To Walk Invisible - brief thoughts

Charlotte, Emily and Anne

BBC’s prestige drama To Walk Invisible, written and directed by Sally Wainwright, was a pleasure to watch as it charted the evolution of the Brontë sisters from homebodies with no prospects, concerned about what will happen after their father dies as their house is tied (not a problem in the event as he outlived them all) to published authors.  Admittedly it suffered from the common BBC problem of poor sound quality at times, swelling music over-emphatically directing the viewer’s emotions to the detriment of being able to hear what was being said.  But there was much to admire, particularly in the scenery (cgi very well used), faithfully recreating Haworth and the surrounding moors, and reminding the viewer that the parsonage was not isolated but was part of a thriving, and grimy, industrial district.

Characterisation was plausible, displaying the mingled affection and irritation which comes from living in each other’s pockets.  Charlotte is the shrewd ambitious one who nags a reluctant Emily, seeing how brilliant her poetry is.  Emily though lacks confidence, hiding it behind a facade of prickliness and undertaking the bulk of the household chores while the other two write (there is a lot of the domestic stuff shown, countering the assumption that writers lead rarefied lives while tending to reinforce the grim-up-north stereotype).  Anne wants to keep up creatively yet is conscious, as is Charlotte, she is not quite in the same rank as Emily and Charlotte; perhaps an unfair depiction as Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have been reassessed in recent years and found to be surprisingly tough-minded.  Useless alcoholic brother Branwell, with delusions of talent, lacks application and is resentful because of it, knowing he can get his own way if he is obnoxious enough.  And father Patrick is long suffering, always naively optimistic with no foundation that Branwell’s latest crisis will be a turning point leading to his recovery, and taking the girls for granted despite his affection for them.  That he is spectacularly unaware of their prodigious literary activities is brought home when Charlotte enters his study and to his astonishment diffidently mentions she is the author of Jane Eyre and it is doing rather well.

The surprisingly deep bond between Emily and Branwell is touching, evident when they sit on a five-bar gate with their heads resting together looking at the moon before baying companionably.  On a Sunday morning the sisters walking to church find Branwell in the lane clutching a wall in a terrible state.  They blank him and continue tight-lipped, suddenly Emily stops and turns round, not to give him a deserved punch in the kidney but to take him back.  The film is full of such touches: I especially liked the moment where Arthur Bell Nicholls has helped to bring an incapable Branwell inside, losing his hat in the passage, and he and Charlotte awkwardly stoop together to pick it up leaving Arthur on his knee, foreshadowing their marriage; by contrast the homage to Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton with Branwell out of it was too studied and the effort to endow him with a tragic aspect unwarranted.  The suggestion Branwell accidentally caused Emily’s death from TB three months after his own by coughing blood into her face as she nursed him is horrifying.  He never gave anything of value to his family, instead bringing chaos and pain into it.

It struck me afterwards that it would be possible to map Wainwright’s depiction of the siblings onto Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (or at least four-fifths of the Famous Five, though the film’s large but mysteriously little-seen dog obviously intended to suggest the model for Pilot in Jane Eyre could stand in for Timmy).  So the go-getting and bossy Charlotte is Julian.  In-your-face Emily is George.  Branwell appropriately is Dick, even if Branwell never follows Charlotte’s orders as Dick does Julian’s.  And pretty Anne Brontë, dragged along in her sisters’ wake, doubles the feminine slightly drippy Blytonian Anne.  Where the Famous Five go adventuring on Kirrin Island the Brontë sisters mount expeditions into their imaginations.

However, the story is not about the novels themselves, though there are glimpses of what inspired them.  Primarily it is about the struggle of the three sisters to make something of their lives in a world which does not look favourably on independent female achievement, and attain on their own behalf the financial security their father’s death would remove and Branwell could never provide.  In true Yorkshire fashion creativity is allied to business sense, as the scene in which Charlotte, Anne in tow, descends on her publisher George Smith in London indicates.  If practical business also entails an element of invisibility, such as assuming the pseudonyms Acton, Ellis and Currer in order for their words to be judged rather than them, so be it.

After a bizarre episode on the moors with the three sisters backlit – godlike – by a triple sun, an almost transcendental experience presumably inserted to remind viewer that notwithstanding all the talk of business their legacy is greater than something merely produced for money, hackwork, the film more or less concludes with Branwell’s death, his sisters’ fates relegated to a brief postscript.  Unfortunately, by stopping when it does it makes their sad ends seem subordinate to that of their feckless and undeserving brother.  If he was the centre of attention in life, there is is no reason he should be in death.

We finish with shots of the parsonage as it is now, concentrating on the shop selling trinkets which would surely have made the Brontës’ toes curl.  The old place is certainly a lot cleaner than it was in the 1840s, and I was pleased to see a healthy ethnic mix looking at the key rings and mugs; as I recall, during my visit to Haworth the clientele was homogeneously white.  But why suddenly insert tacky commercialism into the moving story of this talented set of writers who have enriched our culture so profoundly, botching the last moments of a fine two hours of television?

Harry Lockhart’s psychic dream

My great-grandfather, Henry James Lockhart, generally known as Harry (1861-1905), was an elephant trainer, as were his two brothers Samuel and George.  Sam and George were far better known than Harry, who has rather been forgotten, perhaps because more of his life was spent in the United States.  Research needs to be done to excavate his career, which may have been as illustrious as his brothers’.

An intriguing anecdote about Harry can be found in the El Paso Herald from 18 January 1904, p. 8, almost exactly a year before his death.  It is headed ‘HARRY LOCKHART, ELEPHANT TRAINER, REACHES MOTHER’S BEDSIDE JUST IN TIME.’  He was in El Paso, Texas, for a few days en route to Mexico City where he was working for Orrin Brothers’ Circus, which had opened a Circus Teatro building in Mexico City in 1894 (Kanellos, p. 98).  El Paso seems to have been his usual stopping-point and he had good friends in the town.

From the article it can be seen that Harry was a popular man, described as ‘The famous elephant trainer and traveler, and prince of good fellows, genial Harry Lockhart’.  Harry was a larger-than-life character: ‘“Business is good" wherever Harry goes’ the journalist claimed, before noting that he had a great reputation as a joker.  On a more serious note, the journalist, who must have sat down with Harry over a few drinks, recounted a dream Harry said he had had:

‘Mr. Lockhart. while traveling through the west recently, dreamed that his mother was ill in Paris. He at once telegraphed to Mrs. Lockhart, who replied that she also had had a similar dream.’

Presumably at this point his mother was not unwell, or she would have said so.  But a dream was enough to set Harry off to Paris: the account concludes:

‘That settled it – Lockhart took the first train for New York, which left in ten minutes, and from there took the first steamer for Europe. arriving in Paris to find his mother seriously ill and praying for him to come. Mr. Lockhart has left a host of warm friends in this city behind him who will be always glad to welcome him back. He intended leaving yesterday, but his friends. Bloom and O'Brien, hid his baggage and he could not get away.’

His mother was Hannah Pinder, through whom the Lockharts are related to the illustrious Anglo-French Pinder circus family.  The dream was most likely precognitive, because when he had it Hannah was apparently not ill.  No more details are given, so the nature of the ailment is unknown.  We do not know how close in time her dream and Harry’s were, nor precisely how similar.

Hannah was born in 1826 so if the dream had occurred in 1903, she was 77, an age when a dutiful son might be worrying about her health.  But that would not explain him making a trip from the western United States to France to see her.  He may have made the entire incident up, but lying about your mother’s health is on a different level to pulling a journalist’s leg.  If he had been telling a yarn, surely it would have been a better one.

The article’s headline implies Harry arrived just in time to witness his mother’s demise, but Hannah outlived Harry.  She died in 1910, while Harry died of pneumonia in Mexico City on 31 January 1905 (family lore says that he had been out in the rain organising shelter for the elephants), and was buried in the city’s English Cemetery (Panteón Inglés, Real del Monte.).  It was almost exactly a year after the spectacular death of his brother George on 24 January 1904, when he was crushed by a runaway elephant at Walthamstow, London.

The El Paso Herald carried a story on 1 February 1905, p. 3: ‘Mrs. Harry Lockhart, wife of the well-known elephant trainer, passed through the city yesterday en route to the City of Mexico to join her husband, who is seriously ill there. “Harry” is well known here and his numerous friends hope that he may pull through and continue to delight the circus goers with his famous trained animals.’  Sadly by the time she arrived he was already dead, and there is a further family story of his wife and young son, also Harry, arriving at the cemetery as the mourners were leaving it.

Reference

Nicolás Kanellos. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Are you gay? If so, apparently there’s good chance you are possessed by a ghost

An article appeared in Pink News (primary focus of interest fairly obvious) on 7th December highlighting an article on a website run by the Spiritual Science Research Foundation (SSRF) which asserts that an overwhelming reason for homosexuality is possession by a ghost.  This is not a good thing as it has a deleterious effect on the possessed person’s ‘capacity’.  The SSRF article in question is ‘Symptoms of Ghost Affecting or Possessing a Person’ and it includes figures to back up the argument.  It seems ‘about 30% of the world’s population is possessed by ghosts.’  Only 5% of homosexuality is accounted for by hormonal changes; 10% is psychological, such as a gay encounter that was pleasurable; and a whopping 85% originates in ‘spiritual causes’, largely meaning ghosts.  Ghosts, it should be added, encompass a variety of phenomena, not just the expected discarnate spirits: ‘demons, devils, negative energies, etc.’.  The spiritual perspective is Hindu.

Unfortunately most people don’t realise they have been infected as only saints, characterised by being above the (scale undefined) ‘70% spiritual level’, or those possessing an ‘advanced sixth sense’, can tell.  That leaves a huge number of people possessed by ghosts while unaware of their position.  There are ways to diagnose it, but the symptoms listed are wide-ranging, often vague, and easily confused with other ailments, presumably why ghosts can get away behaving in this outrageous manner with impunity.  When it comes to sex, things get complicated.  Possession by a ghost can lead either to an increase or a decrease in the sexual drive, so that isn’t much help in assessment.  There are however differences according to whether one is possessed by a ghost of the same of a different sex:

‘If a female ghost possesses a woman, it attracts other male ghosts either directly or through the medium of other males possessed by male ghosts. Such women do not feel the need for getting into a formal relationship with the opposite sex like getting married. They come up with some excuse or the other to avoid such relationships.’

So a woman who is single and not in a relationship is a bad sign.  Oddly there is nothing about the effect a male ghost has when inside a man.  Presumably they remain confirmed bachelors.  It gets really interesting when it comes to cross-sex possession.  The main reason behind men being gay is that they are possessed by female ghosts, and the female ghosts are attracted to living men.  Conversely some women are occupied by male ghosts and they are consequently attracted to females.  The ghost’s consciousness is stronger than the living person’s and can control it in the desired direction.

This of course presupposes the ghosts are heterosexual.  Would a male gay ghost inside a woman be attracted to men, and a female gay ghost inside a man be attracted to females, thus from the outside looking exactly like a non-ghost heterosexual situation?  What about bisexuals; is that the result of a bisexual ghost, or one with a low libido unable to exert full control over the host?  Later on there is a reference to ghosts inside married couples, leading to disharmony, but no mention of the differential effect of the ghost’s sex.  Women should either be spinsters or lesbians according to whether they have a female or male ghost in them so there is some faulty logic somewhere.  The good news is that this deplorable situation can be combated by practices such as hypnotherapy, chanting and focusing energy flows.  In this way ‘homosexual tendencies and desires’ can be overcome, though it’s unclear what happens to the invading entity when the homosexual is freed.

So what about these findings from a body with science and research in its name, do they bear scrutiny?  The first thing to say is that offensiveness or peculiarity of a claim does not automatically render it invalid.  One may have a gut feeling about its plausibility, but guts are not reliable indicators; it’s the evidence that counts.  So what is the evidence?  Unsurprisingly, there does not seem to be any.  The methodology has not been included to allow others to follow the process.  As far as I can tell the statistics have been plucked out of the air, perhaps arrived at by a process of meditating and concluding ‘that feels about right’.  If determining the presence of a possessing ghost is so difficult I’m baffled as to how one could conduct any kind of survey that would give an accurate figure, assuming of course the idea of ghosts possessing the living is valid (leaving aside occasional cases where spirits were said to overshadow the living in the psychical research literature).  The data collection, if it exists, should be released immediately to allow independent parties to assess it.

Further, there is a page on the SSRF website which is essentially homophobic, referring to gay parades as becoming more ‘gruesome’ (i.e. flamboyant), gay pride a form of egotism, and homosexuality a sign of society in decline: ‘Indulging in homosexual activity or supporting it invites sin’.  Russian attitudes to gay marches are cited with approval, a stance offensive to anyone keen to uphold liberal values.  The result of all this gayness, we are warned, will be an increase in unhappiness.  (The counter-argument is that if you want to see people having a huge amount of fun you could do worse than witness a gay pride march.)  The suspicion arises that the information presented by the SSRF stems from prejudice, not scientific research.

Following the Pink News article, Hayley Stevens wrote an article for her blog criticising the SSRF.  What was surprising was how, when links were posted on the Society for Psychical Research’s Facebook page, hostility was directed at Pink News and Stevens – not to mention the SPR’s Facebook administrator (OK, me) – rather than at the SSRF.  Some of it seems to have been because there was actually support for the SSRF’s claim, with resentment at seeing it criticised, though the support was not overtly specified.  Others obviously didn’t bother to read beyond the headlines and assumed it was Pink News and Stevens who were saying gay people were possessed by ghosts (it was generally difficult to disentangle whether comments along the lines of ‘this is crap’ referred to the SSRF’s claim or to the coverage by Pink News and Stevens).  There may have been New Age discomfort that an eastern religion could display bigotry.  One or two commenters were firmly of the belief that ‘yeah, demons’.  Possibly others felt such unsavoury matter should not be given an airing whatever the slant.  There was little calm consideration of what should correctly be called the ‘Spiritual’ Pseudoscience Research Foundation’s unsupported statements, which was somewhat depressing.

Victorian Entertainments: There Will Be Fun

The idea of Victorian entertainments might initially conjure up parlour games of an improving sort, or an evening round the piano exhorting Maud to come into the garden.  The latest free exhibition at the British Library takes a more expansive look at the world of Victorian show business thanks to conjuror Harry Evans, aka the Great Evanion.

In 1895 Evans was on his uppers and was forced by necessity to sell his collection of posters, playbills, sheet music and other ephemera, some 6,000 items in all, to the British Museum for £20.  That was apparently the most the curators could spend on a single transaction without having to seek approval from the trustees, who would probably have turned their noses up at the offer.

British institutions are not particularly noted for having this sort of foresight, but Evans’s loss was a huge gain for our understanding and appreciation of popular entertainment in the late nineteenth century.  If not the greatest show on earth, the British Library has conjured up a wonderful little one to put us in the mood for the festive season.

The exhibition encompasses magic, circus acts, menageries, mesmerism, dioramas, waxworks, panto and more, together giving a splendid insight into the way our forebears spent their hard-earned leisure in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  There are five main sections, devoted to stars of varying kinds, and degrees of celebrity: John Nevil Maskelyne, Dan Leno, ‘Lord’ George Sanger (a distant relative of mine), Annie De Montford and the Great Evanion himself.  Why these five were selected is not made clear, presumably because there is enough available in the archives relevant to each to constitute a cohesive presentation.

Evanion is not very well known today, but it would have been impolite to omit him, considering he has largely made the exhibition possible.  He was a magician who after appearing in front of royalty (there is some dispute about their precise status) thereafter billed himself as the ‘Royal conjuror’.

Maskelyne was manager of the Egyptian Hall in Regent Street, ‘England’s Home of Mystery’, in partnership first with George Cooke and then David Devant.  Egyptian Hall Posters on display tilt at Theosophy in the form of Koot Hoomi and the Mahatmas, hinting that there was often a seriously sceptical intent behind Maskelyne’s magic.

De Montford, ‘the psychological star’, was originally a millworker but carved out a career as a mesmerist, an unusual occupation for a woman, situated on the blurred line between science and entertainment.  To indicate how popular mesmerism was, on display is the music for Harry Castling’s song How I Mesmerise ‘em, as sung by Charles Gardener.

Sanger was the purveyor of ‘something new under the sun, twice daily’, as both a travelling circus impresario and later at Astley’s Amphitheatre.  A copy of his 1908 autobiography is in one of the cases, and its title, Seventy Year a Showman, does not seem an exaggeration.  Next to it is a ‘memoir’ by one of his acts, Toby the learned pig, which I think it can be assumed was ghost-written.

Finally, tucked round the corner is a section devoted to George Wild Galvin, better known as Dan Leno, comic singer and versatile performer, including as a clog dancer and pantomime dame.  He was allegedly the funniest man on earth (in admittedly a fairly small field).

The star attraction of There Will Be Fun has to be the wonderful posters.  They conjure up the greasepaint and sawdust and are marvels of the printer’s art.  Designed to be disposable, it seems a miracle they have survived in such fine condition.

Bulking out the gems from the Great Evanion’s collection there are films, such as one from 1902 of Dan Leno’s family larking about in the garden, and early sound recordings.  Further objects have been loaned by the Magic Circle, including rather oddly the spend-a-penny toilet lock invented by Maskelyne.

As well as the archival material, there are new films of actors recreating the old routines, and supplementing the exhibition is a series of live performances in the library – probably mounted in the name of ‘access’ but all to the good if it focuses attention on the collection.  The curators have dressed the display in a gorgeous red circus-themed paper with evocative gold text to reinforce the Victorian atmosphere.

Performing was one way someone from humble origins, with talent and some luck, could carve a lucrative career in a society where opportunities for social mobility were limited.  Sadly though, a lot of the greats who dedicated their careers to entertaining our ancestors came to unfortunate ends.  Of those showcased here, Annie De Montfort died in 1882 at the age of 46; Dan Leno spent time in an asylum and died in 1904 aged 43; impoverished, Harry Evans died in 1905 in Lambeth infirmary of throat cancer; George Sanger was murdered with an axe in 1911.

However, their legacy lives on in this excellent little exhibition and for anybody dropping in to see it one thing is certain – there will be fun!  It runs until 12 March 2017.

Juergen Teller selects Robert Mapplethorpe

Muffin, by Robert Mapplethorpe

It is easy to forget quite how young Robert Mapplethorpe was when he died in 1989.  The exhibition currently on display at the Alison Jacques Gallery in Berners Street, London, was mounted to commemorate what would have been his 70th birthday.  Juergen Teller has collaborated with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York to choose 48 images. encompassing Polaroids and silver gelatin prints, spread over two floors.  A note at the entrance wisely points out that the contents are not suitable for children, though they can all be found on the gallery’s website.

I can’t make up my mind what I think about Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and my visit didn’t help clarify my opinion.  They were ably selected by Teller (a good choice of curator for such challenging material), but on this showing what mainly distinguishes Mapplethorpe was his indifference to taboos surrounding the explicit depiction of male genitalia and anuses, and I’m not sure the intention to provoke, which must have been an element of his method, is enough to put him in the first rank of photographic artists.

That said, there is a lot more to him than naked men, and this was a welcome reminder of the variety of subjects at which he pointed his camera.  There are still lifes and animals as well as the portraits for which he is best known.  Patti Smith is present of course, but not wearing a shirt, in fact not wearing anything up top at all as she presses her breasts to a window pane, hands up in a pose evoking Maya Derren and so reinforcing Smith’s credentials as a significant artist.

Mapplethorpe is particularly adept at juxtapositions, whether with the contents of an image – a small statue of a devil with a pitchfork about to spear a penis looking like a hotdog – or titles – a classical statue with its arms flexed, as if stretching after sleep, called ‘The Sluggard’.  Gisèle Freund was photographed with one of her pictures of Virginia Woolf on a shelf next to her, rather a startling addition to a Mapplethorpe.  One wonders what Woolf would have made of all this.

In aesthetic terms the still lifes work well: eight frogs on a plate (or is this a portrait? – you don’t expect a still life to have the capability to jump), seedpods, bread in profile at first glance looking unsettlingly like dung; but inevitably they are secondary to the explicit depictions of the human form,  These often have a playfulness and sense of collaboration which neutralises any sense of seediness they might otherwise have had.  If it should seem crude on occasion, most notably in the explicitness of ‘Fist Fuck’, that says more about the prejudices of the viewer than it does about the photographer.

Mapplethorpe clearly had a way with people to earn such trust, and his empathy is revealed in the connection he makes with his subjects, but my favourite of the whole show has to be the dog Muffin pictured looking like an indolent nineteenth-century French courtesan.  Some of the other work is a little obvious or doesn’t quite succeed – ‘Corn’, in which a cob inevitably looks like a penis; a pair of cocoanuts resembling breasts; a grid of apartment windows marred by an ugly shadow that would be frowned on in a club competition; a long exposure making flowing water look velvety (‘Puerto Rico’), already a cliché in 1981 when it was taken.

Such reservations notwithstanding, Teller is to be congratulated on choosing an interesting group, as is Alison Jacques for showing it.  I would have liked to have seen more of Mapplethorpe’s corpus so finely printed, but am grateful these have been made available.  I’m still agnostic on their lasting value, but you could never say Mapplethorpe was a dull personality, nor, with the odd exception (the 1982 one of a television is surprising in its banality), producing boring photographs.

The Society for Psychical Research’s fundraising appeal

In March 2015 I outlined the reasons why I did not feel it sensible to leave money to the Society for Psychical Research in my will.  The Society had been the beneficiary of a significant bequest from late Nigel Buckmaster but was not in my opinion using it wisely.  Since writing that, my attitude towards leaving money to the SPR has not changed.  What has changed is that in mid-2015 the organisation moved from its rented premises in Marloes Road, having purchased a three-story building in Vernon Mews, West Kensington.  The move was forced on the Society by the landlord at Marloes Road ending the tenancy, and it made sense to buy rather than carry on renting.  The choice of suitable property was limited but, while far from perfect, the new premises are definitely better than the old cramped office and library.

The latest issue of the SPR’s magazine Paranormal Review has an interesting article by the Hon. Treasurer Dr Richard Broughton on the formidable logistics of the move, which had to be done in a very short period to meet the date the landlord had set.  It was a stressful operation, and fitting out the building to suit the Society’s needs was lengthy and expensive.  Broughton’s article states the cost of the move, which is fairly eye-watering: the purchase price was £1.2m, with another £100,000 for fees and the necessary refurbishment.

The Hon. Treasurer concludes by launching an appeal for funds, noting: ‘Our first donor was Mr Nigel Buckmaster who, you might say, foresaw our needs and allocated a portion of his generous bequest to the Society that amounted to £263,000.  That leaves a little over a million pounds to raise and we need your help.’  To facilitate the appeal a ‘Building Fund Committee’ has been established, and a couple of days ago a ‘New Home Campaign’ donate button appeared in a prominent position on the website, though a new home campaign sounds more like something you do to get a new home than start after you have obtained it (and paid for it).  There are enticements to donors in Broughton’s pitch: opportunities to name the library and lecture hall, though no figures are mentioned.

Mr Buckmaster certainly referred to the purchase of a building in his will, but did not specify any particular amount; he could hardly have known precisely how much his estate would be worth after his death.  That £263,000 was what was left after other Buckmaster projects had been allocated from the bequest which, with growth, amounted to some £750,000.  To put it in perspective, from the Buckmaster funds the SPR will have spent more on the new website and online encyclopaedia – a budget of £350,000 – than was allocated to new premises.

The back page of the magazine is devoted to the appeal under the call ‘Help Build Your Society’, noting the symmetry between the £1.3m spent and 1.3 centuries of the SPR’s existence (134 years).  ‘To be able to realise this dream [i.e. a new home] in London’s heated property market we had to dig deep into our financial reserves.  Now we need your help to recoup this ‘advance’ and help us pay for our new home.’

I’m all for the SPR having a healthy financial position of course, but less sanguine about how it spends its money (including how little it spends on supporting research).  It’s good news it has its own spacious property, both a valuable asset and a base to provide a better service than was the case at Marloes Road.  But the appeal subtly suggests that having spent this large sum on the Vernon Mews property, the Society is now a bit strapped for cash.  It doesn’t mention that the last building the SPR owned and rented out for many years, 1 Adam & Eve Mews, just off Kensington High Street, was sold for £800,000.  Nor does it refer to the difference between the proportion from the Bucknmaster bequest allocated to the new home and the amount the bequest was worth in toto, which comes to nearly half a million pounds.

My attitude is still that it would have been better to have used the money the Society already had more wisely than squander it and have to replenish it.  For example, to simply replace the Buckmaster money given to Council member Dr David Rousseau for personal projects yet to show their worth will necessitate raising £78,000.  Perhaps the appeal will bring in the required million, but I am doubtful in the present financial climate, not to mention the fact the Society actually already had the £1.3m necessary without having to ask.  On the other hand someone may fancy having the rather elegant library named after them.

References

Broughton, Richard S., ‘The Society for Psychical Research’s New Home’, Paranormal Review, Issue 80, Autumn 2016, pp. 8-10.

‘Help Build Your Society: 1.3 Centuries of History … £1.3 Million’, Paranormal Review, Issue 80, Autumn 2016, p. 36.

Felix Dzerzhinsky

Introduction

It may be thought odd by some to devote a lengthy post to the head of the Cheka, a man noted for his ruthless behaviour, especially in these difficult times when Russia is again pursuing its imperialist agenda in Ukraine.  I began compiling this post before the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and since then have become increasingly concerned some readers may interpret it as indicating a positive attitude towards the current Russian regime and its actions.

It is worth pointing out that interest in an individual does not necessarily mean one endorses his or her views and actions (if such were the case, many biographies would find few readers).  Dzerzhinsky was a fascinating man, but his flaws are obvious, and collecting information about him should not be taken as a defence, nor a reflection of my political sympathies.

In happier times I count myself a Russophile, but the war appals and distresses me, as it should any right-minded person.  Over the years I have attended events arranged by the Ukrainian Studies department at the University of Cambridge, occasionally reporting on the annual Cambridge Ukrainian film festival, so my attitude towards Ukraine should be clear; writing about Iron Felix does not mean I feel less keenly the suffering of its people.

17 April 2023

The Death of Felix Dzerzhinsky

I have long had an interest in Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926); in 2008 I was photographed next to his statue in Minsk, Belarus, then earlier this year standing by his grave at the Kremlin wall near Lenin’s Mausoleum (the plaque marking the final resting place of the remains of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, is just visible on the left, between the trees).  So I was intrigued by the title of a talk, given on 15 November 2016 at the University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities by Iain Lauchlan of the University of Edinburgh in the series ‘Conspiracy & Democracy’, called ‘Conspiracy in the Kremlin: Who (or what) killed Felix Dzerzhinsky’.

The talk hinged on Dzerzhinsky’s sudden death after a two-hour speech to the Central Committee on 20 July 1926 in which he had been critical of Stalin.  The cause given was heart attack.  But was it?  Could it have been murder, and if so, who could have been responsible?  Was this an early move by Stalin to remove possible opposition and consolidate his own grip on power?

‘Iron Felix’ is best known for his role in the Soviet revolutionary government as head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known as the Cheka, though he was also appointed Commissar for Internal Affairs which I suppose would be the equivalent of the British Home Secretary also being head of MI5.  Trusted by Lenin, he was ruthless in pursuing counter-revolutionaries and other enemies of the Bolsheviks.

Minsk, 2008. Photo: Keith Ruffles

Operating in ways not unlike those of the old Tsarist Okhrana, his approach was not above criticism: Victor Serge argued that a transparent system would have achieved its results as efficiently, but with more justice.  Dzerzhinsky on the other hand felt this was a life-or-death struggle and half measures could lead to disaster.  As Lauchlan put it in noting how dependable Dzerzhinsky was, if you had to break eggs to make an omelette, Dzerzhinsky was a man who could be relied on to break them honestly.  It was a position that could attract a sadist who might go beyond what was necessary whereas he did not like the job so would not use it for personal gratification.  His colleagues did not feel his methods were excessive.

Dzerzhinsky died in the Kremlin in mysterious circumstances and rumours swirled around his death immediately, particularly in the foreign and émigré press, his sudden demise used by opponents of the regime to suggest it was a sign of internal dissension.  There was a Russian tradition of violence in the Kremlin, notably Ivan the Terrible killing his son in 1581, and by evoking that murderous history Dzerzhinsky’s death was bound to create conspiracy theories.

Moscow, 2016. Photo: Karen Ruffles

The suspicion arose that the regime was encountering its Thermidor, a parallel with the situation in France when the Reign of Terror was brought to an end in 1794 and its leading light, Robespierre, guillotined.  By this interpretation Dzerzhinsky was the Soviet Robespierre and his death represented the government, post-Lenin, in crisis (more positively it could have been interpreted as the often arbitrary repression he represented easing as the government stabilised under the New Economic Policy, but from an anti-Bolshevik perspective it made sense to accentuate negative interpretations).

There were a number of colleagues who could have wanted Dzerzhinsky out of the way, representing a variety of shades of opinion.  Suspects included Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin.  They had all had areas of disagreement with their late comrade.  However, Lauchlan emphasised firstly that Dzerzhinsky argued with both wings, putting him in the middle; and while he disagreed on some things, equally he agreed on others.  There was no single aspect of policy which might want someone to have him killed.

Significantly, Stalin was not mentioned at the time as a moving force in a possible murder.  Nor did Stalin accuse any of those he eliminated later of having orchestrated Dzerzhinsky’s death when he could easily have done so, though Lauchlan did mention that Stalin had planned to include the possibility of his murder as part of the allegations in the Doctors’ Plot shortly before his own death.  Stalin was capable of accusing others of acts he had authorised, so it would have been easy for him to point the finger, even if evidence was lacking or had to be manufactured.  Later a rumour circulated that Stalin had had Dzerzhinsky killed because as head of the Cheka the latter had uncovered evidence Stalin had once been an Okhrana agent, though this turned out to be baseless.

So if accusations of a conspiracy were lacking in 1926, why did they emerge later?  Lauchlan argued that it is easy to interpret history backwards, reading motives into events retrospectively because we know what takes place next.  Further, history can become a kind of soap opera in which everything occurs for a reason.  Properly constructed drama does not allow for random forces, it requires motivated individual acts.  From that point of view it is easier to see Dzerzhinsky’s death as part of a wider scheme than acknowledge he just dropped dead from a heart attack.

There were a number of deaths in the senior Soviet hierarchy in the 1920s and 30s which happened at opportune moments, and if one thinks in terms of conspiracies then these could be regarded not as coincidences but acts by the state to purge dissent.  However, Lauchlan’s view is that Stalin’s paranoia only developed after the suicide of his wife in 1932, after which he gradually became insular within a limited clique.  By the time of Sergei Kirov’s murder in 1934 he was ready to implicate a wide range of rivals, and order purges using the pretext of a widespread conspiracy.  The political landscape was entirely different to that of 1926, when Stalin had walked with other leading Bolsheviks behind Dzerzhinsky’s coffin.

Assuming Dzerzhinsky’s death was from natural causes, what more can we say about the man?  For Lauchlan this touches on leadership as performance (curiously Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who happened to be in Moscow at the time, attended his funeral).  With his distinctive beard and sinister reputation, Dzerzhinsky consciously projected himself as a Mephistophelean character.  He admired Robespierre, and saw himself in the same heroic mould.

In pursuit of that image and harbouring a feeling of having a higher purpose, it looks like he had a death wish.  He was not averse to putting himself in dangerous situations and despite a history of ill-health, including previous heart attacks, he effectively worked himself into an early grave, ignoring doctors’ advice to slow down.  He perhaps saw himself as a secular saint, sacrificing himself for the revolution, and there is a remarkable group photo, suppressed until the 1990s, with him in the centre which echoes The Last Supper; he even appears to have a halo behind his head.  It may be relevant that as a youth he had at one point intended to enter a seminary.

Lauchlan outlined a possible cause for this sense Dzerzhinsky possessed that he was somehow destined to martyrdom.  He had had tuberculosis in 1901 which inculcated in him the feeling he was between life and death, engaged in a superhuman struggle with the enemy within, just as he struggled against another kind of enemy within as head of the Cheka.  He wanted his life to have meaning, but turned the desire in a pathological direction.  The irony is that after his death an autopsy, conducted by the foremost authority on TB in the country, revealed no trace of the disease – a conclusion there was no reason to fabricate.  Dzerzhinsky had based his approach to life on a false premise.

For all his faults, Dzerzhinsky created an iconic role model that endures today.  He is still popular in Russia at both official and public levels as a symbol of integrity, and there is a movement to bring his statue, pulled down in 1991 and currently languishing in the fallen statue park at the Central House of Artists, back to its original position outside the Lubyanka.  He is not so popular in Poland (he was an ethnic Pole) and his statue in Dzerzhinsky Square in Warsaw came down in 1989, the square given back its pre-war name.  As the existence of a statue in Belarus attests, the authorities there are quite positive towards his legacy.

The lecture’s title was somewhat misleading in emphasising the ‘who’ over the ‘what’.  One was expecting a surprise contender for Dzerzhinsky’s assassin, perhaps a name hidden in state archives for decades, so it was a slight anti-climax to learn he did actually die of a heart attack after all.  That is an indication of our hankering after conspiracies, life as soap opera.  Despite the disappointment it was still an interesting profile, showing there was more to Dzerzhinsky, and greater nuance, than is suggested by his image as director of the brutal state security apparatus.  Dr Lauchlan has a biography in press – Iron Felix: Death, Tyranny & the Pursuit of Happiness in Revolutionary Russia, 1877-1926 – which will be well worth a look.

18 November 2016

 

Update 18 September 2017: Dzerzhinsky in Kirov

I have expressed a rather optimistic interest in visiting all of the statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky in existence, of which apparently there are a couple of dozen across Russia, but now I find there is another to add to the list.  On 5 September a new statue was unveiled in the Russian city of Kirov (named after the Leningrad party boss who was assassinated in 1934), some 500 miles east of Moscow.  An imposing 8 ft 6 in. tall and weighing 2 tons, it stands in the courtyard of the regional FSB veterans’ association which, while it’s not exactly the Lubyanka, is an appropriate spot.  There is a short YouTube video of the unveiling, with the laying of many flowers at his feet, and a fine statue it looks, Felix standing erect and proud as if he was still set to defend the Revolution from its class enemies.

Kirov may seem an unlikely spot, but the project was the initiative of a group of local FSB ‘veterans’, supported by labour organisations in the area.  The statue was paid for by private donations, though the city was happy for it to be erected, with a strong majority in favour on the local council.  There was already a commemorative plaque to Dzerzhinsky on the veterans’ association building and the addition of a statue was the culmination of a long campaign.  The ostensible reason for the location – that Dzerzhinsky twice visited the city, in 1898 and 1919, when it was known as Vyatka – seems somewhat weak, but the sponsors needed some kind of justification, and they go on in more general terms to praise Felix’s positive contribution to ’the struggle for mankind’s bright future’, as Viktor Kolpakov, the director of the regional FSB veterans’ association, said to the city’s council.  To be fair Dzerzhinsky did stay, with Stalin, in the building which now houses the association while in town during the Civil War.

The new statue has been getting some coverage: Ben Macintyre wrote an article in Saturday’s Times with the alarmist title ‘Lenin’s architect of red terror rises again: Decades after Soviet statues were destroyed it is chilling to see Putin put up a new one of Felix Dzerzhinsky’.  While it is a little unfair to lay this directly at the desk of Mr Putin, it is doubtful it would have happened had he been opposed to the idea, and it is reasonable to assume Putin would have sympathy for Dzerzhinsky’s methods from the days when you didn’t have to bother pretending to be democratic.

Also on Saturday, Radio 4’s ‘Archive on 4’ programme was devoted the current fashion for tearing down statutes that embody values now considered offensive, including those commemorating Confederate leaders in the United States and the mass slaughter of Lenins in Ukraine.  Kirov was given as an unusual counter-example bucking the trend, but of course it shows that if there is a sufficiently strong fan base and limited opposition, you can memorialise anyone.  There are critics in Kirov, such as relatives of those who suffered under the Soviet regime, feeling much the same as people elsewhere for whom such statues are unwelcome reminders of dark times, but their opinions count for little compared to FSB veterans’.

 

Update 26 May 2018: Dzerzhinsky in Sofia

On a recent trip to Sofia I visited the Museum of Socialist Art, or the Gallery of Totalitarian Art as some of the literature describes it, though in Bulgarian it is clearly the former: Музей на социалистическото изкуство.  It is part of the National Art Gallery and was founded in 2011.  Located in the suburbs, it is tucked behind the National Investigation Service, next to a large shopping centre, and is noticeable from the road mainly because of the large red star at the front which once graced the Communist Party HQ in the city.  Appropriately the museum is just round the corner from the G. M. Dimitrov metro station, named after Georgi Dimitrov, the first communist leader of Bulgaria from 1946-49.

Its remit is to collect art from 1944 to 1989, i.e. the period of Soviet domination.  The ‘Totalitarian Art’ title was apparently the name initially proposed but discarded officially, though clearly not in some people’s minds, in favour of ‘Socialist’.  The word totalitarian is a misnomer as the institution’s remit does not cover the period 1941-44, but then on a casual visit to the country one would be forgiven for not realising Bulgaria had been allied to Germany during the war, and probably little evidence of that dark embarrassing period remains in the country.

Sofia, 2018. Photo: Karen Ruffles

Outside the museum building there is, as in Memento Park, Budapest but on a smaller scale, a collection of sculpture on display: a mixture of heroic statuary and small pieces of individuals, and to a lesser extent idealised interpretations of the masses they were supposed to represent.  I was pleasantly surprised to find at the end of a path a modest bust of Dzerzhinsky.  According to the plate attached to the plinth it had been carved by Vassil Pissanov in 1924.  Prior to its relocation to Sofia had been in the Petko Churchuliev art gallery in Dimitrovgrad, a new town established in 1947 and named after guess who.  Presumably it was a gift from Russia at that time, but the plate did not say where it had been between 1924 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria.  Naturally Felix and I posed together for a photo opportunity.  The visit to the museum was enjoyable, though there was less inside than I had hoped and apart from a 20-minute newsreel compilation no context whatsoever, but finding the bust of Dzerzhinsky more than compensated.

 

Update 23 August 2022: Dzerzhinsky on film

Recently I saw for sale a vintage film poster (which I didn’t buy) advertising a film in which Felix Dzerzhinsky features heavily.  It is a Soviet film, ВИХРИ ВРАЖДЕБНЫЕ, which translates as Hostile Whirlwinds, though it seems it was also called simply Felix Dzerzhinsky.  The title is drawn from the opening of the Polish revolutionary song Warszawianka, later adapted in Russian as Varshavianka.  The biopic, attractively shot in colour, is available on YouTube but alas does not have subtitles, and my Russian is not good enough to keep up with the dialogue.

ВИХРИ ВРАЖДЕБНЫЕ

Going by what I can gather from secondary sources, it covers the first few years of the new regime and a busy Dzerzhinsky, played by Vladimir Yemelyanovm, is shown as head of the Cheka sorting out various problems: besting the Left Social Revolutionaries, disarming anarchists, foiling the Lockhart Plot, restoring the railway network, and helping homeless children, thereby making converts who go on to work at the Yugostal plant in Ukraine where saboteurs are in evidence.

The film was directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm, and the screenwriter was Nikolai Pogodin.  The production had a troubled history.  It was finished after Stalin’s death in 1953, but shelved and not released in the Soviet Union until 1956 with references to Stalin, played by Mikhail Gelovani, excised (though I spotted Trotsky walking out of a hall during a fiery speech Dzerzhinsky was giving).  The poster artist was the prolific Boris Zelensky.

Update 10 November 2022: Loss of Dzerzhinsky bust in Omsk, Siberia

My aim to visit all the extant statues of Dzerzhinsky has suffered a blow.  Well, of course it had already suffered a blow when Russia again invaded Ukraine in February 2022, an act which has greatly reduced the likelihood of my return to Russia.  But now another has occurred.

On 8 November 2022, the Belarusian media outlet Nexta reported that: ‘In #Omsk, unknown persons demolished a monument to Chekist Felix #Dzerzhinsky.’ They do not say how they know it was smashed rather than stolen.  Before-and-after photographs showed the bust was gone and the plinth had been damaged.

Judging by the three photographs, the bust was uncared for in recent times.  The first shows Dzerzhinsky in good shape, a red rose resting on the plinth.  In the second he looks scruffy, surrounding vegetation has grown higher, and the tiles surfacing the plinth are loosening.  The third photograph shows the end of a progression of neglect.

So unless the bust is missing rather than destroyed and is returned, which seems unlikely, I can cross Omsk off my list.  There is an attractive park there named after Dzerzhinsky, who spent time in the city in early 1922 organising food transport, but that does not provide a strong enough reason to make the journey.

Update 16 January 2023: Dzerzhinsky memorabilia

As well as the large-scale busts, Dzerzhinsky’s features were turned into a range of ornaments, of varying materials and quality, suitable for household display.  These occasionally come up for sale, and I keep an eye out for photographs of examples; I don’t think I am ready to build a collection of the objects themselves to adorn my mantlepiece, though they would make an unusual talking point.

Contextual information is invariably missing, but presumably the bulk of these were made to commemorate his death, or an anniversary of it.  They raise questions of who made them, in what quantities, and what the market was: did people purchase them because they were sad to lose such a highly-valued member of the regime and fancied having a memento; or did they feel obliged to display them in order to demonstrate their loyalty to the Party?  How often were busts of other minor Bolshevik leaders produced, or was Felix a special case?

Update 2 February 2023: Dzerzhinsky bust in Vietnam!

While one door may have closed – the vanished Dzerzhinsky in Omsk – another has opened, for news has belatedly reached me that, going against the flow of history, a bust of Dzerzhinsky was erected in Hanoi in 2017.  It resides, unsurprisingly, outside the People's Police Academy.

BBC News Vietnam carried a report, with a photograph of the unveiling ceremony, which took place on 20 January 2017.  As well as local police representatives there were attendees from the Russian Embassy and Russian Cultural Centre.

The article provides a potted biography and character analysis culled from the Encyclopedia Britannica and other commentators, noting Dzerzhinsky’s patchy reputation since 1989: more positive in Russia than in Poland.  It concludes by mentioning (with a photo) the statue removed from outside the Lubyanka in 1991 and the calls by some for its restoration.

What makes the event in Hanoi even curiouser is the fact that it was not the only memorial to Dzerzhinsky erected in 2017.  As noted above, on 5 September a statue was unveiled in Kirov at the instigation of the local FSB veterans.  Clearly he was having a moment, perhaps linked to the centenary of the Revolution.  One wonders what 2026, the centenary of his death, will bring.

Even with Felix enjoying a measure of support in Russia, the erection of a bust in Vietnam seems odd, as he had no personal connection to that country.  Perhaps the police are sending a message to their population that they are ready to adopt his methods if necessary.  One wonders, though, how much Hanoi’s residents know about him and the role he played in establishing the Bolshevik regime.  Still, whatever the rationale, it’s a handsome bust.

Source: ‘Who is Mr. Dzerzhinsky whose statue was erected in Vietnam?’, BBC News Tiếng Việt, 21 January 2017. https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/world-38697777 (retrieved 1 February 2023).

Update 1 November 2023: Felix Dzerzhinsky back in Moscow and Tver

There has been a fair bit of activity recently in the field of Dzerzhinsky memorials, with new statues erected in Moscow and Tver.  Naturally, Moscow’s made the bigger splash.  I’ll deal with these in turn.

1 Moscow

TASS reported that on 11 September 2023, Dzerzhinsky’s birthday, a new bronze statue had been unveiled outside the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in the Yasenevo district in southern Moscow.  Constructed by sculptor Vladimir Ivanov, it is a copy, though smaller, of the statue designed by Evgeniy Vuchetich that stood in Lubyanka Square from 1958 (its unveiling attended by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev) to August 1991.  The original still resides in the Muzeon Park of Arts, part of Gorky Park.  The SVR commissioned Ivanov to reproduce the original as closely as possible, referring to Dzerzhinsky as ‘the knight of the revolution.’  There was already a Dzerzhinsky plaque inside the building.

For some years previously there had been agitation, including by the organisation of veterans of the army and state security agencies, for the return of Vuchetich’s Dzerzhinsky’s statue from its exile to its original location.  In 2007 it was recognised as having ‘regional significance’, and it was cleaned of graffiti in 2015.  The 1991 removal was declared illegal by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office in 2021.  A dry run for its restoration took place in 2005, when a bust of Dzerzhinsky was returned to the courtyard of the Moscow Police headquarters.  This too had been removed following the failed coup in August 1991.

A vote took place in Moscow in February 2021 on a choice between two possible monuments to occupy the vacant space in Lubyanka Square: either Dzerzhinsky or Alexander Nevsky, famed for his military victories (think Battle on the Ice) and therefore a suitable patriotic symbol.  This would have presented a way to reinstate Dzerzhinsky, and to do so with popular support.  In the event, with nearly 320,000 ballots cast and Nevsky leading by 55 percent to 45 percent, Sergei Sobyanin, mayor of Moscow, cancelled the week-long online referendum after two days because he felt that rather than unite opinion the issue was too divisive – meaning there had been a backlash against Dzerzhinsky and what he represented.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the emphasis on patriotism and a crackdown on the war’s opponents, tipped the balance in favour of Dzerzhinsky’s return, though in a less contentious location.  It is a clear reminder of Putin’s nostalgia for the status once enjoyed by the USSR and its centralised control.  Sergei Naryshkin, the SVR’s director, said at the Yasenevo unveiling ceremony that Dzerzhinsky's face on both the original and the new statue looks towards Poland and the Baltic states, ‘because the threat to Russia from the northwest remains.’  He hailed Dzerzhinsky for his ‘crystal honesty’ and ‘winged words that only a person with a cold head, a warm heart and clean hands can become a security officer have become a significant moral guideline for several generations of employees of the security agencies of our country.’  Clearly, Dzerzhinsky is considered a role model for today’s agents.

Supporters of the new statue see him as a symbol of order, or a ‘reconciliation with history.’ while opponents naturally consider him a symbol of repression, in fact a message being sent by the current regime to its critics, and would replace ‘warm heart and clean hands’ with alternative adjectives.  Memorial, which investigates human rights crimes during the Soviet period, noted that ‘the idea of ​​restoring the Dzerzhinsky monument could only come to the mind of a man completely devoid of conscience’ (the organisation was forcibly dissolved in early 2022).  Its erection can be seen as a justification of Chekist methods for a new age.

There are two puzzling aspects to the statue.  The first is that it is out in the suburbs, when it could have been given a more prominent position, perhaps even where the original once stood, as a reminder of the continuity between the old ways and the present regime.  Its location either betrays a certain ambivalence towards his legacy, even if some aspects remain useful, or an understanding of quite how polarising a figure he remains.  The second is that it is smaller than its predecessor.  Perhaps materials are scarce when there is a war on, and this is all the sponsors could manage.

To do it properly, the new statue should have been at least as big as the old one, to project self-confidence.  Despite the director’s bullish words, the result feels half-hearted.  It could though be an exercise in testing the water prior to the restoration of the original, or a full-size replica, to its old Lubyanka site.  The idea still has its proponents, despite the 2021 setback.  Either way, offering the ancient past as something new suggests a poverty of ideas, a system stuck in a rut.

 

2 Tver

Tver, northwest of Moscow, also has a new Dzerzhinsky, or at least a newly-installed one.  If the one in Moscow proved controversial, that in Tver is far more so.  It is part of a group recently placed at the Mednoye memorial complex to supplement its ‘permanent exhibition’.  The bust of Stalin is the most notable, and there are also busts of Kalinin (who came from the region; from 1931 to 1990 the city of Tver was called Kalinin), Kirov and Voroshilov.  In the middle of the row is a group sculpture of Lenin flanked by Dzerzhinsky and Sverdlov.  The new exhibition opened on 19 October 2023, the 27th anniversary of the creation of the complex.

What makes the move so puzzling is that the complex is dedicated to the victims of the purges, and to the memory of over six thousand Polish prisoners and others executed in the spring of 1940.  Alexander Chunosov, the head of the memorial complex, said the decision to install it was made by the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia in Moscow, from whose collection the figures were drawn.  By contrast, in 2019 the regional authorities had ordered the removal of two plaques from the complex which commemorated the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror.

It seems Chunosov was left by the Moscow museum to justify its act.  He claimed the figures were part of the narrative of repression and were not intended to glorify the Soviet leadership, adding he saw nothing contradictory in the new monuments, as he considered those depicted to be part of the process of repression (the other side of the coin, as it were).  He did not say why he thought their presence added value to the memorial’s purpose, nor the effect it might have on those who had been affected by that repression.