Tea at Trianon: Hostage of the North

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, March 23, 2020

Hostage of the North

From PRI:

Ivanova's plight clashes with Russian President Vladimir Putin's quest to conquer the warming Arctic. In April, he promised that the Northern Sea Route between Murmansk and Vladivostok would grow to rival the Suez canal as a shipping lane. Seven military bases have been built or reopened along the northern coast since 2013. Last month, the government approved huge tax breaks for oil and gas development in the Arctic, including offshore projects.

But the paradox is that the north is emptying out even as Russia tries to develop it. Vorkuta was built during Joseph Stalin's reign on the backs of starved Gulag prisoners, 200,000 of whom died. After Stalin's death, the Soviet Union lured more willing workers north with doubled wages and early retirement. But since the fall of the communist system that developed the region, 1 million people have left the Arctic zone. Far more have fled Siberia and the far east. Today, northern resources are being dug and drilled by dormitories of fly-in laborers rather than cities of Soviet shock workers. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, hyperinflation vaporized Russians' savings overnight, including what workers in places like Vorkuta had put away to retire in the “middle latitudes.” The average apartment in central Russia costs 30 times as much as in Vorkuta.

“Money people saved to buy an apartment turned into only enough to buy a sausage,” said Nadezhda Zamyatina, a geography professor at Moscow State University who has consulted several northern cities on development. (Read more.)