Roamer's column

It was not meant to end that way; by the time it was over, Bloody Sunday had lost Father Gapon, the leader of what was in effect more than a petition march, his faith in God and in the Tsar, and an estimated 200 petitioners their lives. Many times that number were injured when troops fired on the advancing crowd.

This event in St Petersburg in January 1905 is seen as the precursor to the revolution which toppled the monarchy in February 1917, in turn the precursor of the Bolshevik Revolution in November that year. But 1905 also paved the way, unbeknownst to its followers, for the fall of Russian liberalism. By the end of the year, however, liberals had seen to the introduction of an alien word in the Russian lexicon. It may have been their greatest triumph - a form of constitutionalism and a shadow of parliamentarianism.

1905 saw Russia in a schizophrenic state of mind that would come to an end - for the worse, as history has shown - in 1917, when the 'Big' Revolution installed a Communist tsar instead. The liberals were eaten up by the Revolution (Lenin will introduce terror as a policy) as indeed were so many of the revolutionaries themselves under Stalin's Reign of Terror (Stalin will use terror as a weapon to maintain his personal ascendancy). Where are their apologists today? They exist still, be sure, but they are in hiding.

The breathing space provided by 1905 for Tsar Nicholas II turned out to be just that. There was a sense at the end of that year that nothing had changed; in another, that everything had changed or was about to do so. As the Tsar turned this way and that to find a solution that would not, as he saw it, break his coronation oath, he failed to keep his country together. Radical elements worked at the destruction of the state, which was in effect the Tsar.

And yet, when the most ludicrous call to arms came in 1914, the people rallied round the man some of them believed to be God's anointed even if he had been blemished by Bloody Sunday. Rallied only to abandon him three years later when, finally, the Communists seized power in 1917 and "all power" was assumed by "the Soviets - the sole power which can render further evolution gradual, peaceful and tranquil, proceeding in perfect accord with the level of consciousness and decision exhibited by the majority of the popular masses".

The words are Lenin's. The majority of the popular masses hardly knew him at the time, but they would, little realising that the promised paradise would last too short a term, the blazing lights of the radiant future would soon be dimmed. Revolutionary power would not be people power as 50, 60 million members of the Soviet Union found out for themselves between 1917 and 1980.

In Ronald Hingley's book Nightingale Fever he quotes Anna Akhmatova, one of the four most celebrated poets who lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and beyond, as saying: "Shakespeare's plays - the sensational atrocities, passions, duels - are child's play compared to the life of each one of us. Of the sufferings of those executed and sent to concentration camps I dare not speak. But even our disaster-free biographies are Shakespearean tragedy multiplied by a thousand". Hardly disaster-free in the case of Osip Mandelstam ("And there is no hope/For heart still flushed/With Nightingale Fever") and Marina Tsvetayeva. They perished during Lenin's touted "evolution, gradual, peaceful and tranquil" ushered in by the Revolution.

The fourth poet in Hingley's quartet is Boris Pasternak.

2005 - our man at the National Gallery

The National Gallery in London and the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale di Napoli have collaborated to organise an exhibition entitled Caravaggio: The Final Years. Dubbed "Sensation 1606", the exhibition will run for three months from February 23 to May 22 and has been billed as the Gallery's highlight for this year.

Keith Sciberras, a lecturer in art history at the University of Malta is currently an A.W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This prestigious Fellowship was earned for his research into Caravaggio. He will be spending three months at the Met this summer contributing to further research on an artist who has finally found his place under the artistic sun.

Dr Sciberras has been invited to deliver next Wednesday's inaugural evening lecture at the Gallery: "Caravaggio, Knight of Malta: Virtuosity Honoured, Chivalry Disgraced". The title is apposite. 1606 to 1610 was a dramatic period in the life of the artist, dramatic, heady, creative and, one is inclined to suppose, inevitably spiced with a perverse sort of tragedy.

We learned much about Caravaggio last May when the History of Art Programme of the University of Malta and the Caravaggio Foundation invited the world's leading authorities on Caravaggio - among whom Maurizio Marini, Sir Denis Mahon, aged ninetysomething, who fell badly on the first night and gamely went on with the show the next day with a bump the size of an apple on his forehead, Catherine Puglisi, over whom I rhapsodised in this column at the time, David Stone, John T. Spike and Mina Gregori - to deliver a cycle of lectures on an artist who, I had commented at the time, "combined raw thuggery with rare genius".

Caravaggio was invested with the habit of Magisterial Obedience in the summer of 1608, a title Grand Master Wignacourt had abolished only a few years before. Its reappointment, as Keith Sciberras points out in an article that appeared in last month's edition of The Burlington Magazine, required papal dispensation. This was granted along with another dispensation to allow "una persona a noi ben vista", as Wignacourt craftily put it in a letter to the Order's ambassador in Rome, to receive the honorific title (a double whammy by any standard); una persona, moreover, who had committed murder.

By the autumn of 1608, his habit hardly creased, C was in disgrace for his participation in a brawl, imprisoned in Fort St Angelo from where he escaped and hot-boated it to Sicily. The escape was the last straw; not quite a straw, either. It was deemed even more dishonourable than his original crime. He was formally deprived of his habit in absentia. Could he ever be reinstated - now that he is irredeemably in absentia? Dr Sciberras seems to think the current Grand Master would look upon a reinvestiture ceremony as somewhat carnivalesque, but it would not be the first time a disgraced knight was readmitted to the Order's honorific table.

Other speakers during the exhibition at the National Gallery include Helen Langdon, well-known for her distinguished eponymous biography of the artist, Michael Fried, Professor of Humanities at John Hopkins University, David Stone, Professor of Art History at Delaware University, Dawson Carr, National Gallery Curator, who will introduce the exhibition, and Keith Christiansen, Curator at the Met.

Anybody intending to get away from our intemperate climate for London's milder weather conditions should keep Wednesday evening free should he or she be there. Those who are fascinated by an artist who was ditched by the 18th and 19th century and rediscovered with a vengeance in the 20th, have the next three months in which to visit " Sensation 1606". If you are curious, visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk/plan/floorplan.htm

2005 (continued)

Meanwhile, back in the present, Occidental, Amerada Hess and Chevron Texaco have won 11 of 15 contracts for oil exploration in Libya. The pariah of the Eighties and Nineties has rediscovered the Great Satan and found him good. Conversely, the Americans have revisited the pariah country and found it welcoming. There are estimates being reported of 100 billion barrels of oil and huge quantities of gas waiting to be explored in North Africa and the Gulf of Guinea alone; billions more in Sao Tomè and Principe.

And back in the present, we all know now that the killing of tens of thousands in Sudan does not constitute genocide in the eyes of the United Nations. It is pretty serious stuff, mind you, that much is admitted; not quite genocide though. Perhaps the figure has to rise above a million for that status to be achieved. Last summer, however, the American House of Representatives described the Sudanese government's action as genocidal. Months before that, the UN was gamely telling the world that what was happening in Darfur was the world's worst humanitarian disaster. Oh, yes; that's what it is; cannot be genocide because the Americans say so. Never mind that France and China have oil interests in the region.

And back in the present, followers of politics in the UK will have been amazed at the depths into which Red Ken and Mr Blair's associates are plummeting, the first with the spat he had with a Jewish journalist, the second with their party's dirty tricks election campaign; as if they were not enough already, Alistair Campbell has been recruited to help with strategy. It is rather like the flagellation that sometimes goes on in our island.

The publication of the Scott Wilson report, for example, has opened the way for whatever poisons lurk within the Maghtab, Qortin and Tal-Fulija landfills to have the stuffing knocked out of them. Naturally, for so his reactions are starting to be, Alternattiva's leader Dr Harry Vassallo appeared to have nothing positive to say about the findings of Scott Wilson, which happened to be far less alarming than many of us thought or were led to believe. A hooray to that was far too much for him to manage. Instead, he went on about the delay in publication of the report! And another thing: Malta was not in compliance with the Aarhus Convention. His party would so inform the board monitoring the implementation of the Aarhus Convention. Oh dear.

And Dr Gonzi bats for Malta in Brussels, arguing that Malta should remain eligible for the highest level of EU funding during the period 2007-2013. Naturally, again, the Opposition this time is intimating that a deal has already been struck and Dr Gonzi is making a Maghtab out of a litter bin. There you are, then.

2005 (continued)

Points one and three lifted from proposals to be found in the document dealing with the social and economic regeneration of Malta and from which the Labour Party has still to dissociate itself - removal of bonus and uncapping the ceiling of social security contributions for those on the highest salary bracket - continue to be plastered on full-page advertisements taken out by the Information Office of the Nationalist Party. For point three, the ad carries Dr Sant's 10 per cent devaluation of the Maltese lira to help with the island's regeneration.

Point four has just emerged; it does not strike me as being a bombshell. It deals with the repayment of stipends. University and sixth form students who collect some Lm8 million to help them through their tertiary education and to invest in a car will not think much of the idea. Their preference for the status quo does not make it, or a variation of it, either unreasonable or anti-social.

If pensions and health care are going to be put through a reform process, and correctly so, why not stipends? There are arguments to be made in favour of a rethink. At one level, it is not unreasonable for a wage earner taxed at whatever level to ask why he should have to help pay for Mr or Ms Richbody's son to earn a degree and become a wage earner of some consequence thereafter?

At another, it is equally not unreasonable for Mr Richbody to question why, on top of paying income tax and social security contributions at the highest rate he should also help to pay for Mr and Ms Poorbody's higher education and Poorbody graduating without the slightest hint of indebtedness to society. This, says Richbody, is not good for Poorbody's soul. Socially just means can be found for Poorbody to pay back, some, half, all of the money he was given by the taxpayer even if only as an expression of gratitude. Stipends are not a human right.

Points one to three continue to stink. One wonders how the Labour Party can endure the odour. Point four is more than arguable, either in its present form or in an altered one that should have as its consequence larger funds passed on to the University for research, lecture room amenities, its library, subsidising student overseas study tours (about which some other time) and a thousand and one other uses.

Well done, that lobby group

I would only ask one thing of the Valletta Alive Foundation (VAF), which came alive last Friday. Don't get the city to hum to the blare of music; discreet stuff, OK, but imitation-Paceville please, never. There is enough for the founding members to be getting on with at one level alone: to conserve and to bring to life the city's lapidary magnificence, to persuade and help those responsible for every church, every palace, every house of significance, every niche, every fountain (ah, those waterless fountains) every square, every monument, to get stuck into serious restoration where this is needed.

And in each church, in each palace, in each building of significance that is open to residents and visitors, can we have a 'biography' of the place - its history, its treasures and their provenance; one that is not written up anyhow, but cleared with our most authoritative sources, checked out for its English and any other translation. Error-littered publications passed on as authoritative sources by publishers and critics who should know better, litter our bookshops.

Strike a blow for professionalism in anything that has to do with Valletta and the heritage within. Strike it, VAF.