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Does This Remind You of Anyone?

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An Amazing Coincidence

An Amazing Coincidence

When I read Teffi’s essay on Rasputin in Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, couldn’t help comparing the dread Siberian starets to an American political figure in the news. Here are three instances, from which you can draw your own conclusions:

The Black Automobile

According to Teffi:

The “Black Automobile” remains a mystery to this day. Several nights running this car had roared across the vField of Mars, sped over the Palace Bridge, and disappeared into the unknown. Shots had been fired from inside the car. Passers-by had been wounded.

“It’s Rasputin’s doing,” people were saying, “Who else?”

Dealings with Women

Teffi was seated next to Rasputin, who tried to get her to have some wine:

Rasputin was drinking a great deal and very quickly. Suddenly he leaned towards me and whispered, “Why aren’t you drinking, eh? God will forgive you. Drink.”

He kept trying to get her to drink and to come to his place, but she wisely refused.

He “Sows Discord and Panic”

Finally, Teffi writes:

He profits from everything black, evil and incomprehensible. Everything that sows discord and panic. And there’s nothing he can’t explain to his own advantage when he needs to.

Now I could add that he tweets nasty, ad hominem attacks in the middle of the night, but that would be giving it away, wouldn’t it?

 

 

 

 

Serendipity: A Glimpse of Rasputin

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Gregory Rasputin in Color

Gregory Rasputin in Color

The following beguiling sketch comes from Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya—perhaps better known as Teffi—whose essay on the Siberian “holy man” is reprinted in her Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me: The Best of Teffi, published by New York Review:

I had glimpsed Rasputin once before. In a train. He must have been on his way east, to visit his home village in Siberia. He was in a first-class compartment. With his entourage: a little man ho was something like a secretary to him, a woman of a certain age with her daughter, and Madame V—, a lady-in-waiting to the Tsaritsa.

It was very hot and the compartment doors were wide open. Rasputin was presiding over tea—with a tin teapot, dried bread rings and lumps of sugar on the side. He was wearing a pink calico smock over his trousers, wiping his forehead and neck with an embroidered towel and talking rather peevishly, with a broad Siberian accent.

“Dearie! Go and fetch us some more hot water! Hot water, I said, go and get us some. The tea’s right stewed, but they didn’t even give us any hot water. And where is the strainer? Annushka! The strainer—where is it? Oh, what a muddler you are!”

I love the picture of the demonic starets wearing a pink smock.

The photograph above was published by The Daily Mail, along with other interesting color pictures of Rasputin and the Tsar.

Teffi’s essay on Rasputin made me think, and you shall find out later this week exactly what it made me think about.

The Commie Sub Commander Who Saved the World

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Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and Wife

Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and Wife

Not since the fall of Communism has America become so confrontational with Russia. Perhaps now is the right time to remind you that a Soviet submarine officer prevented the outbreak of a devastating nuclear World War III.

It was October 1962. The United States military had detected that Soviet nuclear missiles had been set up in Cuba: Kennedy was determined to face down Nikita Khruschchev in the world’s most dangerous nuclear confrontation to date. According to Wikipedia:

[A] group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba. Despite being in international waters, the Americans started dropping practice signaling depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine’s crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic. Those on board did not know whether war had broken out or not. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.

Unlike the other subs in the flotilla, three officers on board the B-59 had to agree unanimously to authorize a nuclear launch: Captain Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov. Typically, Russian submarines armed with the “Special Weapon” only required the captain to get authorization from the political officer to launch a nuclear torpedo. However, due to Arkhipov’s position as flotilla commander, the B-59‘s captain also was required to gain Arkhipov’s approval. An argument broke out, with only Arkhipov against the launch.

Fortunately, it was Arkhipov’s voice that prevailed. He persuaded Savitsky to surface and to await further orders from Moscow. Had the nuclear torpedo been fired, war would have ensued within minutes.  According to U.S. Secretary of Defense under Kennedy, Robert McNamara, we came very close to nuclear war, closer than we knew at the time.

The important thing to remember here, I think, is that neither side had an exclusive claim on truth or morality: The “enemy,” a Communist sub commander, saved the world. If you’re interested, here is an interesting account on the subject in The Guardian.

Vladimir Putin is, to some, evil incarnated—but is Donald J. Trump any better? Sometimes there’s little to choose between a KGB officer and a New York real estate developer.

An Unnecessary Holiday

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It Was Leif Eriksson Who Discovered America

It Was Leif Eriksson Who Discovered America

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue …

Okay, I’m willing to grant him that. He didn’t “discover” America, though. The original discoverers walked across what is now the Bering Strait (or sailed in from various Pacific islands) and scattered through North and South America thousands of years ago. If you’re looking for a European discoverer, your man is the Icelander Leif Eriksson, aided and abetted by information from one Bjarni Herjulfsson. He started a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland.

The Viking settlers did not stick around. They faced constant warfare with the Skraelings (i.e. aborigines) and gave it up as a lost cause. But they left behind an archeological record and wrote the experience up in the Vinland Saga, which you can read for yourself. Penguin Books has a good edition, which includes several related sagas bound in the same volume.

In the meantime, we are stuck with this holiday in October commemorating an Italian explorer who is reviled by generations of the people he called Indians. If you want to see what they really thought, read Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire. The Spanish and Portuguese colonial experiences left behind some very pretty churches and millions of tormented Indian slaves, if they were so unlucky as to survive.

Columbus himself was not himself an arrant villain, but he made it possible for real arrant villains like Pedro de Alvarado and Nuño de Guzman to control the lives of thousands of innocents. Okay, so maybe they had human sacrifice—but nowhere on the scale of death practiced by the Iberian newcomers.

The Infamous Shad Bake

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Major General George E. Pickett, C.S.A.

Major General George E. Pickett, C.S.A.

He is most famous for leading a spectacularly failed charge against an entrenched elevated position at the Battle of Gettysburg. But he was not to blame for that: The charge was ordered by Lee and executed as ably as possible considering that it was foredoomed to end in disaster.

But that was not the last act of Pickett’s career in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Pickett was commanding general of C.S.A. forces at Five Points, off the right flank of the Petersburg defenses. Lee had given his general direct orders regarding holding his position: “Hold Five Forks at all hazards. Protect road to Ford’s Depot and prevent Union forces from striking the Southside Railroad. Regret exceedingly your forced withdrawal, and your inability to hold the advantage you had gained.” [Italics mine]

The tone of this order did not sit well with General Pickett. Whereupon, feeling that he had covered his bases adequately in case Sheridan should attack, Pickett accepted an invitation from a fellow officer to join in a picnic of shad that had been caught in the Nottoway River. Both he and Fitzhugh Lee left their forces to subordinates and indulged in a nice shad bake.

Unfortunately, Sheridan picked that point to attack Five Forks and stage one of the most decisive victories of the long Siege of Petersburg, sending the defenders scampering for their lives.

Needless to say, that did not sit well with Robert E. Lee, who terminated Pickett’s command a few days later.

 

In at the Finish

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Abe Lincoln Walking he Streets of Richmond in April 1865

Abe Lincoln Walking he Streets of Richmond in April 1865

It is not generally remembered that Abraham Lincoln was visiting the Union lines during the final breakthrough of the siege of Petersburg. Once  General Sheridan crushed the Confederate resistance at Five Points, there was no more holding back of the Grant’s army: Richmond would have to be abandoned.

Even before it was entirely safe to do so, Lincoln had Admiral Porter sail up the James River and land him in the Rebel capital. On April 4, 1865, he walked around what remained of the city (part of which was still in flames). At first, he was accompanied only by a few Naval officers and men, until General Weitzel, who controlled the Union forces in the city, provided an adequate guard for him.

It is a pity that Matthew Brady was not there to take photographs of the lanky President being approached by Black Virginians, who recognized him at once and sang hymns of thanksgiving. Of course, he received a much less welcoming response from most White residents.

I am close to finishing Volume III of Shelby Foote’s great The Civil War: A Narration, which covers the period from the Red River Campaign of 1864 to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Since the beginning of the month, I have read little else, and my mind is full of Civil War battles and the awful destruction of thousands of Americans of both sides. To this day, the butcher’s bill for the Civil War dwarfs the sum total of casualties of all other wars in which the U.S. has participated since its inception in 1776.

Marching Through Georgia

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The Route of Sherman’s March to the Sea

The Route of Sherman’s March to the Sea

Much has been written about William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea in terms of its savagery—but almost nothing in terms of its ingenuity. After Atlanta was destroyed by Sherman’s forces, Confederate General John Bell Hood decided to attack toward Tennessee, destroying Sherman’s supplies.

But what Sherman had decided instead was to avoid Hood’s army altogether and march to Savannah, where he could be resupplied with Union ships waiting near the harbor. So he divided his army into two columns and, while marching, supplied his army with provender hijacked from plantations in the rich farm land along the route. In fact, Sherman arrived in Savannah with more cattle than he started from in Atlanta. And his men were well fed with turkeys, hogs, sweet potatoes, molasses, and corn that they were able to commandeer enroute.

William Tecumseh Sherman - 1893 Stamp Issue

William Tecumseh Sherman – 1893 Stamp Issue

It had been always been the Union Army’s strategy to fight and defeat the enemy’s army. Even Ulysses S. Grant, besieging Petersburg on the outskirts of Richmond, had doubts about the plan, but finally decided to give his approval. Sherman wasted no time in disappearing from the scene, fighting no battles until he re-emerged at Savannah.

The Confederates were thoroughly confused. Hood was marching his army into Tennessee, where it ran into George Thomas’s forces at Franklin and Nashville. Other Confederates thought that Sherman’s goal was Macon or Augusta, which they dutifully reinforced, only to be avoided by Sherman’s columns as they attacked no city larger than Milledgeville, which was until 1868, the State Capitol.

I am currently reading Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, Red River to Appomatox, which provides a Southern view of the end of the Civil War. Even Foote does not accept that Sherman’s soldiers were particularly brutal, though there was a considerable amount of agricultural theft, freeing of slaves, and destruction of property. It seems to have been under control, however, and Foote makes no claims of murder or rapine.

 

Dunhuang

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Bodhisattva and Guardian God

Bodhisattva and Guardian God

It is over a thousand years ago. Caravans with goods from Europe and the Middle East are about to enter China, right near where the Great Wall sputters to an end near Mogao and Dunhuang. There, at an oasis wedged between the sand dunes of the Lop Desert and the Qilian Mountains, is a series of caves which have been hollowed out and converted into Buddhist temples.

Although Buddhism was the predominant religion of the time, works have been found among Dunhuang’s treasures that included scrolls about Christianity and Judaism, not to mention the oldest printed work on the planet, a scroll of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra.

Notice the western edge of the Great Wall in the map below.

Dunhuang Is Located North of Tibet in Chinese Turkestan

Dunhuang Is Located North of Tibet in Chinese Turkestan

The Getty Center in Los Angeles is running a major exhibit of items from Dunhuang and replicas of the most impressive Buddhist temple caves, including 3-D images. Today, when we visited, the Dunhuang exhibit halls were thronged primarily with Chinese tourists. Still, it was the most interesting of the traveling exhibits now at the Getty Center. Fortunately, the caves at Dunhuang have not been vandalized by jihadist thugs such as were the giant Buddhist sculptures at Bamiyan in Afghanistan.

We tend not to think much about the Silk Road, because it was so thoroughly shut down by Western European naval exploration and the new markets that were created by it. But as long ago as the Roman Empire, silk and spices and other goods from the East were being traded to Europe via camels on the Silk Road that extended from China to the Middle East.

 

The Man Who Destroyed Yugoslavia

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Slobodan Milošević

Slobodan Milošević

He was the 3rd President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997-2000), 1st President of Serbia (1991-1997), and the 14th President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia (1989-1991). I am referring to Slobodan Milošević, the leader who took his country down a rat hole, was responsible for thousands of deaths by genocide (which he called “ethnic cleansing”), and died while awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague.

Although he initially ruled a nation of Serbs, Croatians, Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, Muslim Bosnians, and Hungarians, in the end he was only interested in changing diverse Yugoslavia into a Greater Serbia. Most of his crimes involved his preferential treatment of his fellow Serbs, mostly in the Yugoslavian Republics of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where forces under him or allied to him committed devastating massacres of men, women, and children, including large scale rape and torture.

I am currently reading Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little (New York: Penguin, 1997). Although twenty years have passed since the first edition came out in 1996, the book still reads like today’s headlines.

It shows what can happen when the elected leader of a democracy decides to take sides on behalf of a particular population and, at the same time, act prejudicially against others. (That’s one of the reasons I am so against a political party being responsive only to, say, angry white males.)

The United States is a diverse country very like the old Yugoslavia. It wouldn’t take much effort to break the country into warring fragments. That’s what happened in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot decided to persecute or kill city dwellers. Also Hitler’s Germany with its antisemitism and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s persecution of Christians and Baha’i. And, needless to say, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh’s attacks on Christians, Yezidis, and non-Sunni Muslims of the approved flavor.

 

The West Cork Flying Column

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Military Re-Enactors at Old Fort MacArthur

Military Re-Enactors at Old Fort MacArthur

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Irish War of Independence. In April 1916 a group of volunteers took over the Dublin Post Office, were captured and executed by the British. Yesterday, I went by myself (Martine not feeling well) to the Old Fort MacArthur days in San Pedro.

Present was a group of military re-enactors modeled on the West Cork Flying Column commanded by Thomas Barry (as described in his excellent Guerilla Days in Ireland: A Personal Account of the Anglo-Irish War). I have run across this group before and admire their knowledge of their country’s history and their adherence to verisimilitude. Also, they have the best music by far of any group at the show.

The Irish War of Independence went on until December 1921 when the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Irish Free State.