Tsar Quotes

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

I was not born to amuse the Tsars.

You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else's.

The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature- but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind.

We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.

I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.

You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook.

There, weeping, a tsarevna lies locked in a cell. And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well. There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies, the demon Baba Yaga flies. There Tsar Koschei, he wastes away, poring over his pale gold.

And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.

There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.

I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.

History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers.

Take some exercise, try to recover the look of a human being.

The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.

Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.

A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.

You see, my love. As you've always said, after the rain-" Sun." After the darkness-" Light." And after the illness-" Health." Exactly," said the Tsar. "We mustn't give up faith.

Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.

Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.

I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, not the caboose on a train of grand duchesses. Someday, I promise myself, no one will be able to hear my name or look at my picture and suppose they know all about me. Someday I will do something bigger than what I am.

The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.

We should be used to it," Tatiana reasons. "There have always been lines separating us from the rest of the world, whether they were satin ribbons or iron rails.

Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand?

History is the error we are forever correcting.” —Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

Brother," he wept, "my heart is being cut in two. I cannot bear it." "Tscha!" said the Tsar of Birds. "Life is like that.

If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.

Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.

The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it's earned.

The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.

My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.

Now we'd help her if we could. We can't. So we're helping you. That's all that most of us who are not Tsars or witches can manage to do.

Marya put down her fork. “Why are you doing this, Koschei? I have had lovers before. You have, too. Remember Marina? The rusalka? She and I swam together every morning. We raced the salmon. You called us your little sharks.” The Tsar of Life held his knife so tightly Marya could see his knucklebones bulging. “Were any of them called Ivan? Were any of them human boys all sticky with their own innocence? I know you. I know you because you are like me, as much like me as two spoons nested in each other.” Her husband leaned close to her, the candlelight sparking in his dark, shaggy hair. “When you steal them, they mean so much more, Marousha. Trust me. I know. What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you? Did I not give you enough pretty dresses? Enough emeralds? I’m sure I have more, somewhere.” Marya lifted her hand and laid it on her husband’s cheek. With a blinking quickness, she drove her nails deep into his face. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I have worn nothing but blood and death for years. I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me. I have learned all the tricks you said I must learn. I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man. I have learned to lay my finger aside my nose and disappear. I have learned to watch everything die. I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too. And if I have watched all my soldiers die in front of me, if I have only been saved by my rifle and my own hands, if I have drunk more blood than water for weeks, then I take the human boy who stumbled into my tent and hold him between my legs until I stop screaming, you will not punish me for it. Are we not chyerti? Are we not devils? I will not even hear your punishment, old man.

I have human friends, obviously. But everything's easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.

Greed does not rest until it is satisfied, and greed is never satisfied

There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.

The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.

On the news that the Tsar had sent the troops icons to boost their morals, General Dragomirov quipped: 'The Japanese are beating us with machine-guns, but never mind: we'll beat them with icons.

[T]o some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses.

In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]

This should be a librarian’s job, of course, but you can’t trust people who read that much.

Monika answered for her father. Giving Walter a conspiratorial grin, she said: “Daddy used to say that if the tsar had been born to a different station in life, he might, with an effort, have become a competent postman.

The tsar was holding her hands against his chest, the ring on his finger gleaming pale silver like the tears running in silver lines down his cheeks; he was gazing down at her with eyes shining jewel-green, as though she were the most beautiful thing in the world.

The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him [Tsar Nicholas I] had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave them.

One of Russia’s tsars, around 1580, was known as Ivan the Terrible, and rightly so. Beside him Nero was mild.

You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.

The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.

But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth.

With tears in her eyes, Alexandra assured him that the husband and father was infinitely more precious to her than the tsar whose throne she had shared. Nicholas finally broke. Laying his head on his wife’s breast, he sobbed like a child.

Maria cries unashamedly on my shoulder while I whisper and pet her cheek, but Anastasia grips my other hand and stares fiercely back at our Alexander Palace with her wet blue eyes until it is no more than a lemon-colored speck against the sunrise.

I'm going to die. And as if that weren't bad enough, I'm going to die inside a cake.

It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens.

A few years later, Mendeleev, now famous, divorced his wife and wanted to remarry. Although the conservative local church said he had to wait seven years, he bribed a priest and got on with the nuptials. This technically made him a bigamist, but no one dared arrest him. When a local bureaucrat complained to the tsar about the double standard applied to the case- the priest was defrocked-the tsar primly replied, "I admit, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev.

The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they’re all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.

With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials. As we cooked in our kitchens we were careful to follow the manufacturer's instructions, as we made love in our bedrooms we embraced within a familiar repertoire of gestures and affections. The medium of film had turned us all into minor actors in an endlessly running daytime serial. In the future, airliners would crash and presidents would be assassinated within agreed conventions as formalised as the coronation of a tsar.

Never forget the first three letters of confidence.

We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste.

I never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'.

Did the tsar refuse to marry you?" I asked. I thought the duke might have been angry with her if he had: he hadn't seemed like a man to be satisfied if his plans went awry. "No," she said. "I am tsarina. For as long as I live." She said it dryly, as if she didn't expect that to last long. "The tsar is a black sorcerer. He is possessed by a demon of flame that wants to devour me." I laughed; I couldn't help it. It wasn't mirth, it was bitterness. "So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.

Some people thirst for fame. They will do anything to have it. They will betray anyone. They will humiliate themselves and those around them. To be hated or loved makes no difference to them. What they want is to be known. Is is a sad addiction, and such people wallow in it all their lives, like pigs in filth.

There's nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.

Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?' It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisers knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar's head - if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl.

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras, but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realise that they are already trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within a bigger box – human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

What divine imagination could conjure something so imperfect as life?

Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-sized plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should have been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.

Putin had told Yeltsin that he did not like election campaigns, and now he dismissed campaign promises as unachievable lies told by politicians and denigrated television advertisements as unseemly manipulation of gullible consumers.

In my carpet bag are the mushrooms that I gathered in the woods. With two fingers I pick up a piece and look at it. Then I take a bite and wait for my body to react. Now I'm in a better mood. In a short time I'll be dead. Or alive. I'm not always sure that there's any difference.

He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland.

To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that's what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him.

Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We're not gaseous no matter how we sit to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient.

The prison inspector and the warders, though they had never understood or gone into the meaning of these dogmas and of all that went on in church, believed that they must believe, because the higher authorities and the Tsar himself believed in it. Besides, though faintly (and themselves unable to explain why), they felt that this faith defended their cruel occupations. If this faith did not exist it would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to use all their powers to torment people, as they were now doing, with a quiet conscience. The inspector was such a kind-hearted man that he could not have lived as he was now living unsupported by his faith.

What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

In the flash there's no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.

On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him.

No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We've given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive.

We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.

The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston.

There were days when Earth's small glories were luminous enough to dim church icons to duller golds. Diving from the roof into fresh snow. Throwing dishes from the window after Mother's funeral. I have been blessed.

...from the perspective of the individual, it could be said that the single greatest difference between Russia and the West, both under Tsarism and Communism, was that in Western Europe citizens were generally free to do as they pleased so long as their activities had not been specifically prohibited by the state, while the people of Russia were not free to do anything unless the state had given them specific permission to do it. No subject of the Tsar, regardless of his rank or class, could sleep securely in his bed in the knowledge that his house would not be subject to a search, or he himself to arrest.

The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn't added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it's peace of a kind he hadn't imagined himself worthy of receiving.

I’d never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life’s madness: The institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.

An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.

Left-wing progressivism” and “managerialism” are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter. To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as “managerialism” but consider the armies of HR officer, diversity tsars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of “LGBT” and used to police and control enterprises. The “philanthropic” endeavours of the Ford Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to setup new power centres for managerialism under the guise of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Similar case studies can be found in issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The LOGIC of managerialism is to create invisible “problems” which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as “unconscious bias training”, “net zero carbon”, the ratio of men and women on executive boards or whatever else.

Гришка-Вор тебя не ополячил, Петр-Царь тебя не онемечил. Что же делаешь, голубка? — Плачу. Где же спесь твоя, Москва? — Далече. — Голубочки где твои? — Нет корму. — Кто унес его? — Да ворон черный. — Где кресты твои святые? — Сбиты. — Где сыны твои, Москва? — Убиты. 10 декабря 1917 Felon Grishka could not polonize you, and Tsar Peter could not germanize you. What are you about, my fairest? - Weeping. Moscow, where's that ancient pride? - Far sleeping. - Where are all your doves? - No food to save them. - Who made off with it? - The coal-black raven. - And your holy crosses? - Ripped asunder. - Moscow, and your sons? - Slain in their hundreds.

Это просто, как кровь и пот: Царь — народу, царю — народ. Это ясно, как тайна двух: Двое рядом, а третий — Дух. Царь с небес на престол взведён: Это чисто, как снег и сон. Царь опять на престол взойдёт — Это свято, как кровь и пот. 7 мая 1918, 3-ий день Пасхи (а оставалось ему жить меньше трёх месяцев!) It is simple, as blood and sweat: Tsar and people - in destiny wed. It is clear, as a secret shared Between two, an the Spirit- the third. Heaven summoned the tsar to his throne: It is spotless, as sleep as snow. And the tsar shall regain his throne yet: It is sacred, as blood and sweat. 24th April 1918 3rd day of Easter (and he had - less than three months to live!)

I want to take away your sunshine, Lukas. Not because I'm evil but because the sun can't exist without shadows. I want to examine the lie that keeps you afloat--the idea that it's wonderful to be Lukas, that it's splendid to be the tsar's favorite dwarf, that there's nothing better to do than bring crackers to Menshikov like some kind of dog. When does it hurt the most, Lukas? That's what I'd like to know. What hurts you more than anything else? Is it when the tsar mocks you? Or is it when he can't remember your name? Is it when he forgets all about your for a year or two? When are you going to curse Peter Alexeyevich to Hell, Lukas? That's what I'd like to know. I want to get behind that smile of yours, and your clown's heart. And then I'll console you when you fall apart--I'll console you when you realize that you are infinitely unloved. At that moment I'll be at your side, but no before. Not a moment before.

У меня в Москве — купола горят! У меня в Москве — колокола звонят! И гробницы в ряд у меня стоят, — В них царицы спят, и цари. И не знаешь ты, что зарёй в Кремле Легче дышится — чем на всей земле! И не знаешь ты, что зарёй в Кремле Я молюсь тебе — до зари! И проходишь ты над своей Невой О ту пору, как над рекой-Москвой Я стою с опущенной головой, И слипаются фонари. Всей бессонницей я тебя люблю, Всей бессонницей я тебе внемлю — О ту пору, как по всему Кремлю Просыпаются звонари… Но моя река — да с твоей рекой, Но моя рука — да с твоей рукой Не сойдутся, Радость моя, доколь Не догонит заря — зари. 7 мая 1916 At home in Moscow - where the domes are burning, at home in Moscow - in the sound of bells, where I live the tombs - in their rows are standing and in them Tsaritsas - are asleep and tsars. And you don't know how - at dawn the Kremlin is the easiest place to - breathe in the whole wide earth and you don't know when - dawn reaches the Kremlin I pray to you until - the next day comes and I go with you - by your river Neva even while beside - the Moscow river I am standing here - with my head lowered and the line of street lights - sticks fast together. With my insomnia - I love you wholly. With my insomnia - I listen for you, just at the hour throughout - the Kremlin, men who ring the bells - begin to waken, Still my river - and your river still my hand - and your hand will never join, or not until one dawn catches up another dawning.

Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy

The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Konstantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark. Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’ But how could you keep it there if there really was only one true way, one line, and it is blocked? ‘I have gone where you did not want me to go.’ In

Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn't look at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera's emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than wonder to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia's poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right.

Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No

Надобно смело признаться, Лира! Мы тяготели к великим мира: Мачтам, знаменам, церквам, царям, Бардам, героям, орлам и старцам, Так, присягнувши на верность — царствам, Не доверяют Шатра — ветрам. Знаешь царя — так псаря не жалуй! Верность как якорем нас держала: Верность величью — вине — беде, Верность великой вине венчанной! Так, присягнувши на верность — Хану, Не присягают его орде. Ветреный век мы застали, Лира! Ветер в клоки изодрав мундиры, Треплет последний лоскут Шатра… Новые толпы — иные флаги! Мы ж остаемся верны присяге, Ибо дурные вожди — ветра. 14 августа 1918 Better, my Lyre, to confess it freely! It was the great ever stirred our feelings: masts, battle ensigns, churches, and kings, bards, epic heroes, eagles, and elders. Those that are pledged to the realm, like soldiers, do not confide their Tent - to the winds. You know the Tsar - do not toy with the hunter! Loyalty has held us, firm as an anchor: loyalty to greatness - to guilt - to grief, to the great crowned guilt - loyalty unswerving! Those that are pledged to the Khan will serve him - their oath is not to the horde, but its chief. We struck a fickle age, Lyre, that scatters all to the winds! Uniforms ripped to tatters, and the last shreds of the Tent worn thin... New crowds collecting - other flags waving! But we still stand by our word - unwavering, for they are devious captains - the winds.

The rapt pupil will be forgive for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be visrtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it wil commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature-but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all. So where is the country of the Tsar of Death? Where is the nation of the Tsar of Life? They are not so easy to find, yet each day you step upon both one hundred times or more. Every portion of Eath is infinitely divided between them, to the smallest unit of measure, and smaller yet. Even the specks of soil war with one another. Even the atoms strangle each other in their sleep. To reach the country of the Tsar of Life, which is both impossibly near and hopelessly far, you must not wish to arrive there, but approach is stealthily, sideways. It is best to be ill, in a fever, a delirium. In the riot of sickness, when the threatened flesh rouses itself, all redness and fluid and heat, it is easiest to topple over into the country you seek. Of course, it is just as easy, in this manner to reach the country of the Tsar of Death. Travel is never without risk.

At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles. The seven levels are labelled as follows: (1) Autistic (2) Animistic (3) Awakening and fright (4) Aggressive power seeking (5) Sociocentric (6) Aggressive individualistic (7) Pacifist individualistic. The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose. Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish. Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management. Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).

CUSINS. No: the price is settled: that is all. The real tug of war is still to come. What about the moral question? LADY BRITOMART. There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals. UNDERSHAFT [determinedly] No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here. CUSINS. What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer? UNDERSHAFT. To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop IF GOD GAVE THE HAND, LET NOT MAN WITHHOLD THE SWORD. The second wrote up ALL HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: NONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO JUDGE. The third wrote up TO MAN THE WEAPON: TO HEAVEN THE VICTORY. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up PEACE SHALL NOT PREVAIL SAVE WITH A SWORD IN HER HAND. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, UNASHAMED. CUSINS.

You are not that kind of man Pekkala. You are not the monster that your enemies once believed you to be. If you were, you would never have been such a formidable opponent for people like myself. Monsters are easy to defeat. With such people, it is only a question of blood and time, since there only weapon is fear. But you-you won the hearts of the people and the respect of your enemies. I do not believe you understand how rare a thing that is, and those whose hearts you won are out there still." Stalin brushed his hand towards the window, and out across the pale blue autumn sky. " They know how difficult your job can be, and how few of those who walk your path can do what must be done and still hold on to their humanity. They have not forgotten you. And I don't believe you have forgotten them".

From that point of view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable, had at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at the city and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance of possessing it agitated and awed him. "But could it be otherwise?" he thought. "Here is this capital at my feet. Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange, beautiful, and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In what light must I appear to them!" thought he, thinking of his troops. "Here she is, the reward for all those fainthearted men," he reflected, glancing at those near him and at the troops who were approaching and forming up. "One word from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars would perish. But my clemency is always ready to descend upon the vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But no, it can't be true that I am in Moscow," he suddenly thought. "Yet here she is lying at my feet, with her golden domes and crosses scintillating and twinkling in the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy… . It is just this which Alexander will feel most painfully, I know him." (It seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking place lay in the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) "From the height of the Kremlin—yes, there is the Kremlin, yes—I will give them just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true civilization, I will make generations of boyars remember their conqueror with love. I will tell the deputation that I did not, and do not, desire war, that I have waged war only against the false policy of their court; that I love and respect Alexander and that in Moscow I will accept terms of peace worthy of myself and of my people. I do not wish to utilize the fortunes of war to humiliate an honored monarch. 'Boyars,' I will say to them, 'I do not desire war, I desire the peace and welfare of all my subjects.' However, I know their presence will inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always do: clearly, impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am in Moscow? Yes, there she lies.