#Russian Revolution of 1905

[ammg-old2]

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a facade of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: They failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance this morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.

[world-v-you-blog]

The Uses of History, 22 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 4 – 1905-1914

(Photo credit – Wikipedia – Rasputin) Following the abortive Revolution of 1905, catalyzed by the defeat in the war with Japan (1904-1905), the Russian Empire clearly needed to undertake serious reform in virtually every aspect of its society. Mere economic reform and modernization of industry and finances would not suffice. There was no imperial will for democracy, but an elected Duma was…

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Personally, I think if you describe yourself as a socialist and also have a bust of Vladimir Lenin's head in your house, I should be allowed to smash that bust over your head with no consequences.

[bonefool]

1905 Russian Postcard

The caption in Russian reads: "The Blood of the Russian People Cries Out for Revenge." This is a Russian copy of a French postcard. This dates from the period after the "Bloody Sunday" revolution of 1905, when czarist palace guards shot at protesting crowds, forever burying the Czar's reputation to his people.

[snatching-ishidates-wig]

On Soviets

"The word “soviet” roughly translates as “council.” These workers councils were first formed during the 1905 Revolution to coordinate strikes among workers and broker deals with factory owners. They were seen as a direct embodiment of proletarian power. This association became important to legitimacy of the St. Petersburg soviet after the tsarist regime fell in 1917 and was later used by the Bolsheviks to define the Soviet Union as a workers' state."

Source: Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (Lecture). University of California, Santa Cruz.

[schlock-luster-video]

On January 30, 1989 Battleship Potemkin was screened at the Gothenburg Film Festival.

[russia-libertaire]

The Soviets

'The workers, naturally enough, were the first to react to Bloody Sunday. Abandoning any hope of support from church or tsar, they turned for advice and organizational support to the opposition, especially to the socialists. The Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries were slow to respond: their leaders were still in emigration, cut off from their potential constituents and preoccupied by heated polemics with one another. Local activists did what they could to improvise meetings, protests, and strikes, and gradually their contact with the workers improved and assumed more organized forms. The result was a new type of workers' association, the Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies. First set up in the textile town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk to coordinate a general strike, the soviets were usually elected by the workers of the major enterprises in any given town, at the rate of one deputy for every 500 or so workers. They would meet in a large building, or even in the open air, where not only deputies but also their electors could attend and contribute to discussions. This was a close approach to direct democracy, since, at least in principle, any deputy could be recalled at any time if he failed to satisfy his constituents and be replaced by someone else. The members of each soviet elected an executive committee to deal with day-to-day business and to negotiate with employers, municipality, and police: often they would choose professional people, seeing them as more skillful spokesmen than they themselves could be. Through the executive committees the socialist activists gained influence over the soviets and sometimes directly organized them. The soviets were the best forum for radical intellectuals and workers to cooperate with each other at a time of political crisis. For the workers, they took a familiar form: their general meetings resembled overgrown and disorderly village assemblies, in which everyone tried to speak and mass enthusiasm welled up. On the other hand, the executive committees supplied the element of conscious policy and organization. The soviets' greatest moment came in St. Petersburg in October 1905, when they organized a general strike which disrupted normal production and communications not only in the capital city but over much of the empire. This was the decisive blow which compelled the tsar to grant the October Manifesto, promising civil liberties and an elected legislative assembly.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking

[dogstarblues]

IM SO BOREEEEEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

[mesetacadre]

I think it's fair to say there is interest in an explanation of trotskyism from a marxist-leninist perspective. Information on what exactly Trotsky did and what trotskyism is nowadays is complicated to come by unless you know a trotskyist willing to be straightforward or someone involved in organizing with these types of communists. So instead of answering these asks without much prior research or preparation, I decided to wait until I was freer, without too many academic and political responsibilities. Full disclosure, the portion of this post on Trotsky himself is essentially (though not completely) a summary of Moissaye J. Olgin's Trotskysim: Counter-revolution in Disguise, which gets into the basics of trotskyism as well as Trotsky's actual position on his contemporary issues, such as the Chinese revolution, or the CPUSA which I don't get into here but I highly recommend reading. The second portion, about modern trotskyism and how it got to be present in the countries that it is, is shorter and more based on my own experiences organizing with trotskyists as well as reading what they have to say, and conversations with much more knowledgeable comrades of mine.

What is trotskyism?

Succinctly, it is the form of left opposition to marxism-leninism that has enjoyed the most spread, spearheaded by Leon Trotsky and his criticisms of the USSR.

Trotsky himself, despite what his self-aggrandizing History of the Russian Revolution leads one to believe, was never a bolshevik, much less a leninist. The second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party¹ (RSDLP) of 1903, which sought to establish the bases of what would become the bolshevik party and the CPSU, saw the start of the menshevik-bolshevik split, on the issue of what the party should become and how it should be organized.

The bolsheviks, already lead by Lenin, defended the principles of organization that were later systematized into democratic-centralism. These principles were the freedom of discussion until the party decided by a majority vote during a Congress, Conference or other organ for discussion, a position on any issue. After this, unity of action should follow, and the comrades who held the minority opinion, even if they still disagree, should submit to the collectively agreed-upon position, and act on that line an all party matters. This is to ensure that the party of the proletariat, representing the interests of one class, is not divided, and is able to express that single will. Otherwise, its action is crippled by unending debates kept alive by a minority. Consequently, these principles also lead to the intolerance towards fractions within the party.

Trotsky, who aligned himself with the mensheviks, opposed these principles, instead advocating for a complete liberty of individual action of comrades in the party. He called Lenin "the great disorganizer of the party" over this. This is the first great pillar of trotskyism, a rejection of democratic-centralism in favor of the creation of endless cliques and fractions within the party, which he did multiple times within the CPSU until his expulsion.

The second great pillar of the trotskyist opposition that arose before the October Revolution was of defeatism regarding the peasantry. Especially after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, Trotsky was convinced that a successful revolution in a country such as the Russian Empire, where the peasantry was a majority and usually held reactionary positions due to various economic determinations², was impossible because these reactionary elements would inevitably overthrow a worker's dictatorship. While already an excessively defeatist position among other communists, and certainly not a bolshevik position, this belief did not change whether it was 1905, 1915, or 1935. Up to the end, even once the USSR had beaten the armed intervention of 14 armies and had transformed the peasantry by eliminating the class of kulaks and collectivizing agriculture, Trotsky's opposition to socialism in one country relied on the perception of an insurmountable reactionary class constantly on the edge of an overthrow. This is what the "permanent revolution", a term that when used by trotsky has nothing to do with the same term used by Marx and Engels, actually means. A defeatism so deep, that only the practically simultaneous and global victory of the proletariat is possible, all without party unity!

This also negates other leninist positions such as the weakest chain theory, crucial to understanding imperialism, or the necessity of a communist party altogether. Since socialism in one country will inevitably fail, Trotsky told workers that an armed insurrection once the conditions was right was pointless, and that they should instead work for a "worldwide revolution", something that's in practice impossible because it would necessitate a synchronization of the conditions necessary for a revolution in every single imperialist country at once. Unequal development is an unbreakable rule of the imperialist stage of capitalism, and the notion of a worldwide revolution or even a revolution among a significant portion of imperialist countries was already refuted by Lenin in 1915.

So how did Trotsky reconcile his defeatist dogmatism with a living and thriving proof against it in the form of the USSR? As the third great pillar of trotskyism, he insisted by every possible avenue that the USSR wasn't actually socialist, the reasons for which changed constantly. Some issues were already recognized by the CPSU and worked against, and Trotsky exaggerated them. He expressed concern about the Central Committee replacing the party itself, he expressed concern about bureaucratization, the NEP and its lack of collectivization, the excessive speed of collectivization in the 30s, and other criticisms which, when taken together, show only contradiction and a single consistent position: that any attack against the USSR was legitimate.

And it's not like he was being ignored in the USSR, he simply always chose the most incendiary and anti-leninist methods for criticism. In the 13th Congress of the RCP(b) of 1924, among other things, the resolution that was approved recognized many flaws in the party coming out of the NEP, but that these issues weren't actively dangerous and could be solved: bureaucratization in some areas, excessive departmentalization, some influence of bourgeois elements. This resolution was passed unanimously, which included Trotsky. Immediately after the Congress, he published a pamphlet called The New Course, in which he lambasts this Congress and the entire party as having degenerated. In this pamphlet he also places students as the "barometer of the revolution", instead of workers themselves. His only proposal to that Congress was one to allow "freedom of groupings", meaning the freedom to form fractions. Once again he pulled the same stunt in the 15th Congress of 1926; he publicly subscribed to a resolution that explicitly banned such fractions, and directly afterwards published more pamphlets that directly opposed the resolution that he subscribed to! This is not a man who levied fair criticisms and was shut down, he was someone who held minority positions, anti-leninist ones, and refused to admit it, to the point of plotting against the USSR.

But how come Trotsky, during his better known times in exile, claimed he was the true Leninist and that he opposed the Stalinist degeneration? This is the greatest example of a tactic he used constantly. To always seem like the rational critic, and to pass his opposition as one coming from another bolshevik, he always shifted the perspective of his criticisms. In the times of Lenin, Lenin was the "great disorganizer", and the "leader of the reactionary wing of the party"³. But once Lenin died, he became the most loyal foot-soldier of Leninism, crusading against the Stalinist corruption. Then it was Stalin who became Trotsky's devil, effortlessly transposing his criticisms of Lenin to Stalin, and shifting his perspective from that of a menshevik, to that of a true "bolshevik-leninist".

This tactic was used constantly. For instance. when he was still within the ranks of the party, he completely opposed the principles of democratic-centralism, but once he was in exile and had to criticize the Communist International, his issue suddenly became only that the bolshevik form of organization was being hastily applied to different contexts. Then, he really had no issue with democratic-centralism. When he talked of the possibility of a revolution in the US, then all his worries of an insurmountable reaction dissolved, instead becoming an optimist who believed that, actually, there would be no real significant class who would oppose a revolution in the US, and that therefore the USamerican workers should carry out a revolution "without compulsion". The very same person who over the course of decades insisted on the dangers of a counter-revolution apparently believed the workers of the USA had no opposition to fear. This was, rather, simply an opposition to the Communist International's analysis of imperialism, as Trotsky placed the most revolutionary potential in the countries where capitalism was most developed, the imperial core, the very same mistake Marx and Engels committed, except only 70 years prior and with no good framework with which to analyze imperialism. If Trotsky was truly a leninist, then he utterly failed at even beginning to understand anything about the theory regarding imperialism.

I think this is a good enough place to leave Trotsky be, and talk now about trotskyism beyond Trotsky.

Trotskyism, especially in its analysis of imperialism, is very attractive to the imperial core communist. It appeals to multiple sensibilities like individualism, an aversion to revolutionary discipline and work, and impatience. By putting the emphasis away from the party of our class and onto the group of individual ideologues, each with their own cliques and mini-parties, by completely disregarding the possibility of a revolution outside the top of the imperialist pyramid, and by also disregarding the possibility of a revolution until the instance of a total global victory, it is no wonder most trotskyists nowadays are found in the imperial core. This is, with the exception of a portion of Latin-American countries, which I think deserves its own explanation.

Latin America in the 20s and 30s was a continent⁴ of very differing levels of development of capitalism and the proletariat. When many European trotskyists left to Latin America for various reasons, it's no coincidence that they ended up mostly in the urban centers of the most developed countries, such as Argentina and México, where Trotsky himself ended his emigrations after exile. It was exported to places that had a significantly developed proletariat, places which up to that point lacked a culture of multiple communist parties, like Europe had, and places with a strong unionist movement. Other countries like Colombia, Ecuador or Perú, whose worker movements were more significantly indigenist and/or decolonial, along with not meeting the other conditions like Argentina and México, were less ripe for trotskyism.

The condition for a lack of a multi-party environment was important because the trotskyist opposition to the USSR collected all the "orphaned" communists who opposed the sections of the Communist International in each of their countries, especially after the Moscow trials of the late 30s which expanded the opposition to marxism-leninism internationally, as well as with other events like the Hungarian intervention after WW2. But besides this very specific phenomenon, product of a set of very specific conditions which, outside of the imperial core, were only met in these specific countries, the basis of trotskyism as an imperial core opposition to marxism-leninism remains.

So nowadays, trotskyists are mostly located in the imperial core, with those exceptions I've explained. And this leads me to the last part of this post, which is about organizing with trotskyists as a marxist-leninist. In short, it's not impossible but also not an extraordinary situation. Organizing in the imperial core varies from country to country, that much is clear, but the fragmentation into countless groups and sects, as well as the competition with social-democrats, is broadly consistent. These conditions, again generally, mean marxist-leninist parties in the imperial core have to collaborate with a myriad of communist offshoots, anarchists, and ill-defined "leftists" to achieve a broader reach. This includes trotskyists. What makes them in particular uniquely annoying to organize with is that they continue to pretend to be leninists despite all the discrepancies, so they tend to constitute competitors in agitation and rhetoric, while their internal organization usually resembles that of an anarchist group more than anything else. From this, other symptoms like a reliance on assemblyism (especially in the students' movement) and extreme levels of voluntarism naturally follow.

The IMT (International Marxist Tendency), or whichever acronym it is that they're using now, has a relevant presence in just the US and UK with a nominal one in most other imperial core countries. In all cases they're not much more than newspaper vendors who sometimes gives talks at best, and mere reading clubs or financially-extorting sects at worst. There is another international grouping of trotskyist parties that I've come across led by the PTA (Partido del Trabajo Argentino, Argentinian Labor Party), mostly linked via their news broadcast Izquierda Diario, although from what I've heard, the PTA finances their international "children" parties too. Of course, these groups all have different names in each country which in turn tend to change every few years.

Before the split of the Second International during WWI, communists called themselves social-democrats

The mode of production of the peasantry was very individualized, since each peasant or group of peasants lived partly from the fruits of their own labor, they didn't sell it in its entirety. This stands in contrast with the proletariat's completely socialized mode of production; every worker sells the entirety of their labor-power and sustains themself by purchasing commodities with their salary. The pre-existing socialization of production in capitalism was identified by Marx and Engels already in the Manifesto as one of the reasons for the proletariat being the revolutionary class by excellence. The reactionary tendencies of the peasantry wasn't wholly determined by this, it also depended on various historical and contextual reasons, but this should be better expanded on a dedicated post to social alliances.

These are all real insults thrown at Lenin by Trotsky when he disagreed about party discipline. The "true leninist", ladies and gentlemen

Using "continent" in a very loose way here. It's not like the common definitions of continent are very determined either. But you get what I mean

[unhonestlymirror]

"May 7th in Lithuania is celebrated as Lithuanian Press Restoration, Language and Book Day. Book smugglers became a symbol of Lithuanians’ resistance to russification."

"VINCENTAS JUŠKA (1860‒1939) became a symbol of the Lithuanian book smuggling movement, a very tough native of Žemaitija region in Lithuania. He was born in Mažeikiai district. In the village of Rubikai. He began book smuggling in 1880.

📒📗📕Lithuanian book smugglers or Lithuanian book carriers (Lithuanian: knygnešiai, singular: knygnešys) smuggled Lithuanian language books printed in the Latin alphabet into Lithuanian-speaking areas of the occupied Lithuania by the so called ruZZian "empire", defying a ban on such materials in force from 1864 to 1904. In Lithuanian knygnešys literally means "the one who carries books". Opposing imperial Russian authorities' efforts to replace the traditional Latin orthography with Cyrillic, and transporting printed matter from as far away as the United States to do so, the book smugglers became a symbol of Lithuanians' resistance to russification.

📒📗📕Vincentas Juška was arrested more than once, although it is said that the policemen were quite afraid of him - tall, big, strong. In 1895 convicted and imprisoned for a year. After being released from prison, he had to live in exile, in Riga, Latvia. But that didn't stop him. He still transported the banned Lithuanian press from Kalvarija, Lithuania and distributed it among Riga's Lithuanians. After participating in the 1905 Russian Revolution, he went to the United States to avoid arrest.

📒📗📕In 1924 Vincentas returned to Lithuania. In 1929 he was granted a book smuggler's pension. He was a non-believer, disliked by priests and parishioners, considered "possessed by the devil". Even though he was also smuggling prayer books. Sometimes he went to the church, watched the services, and listened to the organ music. Pious people resented his behavior because, according to his contemporaries, he did not even take off his hat in church, but turned hat's beak backwards.

📒📗📕Many people gathered at V. Juška's funeral. Not so much out of respect for the book smuggler, but out of curiosity how a non-believer will be buried. The coffin was carried around the cemetery, because it was forbidden to carry non-believers through the consecrated ground of a cemetery.

With the care of his daughter Genovaitė Šamatauskienė, a monument was erected in the cemetery, on the tombstone of which Vincentas Juška's favorite words are engraved:

"KIDS, LOVE THE BOOK".

Courtesy of Vita Gailiūnaitė."

[coraniaid]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes place in a world full of demons and magic and werewolves and invisible girls and convincingly human-like robots; in a world where the Russian Revolution took place in 1905 and a song released in 1957 could be a hit in 1955 and high school sports coaches can use declassified Soviet research to turn teenagers into fish monsters; in a world where vampire attacks are commonplace enough that the police have a standard lie ready to deploy about them and where weekly student deaths are not reason enough to shut down the local high school.

But so far, forty-one episodes into my rewatch, the most fantastic and least plausible thing in the show by some distance is the fact that Buffy still willingly chooses to socialize with Xander Harris.

[world-v-you-blog]

The Uses of History, 21 – Russia the Long-Suffering, 3 – 1904-1917

(Photo Credit – Imperial Museums Greenwich) Many historians see 1905 as the last chance of the Tsarist regime in Russia to avoid the coming inevitable catastrophe that had been brewing for almost a century beneath the apparently stable autocratic surface of the immense Russian Empire. That Empire bestrode the whole great stretch of northern Asia from the Urals to the Bering Strait and the…

[blueplumbbob]

A little bit of context for today's story post: some Lorimer lore, if you will. content warnings for death and pregnancy.

Above: Formal portrait commissioned by the Palace, c. 1919, age 22. Left: Pictured c. 1905, age 8, with her parents. Right: Pictured c. 1914, age 17.

Frances, Princess of Romilly, (born Frances Elizabeth Imogen Selby; March 5, 1897 - April 11, 1924) was the first wife of King Arthur V and the mother of his three eldest children: King Frederick IV, Prince Patrick, Duke of Statham, and Prince Louis, Duke of Atteberry.

Frances Selby was born on March 5, 1897 in Maloret, Iverny to Lt. Col. James Selby and Lady Imogen Penrose, a niece of Earl Maurice Penrose, husband of King Charles IV’s fifth daughter Princess Georgia. The marriage was loving, but morganatic, and Frances was the only surviving child. 

Frances was enrolled in the Maloret Girls’ School at age six, on the insistence of her mother. She graduated in 1914 and had planned to enroll at St. Anne’s Women’s College in Lorain, but the outbreak of World War I prevented this. Frances’s father, James, was drafted into the war at age 50 for his military accomplishments in the 1889 Isle of Leonne Offensive, a brief land dispute between Iverny and the United Kingdom. His actions as a Lieutenant colonel during a 1915 Western Front battle, while directly in opposition to his superior’s commands, were responsible for saving the lives of nearly 1,200 Ivernian soldiers. He was dishonorably discharged for insubordination in November 1915, but received a pardon directly from the Queen. In January 1916, he was knighted by Queen Jane II and awarded an Augustan Cross for valor, the highest military honor in Iverny. Frances reportedly met then Prince Arthur of Ettinger, the Queen’s cousin, at this ceremony.

Prince Arthur and Frances quickly bonded over their shared love of books and reading. According to the diaries of his sister Princess Antonia, the prince reportedly gave up to thirty-three books as gifts to the young Frances, and loaned out several copies from both his personal library and the Queen’s Clemons Palace library. It did not come as a surprise to the family when Arthur asked the Queen’s permission to marry Frances in the fall of 1917. The match proved unpopular in the Assembly and amongst the Royal Family for being morganatic, especially because Arthur was second-in-line to the throne behind his father, and Queen Jane II had yet to marry and produce an heir. However, the Queen approved the marriage on the grounds that morganatic marriages, while unpopular, were not against the law, and that she “saw the deep Affection and Trust between these two young people.” This infuriated Arthur’s mother, the Duchess of Ettinger, who had been trying to arrange a marriage between Arthur and one of her Romanov relatives for years. The wedding and marriage were delayed by the Queen for months at the Duchess’s insistence as the Russian Revolution made contact with her family almost impossible. 

The Queen died unexpectedly at age 26 in November 1918 from the Spanish Flu, shocking the nation and sending the royal family into upheaval. The Duke of Ettinger ascended the throne as Richard V, and both his wife and the Assembly urged him to prohibit the marriage. The new king refused on the grounds that “continuation of the Family line is essential” and that “through all of their Hardships, Miss Selby and the Crown Prince have stayed true to themselves and steadfastly honoured the love between them. Despite her humble background, she will make a fine Queen for this nation.” The two were finally married in February 1919 at Herriot Cathedral in Gaucelin. The Princess became a dedicated patron of many of the same causes that the very popular Queen Jane II supported, such as labor and occupational safety and education, as well as several of her own, including literacy and public libraries, quickly endearing her to the skeptical public. Her popularity exploded almost overnight.

The couple’s first child, Prince Frederick of Romilly, was born in January 1920, followed by another son, Prince Patrick, in the summer of 1922. Both pregnancies and deliveries were easy and uncomplicated. When the Princess fell pregnant again in 1923, court diarists wrote that she complained often of exhaustion and chills, and was confined to bedrest for much of the pregnancy. In April 1924, the Princess went into labor. After almost eleven hours of no progress despite labor symptoms, the court physician determined that the baby was breeched and ordered a cesarean section. Court midwives desperately contested this decision, but the Princess agreed to the surgery. The child, Prince Louis of Romilly, was born healthy on April 8, 1924, and initially the Princess recovered well from the delivery. However, the next day, the Princess developed a fever and extreme fatigue, and her condition rapidly deteriorated. The Princess died on April 11, 1924 at 27 years old, three days after giving birth to her third son, from sepsis and postpartum hemorrhage. The nation, still reeling from the shock of losing Queen Jane II unexpectedly five years prior, was in shock, outrage, and disbelief, but none moreso than the Crown Prince himself. 

[rpgchoices]

Sometimes I really want to read a short summary of what to expect from a game… and thankfully people can also submit their summaries of games they played and help me (and others) find games that cater to their interests!

submitted by @lairofsentinel

(click here for other videogames)

what to expect from THE THAUMATURGE

Isometric RPG-detective game with some [fake] choices. The story seems to be quite linear, and you have some factions/characters to pick in the last part of the game in order to obtain different combinations of endings.

It has a simple turn-based combat system.

Story set in a fantasy 1905 Warsaw (Poland), under the Russian Empire occupation, wrapped in a context of an imminent anti-tsar revolution.

The Slavic culture with which this game has been done gives it a unique, refreshing identity. 

The lore of the game combines historical events and historical polish figures of the time with mythological Slavic creatures and a concept of magic that makes it work in an interesting way.

You play as a thaumaturge: a person capable of reading and influencing people's thoughts, seeing thoughts and emotions imprinted on objects, and befriending demons called Salutors that you can use in your benefit to improve all these powers. 

The game is divided into chapters. It has a quest log that has everything perfectly organized: task quests, secondary quests, subplot quests, and main quests.  All the quests that are not Main and Subplot have an icon of a timer. Don’t worry about it. They are not “timed” in the sense that you need to complete them in X amount of hours, it means you need to complete them before advancing the main quest if you don’t want to fail them.

No real customization of the main character you play: Wiktor Szulski. You can only change hairstyle, beard, and the colour of the outfit.

Fully voiced, with a stern voice acting that has its charm.

Short game of 15 hrs if focused on the main story only. It extends to approx. 35 hrs if you explore secondary quests and tasks.

���—- Plot? ——-

You play as Wiktor Szulski, a thaumaturge that is ill and has been looking for a healer all over Europe. He finds a cure in a far away town. However, soon after, he receives the news of a tragedy in his family and must return to his native Warsaw. Back home, he starts to investigate the case of this tragedy to understand the who, the what, and the why. 

——- Gameplay? ——- 

You interact with characters, and by using the powers of your Salutors, you can manipulate them in your favour. Failure usually ends up in a strange turn-based fight. 

——- Characters? ——- 

There are a lot of characters here. You meet all Wiktor’s family, and you can decide with your choices what kind of relationship he had with each of them. You also meet childhood friends.

 ——- LGBT? ——-

Nothing in the foreground. There is a quest of a man who lost his gay lover, and has been hiding this pain due to the shame these relationships gave people back in that time.

Wiktor’s sister also has some rumours around her that claim she is not interested in men. But this seems to be more a symptom of the patriarchal society she is in: she is one of the first Polish women wearing trousers and leading a business by her own.

——- Sadness level? ——- 

Low.  It may depend on your subjectivities. It's not the focus of the narrative.

——- Happy ending? Deaths? ——-

There is a lot of death, and you have a different combination of epilogues that depends on your choices along the game (but mostly at the end). 

[duchesssoflennox]

FOUR DAUGHTERS OF THE LAST TSAR OF RUSSIA...🤍🥀

Four daughters of tsar Nicholas II and the last imperial children of Russia!

in order: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia✨️ They were known for their special personalities and their Golden hearts, as well as their tragic deaths...💔🥀

I have written their personality characteristics under their photos🫶🥰

Romanov sisters adored their only little brother, Tsesarevich Alexei, who was always sick due to his congenital disease of hemophilia...🥺🌟

In 1917, the Bolsheviks came to power and Romanovs were exiled to Siberia after 300 years of rule. The revolution that began with the massacre of Bloody Sunday by Tsar Nicholas II on January 22, 1905, ended in 1917 when the Bolsheviks came to power! and tsar Nicholas with his wife, Five children and 4 of his crew were shot in July 17, 1918... 💔 Their bodies were then taken to a remote forest where they were mutilated, dismembered and buried with grenades, fire and acid to avoid identification.

Age of family members at the time of execution: Nicholas II was 50 years old, Alexandra Feodorovna was 46 years old, Olga was 22 years old, Tatiana was 21 years old, Maria was 19 years old, Anastasia was 17 years old, Alexei was 13 years old.

Their burial place was discovered by amateur detectives in 1979, and in 1998, 80 years after the execution, the remains of the Romanov family were buried in a state funeral in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg!

In 2007, a smaller grave containing the remains of the two missing Romanov children from the larger grave was discovered by amateur archaeologists. DNA analysis confirmed they were the remains of Alexei and one of his sisters.

During the 84 days following the murders in Yekaterinburg, 27 other friends and relatives of the emperor (14 Romanovs and 13 members of the imperial family) were killed by the Bolsheviks... 😥💔

On August 15, 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church announced that it had canonized the members of Romanov family for their "modesty, patience, and humility."

[dasha-through-the-snow]

We in the US get like no education whatsoever about Imperial Russian life and culture even in college, what are some things you know about it and whether or not the shift to the Soviet Union and later Russian Federation altered it or killed it?

Apologies if this is a sensitive topic.

Imperial Russia was a whack-ass place, where rughly 85% of the population were peasants, who were not allowed to leave the plot of land they were assigned to. So slaves, with a bit of extra flair.

The rest lived a pretty average European existence of the time, with minor caveats, like the horrible police system, the awful bureaucracy and no political representation whatsoever. Tiny attempts at liberalism were only attempted in the brief time between 1905 and World War I.

Then the Soviets came, tried to do a bunch of wild experiments, before defaulting to the pre-revolution status quo, sans the hereditary monarchy. Like, that's legitimately the only thing they got rid of. Peasants still couldn't leave their villages, there was no political representation and the cities and villages lived in entirely different worlds.

Then the Soviets decided they need HEAVY INDUSTRY and that started a massive growth in the number of urban citizens (a good chunk of which were forcibly-ressetled peasants).

Then the 90s threw everything out of whack. We had a brief period of something approaching political freedom up until roughly 2004, when Putin settled into his autocrat status. The 90s were also, like, really-really bad. Everyone suddenly became even poorer than before and the crime skyrocketed. But there's a good argument to be made that it would've happened anyway, even if USSR didn't collapse. Shit was bad.

Culture-wise all of this did some interesting things. So, in the Imperial times, culture as a whole was a prerogative of the free and the wealthy, but also it was mostly pushed forward by rebellious rich kids in a few big cities. They got a nice formal education, spoke several languages and studied foreign art.

Then the Soviets came and due to the inequality inherent in the Soviet regime, the artists, once again, were relegated to the few big cities where there were education opportunities. But the import of foreign art stopped to a trickle, so the culture diverged from the then-contemporary West in its own weird ways. Ways that were tightly controlled by the state, but hey.

And then in the 90s, 7 lost decades of media suddenly flooded into the country along with true opportunities to rise from nothing for the first time since forever. Again, a very interesting cultural time, until it all got massively corporate and state-sponsored. Yeah, at the same time.