I’m not yet old enough to perk up my ears every time an old man dies. Yet I was saddened to learn that an old communist I’d known gave up the ghost recently. I’d visited his St Petersburg apartment about fifteen winters ago and we tossed back many tumblers of Ararat cognac. (The Armenian stuff Churchill was fond of – and yes – properly called ‘cognac’ after it won a taste test back in the day (See, Wiki)).
I will call him Vanya: Grim. Gray. Gaunt hands resting on a carved cane. The graves of many comrades reclaimed by nature long ago. He was neatly dressed and had a certain Soviet kind of cleanliness that is somehow different from Western cleanliness. I believe he had been a military engineer.
He said things like: ‘Poetry is food for the soul. A man who rejects it is a beast.’ And he recited countless poems from memory.
I remember he mentioned how his teachers, when he was a boy, would take the classes on ‘literary walks’ to the places associated with the great masters of Russian literature and how everything was weaved in with the books read in class. These peregrinations, through boulevards and alleys, hit every spot where the old, rarified culture still hovered. And all the important names stuck in little Vanya’s cranium. ‘Literature reconciles us to existence…’ he added, ‘Our people will never accept a relativistic education. For us, literature, music, even architecture, is a promise that the world is good. We will always be so, whatever way things go.’
He even hammered on a piano and produced a melancholic thunder of real beauty. And something he said stayed with me: ‘I cannot, on principle, accept official religion, yet I believe music comes to our world from another purer world. It is the highest form of Platonism. And, for good or ill, it is not possible for an artist to be an atheist.’
We talked more about Pushkin and Prokofiev than Perestroika and the former Politburo. But he did opine that Russia ‘needed Putin’ or it would fall into ‘banditry, anarchy and financial feudalism’.
There was a photograph of a sturdy aproned woman in a flowing skirt, like a Gypsy’s, on his row of endless books. ‘That was my Tanya,’ he said.
At one point, he put some drops on his tooth. Apparently, he’d had the same toothache since time out of mind. But when I asked if it was hard to get a dentist appointment, he only gave me a bemused look, like my whole civilization was made of soft stuff or something. And what made it odd was his declaration that ‘all disease comes from the teeth or the nerves’.
Anyways, what really confounds me about Vanya is: Why did I like him? It makes no sense!
The fact is, I can’t bear progressives. Sure, when I was younger, I would ‘exchange ideas’ and all. But these days my brain is too full for that. I’ve got to forget something before anything new gets in. So how could I like a near Stalinist when I can barely stomach a deconstructionist? Was I some sort of perverse hypocrite? Am I really that unfixed in principle?
But soon I figured things out: It seems, deep down, I don’t measure a man by ideology. Yet I have been contaminated by the leftist doctrine that the human person is only a mirage ‘constructed’ by the ever-changing flow of ideas (or else a bundle of biologically determined wants in the case of homosexuality). In America, this is especially so, because our entire national life is built on ephemeral concepts. And so, our common destiny depends, lopsidedly, on whatever dominant ideas happen to float in the air. Chesterton noticed this when he said that in England it isn’t so much what a man thinks, since everyone knows how he spends his time: Lord So-and-So might be an anarchist, but he’ll still dress for dinner (Cambridge spy cells notwithstanding).
Yes, I liked our Communist simply because he was a good man. He had a sense of personal honor as punctilious as that of any knight who had donned shining armor. And shall I say it? This Marxist was something not ideological (as leftist would have us believe): a tory!
Now, I know that for purges and gulags to happen, there needs to be an adequate number of scoundrels to do the dirty work. And I have never held a whit of sympathy for the Soviet experiment. Yet, fairness compels me to own that many ordinary Soviet citizens were probably not unlike our hero. And, in any case, he is of the type I most often met in my travels over there.
But how does our Vanya compare to the progressives that surround me now like flies? Well, I no doubt could excavate some sufficiently noble contemporary to hold a candle to him. But that would not be a representative sample. The sort of progressive that usually comes my way is more like a man I will call Lance.
I’m not sure how Lance got the job at my former company. From day one he gave the marked impression the whole place irritated him. He was the kind of guy who expansively proclaimed his sympathy for all the world’s oppressed (not just people but even chickens and cows). Yet he was singularly hated by those most oppressed at our company: the clerks and janitorial staff. He even made the cleaning lady change some chemical she used, citing his allergies.
And let me tell you of Lance’s coup de grace. Once, the boss called him into his office to discuss some business, but he did it while holding a bacon cheeseburger. And what does Lance do? He complains about being obliged to smell roasted flesh. And the boss was duly compelled to change his ancient practice. Yes, Lance cancelled a bacon cheeseburger.
Once, after his girlfriend hurled a book at him, Lance summoned the police and had her tossed from her own leasehold – and he somehow managed to continue dwelling there without her. (If I knew Lance’s methodology, for all the frying pans that have flown at my head, I’d have several handsome residences by now).
But his own revolution turned around and ate him in the end. This happened after Lance told a black woman, who was engaged to marry, that she’d be putting herself into ‘domestic slavery’. All the blacks and woman started a campaign against him. And the boss was onboard. So, one day, he was called into the Human Resources office and nobody saw him again. This was one instance that the PC Police really did some good.
Anyways, I bet this is the first instance that a communist was heartfully praised in these venerable pages. But this life is a variegated business, gentle reader, and strange things happen if only one lives long enough.
This article was published in the December 2021 edition of The Salisbury Review, The UK’s most conservative magazine.
Mark Mantel is an American lawyer. He was born in St Petersburg and left when he was a boy. He went there for long trips during his university years and during law school. He was christened into the Orthodox Church during Soviet times (in a village church) and still keeps to that faith.
Soviet communism is a curious phenomenon. It combined elements of Marxism with elements of traditional Russian culture based on Orthodox Christianity. Among Soviet Communist Party members there were quite a few whom I would call ‘misguided Christians’. Their world view was Communist, but their personal mores were Christian. They were modest, kind, hard-working, ascetic, chaste. However, they strove not for the Kingdom of God, but for the chimeric paradise on earth promised by their deluded ideologues.
Of course, their morality was built on the sand of materialism, therefore they could not hand it over to the following generations. Their children tended to be much more materialistic, egocentric and hedonistic. Morality not rooted in a religious faith is a fickle flower.
Still, for its faults, Soviet societies produced very few ‘Lances’.
Meanwhile in the USA, we currently see many extraordinary events, and interpretations of events, that are extreme vivid versions of what is happening throughout the Anglosphere.
On 6 Jan 2021, a riot by a group of largely unwashed people -this group fully infiltrated by FBI and Secret Service agents- strolled past security guards -who stand back and waved ’em through- into the US Capitol. And this is labeled an “insurrection”.
Of course, this group -infiltrated by FBI and Secret Service agents- had no clue about how to take over the US government, and did not even have that intention. They were a group of largely unwashed, mostly drugged-up idiots -infiltrated by FBI and Secret Service agents.
The action by a black, leftist, affirmative action security guard in murdering an unarmed white woman in cold blood during this fracas is portrayed by the left as an act of extreme bravery in the defense of the nation.
I ask you.
Meanwhile, across the land, blacks who kill, rape, thieve and tell fibs are not held to any account. But whites who defend themselves against such blacks are sentenced to life imprisonment -and the black murdering, raping, thieving criminals are (falsely) described as gentle family men, just out jogging or something innocently similar.
This is happening widely and will happen with increasing frequency because District Attorneys, black and leftist white, whose elections to office are funded by Soros and similar evil people, are releasing black murderers, rapists, and thieves from custody at fast pace. And many such violently criminal blacks are not taken into custody at all -because, in many precincts, the cops have simply given up because local judges -black and leftist whites- dismiss cases against black criminals, violent and otherwise.
And this is just the tip of a very large iceberg in the USA. And similar treatment of non-whites is now being enjoyed by non-whites and leftist whites all over the Anglosphere.
All this, while the Anglosphere sleeps and/or watches TV while slurping alcohol or doing some other kinda drug to escape the idiocy of multiculturalism and its accoutrement, and what happens when “government” gets too big, and when hardly any whites can be bothered to do the necessary to save Western Civ.
“He even made the cleaning lady change some chemical she used, citing his allergies.” I doubt it, but it’s reasonable not to use chemicals that are causing problems.
“This Marxist was something not ideological (as leftist would have us believe): a tory!” What does this illiterate nonsense even mean?
“And the boss was duly compelled to change his ancient practice.” Quite right, how rude to be chewing messily on a bit of junk food while having a business chat in the place of work. Take 5 minutes to finish your food, then call me in.
“Lance summoned the police and had her tossed from her own leasehold – and he somehow managed to continue dwelling there without her.” 8n other words, you don’t know the full story. That’s if “Lance” even exists.
What else do you expect from an American lawyer but utter nonsense? The events of the past year, Giuliani and his bonkers colleagues being prime examples.
I should explain to Mark Mantel I suspect the writer who goes by the name, ”the editor’s denying free speech again” (aka Andrew or Werdna ? previously banned for abusive texts )is probably a member of the English middle class left wing dinner table tendency – often to be found in socially valuable jobs such as event management, TV advertising, (sugary drinks, alcohol fast food), investment banking, property, second homes, who had no difficulty in Tony Blair taking us into a war in the Middle East which destroyed entire societies, killed tens of thousands and provoked a refugee crisis we are now paying for, and in passing did wonders for the Human Rights Industry in which Tony’s wife is employed to her great financial advantage. Tony and Cherie (his wife) are both multi millionaires as all good socialists should be. On the other hand our commentator might sleep in shop doorways to demonstrate his solidarity with the dispossessed, but I have my doubts.
A “Lance” is a humanist from hell (or from Dostoyevsky who can rightly be called “the psychologist of hell”). He loves the human race in the abstract but detests almost every individual representative of it which he comes across and considers it his duty to show his content and resentment to people.
For all his grand ideas, a “Lance” is as bigoted and as narrow-minded as the most dogmatic Puritan in Salem. If “Lances” of the world unite and take power they will definitely burn people at stake or rather send them to re-education camps by the million. Camps are more efficient than individual auto-da-fés.
The Lances of the Anglosphere?
We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
And, if the West’s “Print Money and ancillary practices” solution to the economic problem prove not to be sustainable (sustainable as that word meant before the Green Hysteria) when the costs kick in of the Green Hysteria, and the costs accrue of the massive inflow to the Anglosphere and Western Europe, of groups with large proportions of members who are violent and/or nett consumers-
-the Lances will have to learn to be productive-
-or starve along with the rest of the lower 50% of the populace, with no medicine/healthcare for that benighted tranche either (see the tale of Vanya above).
Anyway, it is time for fully sentient humans to develop a couple scenarios within which they and their families can survive, perhaps thrive, in the Wasteland that will be upon us if the “Print Money and to hell with proper productivity and profits” scheme does run into the thick, hard wall of Reality.
What a wonderful article! But there were also many civilised and cultured Germans living in Nazi Germany who despised the régime, and were proud of their heritage, culture, and faith.
I think there are wonderful people almost everywhere. But they rarely find themselves in a position of power – just because they are not power-hungry.