{"id":101500,"date":"2026-07-15T01:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=101500"},"modified":"2026-07-14T10:10:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T14:10:34","slug":"qotd-first-up-against-the-wall-come-the-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/15\/qotd-first-up-against-the-wall-come-the-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.<\/p>\n

A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862\u20131905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.<\/p>\n

He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.<\/p>\n

Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.<\/p>\n

Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.<\/p>\n

Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.<\/p>\n

When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.<\/p>\n

He had set forces in motion that he could not control.<\/p>\n

He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.<\/p>\n

His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.<\/p>\n

The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration<\/em>, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”<\/p>\n

Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter<\/em><\/a>, 2026-03-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder. A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862\u20131905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia. He was a textile magnate, a patron of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,53,41,1119],"tags":[1391,780,506,76,433,1461],"class_list":["post-101500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","category-russia","tag-biography","tag-communism","tag-revolution","tag-socialism","tag-sovietunion","tag-usefulidiots"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qp6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101500"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103623,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101500\/revisions\/103623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}