The Dance of Russia

Tolstoy’s War and Peace for me is remarkable as a set of epic scenes held together by a loose narrative and a somewhat tendentious philosophy of history. Those epic scenes, though, are incomparable, pushing to the heart of national consciousness, pushing to the heart of what it is to be Russian.

There is no better illustration of this idea than that depicting the dance of Countess Natasha Rostova, an aristocrat, French educated, a person who knows, or should know, nothing of deep Russia, not sophisticated, just enduring. Yet after the wolf hunt, when the party is resting in a peasant hut, after her uncle begins a folk tune on his guitar, she dances, a dance she has never been taught. At once all of the cosmopolitan sophistication disappears; at once she reaches by intuition alone into the ancient culture of her people. Tolstoy describes it thus;

Here was a young countess, educated by a French émigré governess. Where, when and how had she imbibed the spirit of that peasant dance along with the Russian air she breathed, and those movements which the French style should have squeezed out of her long ago? But her movements and the spirit of them were truly Russian, inimitable, unteachable.

It’s a sublime moment, beautifully captured in words, beautifully captured in image in Sergei Bondarchuk’s movie made in the days of the old Soviet Union.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness reflected a new awareness that all was not well with the European 'civilizing' mission in Africa; that imperial expansion had become a cover for a venture which increasingly subverted local life.

It was in consequence of this that the African Society was founded in 1900, in memory of the writer and ethnographer, Mary Kingsley, dedicated to building up respect for African customs and changing European understanding about Africa and the Africans. The West African Mail was launched in 1903 by E D Morel, with the aim of supplying 'reliable and impartial intelligence' on West African issues. More and more journalists and writers began to condemn what was happening in Africa, not just in the Congo, but elsewhere, particularly South-West Africa, where the Germans were carrying out the first genocide of the twentieth century. Another British journalist, H W Nevinson, investigated slavery in Portuguese West Africa, publishing his findings in 1906 as A Modern Slavery.

To add to Conrad's fictional treatment of the horrors of colonial exploitation, Mark Twain wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy, and Arthur Conan Doyle The Crime of the Congo. In Red Rubber, published in 1906, Morel made it clear that the worst of Leopold's atrocities had been a consequence of the rising world demand for rubber for the growing automobile industry. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the first Model T came of the Ford assembly line in the same year. In 1909, in an attempt to strengthen the front against the abuses in Africa, the Anti-Slavery Society united with the Aborigines Protection Society to form a single Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. This investigated abuses not just in Africa but all over the world, including the Putumayo atrocities in South America.

Heart of Darkness came at just the right moment in history. But in the end, when Marlow returns to Brussels to report Kurtz's death to his fiancé, he hides the truth under a comforting fiction. Some realities are just too hard to bear.

Mosley and the New Party

Oswald Mosley, the eventual leader of the British Union of Fascists, was, rather like Winston Churchill, notable for his tendency to switch parties. Originally a Tory, he joined the Labour Party, rising to high public office in the wake of the party’s electoral success in the election of 1929. Always something of a political maverick, had no real roots in the British Labour movement; and in traditional Labour politics roots was everything. His obvious ambition, his personal vanity, and his tendency to strain at the constraints of party discipline, were also factors working against him. His intellectual brilliance and his personal charisma clearly impressed some, though in the end this was not enough.

The Mosley Memorandum was a bold scheme, with Keynesian overtones, for dealing with the problem of mass unemployment, but was in advance of orthodox thinking; in advance of what the senior figures in the government of Ramsay MacDonald were prepared to contemplate. When the cabinet failed to accept his arguments he resigned from ministerial office, comforting himself, one suspects, with the same false hopes of Lord Randolph Churchill - that his stature, the force of his argument would carry his parliamentary colleagues along the road of support. It did not.

In forcing a vote critical of government policy on unemployment he lost by 29 to 210. His last hope was to persuade the annual Party conference, held at Llandudno in October 1930. Although the constituency parties voted heavily in his favour the executive had the support of the trade union block vote. He was now an isolated figure in the movement, a prophet without honour.

It might be said that from this point onwards Mosley was carried forward by a mixture of conceit and frustrated ambition. He was already noted in the Party for a belief that 'dictatorial methods' were needed to deal with the depth of the economic crisis, causing some to nickname him the 'English Hitler.' Mosley was hopeful that Aneurin Bevan, a prominent Labour left-winger, would join his proposed New Party, but he shied away, saying that it would 'end as a Fascist party.' Mosley’s whole base of support soon evaporated. The New Party formed on a ripple, not a tide. Fascism lay beyond.

Valens and the Witches

The latest issue of The Fortean Times has drawn my attention to lesser known episodes of the later Roman history, the brief politician witch-hunt in AD 371-2 under the Emperor Valens, heading the eastern part of the Empire. The full story is reported in the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus, an eye-witness to many of the topics he discusses and the best of the late Classical historians, setting himself the task of continuing in the tradition laid almost three centuries before his time by Tacitus.

Two of the early victims of Imperial paranoia were men by the name of Hilarius and Patricious, citizens of Antioch, both accused of using magic in favour of the cause of a potential usurper. After torture Marcellinus says that they made the following statement before a special court convened for the purpose;

My lords, in an unlucky moment, we put together out of laurel twigs in the shape of the Delphic tripod the hapless little table before you. We consecrated it with cryptic spells and a long series of magical rites, and at last made it work. The way in which it did so, when we wished to consult it about hidden matters, was this. It was placed in the middle of a room thoroughly fumigated with spices from Arabia, and was covered with a round dish made from an alloy of various metals. The outer rim of the dish was cunningly engraved with the twenty-four letters of the alphabet separated by accurately measured intervals. A man dressed in linen garments and wearing linen sandals, with a fillet round his head and green twigs from a lucky tree in his hand, officiated as a priest. After uttering a set prayer to invoke the divine power which presides over prophecy, he took his place above the tripod…and set swinging a ring suspended by a fine cotton thread…the ring moved by a series of jumps over the marked spaces, came to a rest on particular letters…

The question, the fatal question, asked of this wigi-like oracle was who would succeed Valens to the throne. No sooner had the ring touched on THEO than one of the company said that this pointed to Theodorus. Thereupon the matter, and the ring, was left hanging.

After all, who else could it be? Theodorus was known to all, a high government official, already denounced by these informers for his imperial ambitions, ambitions aided by magic. He was at once arrested and brought to Constantinople along with his accusers. All three were condemned to death, Marcellinus describing the execution of the principal accused as an ‘Olympic event.’

It’s rather a pity that the magicians did not allow the ring to complete its course. If they had they might have discovered that Valens eventual successor was not Theodorus at all but Theodosius the Great, the last ruler of a unified Roman Empire. Magic has power but only for those with the patience to await its revelations. :-)

Ana in Moscow

I spent Christmas in Moscow five years ago, the winter of my twentieth year. We only had few days in the city, a brief time to discover something of its secrets and its Byzantine charm. I do, I confess, have an exaggerated sense of romance and what a place to indulge this, the snow lying on the towers of the Kremlin and the domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral!

We stayed in the National Hotel, not too far from Red Square in central Moscow. Arriving late the day before Christmas Eve we decided to dine in the hotel restaurant rather than go out. On the passageway leading towards the entrance one has to run a gauntlet, rows of photographs of former residents and guests. I could not recognise them all but those I did were enough to induce a slight shiver. Lenin had been, as had Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Cheka, the forerunner of all agencies of the Soviet Secret police. I expect Trotsky stayed there also at one time, though I could see no portrait; for the National Hotel had been the temporary headquarters of the Bolshevik Party after the capital was moved from Petrograd in 1918.

On Christmas Eve we went to the Bolshoi, one of my long-time ambitions, having bought tickets in advance on the net for a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Unfortunately the big theatre was closed at the time for repairs. The little theatre was impressive enough in its own right, so the big theatre must be truly splendid. The programme notes came with the chilling denunciation of the opera originally published in Pravda in 1936, and thought to be by Stalin himself, who ostentatiously walked out of a performance. The composer survived, but only after prostrating himself in the most abject way.

On Christmas Day – not a holiday in Orthodox Russia –we were taken on a personal tour of the Kremlin, discovering some of its hidden treasures, including the beautiful little churches where Ivan the Terrible once worshiped. There was a choir when we went in, beautiful singing that gave the place added atmosphere.

Elsewhere in the complex there was so much to see: the Faberge eggs given to the family of the last Tsar; the Severe Tea-set given by Napoleon to Alexander I after the Treaty of Tilsit. And then there were the boots that Peter the Great made for himself. Oh, what a giant of a man!

There is so much more I could tell, so much more we saw. And, yes, I did go and see Lenin on Red Square, though I’m not convinced that he is real. Still, if he is, he deserves no better fate, to be gawped at by the idle and the curious, forever denied the refuge and protection of the soil of Holy Russia.

Norwich and the Blood Libel

So far as the great currents of European anti-Semitism are concerned England, I believed, always stood apart. Yes, there were incidents like the Massacre at York during the reign of Richard I followed by the final expulsion of an impoverished community a hundred years later, though there were few of the wholesale pogroms that were a part of Medieval life in the rest of Western Europe from the First Crusade onwards. Put another way, I believed that England added nothing that could be defined as unique to the experience of Jewish persecution. I now know that not to be true: England added one of the most enduring anti-Jewish myths – that of the blood libel.

The latest edition of History Today carries an article by Miri Rubin, entitled Making of a Martyr: William of Norwich and the Jews. This concerns the case of a twelve year old boy who was found dead in 1144 close to his home town of Norwich in the east of England. At that time the town had a small but flourishing Jewish community which enjoyed the protection of the crown. The circumstances of William’s death are not at all clear, though six years after the event Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of the Norwich Cathedral Priory, wrote The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich, a determined attempt to prove that he was martyred by the local Jews, killed as part of a ritual sacrifice.

Thomas’s motives are not entirely clear. There was, of course, an abiding tradition of religious anti-Judaism in the church. There was some resentment over the role of the local sheriff in giving protection to the Jewish community, a particular source of anger among the peasants, compounded, perhaps, by church teaching. It also has to be said that talking up the cult of Saint William was good for business, if I can put it like that, as possession of relics attracted pilgrims and pilgrims, the tourists of the day, brought wealth.

The story was already in wide circulation when Thomas arrived in Norwich. Popular opinion was firm in the belief that the Jews were responsible, a view rejected by royal officials for lack of proof. William was also held to be responsible for a number of miracles, leading to the creation of a local cult, something generally discouraged by the church, which preferred more ‘international’ saints.

It was after Thomas made it his business to investigate the story that it acquired more than a purely local significance. The fact that the authorities in the person of Sheriff John de Chesney had rejected the unfounded accusations, and given the Jewish community protection in Norwich Castle, is explained away as the result of bribery. The malevolence of the Jews stands in contrast to the purity of William; in exchange for their evil came his good. The blood libel, the notion that Jews deliberately used Christian children in ritual sacrifice, had entered history. To this day it has never gone away.

The following century William was joined by Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, an even more celebrated case, mentioned by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. On the Continent they were joined by such figures as Simon of Trent, Christopher of Toledo and others. The latter case is particularly important in that it had a clear political purpose, facilitating the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

With the emergence of the secular age the blood liable simply underwent a metamorphosis, taking on modern racist and anti-Semitic forms. In Russia in 1913 one Menahem Mendel Beilis was put on trail on a charge of ritual murder, a particularly notorious case the facts of which Bernhard Malamud was later to use in his novel The Fixer. The post-war Kielce Pogrom in Poland is directly attributable to the blood libel. It continues, even so far as the present day, part of an ever-present anti-Jewish narrative arising from the cloisters of Medieval Norwich.

The Tragedy of John Amery

My attention recently to An English Tragedy, a play by Ronald Harwood which depicts the final weeks in the life of John Amery, executed for treason in December 1945. It was broadcast on Radio Four a week last Saturday. Unfortunately I missed it and by the time I found out it was no longer available on iPlayer.

But, from a position of knowing virtually nothing at all about the subject, I’ve done a spot of quick background reading. It’s a tragic story; tragic for him and tragic for his family. It’s a story of self-destruction, the deliberate self-destruction of a man who in some ways recalls the fictional character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He even had the same life-long attachment to his teddy bear.

John came from a very privileged background. He was the son of Leo Amery and brother of Julian Amery, both members of the Conservative Party who rose to high office. Leo was to serve as Secretary of State for India in Churchill’s wartime cabinet. But John, for some not fully explained reason, was a life-long bad 'un; a man extended every opportunity who invariably wasted every opportunity. There is something odd about him, something I can't quite pinpoint. It's a mixture of things; he was at war with his world; he was at war with his parents; he was at war with himself.

John was a worry to his parents from a very early age. Nanny used to tell them of the terrible tantrums that he had, and that he was a very hard child to manage. One of his first teachers described him as "extremely abnormal" with a tendency to live inside himself. His behaviour at Harrow was such that his worried parents referred him to a psychiatrist, who concluded that he had no moral sense of right and wrong. From Harrow he was sent to a boys' school in Switzerland only to return after contracting syphilis, which he claimed to have caught while working as a rent boy.

And so it went on, this litany of troubles and endless rebellion. At the age of twenty he married Una Eveline Wing, an actress who turned out to be a prostitute. He married despite the wishes of his parents, leaving with Una for Paris after they refused their permission. Still his parents indulged him, bailing him out from disastrous business endeavours and criminal exploits. Always short of money, Una was to claim that he continued to work as a homosexual prostitute.

Apart from the general dissolute air he cried with him, he was something of a fantasist. Hating communism, he claimed to have fought with the Spanish Nationalists after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, being awarded a medal of honour while serving with Italian volunteer units sent to Franco by Mussolini. In fact this was a lie, though still in wide circulation. Even Harwood believes it to be true. Far from fighting in the war, Amery did not enter Spain until 1939 after the conflict was over.

On his return to France he took up with Jeanine Barde, yet another prostitute. He also fell under the influence of Jacques Doirot, leader of the fascist Parti Populaire Francais. It was now that he adopted a lavish form of anti-Semitism, yet another way of objectifying his hatred of the world. The Wikipedia article describes him as a 'fascist' though I can find no evidence that he ever belonged to any fascist party. Fascism was just another attitude for him, a style and a fashion. There is something more, something about his anti-Semitism, though let me hold on that for a bit.

After the Germans conquered France in 1940, he came to the attention of the occupation authorities, having written some articles critical of British bombing, receiving a personal invitation to come to Berlin from. There, as a guest of the Germany government, he made propaganda broadcasts to Britain beginning in November 1942, on the same network as William Joyce, the so-called Lord Haw Haw. In England Leo Amery was assured by both Churchill and the King that this was no refection on him or his loyalty. Still, he took the final step of going to a lawyer and finally disinheriting his wayward son.

John made nine broadcasts in all, though clearly he soon exhausted his usefulness, as the Germans sent him back to France at the end of the year. There he married for a second time, to Michelle Thomas, his third prostitute lover. This seems to have been the one consistent act in his life, this taste for a particular type of sexual professional!

Back in France he was impressed by the volunteer force that Doriot and others had raised to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. This gave him the idea that a similar British unit might be recruited from among British prisoners of war. He was allowed to trawl POW camps in France for the purpose of recruiting. Despite the harsh conditions in these places, and the semi-starvation rations, his mission was almost a complete failure. In the end something like fifty men signed up for the so-called Legion of Saint George.

Amery's connection with this unit was ended in October 1943, when it was taken over by the Waffen SS and renamed the British Free Corps. Far from being a 'corps', this force, of purely propaganda value, had less than thirty men at any one time, weaker than a German platoon. Amery returned to Berlin, where he continued to write and broadcast propaganda before travelling to Italy in late 1944 to aid the Salo Republic, Mussolini's rump fascist state in the north of the country. He was captured by Italian partisans, eventually being handed over to the British.

Back in Britain, and with the war now at an end, he was charged with treason. Despite being previously disowned by the family, both Leo and Julian did their best to come to has assistance.

Unlike that of William Joyce, the case against Amery was cast-iron; he was an obvious traitor. Still, he had some powerful connections among the old establishment. There were strong grounds, moreover, for showing that he suffered from a form of mental illness, a defence that had saved the American poet Ezra Pound from similar accusations. But John, in his final act of rebellion, pleaded guilty on 28 November 1945 despite being warned by the judge of the consequences of such a declaration. It was, in effect, an act of suicide, a final way of wounding his family. He was duly hanged at Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepont on December 19, aged thirty-three years old.

In his radio broadcasts from Germany Amery said that he was preventing a "world dominated by Jewry." The tragic thing is, the thing I alluded to above, is that he was quarter Jewish himself, though the family had kept this secret well hidden, something that Harwood discovered in the course of his research for An English Tragedy. Leo Amery's mother had been born in the Jewish quarter of Budapest, though he chose to keep this inconvenient fact hidden because he thought it might impede his rise through the ranks of the Conservative Party, given the casual anti-Semitism of the day. The irony is that while John was broadcasting on the dangers of world Jewry from Berlin he himself would have been eligible for deportation and extermination by the lights of the Wansee Conference.

Was this knowledge part of his self-loathing, part of his lifelong war with his family? It's possible-and Harwood speculates that it was an important factor - but we will never know for certain; indeed, it is uncertain that he new himself. Was his guilty plea an act of expiation or a final act of spite? Again that is something that we will never know.

I have to say there is for me something oddly compelling about John Amery, something compelling in the tragedy of his life, a life that never found an anchor in anything at all other than the worst of causes. He carries shades of Arthur Rimbaud, another professional bad boy. But Rimbaud had true talent. All Amery's potential was squandered into nothing.