Death of Idealism

Hans Fallada’s novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein, given the English title Alone in Berlin, is a political thriller set in the German capital during the Second World War. It focuses chiefly on an act of resistance, futile and pointless, by an elderly couple who decide on a postcard campaign, denouncing the regime, after their only son is killed at the front. It’s both an act of faith and of desperation, whispers in a hurricane, never destined to be heard.

I was reminded of it recently on reading an article by Robert Hornsby in History Today (Circles of Subversion in Khrushchev’s USSR) which touches on attempts at resistance within the Soviet Union, small scale, fragmented and isolated, sometimes no more than a single individual pretending to be a large organisation. My first reaction was one of surprise that there was any subversion at all, believing that independent-minded defiance had been more or less bled out of the Soviet State by Stalin.

Apparently not, for hundreds of clandestine organisations and groups appeared during the so-called ‘thaw’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of which secretly distributed manifestos critical of the existing system, a little in the fashion of the couple in Fallada’s novel.

A lot of these groups were made of religious or national dissidents, but there were some ‘idealists’, including members of the Communist Party or the Komsomolsk, the youth wing, who took the nonsense of socialism seriously, simply believing that it had somehow been corrupted under Stalin.

The information we have, mostly retrieved from KGB archives, includes leaflets reminiscent of the slogans of 1917, one calling for “land to the peasants, factories to the workers and culture to the intelligentsia.” Others called for a Nuremberg-style indictment of Stalin’s surviving henchmen or the suspension of article 58 of the criminal code, long used in the persecution of ‘anti-Soviet’ elements.

Although these people when caught, as they most often were, were prosecuted using that blunt tool, on the assumption that they were acting under hostile influences, they were neither anti-Communist nor pro-West. Typical here was the Union for the Struggle for the Revival of Leninism established in 1963 by one Petro Grigorenko, aiming to return the USSR to ‘true Leninism.’

The fact is that these ideological simpletons took Khrushchev at his word, that Stalinism was an aberration and that the system could be reformed from within. In reality the regime was intolerant of any challenge to its ideological monopoly, even from a supposedly Marxist-Leninist perspective. As Hornsby says, when a new crackdown began in late 1956 in the wake of the Hungarian uprising officials were specifically told that ‘neo-Bolshevik’ elements were not to be tolerated or mistaken for allies.

It could not last; the idealism could not last in a system that was unresponsive, bureaucratic and sclerotic. The instability and false hopes of the Khrushchev era gave way to the relative prosperity of the Brezhnev period, in which oppression went hand in hand with an increase in living standards. By the mid-1960s the Communist idealism revived by the thaw was in terminal decline, not just because of the efficiency of the state security apparatus but because nobody cared and nobody believed.

Sorry, there was one last believer, who by one of history’s acutest ironies turned out to be the General Secretary of the Communist Party itself – Mikhail Gorbachev. His labour was beyond that of Hercules, to reform the unreformable. In retrospect his initiatives look almost comically naïve, all based on a call for ‘openness’ in a society that had learned apathy as a mode of defence. The idealists, the believers, the Leninists were all gone.

Past Futures

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Do you know who wrote that? I confess I did not. It was Tom Paine, a statement from Common Sense, his defence of the American rebels of 1776. I’ve only ever read The Rights of Man and have no high opinion of Paine. Still, I agree with his sentiments here, never more so than today, never more so than at this time.

There are so many things we take for granted in our lives, people who live in relative security, those of us who are lucky enough to consider personal freedom to be an inalienable right, something bequeathed by past struggles and guaranteed by law. We have reached the ‘end of history’, so the argument advanced by Francis Fukuyama went; liberal democracy is the terminus, the best of all possible worlds.

The truth is different; everything is contingent, nothing certain. Europe, it would seem to me, is entering a post-democratic age, developing forms of governance that are becoming increasingly intolerable, increasingly at variance with Anglo-Saxon traditions. America, beset by a crippling debt burden, also faces an uncertain future, with freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution under threat from the growth of state.

Michael Newton’s The Path to Tyranny: A History of Free Society’s Descent into Tyranny, which, by simple coincidence, I read at just the right time, is a warning, one, in my pessimism, I fear may already be too late. The author is true to his subject, coming like a doctor, or perhaps like a forensic scientist, offering a diagnosis to be worked on or a report to be lamented over; I can’t make up my mind which.

There are some impressive passages, of which the following is possibly the best example;

While free societies often descend into tyranny because of the choices they make, the people never actually choose tyranny. Instead, demagogues and ideologues promising freedom, equality, and wealth lead them to it. Today, politicians promise the right to high quality education, the right to free and affordable health care and housing, and many more so-called rights. These are not genuine rights. They are benefits at the expense of others. The rights to private property, free speech, and freedom of religion are true tights because they have no cost. The “rights” to education, housing, and health care cost the providers who must supply them for free or at a discount, or they must cost other taxpayers to reimburse the providers. As a result of the government providing these new “rights”, the people have fewer choices as the government rations goods and services, businesses are burdened with more regulation and more bureaucracy is added to the system. Instead of the greater freedom and wealth promised, the people are poorer and become slaves to the government.

We then proceed on a journey through various stages and states, from Ancient Greece to Modern America, a journey in political degeneracy, in the systematic erosion of freedom attendant on the rise of the state and forms of demagogic democracy, though the writer himself does not use that expression. I’m thinking specifically of something Aristotle wrote about democracy, that it was the perversion of constitutional government in the interest of the needy. Is that not the perfect leitmotiv for the last hundred years of political evolution in the West? I certainly believe it to be so.

Polybius took this up, warning, as Newton reminds us, that giving people too much power invariably ends in tyranny. Oh it’s all very well to talk about the emergence of tyranny in Athens, Rome, Communist Russia, Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, but the United States, what is the United States doing here? For the simple reason that, like Athens or Rome, it, too, is in the process of transition, with outcomes that remain wholly uncertain.

The signs Newton points to are really quite salutary, a growth in state power and intrusiveness that would have horrified the Founding Fathers, a potential tyranny far, far greater than the royal government of George III. The power of the Internal Revenue Service alone should be enough to occasion a dozen Revolutions! The present debt crisis is bound to make things even worse.

The Path to Tyranny is a lucid and compelling treatment of an important subject, one that should be of interest to all who value liberty. My criticisms,such as they are, are all of a minor nature. I think the chapter on Ancient Israel should have been placed at the outset, before that on Greece, rather than between Rome and Communist Russia. Also a couple of intermediate chapters would have been useful, including perhaps one on the descent into tyranny of Cromwell’s England, my own period of special interest. More important a chapter on France after the Revolution of 1789 would have been particularly useful in linking the ancient world with modern tyrannies like Communism and Fascist. Neither Communism nor Fascism can be properly understood, I feel, free from the forms of totalitarian democracy that emerged during this period. There are also a few minor errors of fact, of no great moment, I have to say.

None of this should detract from an important book that really does speak to the times, a book that holds up a Janus-like mirror to the present, showing past futures.

Shopping with Violence

This I a slightly amended version of an article I wrote for Broowaha.

I want to say a word or two about the riots in London, my city, my home. My view is that - as with the Norwegian massacre - it is best to stand back from such events before forming a definite judgement, simply to allow the facts to settle. But judgements are already being formed which have nothing whatsoever to do with facts and everything to do with politics. The suggestion is that these events, which have disgraced my country and its capital in the eyes of the world, are somehow to do with cutbacks. This is no more than a supposition, based not on evidence but wishful thinking.

The opportunity has also been taken to attack the police, that somehow they do not respect the 'right to peaceful protest,' an assertion that again is utterly at variance with the facts. No it's more; it's an outright lie, one that is clearly intended to give a completely wrong impression to people who know little of the Metropolitan Police, who know little of London and little of this country. If anything the police have gone too far in the opposite direction, a softly softly approach that sometimes makes the force look fumbling and weak, an approach that saw them lose control at the weekend

To try to play politics at time like this really is appalling. The present government of David Cameron has been in power for just over a year, inheriting a massive and unsupportable debt from the previous administration. There was no alternative to serious fiscal retrenchment, but the cuts, such as they are, have not yet had an impact. No, people are not starving in the streets while capitalist fat cats sit back complacently smoking Havana cigars. I would simply ask you to see this Marxist fantasy for the risible nonsense it truly is.

Simply put these riots are anarchy for the sake of anarchy, not for politics, disorder as an end in itself. Who are the targets? The bastions of capitalism, perhaps, the banks and the stock exchange? No, ordinary traders, little shopkeepers, who have seen their stores looted and their livelihoods destroyed. Workers of the world unite; you have DVDs and a couple of video games to gain, to say nothing of shoes and sofas.

So what is the truth? Rarely pure and never simple, perhaps? Pure and simple for some, that much is obvious. The reality is we are dealing with a hijack here. What started as a peaceful vigil over the shooting of a man called Mark Duggan (leader of a drug gang, incidentally) in the district of Tottenham was quickly taken over by those who had never heard of him and had no interest at all in making a political point. A great many involved in this Twitter riot (yes, that's the medium) are teenagers. One, a fifteen year old, was caught on camera, saying that it was 'fun.' Commenting on this Richard Evans, who edits an online news forum, said;

Make no mistake, they're not crusaders on some just cause, most of them don't even have a point to make, these are morons acting like morons — nothing more, nothing less. It must actually be insulting to Mark Duggan's family and friends — who have spoken out against the riots — that people are doing this in his name, using his death as an excuse to steal some crappy trainers from a JJB Sports.

Morons, well, that's certainly one way of putting it; I'm not quite sure what other term could be used for those who were filmed helping an injured and bleeding teenager to his feet, only to start rifling through his backpack to take anything of value. Was he a capitalist, a supporter of the cutbacks who just happened to have lost his way, perhaps having mislaid his merc? Well, that's one possible spin, I suppose.

Then there is the woman who was stabbed in a fight over...over what exactly?, over some principle of the revolution? No it was over a looted cut-price sofa. Incidentally, as the mob smashed its way into this furniture store a member of staff (a capitalist lackey) had his jaw broken while paramedics stood in fear of their lives. Elsewhere, in front of a smashed store window, a woman can be seen trying on a pair of shoes. As one report says, this wasn’t a spontaneous uprising of dissent from the downtrodden masses, it was shopping with violence.

Most people not from this country have probably never heard of Tottenham, Hackney and Brixton, the districts at the heart of the disorders, For the benefit of Americans, the closest parallel that comes to mind is Watts in Los Angeles. Yes, these areas of high social deprivation, much of it inherited, ghettos of state dependency. There have been riots here in the past. What was the result; more oppression, more deprivation? No millions and millions of pounds were poured into community reclamation schemes which have clearly reclaimed nothing.

There is racism here, something else an audience beyond England may not be aware of, but it's not as you may suppose. Black mobs were seen attacking white people but that's really only one dimension. The racism is multi-faceted. Think of the movie Crash, set in California, then you may begin to understand something of the complexity. The hostility is one of ethnic fragmentation, rather than skin colour, black Nigerians hating black Jamaicans, both hating people from the Middle East. Anybody who has managed to rise above the common herd, anybody who has made a success, no matter how modest, has turned into a potential target. One Tweet in this Twitter riot reads "F**k the electronics, them Turkish jewellers needed to get robbed." Yes, the needed to get robbed, as lots of others needed to get robbed.

There are no politics other than the political irresponsibility of the left, singing a hymn that bears no relationship to reality. This includes various Labour MPs, whose administration had over thirteen years to be tough on crime and the causes of crime and did absolutely nothing, other than to pour in endless doles. There are notable exceptions, including Diane Abbott, a black Labour MP, a former leadership contender and a leading left-winger, a person with whom I have virtually nothing in common, politically or ideologically. But she has taken the bold step, distancing herself from those who have irresponsibly blamed the illusory cuts, adding to the Twitter conflagration - "Cuts don’t turn you into a thief. What we saw was people thieving for hours...the violence in London was totally opportunistic and utterly unacceptable."

I would only add brutal and ugly. The victims will all turn out to be other members of the community, not bankers and speculators. The victim is also London, a city I both hate and love in equal measure, a city that is in my blood. I try to be measured but I have no respect at all for those who have abused the city, who have traduced and cheapened it in the eyes of the world and, above all, those who are attempting to twist the facts for their own ideological ends. If you think these dreadful events are about injustice, inequality and deprivation I would urge you to think again. It's no more than hooliganism, based on forms of avarice that would shame even the greediest banker.

The Wicked Debt of the West

How quickly things are moving. It’s not that long since I wrote about the great euro rescue (A New Old Young Plan). There they were, our leaders, all beaming smiles and all self-congratulation. I’ll just remind you of part of what I said;

Be assured: the crisis is over. The smug smiles said it all, as the European leaders emerged from the end of last week’s summit on the euro debt disaster. They emerged bearing gifts to the Greeks, a second bail-out of the profligate nation worth over $130billion. The details are all a bit vague, though; who, exactly, is going to pay what? Never mind that. Rejoice; the crisis is over; the euro lives; the European ideal lives. The crisis is over…until the next time.

My goodness, not even I, as prescient as I am, foresaw that the ‘next time’ would be a fortnight later! The rolling show rolls. A little like the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the contagion has now entered Italy and Spain.

There is a crisis here alright, a crisis not of economics but of politics; of stupidity, mismanagement and hubris. It’s crisis that’s besetting much of the Western world; it’s besetting America, which has for the first time in its history lost its impeccable credit rating. Sometimes I feel as if I’m standing on the sidelines looking at some impossible drama; stop, look, learn, I want to shout but nobody is listening; it’s all pictures in a dream.

I’m dipping in to The Federalist Papers at the present, those brilliant political musings by a brilliant generation, people rich in an understanding of law, politics, philosophy and history, all helping to shape their vision for the constitutional future of the infant United States. Having escaped one perceived tyranny they were anxious to avoid another; of the majority, of unrestricted executive power, of irresponsible government. Checks and balances were built into the system, intending that no one element should dominate at the cost of the other, at the cost of the nation itself.

Now America is drowning in debt, a figure so large that it’s beyond the comprehension of most people. In ordinary terms, or understandable figures, it now stands at $40,000 for every man, woman and child in the land, and climbing by the second. It could not come at the worst time in the nation’s history, a time when Presidential authority is at the lowest point ever. I once wrote that one would have to go all the way back to James Buchanan to find a President less equal to the task than Barack Obama. I now think that there may be some virtue to Buchanan.

In Federalist Number Ten James Madison wrote that “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; they have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

But America has ignored Madison’s warning; America advanced towards a form of pork barrel democracy which has all but destroyed the securities built into the system by the Founders. Executive power, from Lincoln, to Wilson, to Roosevelt and beyond has increased beyond all measure, as has fiscal irresponsibility, the attack on property, the misuse of taxation, the appalling dependence of a great part of the population on government, something that would have horrified Madison and Jefferson.

It isn’t just the Democrats who are at fault here. The costs incurred by George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’, out of all proportion to the results, should have raised the alarm, should have led to an awareness that there was a serious need for fiscal retrenchment, But no, Obama built debt upon debt in attempting to turn the country into a European-style social democracy. It was as if the executive was gripped by a kind of madness.

Now it’s over. The state has bloated to the point where it represents a serious danger to the future well-being of the American economy and polity. The best comment I’ve seen on this dreadful situation was that of Janet Daley writing yesterday in the Sunday Telegraph. Contrary to what the Obama Democrats were claiming, the recent face-off with Congress did not show that the nation’s politics were ‘dysfunctional’; it showed, rather, that they were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended, that the legislature was acting as a check on the executive;

The Tea Party faction within the Republican Party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future towards which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programme which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with taxes could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.

It’s a kind of sport to scoff at the Tea party, the grass roots and populist movement, by the shallow East Coast literati, the chattering classes whose minds are filled with the nonsense purveyed by the likes of New York Times. But from my point of view, that of an outsider, though one who happens to love America and all that it has given the world, the Tea Party is far truer to the original spirit of the Founding Fathers and that original principle of liberty upon which the nation was built.

As Daly quite rightly says, the hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. “That is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact what is irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.”

By coincidence, besides the Federalist Papers, I’ve been reading Michael Newton’s The Path to Tyranny: A History of Free Society’s descent into Tyranny, which finishes with a chapter on the United States, written well before the present crisis. He concludes as follows;

The United States is repeating the mistakes of the past: redistributing wealth through a progressive tax system, expanding the size of government, creating fictional wars were none exist, enriching the political class, establishing an army of unelected bureaucrats to control the lives of the people, and promoting democracy at the expense of the republic. The United States government is approaching bankruptcy and there are two likely outcomes if the current direction is maintained.

The first outcome, he continues, is that wealth will simply be exported to places with less burdensome tax regimes. The second is even more alarming. As people become aware that the current political system cannot fix the problem the call will go up for a single individual or group to restructure the government and country. My guess is that he result will not be Solon, the Greek law giver, or Cincinnatus, the noblest Roman of them all, but something along the lines of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. Yes, It Can Happen Here, it could happen here. The Constitution has been no guarantee against massive irresponsibility and the unscrupulous use of power. It is no longer a guarantee against tyranny.

In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

The Children Are Dead

Commenting in the Times on the present famine in Somalia, Tristan McConnell said that that the situation is set to get worse – “There are no rains expected for months and there will be no harvests until the end of the year at the earliest.”

Wherever the rain falls it does not fall on Somalia. It’s a disaster, an act of God, a theme taken up by the various aid agencies last month, who were blaming it on the “worst drought in sixty years.” Yes, it’s the worst drought in sixty years apart, that is, from the heavy downpours that have been flooding refugee camps in Mogadishu, the capital of this state that is not a state, over the last few days.

The simple fact is that the whole thing is a lie: God is not responsible for the starvation, people are, and the people I have in mind are the Islamists of al-Shabaab, who, as Aidan Hartley reports in the Spectator, control large parts of the south, ruling “over the population in a style reminiscent of Pol Pot’s Cambodia crossed with the Taleban.” Somalia is suffering from a famine alright, but it has political rather than natural causes.

In the same issue of the Times McConnell gives a more exact picture, telling of the suffering induced by the brutal and puritanical rule of the fundamentalist al-Shabaab, an organisation with links to al-Qaeda. Aid agencies are banned from the territory it controls. Omar Abdirahman, a local farmer, said “We’ve had a lot of drought and still lived. But al-Shabaab have blocked humanitarian aid and they stole my goats and livelihood.”

The brutish stupidity of the Islamists of al-Shabaab, which has seen grain stores in the sorghum-growing areas looted and farmers so intimidated that they have given up sowing crops altogether, is compounded by a form of inter-tribal racism. The victims of the militants are members of weak, minority or less well-armed clans, particularly the Rahanwein. Not only has food been requisitioned, or farmers subject to extortionate ‘taxes,’ but there are also reports of sexual violence against refugees.

So, people in the West, being asked for donations, once again being presented by conscience-moving pictures of malnourished children, are being told half-truths at best. Uneven rainfall is certainly causing problems but not so bad that they could not be overcome in normal circumstances. But Somalia is a country that has long lived with the most abnormal circumstances imaginable. Even aid workers are moved to acknowledge that the problem is less lack of rain than the failure of the Somali state.

Send your donatioins by all means if it will salve your conscience but it’s as well to be aware that the aid it buys is likely to end up as part of the politics of food, with local militants using it to achieve their own particular ends, regardless of the perceived suffering. As Hartley says, the picture is likely to be no better than that of the last famine crisis of 1992: some will get rich, most will die, rivals will fight over the foreign bonanza, food will be looted, aid workers will be kidnapped and murdered. Food aid, in other words, will only make a bad situation worse.

As a result, all of those who donated so generously to the famine appeals will end up loathing the Somalis, who they will blame for being ungrateful savages. World governments will hold a conference, then wash their hands of Somalia yet again. But it won’t save those starving children.

The truth is by the time you saw those pictures, if you saw those pictures, the children were already dead.

Simply the Best

I was privately educated, spending the formative years of my life at Wycombe Abbey, a boarding school for girls near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. The environment was excellent, educational, social and sporting.

While there I made some friendships that have proved lasting, including one with a girl who attended thanks to the Assisted Places Scheme (APS). This was introduced by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1980, enabling thousands of pupils from less affluent backgrounds to benefit from the kind of experience that the independent sector has to offer.

No sooner was the government of Tony Blair elected in 1997 than the whole thing was abandoned. It was ‘elitist,’ so the mantra went among the appalling inverted snobs of the Labour Party, elitist to allow clever children from poorer families access to the best that the country had to offer.

I’ve never disguised the contempt I have for socialists and Labourites in general, always attempting to reduce everything to a lowest common denominator. Their actions were all the more wretched because Blair went to one of the most prestigious public schools in Scotland; all the more contemptible because Dianne Abbot, a former leadership contender and all round left-wing loud mouth, chose to send her own son to a leading independent school in London, while denouncing private education as ‘elitist.’ It’s alright for me and mine; it’s not alright for you and yours.

The APS is long gone but people, even people of relatively modest means, still have far greater faith in the fee-paying independents than they do in the state sector, the arena of so much that is bad, the arena that Abbot was so anxious to rescue her own child from. According to a recent report I read, parents in Britain spend far more educating their children privately than any other country in Europe, almost double the level, for example, of France. Household spending on education is also higher here than it is in the United States.

The reasons for this are not hard to understand. More and more parents are concerned about issues of discipline and about the general dumbing down that has been such a feature of state education in England. Commenting on this Philip Davis, the Tory MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, said;

Parents who send their children to private schools are not all rich and snobbish. They are people who make enormous sacrifices because they do not think state schools are up to scratch. Private schools are popular because of the ethos they have which state schools seem to lack. It is to do with discipline, standing up when the teacher comes in to the room, turning out nice people who treat people with respect. And there is the fact that exams have been dumbed down so much.

The problem is worse in the inner cities, places where a high number of immigrants have settled, people whose first language is not English. Rightly or wrongly, many parents feel that their own children are being held back when teachers have to concentrate in the first place in conveying the rudiments of our language.

It all comes down to one thing, namely how important it is to give one’s children the best possible advantage in life. Despite the steady drip of cultural socialism, of notions of equality, of welfarism, of expectations that the state will always provide, we live in a competitive world, a world where excellence will always show. For that reason and for so many others if I ever have a daughter she will go to my old school. There is no doubt at all about that.

Romanov Remembrance

Among the more notable items I saw on my tour of the Kremlin on a particularly memorable Christmas Day, several years ago now, was the Faberge Eggs in the Armoury Museum, those splendid jewelled creations made by the firm of Peter Carl Faberge for the last two Tsars to mark the Easter holiday.

There is one in particular that stood out - the Kremlin Egg, a gift from Nicholas to the Empress Alexandra in 1906. For me there was something almost magical in this, a trace from the past, a link with those long dead royal martyrs, the first drops in an ocean of martyrdom.

The Russian royal family has long been a subject of unique and compelling fascination for me, not just Nicholas and Alexandra but also Alexi, the Tsarevich, murdered when he was only fourteen years old, and his four sisters, the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, who referred to themselves collectively as OTMA.

The murder of the royal family in July 1918 in the sinisterly named House of Special Purpose in Yekaterinburg was a hideous crime. Even at the time it was a source of some embarrassment to the Soviet government. It was over a year after the event before it was prepared to admit that Alexandra and the children had been killed alongside Nicholas, and even then the Social Revolutionaries, opponents of the Bolsheviks, were blamed for the atrocity.

The guilt has haunted Russia ever since, evidenced by the fact that no fewer than three official inquiries have been opened into the regicide since the fall of communism, opened and then closed again just as quickly.

Now the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Romanov, a descendent of the last Tsar who also claims to be his heir, has won an important victory in a Moscow court, obliging Russia’s Investigative Committee to hand over the eight hundred page dossier it holds on the killings and the aftermath. Her lawyer, who claimed it as a triumph over “legal nihilism in Russia,” says that she plans to publish the documents along with her own assessment of the investigation carried out by the state prosecutors.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union the official line taken by the judicial system was that massacre had been a ‘crime’ rather than an act of state policy. The reticence here clearly goes beyond the legal system into the heart of Russian history and politics. There has never been a serious attempt to come to terms with the past, no truth and reconciliation committee to draw attention to the criminality of a huge part Russia’s recent history. After all Lenin, or what purports to be Lenin, the criminal in chief, still sleeps in Red Square, an object of idle curiosity.

I honestly don’t think these documents will tell us much that we don’t already know. The communist line that it was chiefly the work of the local Ural Soviet, backed by Yakov Sverdlov, then Party Secretary, was an obvious lie, an attempt at official distance. Perhaps we may learn a little more about the precise role of Lenin and the Bolshevik government. I said in a previous article (The Murder of the Romanovs) that Lenin was at least guilty by association. It will be helpful if the accusation can be made more exact.

The remains of the Tsar and his family were finally interred in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Saint Petersburg. Now canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, they stand as testimony to the crimes of communism. Transfigured in death, the triumph of the Romanovs has as been all the greater.