This morning we heard of the re-interment in St. Petersburg of the mortal remains of the last Tsar’s mother Empress Maria Fyodorovna, who died in exile in Denmark.
Few weeks back, came across my copy of The Summers Day is Done by an author named Robert Tyler Stevens. I first read it about thirty years ago, but it was as fresh and as good as the day I first read it! The novel is based around the friendship and love between an English Intelligence agent and the eldest daughter of the Tsar Nicholas of Russia. The theme is of a man held back by traditions of class, status and position from declaring his love for the daughter of the most powerful man in Russia, but is also a total denunciation of the barbarous depths into which the revolution of the Russian people was driven! A popular cause was subverted by the Bolsheviks, and the slaughter of the whole Imperial Family, the direct result of the seizure of power by such as Lenin, Trotsky and of course, Stalin, was the straw which ended the war between the White and Red armies, as the figureheads for the White forces had been murdered!
The one passage which always stays with me comes near the end of the book, where the Englishman and his Cossack allies learn of the murders, and goes:-
“The lesson to be learned, but which we refuse to learn, is that they are all the same, heroes of revolutions. The fact that we refuse to learn, that there are always some of us who will give help, comfort and bread to the violent ones, means that the children of Nicholas died in vain!”
When the so-called Good Friday agreement was signed, the more thoughtful newspapers forecast that it was not enough, but the politicians, headed of course by Blair, brushed the objections aside; the murderers were freed, and the terrorists entered into Government! I hold no admiration for the Rev. Ian Paisley, for he is the epitome of everything which is intransigent and one-sided within the Northern Irish equation, but the man spoke the truth, in that until the IRA was disarmed, and all weapons held by that evil organisation were taken up, they did not deserve to sit in the halls of democracy! The cease-fire still holds, the devolved Assembly remains suspended, but the killers are still sitting ready, with their Semtex and Armalites within easy reach. The one thing which this Labour Government forgot is that if you treat with terrorists, you must always remember who you are talking to, and any idea that things can be sorted out after the event should have been discarded about two seconds after the idea was born!