Quietly, in a time of idle relaxation for successful farmers in the Tara-style mansions of western Russia, a winter was setting in.  What these landowners could not know was that this winter would be their last.  For generations they had farmed the land. Fathers before them had relied on the serfs of wasted human potential to supply their means. Production in business relied on so much human chattel. Really, that was life, and it raised few questions.

Powerfully, easily and with insidious law-driven certainty, a new reality was coming. Reaching from the cities of Petrograd to Moscow and beyond, armies of young people bent on following the secret directives of leaders who were a new source and summit of power departed for the western farms to powerfully instill a  hate in the people against those of means and to write a new order in society. What had happened to Russia’s royal family must happen to lesser families of means for this altogether transformational elevation of the new order to rule. It was less personal than business, and nothing was going restively to stop it.

When an autistic boy patiently reading the papers and surreptitiously hearing all conversation witnessed within his mind the inevitable consequence of this trend for parents and friends of those around him, his lips could not share the horror of his family and friends’ demise. All of the production from his family’s farm issued from winter storage bins in trade that was in rubles of safely inflationary products of the new regime. Silver and gold were stored in family keepsakes that were not easily transported.

Russia’s new government was desperate for the wealth of its churches and citizens of means to write its’ new agenda of power-shifting proletarianism in the hearts of its sacrificing, easily-led citizens. It was prepared to implement its’ revolution at lightning speed when the pieces were in place. Resentment of the rich and religious who did not care enough for people of lesser means and birth only justified the appropriations and slaughter taking place in the plans and then the lands of a great nation. With zeal and rhetoric, the party apparatus enabled a population well-conditioned to discount the value of life and instilled with fervor to do what it must.

The autistic boy could see the unfolding, wanting, teaching, and waiting as the steppes of his vast country would be soaked in sacrificial blood to a demon of hate and a killer of hope for the future.  He was powerless. And those of capability had long ago lost the prudence to see that history repeats itself.

John Smyth copyright 2013

Feb. 21, 2013