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Black Sea slugs
tanks get broken great
mines can't mind disputed
Straits
bad for business mates
fighting's gonna spend
blood &
treasure till it ends
badly round the bend
ideologies
stupid owl hegemonies
blind to you &
me
Florence Nightingale
serves the killers
saves no whales
pirates rule the waves
geezer's run amock
how to stop his bloody
cock's
dab of novichock
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A Review (sorta)
Looking back on the Seventies it’s odd to think how many
people had faith in Russia and China. Anyone on the left who criticised the occupation
of Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact was thought of as a dangerous right-winger.
You didn’t have to be in the Worker’s Revolutionary Party, Socialist Worker or –
fgs – the RCP, to view the basic Communist Party as merely out of touch. China’s
Cultural Revolution was the dream of half the stalwarts of duffle coat, donkey
jacket, beard and sandals. Go to David Hare’s latest play and be seen carrying Tony’s
Benn’s Arguments for Socialism to be hip. Reading Solzhenitsyn, however, was considered
very Tory of you, even if you were a known Labour Party member.
When I first read One Day IN The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (half
a century ago) what convinced me was not its condemnation of socialism. I didn’t
equate social justice with the Gulags any more than I thought of Shostakovich
as a political tub thumper. This was Russia. Russian socialism like Russian creativity
was bound to be extreme. Only a Russian would have written The Firebird or The
Idiot. Tchaikovsky could be bombastic, Yevtushenko not to be trusted, Marc Chagall
– well, what did you expect from a comfortable exile? And Marx himself believed
the Russian proletariat incapable of true liberation. They would cling to things
rooted in the soil, in the church and the soul of Mother Russia – not an
ideology born in Hegel’s Germany and nurtured in the fug of a British Reading Room.
The passion to do things in the Russian way might have led
to great ballet, to the survival of St Petersburg in World War Two, even to
putting the first human in space. But when it came to running an imperial government
(of whatever political persuasion), the temptation of the Russians to hitch
their fates to the wiles of a strongman would always scupper anything other
than expediency. In other words, the end would justify the means. With Hitler
it was, If you can’t do it this way, do it that way - and send two different knuckleheads
to do the same job. With Stalin, with an endless supply of the above, it was
merely a matter of moving mountains.
Orwell presaged all of Ivan Denisovich in fiction. Boxer in Animal
Farm works his hooves to the bone, only to be rewarded with a trip to the
knacker’s yard. Winston Smith’s free spirit is toyed with, then utterly broken
in Room 101. But Ivan Denisovich Shukov is not fiction. He is one of tens of
thousands rounded up on bogus charges and sent to work camps in Siberia to
build pioneer towns. A fellow prisoner is a navy Captain who had spent a month as
a liaison officer on a British cruiser. Years later, he was sent a memento of
their time together by a British admiral. For this he is arrested as a spy and
sentenced to 10 years hard labour. I shan’t reveal what Shukov’s ‘crime’ was,
but it’s equally unjust.
The conditions in the camp are truly awful, the work gruelling,
the punishments brutal and cruel, the lack of dignity almost total, and yet the
job gets done. Inmates fully co-operate in their own grinding oppression. Solzhenitsyn’s
style is to tell it all as it is (well, only the very grossest details are left
out). When I first read it, at the age of sixteen or so, I was amazed how
quickly I skipped through the pages. Compared with a Herman Hesse, Nietzsche, or
other translated authors, it wasn’t simply unputdownable, more like a race to
the finish.
This is what you get with Russia. What exactly are they
trying to prove? Is there anything in there? Those who I’ve known have been
fine individuals. Not hypocrites (like so many Anglo-Saxons), they are all
potential members of a dangerous cult. Try your best to see things their way,
but don’t try to win any arguments with people whose very survival depends on the
denial they are ever mistaken. Stalin is always right. Especially when he’s wrong.
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| Black Sea flotsam, March 28th, 2022 |
is your death
necessary 2
were they lovely
babies once
did their mummies give
a damn
keep them safe
from falling bombs
pootin' about
Freudian analysis
x-ray
encephalogram
reading palms by rule
of thumb
pootin' about
ask a mother what
she thinks
hit or childless
cos of them
should convention
carry on
pootin’ about
still the
conscience hesitates
as if history
hasn’t cloned
walkin' talkin'
bogey men
pootin' about
intervention
bothers us
should we think it
out again
till the bombs
& bullets come
pootin' about
 |
| Never Under-Said |
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