The state grew fat and the people grew lean……Klyuchevsky grew confused but Zemfira sang it straight…

Klyuchevsky is such a famous 19th century Russian historian, so distinguished for his monumental work ‘The Course of Russian History’, that Tsar Vlad must have read his work. Klyuchevsky was noted for the famous aphorism about the state growing fat as the people grew lean. It was written in connection with his attack on the corrupting influence of serfdom on Russian life : it corrupted the nobility, made them slothful and worthless ; led to the exploitation of the serfs rather than the land which therefore remained backward ; led to the state becoming a colossus on serfs legs.

According to Klyuchevsky, Catherine the Great ran the most vicious system of serfdom in Europe — and she usually gets a good press as an Enlightenment monarch! Tsar Vlad no doubt takes heart from Klyuchevsky’s view that the Russian state grew to be an all powerful, centralised autocracy because it had no choice — individuals, even morally and mentally unstable ones such as Ivan the Terrible, had little or no influence on this outcome. It was all a matter of the grand forces of economics and geography. So convinced did he become of the irrelevance of the individual that he described Russia’s past as akin to a vast mist shrouding millions of individuals beavering away with just vague outlines of Peter the Great and Pushkin faintly discernible in the background!

For him, the state has to be strong and whatever price has to be paid must be paid. Serfdom, although a blight on the lives of millions, was prepared by the centuries and moulded by the unsatisfactory conditions of life in Russia. Inevitable. The sacrifice of the peasants freedoms was ‘ one of the sacrifices necessary to ensure the survival of the nation’

This last must sound like music to the ears of Tsar Vlad. His major theme in various speeches has been the pre-eminence of the state over all other considerations. These would include the lives, freedom and prosperity of Russian citizens, especially opponents of his regime, and especially of Ukrainian citizens, innocent, young and old.

But Tsar Vlad likes to think that individuals like himself, and Stalin, have been very significant in shaping the course of Russian history. So he would be at odds with Klyuchevsky on this issue.

And Tsar Vlad must attribute significance to certain opposition figures of his own time. Why else bother to kill or poison them?

In fact, Klyuchevsky was himself very confused on the role of individuals versus his great forces. His magnum opus almost contradicts him insofar as it is filled with wonderful portraits of those characters he has admired from the long course of the Russian past.

Sometimes the poets nail it with a few words while the academics miss it with volumes.

‘ Man hands misery on to man/ it deepens like a coastal shelf’ , wrote Philip Larkin.

And the great contemporary Russian rock artist Zemfira has nailed the Ukraine tragedy with two words in her You Tube video ‘ Don’t Shoot!’

What an individual!

The video contains footage of Russia’s military assault on Ukraine and of anti-war protests in Moscow.

Tsar Vlad must be furious — but too bad Vlad — she’s left the country.

Klyuchevsky must be spinning in his grave. One thing he admired about the otherwise decadent west was its representative institutions and the lively, vital debate they encouraged.