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L'Armata a cavallo - Author's notes

An Internazionale of good men

 

During the first years of the Bolshevik revolution, the following Jewish joke made the rounds. At a meeting of the inner Central Committee of the Communist Party, Trotsky whispers in Lenin's ear: «Let's wait for the goy to leave (Stalin) and then we can pray, we have a minyan (the quorum of ten adult Jewish males needed in order to pray).» This little humoristic story reveals to us a well known fact in the Jewish-Russian world, that is to say the whole group of Bolshevik leaders who had decided and carried out the revolution, was in majority made up of Jews and half-Jews. Their names are famous:Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Sverdlov and, a much less known fact, Lenin himself, who was Jewish on his mother's side. Some of them had even received a religious education. Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was the son of a rabbi. However, this singularity was not an exclusive of the top Bolshevik leaders.The numbers regarding the Jewish presence in all socialist, communist and anarchist revolutionary movements is mind staggering. The first revolutionary workers' party of Eastern Europe was the Bund, a revolutionary organization of the Jewish workers of Russia and Poland. Later, the management structure of the Russian Social Democratic Party came fron the Bund, and many of its leaders merged into the Bolshevik Communist Party after the break with Mensheviks.

What is the connection, then, between Judaism and the revolution? Surely and obviously, it is the visionary language of the prophets of Israel who call us to the duties of social justice and liberation of the oppressed as first instances of the Jewish message. But that is not all, there is much more to it. Judaism is, perhaps, the first great revolution in world history, surely in the West, and its story begins with Abraham, the great patriarch and peerless revolutionary who shattered all idols and fractured the sceptre of all possible tyrants. This brilliant "ferryman" is responsible for having "founded" the human being and having led the way over historical time with a radical subversion of the basis of the ancient world, stipulating with the God of monotheism a pact of equal dignity between creator and creature.

Another great Jew is responsible for the first instance of liberation from an idolatric imperial power, an unprecedented and surprising process born from the lower layers of society: Moses. A "renegade" from the class in power – that of the pharaohs – he led a people of slaves who broke the chains of slavery and its world-view, and inaugurated a new vision of life based on freedom and guaranteed by a ground-breaking, ineffable concept of the divine. Moses not only guided the path of liberation, he also constructed a passage to the institution of a new society and a new man, using the instrument of a new, powerful legislation, which remains an unparalleled paradigm of the relationship between ethos and justice. The story of Exodus somehow has become the framework in which are inscribed all future stories of liberation.

However, the complexity, the capacity for paradox and the confidence Moses had at the time of the Torah, did not pass on to the revolutionary episodes close to us. The great revolutionaries of the 1900's believed in the miraculous power of the revolutionary break and they invented an imaginary, hypostatic man to fit their own theories, instead of building the revolution around man in his reality, with his fragile and contradictory precariousness, with his shortcomings and structural complications which make him a volatile and scarcely dependable social subject. These and other reasons determine the tragic failure of the greatest utopia in the history of mankind, Communism. For precise political reasons, a certain type of revisionism, would have us believe today, that it was exclusively a horror story. This is not so, it was a story of men, ideas, sacrifices, devotion, betrayals, suffering and pain which we should not throw out to the garbage can of TV history. The men who gave their lives for the great utopia of redemption deserve a gaze which may remind us of their extreme humanity, and a pietas which won't reduce them to mere numbers. Millions of revolutionaries and Communists were victims of the "insecure dictator" Yussip Vissarionovich Dzugasvili, known as Stalin, and among them, the great Soviet-Jewish writer Isaak Babel. Our representation is freely inspired by his masterpiece "Red Cavalry".

The stories in Red Cavalry were born from Babel's actual live experience on the Russian-Polish front in the civil war that followed the revolution. The author, who in his writings calls himself Lyutov, was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Army of the legendary Cossack Commander Semyon Budyonny. The small, bespectacled Jewish intellectual, brought up in the sweetness and the profundities of Hassidism, had himself requested to be assigned to the ferocious red Cossacks who, though loyal to the revolution, had savage anti-semitism written deep in their own traditional culture, nourished by a secular history of Jewish massacres. Babel-Lyutov seeks a baptism of violence in order to obtain full legitimacy as a revolutionary, but he will fail to achieve this end. He is defeated by the irreparable contradiction with his own Judaism, defeated by the commandment "thou...shalt not kill!

He can't muster the courage to load his firearm during combat so as not to risk taking someone's life, even an enemy, God preserve us. His bloodiest crime is the murder of an innocent goose with his sabre, and this horrible killing will cause him never-ending nightmares and make his heart bleed. Babel/Lyutov, who fought on the Russian-Polish front, sole witness of Trotsky's Red Army's defeat, has bequethed to us his readers, a gift consisting of one of the highest moments in the literature of all times. From Babel's pages emerge men who are both little and extraordinary. All of them, the weak, the ferocious, the insane, the victims, the executioners are seen in all their painful and desperate humanity. Not once does Babel give in to the perversion of judgement. Towering above them all, is the junk-dealer Ghedali, the blind brick-a-brack vendor, rapsodo sui generis, who wants to reconcile Judaism with the Revolution, and goes about crying to the wind: "Where is the sweet revolution? The revolution is joy, happiness. We know what the Internationale is, give us an Internationale of good men. We will enroll every soul in the Party and say: "Sit at the table of life, soul, and enjoy!"

Konarmiya (the cavalry army) unfolds like a musical score consisting of images, sounds, music, songs and words, with which the two great choirs, Bolsheviks and Tsarists, make battle with one another. Caught between these two "armies", a host of musicians/red cavalrymen interpret the epic of the revolutionaries, while the actors tell and shout of the little man's dismay and defeat. And before it dies, the Revolution will dance its dream/nightmare of glory and blood.

Why should we create such an unfashionable work, all red stars and banners? Why listen to the voice of Ghedali and those like him, the heroes of a diaspora who went up in smoke through the chimneys of a brutal and no longer human world? The answer is: for the men of good will who don't believe in the end of History, who can't accept being permanently delivered to the dominion of Mammon, the golden idol whose latest and most subtle incarnation is in the guise of the so-called "free market" which demands the sacrifice of our children. And. ultimately, for those who still believe in the possibility of conquering freedom, justice, equality and kindness on this earth.
 
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