Greta Bridge
Assignation with Greta
by Bill Hartley
Some rivers are well known with their name denoting a whole region. Others can be quite obscure and it doesn’t help when more than one river carries the same name. There are two called Greta, the best known being in the Lake District. The other rises close to the northern boundary of the Yorkshire Dales National Park and runs for only about 20 miles until it joins the Tees. Here the country rock is soft limestone and during its short journey the river has created a narrow valley and at intervals deep wooded gorges, meaning it can be a risky business to stray off the footpath. Packed into this short and little visited river is some wonderful scenery. The surrounding country was once well fortified, physical symbols of the area’s turbulent past. Castles are to be found in unlikely locations. In a nearby farmyard is Scargill (no relation), one of the smallest. However it’s not just the scenery which makes the river Greta worth a visit. The final three miles of this river has a significant artistic and literary heritage.
The easiest approach is via the hamlet of Greta Bridge, just off the A66. A mile or so upstream is the ruins of St Mary’s church and the site of a deserted medieval village. This was once a thriving settlement and no-one is sure why the inhabitants left. A better question would be why people settled there in the first place. Egglestone Abbey lies nearby and perhaps the monks saw it as a good location for lime or charcoal burning, since there is ample timber here. The dissolution of the Abbey and sale of its lands may have led to less centralised rural activities. Continue reading
A Light, Shining in Darkness
Lenin and Stalin
A Light, Shining in Darkness
Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2019, pp. ix-xi + pp. 1-326 + notes, photos, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-300-22278-4, reviewed by Frank Ellis
I begin with the Soviet century. In 1917, a gang of ideological fanatics seized power in Russia. They then proceeded to conduct an experiment affecting millions of people not just in Russia but throughout the world. The apparent aim of this experiment was to create something akin to paradise on earth. To this end, the owners of factories, banks and other private assets were dispossessed and their property now managed by the state in the name of the people and for the good of the people. All manifestations of inequality – racial, economic and political – were abolished (just like that), and henceforth, all forms of racial and ethnic prejudice, especially Great Russian chauvinism, were declared to be anti-Soviet and punishable. In the new classless society, one free of any racial and class antagonisms, wars would cease and a new age of unimaginable peace and prosperity would ensue. The very existence and success of this society would inspire the workers of the world to take up arms against their capitalist oppressors.
Inequalities in wealth, intellectual achievement and status are natural, arising when people are left to their own lawful devices. In order to eradicate these naturally occurring inequalities, the terror apparatus of the Soviet state had constantly to intervene in people’s lives. The results of this experiment were not class solidarity, liberty, prosperity and equality but terror, genocide and economic collapse. By 1939, Stalin, Lenin’s successor, had created the world’s first totalitarian state: liberty enslaved; equality in squalor; and loneliness in grief and suffering. In 2020, many academics and politicians in the West and in the Russian Federation, do not wish to be reminded that contrary to Hollywood and our universities, the period from 1917 to 1991, more accurately, the Communist Century, was a catastrophe for the planet (and since 1991, the ideological fallout has mutated into something worse). Continue reading →
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