A Bolshevik Empress

And the cringing sinners who fall at her feet

Annajanska by George Bernard Shaw

We must set the scene, for there has been a coup. And not only a coup but a revolution. There’s been more than one of those. We see two military men. One an old soldier, a general, and the other his strange lieutenant (officious, giggling, jealous of his rank and status, occasionally bolshy and disloyal).

Think of those coups and political movements. A dynasty overthrown, or possibly restored. More than one revolutionary committee, staffed by the usual madmen and dregs. Reds and moderates, moderate reds, and a provisional government that may be dissolved by bullets or may dissolve itself and reconstitute as another.

The prime minister may yet have shot himself. But these politicians, you can’t trust them; some of them shoot themselves with blank cartridges.

Pity, then, our poor general. A man born to service, adoring of his former overlords. He waited on his rulers as if they were more than human. He wanted them to exist like ikons in eastern churches: burnished faces, distorted; cold pieces of art to be adored and loved, offering nothing back.

So think of him, this general, as he presides over a revolutionary situation. He has been promoted, but if he says what he really thinks he will be fired, likely shot. So he wails whingingly to his underlings and complains about the state of the world, but does not know to which government he ought to send his plaintive letters. There are so many of them. Both governments and letters.

Poor man. He wishes to have some idol, a wax figure of royal blood to fall before. He wants to have some boots to black, a hand or a garnet on a band of gold to kiss. A man who hopes to kneel and is expected, nay demanded, to stand on his own hind legs and to act as an autonomous individual; an officer entrusted with the nation’s future, what little of it remains.

And he gets some bad news on the phone. It seems that the princess, the last surviving heir of this beloved dynasty (they’ve whipped men and women and little children to death for a good seven hundred years) has done many things. All of them bad. One of them is worst: she has joined the revolution. (The general is entitled to ask which one.) And she has also eloped with an officer in parade uniform: a snake in the grass, a devil!

Oh, it is more than the poor general can take. He considers his resignation. He considers his revolver. Generations of his own family’s slave-like service and the dynasty throws it all away like this! The indignity! The dishonour!

Eheu! the man may as well shout. Alas and alack and fiddlesticks!

His subordinate is now on the phone, having an argument with the guy at the other end. (This guy, he tells his general, has just been promoted; clearly loves to hear his own voice giving orders.) And the result: they have got the princess. She’s been captured. And is detained, of course, despite her theoretical revolutionary change of heart.

The story updates itself in real time, like a website refreshing. The lieutenant fills us in. She’s been nabbed. Now she’s under arrest. Oh, actually, they’re sending her here. No, it turns out they sent her here earlier. She’s downstairs now. Well, don’t send her upstairs. Oh, right, they have sent her upstairs. Or rather they couldn’t hold her back. She’s actually here right now.

And then the lady herself (with the convulsive strength Shaw sometimes gives his tough women characters) enters, dragging two soldiers behind her, men who are making vain efforts to slow her and to hold onto the sleeves of her coat.

The general seems angry and is weeping internally. He has to address his joy, the object of his soldierly devotion, simply as ‘prisoner.’ He does this even after she says that she’s a good commie now and would much prefer ‘comrade.’ Eventually, she even desists from twisting the arms of the soldiers who arrested her. One of them she remembers having bitten. Finally, the two soldiers, quite puffed out, are dismissed.

In the company of the general and his fey lieutenant, she starts to make her pitch. The general says that she should have been ruler, like her dear father and mother. What would her grandmother say? What would the general’s monarchy-loving grandfather have said to him, had he known?

Oh, the people have always loved your family. They’ve knelt down in the mud before them many times. They’ve taken their whippings like good sports. For they want saints, even if they are made of plaster. The scum want bored nobility, bored royals. They want someone above them and better than they are. Can’t you see it’s what the people want? They want to bleed and die in the fields, to suffer degradation, privation, abjection. They desire, actively desire, to starve so that the ruling house might build palaces. They want their life’s wages to be spent on a gold-cloth dress worn only once.

These are the people who permitted themselves to be slaughtered, who lined up and saluted, who accepted reigns of terror and very short reins, provided that the hand that held them was a royal one.

Can you not see, highness? It’s what the people want. You ought to ride to power again, that you might deliver more of the same.

And the princess (a woman who, in youth, ran away to join the circus and does not care which group of vicious killers rules this land) disagrees.