His recorded dialogues, though purportedly a melting pot for the ideas of all participants, invariably became a showcase for Krishnamurti’s point of view, to which other interlocutors would happily defer; or object at their peril. The usual pattern was to begin with generalisations, the whole group contributing, before the discussion became more specifically centered on one of Krishnamurti’s favorite themes. Then one can witness a gradual increase in tension as the teacher’s conviciton mounts. It is compelling to watch such unshakeable assurance. He becomes forceful and, although still inviting the opinions of others, is prone to passionate interruptions, at times hardly listening to what another has said. And eventual pause is achieved, either through the force of his argument or the intimidation of other participants, and Krishnamurti backs off calmly, half closes his eyes, and pronounces his conclusions in an oracular style. The technique and the rather bullying way in which he was on occasion seen to treat his audiences, leads sceptics to believe that this so-called exponent of spiritual freedom was in reality an arch dogmatist. He learned from Annie Besant, they would say, that incontrovertibility was the ost effective form of dissemination.
Roland Vernon, Star in the East, Krishnamurti and the Invention of a Messiah
In answer, I am relieved to report to you, it isn’t going at all. I have decided to give up.
No offense to you, or any worthy ladies who may be reading this unintended, but, after dating some 20 women over the last 13 years, I think I have come to the conclusion that it’s… just a huge waste of time.
Soon after our last meeting in Brussels, I discovered Tinder, an online dating platform; and — oh, internet can be such a productivity enhancer! — through it, I made contact with some 80 women, 40 of which I interviewed at length, 20 of which I met in person, sometimes more than once, 10 of which I had a romance with. This has given me the chance to get to know women like never before, understand how they think, what they want, and what they have to offer, and the result of all this research is really seriously underwhelming: I have decided I am not interested in the product. (I don’t mean the dating app, I mean the gentle sex).
My last affair was the last straw: it’s too much work and too much pain for too little reward.
No more oil use by 2040. There is much less time to act than I had guessed. Emissions must start declining by 10% annually this year, or else by 30% in 10 years. By 2040 we must use no fossil fuels at all. (Bloomberg reports the ultra-rich are selling their oil stocks).
Small particle shield. Governments are commissioning intergovernmental commissions to produce studies, which are uniformly pessimistic, and increasing alarmist, then do nothing, or not much, to address the dangers; meaning that emission reductions are becoming less and less likely to achive less than 4% warming (the once hoped for less than 2% seems already out of reach); meaning that progessively new ideas for tackling global warming are gaining ground. One rising especially fast is filling the atmosphere with tiny particle pollution (perhaps by firing rockets full of gunk into the atmosphere), which, scattering sunlight, would reflect some into space and thus help things cooler. Those with small particle asthma, like me, will choke to death so that the rest of the planet can stay cooler for a while; but then maybe we don’t need to sell our oil stocks.
Plant food is becoming less nutritious. Due to higher temperatures and more CO2 in the atmosphere, plant food is becoming calorie-richer, meaning that relatively speaking, it is becoming less nutritious (you have to take in more calories to get the same amount of protein, vitamins, minerals and fibers).
H2S blooms. Releasing pollution into the ocean has two effects: it increases nutrient content (more carbon, more nitrates) and reduces oxygen, leading anaerobic bacteria to thrive, which, while feeding and multiplying, produce H2S. This not only poisons fish but also escapes into the atmosphere. H2S doesn’t just stink like rotten eggs, it is also highly poisonous to men. This process likely was the cause of one of the last 6 mass extinctions on earth 250 million years ago. One especially nasty bloom is now off the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. Another place I had once hoped one day to visit gone got away.
“The egoism of child bearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country’, the novelist Sheila Heti, writes, in a representative passage from Motherhood, her meditation on the meaning of parenthood, which she chose to avoid.
Conrad von Hoetzendorf’s main idea in life was to attack, attack, attack. We have already seen how brilliantly it worked in amor. His constant badgering of the Austrian leadership to declare war and attack — attack the Serbs, the Turks, the Russians, the Italians — there was no difficulty on the international arena to which he could not see this one and simple and obvious solution — attack! — eventually tired everyone out. The emperor called him for a dressing down.
‘These incessant attacks on Aehrenthal, these pinpricks, I forbid them,’ he told Conrad. ‘These ever-recurring reproaches regarding Italy and the Balkans are directed at Me. Policy – it is I who make it! My policy is a policy of peace. Everyone must learn to live with that.’
Conrad opened his mouth to object and demand that Austria… attack! (what else), but… was dismissed. The following day, while working on a presentation arguing that Austria must attack, he was… fired.
Several years later, he was brought back to high command, just in time for the outbreak of the war. He got his chance to attack at last. And what did he do?
Unlike Germans, who, faced with the similar challenge of a war on two fronts, had decided to concentrate all their forces on one front, and knocking one enemy out completely out of the game, before turning on the other (they just picked the wrong one to attack); Conrad, faced with the Serbian and Russian fronts, decided to divide his forces in… three: one part to attak Serbia, one part to attack Russia, and one part to stand pat and see which way the chances of war were going. At first, when the attack on Belgrade turned out to be tougher than expected, Conrad decided to send that final third to help with that; but then, as Russian armies crashed into Galicia, he recalled them and sent them back north, against Russia, just in time to miss the main action. The consequence of this brilliant strategy was that Austria neither captured Belgrade nor managed to defend Galicia.
When push came to shove, Conrad, it turned out, did not know how to attack.
Which is not much of a surprise, as his military career consisted mainly of commanding brilliantly…. units in peacetime. It is reported that he showed “great ability in reforming field exercise” during his appointment in Lemberg. (One, two, three, four, right leg up!)
Plus he had a very fine pair of moustches.
Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914
At the meeting of the Russian Council of Ministers, at 3PM, on 24th July, 1914, the ministers debated whether, in response to Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, they could risk threatening war on Austria. Krivoshein, the powerful minister of agriculture and the dominant figure of the council, said that though no one wanted war, yet threatening it was probably the only way to avoid it. The minister of war, Sukhomlinov, who was later that very same day to communicate in private that, in his view, Russia would not be ready to face German and Austrian armies until 1917 at the earliest, during the council meeting hid behind military bluster: “I was a soldier…” he explained in his memoirs later, “if I were to hide behind the pleading of military weakness, people would accuse me of cowardice.” The minister of the navy, Grigorovich, said nothing, then privately the same day: “Our navy cannot match German navy, Kronstadt is too outdated to protect Saint Petersburg against naval bombardment.” Maklakov, the all important minister of the interior (given the political instability of Russia), was not even asked to speak; on the 29th he commented to a visitor how much Russian revolutionaries would rejoice at the new of the war. “We cannot be popular with the masses, and the masses like the idea of a revolution a lot more than the idea of victory over Germany.” The visitor reported that his office was full of holy icons and candles, like a church. “We cannot escape our fate”, Maklakov said. He was among the first victims of the revolutionaries in 1917.
I am reminded of an old AIDS-awarenes campaign advertisement, encouraging people to demand that their sex partners use a condom. The tagline said: “Do not die of embarrassment”. In this case, Russia went to war… our of embarassment.
Note: The Holy Icon of the Inexhaustible Chalice is a wonderworking icon of the Mother of God (Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) or Богородица (Bogoroditsa)) which revealed itself in Serpukhov, Russia in 1878. The original icon has been lost during the Russian revolution and there are rumors that the original has been found in a private collection.
Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia
Turgenev’s mother, Varvara Petrovna, loved her two sons, but especially doted on Ivan. When he went to study abroad she sent him extravagant sums of money and wrote him frequently loving and tender letters, in which she expressed her ideas about his future living by her side, with a beautiful wife she, the mother, would of course approve of, either on their country estate, or perhaps in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, where he would perhaps engage in some official career. Only would he write her more often, and would he soon come back.
Turgenev did not write often, and came home ever more rarely, and stayed less and less, perhaps because he was growing sick of Russia (the Holy Mother Russia, as the phrase has it) but perhaps also because he was… “a little too much in the son”, as Hamlet says. “You are my star, she wrote to him, “like a thread and a needle, the thread must follow where the needle goes.” “I love you both passionately, but you especially”, “Jean (i.e. Ivan) is my own sun, I see nothing but him, and when he is in eclipse, I see nothing. I don’t know where I am anymore.” “My dear fille, my Jeanette, I alone conceived you, all that I am, you are.” Etc. Etc.
Turgenev would use similar language in his love letters to Pauline Viardot; but, understandably, he felt embarassed by such letters from his mother, and overwhelmed by her pretensions on his life and time. To an adult man, his mother is his past; we cannot live looking backward.
Varvara’s excessive love for her sons was perhaps a reflection of her early widowhood — there was no one else to fill her life. She read Ivan’s absences as base ingratitude and in time cut back his allowances, eventually ending them altogether. She cut off the younger son without a penny, too, because — well, because, of course, she did not approve of his choice of wife (was anyone good for her sons except Varvara herself? Probably not!).
To demonstrate her power and displeasure, she visibly doted on her foster daughter, giving her visible lavish gifts while giving her sons nothing. When, as grown men, they asked her for their settlement, to which they were entitled, she produced intentionally ineffective documents, giving them nothing.
In the end, Ivan stopped visiting, moved permanently to France, stopped writing. As often is the case, Varvara’s desire to have everyting, in the end, lost all if it.
My own situation was very similar; and I see many of my male friends struggling with the same. Trying to fix my problem with my excessively loving and possessive mother, I told her, at the age of 36, that, as I have grown up, it was time for her to grow up, too — grow up and let me be my own man. As you can easily imagine, that was my last conversation with her. A couple years ago, I took to lunch the mother of my friend, D., to tell her, “look, if you do not stop doing this, you will lose him entirely”. It was like throwing beans against the wall: her ears heard my words, but the words did not penetrate her skull. Her lovely, wonderful, gorgeous D., he was wholy her own, forever.
I shrugged, paid, and left. These situations are hopeless. There is no pill for stupid.
Avraham Yarmolinsky, Turgenev, the man, his art, and his age
In September 1912, two years before the outbreak of WWI, Roman Rosen, a high ranking Russian diplomat (he had negotiated the treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War), submitted a lengthy memorandum to the Tsar, Nicholas II. In it, he noted that to large extent, Russian foreign policy at the time was largely guided by catch phrases, such as “balance of power”, “the danger of German hegemony”, Russia’s “natural obligation to Balkan Slavs”, and the idea that Constantinople was a key to Russias home and must therefore rest safely in Russian hands.
As regards Constantinople, he argued that acquiring the city would represent a challenge too great for an empire which was already struggling to maintain order amongs its current non-Russian subjects (note that the period between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the outbreak of World War I was one of constant unrest in Russia, with major figures being assassinated and/or major terrorist attacks taking place almost every month); and would probably lead to Russia’s collapse; not to mention the fear and loathing and active opposition it would cause among all Russia’s neighbors and all the major powers. It would be much easier, safer, and cheaper for Russia to gain sea passage for its warships through the Turkish Straits by increasing the security of Turkey herself, perhaps by way of international guarantees of security by a conference of all the great powers acting in concert.
He was even more dismissive as regards Russia’s relations with southern Slavs. The usual argument put forward in favor of this Slavophile policy was that their armies would represent useful allies in the event of a war with Russia. This was nonsense, Rosen said, because the only reason for an Austrian-Russian conflict was Russia’s patronage of the Balkan Slavs. In reality, Balkan middle classes looked for their model and inspiration to Western Europe, not the more backward Russia. Balkan Slavs were unreliable allies and Russia’s trade with the Balkan nations was miniscule. It would be altogether better to let Austria Hungary to expand into the Balkans, as this would tie her down, cause her a myriad problems, and any acquisition of additional Slav population by Austria would weaken the domination of the German ethnic element in Austria-Hungary, probably loosening her German character and thus her relations with Germany.
Regarding balance of power, Rosen observed that Europe was probably more secure in the days of Bismarck, when German hegemony ruled out any chance of France trying to seek revenge for her loss of Alzace and Lorraine. It was wholy against Russian interests to try to support France or England in their struggle against Germany, as her principal interests lay in seeking maximum security for her western regions — something best served by good relations with Austria and Germany — and concentrating her resources on the development of the vast resources of Russian Siberia and Russian Far East. In comparison to the huge potential of those regions, the European issues that dominated Russian public opinion and drove Russian foreign policy were actually of minimal interest.
Rosen’s Scandinavian ancestry, together with the originality of his thought, made it unlikely that he would have a big impact on Russian political thinking.
At about the same time, another Russian diplomat, Aleksandr Giers, memorialized about the Balkan Slavs (whom he knew from lengthy postings in Montenegro) that their chief characteristics were “lying, breaking their word, laziness, self-publicity, greed for money, and arrogance”. King Nikita of Montenegro, one of Russia’s public heroes (his two sisters married Russian Grand Dukes), was a wholly cynical and unreliable partner intent on manipulating Russian public opinion and driven by no other loyalty than concern to save and promote his own dynasty. As for Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Romanians — there was little to choose between them: they all hate each other and show little inclination to settle the accounts accumulated between them over the centuries by means of reasonable compromises. Rather than encourage these midgets in their aggressive and provocative policies, which risked Russia’s good relations with Austria-Hungary, and therefore with Germany, Russia ought to try to remain on best terms with those two neighbors, mainly for economic reasons. The Russo-German trade treaty in existence might indeed be responsible for trade deficits and an outflow of Russian specie, but it also fueled fast economic growth in Russia — fastest in Europe of the day — and helped speed Russia’s modernization in every aspect of her administration and economy.
Nicholas read Giers’s report and passed it to his ministers with request for their opinion, where it appears to have died a natural death.
In 1914, Petr Durnovo, the former chief of secret police, who was the person largely responsible for suppressing the revolution of 1905, memorialized the Tsar saying that could Russia even win a war against Austria and Germany (which he doubted), she would have nothing to gain from such a victory. Such a victory would leave Russia at the mercy of her democratic and liberal former allies. Not only would a war against Germany wreck Russia’s main trading partner and the key bulwark of conservatism in Europe, but the immense costs would make Russia dependent on French and English loans. Having probably born the major cost of the war on land, Russia would get no thanks for her allies. On the contary, with the demise of Germany and Austria, Russia’s use to them would be gone.
However, he went on,Russia was not likely to win the war. She was techonogically backward and would soon run into shortages of new technologies of war, such as heavy artillery, and the fact that Austria and Germany would control both Bosporus and Sund meant that none could be easily imported. And any defeat of Russia would mean another revolution, one which would this time be impossible to suppress, as this time around, there would be no available peacetime army to do the work of suppressing.
In August of that year, Russian leadership decided to go to War against Germany, Austria and Turkey in defense of Serbia’s right to assassinate Austrian monarchs.
Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia
Says Dominic Lieven, the great-grandson of the Lord Chamberlain of the Imperial Court of Russia, and a history prof at Cambridge, in a book published by Pinguin in ridiculously small print.
The argument goes like this:
“In 1914, the eight Ukrainian provinces (a smaller area than today’s Ukraine) produced 1/3 of the (Russian) Empire’s wheat, most of its exported grains, and 80% of its sugar. Without this it would be impossible to maintain the Empire’s positive trade balance on which the government’s strategy of economic development depended. Supplying Russian cities in the much less fertile northern zone would also become problematic. Even more crucial was Ukraine’s role in heavy industry and mining: in 1914, 70% of the Empire’s coal, 68% of its cast iron, and 58% of its steel came from the region, as did a large share of its engineerig products. Until the 1930’s, when Stalin developed the Urals and the Western Siberian industrial region, if Russia had lost Ukraine, it would have ceased to be a great power.”
In 1914, ethnic Russians made up only 44% of the population of Russia’s multiethnic empire. Another 22% was made up by Ukrainians, whose national consciousness was uncertain: it wasn’t clear whether Ukrainians were Russia’s Yorkshiremen — basically, members of the greater nation only with a funny accent and some peculiar customs — or a separate people altogether. If the former, Russians made up 2/3 of the population of the empire and were firmly in control; if the latter, less than half, and Russia looked way too similar to Austria Hungary.
Ukrainian nationalism wasn’t strong in Russia, in part due to various state policies designed to prevent is rise — denying education to Ukrainians, denying them the right to print in their own language, offering them chances for social advancement only if they agreed to declare themselves Russians, subjecting Ukrainian Orthdox church to the Russian Orthodox church, etc. But just across the border, in Austrian Galicia, lived 3.5 million Ukrainians whose cultural revival and rise in national awareness was not only not opposed by the Austrian authorities, but actually encouraged because it was seen as counteracting the political power of uppity Poles in Galicia.
In short, Austria-Hungary’s continuing rule over 3.5 million Ukrainians represented to Russia a clear and present existential danger.
Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia
“It is a pity that you are absorbed in a feeling for a single person”. Thus Turgenev said to a young protege who was about to marry for love. There was something to be said for an unhappy marriage, but the cramping emotional routine of a successful marriage was cramping to the artist. One should approach every woman as a potential mistress: variety, not satisfaction, is what talent feeds upon. For himself, he found, he could work best when the page was warmed by the glow of a casual affair, more especially with a married woman, “who can manage both herself and her passions”. He could not understand this young man’s prediclection for a mere girl. As the years went by, he was to regret not having married, but he seems to have retained the belief that any permanent relation to a woman was harmful to an artist.
Avraham Yarmolinsky, Turgenev, the man, his art, and his age
Oltre Mare 