...what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper,
none dare call it treason.
(John Harington, 1590?)
A lot is being made of the spectacular stupidity of the horde that invaded the Capitol on January 6. One white supremacist got arrested because he was wearing an ankle bracelet with a GPS monitor (which was a condition of his release after a previous crime). Another got busted after posing for photos while looting the House Speaker’s office. I could continue for a long time, but the prize probably should go to a Pennsylvania woman who is now on the run after recording herself stealing a computer from Speaker Pelosi’s office, supposedly with a plan to sell it to Russia.
What were they thinking about, flashing their maskless faces at a COVID-19 superspreader event from hell not just for the surveillance cameras, but for thousands of cellphone photos and videos? How can somebody be so stupid, thinking they can avoid retribution after exposing themselves like that?
While puzzling over this, something brought to my mind another takeover of a symbol of power — the storm of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917. The crowd involved there was a bit larger — around forty thousand all told, it included many disgruntled members (and former members) of the imperial Army and Navy, and it was much better organized. Still, there are many uncanny similarities. The palace was not well guarded, somebody opened the back doors from the inside and let the insurrectionists in (there is no record of them being given tours the day before). The palace was looted and vandalized, there was rampant public defecation, and many people involved were wearing funny fur hats (no horns though). Finally, the casualty count was also mercifully small — six men and one woman.
This is where the similarities end and the differences begin though (let me note that some of these differences are of a frighteningly quantitative nature). A part of the Russian military, disillusioned by years of the World War under inept leadership, joined the insurrection. The city police did not clear the grounds — they were too busy hiding — and kept hiding. Finally, during the storm the insurrectionists successfully captured all but one member of the government — only Prime Minister Kerensky managed to flee.
So why am I bringing this up? Everybody knows that the storm of the Winter Palace led to several
years of a spectacularly bloody civil war (combined with famine, foreign intervention, the flu pandemic — oh wait...). That war only ended — or mostly ended — with the establishment of the Soviet Union, which lasted for almost seven decades — from 1922 to 1991. What is not known to everybody, though, is that the nearly all of the Winter Palace storm archival footage (like the cover image of this diary) actually does not come from 1917 — it’s either from a 1920 reenactment or from a 1927 Sergei Eisenstein movie. The history of the takeover was rewritten into an epic battle, with battle cruiser Aurora firing the first shot (in reality, it was a blank — but who cared?), and the sordid details like the looting of the wine cellar and the subsequent rape of several women auxiliaries vanished.
Accordingly, my contention is that the idiot selfie-takers did not fear retribution — they were confident there would be no retribution — and like in 1917, they had help (and assurances of some kind?) from the inside. Moreover, I think they were already looking forward to rewriting history and similarly depicting themselves as victors in some kind of an epic battle.
It didn’t come that close. However, I find it seriously disconcerting that it came as close as it did, considering how things turned out after that 1917 affair...