Fenek Solère: Rising

Inside Herman’s apartment, the rooms were cold. It seemed the heating was constantly failing. ‘It’s freezing, Pappa!’ Ekaterina admonished him, fussing around the place. He waved her concerns away with a ‘Ba, soon I’ll be dead anyway’, type of reply. Then, turning to Tom, she said, ‘It loses energy through bad windows.’ From what the newcomer could see, the flat comprised two bedrooms and a lounge with a good, high ceiling and a chair placed so as to give a view back over the road they had just crossed. Tom realised her grandfather had probably been watching them walk hand-in-hand from the underground station. The bathroom was small and the kitchen even smaller. A St Andrew’s cross hung on the wall. Heavy curtains had been selected not so much for their aesthetic quality as their capacity to insulate. Nineteenth-century furniture was crammed full of books by Schwartz-Bostunich and Nilus. There were texts of all descriptions: technical, political, and historical. Tom read the spines of novels like Bryusov’s Pale Horse , Rozanov’s Apocalypse of Our Time , Solovyov’s A Story of the Anti-Christ , and Andrei Bely’s Vision of the Coming Kingdom of the Beast . There was a chess set on a coffee table.

‘My ancestors are part German’, her grandfather said in halting English. Then, noticing where Tom’s eyes had settled, he continued in Russian, with Ekaterina translating. ‘You admire the game?’

‘I play a little’, Tom replied.

‘Kasparov is a genius, but he should have stayed out of politics.’

‘And Karpov?’

‘A KGB mechanist.’ In that moment they understood each other. There was mutual recognition of kindred spirits across continents and generations.

‘Chess is not everything, but it is nearly everything’, he speculated. ‘I can remember when I came here with my first wife, Sveta, in 1956. It was just after Khrushchev had denounced Comrade Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress. “Comrades”, he said, “we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all”.’ The old man’s eyes meandered for a moment. ‘We never achieved that!’

‘Putin followed in that tradition.’

The old man’s eyes flared. ‘Different tradition’, he wheezed. ‘It is true we have always had strong autocrats, but this did not start with the Bolsheviks. First there was five centuries of Tsarist absolutism, beginning from the time we drove the Mongol hordes from our land. Then there were people like Metropolitan Macarius and Iury Krizhanich, author of Politika , who believed in enlightened absolutism. Krizhanich died fighting with the Polish army defending Vienna from the Turks. Patriarch Nikon, Khomiakov, Feofan Prokopovich, and Tatishchev were also conservative Orthodox patriots of the pravoslavnyi variety. The Church was moving back then towards a national self-consciousness, nationalnoe samosoznanie . Even Pushkin himself regarded “inequality as a law of nature”.’ Herman draped an arm around Ekaterina to steady himself. ‘ Then there was Shcherbatov, Speransky, and Karamzin. They were followed by Chaadaev, Gogol, and the Slavophile school.’

‘Very many thinkers!’

‘And many more, too! After 1855 there were Katkov, Samarin, Aksakov, Leontiev and Witte. Later, Kavelin, Chicherin, Gradovsky, Soloviev, Nesterov, Sergei Bulgakov, the Szemstvo movement, Struve, Shipov, and of course Stolypin, assassinated by Dimitri Bogrov at the Kiev Opera before he could save the Imperial dynasty.’

‘And Bogrov’s real name was Mordekhai Gershkovich, a Jewish provocateur.’

‘Yes!’

‘But anyway, I’m sure you would agree with me that the Paschal Edict was the beginning of the end. It killed the notion of the apostolic role of the Tsar. That perception was only partially corrected by the symbolic canonisation of the patriotic Patriarch Germogen in 1913.’

‘And four years later?’

‘The Revolution, of course.’

‘Another coup d’etat !’ he was corrected quickly. ‘My…’ Then, looking over at Ekaterina, he corrected himself, ‘Our favourite author Solzhenitsyn said, “You must understand the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. Driven by ethnic hatred, they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of remorse… It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that the world is ignorant of or uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators”.’

‘Yes, even Israeli journalists now admit that 40 percent of the top-ranking officials in the Soviet system were Jewish Chekists. Gengrihky Yagoda alone was responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million Christian Russians.’

‘The percentage is much higher, my friend. Zionism and Marxism are brothers.’ Herman sighed. ‘And they still operate the same way. Your Robert Wilton, a British journalist for The London Times was here at the time of the Revolution. He said, “Bolshevism is not Russian. It’s essentially non-national. Its leaders belong almost entirely to the race that lost its country and its nationhood long ago. In April 1918, the Russian government, including 384 peoples’ commissars, was represented by 2 negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and Georgians, and more than 300 Jews. Of the last, 264 had come to Russia from the United States during the Revolution… The revolutionary pseudo-Jews thus destroying Russia’s hopes of national revival and dragging the country into chaos”.’

‘I am familiar with his works Russia’s Agony and The Last Days of the Romanovs. ’

‘Did you know his writing was censored? He named names, identified aliens operating under assumed Russian and Polish identities. After that, he was threatened with murder.’

‘I can well imagine, they operate like a mafia.’

‘They run the American and the Russian mafia. Who talks of the Ukrainian Holodmor? What did the former Sephardic Rabbi of Jerusalem, Ovadia Yosef, say about Palestinians at his Passover speech? “It is forbidden to be merciful to them, you must send missiles to annihilate them… the Lord shall return the Arabs’ deeds on their own heads, waste their seed, and exterminate them, devastate them, and vanish them from this world”.’

‘So much for their never again protestations about the Holocaust!’

‘Comrade Lenin was financed by the Warburgs, the plutocrat Jacob Henry Schiff, and the Khun, Loeb & Company banking house. The first Politburo was, like the Cheka, overwhelmingly foreign. Your own Winston Churchill said, “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism by the international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one.” Just read what Hugo Koehler of the US intelligence mission said when reporting back to Washington about our gibel rossii, our supposed Civil War.’ Herman’s eyes flashed. ‘They say truth is stranger than fiction. I once read a novel called Biarritz …’

Then, thinking he was talking too much politics, he tried to change the subject. ‘These districts’, he gestured out of the window, ‘were mikroraioni , little towns of their own, with their own shops and schools, and more and more people came and lived there. Hardly anyone had homes in the centre of town anymore.’

‘Indeed’, Tom said, picking up the old man’s thread, trying to place the conversation back on a literary track. ‘I think Berdayev spoke of Dostoevksy’s gestalt, something about faith requiring space unfettered by form, as being real Christianity.’ The old man, reassured that he was not being too outspoken, was not to be outdone.