The Faint-hearted Bolshevik

The Faint-hearted Bolshevik by Lorenzo Silva

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Authors: Lorenzo Silva
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I find myself taking sides with the Grand Duchess against the Bolshevik. In the first place, I’m sure the Grand Duchess washed herself more often, and she spoke French. When you’re walking down a deserted street at night (life is a dark and deserted street at night), and you turn a corner, you would rather come across a sweet-smelling young lady who speaks French than a muzhik crawling with lice. Secondly, although the idea is a bit too despicable for people to easily admit, any male who finds himself attracted by a female feels a physiological hatred towards the guy who gets to have her, regularly or as a one-off.
    So, having made clear my devoted commitment to the Grand Duchess, it is nevertheless undeniable that I have never been able to put myself in her shoes, whereas I have tried the Bolshevik’s on for size. There’s a moment in particular when the Bolshevik’s fate sends a shiver down my spine. Not when he finds her, not even when he strips her and discovers her divine treasure (maybe the brute didn’t even bother to strip her). Nor, of course, when he defiles her, taking her like any other woman and dispossessing her of her Grand Duchy. No, the moment when the Bolshevik discovers his elusive mission here on Earth occurs after the Grand Duchess has been assassinated and buried, when he remembers her for the first time.
    Until then, he has been able to seek refuge in the mob he belongs to. But at that moment he is on his own. Filtered through memory for the first time, his feelings about the Grand Duchess are something that concern only him. And the damsel’s martyrdom and death don’t have the same meaning for him as for the others. The rest of them barely are aware of anything except for the black pleasure of revenge. He on the other hand, falling into an ambush of destiny, suffers a loss. The Cause demanded that she be executed, and he believed in the Cause. How many muzhiks died during the reign of Nicholas II? Until this moment, the answers to simple questions like that protected him. But now no more. He wishes the little girl hadn’t disappeared, and the Cause is responsible for his devastation. The Cause and himself.
    What a tender moment, when the Bolshevik turns against himself and the Revolution to admit his already necessarily despairing love for the Grand Duchess. When he forgets that the sweet memory he surrenders to was refined over the centuries thanks to the blood and sweat of his own ancestors. There is no more interesting believer than the one who changes faith. An unswerving patriot, an unrelenting revolutionary, a chaste monk, prompt yawns as easily as approving epitaphs. The world progresses thanks to renegades.
    I’ve always thought that the paradise where the heroes go,Valhalla or whatever it’s called, must be a gloomy place where trumpets blow, banners fly in the air, and athletic hetaerae perform laborious sexual gymnastics with the champions. On the other hand, the den where felons wallow must be a place worthy of fantasy: it must be swarming with the most complex women, with whom it’s possible to hold substantial conversations. Nor is it a question, in my view, of spending all day mating like monkeys, to obtain the tedious reward that for an alarming number of cultures is the only thing that brainless idiots who die for a sublime idea seem to want.
    Like everyone else, I’ve got my revolutionary side, and I find it somewhat trying to praise the genocides encouraged or tolerated by the Czars as part of their empire-building whims. It’s worth pointing this out so that what I’m about to state is not misunderstood: of everything that happened in the Russian Revolution, nothing affects me more than the faint-heartedness of this Bolshevik, overwhelmed by his filthy passion for the tyrant’s daughter. Perhaps such a Bolshevik never existed, and it’s undeniable that the revolution was the epic culmination of a powerful belief. Even so, I stand by what I’ve said. Beliefs

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