In addition to the 40th anniversary of the successful landing on December 12, 1979, of the author and his family in the New World, 2019 is also rich in other significant events.  In particular, this year marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of three revolutionaries in 1879. 

One of them, the son of a businessman, already turned one hundred and forty on March 14.  He revolutionized science and showed that familiar concepts of the world around us, such as time, mass, and dimensions, are relative.  Some before him suspected this, but he convincingly explained, and now it became clear to everyone, that if you spend an hour with your girlfriend, then it would seem to you to be just a minute.  And if, God forbid, you touch a red-hot stove, then that second will seem to last forever.

The son of a businessman and the nephew of an engineer, he (in addition to his flat feet) apparently also suffered from some form of visual disturbance, because he tried to prove to others that space was distorted.  He even organized a German scientific expedition to confirm this phenomenon to — where would you think? — Crimea, Russia, in 1914.  However, the Russians met the expedition as unfriendly hosts.  At the start of World War I, they decided that this was a spying mission and — even worse — plagiarism, because the uncertainty, relativity, and curvature of space have long been known in Russia, which is reflected even in their traditional folk songs.  For example:

Where is the left side? Where is the right one?
Where is the grocery store? Where is the bank?
Street, street, you are, brother, drunk.

Another song says:

Street, street, straight wide street,
No matter how you're looked at,
Why are you, street, getting crooked?

In Russia, however, anger against a heedless scientist is not held for long, and the people good-naturedly call him  "Professor Odnokamushkin" (Russian for "Einstein," which literally means "single rock").

While the son of the businessman, a graduate of the Zurich Institute of Technology, entertained himself by practicing in the field of physics, the other two revolutionaries, the well known son of a shoemaker and the son of a farmer, who did not graduate from universities, found their recognition in matters more prosaic, working with people.

However, they, the children of the people, sensed the laws of relativity, perhaps even more acutely than the eccentric professor, and realized that these laws held much homespun truth.  Their revolutionary genius helped them to discern that any (even homespun) truth, morals, laws of ownership, and respect for individual rights are relative and doubtful.  For them, it was surely so, and how (they marveled) could it be otherwise?  As one Russian revolutionary poet, Mayakovsky, explained the ABCs of the "expropriation of the expropriators" to his paramour:

And what is worse, my Uliana?
Pull to the hut a concert piano.
Gramophone and a clock.

Only the naïve rabbis, whose consciousness was weighed down by the wisdom of the Torah and Talmud, did not understand this and appealed to Lev Trotsky, the son of the farmer, who had his 140th birthday on November 7 of this year.  They tried to explain to him that "Trotsky makes the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills."  The phrase hints to the fact that Trotsky's real surname was Bronstein (Trotsky was his revolutionary pseudonym), a name typical among many Jews who suffered from the disruption of society caused by the Bolshevik upheaval.

However, in response to the rabbis, there was only the hum of a crowd greeting the commissar:

The echo of fiery speeches,
The throngs that are jubilant.
Lev was Leiba in childhood,
The personality is brilliant.

The inspired genius gazed wildly at the mundane rabbis, who did not realize that he had long been no longer a Jew, but a communist (the butterfly thought it had escaped from the cocoon of the Pale of Settlement), and those philistine Jewish cares and sufferings were now alien to him.

He wanted to interrogate and put on trial the former Russian emperor Nicholas II, who came under great impeachment in the spring of 1917.  As the author's grandmother wrote:

An alarm came in February.
Nick pulled his hair, such ordeals.
Lost the reins, lost the tsar wagon
With all his luggage and all four wheels.

Alas, Trotsky was unable to schedule an interrogation before the execution.  The Bolsheviks slaughtered Nicholas II with his entire family in July 1918.

However, one cannot escape karma.  The karma touched many of the tsar's former oppressors in the late 1930s.  Trotsky was already in Mexico, but karma reached out and touched him with an ice axe in 1940.  From this fact, it is obvious that global warming really exists.  Nobody nowadays could find an ice axe in Mexico!

Watching from the comfort of our homes the preparation for the impeachment of the very important statesman of our era, let us hope the karma of his leading inquisitor will not be as severe as what befell the friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

It seems, however, that the one who most deeply understood and developed the theory of relativity (in the social sciences) was none other than the son of a shoemaker, who was rumored to be illegitimately born on December 21.  Poet Guberman wrote:

The son of the teacher, a shabby genius,
The criminal system invented.
And the son of a shoemaker, the mountain eagle,
By covering it with blood and glory,
The unfair regime perfected.

The subject of how the son of a shoemaker, the former seminarian nicknamed Koba, fundamentally implemented the theory of relativity into practice, tells the tale that thousands of formerly loyal citizens were suddenly revealed to be spies of foreign intelligence services.  A general suddenly found out that he was no longer a general, but held the rank of stool.  Unlike many others, a talented revolutionary, a friend of sailors and firefighters, the son of laundress Keke and the shoemaker Beso (not to be confused with Michel Besso, a friend of the founder of the theory of relativity) realized that proving mathematical principles, solving long integral equations, and making use of tensor calculus were no longer required.

An eye knocked out during interrogations; fingers or other delicate external organs pinched by doors by an interrogator; and other, even more hideous techniques were simpler and more reliable methods of relativity's indoctrination.  Merely threatening the possibility of using such methods of persuasion would also lead to amazing results.

We recall historically significant revolutionaries (especially the sons of the shoemaker and farmer), listening to some half-mad Democratic Party speakers about the benefits of socialism, and remember that behind this beautiful word, there is lurking the ghost of relativity in human relations with all the ensuing consequences.

Let us say in the affirmative,
And repeat this a hundredfold, my dear,
That not everything is relative,
Although E = mc² that is correct and clear.

Valery Dunaevsky, Ph.D. is the author of the biographical-historical memoir A Daughter of the "Enemy of the People" about life in the USSR in the mid-20th century.