A year or two after the first Russian Revolution of 1905, Nicholas II summoned the head of his bodyguard (“akhranka”), Colonel Alexander Spiridovich , and demanded to report who the Russian revolutionaries were-the Bolsheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Spiridovich had probably prepared an excessively detailed report, and the Emperor asked to present in one sentence what these people wanted. The Colonel’s answer was as follows: they want power, but they want to have something other than an ordinary career. Indeed, under normal circumstances, a lawyer who has never won a case, a mid-level public speaker, or a failed Polish priest would hardly occupy high positions. It was only the revolutionary wave that brought “infernal talents” like Lenin, Trotsky, or Dzerzhinsky to the surface.
Jean-Paul Marat was a self-taught doctor and veterinarian, wrote poems and treatises. Everyone laughed at his scientific and artistic works. But the Great French Revolution began, he published the “The People’s Friend” newspape, which became a tool to take revenge on those who mocked him, declaring them “counter-revolutionary”. Those who had ever spoken a bitter word to the unsuccessful veterinarian were taken to the prison. And when Marat was killed in his bathroom, he was declared a “saint of the revolution”.
Revolutions must happen, but they must be treated as inevitable evils. It’s just that the revolutionaries who came to power after them “find themselves” in one case quickly, in another case slowly, and in the third case, they don’t come to their senses at all. Everything depends on the ability and desire to learn and the degree of narcissism.
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Five and a half years, it seems to me, is quite enough to understand that in international relations (first of all), as well as in the economy, education, culture, and law enforcement sphere, one should be guided not by “revolutionary values,” but by the state’s accumulated heritage and with conclusions of the specialists. Do you remember in 2018, the Minister of Culture, Lilit Makunts, planned to establish a Museum of the Revolution? That level of insanity is still maintained.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
