Byzantium Endures

FIFTEEN

HISTORY IS NEVER THE SAME; but events repeat themselves. Gradually, through this repetition, you learn that people are very similar everywhere you go. They have always been inclined to leap to conclusions about me. I have rarely been guilty of anything. Is it my fault they transfer their own hopes and fears onto me? I am a scientist with a scientist’s mind. Few understand this. I have been humiliated. Grishenko humiliated me. Brodmann spoke of ‘outrages’ and ‘lack of discipline’ and used his Marxist rubbish to condemn Grishenko’s attack, but I could not bring myself to take the matter further. I am a forgiving soul. I had been fond of Yermeloff. To some extent I could understand Grishenko’s grief. Nonetheless, it was all but impossible for me to sit on anything hard for many weeks to come. Later, I would give the pistols into the safekeeping of Mrs Cornelius and would not see them again until 1940. Now, they had become a comfort.

Brodmann had forced the doctor to attend me. I had won some sympathy, though still a ‘Viper’ and a ‘Jew’, a murderer of the Tsar. Alone, I could have agreed with everything he said about the Reds, but Brodmann had hovered. Perhaps he had been afraid the poor little doctor would assassinate me. We were due to link up with Hrihorieff. There was a train we must catch. As we left for the station, I felt only the song of the pain, as we say. It would not be for another day that I experienced the stiffness and throbbing agony, far harder to bear and more irritating.

I saw Grishenko once more while I was boarding the train. He grinned at me. I blushed like a girl. Nobody else noticed my reaction. Brodmann was too furious, pointing out Grishenko as my assailant. In all his looted finery, Grishenko rode away on his pony, lashing at its neck and shoulders with that whip. The round pommels of my pistols rested against each of my hips. They fitted easily into the pockets of my louse-ridden greatcoat. I also had my papers, my diploma.

We received special attention. We had even better accommodation than on the Kiev train. The seats, thank God, were soft. Brodmann sat opposite me, by the window. He kept grumbling and muttering and staring out at the muddy snow, looking for Grishenko. I laughed and told him it was nothing.

‘It is typical!’ Brodmann would have me know. ‘Justice is merely their word for vendetta. And this is the material we must work with!’

Strangely, I felt elevated that morning. I felt superior. I chuckled. ‘Worse has happened to me, Brodmann. You should be in my trade.’

‘I hate violence.’ His soft, wizened face clouded.

‘Then you’re in the wrong vocation.’ Our thin friend entered, pulled off his long coat, folded it neatly, and placed it in the overhead rack.

‘I was a pacifist. The Bolsheviks promised peace. I worked for them at the Front. I published newspapers, pamphlets.’ Brodmann sat back as the train began to move. ‘Does anyone know where we’re really going?’

‘Hrihorieff said he wants us at his field HQ. He has some idea of taking Kherson or Nikolaieff. Maybe he’s there already.’

‘They’re far too well defended. Greeks and French in one, Germans in the other.’

‘The Germans aren’t happy about fighting for the Allies and the Whites. They might come over to us.’

‘But not to Hrihorieff. He’s shown what he thinks of Germans. They wouldn’t trust him.’

The train moved into wide, horizonless steppe-land. Filth gave way to the purity of late snow. It would begin to melt quite soon. The conflict might be settled by spring. Hrihorieff’s and the Bolsheviks’ advances were rapid. Soon there would probably be a decisive battle. My only fear was that it would occur in Odessa before I could get Mother and Esmé to safety. Hrihorieff’s progress seemed relentless and inevitable. If Makhno joined us, Whites and Allies might well be wiped out. I was praying for dissension amongst the different leftist groups. There is nothing like socialism to divide men up into smaller units. Those flags were the colour of the roses I gave to Mrs Cornelius: the deepest, blood-red lustre. The colour of my own blood. Pricked on thorns, my blood mingled with the petals: she was my sister, my mother, my friend. Roses. I would not look back. I have no nostalgia. I have been cheated. This is the world. God’s purpose will be revealed in Heaven. I had no Faith. All God’s gifts were taken from me. I am selling the same fur coats (though cleaner) I was in those days forced to wear. The young men strut up and down like comic-opera Chekists. There is one who wears the badge of Anarchy. What can he know of Anarchy? He speaks a little Russian. I say to him: ‘What is this?’ The badge. He says A is for Anarchy. I say why not wear a badge from A to Z to make the Z for Zionism, it is the same thing. He finds me amusing. He is a fool. All these murders and kidnappings. The Anarchists were tools and still are fools. They rejected power and yet accepted responsibility for their terrorism. What did they gain? What did the world gain? Anarchy? No government? It gained more, worse government. Chaos. The universe expands. The universe grows cold. Soon there will be snow everywhere.

The snow will harden and squeeze the Earth. All will be ice. The ice will contract to vanishing point. Then there will be nothing. It is a law of physics. It is entropy. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is the Heat Death of the Universe. It is the end. This echo-theory they have discovered: what is that but Hope? And what is Hope but Faith? They have their ‘echo-theory’: nothing in the universe vanishes, nothing dies. They have done no more than rediscover God! That is the state of science today. It wastes its resources and the public’s money finding out what the world has known from the beginning of Time and will know until the end of Time: God loves the world. This is not science as I was taught it. Mine was a world of machines and engines, not theoretical gobbledegook. Everyone wants to be an Einstein. Einstein had the grace to credit his source. He was a godly fool. What Russians call an ‘enchanted one’. For all that he was a Jew and a Zionist. But perhaps I do him too much credit. How those two Jews confused the world between them! They introduced more superstition into the twentieth century than all our scientists had banished from the nineteenth. Sex? Freud confused sex with affection; the need for love. Physics? They have become poetry. Everyone says so. They build huge laboratories to test poetic theories. Where is the old pragmatism?

The train stopped after about two hours. We were on the empty steppe. An apparently orderly military camp was set up on a nearby ridge. Soldiers began to trudge across to us. They carried large cans of soup. These were distributed the length of the train. We had made a scheduled food-stop. Bandit or not, Hrihorieff knew enough to keep his lines of communication clear. His logistics were excellent. He controlled a wide radius of track. The track and the telegraphs gave him the power of rapid transport and the ability to modify orders quickly. The Whites further South had far less rolling stock or track available to them. They were fundamentally more suspicious of technical innovation. Here the Reds, to their credit, had the advantage. They had fewer aeroplanes, but they were prepared to use them. The Whites put their faith in cavalry charges. They were brave romantics. It was calculating Jews who looked into the Future. But they did not see everything. I do not deny it was a crime. But it was a crime of revenge. It was not coldblooded. I have literature which claims only two or three million died in the camps. I believe it was six million. Stalin killed more. Death dominated the twentieth century just as it had the sixth, the fourteenth and the seventeenth. Memento mori. The Western democracies should recall the Golden Age of Florence. Savonarola destroyed it in a month. Freedom and responsibility are the same thing. The young have forgotten. Self-discipline, not swords, saved Sparta. Brotherly-love saved Sparta. But it did not save those poor, noble Greeks at Kherson when the servants of Satan descended upon them. They say I know nothing of religion. But I have come to religion. My heart and my brain brought me to the noble faith of Russia which resisted Africa and Asia, took root here, in London; in New York, in Paris, everywhere. Is that a dead faith? The true faith of Constantine, who made Rome Christian, who founded Byzantium? There is no purer faith. It is the faith of the Greeks who invented the Christian religion. The Jews borrowed it and handed it back to them as if it were new. Jews have always traded so. Paul understood this. The Greeks give us everything, yet we betray them over and over again. Look at Cyprus. The British are in love with Islam. They give them land for their mosques. They applaud them in their books; they invite them to buy Park Lane. They name their heroes after Arabia. They flirt with Islam as a young girl flirts with the demon-lover who plans to make her a harlot. They are simple-minded. They lack the ancient experience of Russia. Beware Carthage! I had pamphlets printed at my own expense. There is no point in explaining to the British. At best I was laughed at. I used to keep them in my shop. The National Front is no good. I am not afraid of Indians. Or the Chinese who run the fish-and-chip shop across the road. Can nobody see but me? Spies fill these streets. It is like a nightmare. I am the sole person who realises what is going on. Nazis and National Front have only acne and envy in common. Communists and foreigners steal our souls, our blood, our minds. But these are not Martians. This is not The War of the Worlds. We cannot expect a natural solution. The body fights cancer. It usually wins. The new cells destroy the rogues. Only when intelligence interferes is there danger. Many die because they are diagnosed. Cancer comes and goes, the body instinctively fights it. So we should fight. Nothing so spectacular as the Gorynich dragon. Chur menia! Chur menia! But who will listen? Not the Chinese or the Africans or the Indians. Not the Italians. Even the Greeks will not listen. There is a Serbian Church, admittedly, behind the Public Library. And a Greek Church in Bayswater. I continue to be optimistic. I have become more subtle in my methods. It is all monasteries and convents, all Catholics and Irish and negro chapels here. Some of the young people appear to understand. Perhaps we will muddle through. When we have sent back all the foreigners, and transported Golders Green to the Promised Land. But I think it is too late. Oh, Byzantium! Come to us with your horses and your swords to save us.

The train started up again. The soup had been a half-way decent shtshyi, with good meat. Brodmann had gone to sleep. The others read or scribbled in notebooks. That was how they fought our Civil War. Yet every man in that carriage probably had more blood on his hands than a dozen Cossacks. Sometimes cavalry trotted alongside the train. The riders gave Red salutes and waved. If we moved slowly they would exchange shouts with the troops. We were carrying guns and soldiers. Every coach was armoured. Sometimes, as in our own, they had been fitted with a hotchpotch of sheet-metal riveted at random. The windows were largely unprotected. In the event of an attack we were supposed to throw ourselves to the floor and hope for the best. But there were no attacks. Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks between them had brought a kind of peace to the area. It would not be long before they fell out amongst themselves. In common with the Whites, they all had a hatred of the Nationalists. But the Devil was amongst us. Never had Russia been so divided. Only now are the wounds healing, but Islam and Zion still threaten the Slavic race.

I was to see Hrihorieff the next day. Following his usual habit he had taken over a good-sized town. Mounted on a white Arab, like Skoropadskya’s, he was reviewing his troops: motley, swaggering Cossacks in a thousand varieties of clothing, armed with good carbines. Their ponies, as always, were lovingly groomed. The Zaporizhian Ataman was fairly short, his head was shaven, he had grey, Mongolian features, but he was no play-actor. He handled his horse well. His uniform was ‘pure’ Cossack, without any stupid antique adornments. He drew his strength from his troops as Constantine did when he returned from England to claim the Roman Empire. He was a true soldier. He had served bravely in the War. He laughed, he gesticulated, but his horse was always firmly controlled, never allowed to skip or rear. Thus he displayed the intelligence and the will lying beneath the braggadocio. This was why the Cossacks allowed him to be their master: to lead them on their daring attacks on great Ukrainian cities. I understood why Yermeloff had planned to become indispensable to the Ataman, why Grishenko was so useful. If Lenin or Trotsky had possessed half Hrihorieff’s manliness we should never have suffered the disasters and consequences of War Communism. There is none, in all that frightful crew, I would have served more willingly than Hrihorieff, yet I continued to be nervous of his followers. Pretending to disapprove of the pogromchik bandits, he nonetheless used them for his own ends, as Queen Elizabeth had used her pirates. Ultimately they might, in spite of Yermeloff’s guess, be eliminated, as Lafitte was cast out after serving his turn in the American Revolution. Trotsky would cheerfully have killed most of his allies by 1921. He invited them for peace-talks or political meetings and had them shot. Trotsky learned bandit ruthlessness but not bandit courage. I am a child in such matters.

The train stayed another day in a siding, then took us away from Hrihorieff’s garrison to a nearby Bolshevik camp. This contained more uniforms but it was only slightly less orderly than the partisan camps. Many Red Cavalry Cossacks were drunk, though Chekists tried to control them. These commissars had far more authority than any ordinary officer. They were greatly feared, as Lenin wanted them to be. I was doubly glad I was an ‘activist’, with comrades who still talked of ways and means of getting me to Odessa. We were thirty or forty versts closer, I think. I was not good at judging distance or the passage of time. Nikolaieff, if that were our destination, was relatively near to Odessa, east along the coast. Kherson was even further east, on the Dnieper, as Nikolaieff was on the Bug. The two towns were strategically important. They were served by main railway lines and rivers leading directly to the sea. Large ships docked at both. With these cities taken, an army approaching from Alexandriya would be able to attack Odessa with its large well-equipped Allied and White garrison. This was the substance of most debates over the coming days. Allied ‘interventionist’ forces defended Kherson and a reluctant German garrison occupied Nikolaieff. Though supported by French or English warships, the cities were vulnerable. However there was considerable dispute between Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks about strategy. I suspect Antonov wanted any victories for himself. Brodmann claimed to be winning partisans over to the Bolshevik cause daily. They were now, he said, describing themselves as ‘Bolsheviks’ instead of ‘Barotbists’. I was unimpressed. They seized on slogans and Parties for comfort because they could no longer fight for God. At least the Whites knew what was of value to them. With better leaders, they would have given us back God and our Tsar. The Roman Empire never fell. It lives on in spirit. God will return to Russia. There is a religious revival. Byzantium remains in the soil, in the hearts of the people.

The train moved a few versts a day. Grubby snow melted and revealed a ruined land; as bandages are peeled away from an unhealed body.

What surfaced, like detritus from wrecked and violated ships, was disgusting: we saw half-eaten human corpses, not savaged by beasts, but by men and women. Peasants were now being shot for cannibalism, for selling human flesh as animal-meat. We saw burnt-out cottages and farms; the shells of honourable old mansions; the broken skeletons of ploughs and carriages; the bodies of untended cattle and sheep, hides and fleeces rotting on stinking bones. It was our shame. We had hidden it in winter, as we always do. But when buds were on those trees not smashed by shells, when shoots sprang from earth not desecrated with oil and fire and human filth, our crimes were revealed. No enemy had committed these atrocities, unless it was Karl Marx. This had been done in the name of the Ukrainian nation: in the name of Russia: in the name of Unity: in the name of Humanity: in the name of Brotherly Love. No Crusade was ever more shamefully perverted. The Holy Sepulchre had been stolen from our hearts. And guilt, as guilt will, made our soldiers even more savage. The tales we heard were terrible: of Jews and Whites toasted over fires on sheets of steel, of mutilations and rape; of the most disgusting sexual atrocities committed on men and women. Spring came, but not peace. In Russian the word for World is Peace; the word for Peace is Us; they are all derivations of the same thing: the word for Us is Earth. That is why we speak of ‘our earth, our world, our peace, ourselves’; why we make that identification foreigners rarely understand. To violate our earth is to violate everything. We are not mystics. It is only our language which is mystical. Because of its resonances. It gives us our great literature, our poetry, our songs, our music. It makes associations a German, for instance, cannot begin to perceive unless he speaks Russian lovingly and fluently. The steppe-dweller becomes touchy and despairing if his land is attacked by unnatural things. The Cossacks fought not for Bolshevism, not for Whites or Greens or Blacks; they fought, purely and simply, against the roads, the railways, the cities. Their idyllic Russia was a Russia of wide skies and small villages, of horses and cattle. If they could have accepted the twentieth century, the world would have been sweet for them. They would have been able to create more freedom than any they had previously known. But they attacked a town to raze it, to loot it, to take their booty home. Even Hrihorieff, even Makhno, both of them strategists of great cunning and not illiterate men, could not understand that the cities were fundamental to their world. This ignorance was the chief cause of their downfall. Control of the cities was the key to the freedom they sought. They discussed this, but they did not feel it. A Cossack must feel something in his bones before he can accept it. It was the Jew, the world over, who controlled the cities; he is its first real, instinctive modern city-dweller. Even those in the shtetls hated the steppe.

Our Ukrainian war was the first great war between Urban- and Country-dweller. To survive today, one must league oneself with the city. Those who leave are at best sentimentalists, at worst deserters. Ukraine was a land of wealthy industrial cities drawing on our mineral resources; of wealthy kulaks drawing on our infinite wheatlands. More than anywhere else in Russia, Ukraine displayed both the dilemma and the solution. That is why we have suffered so much up to the present day. I do not speak from self-pity. There is little of that in my nature. I speak objectively. The problem could have been defined. It could have been remedied. Ukraine could have become the world’s first modern civilisation. Trotsky and the Nationalists between them put an end to that. Two negative forces collided. Ego: they all thought they knew best. Chaos and Old Night were released upon the world.

Brodmann and I became friends, of sorts. He admired me and would often ask for practical advice. I did what I could to modify his excesses. I invented examples drawn from my fictitious Red activist life. As a result, my reputation grew. My engineering skills were often called upon as we moved from camp to camp. I was still a prisoner. Of course, they did not know it. Dozens of times I pointed out I would be more useful to them in Odessa. I was now ignored. They began to plan in earnest the assassination of Hrihorieff. They had received direct orders from their Moscow superiors. The Ataman was acting out of hand, refusing to take orders, winning over Bolshevik liaison men to his own point of view, seducing some of their best people. I was asked to make an infernal machine to blow up the Cossack chieftain. My conscience would not let me. I claimed materials were hard to come by. Of course they offered to requisition everything I needed. I said it was a dangerous business. Whoever used the bomb might also be blown up. They would employ someone not particularly ‘useful to the Party’. I mentioned the possibility of people other than Hrihorieff dying. I was told that those who had gathered about him were as much responsible as the Ataman himself. I heard the whole litany: the now-familiar Bolshevik rationalisation of cold-blooded murder. This, too, would establish itself in the consciousness of all kinds of socialists, including the National Socialists, who hampered their own cause by adopting the tactics of those they opposed. They also inherited the Bolshevik talent for efficient-sounding neologisms. Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin have a great deal to answer for. Stalin regarded himself as a philologist. I was not surprised to learn that. It was easy for him. He had invented the very language he pretended to examine. Zamyatin, with his eloquence and insight, pointed this out in his book Mi (We in English). He had all his ideas stolen by Huxley and Orwell, those poor imitators of H.G. Wells. The Anarchists on the other hand were always bad at inventing new words, though most of their best slogans were taken over by the Bolsheviks. This was probably the reason for Anarchism’s failure. It could not simplify problems. Lenin understood how effective simplification could be. Cheka. The word is a chilling abbreviation of words meaning Special Commission for Internal Affairs. We would be wary of such a name, but we would not immediately fear it. In Scandinavian the word for terror is something like Skrek. Skrek would have the same mixture of coldness and authority: a no-nonsense sound. And how the Chekists loved to use their name!

‘Cheka!’ And off would come the hats and caps. Men and women would even kneel. Russians were still scarcely aware they were no longer serfs, let alone that they were ‘comrades’. ‘Cheka!’ And out would come the pathetic little hoards, or the papers, or the pleas for mercy. And the machine-guns would go cheka-cheka-cheka just to prove what mercy meant: a quick death rather than a slow one. Of course the Chekists turned on one another in the end. Down they went, in cellars, in ditches, in camps, until the name was so foul it had to be changed and Beria began his rule, whispering words of fear in Stalin’s ear. They say he laughed when he saw Stalin was really dead. He strutted about as if he had achieved that death himself. He thought he had triumphed entirely. We should have had a Jewish Tsar sitting on the Russian throne. Luckily Beria met the fate of Rasputin, an amateur at manipulation compared to his famous successor. Stalin was ready to begin an action against the Jews. That was why Beria poisoned him. But these facts are obscured. What did Stalin do, for instance, with .Hitler’s body? To that uncertain, Georgian mind it was his by right of vendetta. Or was Stalin the first true robot; this Man of Steel? Is that the joke Beria played upon the world? In Russia they still call KGB ‘cheka’: it has become a slang word.

Brodmann confided to me, at last, that he wanted no part of the assassination plan. I told him I agreed. As a professional saboteur, the killing of Hrihorieff was beneath me. ‘My violence is done to machines and communications,’ I said. We shared a Wagon-Lit. It had been parked in a siding somewhere to the north of Nikolaieff. We got few reports. Hrihorieff seemed undecided which town to attack first. Antonov did not want Hrihorieff to attack either. He claimed he wished to ‘save’ the citizens from outrage. He really needed to prove himself to his masters, to claim Hrihorieff’s glory. Hrihorieff, in turn, boasted of a dozen conquests a day. Half the towns taken were shtetls or gypsy camps. But his boasting had the desired effect. More and more partisans joined him as he moved towards the cities: firing threatening cables before him as an ancestor might have fired human heads; to frighten the garrisons and undermine their morale.

At some time in March we learned Hrihorieff had taken Kherson by storm. His telegrams ‘To All, All, All!’ came back and were posted up throughout South Ukraine. The city was occupied in the name of ‘The Working People of the World’, but the tone of his messages was clear: Hrihorieff, Ataman of the Zaporizhian Cossacks, had done what the Bolsheviks could not do. The pogroms continued. Even Antonov, in control of Kiev, had been unable to stop the sacking of Podol by regular Red Army soldiers.

There was a multitude of rumours. We were fifty versts behind the lines and received no direct information. I was only interested in Hrihorieff as far as he concerned me. I still could not get permission to go to Odessa. Antonov had become suspicious of Bolsheviks playing ‘happy ships’ with Hrihorieff. This naval term describes what happens when one crew falls in love with another. The Bolshevik officially in command of irregular units did whatever Hrihorieff ordered. We were not all so sure of the chieftain’s ability to hold his gains. This was why Antonov wanted him liquidated.

What had happened in Kherson was this: Hrihorieff issued an ultimatum to the garrison’s C-in-C. The dignified Greek replied it was his duty to defend the city to the last. He had confined leftist hostages and their families in a warehouse. The French frigates in the river opened fire on Hrihorieff’s Cossacks as they swept into Kherson. The French used incendiary shells. These set the warehouse alight. Hundreds of men, women and children were burned alive. Hrihorieff took ghastly revenge. The French escaped, but not a single Greek was spared. They were killed as they fought or as they surrendered. Hrihorieff filled a ship with their bodies and sent it down the river to Odessa: the first modern corpse-ship. The effect on the morale of the French garrison in Odessa and, when the news came, Nikolaieff’s German garrison, was of course devastating.

Kherson had given up her materiel: tanks, guns, ammunition, food. The city was looted in true Cossack fashion. Hrihorieff continued to pretend he served ‘Soviet’ authority. His men were seen selling their booty in our camp, in every village they stopped at: women’s dresses, suits, boots, crucifixes, ikons, paintings, delicacies, antiques. Half the ‘boorzhoos’ had sought refuge in Kherson. The Cossacks had found them easy victims.

Nikolaieff surrendered soon after this and Hrihorieff gained greater strength. Thousands of Cossacks, Haidamaki, partisan divisions, tanks, infantry in armoured trains, began to move on Odessa. Panic filled me. Anything could happen to my mother and Esmé. I applied through Antonov’s field commanders to be returned to Odessa. I received no reply.

I heard a rumour. One of our trains was leaving for the ‘Odessa Front’. It carried Bolshevik troops. Antonov hoped to strengthen Hrihorieff’s units and pretend Bolsheviks were responsible for the victory. With Brodmann and one other, I at last got myself assigned as political commissar: because I knew the city well I could contact Bolshevik comrades already spreading propaganda amongst the French, local people and Whites.

I shared the staff-carriage with a dozen half-drunk Red Army officers, Brodmann and the other commissar. His name was something like Kreshchenko. When the train was on its way the officers revealed their orders. We were not going direct to Odessa. Our first job was to contact Makhno to try to gain his sympathy and help in curtailing Hrihorieff. Apparently Makhno disapproved of Hrihorieff. His support, the equal to the Ataman’s, had been given reluctantly. The Red Army men said the French were weak, divided at home, confused in their orders, understanding nothing of the issues involved. Those Moscow Bolsheviks could as easily have said the same of themselves. They had no clear idea of Makhno’s or Hrihorieff’s political stand. Their distaste for the irregulars was evident (they were all ex-Tsarists). I sympathised, but I had been forced to survive amongst the rabble. I knew at least how feelings ran. Even the Red Cossacks believed ‘Russian chauvinists’ were not true Communists. The Cossacks, they argued, were Communists by tradition and experience. The single fact Trotsky understood was that Ukrainian partisans were hard to discipline. It had been easy enough for him to take over the remnants of the Tsar’s army; but he loathed the peasant fighters. He would destroy as many as he could once they had served their turn. Stalin completed his work. Every Bolshevik success involved a revival of Tsarist methods. Tell me who was vindicated. Tell me who was responsible for Pan-Islam? We have no Cossacks now.

The ghosts of those murdered Greeks hang over the misty waters of the Dnieper; they rise and fall on the bloody waves of the Black Sea. The marrow was sucked from their bones. Greece, Mother of Civilisation: your children dishonour your name. And what if Cassandra had been there to see, to warn them, would they have listened? The good do not listen; the innocent do not listen; only the evil listen. Their faces were smashed with rifle-butts. Their clothing was torn from their bodies. They were piled like rotten meat into the boats and sent down our Russian river to our own sea. How the Turk must have chuckled when he learned with what brutality we had turned upon one another. Those noble Greeks. Betrayed by French and Russians alike. And we allow ourselves to speak of Democracy. We use their language, their religion, their culture, their logic, and we let them rot. We give them up to the infidel. Greece is our common cause and we do not see it. Our standard, our ideal. Those tourists coo over the bones of Greece; those perverts leer at naked statues and make a mockery of the teachings of Plato; they disgrace themselves with kebabs and retsina and silly dances. In Athens, the Greeks sell themselves to anyone; they destroy their honour: but can they be blamed? Greece, Mother of the World, raped by her own sons. So she becomes a cynical, painted whore? Odysseus! We built a city in your name; and we defiled it. We filled it up with offal. We killed your brave men. We stabled our horses in your holy places. We raped your priestesses. We tore down your golden paintings and smashed your statues. But Greece must rise as Christ shall rise; ennobled by sacrifice, strengthened through pain. They beat me with their rods. And God comes to me. Istanbul? What sort of feeble name is that for the city of Constantine the Great, who brought Faith to Rome? Byzantium! These are names to sing. But Istanbul! That is a name to wail from corrupted towers raised by self-pitying, greedy, cruel Turks; to shriek for jehad and revenge on the People of the Lamb. Aйя-coфия...и bcem beκam – ιιρиmρ ІΟctиhиaha... For a thousand years she guarded the East. Even the Turk could not conquer her. Below the trappings, the tired images of Communism, she still lives, the ikons glow, the Mother of God, the Son of God; and the old man is Stalin drooling in his death-agonies. God the Son has not perished. His day is not yet. Byzantium and Rome will unite against the Tatar, the Negro, the Jew, the Teuton. Let the Turks celebrate their Suleimans and Harouns, their treacherous Lawrences. Their oil will flow into the sea and the world shall die. Fear Africa. No one will listen. They are fools. They are innocents. They call me a racist. I am not. Race is nothing. It is their religion I fear. Religion based on hate and envy. Carthage, with its dark and ancient eye, its red lips, its blue-black beard, growls for vengeance. Byzantium shall rise. The drums shall cease. The gongs shall not echo. The snow shall be our own and our rivers will be silver. We defended Europe. We built a Byzantine colony on the ruins of Carthage but it was foredoomed; for the Romans dedicated the ruins to the infernal gods and invoked an evil which exists to this day. I have been there. At least, to Tunis. We must be ready. Brave, free Cossacks and the Byzantine Faith. Are they to go the way of Greece? Will our Cossacks dance and drone on dull red stages and our priests sell dirty photographs in Leningrad streets? Where is peace? Where is the Lamb of God? They took Krassnoff and they hanged him from a black tree. They plotted to kill Hrihorieff. They killed Makhno’s commanders. They drove others to suicide. And you tell me they are not to be feared? You think this is God’s plan? How can it be? Has God changed sides? How could the Turk fulfil His purpose? Are we not tested enough? For two thousand years we have suffered. Is it guilt? Carthage was destroyed. Is it guilt? For what?

Brodmann was nervous of visiting Makhno. He sat in a corner of the carriage and complained. He hated Anarchists worse than Whites. He had probably supported both in his time. He argued that History was not ready for Kropotkin’s dreams. Men were too vicious and self-seeking; they had to be trained to the idea of Communism, as dogs. He was like a religious convert who turns against all he once admired because it has not proven perfect. I have met the type often. He sought to impose a grey vision on the objective world because he had lost his centre, his inner life. Christian or Communist, the temperament is the same. They hated Makhno, in those days. The Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Allies. Not only was he as successful as Hrihorieff, he had been able to hold his gains better. He became a drunkard in Paris. A lost, wretched, confused consumptive whose wife and child left him, who talked and coughed and wept his way to extinction. I was to meet him there, in Paris, where so many lonely Russians live.