Christmas

 A merry Christmas to everyone!

These splendid angels are from the Priory Church, Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

The Caucasus: Pagan Philosophy, by Peter Shilston

(I wrote this after a visit to the Caucasus. It took the Russians fifty years, in the first half of the 19th century, to conquer the tribes of this mountainous region. During this time, Lermontov set his nihilistic novel "A hero of our times", there, and Pushkin sent his hero, Eugene Onegin,to fight there. Tolstoy's early stories, like "The cossacks" tell of his experiences holding the line of the Terek river against the tribes, and his very last story, "Hadji Murat", concerns a Chechen chief who tries to defect to the Russians but as a result is mistrusted by both sides. At the end of the Second World War Stalin (who was himself a Georgian) deported entire mountain peoples, Chechens, Inguish and others, to Siberia, where about a quarter of then died before Khrushchev allowed them to return to their homeland - which,from a Russian point of view, was probably a mistake)

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The people are like their mountains

 beautiful, wild, untameable, hard, crushing any weakness, 

implacable in revenge on outsiders who show them no respect.

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 Silly people in the cities 

may speak of dying for a cause 

but a serious man knows 

that for your cause to triumph you must kill.

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In the end we all die. What matters is how we die 

and what better way to die than in defence of your home

 surrounded by the bodies of your enemies?

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The only true immortality is to live in legend 

when your children's children 

tell stories of your mighty deeds. 

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The mountains and their people

once inspired Pushkin and Lermontov and Tolstoy 

and now they inspire Vladimir Putin 

- a serious man.