The Rest Is History
Been thinking about the news—the country, the world—and my jumbled up feelings about it all. I’m angry, incensed, furious. I’m scared, which is what they want, I guess. I want to leave the country. I wonder and worry …will there come a time when it’s too late? I remind myself not to be paranoid. But am I? What’s a reasonable amount of fear?
My life goes on and it’s mostly good, but I can remember a time before this situation and these fears existed, and remembering it both feels good and fucks me up even more.
In the end I just feel sad, with nothing but love and pity for the poor idiot hopeless human race. It’s heartbreaking, what we’ve done, what we continue to do to each other. It’s amazing how little we’ve learned.
I think about how my great-great grandfather Boris was once imprisoned, in his impetuous youth, for plotting to blow up the Tsar. (I just found out about this a couple of years ago and was as surprised as you are.) Boris and my great-great grandmother Anna* had fled Tsarist Russia and were living in Paris at the time, where they hung out in the forest outside the city, making bombs. Fortunately they were caught before they murdered anyone.
Eventually they emigrated to the U.S., where they worked as labor organizers, becoming prominent socialist leaders. They gave rousing speeches in the factories and Boris was often arrested (or severely beaten by labor contractors) for being an agitator. "We expect this in Czarist Russia, but America is supposed to be a land of liberty, yet in Buffalo, an American city, they drag me and other speakers of the Socialist Labor Party to the police station," he said. Anna made speeches too, but wasn’t arrested until later. “Workers, you must organize into unions and stand ready to resist the tsars!” She said. “No one will help you unless you help yourselves. Each capitalist works for the other while the laborer starves. You should hate capitalists like a mad dog and not make a jackass out of yourselves at election time. The Socialist Party is the one that will help you.”
In 1917, Vladimir Lenin asked Boris to come back to Russia, thinking his experience as a socialist leader in the states would be useful for the new Bolshevik government. In Russia, Boris acted as advisor and secretary to Lenin, and was Minister of Propaganda and Minister of Labor. They started the Comintern, and the rest is history. Back in the U.S., Anna was arrested for being a communist.
I often think about these ancestors, who did so much in the face of injustice, evolving from a simple murderous plot, to dedicated and careful political work. They were, among other things, brave. I would really love to hear their thoughts about the current situation in the U.S. How would they feel? What they would do?
*Anna, an obstetrician, became one of the first female doctors in the U.S. She was known for traveling by bicycle to provide free care to immigrant families and railroad workers. There’s a mural of her in Cheektowaga NY which shows her using a railroad handcar to travel to a Gypsy encampment for a breech delivery that she was paid for with two chickens.
Boris Reinstein booking photo from the Préfecture de Police:
“Nihilists Sentenced in Paris 1890 for Complicity in Making Exploding Bomber”
Aha. So some ancestors did surely know each other. Interesting.
Do you know what happenned to Boris?
I'm asking not out of sheer curiosity.
This old guard as they were being called, didn't survive well, or not at all. They were all purged, later, in the thirties
Of course there were exceptions -for example the (distant)relative I'm talking about a) left Soviet government in several months,. Probably didn't want to have that much in common with that goverment, afyer all
and b) he was so ancient when purges started he was left alone, not being considered a threat. Everybody else died a horrible death, after horrible tortures, or was sent to Gulag, to die another kind of horrible death)
So I don't know what they'd say.
I guess each one would have their own opinion.
Some did believe until the very end.
They'd say wrong people arrived after them. For example.
But. it starts with them taking power, and then they need to hold to it, right?
What's the power, if one can't hold onto it.
And then it appears it has to be done by any means possible.
And then it's "let's send 300 000 folks from St Petersburg to Siberia or Kazakhstan , just in case, so the city will tremble, and won't consider itself equal to Moscow", or some such.
In addition to many other things.
And they'd smile and say: "We know you did nothing wrong; we're just making examples out of you"
Then you have an Empire of Evil- with a beautiful Constitution though , and nice pictures of kids playing and workers working, and the machine of lies even the US would be envious of.
Then it breaks and dissolves- but the one who had real power there, find their way to that power again, and put back monuments to the Great Stalin, and find reasons to wage wars, which is now 4 years (I'm from Kiev, so my post might be a bit too colored by this detail)
and are in general as considerate of human lives as Tzars before them; only Tsars seem more conscientous still.
Yes; I also had some very brave ancestors, and most of them were wonderful people.
Didn't help.
There is quiet sort of bravery too; noone notices it, no one acknowledges it, but because of it, world maybe still is standing.
But I like the idea your ancerstors and mine probably argued together, and drank tea(or whatever they drank) together, and were naive enough, until they weren't.
Thank you for the post, Anna ❤️
Also, how did you find out about all this???