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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