Ross > Recent Status Updates

“During the month of June those people had well convinced themselves of the strong influence of the Bolsheviks on the masses, and they now simply refused to believe that a movement of workers and soldiers could have surged up over the heads of the Bolsheviks.” (Cont…)

“The throng of workers, hungry and dead-tired, scattered about on the street and in the garden, a majority immediately stretching themselves out, thinking to wait there for an answer.” (1/3)

There’s a split-page poem early on. Left side conversational; right non-diegetic. Not written to be read across lines. But on the last page, the left (“She was doing what women do / even then.”) stretches your eyes to the right (“Coltrane leafs through / the voluminous air for some note / to save us from ourselves”) and you must read
“She was doing what women do to save us from ourselves”

I’m making a ton of progress on this actually but it’s not showing because I’m in the many Roman numeraled prefaces. You have to believe me.

“I press against the taxicab
Window. I’m back here, interfaced
With a dead phosphorescence;
The whole town smells
Like the world’s oldest anger.”

Andrew Jackson is the devil.

“A Lakota calendar records that in the winter of 1814-15, a party of Lakotas visited a Kiowa camp on the North Platte River, in what's now western Nebraska, to discuss peace. The season's name, "Kiowa-Hit-on-Head-with-Axe Winter," reveals that the talks did not go well.”

Finished the appendices, as well as the introduction to volumes 1 and 2, which consists primarily of Trotsky responding to criticism of the first volume from a M.N. Pokrovsky, who Trotsky repeatedly clowns on, but then includes the footnote: “I did not realize he had died while I was working on this criticism. He was brilliant and I’ve heard lovely things” (paraphrase).

Appendix 1 is a pretty good essay on Russia’s unique development in its own right.

“The Bolsheviks went after the provincials. Does this look like a gang of conspirators? The delegates agreed that it did not. "In Petrograd you are the power," they conceded […], "but not in the provinces, not at the front. Petrograd cannot go against the whole country." That's all right, answered the Bolsheviks, your turn will soon come the same slogans will be raised.”

Finished vol. 1. Onto the appendices.

“The congress could not make up its mind to lift a hand against the State Duma […]. Its timidity before the reaction was covered up by the Menshevik orator Bogdanov with the remark that the Duma and the Soviet are ‘dead and nonexistent organizations anyway.’ Martov, with his polemical wit, answered: ‘Bogdanov proposes that we should declare the Duma dead but not make any attempt upon its life.’”

“The most dangerous of the aberrations of the revolution arises when the mechanical accountant of democracy balances in one column yesterday, today and tomorrow, and thereby impels the formal democrats to look for the head of the revolution where in reality is to be found its very heavy tail. Lenin taught his party to distinguish head from tail.”

“The press accused the militia of acts of violence, requisitions, and illegal arrests. It is indubitable that the militia did employ violence: it was created exactly for that. Its crime consisted, however, in resorting to violence in dealing with representatives of that class which was not accustomed to be the object of violence and did not want to get accustomed to it.”

Beast mode

“The head of one of the Kostroma monasteries bitterly complained at the end of May against a requisition by the peasants of a third of his horned cattle. The reverend monk should have been more meek: he will soon bid farewell to the other two-thirds.”

It is funny how fucked the Provisional Government was, how virtually every choice they had was either do nothing and make everything worse, or do something for their interests and make everything worse faster.

“Fuchsia stole back and knelt down, putting her strong arms around her old nurse and her brother.
[…]
‘I 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 you-,’ whispered Fuchsia, lifting her sullen eyes. 'I love you, I love you', then turning her head to the door - ‘you've made her cry’, she shouted, as though addressing the string of figures who had so recently passed through - ‘you've made her cry, you beasts!'”