Tea at Trianon: The Making of the Soviet Ruling Class

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

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

The Making of the Soviet Ruling Class

Life in the soviet Paradise. From the Marxist publication Jacobin:

Even in relatively privileged Moscow, the famine would intrude on the House of Government, as many residents invited family members to live with them. Most House residents who had arrived from rural areas had relatives who starved during the famine, and many of the House maids were refugees from collectivization. In 1933 at the nearby Big Stone Bridge, beggars stood, “grown-ups and children, who looked like little skeletons, with their hands stretched out.” Although security at the House of Government was very strict, as late as 1935, “skinny children from the nearby houses would slide through the bars of the metal gates and fences, hide beneath the columns, and beg for food.”

Working-class children who lived in nearby dorms, barracks, and tenements were in “awe at the wealth they observed” in the House. Occasionally House girls visited schoolmates outside the gated community, but they were “shocked at the squalor they found and had no wish to see it again,” while boys on their way home from school “risked being ambushed and beaten up.”

During its construction from 1928 to 1931, seasonal workers from the countryside who built the House of Government lived in unheated, unsanitary barracks with more workers than meters of space, worked ten-hour days, and had to consume “spoiled food with maggots in it.” As early as 1928, the district party noted that first among that workers’ political diseases was “a vulgar egalitarianism with regard to the city and the countryside,” while hundreds fled the construction site without working a single day.

House residents vacationed in the Caucasian Riviera during the famine, where at “any time of the day or night a servant may be sent to get piping hot food.” In 1933, the nomenklatura guests were entitled to white and black bread, caviar, smoked fish, ham, or sausage, among other things. At the House of Government, tenants shopped in exclusive food stores and had maids, nannies, and chauffeurs. Most House of Government women, according to Stalin’s niece Kira, had their clothes made to order — “not only dresses and suits, but even overcoats and fur coats.” (Read more.)