Happy anniversary, Russia!

Yesterday marked the centenary since Lenin’s death, and I think not only Russia but the world at large should celebrate the demise of that ghoul.

But of course, the Russians celebrate Lenin’s life, not just his death (from syphilis). His mummy still adorns Red Square, and people still queue up to pay homage, although nowhere near in the numbers I remember from my childhood.

The Russians tend to reserve their special affection for the bloodiest of their tyrants. This is called respect for traditional values, a quality mandated by today’s fascist government.

The milestones on the path of their historical worship are Ivan IV (the Terrible), Peter I (the Great), Lenin, Stalin and – if the Russians know what’s good for them – Putin. Vlad himself feels he belongs in that company, and I think he is right, although not necessarily in the way he means.

His predecessors are now portrayed as stern, sometimes cruel rulers who nevertheless devoted their lives to making Russia great. Yes, they committed a few unfortunate excesses, but the net result of their reigns was undeniably positive.

My take on history is different. All those men were (Putin still is) blood-thirsty tyrants who anchored Russia, securely and eternally, in the morass of unrestrained savagery. Now I’m sure you know enough about Lenin and Stalin not to take issue with this view. But what about Putin’s other two predecessors?

Ivan ruled Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584. This contemporary of Elizabeth I began his reign by opening large-scale hostilities against his own people, whose devotion he doubted.

First he struck out in the north-westerly direction, systematically sacking every Russian town in his path. Klin and Tver in particular suffered the most hideous outrages.

Apart from having all the more prominent citizens murdered, Ivan’s oprichniks robbed everyone else and, as a final touch later to be duplicated by Lenin and Stalin, either confiscated or destroyed their stores of grain. This stratagem worked to perfection in the way of a delayed-action bomb: those spared the oprichniks’ axes would succumb to starvation during the winter.

It was early in the campaign that the tsar’s strategy of plunder and murder was refined. After capturing Tver, the oprichniks first robbed and murdered all the clergy from the bishop down. Two days later, they robbed all other denizens of their possessions, trashed every house, looted what appealed to them and burned everything else.

Finally, the oprichniks burst through the streets, murdering everyone they could see or seize: young and old, men and women, children and even pets. This they repeated in their subsequent conquests: there were 1,500 people murdered in Torzhok alone, and it was a small town.

In January 1570 the tsar captured Novgorod. This pro-Western Hanseatic city with parliamentary traditions had long been a burr under Ivan’s blanket, and finally he had had enough. The three-prong punitive strategy had already been tested, so the tsar knew what he was doing. First the place had to be decapitated by the destruction of its elites. Second, it had to be robbed of any means of sustenance. The knowledge was immediately put into practice: the first two prongs stabbed home with a most satisfying effect.

By way of a warm-up, all Novgorod monks were clubbed to death. Then Ivan summoned the city’s aristocracy and business elite, the boyars and the merchants, accompanied by their wives and children. They were all tortured ‘unimaginably’, as a contemporary described it. Many were burnt by a diabolical chemical compound personally developed by the talented tsar, who had an aptitude for science as well as for aesthetics. Those men who were still alive were then drowned in the Volkhov river, followed by their wives who were tied to their babies and pushed under the ice.

The third prong went in when Ivan ordered that every house and shop be cleared of all possessions and food. These were then destroyed, along with every grain silo, all domestic fowl and cattle. So on top of the 60,000 killed directly, whose corpses were swelling the Volkhov, the denizens of the whole region had to suffer horrendous famines and epidemics. Cannibalism was rife; corpses were dug out of their graves and devoured – and Lenin and Stalin were still long in coming.

Another epic hero, Peter, is credited with having “chopped a window into Europe”, in the words Pushkin attributed to the tsar. Now a window, as opposed to a door, is used by two types of people: burglars and Peeping Toms. One could argue that it was in those two capacities that Russia has been dealing with Europe ever since.

As to Peter’s reign, there is little I can add to the sketch expertly drawn by Russia’s greatest writer, Leo Tolstoy:

“The most staggering and the most familiar horrors of Russian history closest to us began with Peter I.

“For a quarter of a century that crazed, drink-sodden animal rotting from syphilis murdered, executed, buried people alive, imprisoned his wives, wenched, buggered, boozed, amused himself by beheading people, blasphemed, drove around with a cross made out of wooden male organs and copies of the Gospel, glorified Christ with a crate of vodka, demeaned faith, crowned his slut and his male lover, executed his son and died of syphilis – and people don’t just forget his crimes but extol the greatness of this monster and erect endless statues of him.”

Peter beggared whole provinces and reduced their population to starvation by his insane drive to build the city named St Petersburg after his patron saint. Some 300,000 perished erecting those pretty bridges and sumptuous palaces on a swamp.

The rest of the country was exhausted by the incessant wars Peter fought against all and sundry. Now he is mainly remembered for his victory at Poltava against Charles XII of Sweden, but Peter’s other campaigns were less successful and many were outright disasters.

He is also hailed as the founder of the Russian navy, although during his lifetime and for at least a century thereafter the country lacked a blue-water navy in the fullest sense of the word. The actual ships Peter had built at a tremendous cost in lives didn’t outlive him: their wooden hulls either rotted away or were crushed by ice in the northern ports.

I can’t think offhand of a single Western country that venerates its mass murderers with the same gusto. Yesterday, for example, red flags were flying all over Moscow, when those Lenin worshippers indulged their nostalgia for another monster.

I’d rather see the blue-and-yellow flags of a country heroically defending herself against Russian invaders. But anyone unfurling one of those in Russia will be killed by today’s heir to the long line of ghoulish rulers.