Lev Kamenev (1883–1936). Alexander Garden Obelisk in the background.
Lev Kamenev (1883–1936). Alexander Garden Obelisk in the background.
SÉANCES ON THE MOSCOW RIVER – THOMAS MORE AND NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI By Michael Jackson *** The Montréal Review, April 2026 |
|||
Incantations raised apparitions of Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More between 1918 and 1936. By hermetic divinations the living found occult messages in the dead twice over. The necromancy occurred in two melancholy séances described below.
A soaring obelisk lifts our eyes from the frangible earth to the eternal heavens where dwell the gods. One such elevator in stone was erected outside the walls of the Kremlin on 10 July 1914 in the Alexander Garden where it was raised before an applauding crowd and dedicated with religious solemnity to mark, nay, to celebrate, three hundred years of the House of Romanov in the expanse between the Baltic, White, Japan, Caspian, and Black Seas. It had been designed by Sergey Aleksandrovitch Vlasev, having won a competition in 1912 for a commemorative monument endowed by the Duma of the city of Moscow. When the first spade had been turned in April of 1914 there was a military ceremony with huzzahs aplenty, orchestral music, and toasts to the monarch.
Standing watch at the main gate of the Alexander Garden, it was a tapering four-sided monolith crowned with the double-headed eagle of the dynasty. Its finial was the coat of arms of the family royal and a griffin bearing a sword and a shield. Down the face were engraved in descending order the names of the emperors and empresses of the Romanov succession. The supporting base bore a relief of Saint George with the coat of arms of provinces and regions on small shields. The signs and symbols of the dynasty were there in the rock of ages to be read by all who passed by…forever. The granite for this most Russian of monuments came from Finland, then one of the regions of Greater Russia. Carved into stone, the Romanovs were to endure wind and weather for eons like the Egyptian obelisks Europeans had taken home in the Nineteenth Century. Such examples as Cleopatra’s Needle in London or Trajan’s Column in Rome weigh between 450 and 650 tons. Altogether an immovable object an onlooker might have thought on that day in July 1914 as the Romanov stele was consecrated. When the formalities subsided and these witnesses repaired for a refreshing cup of black tea, they might have glanced at newspapers bearing the news of the 28 June murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, heir to the neighboring empire, who had gone there to broker peace. That ducal shock moved the tectonic plates beneath the monument in a few short years, for on 12 April 1918 the Central Committee of the Communist Party decreed that monuments honouring tsars and their servants be removed and replaced by declarations in stone of heroes of the revolution of all times and all peoples. The Moscow Soviet followed the party line to this colossus. The eagle was shot from its perch on the pyramidion by Latvian Riflemen who had won a marksmanship contest for the honour of symbolically decapitating the dynasty. The emblems on the base were chipped away much as successive Pharaohs in Egypt did to their disagreeable predecessors. Saint George was unhorsed and replaced by the inscription that read ‘Proletarians of all countries unite!’ That left the column itself, and it had to be dismantled into its seven parts, each then chiseled, and sandblasted back to a plain and smooth surface, and then engraved anew. Designer Vlasev lived to see this come to pass, dying in 1931. What he made of it is lost to time. Once the slate was clean, the names of nineteen intellectual and political antecedents of socialism was offered for its adornment by Vladimir Friche, a proletarian journalist, starting the hagiography with the deities Marx and Engels at the head of the list. The red ribbon was cut at a third ceremony in October 1918 to mark the first anniversary of the Bolshevik ascension. Twenty years later in 1939 the veneration of this totem was re-newed in another celebration of the end of the tyranny of Tsars. Apart from Marx and Engels who else was on the revered list? The carving is cryptic, offering only last names and in some cases not fully spelled out: Liebnecht, Lasalle, Bebel, Campanella, Meslier, Winstanley, More, St Simon, Vaillant, Fourier, Jaures, Proudhon, Bakunin, Chernyshevskii, Lavrov, Mikhailovskii and Plekhanov. (For further information about these individuals see the Wikipedia entry for the memorial.) The only published restriction was that no living person was to be named. Lenin was not about to give accolades to any rival. Apart from the demigods at the top many of those named were and are obscure. How they contributed to the unity of the workers of the world is a puzzle. Women are conspicuous by their absence on this marker. Yet there were some obvious candidates who were well-known at the time: Flora Tristan a French revolutionary, Margaret Cavendish a fiery writer, Emma Goldman an anarchist leader, and Rosa Luxemburg a founder of the German Communist Party. These women had done far more to bring forth the Red Wave, a critic might say, than a closet atheist like Meslier, a hemorrhoidal scribbler like Fourier, an innocent like Campanella, a dilettante like St-Simon, or a trimmer like Jaurès. By way of comparison the Kensal Green Memorial to Reformers of 1885, another menhir in London, extols half a dozen women among its worthies. The Moscow list demands our attention because there, sandwiched between Italian Tommaso Campanella, author of the City of the Sun, and Brit Gerrard Winstanley, reluctant leader of a peasant uprising, it summons the spirit of Thomas More, Sir and Saint. Even to note his titles is to wonder why he is so proudly hailed there in central Moscow beside the wall of the Kremlin. If Comrade Friche explained his nominations, it is not readily available, ergo one can only infer what the reasoning might have been to include Thomas More. Of course, it is hardly likely to have been More’s subordination to the Christian god, mortal commitment to the Roman Church, nor his lifelong fealty to the hereditary monarch Henry VIII, still less his executive authority to send members of the underclass to jail, the stocks, the torch, or the block. No, it is not in his life that we must look for the laurels that cut him into the stone of Bolshevik Moscow. We must turn instead to the pages of his book Utopia, and once we do what swims to the surface is the description of the society of perfection extolled there. It is one marked by a uniformity of clothing, a minutely regulated life, social indoctrination, and a denial of private property and outright rejection of wealth and riches. We must, however, overlook the fact that in the book Utopia More himself explicitly rejects such arrangements after having spelled them out. From 1918 this spire stood 15 meters high heralding More as a begetter of Soviet communism. The column, and More with it, withstood two momentous events in the following years, the first a tremor, the second an earthquake. In 1935 Pope Pius XI in distant Rome canonized Thomas More for his martyrdom in refusing to bend to King Henry VIII replacing the pope as head of the Church of England. (This was done in an irregular manner, perhaps as comment on the times.) With that tremor the haloed saint soon began to appear in devotional stained-glass windows of both Catholic and Protestant denominations. He has since become a secular saint, too, as a hero of the private conscience in film, plays, novels, literary allusions, and the popular culture at large. It might be worth noting that near him on the stone is Jean Meslier (1664-1729), a priest who lost his faith and embraced, in the closet, atheism. This conversion was only discovered at his death, and the fact was suppressed for some time. (While Miguel Unamuno’s deeply moving story San Manuel Bueno depicts just such a priest in noble terms, I doubt that is the dimension Friche saw in Meslier.) Uniting Meslier and More made an odd couple, a believer and disbeliever. The monument may have been rocked by this 1935 canonization, but there were other distractions to which attention will turn in a moment. First let us note the later earthquake that the obelisk survived, namely, the 22 June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union in a move that took only Josef Stalin by surprise. After torturous years these invaders were expelled from Mother Russia in Operation Bagration in August of 1944. During the 1941-1944 maelstrom, Moscow was bombed repeatedly, and the Kremlin made a tempting target nestled along the eponymous river, making it easy to find, and many of the buildings in the compound were damaged. The air attacks were frequent by early 1942 after German scouts in December 1941 made the closest advance to the Soviet capital, coming within 20 kilometers at the village of Khimki, allowing binoculared officers to see the spires in the city. It was standard practice in air raids to use those spires as reference points to orient bombardiers. In response it became standard practice to disguise, camouflage, or paint black such reference points. The Alexander Column may have been concealed in a like manner. Two generations later more tremors shook the red earth along the Moskva River and in tumultuous days of glasnost and perestroika, a few voices suggested the Romanov Obelisk should be restored for the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 2014. No doubt a strange set of bedfellows warmed to the idea, slowly and tentatively to test the official response. Among this group must have been nostalgics who remembered only the glory and glamour of the House of Romanov as in the sumptuous 2000 movie The Russian Ark. There must have been communists who wished to red-wash away their own past enthusiasms by embracing this symbol of a Disney soft-focus past. And, of course, as always, the opportunists ever-seeking self-aggrandizement would have been present. To these three a fourth element came from the Orthodox churchmen who gilded their dogma with the Romanov aura. After all, at the direction of their confessors some Tsars spent more time on their knees praying to an unseen god than on governing. By 2013 this restoration came to be spoken of in the corridors and offices of government ministries, and a research project was commissioned to document everything about the Alexander Garden obelisk from its inception and subsequent history to capture the ever-changing past. Even as that research began, on 2 July 2013 the obelisk vanished. Vanished! No, it was not an alien abduction, though the speed and secrecy with which it happened surely stimulated wits to make that comparison. Then before the conspiracy theorist could achieve lift-off, voilà it reappeared in October 2013, having once again been effaced and re-engraved with the original Romanov list. The tipping point to stimulate this event may have sprung from the desire of the Putin regime to bask in the reflected glory of the selective memory of the Romanov centuries at the expense of discarding even Marx and Engels. Altogether a convoluted bit of reasoning this would have been, twisted enough even to satisfy Niccolò Machiavelli, for this son of the KGB who was on record as Nostalgic Number One for the Soviet Union. Now by the alchemy of policy, Putin became Nostalgic Number One for the Romanov tyranny. (Later in another display of flexibility Putin christened the Wall of Grief, a breathtaking monument to the victims of Stalin, while pursuing the Great Leader’s ambitious in Ukraine. Cesare Borgia would have nodded at this subterfuge.) Another sacramental ceremony occurred on 4 November 2013 attended by ranks of dignitaries, no doubt carefully selected, presided over by churchmen who in return for their new-found prerogatives had enlisted their suppedaneum crosses at the service of the government of the day as so many fundamentalists have done in the United States. The Romanovs thus were rehabilitated. However, according to some sources on that grey day in November there were red faces, for the private company that did the job was, of course, the low bid contractor and, well there were spelling errors in the names, an orphaned hyphen, and a standard Cyrillic font had been used and not the Latin version of the original. The commissioned research that would have prevented such simple errors was, as is so often the case with such a political football, disregarded. Side-by-side photographs of the original with this contemporary reproduction show the difference at a glance.
Discretion had been observed and the last Tsar named was omitted. That was Grand Duke Michael, namesake of the first Romanov tsar. Nicholas II’s abdication manifesto of 15 March 1917 named him as the successor to the chalice, but Michael declined the honour and the onus. Yet briefly he had been a paper tsar. In 2013, his name was absent from the replica list, perhaps to veil the vexed circumstances of the Romanov extinction event. Did someone propose during the period between July and November 2013 that the monument be made Russian by replacing the Finnish stone with Russian rock unearthed in the Caucasus Mountains where it is abundant? Possibly, but the time and costs of such a change might have weighed against the suggestion. Granite had been chosen in 1914 for its endurance, but one wonders how many more times this stone palimpsest will be disassembled and re-carved to suit a changing environment, like the Stalin era photographs that were airbrushed to eliminate those who had been eliminated. All that is solid can melt into the air, as Karl Marx wrote. * In sum, between, 1918 and 2013, for nearly a century, Thomas More was publicly celebrated as a forerunner of the communism practiced in the Soviet Union in that period. As Immanuel Kant might have said, ‘A man must protect himself from his enemies, no one can protect him from his friends.’ The Soviet friendship for More serves as an example of such unwanted bonhomie. Marx once said history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. If, today, this story seems a farce, here the order is reversed for the tragedy follows this séance.
Plus c’est la même chose. Graphic by Katie Blake
The key dates in this tale are to be remembered, particularly 1918 when More mounted the pedestal and 1939 when its significance was again celebrated. Between those years, it was in 1936 when the Moscow Trials began in earnest for the second act of this story. These trials were indeed a show, first in the Soviet Union itself for they were reported, promoted, and made known by newspapers, handbills, wall posters, radio broadcasts, newsreels in cinemas, announcements in theatres, and by town criers. Such a spectacle attracted world attention with journalists of all stripes rallying to them for ready-made copy. Most of them swallowed whole what was served up to them by their hosts, like those escorted visitors who made a pilgrimage to the workers’ paradise around this time. Few noticed and even fewer reported that the accusations sometimes had a culprit in two places at once miles apart committing heinous crimes against the Party in both places as if by witchcraft. This sorry episode is far larger and more significant than the granite marker, but only one scene from it, a significant one, is relevant here. Still a word of background might be welcome to some readers. Comrade Stalin was never a man to take a chance and in the middle of the 1930s it occurred to him that he might have enemies within as well as without the walls of the Kremlin. Once that thought crystallized, he saw evidence of its reality among all manner of people. The complexities of the matter resolved into a Scapegoat Number One – Leon Trotsky who had committed the original sin of outshining Stalin during the Revolution and subsequent wars with his military leadership, a failing compounded by his opposition to Stalin in the Politburo after Lenin’s death. While Trotsky argued from first principles, Stalin made deals and soon Trotsky was imprisoned, exiled, and finally deported for the crime of being Trotsky. Abroad he continued his diatribes against Stalin’s betrayal of the Revolution, as he saw it. He moved from Turkey, to France, to Norway, and Mexico ahead of the assassins. In 1936 the gadfly Trotsky was tried in absentia and sentenced to death executed in Mexico City by a Comintern agent Ramón Mercader in 1940. That Stalin might have had enemies was a result of the plague years of falling industrial production, rampant disease, increased thievery, forced relocations, the extermination of the Kulaks, contrived famine, and much else. Despite the glowing reports on the Potemkin Villages those Western pilgrims to the Soviet Union visited on carefully managed guided tours, all was not well in the Workers’ Paradise. The Great Depression in the West echoed in Russia, if for no other reason than the effort to raise money by selling remnants of Romanov era art and artefacts no longer found cashed-up capitalist buyers outbidding each other. Energetic though he was, one man alone, not even the evil magus Trotsky, could be blamed for all of these woes, and so had been born the Little Trotskys. Like the shape-shifting immigrant of today’s political speechwriters who can steal jobs while living on public welfare, invisible Trotskyite men (and women were also included in this amalgamation) were born of words and bore a great many responsibilities. Hey presto, the problems of the Soviet Union are the work of closet Trotskyites, who sabotage the regime at this turn and that. These enemies of the people were so insidious that they were inside the Party tent, in the very Politburo itself among the Old Bolsheviks therein. So it was that Stalin’s hand fell upon them, nearly to the last man and woman. Lit, the flame of the Show Trials in Moscow burned brightly. The first of these public circuses was staged in the House of the Unions, near the Bolshoi Theatre, a 15-minute walk from the Alexander Garden where Thomas More stood enshrined as an honourary red saint. A principal defendant in the first trial was Lev Kamenev. He had been a deputy Premier 1923-1926 when Lenin was ill and Kamenev was a man with profound revolutionary credentials, having been arrested and imprisoned more than once by the Tsarist secret police. One of his acts while deputy premier was to marginalize his troublesome brother-in-law, Leon Trotsky. Prosecutor-General Andrey Vyshinsky led the case against him. A one-time Menshevik, Vyshinsky was motivated zealously to redeem himself with the current regime and had done so at earlier, lower key trials. His vile, virulent, vehement, and vituperative vilification of Kamenev was so vainglorious, was so extreme, was so extraordinary that it was reported around the world in letters of fire thanks to the Comintern. According to Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the fact that Kamenev had been arrested and beaten by Tsarist police was to conceal his duplicity. His release was proof that he had been recruited by counter-revolutionary forces. Survival was proof of betrayal, i.e., the proof of loyalty was death, just as in witch-dunking when the proof of innocence was death by drowning. The fact that as a Deputy Premier Kamenev had opposed Trotsky, despite their marital relationship, was dismissed by the prosecutor as a stratagem to throw off the scent akin to a fugitive wading in water to elude tracker dogs. Such an elaborate and long-term diversion was typical of these villains, Vyshinsky railed. Likewise, the fact that Kamenev had been either imprisoned or under 24/7 surveillance for years was scorned as a subterfuge by the perfidious conspirators who had still – by occult incantations? -- while sequestered orchestrated sabotage against the party through the Deep Party they still controlled. Every one of Kamenev’s revolutionary credentials was distorted into an indictment of anti-revolutionary deeds, rather like the later playbook of American Karl Rove who advised the many who listened to him to twist their opponents’ virtues into vices and laid one of the foundation stones upon which rests contemporary politics in the United States. Nefarious plotting by the conspirators, according to Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, was only to be expected from the likes of Lev Kamenev who was an ‘intellectual,’ this being then as it has so often been since, an epithet of derision, disgust, and contempt. (Radio shock jocks around the world continue to dine on cheap shots at such outlandish book-reading people.) Evidence of Kamenev’s intellectual and ergo treacherous nature was readily to hand according to the Comrade Prosecutor-General. Proof of Kamenev’s guilt was obvious, declared Vyshinsky in his corrosive address. When Kamenev was editor of the Academic House of Moscow publishers he had prepared and edited a Russian translation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince as the first volume in the collected works of the Florentine. For this purpose, Kamenev had written a five-page introduction for readers who became curious when they encountered references to Machiavelli. This publication occurred in the very year Thomas More ascended to sainthood, 1935. In this short précis Kamenev is bland and, if anything, rather like his contemporary, the Italian Antonio Gramsci (who would soon die at the hands of Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy), he sees in Machiavelli someone from whom revolutionaries can learn. Like Shakespeare’s Glendower, Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky called a spirit from the vasty deep, one Niccolò Machiavelli who was ‘a hardened schemer,’ a man who recommended ‘bestial policies.’ Machiavelli held that ‘all criteria of good and evil, of the permissible and impermissible, of the lawful and criminal were relative,’ Vyshinky asserted. Worse, Machiavelli mixes up what is ‘good with what is evil’ to justify a slave-society in which the few rich rule over the toiling masses!’ By spreading Machiavelli’s words Kamenev endorsed them and proposed to plant this evil seed throughout the land. Echoing Cardinal Reginald Pole who in 1535 recoiled from the finger of the devil wielded by Machiavelli, the prosecutor’s condemnation was complete. The references in Comrade Vyshinsky’s harangue suggest he presumed that the name Machiavelli meant something to auditors, and the something was negative. Although Kamenev had been careful to say in his preface that Marx and Engels had each praised Machiavelli for his insights into politics this fact, along with many others, was omitted by Vyshinsky, and revolutionary justice did not permit Kamenev to point this out. Nor was revolutionary justice delayed. Kamenev’s verdict was speedy, and the sentence was final. Immediately at the conclusion of his trial, he was executed in August 1936 and so was his son in 1939 and his wife in 1941 for they carried the contagion of Machiavelli in their blood from association with Kamenev. This trial was only one chapter of the Great Purge in which millions suffered, and few were guilty of anything but living. The only proof of sufficient loyalty for many was death. Though, as Arthur Koestler explained in his novel Darkness at Noon (1940), out of loyalty, martyrdom, fealty, resignation, discipline, self-sacrifice, the hope of sparing others, plea bargaining, abnegation, or trauma many confessed. There is no indication that the NKVD torturers suffered the psychoses Dr Franz Fanon observed in their French counterparts in Algeria of the 1950s. Perhaps that is because few of them survived the next round of purges, being themselves consumed by the machine they had built. In far England such intellectual lights as Beatrice Webb expressed pleasure that Stalin had ‘cut out the dead wood.’ Nor was she alone in supposing that the Trials were a step forward in the history of progress, for eample, a young Barbara Castle agreed. She later was de facto deputy leader in a Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Against that may be set the Dewey Commission tome Not Guilty (1938) which refuted even the alleged factual evidence of the Trials root and branch as they occurred, but it sank into obscurity under the salvoes of apologists like Webb.1 Contempt for facts has a long history. As the obelisk was effaced and re-carved, so Kamenev went down the memory hole of Soviet history. Photographs were either removed or photoshopped to remove him. Minions redacted his name from books. He and hundreds of other Old Bolsheviks vanished from Soviet history leaving only Comrade Stalin striding across the steppes into the Red Dawn. For what it is worth, Kamenev, like others, was posthumously rehabilitated after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Trials in his famous Secret Speech of 1956. In 1988 the Soviet Supreme annulled his conviction. But as ever in Moscow only the future is certain, the past can change, as it has in 2024 when the Moscow Gulag Museum closed. There have been rumours for years that some of these rehabilitations have been quashed more recently in secret as the political winds blow this way and that. Courts around the world are subject to this weather. Perhaps it was for this reason that at one time Ukraine legislated against such secret reversals changing the past. * Voltaire, that master of words, had anticipated Kant: praying in mock humility (for there was never a less humble man than this one), ‘Lord, protect me from my friends, I can take care of my enemies.’ It was Kamenev’s friends who erased him and his kind, not his capitalist, Tsarist, counter-revolutionary, or White enemies. Coda To review these two tales in tandem reveals the ironies of fate in a world where the sainted Thomas More stands behind the likes of Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky while he condemns Niccolò Machiavelli, whose works had headed the list of banned books in the inaugural Papal Index of 1565. So it is that atheist Vyshinsky takes comfort from the pious saint and joins the Pope in renouncing Machiavelli. Refracted in this prism there are apparent similarities of Lev Kamenev and Niccolò Machiavelli in the pitch, roll, and yaw of their careers. Rising on their pens as scribes and organizers they fell with a regime change. True, Kamenev’s fall was harder, faster, and fatal, and not only for himself but his family to say nothing of the fifteen other defendants in the dock with him, none of whom survived, and the thousands upon thousands who followed. But then one might say the same of Thomas More who steered a true course only to find the current beneath had changed when he had not. Thus, he became, with thousands of others like Kamenev, dispensable. His old comrades like Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, John Fisher, and countless others also met the justice of the new regimen. With the passage of time Kamenev was rehabilitated, though Machiavelli has never been exorcised from the popular mind and remains a demonic figure in the Western vocabulary. Every week it seems a journalist echoes Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky in attributing Machiavellianism to a transitory political figure. * Did Vyshinsky perchance miscalculate by evoking so immediately, so memorably, and so dramatically Machiavelli in the trial. An observer might have noticed, though seemingly none did at the time, that the vulgar Machiavelli of Vyshinsky’s harangue described the very practices the Stalin regime was using in plain sight while decrying their use by others. It was Cesare Borgia whom Machiavelli described as first beguiling and then beheading his frenemies lest they strike blows against him. What else was Comrade Stalin doing but this self-same act, albeit indiscriminately and on an industrial scale but then it has been said that Stalin was an avid reader of Machiavelli. *** These clay golems of Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More conjured at séances in Moscow remind us that their images can and were genetically manipulated to meet the needs of the moment. In 1918 the Bolshevik regime thirsted for authenticating ancestors, and that was as much the point of the names on the obelisk, as honouring them: the new order felt the need for a legitimating genealogy. Disturbed from the slumber of death was More mounted on high. As the world turned, came the need in 1936 for a Mephistopheles to explain the preternatural machinations of ordinary men like Kamenev, and: ‘Enter Machiavelli.’ Once condemned by devout churchmen, Machiavelli was then disparaged by proudly avowed atheists. Together the distorted mirror images of More and Machiavelli in Moscow offer object lessons in how their genomes can be re-sequenced to suit the manipulator. Friends are indeed dangerous as the philosophers warned heeding Jeremiah's counsel. Postscript The story of Kamenev and the Trials and the national tragedy it prefigured is far deeper and darker than these few lines suggest. A reader might start with Robert Conquest’s pioneering The Great Terror for a primer. When Soviet archives opened in the 1990s a great deal of further research began, gradually developing the larger picture. Vyshinsky had a long and profitable career after the trials, serving for a time at the United Nations in New York City.
|
MONTREAL REVIEW CONTRIBUTOR'S ESSAY COLLECTION HONORED
|
||
The Montréal Review © All rights reserved. ISSN 1920-2911
