Russian history

A brief history of parties

As Enoch Powell pointed out, “all political careers end in failure.” More often than not, those failures are self-inflicted. Without Partygate, for example, Boris Johnson might still be Britain’s prime minister. Although the debacle may not have been the final nail in his professional coffin, it certainly arranged the wake. His fans and critics alike were infuriated by the idea of public servants living it up while the rest of the nation was locked down during Covid in May 2020. That sort of scandal, however, is nothing new — anger at Partygate is nothing to some earlier episodes in history. Alexander the Great was an Olympian boozer who habitually went on weeklong binges after subjugating his enemies.

history

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece is finally appearing

In the mid-1970s, exiled from the Soviet Union for exposing its vast crimes against humanity, and having won the Nobel Prize in Literature for that endeavor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn turned his back on the lionization that awaited him in New York and other cultural capitals of the West and instead settled with his family in the woods of Vermont. Avoiding visitors for the better part of the next two decades, he churned out half a dozen or so books, averaging roughly 750 pages each, that together tell the story of the Russian Revolution and its antecedents. This act of sheer energy, self-discipline and renunciation of the conventional worldly pleasures bestowed by the literary elite was in the spirit of Russia’s own eastern monasticism.

Solzhenitsyn