Tony > Recent Status Updates

Read the Introduction by Janet Gezari, which was useful. The poems are rather good so far but, based on the subject matter, you can tell this is the woman that will write 'Wuthering Heights'. I love the Gondal poems, which is the world that the sisters created themselves. You get the impression they would have loved the Silmarillion.

I have finished Part 2. The Provisional Government is wobbling as the forces of historical materialism are stacked against it. The Bolshevik Revolution is a-coming.

Trotsky is much more 'in' the text now as we get closer to the final revolution. As is Lenin and his 'political genius'.

Read Chapter 30, 31, and 32 as I couldn't sleep. These mostly covered the Kornilov's attempt at a coup, Kerensky's role in both encouraging it and then putting it down, and what Trotsky feels caused the coup's failure. We're still in August/September.

Chapter 29 is finished. And Trotsky is dealing out the sarcasm and the snark when talking about the 'State Conference in Moscow'. You get the impression that he doesn't like Kropotkin and the Anarchists in the slightest. Even more than the capitalists.

Finished Chapter 28 - which was, basically, a kicking given to Kerensky and Kornilov for being low rent Napoleon Bonaparte's who failed to get their Bonapartism off the ground because the revolution was still unfinished.

Slowly but surely I progress.

Finished Chapter 27. More names, more people who will be exiled, or murdered, or fade away.

So many notes and highlights! I've started adding notes to names so I can track their fates - which is mainly exile and death.

That was Chapter's 20-25. Our next live show is 14th September for Chapters 26-30.

Slowly, but surely.

This is a good read, but occasionally I think Sarah Percy is pushing too hard against the historical evidence in order to make her point. I think her point is made without needing to do that.