Commies

Oil derricks in the Baku oil field in Azerbaijan in 1912. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich

Reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice DeKobra. It's 1927 and our man, Prince Séliman, has gone to meet with the Soviet leader in Berlin, one Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine, in an attempt to rescue Lady Diana's fortune in the form of 15,000 acres of oil fields from the Bosheviks. These two are in conversation and Varichkine lets loose with this:

"Really and truly, my friend, you are naive. Living is high since the War - but human life is cheap. When 20 million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, an abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our Revolution with a shepherd's staff in our hand and Pan's pipes to our lips? Believe me the world is always kind to successful tyrants and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the White Hope of the Western Liberals - he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us - Lenin and his following. With about 50 pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest Statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social Revolution conducted along legal lines is a toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic socialists nourished on noodles and black bread."

Add in the political infighting, treachery and murder going on in House of the Dragon and it is no wonder I am of a cynical frame of mind. 

Notes:

• Kerensky has a page in Wikipedia.
• Jelesniakof is mentioned in the book Lenin by Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov.
• Nikolay Krestinsky was the Soviet Ambassador to Germany from 1923 to 1930.
• Prince Séliman and Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine both seem to be entirely fictitious.

The oil fields in question are near Tbilisi, Georgia:

Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea

P. S. Totally unrelated to this post, but I just came across a story about a priest murdered in Derbent which is on the above map, in Russia, on the Caspian Sea just above the border with Azerbaijan.