"They tiptoed from room to room, afraid to speak above a whisper and gazing with a kind of awe at the unbelievable luxury, at the beds with their feather mattresses, the looking glasses, the horsehair sofa, the Brussels carpet, the lithograph of Queen Victoria over the drawing room mantelpiece...A unanimous resolution was passed on the spot that the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum. All agreed that no animal must ever live there."
--George Orwell, Animal Farm
You may have been wondering about the uncharacteristic reticence on the part of Mad Dog for the past two weeks: He has been on a fact evading, impression forming journey to Russia and the Scandinavian nations and the Baltic.
One thing he learned is that these countries have histories which go back a long way before Hitler and Stalin, but recent history extends to 70 years ago, and while most of the people who suffered under the Nazis are dead or soon to be, memories persist.
German tourists with ear plugs smiling as their guides show them through the winter palace outside St. Petersburg caught Mad Dog's eye. Our guide, a Russian, was describing how the Nazis plundered the paintings and the Amber Room, stealing whatever wasn't bolted to the wall, so I wondered what those German tourists were hearing through their earphones.
In Berlin, the bullet holes from the Russian attack are not erased, but simply plugged, "To remind us," as our guide, who happened to be a Brit ex-pat now a recently naturalized German citizen, told us.
Her story was interesting. She visited and fell in thrall to Berlin right out of college, 10 years ago and stayed--but once Brexit got voted through, she became a German citizen so she wouldn't have to leave. Her German is excellent. She likes the night life and the Bohemian life in Berlin. Berlin was actually strongly anti Nazi in the pre war years, filled as it was with gays, artists, free thinkers, academics, scientists and people who were not impressed by a race baiting demagogue who had one simple message which he simply kept repeating: "You feel like losers; I'm going to make you feel like a winner again."
Mad Dog was astonished by the obscene excess of wealth visible in Catherine's palaces--in all the palaces--where, apparently, the empress awoke every day and dreamed up some new way to spend boat loads of money in some revolting new way. All you have to do is to walk the halls of these monuments to pathological ego and you know why the Russians had to have a revolution. They had workers all over these palaces and they must have taken home tales of what they saw, what they were working on, even if they were being paid.
The wonder is the Communists worked so hard to preserve it all--our Russian guide had no answer for this. Unless the Communists wanted to march the masses through these gold gilt rooms with their elaborate hand inlaid furniture to say, "This is how these pigs lived. Look at how they lived!" as a lesson in the psychopathology of a capitalist, unequal society where the very few live every day playing with Faberge eggs and strolling among walls adorned with Rembrandts and the best Italian artists.
It is actually a little nauseating, this wealth. You find yourself wondering where all the money came from in a backward nation like Russia, where forests and coal and agriculture were all they had. But there was clearly more money than Catherine "The Great" could figure out how to spend.
You wonder, if we were shown the insides of the palaces of our own 1% whether President Trump would be President today.
But then you see the Soviet era housing blocks, where, it appears, the majority of citizens of St. Petersburg still live today, block after block of dreary, dilapidated high rises which dwarf New York's Coop City, stretching for miles. No housing project in Baltimore ever looked as bleak. And you wonder why they could not have spent just a little more to make these residences look just a little less depressing.
Or maybe, that was the point: Look at where love of beauty and splendor get you--Catherine's palace.
--George Orwell, Animal Farm
You may have been wondering about the uncharacteristic reticence on the part of Mad Dog for the past two weeks: He has been on a fact evading, impression forming journey to Russia and the Scandinavian nations and the Baltic.
One thing he learned is that these countries have histories which go back a long way before Hitler and Stalin, but recent history extends to 70 years ago, and while most of the people who suffered under the Nazis are dead or soon to be, memories persist.
German tourists with ear plugs smiling as their guides show them through the winter palace outside St. Petersburg caught Mad Dog's eye. Our guide, a Russian, was describing how the Nazis plundered the paintings and the Amber Room, stealing whatever wasn't bolted to the wall, so I wondered what those German tourists were hearing through their earphones.
In Berlin, the bullet holes from the Russian attack are not erased, but simply plugged, "To remind us," as our guide, who happened to be a Brit ex-pat now a recently naturalized German citizen, told us.
Her story was interesting. She visited and fell in thrall to Berlin right out of college, 10 years ago and stayed--but once Brexit got voted through, she became a German citizen so she wouldn't have to leave. Her German is excellent. She likes the night life and the Bohemian life in Berlin. Berlin was actually strongly anti Nazi in the pre war years, filled as it was with gays, artists, free thinkers, academics, scientists and people who were not impressed by a race baiting demagogue who had one simple message which he simply kept repeating: "You feel like losers; I'm going to make you feel like a winner again."
Mad Dog was astonished by the obscene excess of wealth visible in Catherine's palaces--in all the palaces--where, apparently, the empress awoke every day and dreamed up some new way to spend boat loads of money in some revolting new way. All you have to do is to walk the halls of these monuments to pathological ego and you know why the Russians had to have a revolution. They had workers all over these palaces and they must have taken home tales of what they saw, what they were working on, even if they were being paid.
The wonder is the Communists worked so hard to preserve it all--our Russian guide had no answer for this. Unless the Communists wanted to march the masses through these gold gilt rooms with their elaborate hand inlaid furniture to say, "This is how these pigs lived. Look at how they lived!" as a lesson in the psychopathology of a capitalist, unequal society where the very few live every day playing with Faberge eggs and strolling among walls adorned with Rembrandts and the best Italian artists.
It is actually a little nauseating, this wealth. You find yourself wondering where all the money came from in a backward nation like Russia, where forests and coal and agriculture were all they had. But there was clearly more money than Catherine "The Great" could figure out how to spend.
You wonder, if we were shown the insides of the palaces of our own 1% whether President Trump would be President today.
But then you see the Soviet era housing blocks, where, it appears, the majority of citizens of St. Petersburg still live today, block after block of dreary, dilapidated high rises which dwarf New York's Coop City, stretching for miles. No housing project in Baltimore ever looked as bleak. And you wonder why they could not have spent just a little more to make these residences look just a little less depressing.
Or maybe, that was the point: Look at where love of beauty and splendor get you--Catherine's palace.
No comments:
Post a Comment