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.

The Ninth Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film, November 2016

Once again the film festival organised by Rory Finin, director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, has brought Ukraine to the Winstanley lecture theatre at Trinity College in Cambridge for two evenings, 11-12 November.  The past couple of festivals unsurprisingly had a major focus on Maidan and the political turmoil which has racked Ukraine, with the emphasis on documentaries exploring filmmakers’ responses to the crisis.  The ninth festival returned to the more traditional format of mixing documentaries portraying broader perspectives on the lives of contemporary Ukrainians with classic fiction.  The festival was run in collaboration with the Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival and the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.

The first film on Friday evening was a short, Has-Beens (Olena Moskalchuk and Dmytro Burko, 2015), about the Petrivka book market next to the railway line in Kyiv/Kiev.  Opening with the sounds of the trains as the camera tracks along a passageway lined with books, we are introduced to a world the twenty-first century seems to have forgotten: a market crammed with decaying books, piled high and scattered around, but few customers for them.  One seller sadly notes people don’t read these days, while a smartly dressed man hunts only for books not available as digital versions.

Many of the units are shuttered and it must be a long time since this forlorn space saw any kind of bustle.  One wonders how the market keeps going, with customers haggling over books that are relics from another era, as the one containing pictures of a young and old Lenin amply demonstrates.  Yet the sellers and their customers are in good humour, boasting and telling jokes.  There is even an effort to repair books that might have to wait a long time to find a loving owner.  It is heartening to see the occasional young person browsing, but on this showing the second-hand book trade is not in good health.  A rather sad film for bibliophiles, but more context to allow the viewer to gauge Petrivka’s position in the world of Ukrainian bookselling generally would have been useful.

The second documentary of the evening was feature-length, and also dealt with a vanishing world: Hollywood on the Dnipro: Dreams from Atlantis (Oleh Chornyi, 2014), Rory pointing out that the title is a nod to the Odessa Film Studio’s nickname of ‘Hollywood on the Black Sea’.  Hollywood on the Dnipro charts the rise and decline of the village of Buchak, about 150 km from Kiev, as a destination for filmmaking during the Soviet era.  Alexander Dovzhenko, who proclaimed the area ‘Ukraine’s Switzerland’, planned to shoot his final film, Poem of the Sea, here.  After his death in 1956 his widow Yuliya Solntseva undertook the project, and the association gave Buchak a boost that attracted other projects throughout the 1960s and into the 70s.

Over the years a significant number of directors arrived, taking full advantage of the picturesque rural setting.  Andrei Tarkovsky, who used it to great effect in his debut feature Ivan’s Childhood, may have been the most notable, but there was a roll-call of directors in what seems to have been a renaissance in Ukrainian cinema paralleling New Wave movements elsewhere in Europe.  An enthusiasm hinting at boundless possibilities is on display in these films.  As dyed cows in one suggests, the area somehow lent itself to play, a poetic approach bordering on surrealism.  It could be that the feeling of remoteness from government strictures encouraged a sense of escape, though there could not be total freedom from state censorship.

The filmmakers talked to those who worked on the films, both sides of the camera, as well as locals who remembered the productions and often acted in them as extras.  Tarkovsky’s Ivan himself, Nikolai Burlyayev, discusses the film and its director while Larisa Kadochnikova, who spent a year filming Ivana Kupala Night here in the 1960s, is given a tour as she tries to pick out landmarks half a century later.

The second part of the film’s title comes from the fact that today the village has largely disappeared under water.  In the early 1970s, against fierce local opposition, the Soviet government authorised the Kaniv hydropower plant which entailed building a reservoir.  Some residents moved to abandoned dwellings above the water line but most were relocated to other villages where they had to build their own houses with no government assistance.  As a result Buchak has been left almost completely deserted, its famous windmill which appeared in many films fallen into decay, though it remains home to a handful of bohemians who value the solitude.  Towards the end there is a shift from celebrating Buchak’s cinematic heritage to highlight the fragile ecosystem and the environmental degradation, with activists fighting to prevent further flooding and preserve the natural beauty along with sites of archaeological significance.

The film’s writer Stanislav Tsalyk, who also appeared in the film, was present to introduce it, and do a Q&A afterwards, though the latter turned out to be a single question from Rory and an extremely lengthy answer that covered most of the questions the audience might have asked.  Tsalyk pointed out some of the problems making the film, notably that many of those who had been involved during the village’s golden age had died or moved away, reducing the number of people they could interview.  Memories were fallible because those who had acted in the films only actually saw them once DVDs became available because there were no cinemas close by, and no electricity.  He added that the films discussed are only a slice of those which used Buchak as a location.

This was an important oral history of the Dnieper’s very own dream factory, bringing to light a significant aspect of Ukrainian cinema.  There was undoubtedly an atmosphere of nostalgia and loss hanging over Hollywood on the Dnipro, but it was too an indicator that such excitement and experimentation can once again energise the country’s film making, and reinforce national identity in the process.

Saturday’s screenings, Two Days (Heorhii Stabovyi, 1927) and The Night Coachman (Heorhii Tasin, 1928), were a complete change of pace, two gripping hour-long dramas that were a fascinating alternative to the didacticism of Sergei Eisenstein’s films in the same period (though a shot of a sleeping stone lion in Two Days may have been intended to echo the first of the famous trio of lions in Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin).  Where Eisenstein’s primary concern was the movement of the masses, subordinating the individual and assuming a common motivation based on class, these two films examined the human cost, particularly intergenerational frictions, as a new world was born, leaving those who were stuck firmly in the old in confusion and despondency.  There were commonalities between the two: both show the brutal execution of a child who has joined the Communists – a son in Two Days, a daughter in The Night Coachman – at the hands of the Whites, and the revenge of the aged father, culminating in death or despair.  In each case the father (a widower) is out of sympathy with his offspring’s views, but aghast at the way the Whites, with whom he naturally feels an affinity, behave.  However, in neither case is the retributive act carried out from class consciousness, but from a more visceral hatred of cold-blooded murderers.

The evening began with Two Days.  A wealthy bourgeois family flees before the advancing Reds, leaving their elderly retainer to look after the house.  During the loading of the car a puppy is accidentally killed, a seemingly minor act in the scheme of things but the beginning of a chain of events which drives the tragedy.  The Reds arrive and the old servant is astonished to find his son with them, someone he had thought dead in the war but who is now a commissar.  The young man though makes it clear his loyalty is to the Revolution.  His father is hiding the young son of the family in his attic room, at considerable risk to himself, as the youngster had been left behind in the confusion.  Unfortunately the puppy’s body is dug up by its mother and this leads to the Reds finding a chest with the family’s valuables, buried for safekeeping.  They remove the chest but the boy in hiding mistakenly thinks the old man had told the revolutionaries of its whereabouts, and when the Reds retreat and the Whites come back, he denounces his erstwhile protector.  The commissar had been ordered to remain undercover but the boy betrays his hiding place, the Whites find him and promptly hang him from the tree under which chest and puppy had been buried.  The old man in his agony burns the house, killing everybody in it, including the boy, before himself expiring on the road.

In depicting the conflict Stabovyi does not create the simplistic dichotomy of noble Reds and dastardly Whites one might expect in the 1920s.  The former are a boorish lot with bad manners, whereas the Whites are cultivated and at least know how to play the piano (and don’t put lit cigarettes on it).  But the Whites are ruthless when it comes to dealing with the captured commissar.  The old man’s political sympathies are entirely with them but he still has personal loyalties, and cannot reconcile the two.  Not seeing where his true interest lies is his tragedy.  Thus he experiences false consciousness by allying himself to the bourgeoisie, sheltering an ungrateful youth who symbolically takes his bed while he has to sleep on the floor.  At one point the old man sits in his room and fondles his old Imperial Army cap.  He sighs that those days are long gone, and indeed they are.  Alone, with nothing left to live for, his time is over as a new society rises from the ashes of the old.

The Night Coachman is a story about an elderly coach driver who has worked nights for 30 years, living comfortably with his daughter who is employed, so he thinks, at a printing works.  In fact she is a Communist, secretly producing revolutionary literature.  Her father discovers that she is no longer at the works and is associating with, in his eyes, bad company, a fellow radical.  The pair have stashed printing equipment in the loft above the stable, and thinking to save her, the father brings in a ruthless counterintelligence officer when he believes the young man will be in the loft alone.  Unfortunately the daughter is there instead, with incriminating evidence.  In a chilling scene the officer forces the old man to drive them to the mortuary.  After telling the custodian there is a body for him while the camera shows the daughter sitting passively, the officer shoots her (in practice one would have expected him to interrogate her to find out as much as possible about her network, but the scene is superbly dramatic).

The following day the old man is in a daze, out in his carriage in daylight for the first time in decades. He sees at a street corner the officer interrogating the very person with whom his daughter had associated, and when the man is detained the officer orders the father to drive them to – the mortuary.  The father whips up the horse, tells the young man to jump, and crashes the carriage on some steps.  His impulsive act kills the officer and the horse, and leaves him dazed and injured as the film ends with him reaching for the scarf he had earlier given his daughter as a gift.

Technically the film is a marvel, with a great deal of night shooting done on location in Odessa.  Early on there is a sequence where the old man is driving the officer and the latter sees a pretty woman in another carriage.  He orders the old man to speed up and drive alongside, then he hops into the other vehicle to exercise his charms on the lady.  It is similar to a sequence in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) in which the camera in a car drives next to another car, filming its occupants; perhaps this is where Vertov got the idea.

As is the case in Two Days, an old man furthers the revolutionary cause, but not from radical motives: here it is to atone for causing the death of his daughter.  Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother has a mother and son pitted against each other initially; however, she comes to understand the system’s injustice after seeing the harsh way it treats him, and she adopts his revolutionary outlook.  Both Stabovyi and Tasin by contrast demonstrate that the way individuals respond to reality is not always so neat.  Ultimately, if one cannot change one’s views in accord with the forces of history, the forces of history will roll over you.  The old, as symbolised by the father, will give way to the new, albeit at the cost of great sacrifice on both sides.

Rory Finin is doing a fine job organising the festival and bringing us gems.  As well as familiar faces it consistently attracts those new to Ukrainian film, and the number of students willing to give up the more usual pleasures of weekend nights (or even Radio 4’s Any Questions?, which was being recorded at the Cambridge Union at the same time on Friday evening) is testament to its attractions.  Watching the clips in Hollywood on the Dnipro made me realise just how many films Rory could potentially programme for future festivals.  Next year (coincidentally the centenary of the Russian Revolution) will mark the tenth.  There is no shortage of potential material so there is scope, budgets willing, for an expanded festival, perhaps occupying all day on the Saturday.  The festival has always been free, but I am sure that a charge to help defray the extra costs would not deter attendants.  I hope Rory will consider pushing the човен out and making the tenth festival of Ukrainian film even more enjoyable than the preceding nine.

The Society for Psychical Research in the exhibition of Curious Objects

Cambridge University Library (CUL) is currently the venue for an exhibition of curious objects called, appropriately, Curious Objects.  On show are some of the unusual items held by the Library in this second public presentation to mark the institution’s 600^th anniversary, the purpose to stress that there is a lot more to the collections for which it has responsibility than books and manuscripts.  Many of the items were accumulated by individuals or picked up as curiosities and came into the library’s possession by chance.  Others were seen as expanding the idea of the library as a repository for the written word to include supplementary material which aided study.  Occasionally the Library has acquired an institutional archive intact, artefacts arriving as a by-product of records.  Sometimes books obtained under the Copyright Act have extra bits bundled in.  Over the years many pieces have been transferred to other repositories within the university, but there is still a lot in the vaults with which to compose a wonderfully eclectic miscellany.

Among the ancient Egyptian pots, facial hair sent to Charles Darwin, Soviet ephemera, footwear and so on is a case devoted to items drawn from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research which, though in the care of CUL, are still the property of the SPR and shown with its permission.  The most eye-catching, and frequently mentioned in publicity, is undoubtedly the ‘ectoplasm’ retrieved from medium Helen Duncan after a séance in Portsmouth.  The soft lighting displays the fabric beautifully even as it undermines any claim to paranormality.  Alongside it is a page from an SPR report of a 1931 séance with Mrs Duncan.

At the other end of the case is a cardboard ‘luminous trumpet’ and its box, as sold by the Two Worlds Publishing Co., Manchester, in the 1920s – British made, 5/- post free.  These were used in séances to amplify spirit voices.  An 1884 slate bears a fine example of spirit writing obtained through the mediumship of William Eglinton, and a photograph by William Crawford has Belfast medium Kathleen Goligher sitting with an ectoplasmic ‘psychic rod’ between her feet.  Next door a photograph of Mina Crandon, the medium ‘Margery’, her face covered by ectoplasm, is accompanied by three wax impressions of thumb prints taken during a séance at the SPR’s premises in London in 1929 that were supposedly from her control, her deceased brother Walter Stinson.

The paper parts of the Society’s holdings are justly famous for their quality, but its other possessions are less well known, and this makes their appearance here noteworthy.  A handsome free booklet has been produced to accompany Curious Objects with 20 high-quality photographs of some of the choicest; it is gratifying to see that two are devoted to the SPR’s contribution, the spirit trumpet and a fine smoky rendition of the Duncan ectoplasm.

It was one of the conditions in the agreement signed by the SPR’s president and the Chairman of the Library Syndicate in 1989 to transfer the SPR’s rare books and archives (other than its audio-visual collection) to Cambridge that CUL would ‘endeavour during the continuance of this agreement to exhibit Society materials whenever possible and to arrange special exhibitions of Society materials as possible.’  This hasn’t happened much in the decades since so CUL are to be congratulated on making the SPR such an important element in their anniversary celebration.  But don’t just visit Curious Objects (open until 21 March 2017) to see the SPR’s treasures – there is much here to enjoy.  Entry is free and if you find yourself in Cambridge it is a fine way to spend an hour, browsing among the stranger things librarians deal with at work.

NB The web pages set up for the exhibition by the university include two items not mentioned above.  These are a cast of the left hand of medium D. D. Home, which has been cleverly rendered in 3D so the viewer can see all round the object; and examples of Harry Price’s ‘Telepatha’ cards with score sheet, his improvement on J. B. Rhine’s Zener cards designed for use in ESP experiments.  These are not in fact among the artefacts in the display but are illustrated on a panel attached to the wall next to it.  Sadly there was not enough room in the case to include the objects themselves.  The panel, headed ‘Spirits, psychics and artefacts’, also gives details of the SPR’s origins and its archives and notes that the Society is still in existence.