Below is an extract from “In Search of the Miraculous” by P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), a brilliant Russian philosopher, mathemetician, and later esotericist. The setting is Russia, on the cusp of history, at a moment when World War I was just winding down and the Russian Revolution of 1917 was on the approach. Reading his observations of the forces grinding on unstoppably around him, as an Empire stumbled towards suicidal catastrophe, gives a rare insight into the workings of history at those times at which later generations can only look on and wonder, what could possibly have gone so terribly and irreversably wrong?
It seems for some people history always happens in their blindspot.
p.316-317:
By this time, that is, by November, 1916, the position of affairs in Russia had begun to assume a very gloomy aspect. Up to this time we, at any rate most of us, had by some miracle kept clear of “events”. Now “events” were drawing nearer to us, that is to say, they were drawing nearer to each of us personally, and we could no longer fail to notice them.
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In the first place it was clear to everyone who was able and who wanted to see it that the war was coming to an end and that it was coming to an end by itself through some deep inner weariness and from the realisation, though dull and obscure yet firmly rooted, of the senselessness of all this horror. No one believed now in words of any kind. No attempts of any kind to galvanyze the war were able to lead to anything. At the same time it was impossible to stop anything and all talk about the necessity of stopping the war merely showed the helplessness of the human mind which was even incapable of realising its own helplessness. In the second place it was clear that the crash was approaching. And it was clear that nobody could stop anything nor could they avert events or direct them into some safe channel. Everything was going in the only way it could go and it could go in no other way. I was particularly struck at this time by the position of professional politicians of the left who, up to this time, had played a passive role but were now preparing to pass into an active one. To be precise they showed themselves to be the blindest, the most unprepared, and the most incapable of understanding what they were really doing, where they were going to, what they were preparing, even for themselves.
I remember Petersburg so well during the last winter of its life. Who could have known then, even assuming the very worst, that this was its last winter? But too many people hated this city and too many feared it and its last days were numbered.