Sergeis Boots

American capitalism exploiting its workers, repressing its Black population at home and spreading its neo-imperialism abroad? Or the worldwide communist movement which, despite much evidence to the contrary, at least holds out the possibility of a fairer world, where workers are liberated from an exploitative system and the vast populations of the imperial colonies are freed?

But joining the communist movement means accepting the need to get your hands dirty, to join in with its culture of conspiracy, revolution and political murder. This book addresses head-on what Camus regarded as the big issue of the day, namely — Is it morally justifiable to commit political murder for what you regard as a just cause? Does the hope of achieving freedom for an entire society in some hypothetical future justify killing a handful of actual people in the here-and-now?

The play follows the activities and impassioned arguments of a small group of revolutionary socialists in Russia, in , who are planning to assassinate the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the fifth son of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. All but one of the characters are real historical personages and the events really took place as described.

Camus based the play on Memoirs of a Terrorist by one of the group, Boris Savinkov. Not until the day comes when we stop being sentimental about children, will the revolution triumph and we be masters of the world.

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The only woman in the group is Dora who is as unbendingly revolutionary as the rest of them. But Kaliayev ignores her please and summons up the determination, two days later, to be back in the street when the Arch Duke is on another carriage drive, and to throw a bomb which blows the old man to smithereens.

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All this happens off stage; we only hear the sound effects and see the excited faces of the characters looking out a window onto the scene of the murder in the street below. In the final acts the play becomes increasingly schematic. Kaliayev was captured by the police after he threw the bomb and is now in prison. He has a brief, ironic dialogue with a fellow prisoner, who, it turns out, is actually the prison hangman and will be killing him.

And then in a long, excruciatingly pretentious scene, Kaliayev is confronted by the Grand Duchess, the wife of the man he blew to smithereens. She is, with heavy predictability, a devout Christian and she wants, of course, to forgive him, and for him to join her in prayer to the Lord of All.

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There is no love except with God. Yes, there is… Love for people… Love for mankind! Skouratov says he will put it about that Kaliayev begged to see the Grand Duchess, begged for her forgiveness and renounced his revolutionary views — i. End of act four. In the last act we are back with the conspirators in their shabby apartment, setting of the first three acts. A stern Roman virtue. And so the torch is handed on. Tyranny is not overthrown.

Freedom does not come for every person in Russia. They resolve to carry out another terrorist atrocity. Only in a declared state of war can killing a clearly-identified enemy be justified, because it stands some chance of success i.

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In all other circumstances, killing is just killing. The Baader-Meinhof group shooting German bankers and industrialists. ETA assassinating Spanish officials. ISIS machine gunning people at a rock concert. Did they achieve their stated aims of overthrowing the system, country or values they detest?

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In the end they were just killers. And more often than not they found themselves trapped in the role of terrorists.

Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich | Books & Boots

Hard to return from the excitement of clandestine meetings, smuggling arms, and planning atrocities to working 9 to 5 in an office. Moreover there is an unavoidable inflationary logic to terrorism. The characters exist in a kind of pre-lapsarian phase of political terrorism. The thirty years of bloodshed, terror and state terrorism sprawling from to was undreamed of. It is, for example, interesting to learn that the real-life Grand Duchess was murdered in by revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War — but by that time we were used to mass murders and killing on an industrial scale: The play is set in an essentially bourgeois world where individual lives — where the complex moral dilemmas of individuals — still matter.

It is full of cardboard characters adopting histrionic and above all, very simple-minded poses. Take a characteristic outburst from the most unflinchingly revolutionary character, Stepan:. This is not only childishly, petulantly melodramatic, it is also plain wrong. There is no such thing as total justice or utter despair, these are tiresomely writerly abstractions. In fact there is a whole world of life and love for everyone to enjoy, whether they believe in God or not. There is absolutely no need to live in this hysterical, Dostoyevskian state of mind unless you want to.

But judging a play from just reading it is a dicey thing to do. Soon after the attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury, the British government accused Moscow of poisoning them with a powerful chemical nerve agent known as Novichok. Speaking after his meeting at the Foreign Office on Friday, British Ambassador Laurie Bristow said the, "crisis has arisen as a result of an appalling attack in the United Kingdom -- the attempted murder of two people using a chemical weapon developed in Russia. President Donald Trump joined British Prime Minister Theresa May and the leaders of Germany and France on Thursday to issue a joint statement pinning the blame for the attack squarely on the Russian government.

Russia has consistently denied any culpability, accusing Britain of refusing to hand over samples of the poison used.

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Prime Minister May said Saturday that Britain would, "consider our next steps in the coming days alongside our allies and partners," after Russia's expulsion of the diplomats. She said the March 4 attack on Skripal was a "flagrant breach of international law and the chemical weapons convention. Skripal's poisoning has prompted police in Britain to re-examine the cases of several Russians who have died or fallen ill on U. In what seems like a strange coincidence, police now say Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian former businessman, was murdered last week at his home just outside London.