Saturday, September 9, 2017



How They Shut Down Populist Latvijans
By © E. Antons Benjamiņš, 2017

A countryside Populist is employed by Nature all day long; an urban Populist chokes and enslaves Nature until it dies.

8 The Last Days Of A Populist Household
(Part 2)

The cause of the instability of the Latvijan government in its early days was the failure of the city bred politicians to allow to come to power a countryside oriented Populist government. At immediate fault were, both, the Urban oriented Bolsheviks and Urban oriented Capitalist Democrats. From an in-depth perspective, the fault stems from the presumptions of secular religious (i.e. political) factions that imperialism—the result of federalist ideology—stands for progress.

The problem that haunted the Latvijan Bolshevik leader Peteris Stuchka was that he no sooner entered Riga (1918) and promised to distribute land to the peasants (an expected and hugely popular and welcomed move; PS: the Latvijan streltsy who came with Stuchka were of a peasant or recently peasant background) that the peasants began to hesitate sending food stuffs to Riga, which caused Stuchka to backtrack on his promise to the peasants. This was an unpopular move squared to the nth, and the peasants—having hoped to become as selfsufficient as they had been in times past—refused to support him further. As a result, the unpopular provisional ‘democratic’ government representing German capitalists and their Latvian sympathizers was able to drive the Bolsheviks from Riga and refuse the once presumed liberators of the Latvijan people participation in future Latvijan governments. The ‘democrats’ had a point: the Bolsheviks (let us not forget their roots in pietist religionists of previous centuries) were angry and threatened to overthrow the Capitalists violently. More angry than anyone else were the Populist peasants, whose failure to elect a government that would allow little or no taxes was to bring their self-sufficient farms (still only the size of large gardens) in the woods to bancrupcy or the edge of it.

My paternal grandmother*, her sister, and their forebears were of such Populists and people of the wood. My aunt’s farm was named ‘Soklehni’, which is a composite word: re, Sok (goes, moves along) + lehni (slow): it goes/ moves along slowly. A long time ago the word (sokle) meant the same thing the Swedish word ‘sweden’ means, re: to slash and burn—a clearing in the wood whereon to establish a family homestead.

*It is interesting to note that my maternal grandmother was born Ral, one of whose forebears Johann Rall led (in 1776) the Hessian troops against George Washington at the battle of Trenton. After being hit by two bullets and mortally wounded, Colonel Rall surrendered to Washington, who treated him magnanimously. Colonell Rall died the following night. His descendants thereafter moved to Russia, where They kept their status by serving the tsar in the military and other government professions.

After the Latvijans established their Kapitalist republic, it was no easy going. The country had no resources other than those of a landscape scoured by a retreating ice age. While not as bad as the Russian PM Vladimir Putin is said to have described it: “....little there but sand and mushrooms”, there was no denying that no rich mineral deposits were to be found. What was there were birch and pine forests, swamps and open bodies of water, and fields threwn with stones. While Livonians in the past had managed to get by, their descendants are being sold all kinds of wonders they cannot afford. In a recent Pop song everyone’s third person asks”: “What happened to my airplane?” as they wait for a flight to England to work in a chicken slaughter house seran wrapping chicken necks and legs.

The morning after the bombing raid by the German airplane, I was awakened by the bark of Nero our shepherd dog. The barking was unusual, because no neighbor ever came to the house at sunrise as it was the time everyone was milking their cows. Then I looked out the window and saw four men. They came riding on horses. They looked like military staff officers on a parade field, and they had their parade swords drawn, pressed against their shoulders, and these gleamed in the sunrise something unbelievable.

It turned out that the bombs of the previous afternoon had killed some of the troop’s horses, and the officers were coming to requisition ours. That was a problem, because Brunis had never been trained to either pull a wagon or bear a rider, but knew how to jump mares only. Uncle Rudis, a veteran of WW1, told the officers that Brunis was a stallion kept for breeding purposes. The officers answered: if you lead us to the horses you drove into the wood, we will let you keep Brunis. Of course, uncle Rudis knew that if he did as asked, he would have no horses left to plow the fields. So he played dumb and said that it would take all day to find them. One of the officers lowered his sword and tapped uncle Rudis on the sholder with its tip. Uncle Rudis raised his arms in a gesture of a supplicant. After a look at the formidable forest on the other side of the field that was beyond the house, the officer let uncle Rudis be.

Aunt Emma invited the officers to stay for breakfast. She served them the best we had: scrambled eggs, bacon, milk, butter, honey, chicory coffee, and when They left gave them a big loaf of black bread to take along. Two days later, she served the same to a high German officer, who said he planned to be in Moscow in two weeks.

Brunis was tethered to a leash. As he bobbed his head furiously up and down, he was taken away. To this day, I wonder what happened to him. Did they keep him, then ate him a day or two later?

Brunis had been, so to speak, the farm household’s Kapital on four legs. He had come to Soklehni as a gift of my grandfather, who as a millionaire Latvian newspaper mogul, had presented him to his divorced wife’s (my grandmother’s) sister, when a poor harvest and government taxes had overwhelmed the capacity of her farm to survive*.

*The stallion was gifted to aunt Emma sometime in the mid-1930s after grandfather had retired and purchased a number of breed horses in Belgium for his model farm in Kurland. As it turned out, by saving ‘Soklehni’ from bankrupcy, grandfather secured a hiding place for his grandchildren when our property was nationalized, and our house on Riga Beach (Jurmala) was turned over to Vilis Lahcis, the first Premier of Soviet Latvija. Because VL stayed there only a short while, his occupancy was likely a political jesture: look, the fishermam’s son has moved into a Latvian barron’s home. Incidentally, VL became the Soviet Premier of Latvija on the basis of “The Fisherman’s Son”, a hugely popular novel in the 1930s.


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