Valentin Savvich Pikul

Devilry

Valentin Pikul

Devilry

I dedicate it to the memory of my grandmother, the Pskov peasant woman Vasilisa Minaevna Karenina, who lived her whole long life not for herself, but for people.

A PROLOGUE THAT COULD BE AN EPILOGUE

The old Russian history was ending and a new one was beginning. Creeping in the lanes with their wings, the booming hooting owls of reaction shied away through their caves ... The first to disappear somewhere was the excessively quick-witted Matilda Kshesinskaya, the most unique prima weighing 2 pounds and 36 pounds (a fluff of the Russian stage!); a brutal crowd of deserters was already smashing her palace, smashing to smithereens the fabulous gardens of Babylon, where overseas birds sang in captivating bushes. The ubiquitous newspapermen stole the ballerina's notebook, and the Russian layman could now find out how the daily budget of this amazing woman was formed:

For a hat - 115 rubles.

A person for tea - 7 kopecks.

For a suit - 600 rubles.

Boric acid - 15 kopecks.

Vovochka as a gift - 3 kopecks.

The imperial couple was temporarily kept under arrest in Tsarskoye Selo; At workers' rallies there were already calls for the execution of Nikolashka the Bloody, and from England they promised to send a cruiser for the Romanovs, and Kerensky expressed a desire to personally escort the royal family to Murmansk. Under the windows of the palace, the students sang:

Alice must go back, Address for letters - Hesse - Darmstadt, Frau Alice is going "nach Rhine", Frau Alice - aufwiederzein!

Who would have believed that until recently they were arguing:

- We will call the monastery over the grave of the unforgettable martyr:

Rasputin! the empress said.

“Dear Alix,” answered her husband respectfully, “but such a name will be misunderstood among the people, for the surname sounds obscene. The monastery is better called Grigorievskaya.

- No, Rasputinskaya! the queen insisted. - There are hundreds of thousands of Grigorievs in Russia, and Rasputin is only one ...

They reconciled on the fact that the monastery would be called Tsarskoye Selo-Rasputin; Before the architect Zverev, the Empress revealed the “ideological” plan of the future temple: “Gregory was killed in accursed Petersburg, and therefore you will turn the Rasputin Monastery towards the capital with a blank wall without a single window. The facade of the monastery, bright and joyful, turn to my palace ... ”On March 21, 1917, on Rasputin’s birthday, they were going to lay the monastery. But in February, ahead of the tsar's schedules, the revolution broke out, and it seemed that Grishka's long-standing threat to the tsars came true:

“Here it is! I will be gone, and you will not be.” It is true that after the assassination of Rasputin, the tsar lasted only 74 days on the throne. When an army is defeated, it buries its banners so that they do not fall into the hands of the victor.

Rasputin lay in the ground, like the banner of a fallen monarchy, and no one knew where his grave was. The Romanovs hid the place of his burial ...

Staff Captain Klimov, who served on the anti-aircraft batteries of Tsarskoye Selo, once walked along the outskirts of the parks; by chance he wandered to the piles of boards and bricks, an unfinished chapel froze in the snow. The officer illuminated its vaults with a flashlight, noticed a blackening under the altar. Having squeezed into its recess, I found myself in the dungeon of the chapel. Here stood a coffin, large and black, almost square; there was a hole in the lid, like a ship's porthole. The staff captain directed the beam of the lantern directly into this hole, and then Rasputin himself looked at him from the depths of non-existence, eerie and ghostly ...

Klimov appeared at the Council of Soldiers' Deputies.

“There are a lot of fools in Russia,” he said. - Isn't it enough to experiment with Russian psychology? How can we guarantee that the obscurantists will not find out where Grishka is lying, as I found out? It is necessary from the beginning to stop all the pilgrimages of the Rasputinites ...

Bolshevik G.V. Yelin (soon the first head of the armored forces of the young Soviet Republic) undertook this business. All in black leather, creaking angrily, he decided to put Rasputin to execution - execution after death!

Today, Lieutenant Kiselev was on duty for the protection of the royal family; in the kitchen he was handed a lunch menu for "citizens of the Romanovs".

“Suppokhlebka,” read Kiselyov, marching along long corridors, “smelt risotto pies and cutlets, vegetable chops, porridge-slurry and pancakes with currants ... Well, not bad!”

The doors leading to the royal chambers opened.

“Citizen Emperor,” the lieutenant said, handing over the menu, “let me draw your highest attention ...

Nicholas II put aside the tabloid "Blue Journal" (in which some of his ministers were presented against the backdrop of prison bars, while the heads of others were wrapped around ropes) and answered the lieutenant dully:

– Doesn’t the awkward combination of the words “citizen” and “emperor” bother you? Why don't you just call me...

He wanted to advise that they address him by his first name and patronymic, but Lieutenant Kiselyov took the hint differently.

“Your Majesty,” he whispered, looking at the door, “the soldiers of the garrison became aware of Rasputin’s grave, now they are holding a meeting, deciding what to do with his ashes…

The Empress, all in heightened attention, quickly spoke with her husband in English, then suddenly, without even feeling pain, she tore off her finger a precious ring, a gift from the British Queen Victoria, almost forcibly pulled it on the lieutenant's little finger.

“I beg you,” she muttered, “you will get anything else you want, just save it!” God will punish us for this villainy...

The state of the empress "was truly terrible, and even worse - the nervous twitches of her face and her whole body during a conversation with Kiselev, which ended in a strong hysterical fit." The lieutenant ran to the chapel when the soldiers were already working with spades, angrily opening the stone floor in order to get to the coffin. Kiselev began to protest:

“Are there really no believers in God among you?” There were also such among the soldiers of the revolution.

“We believe in God,” they said. - But what does Grishka have to do with it? We're not robbing a cemetery to make a profit. And we don’t want to walk on the ground in which this bastard lies, and that’s it!

Kiselev rushed to the office telephone, calling the Taurida Palace, where the Provisional Government met. On the other end of the wire was Commissar Voitinsky:

- Thanks! I will report to Minister of Justice Kerensky... And the soldiers were already carrying the coffin with Rasputin through the streets. Among the local inhabitants, who came running from everywhere, wandered "material evidence" taken from the grave. It was a gospel in expensive morocco and a modest icon tied with a silk bow, like a box of sweets for a name day. From the bottom of the image, the empress drew her name with the names of her daughters with an indelible pencil, Vyrubova signed below; around the list with a frame were placed the words: YOUR - SAVE - US

* in italics in this text are quotes from Pikul's novel "Unclean Power"

By the 1970s, the process of rebirth of the creative intelligentsia was in full swing in the Soviet Union. Writers, actors, artists, whose ancestors were workers and peasants, continuing to create ideologically correct works commissioned by the party, behind the scenes with great pleasure tried on the images of high-born nobles, separated from the plebs by high origin.

In creative companies, where entry was open only to a select few, it became fashionable to regret the "Russia we lost." More than a decade remained before the release of this slogan into the open public space, however, those who in the future will carry the idea to the masses, shell-shocked by perestroika, have already “ripe”.

It was still far from canonization Romanovs, but advanced Soviet creators were already morally delighted with the "innocently murdered Nikolay Romanov, his wife and children." Given the ambiguity of the royal couple, the emphasis in these "kitchen confessions", of course, was placed on the children who were shot.

And now, at the moment when the "underground rehabilitation" of the Romanovs in creative circles was gaining momentum, thunder struck.

Let's not think that Nicholas II had no ideals. It is completely incomprehensible why, but he turned this ideal into the past of Russia: the emperor preached at the court the cult of his ancestor - Alexei Mikhailovich (erroneously called the “quietest” tsar in history). The Winter Palace senselessly copied the reign of the second Romanov, which had died out over the centuries! Count Sheremetev, a prominent connoisseur of boyar antiquity, acted as director of costume balls, which were held with Asian pomp. Nicholas II liked to dress in ancient barmas, and the tsarina played the role of the beautiful Natalia Naryshkina. The courtiers in the clothes of the Moscow boyars drank, grimacing, grandfather's meads and said: "Rederer is still better!" The “gatherings of young ladies” - girls and ladies of high society - came into fashion. Singing along with their sovereign, the ministers rebuilt office rooms in the manner of an old choir and received the tsar in them, while maintaining the clumsy forms of etiquette of the 17th century ... Ancient Slavicisms sounded strange on the telephones: for better, better, like, because ... The tsar was madly in love with these performances.

"Bloody reign - and the most colorless"

In the era of perestroika, the writer's book Valentina Pikulya turned into real bestsellers. A different view of Russian history, far from the classical Soviet canons, aroused tremendous interest among readers. But among Pikul's novels, the publishers preferred to bypass the one that was published in a greatly abridged form in 1979 under the title "At the Last Line". The real name given by the author is “Unclean Force. A political novel about the decay of the autocracy, about the dark forces of the court camarilla and the bureaucracy crowding around the throne; the chronicle of that period which is called the reaction between two revolutions; as well as a reliable story about the life and death of the "holy devil" Rasputin who led the satanic dance of the last "God's anointed"".

Nicholas II had a reputation in everyday life as un charmeur (that is, a charmer) ... A sweet and delicate colonel, who knows how, when necessary, to stand modestly on the sidelines. He will offer you to sit down, inquire about your health, open a cigarette case and say: “Pra-ashu you ...”)... But it was the reign of Nicholas II that was the most cruel and villainous, and it was not for nothing that he received the nickname Bloody. Bloody reign - and the most colorless. The picture of his reign was splattered abundantly with blood by Nicholas II, but the lifeless brush of the tsar did not reflect on the canvas a single glimpse of his autocratic personality.

All-Russian Grishka

In the early 1970s, Pikul took on a topic that seemed to be studied, but, paradoxically, little known. The reign of the last Russian emperor in the USSR has always been viewed exclusively through the prism of the activities of the revolutionaries.

Pikul pushed aside the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks, taking on the Romanovs themselves and the Russian elite of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike earlier historical eras, this time period was captured in the memoirs of contemporaries who held different political views. From these testimonies, a portrait of the era of the decay of the great empire was formed, when Grigory Rasputin became perhaps the main figure in the life of the country.

“The depraved camarilla, which hatched Grishka from a church egg in its court incubator, seems to have no idea what would come of it. And in the parables of Solomon it is said: “Have you seen a man agile in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before the simple." Rasputin firmly understood this biblical truth.

- And why should I stomp in front of the people? I'll sit... I'd rather stand in front of the kings. From their table, even the garbage can be greasy. From a single crumb of the royal age you will be full! .. "

Arguments and Facts

Among the claims that will be made against Valentin Pikul in connection with the "Unclean Force", there will be accusations of non-historicity. In fact, everything is exactly the opposite - this is probably the most documentary book of all that was created by Pikul. The bibliography of the author's manuscript contains 128 titles, including both memoirs, diaries of that era, and verbatim reports of interrogations and testimony of 59 top ministers, gendarmes and officials of the Russian Empire, given in 1917 in the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government.

In a great empire, a powerful monarch, who knew how to keep the country in his fist, leaves the throne to his son, who is not even close to being endowed with a father's character, but tries to copy the manner of his government. The growing crisis is aggravated by the fact that the new emperor has a wife, whose nature was not tolerated even by the closest people. The problems of the empress push her towards mysticism, the search for a messiah, which for her becomes a clever peasant, a lover of booze and a female, Grigory Rasputin. Having no education, but able to influence people, Rasputin begins to skillfully manipulate the royal couple, becoming an indispensable figure for them. And all this against the background of the degradation of the organs of state administration of the empire, the inability of the monarch to follow the path of timely reforms.

Valentin Pikul did not invent anything in this novel. He simply brought a mirror in which he reflected the entire state of the reign of the last emperor. It did not fit into the popular print, which in the same period was created in the kitchens of Soviet creators, "sick" with "lost Russia".

"For Rasputin they will deal with me"

Forgive this writer could not. The work was created in 1972-1975, and even then Pikul faced threats.

“This novel has a very strange and too complicated fate,” the author himself wrote, “I remember that I had not yet started writing this book, when even then I began to receive dirty anonymous letters warning me that they would deal with me for Rasputin. The threats wrote that you, they say, write about anything, but just don’t touch Grigory Rasputin and his best friends.”

Pikul for "Unclean Forces" were from two sides - the threats of the admirers of the imperial family from the "creative kitchens" were combined with the dissatisfaction of the main party ideologist Mikhail Suslov. The latter considered, and, probably, not without reason, in unsightly pictures from the life of the royal environment, parallels with the degradation of the party nomenclature of the era Leonid Brezhnev.

“Many years have passed, a vacuum of ominous silence has developed around my novel and my name - they simply hushed me up and did not print. Meanwhile, historians sometimes told me: we don’t understand why you were beaten? After all, you did not discover anything new, everything that you described in the novel was published in the Soviet press back in the twenties ... ”, admitted Valentin Pikul.

The writer, who passed away in the summer of 1990, managed to see the first publications of the full version of Unclean Forces. However, he had no idea that a few years later the book about Rasputin and the Romanovs would be declared an unspoken taboo.

An inconvenient truth

The canonization of the imperial family turned the "Unclean Force" in the eyes of a certain part of the public into something blasphemous. At the same time, the hierarchs of the church themselves noted that the Romanovs were canonized for martyrdom, and not for the lifestyle they led.

But people from those very kitchens of the "creators of the 1970s" are ready to declare war on anyone who dares to put a mirror on the last Romanovs.

People's Artist of the RSFSR Nikolai Gubenko, who staged "Unclean Force" in 2017 at the "Commonwealth of Taganka Actors" theater, gathered full houses and accusations of slandering the imperial family.

As in the case of the novel, those who blame the authors of the performance ignore the main thing - it is based solely on evidence and documents of the era.

“God's anointed ones” had already degraded to such an extent that they regarded the abnormal presence of Rasputin with their “highly named” persons as a normal phenomenon of autocratic life. Sometimes it even seems to me that Rasputin was to some extent a kind of drug for the Romanovs. It became necessary for Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna, just as a drunkard needs a glass of vodka, as a drug addict needs regular injections of drugs under the skin ... Then they come to life, then their eyes shine again!

There is a very striking moment in the performance staged by Gubenko - against the backdrop of shots of the “dashing 90s”, the boots of the invisible, but present Grishka Rasputin, creak across the stage.

Even now he is invisibly grinning over the shoulder of those who, instead of the truth about the era of Nicholas II, create a false picture of universal grace. A picture that can lead to only one thing - a new repetition of historical mistakes, to a new large-scale catastrophe in Russia.

There was no "Russia that we lost." She destroyed herself, Pikul assured in his best novel.

(A participant in the review competition and all that. Having listened to the comments of strict critics, I added a few words about the peculiarities of the artistic style and the relevance of the book in our time.)

In general, I love the work of V.S. Pikul. His historical works are easy to read, quickly remembered. At one time, thanks to his books, I successfully passed the exam in history at the 4th year of university, which added even more weight to the writer in my eyes. In his books, Pikul took over from Karamzin and successfully delivered it to modern readers, passing it on to future generations. His goal was to compile a kind of artistic historical encyclopedia from the 16th century to modern times.

The author was in love with Russian history and collected so much material for each book that the text then had to be cut in three, leaving only the most important. At one time, his works were so popular that when one of his new novels, The Favorite, was sold, a crowd of pushing buyers squeezed out the windows in a bookstore. But the writer did not consider this novel his masterpiece. The main creative success for him was the novel "Unclean Power", which tells about the pre-revolutionary years of the 20th century. The novel was published with huge bills in 1979, and the full edition was published only 10 years later.

In the preface, Pikul wrote how difficult it was to publish this book, how he was threatened, he did not mention only that he was severely beaten for it. What was the reason for this? The author himself explained this in subsequent reprints with a brief preface, where he said that the crooks and corrupt officials of his contemporary times easily recognized themselves in the crooks and corrupt officials of the pre-revolutionary times.

Pikul always said that the study of history allows not only to know the past, but also to understand the present, and even to foresee the future. That is why, in his last interview in 1990, he extremely accurately predicted all the future problems of Russia and frankly did not share the enthusiasm about the upcoming reforms and democracy (“I told Tose then: “There was a revolution and all sorts of rubbish climbed into the stands. Nothing. The more they talk the less they write"). He also spoke about the importance of historical memory, that a person who does not remember his history is doomed to step on the old rake again and again, repeating past historical mistakes.

The novel "Unclean Power" describes with merciless accuracy all the cancerous tumors that corroded Russia: the unprecedented flourishing of mysticism and clericalism, and the blatant unprofessionalism of careerists striving for power, and the general plunder of the state budget, and the disregard for the tsar's elite towards their own people, which were all taxes and hardships of the war with Japan and Germany have been dumped. Of course, the fish rots from the head, so Pikul saw the root cause of the situation in the personality and character of Nicholas II. The author traces the reign of the last Russian tsar from the coronation and Khodynka to the abdication and revolution, noting his successes and failures, naming the direct culprits of political failures and mistakes.

However, the main place is given to the “evil spirits” - a fatal combination of circumstances that led to the royal throne of the Tobolsk whip Rasputin, who was a real symbol of the death of tsarist Russia. I had to see new history textbooks at the institute, where “Elder Gregory” is portrayed almost as a holy ascetic. Fortunately, these textbooks did not go beyond the institute, but the very tendency to “whitewash black males” is already alarming. Recall at least the memorial plaque of General Mannerheim, who starved 4,000 Russians in concentration camps, who strangled Leningrad with a blockade ring, or the film “Admiral”, where it is bashfully silent about how the brave Admiral Kolchak after the revolution became one of the commanders of the army fighting against the Russian people of the Entente, created military dictatorship on the corpses of not only the Bolsheviks, but also civilians, and also indirectly participated in the plunder of Russia by England and Canada, since during his reign almost 2/3 of its gold reserves were taken out of Russia. Thus, the subsequent devastation and famine of the 20-30s have their own name and surname, and only an enemy of Russia can admire such a person.

Many, many similar names and surnames will be in the novel "Unclean Force", and everyone will be rewarded according to their deserts. The most interesting thing is that almost every hero of the book can be chosen as a prototype of a modern historical figure. Provocateur and brawler Purishkevich - VV Zhirinovsky. Monk Iliodor - Archdeacon A.V. Kuraev. The events of the book with some mystical ruthlessness paint us a picture of modern Russia. I don’t know if we will wait for wagons with icons sent to the front instead of shells, and bandit pogroms that have religious overtones, but are lost because of the total corruption and disintegration of the war army, the lack of rights of the poor in front of those in power, the decline of morality, complete degradation in art (take, for example, modern Russian cinema), a suffocating economy and a dying social component of the country (medicine, education, pensions) - do not leave the slightest chance for a successful end to the existing order of things and the political system. This is what the author tried to say, who wrote this novel back in the period of Brezhnev's "stagnation".
Pikul painstakingly worked on the text of his works. He proudly wrote that his collection of historical documents and photographs made up a whole library, and more and more often, to letters from historians offering their help and a list of necessary documents and books, he had to answer: "Thank you, I already have all this."

Pikul wrote novels in a peculiar way. He rarely followed the method of historicity in the dialogues of the characters, rightly believing that the modern reader simply will not understand all sorts of "better" and "better". But he was very attentive to the depiction of historical events and the characters of the heroes. The text of any novel by Pikul includes entire passages from real historical documents and memoirs, so that we can literally hear the voices of a bygone era. These passages sometimes differ in style and view of certain events (one of the critics called this authorial technique “kaleidoscopic vision”), which helps us look at the phenomenon under discussion from different points of view. In addition to this technique, we can name another one - Pikul does not know how to write boringly and abstrusely, even a modern schoolboy can read his book with interest.

I strongly advise everyone to read this novel - adults and schoolchildren. This is a warning novel, a prophecy novel about what can happen to a country if an unsuitable person becomes its head, whose power will be absolute.

One of the most significant and important novels, one of the best writers who worked in the genre of military literature, Pikul S.V. This novel is dedicated not to some event from the Second World War, but to another of the not few tragedies of the Russian people and the collapse of Russian history, namely the fall of the Great and, as it seemed at that time, indestructible Empire, at the time of the beginning of the twentieth century, but is dedicated to the work only a great tragedy, but also a man whose history is still shrouded in many unsolved mysteries, to be more precise, this is Grigory Rasputin. What was the reason for such an unusual influence on such a powerful family of those years. What did the last of the Emperors, Nicholas II, find in this peasant, and how did the rise of an ordinary person to such high ranks end?

Pikul himself gives a very negative assessment of such an unusual and mysterious person who managed to achieve such high ranks and titles through his skills and talents. The author writes that there is literally nothing holy in Rasputin and he is completely a bad person without a particle of anything good. He describes him as a lustful and terrible man who somehow managed to penetrate into the highest strata of the social and political sphere. Pikul has no pity and no sympathy at all and simply denounces the "holy devil" in all respects.

In the very work of the event and the number of characters described and introduced, it rushes by with such speed and speed that all this can be compared with a team that, foolishly, was harnessed by enraged horses that run with all their might and is driven not by an ordinary coachman, but by an old and a crazy old man dressed in a black undershirt and with a beard that blows in the wind. The death of the prime minister, whose name was Stolypin, begins the First World War and as a completion to all the horror that the Russian people, the red terror and the revolution should experience in the blessed years. The novel literally captures you completely from the very beginning and does not let go until the very end.

Of all this, it is worth highlighting that the main idea of ​​the novel is that a person needs to be interested in his own homeland and its history. It is necessary to do so that future generations, who will succeed us further and further, learn from our mistakes and never again allow what happened in the bloodiest and most terrible moments of our history, and what preceded this evil.

Picture or drawing Evil spirits

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Less than a year after the publication of the first separate edition of M. Kasvinov's book, the magazine Our Contemporary began printing the novel by the popular and, of course, talented writer V. S. Pikul "At the Last Line". There is also another interesting coincidence. According to the writer, he sat down for the novel on September 3, 1972 - following the appearance of the beginning of Kasvinov's book in the magazine (the August issue of Zvezda of the same year). It was completed by V. Pikul on January 1, 1975. Our Contemporary published the novel in four issues in 1979.

... The demon beguiled him to compose this false and slanderous novel about Nicholas II and Grigory Rasputin, - A. Segen, the current head of the prose department of Our Contemporary, A. Segen, assesses this work of Pikul. - Why? Unclear. Knowing, for example, that the scar on [Emperor] Nikolai’s head was left from a trip to Japan, where an overly zealous samurai attacked the Russian Tsar with a saber, Pikul composed a scene in which young Nikolai urinates in an Orthodox Serbian church and receives a well-deserved blow with a saber for this on the head from a Serbian policeman. And such examples in Pikul's novel are a dime a dozen. This is all the more insulting, since Valentin Savvich was a truly remarkable writer and patriot of our Motherland!

The first separate edition of Pikul's novel was published in the year of the "volley ejection" of the book by M.K. Kasvinov (1989).

Since then, this work, published under the title "Unclean Force", was published annually in mass editions until 1995. During this time, the total circulation of the two-volume edition amounted to more than 700 thousand copies.

1990 The height of the prayer standing of the Orthodox for the glorification of the holy Royal Martyrs. “July 13,” writes A. Segen, “Pikul celebrates his 62nd birthday. Three days later, on July 16, he does not feel well all day, and on the night of the 16th to the 17th, precisely on the anniversary of the execution of the Royal Family, Valentin Savvich dies of a heart attack. What's this? The Omen? If so, a sign of what? The fact that Tsar Nicholas called him to court, or the fact that the Tsar forgave the writer? .. "

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At the last line on October 26, in the evening, I was present at a meeting of the government, when an orderly entered, handed General Shatilov a telegram from General Kutepov transmitted by south. Having run through the telegram, General Shatilov handed it to me. General Kutepov reported that in view of

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At the last line In her graceful, intoxicating movement to power, Agrippina ceased to take into account the presence of a husband. However, with all the weakness of the spirit and body, Claudius had supporters who were infuriated by the power of a woman. Warmed up by them, the emperor allowed himself a few

From the book Peasant Civilization in Russia author Berdinskikh Viktor Arsentievich

Chapter 8 A terrible enemy - fire - could destroy everything acquired over many years of hard work in a few minutes. The peasant could

From the book Battles that changed the course of history 1945-2004 author Baranov Alexey Vladimirovich

Part XIV AT THE LAST LINE (INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL CRISES) 64. The new balance of power in post-war world politics

From the book Legends and Myths of Russia author Maksimov Sergey Vasilievich

DEVILRY

From the book Myths and mysteries of our history author Malyshev Vladimir

"Unclean Power" A real scandal was caused by his novel "Unclean Power" ("At the last line"), dedicated to Rasputin. It was said that the wife of Leonid Ilyich did not like the novel. Too frank was the similarity of orgies and outrages that were going on in the decayed

From the book Complete Works. Volume 27. August 1915 - June 1916 author Lenin Vladimir Ilyich

At the last line The transformation of individuals from radical social democrats and revolutionary Marxists into social chauvinists is a phenomenon common to all warring countries. The current of chauvinism is so swift, stormy and strong that everywhere a number of spineless or outlived leftists