by Tom Anderson
However, the semaphore system was viewed with fear in other countries. Some copied it, seeking the same advantages, but the semaphore also came to symbolise Lisieux’s will to centralise power and dominate all affairs throughout his country. Because of this, in liberty-obsessed Britain in particular, the semaphore was severely restricted by an Act of Parliament, and only a token network throughout the south coast was built. Britain would later come to regret this decision.[22]
In the ironic words of Robespierre himself, Lisieux sought a ‘clean break’ with the past. Having compromised with established interests for his first two or three years in power, he now rewrote history to claim he had turned against Robespierrism and the Sans-Culottes from the start. The word ‘Jacobin’ was removed from all records referring to events after Lisieux’s takeover in the Double Revolution, and after that was used to describe Robespierre’s rule only. As far as Lisieux was concerned, ‘Jacobin’ was dangerous. It described a political faction. The fact that a description was necessary meant that there must be more than one faction. And that was intolerable in his Republic.
Lisieux also changed the Republic’s position on the Church. Instead of the Catholic Church being publicly opposed, he instead altered policy towards religious tolerance, and permitted Catholic churches as readily as those surviving Temples of Reason of the cult of Hébert, with their statues of the Goddess of Atheism. All he asked was that all of them publicly display his portrait, and swear allegiance to him – him personally – before every sermon. Thus in one swoop Lisieux assuaged the angry Catholic interests over the Rape of Rome, and extended his control yet further. As for Lisieux’s own beliefs, who can say? It is generally thought now that he was not a deistic-atheist like Hébert and Robespierre, and he was certainly no Christian. Perhaps it is fair to say that all that Jean de Lisieux really believed in was Jean de Lisieux.
And of course La Carte was banned. Lisieux eventually released his own version, but the original was publicly burned throughout France and few original copies survive. The dream of Le Diamant burned with them on that day; yet, in the end, it turned out to be a phoenix…
Chapter #56: Pin the Zion on the Eurasia
“Throughout history, many peoples, races and creeds have been persecuted; but few of them have defined themselves by that persecution.”
- Yakov Litvinov (1875)
*
From: “WEST MEETS EAST: Russia in the reign of Paul I” by Alexei Petrovich Dalakhov (1954, English translation 1979)—
As the nineteenth century dawned, bloodily, across the world, Russia stood at a crossroads. She had emerged, against the odds, from her terrible civil war. The Romanovs had won, and Paul of Lithuania was Tsar. Yet this apparent triumph masked continuing deep divisions. Some of these are obvious when one considers the circumstances of Paul’s victory. The defeat of the Potemkinites and their Swedish allies were ultimately due to forces beyond Paul’s control, whether within or without Russia herself; the Danish intervention and the Cossack revolt led by Heinz Kautzman, the ‘Bald Impostor’. In the long run, this could not be tolerated; the longstanding policy of autarchy and autocracy, inseparable from Russia’s role as the Third Rome and Heir of Byzantium, could not accommodate dependence upon such forces.
Paul’s situation was made more problematic by the fact that the peace with the Potemkinites had been made on relatively good terms, and he was forced to treat the two brothers Potemkin and their allies quite well lest he risk alienating the areas of society that had supported them. These were quite diverse, reflecting the way in which the Potemkins had built up their coalition; a large part of the nobility, the Dvoryanstvo, had been aggravated by Peter III’s quixotic and Prussophile policies, or had been burned while playing the game at court (as indeed Potemkin the elder had) and been sent into disgrace and exile. Yet in their support of the Potemkinites they were joined by an equally significant portion of the serfs and peasantry, individually powerless, yet nonetheless a force to be reckoned with when roused to revolt. The peasants resented the air of foreign rule that Peter’s tastes had suggested, along with his continuation of his namesake Peter the Great’s tendency to move Russia towards the West, introduce European practices and customs, and undermine the Orthodox Church’s more traditional powers. Autarch or not, no Russian Tsar could afford to ignore such a popular attitude, not when peasant revolts had unseated rulers before (and, indeed, had helped Paul himself to power, for many of the peasants had rallied to Kautzman).
The resulting Russian imperial policy was very much a compromise between different interests. Paul could not appease the peasants by rolling back his father’s Germanophile policies, because that would alienate the Volga German colonists who followed Kautzman and his Cossacks. It was fortuitous that Revolutionary France provided a convenient bogeyman, ideologically inimical to Russian autarchy (yet, from the point of few of the oppressed peasant tilling the field, the two were little different). France was also conveniently far away, and despite French successes in Germany, it seemed unlikely that the Russians would actually have to fight her. This meant that Paul’s propagandists could paint France in whatever terms they liked, turning it into the cause of all the world’s ills, Tchernobog personified as a nation. This gave Paul a lever to appease the peasants’ anti-foreign agenda. Radically, he first spoke out against and then actually legislated against the use of French as the first language of the Russian aristocracy. This had been their tongue of choice since the days of Louis XIV, when Bourbon France had been held up as the shining example of European civilisation and worthy of emulation. In fact most of Paul’s compromises gave the short end of the stick to the Dvoryanstvo, despite the power many of them held; the Tsar was no less petty than his father when it came to grievances, and many of the nobles had sided with the Potemkinites. Now Alexander Potemkin was Duke of Courland and his brother Ivan was safely a long way away supervising the development of the East, Paul could take action against their supporters on at least an individual basis.
The slow removal of French as a fashionable language of power in Russia left a gulf that was sometimes filled by German, reflecting Paul following his father’s tastes and the power of Kautzman’s Volga Germans in Russia. However, Paul also encouraged the widespread adoption of the Russian language itself. Previously scorned as the tongue of serfs, Russian was celebrated through poetry and plays funded by the Institute of Cultural Patriotism, set up by Paul in Moscow. His policy towards the former capital again spoke of rapproachment, for Moscow’s support of the Potemkinites had been born of a double resentment of Peter’s regime: the fact that St Petersburg had stolen Moscow’s place as centre of power; and the implications behind that fact, the idea that Moscow was a part of the old, Asian, Slavic Russia, to be discarded in favour of the new and shiny European Russia of St Petersburg. Paul rolled back these policies, even learning Russian himself, though many alleged that his own preferred tongue in private was Lithuanian. These policies were arguably the beginning of the wider, vaguely-defined romantic revivalist movement in Russian society known in the West as ‘Slavicism’.
The gradual introduction of freedom for serfs, starting in Ruthenia and the Caucasus and slowly spreading northwards, was met with alarm by the Russian nobles and landowners. Paul was not too happy about the idea himself, but it had been one of the requirements of Kautzman for his support, and it was essential to maintain the loyalty of the Cossacks. Although there were widespread complaints and mutterings about the emancipation, open violence did not break out until it spread as far as Voronezh in November 1803. There, nobles led by Count Kirill Klimentov refused the orders of the Tsar’s messenger and horsewhipped the man out of the city. The rebellion rapidly spread to other cities in the region.
It was met with alarm by Paul and his supporters, who had only just managed to stabilise the country, and was particularly a matter of concern for the Russian foreign ministry. Paul’s maverick foreign minister, Count Grigory Rostopshchin, had successfully bluffed the Ottomans in
to withdrawing their forces from Georgia a year earlier, fulfilling Paul’s debt of gratitude to Bagration and ensuring that Georgian forces would also remain on side. Yet this internal rebellion betrayed that move for the bluff it was, and in the Sublime Porte, the Sultan began to wonder if even that limited withdrawal had really been necessary. Russia continued to look weak, and the Turks’ war with Austria would not last forever…
It was immediately obvious that the rebellion had to be nipped in the bud. In order to do so, Paul raised an army organised according to Kautzman’s carefully considered doctrine. He put non-Great Russian troops at the fore, including Volga Germans, Georgians, Cossacks and Lithuanians, and left the larger main Russian army as the reserve, without ever actually describing it in such terms. The campaign was a tricky propaganda balancing act; Paul was somewhat justifiably paranoid about his Great Russian troops – led by aristocrat officers, of course – going over to the enemy’s side, yet the more reliable foreign soldiers could not be seen to have achieved the victory, lest this undermine his policy of proclaiming the superiority of Russian and Slavic culture. Kautzman’s strategy was to deliberately engage first with the foreign troops and then let the Russians sweep in and take all the glory. This met with success, cementing Kautzman’s strong position at the Tsar’s court, and the rebels were defeated at Somovo in February 1804. The propaganda side of the operation was handled by Rostopshchin, who had a vested interest in its success, and though not up to the standards of the far more all-encompassing programmes of Lisieux in France, this manipulation did the trick. Voronezh was ‘liberated by Russian arms’, the serfs were emancipated, and Kirill Klimentov was executed in Red Square as Paul looked on.
The campaign had been well handled, and the perception of Russian weakness faded in the eyes of the Ottomans and others. However, Paul’s shaky coalition continued to grapple with further problems. Despite making an example of Klimentov and his supporters, class warfare continued to rage throughout Russia, particularly in the regions due to be emancipated in the near future.
Paul needed to unite all Russians of all classes, forge a distinct national identity to rally around, both for the strength of his own position and the success of his country. The Institute of Cultural Patriotism and its like could only do so much towards this goal. He needed an enemy that he could unite ‘both Russias’, Slavic and European, common and noble, against. Revolutionary France was too much of a paper tiger, already witnessing reversals against the Mittelbund at this time and unlikely to threaten Russia for the forseeable future. No; he needed a more immediate, more present enemy – and one which, unlike the Ottomans, could not fight back.
Fortunately for Paul, such an enemy existed, and indeed had been used for this purpose by many tsars before him. Yet what would result from Paul’s new strategy went far beyond what anyone could have predicted…
*
From: “Israel: Birth of a Nation” by Moshe Galentz (Yiddish original 1964, English translation 1968)—
Yitzhak Volynov was born the son of a jeweller in Krementchuk in 1787. His life is a lesson in the fact that history springs from nowhere, and the most unlikely figures can go on to have great roles. Yet remembrance is seldom for wholly sweet reasons, and Volynov would doubtless have given up his fame for a life less hard.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about the Volynovs. They were a typical family of Ashkenazim, albeit towards the eastern end of the Pale, and had a skilled trade handed down from father to son, in this case the cutting and shaping of gemstones. That naturally made them fairly rich, and the target of some envy; yet like all the Jews of the town, they lived in the cramped quarters of the ghetto and their entrance and exit to that quarter was strictly regulated. They spoke Russian as well as Yiddish, but they were a people apart, forever under suspicion.
Things were never very fine for the Jews of Russia, but matters got progressively worse as the eighteenth century wore on and gave way to the nineteenth. Krementchuk, like much of Ruthenia, supported Paul from the start in the Civil War, and that conflict did not touch the town. It was Kirill Klimentov’s rebellion, and Paul’s response to it, which set the town ablaze.
Krementchuk was occupied by Lithuanian troops before the local nobles could think about joining Klimentov, and sat out the remainder of the rebellion. Yet those local nobles continued to seethe, knowing that emancipation and the undermining of their powers and privileges could only be around the corner. But then Paul’s plan came into play. A distraction, an event that would prevent nobles and peasants from warring, at least for a while – perhaps long enough to reach a consensus on the matter of emancipation.
A pogrom against Russia’s Jews.
Special cadres of veteran Russian soldiers were raised in Moscow and spurred on by the Patriarch, deliberately intended to ignite violence across the country. It was the first time that such public feeling had been deliberately stoked in such a way, and perhaps reflects the lessons that other nations were learning from Jean de Lisieux, for the Russian campaign was just as universal as Lisieux’s overnight excision of Le Diamant from the history books. It was not so simultaneous, of course, but Russia was a much larger and less technologically advanced country, and as yet lacked any form of message system faster than a man on horseback.
The pogrom was rather successful from Tsar Paul’s point of view, at least at first. Both Russian nobles and peasants had reasons to dislike the Jews, for their wealth (some of them), their secrecy, their mere existence outside the normal run of being. Many saw the opportunity for plunder as the ghettoes were invaded, looted and burned, and the fighting over emancipation was momentarily abandoned. Young boys, whether from dacha or trushbyy, took up weapons and went into battle as though driving some new, alien invaders from the land – rather than the reality of turning around and attacking men, women and children who had lived alongside them for years.
All across Russia the pogrom had a severe effect on the economy, upsetting the industry of many towns in which the Jews had made a disproportionate contribution to skilled work, as they so often did. This was considered an acceptable cost for the brief period of fellow-feeling that had been achieved; a new Russian identity, Slavic, Orthodox, Eastern, yet not looking so backward that it would reject new ideas. Paul’s plan had succeeded.
Yet in Krementchuk, events happened that would upset world history forever. Young Yitzhak Volynov, only eighteen and still learning his trade from his father, was caught up in the violence. Like many other young Jewish men, and against the advice of the elders to take refuge and hope it blew over, Volynov fought in the streets against the Russians and killed at least three boys of his own age. Eventually, though, he was overwhelmed by the sheer press, the madness of the crowd, baying for blood.
He was knocked out and awoke hours later, aching all over. What meagre possessions he had had on him had been stolen, and there was a nick at his throat where a rioter had thought to cut his throat when he was robbed, yet had evidently not looked to check he had done it properly. In the coming years, many Russians would curse that unknown knifeman for this negligence.
By that point it was dark and the ghetto was quiet once more. Slowly, he walked home. All around him were bodies, debris, battered homes, the remnants of furniture that had been carried out yet then judged too cumbersome to be worth stealing.
When he came to his house, he saw the whole street had been burned down. His mother, father and sister, all following the advice of the rabbi, had taken refuge – but the Russians had burned them to death in their home. The fire had probably not been started deliberately, for the looters would have wanted to steal the gold and jewels in the house – as it was, with the fire, the house had been left untouched.
Volynov stared at the catastrophe for minutes before falling to his knees and crying out to Adonai, like Job, for why this should happen to him.
And then, like Job – as he always maintained, right unto his death – to him Adonai replied.
Yitzhak Volynov
got to his feet once more. He had fallen as a boy; he arose as a man, or something more than a man. His eyes were cold, all emotion burned from them. Heedless of his wounds, he climbed into the house. The remains of his family he gave a cursory burial, but he took all the gems, all the precious metals from the house that the looters had so unwisely missed. Then he went around the ghetto, talking to the survivors, some of them young men like himself who had managed to escape death by fighting with the Russians in the street. There was something in his new voice, his cold, hard voice, that made him impossible to refuse.
Volynov gathered them in a square that had not been a square until today; such a thing would be unknown in the press of the ghetto – it was empty because all that had stood there had been burned even more thoroughly than his house. And when they had gathered there, he turned to them and preached a great and fiery speech, which was not written down at the time, yet was preserved in oral history no less than the Torah itself had been.
The Job connection still dwelt in his mind, for he quoted that book: “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loose the belt of Orion?” he asked, while sweeping his hand up to the sky. It was a cold, clear night, save where the smoke from the burning ghetto obscured the sky, and that constellation burned clear and bright in the blackness. “No,” he continued, “we cannot. But nor can the Tsar. He is but a mortal man, for all his earthly power, and all shall come to dust in the face of Adonai. Let us follow Moses, follow Ezra, and take our people out of this place unto a better land. Let us not wait, not care to ask his permission. He will let my people go, or he will suffer the consequences.”