go.
In the name of its terrible grandeur
I in voluntary torments will descend into the grave.
I will descend into the grave and on the third day will rise,
And, as rafts are floated down the river,
To me for judgment, like barges of a caravan,
Centuries will float out of the darkness.
Lieutenant Peter Schmidt. But before that, the poet underwent the temptation of the Soviet conception of the events of 1905, having written two poems, “1905” and “Lieutenant Schmidt.” Moreover, the hero-lieutenant Peter Schmidt chosen by Pasternak himself is that very Gapon in miniature. By the way, before writing the poem “1905.” Boris Leonidovich studied Gapon’s pseudo-autobiography, but it did not impress him. But the published letters of Lieutenant Schmidt to his beloved, in which he presented himself as innocent in everything, enchanted the poet.
In fact, Lieutenant Schmidt was a provocateur, deserter and impostor, who proclaimed himself commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Fleet and President of the South, because of whom many people died during the uprising in Sevastopol. Earlier he had been treated in a clinic for schizophrenia and megalomania. Shortly before the events, he robbed the cash box of a ship detachment—two thousand five hundred gold rubles.
The whole story with the poems goes back to two meetings of Boris Leonidovich with Lev Davidovich Trotsky. The first, in 1922. According to Pasternak’s own testimony, Trotsky “asked me… why I ‘refrain’ from responses to public themes. In general, he enchanted me and brought me to admiration; it must also be said that from his point of view he is completely right in asking me such questions.” The second meeting with Trotsky took place five years later, in 1927, when the revolutionary poems written for the twentieth anniversary of the “First Revolution” had already been published. Trotsky suddenly asked Pasternak: “Is this you sincerely: ‘Schmidt,’ and ‘1905’?”
Everything here is noteworthy: “Enchanted me and brought me to admiration,” and Trotsky’s “rightness,” and suspicion of Pasternak’s “sincerity.”
Both these poems, let us say directly, are not the poet’s highest achievement—he was unable, despite all efforts, to be a politically expedient versifier fulfilling a “social order.” This falsity of the poems was detected by the sensitive Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom Pasternak was in stormy correspondence during the years he wrote them.
She wrote:
“The trouble is that you took Schmidt, and not Kalyaev (Seryozha’s words, not mine), the hero of the time (timelessness!), and not the hero of antiquity… What is Schmidt—according to your documentary poem? A Russian intellectual of 1905… The poem rushes past Schmidt, he is a brake. The letters are sheer pity. Why did you need them?..”
In other letters from Tsvetaeva:
“Lieutenant Schmidt, according to your poem, is deeply repulsive to me. A braggart, chatterbox, neurasthenic and whiner (seasickness). Here is Schmidt rising from your poem. A man without a sense of duty, faint-hearted. He abandons the fleet and goes ‘to unravel the intrigue’”; “1905 is a false move… You wanted a simple man, you gave a vulgar man (Letters)”; “When I look in the centuries at this pair, you and Schmidt, I—laugh. One cannot harness a horse and a trembling nag onto one cart.”
But one must give Pasternak his due—the novel “Doctor Zhivago” and especially the poems for the novel give in relation to the history of Russia in the twentieth century a completely different—Christian—perspective, far from these two poems.
Liberal politicians, writers and journalists acted, without fully realizing it, in the role of instigators of terrorism and participants in the “big lie” project.
In fact, liberal politicians, writers and journalists acted, without fully realizing it, in the role of instigators of terrorism and participants in the “big lie” project.
In recent decades, in many countries, legislation regarding terrorism has changed, including in penalties for such a phenomenon as incitement to terrorist acts. For example, in France, criminal liability has been established for incitement and propaganda of terrorism, as well as for apology of terrorism. As of 2011, the punishment was up to five years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to forty-five thousand euros.
14. The Metaphysics of Evil
In domestic political science and historiography, the time must come for rethinking not just our history—this is self-evident—but for differentiating the description of such a phenomenon as the “big lie” into a separate discipline. The religious aspect in this problem must become determining.
I. A. Ilyin An example of such an attitude is the essay by philosopher I. A. Ilyin, “On Demonism and Satanism,” written in Russia in 1917, in which satanism is for the first time considered as a political science problem. The game of demonism, according to the author, was inherent in the culture of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and culminated in the creation by Friedrich Nietzsche of works containing direct and frank preaching of evil in developed “satanic formulas.”
The satanic man loses himself and becomes an earthly instrument of the devil’s will, guided by an anti-Christian element, the author believes. Here are its features according to Ilyin:
-
eternal, unquenchable envy,
-
incurable hatred,
-
daring ferocity,
-
aggressive, militant vulgarity,
-
defiantly shameless deceit,
-
absolute lust for power,
-
contempt for love and good,
-
trampling of spiritual freedom,
-
thirst for universal humiliation, joy from the humiliation and destruction of the best people.
“This black whirlwind is now passing over the world. The game of demonism is coming to an end; the tragic realization of satanism has begun. What was prepared in art has entered souls and begun to be realized by people of satanic disposition and devilish politics. And everywhere the best perish, and the worst rise to the surface, to command and destroy… Russian people have long had the opportunity to study them; they are obliged to know who they are and whence they come; and yet they constantly make mistakes, believe provocateurs, exalt the shameless, hurry to attach their boat to the stern of a ‘big,’ even if cursed, ship… Here I have met people of such perversion, such structure… and always with horror thought about what they will do when they seize political power” (Appendix V).
The thinker I. A. Ilyin’s prophecy about the black whirlwind passing over the world, about people of satanic spirit seizing political power by terrorist methods, clearly relied on Russian realities. And what else could one call the political Khlestakovs, adventurers and impostors such as A. F. Kerensky and V. I. Lenin, who came to power in 1917?
Kerensky as early as 1912 sought the opportunity to join the combat detachment of the Socialist Revolutionaries in order to participate in regicide
Kerensky as early as 1912 sought the opportunity to join the combat detachment of the Socialist Revolutionaries in order to participate in regicide; then, having seized power in February 1917, he invites the terrorist B. V. Savinkov as his deputy in the military ministry of the Provisional Government. In March, having officially joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, he initiated an amnesty, thanks to which all terrorist-murderers, robbers and criminal offenders were released from prisons. At the same time, the royal family and its closest entourage were arrested, as well as fifty-nine top officials of the tsarist government. Then he abolished the police and began the process of recognizing the independence of Poland and Finland. Kerensky became simultaneously chairman of the Provisional Government, deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and general secretary (in essence, leader) of the Grand Orient Masonic lodge.
V. I. Lenin, the theorist of “mass terrorism,” who dreamed as early as April 1905 of “guillotining Nicholas,” unexpectedly received power in the autumn of 1917 from A. F. Kerensky and the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet L. D. Trotsky. Later he attributed to himself the organization of the revolution of 1905–1907 and victory in it, as well as victory in February and October 1917. Lenin immediately pushed aside his comrades, proclaiming populist, deliberately unkeepable and false promises in his first decrees and resolutions “On Peace,” “On Land,” “On the Press,” “On Convening the Constituent Assembly,” “On Abolishing the Death Penalty.” He became the initiator of the split and persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church; with a high degree of probability, also the execution of the royal Romanov dynasty, including the children. He was the founder in Russia of concentration camps. In August 1918, Lenin, for example, telegraphed to Penza about the need to “carry out merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White Guards,” and to lock all doubtful ones “in a concentration camp outside the city.” By the end of 1919, after the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “On Camps of Forced Labor” was issued, there were already twenty-one such camps. Lenin, besides this, was the creator in Russia of the system of hostage-taking—in his instructions he constantly called for taking hostage not only political enemies, but also “one’s own.” Discrimination on class grounds of huge masses of the population (nobility, clergy, peasantry) became for Lenin the main political method of governing the state.
I. A. Ilyin foresaw the appearance in Europe of dictatorial, Nazi and fascist regimes with a misanthropic worldview in Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, France, Finland. Fascist and Nazi parties openly existed in Great Britain, the USA, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Switzerland, Yugoslavia.
Justification and indulgence of terrorism, incitement to terrorist acts, creation of the “big lie” for geopolitical victories turned into a great misfortune for European politicians; it boomeranged on their own nations, peoples and states. It is on them that the guilt lies for the destruction of millions of people in the twentieth century.
To be continued…
