Mad Monks and Pictsies

Books read this week: The Romanovs (W Bruce Lincoln) 8/10, The Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett) 8/10

Peter the Great was a very odd-looking bloke. The picture of him in Lincoln's The Romanovs looks very much like a small dog that has eaten something unpleasant. Not at all the image I had in my mind of the heroically proportioned giant who dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the 18th Century. Then again, with the Romanovs first impressions always seem to be deceiving; this was, after all, the dynasty that gave us the Potemkin village.

The first thing to note about the Romanovs, as a family, was that they were all, without exception, hideously nasty evil people. Now, I don't believe in cursed bloodlines, and I come down hard on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate, and, it has to be said, very few of the Romanov monarchs had happy childhoods; still it is surprising that a dynasty could sit on the throne of Russia for 300+ years, and not produce one single decent human being. To be sure, there are some impressive ones, and some entertaining ones, and more than a few terrifying ones - but not a single one that makes you think "they were a good person, trying to do their best". Just one example; we are told that Tsar Mikhail is known as "Mikhail the Good", and on the same page we are informed that he had ten thousand peasants impaled in the week of his coronation because they asked for lower taxes. We have Tsarina Elizabeth, forcing her fool to spend the night in a palace carved from ice, so that he froze to death. We have Catherine the Great, murdering her (it has to be admitted, utterly repulsive) husband to seize the throne. The main distinction one can draw between the very evil Romanovs and the just a little evil is this; the less evil ones would happily kill thousands of innocent people because it was politically expedient. The more evil ones would do it just for fun.

I think there is an interesting comparision to be made between Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible (it is to be remembered that Ivan's title, "Grozny" translates both as "terrible" and "great"). Both monarchs had disrupted, unhappy and dangerous childhoods, and both were determined to revolutionise Russian society, using whatever (often extremely bloody) means that had at their disposal. Both engaged in extremely formal, extremely obscene mockeries of Orthodox religious ritual. And both murdered their first-born sons; Ivan in a fit of rage (immortalised in Repin's famous, and utterly harrowing painting), and Peter after luring him back to Russia with a false safe conduct, and having had him tortured by his secret police. Both left the country in total disarray by their failure to select a competent successor.

And, of course, both were utterly, utterly mad. Ivan's madness took a more obvious form; fits of rage, violence, the Oprichniki. Peter's was more effective; there must have been a conversation he had which went "I'm going to build a new capital city" "That's a bit mad." "In  a swamp." "That's very mad." "That belongs to Finnland." "What have you been smoking?"

A sizable chunk of the book is dedicated to the evolution of St Petersburg - which was a Romanov city, through and through. This is a very different approach to the mass biography than Norwich's book on the Popes - the focus here is on the entire Russian state, rather than keeping a laser like focus on the subjects of the biography. Which is not to say there isn't a lot of detail on the individuals here; there's plenty on how Tsarina Elizabeth made her entire court dress in drag, and the countess who was employed by Catherine the Great to test drive potential lovers*.

The book is divided into four parts; the first three, dealing with the period up to 1894, are deeply depressing reading as they basically detail how successful the Romanovs were with two stage policy which they applied to every problem; i) Oppress the peasants ii) If the problem has not resolved itself, repeat step (i).

And then in Part IV we get to Nicholas II. It has been said the revolution is the kicking in of a rotten door. Never has this been more true than Nicholas II's Russia. One of his ministers even said of the Romanov state "Don't you see - the slightest warm breath of life will cause the entire edifice to rot away." Nicholas was a vicious, weak and stupid man. Deeply antisemitic with a burning hatred of democracy. So far, par for the course in his family. He was also massively incompetent. This is what made the crucial difference; he is, as far as I know, the only monarch in history to have managed not one but two Bloody Sundays in his reign. There is dark comedy to be had in the way he had to be protected from his own subjects by a fleet of battleships (yes, actual battleships) and his choosing as minister of the interior a syphilitic madman who used a oujie board to commune with the ghost of Rasputin. Also "The Dogger Bank Incident"**.

This part of the book also has some individuals one can actually admire; the worker scribbling a poignant last letter to his wife and child before joining the peaceful march that turned into the second Bloody Sunday, the female revolutionary smuggling hand grenades to besieged workers in Moscow, and the mad heroics of the Social Revolutionary Combat Detachment.

I would love to read more about the Combat Detachment; the book notes in passing that whilst it took the People's Will three months and a lot of dumb luck to assassinate Alexander II, and that he was their only success, only 8% of the targets of the Combat Detachment escaped unharmed. I would really like to know why it was that they were so successful.

There is a certain about of pathos in the final months of Nicholas II and his family; it could scarcely be otherwise. And afterall, the children did nothing to deserve their fate. Then again, neither did the tens of thousands of peasant children who died because of Nicholas II's policies, the unarmed demonstrators gunned down on his orders or the Jews killed in pogroms he authorised.

My second book this week was rather more cheerful - Pratchett's The Wee Free Men which deals with Tiffany Aching, a nine year old Witch-in-training and the Nac Mac Feegle, a band of six-inch tall blue "Pictsies" ("their swords glow blue in the presence of lawyers"). It is classic Pratchett - easy to read, very funny and also quite thought provoking. It is part of his series of Discworld books for children, so the plot is a little simpler than the mainstream Discworld novels, and as a result I ripped through it even faster than usual, but that's not really a problem; Pratchett writes books that really benefit from re-reading. I've been reading Jingo for fourteen years now, and I still turn up jokes I missed the first few dozen times I read the book.

The main antagonist of the Wee Free Men is the Elf Queen, who is one of my favourite Pratchett villains. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have really rejuvenated the idea that elves and fairies are wild, scary things - not cuddly tinkerbells with sparkly wings. It is a theme I like - I've always been partial to the folktales and folk songs where elves steal people away, and claw out the eyes of those who could see them. We also have here the traditional fairy vulnerability to iron. Iron, salt and church bells traditionally ward off th Fair Folk; all, of course, are the products of civilisation. Salt needs mines, or pens to evaporate sea water. Iron needs blast furnaces and mines and smiths. Church bells need architects and smelters and a community. All three represent humanity's taming of the wild things in the world, which is why they ward away elves, the personification of the human fear of the wilderness.

*Sounds like quite a fun job really.

** What is more embarrassing: that the Russian Baltic Fleet mistook the Dogger Bank fishing fleet for a flotilla of Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire, or that the combined fire of the entire Baltic Fleet managed to sink only one fishing boat?