LONDON LETTER AUGUST 2013: OF ACEDEMIA, TERROR, TRAVEL AND THE SAD POETRY OF THE MEMOIR

September has its own smell. April too has a distinctive aroma, though it is September that possesses the most evocative scent. This perfume can sometimes be caught in August. Indeed the day after carnival in Notting Hill the pervading smell is of the death of summer and the scent of September.

On some of the cooler mornings recently I have caught this change on the wind. In Bulgaria this season is marked very startlingly by the migration of mass flocks of birds, which I observed flying south over the bay of Bourgas. I used to watch them in the morning smoking strong cigarettes, drinking wine and black coffee, entranced by the sad poetry of the performance and the meaning contained in this flight.

Autumn is to the academic world what spring is in the natural, the sap rises and the aptly named ‘freshers’ descend upon campus to engage in the Bacchanalia of ‘freshers week.’ Well at least that is how I remember it.

Now I expect it is very different, as the government turns universities into corporations, amalgams of Smithkline Beecham and Merrill Lynch. ‘Freshers week’ now consisting of debt management advice and career planning; the idea that education might have merit simply in its own right, opening up young minds to new ideas, now considered laughable.

For someone whose own life as a young student was cut short, - one is tempted by the melodrama of the word tragically, - by an over fondness for the comforts afforded by alcohol, my life seems to have been unusually influenced by academic values, perhaps compensation for my early exit from the dreaming spires.

Of course one really ‘reads’ for a degree and one thing that has remained throughout my life is a passion for reading. I am currently reading Edvard Radzinsky’s ‘Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar.’

Radzinsky, whom I’ve never read, does himself a disservice with the title of this book, since it is not merely a biography of Alexander but is a sweeping panorama of Russian society in the middle years of the 19^th Century. This period, covering the emancipation of the serfs, the great flowering of Russian literature and the birth of both the anarchist and communist movements, ultimately decided Russia’s fate.

Amongst the events described is the Nechaev affair, one of those moments in history that exposes something of an underlying zeitgeist, in this case the emerging fanaticism of Russia’s growing revolutionary movement. Together with Bakunin Nechaev wrote The Revolutionary Catechism:-

‘The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.’[1]

Nechaev

He went on to murder a young Student Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, who questioned Nechaev’s political ideas. His primary justification being that age old cry of the criminally unscrupulous, the end justifies the means.

But Nechaev was not an isolated case, only an extreme manifestation of a growing trend amongst Russian revolutionary youth; a growing belief that Revolution was not only necessary despite being bloody, but was good precisely because it would be bloody. Thus Petr Tkachev a well known radical writer:-

'Released yet again from the [Peter and Paul] fortress…he told his astonished sister his new discovery. “Only people under twenty five are capable of sacrifice and therefore everyone over that age should be killed for the good of society.”

When asked how many would have to be killed in the revolution, he replied…”We should be thinking about how many can be left.”[2]

One feels the presence of Stalin in the background taking notes.

Dostoevsky wrote his powerful novel, ‘The Possessed’ on reading of the Nechaev case whilst living in Geneva.

Someone is providing my local Oxfam shop[3] with a wonderful selection of literature, their tastes and interests very close to my own. On Monday I picked up a copy of ‘Inside Stalin’s Russia,’ by Harold Eeman, a Belgian diplomat, and ‘Former People,’ by Douglas Smith, describing what became of the Russian Aristocracy, for just under £6.

I love memoirs; they often provide descriptions that reveal far more about an age, a country, or a social class than any number of academic history books, the best are written by journalists or diplomats who have an eye for the telling detail.

Eeman emerges as a humane and compassionate man, intelligent rather than erudite; he provides invaluable material for any student of Stalinism.

Amidst the descriptions of terrible deprivation and the terror inspired by the ever present GPU (AKA Cheka, NKVD,KGB), there are moments of high comedy. I cannot forget the image of Sochi on the Black sea coast, for some reason the town suffering from a chronic shortage of matches. He describes the beach, a sea of hapless smokers, unlit cigarettes in their mouth desperately on the lookout for a light. Then descending like locusts on anyone lucky enough to possess a lighted cigarette.

The image that haunts me most though is one of pure tragedy. Having settled upon a small restaurant just outside Moscow, he with a small party from the Belgian embassy are talking amongst themselves when suddenly a large man who had been engaged in animated conversation with his friends suddenly across the room suddenly left his chair and approached the Belgians. Speaking fluent French he declared himself delighted to come across foreigners, having served the Tsar in the last war he had got to know both the French and Belgians well.

The whole restaurant froze, it being strictly forbidden to fraternise with foreigners. The poor man, momentarily unbalanced by heavy drinking and an instinctive sense of courtesy had signed his arrest, if not death warrant. Sure enough ten minutes later the GPU arrived and carried him away.

The whole story had a particular resonance with me since in the very different atmosphere of 1991 I had dined with a group of mixed foreigners, taken by our Intourist guide, to a restaurant on the edge of the Moscow very similar to the one described by Eeman, where our presence elicited similar attention, though thankfully without such dire consequences.

He also describes flying back from the Caucasus, which again for me brought back memories. I too remember flying on an internal Aeroflot flight in 1991. Flying Aeroflot itself being a memorable experience at that time; as I watched my fellow passengers, predominantly Georgians standing in the aisle smoking, refusing to put on their seat belts, even as the plane started to descend, sitting down only at the very last minute; the Russian man sitting beside me explained that being Georgians they were all quite mad.

All memoirs, indeed all travel writing is a description of time travel, this is what makes them so fascinating, the past indeed another country.  The Moscow I flew into in 1991 is now as much a part of history as the Moscow of 1938.  As indeed is the London I came to in 1983, it no longer exists. It is this quality of loss that gives memoirs their peculiar evocative sad poetry.

I don’t know whether travel broadens the mind. I can think of some people who certainly get about, forever flying here there and everywhere, they are the kind of people who say, “we’ve done Egypt;” whether they can be described as well travelled, let alone being in possession of broad perspectives, is somewhat questionable.

The real magic of travel is invariably not the grandiose monuments, the Eiffel Tower, The White House or The Kremlin, impressive as they can sometimes be, but these places are already ‘familiar’ to us, no it is in the little cafes and bars and side streets, in the murmur of the street market that the magic resides. I have had greater pleasure by far from a conversation with a stranger in a little out of the way café, than all the guided tours and postcard views. It is the strange alchemy of the unfamiliar, the ‘other’ revealing itself to you that the alchemy resides.

The week has been dominated by the David Miranda case which I have written about above. Amongst the plethora of dismal interviews by the establishment justifying Mr Miranda’s detention, the most dismal was the interview of Malcolm Rifkind whose Commons Committee is charged with oversight of the intelligence services. The whole performance was that of a man for whom a cigarette paper’s width between him and the security services would be a gap too wide. As Alan Rusbridger the editor of the Guardian commented,
“Does listening to Rifkind's routine defence of intelligence services reassure you about his oversight of GCHQ, MI5, etc?”

Malcolm Rifkind MP

Mr Rifkind’s comments create a particular dilemma for me since he is my MP and at the moment is assisting me with a number of issues, including my pursuit of the Litvinenko inquest/inquiry. Do I write to him protesting his unbalanced intervention, noting that it calls into doubt his independence from the security establishment/ This would undoubtedly alienate him, since he would see such an obvious inference as a slur upon his honour? Of course MP’s are honour bound to assist all constituents of what ever political persuasion, however there is also something that commentators call ‘the real world.’

One of the more farcical aspects of the affair emerged on Wednesday when the Russian foreign minister denounced the intimidation of journalists, stating this to be a violation on the principles that British politicians trumpet around the world. Chutzpah writ large, but of course true. [4] It was only a matter of time. 

Respecting the Litvinenko inquest there is a website seeking financial support http://litvinenko-jf.livejournal.com/ All contributions will, I know, be gratefully received.

I do not normally promote other blogs however came across the following interesting suggestions respecting the Royal Family, a serious variant of my own tongue in cheek blog- http://alextalbot.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/modest-proposal.html

It suggests leaving the monarchy in place whilst removing its constitutional role. Well as the man said, “I could live with that.” Though of course for all the talk about the monarchy being a pretty piece of constitutional decoration, the Queen and of course Charles would fight both fair an foul to retain their constitutional privileges.

You can read the blog at:- http://andifnotnow.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/on-tactical-republicanism/

Outside they are starting to put up ply board in anticipation of the carnival. Living, as I do in the heart of the carnival celebrations the experience can be one of being under siege. Shopping must be done by 11:a.m. after that the crowds make it impossible.

So with mixed feelings I await the massed ranks of revellers.

HAPPY CARNIVAL 2013

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[1]Qouted in Paul Avrich Bakunin & Nechaev Freedom Press.

[2] ‘Alexander II The Last Great Tsar, Edvard Radzinsky Free Press 2005 P217-218. Such madness was not confined to Russia. A German revolutionary opined after the failures of 1848 that all it would take for the revolution to succeed was the death of  500.000  selected individuals.

[3] A charity shop selling second hand donations of books, clothes, CD’s etc.

[4] For the nature of intimidation of journalists in Russia see http://journalists-in-russia.org/

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