SINCE last year’s bailout, Irish officials have found it tricky to articulate our relationship with our new creditors. At first, government statements coldly described the European Commission, ECB and IMF as the External Authorities. The December frost has since thawed and External Authorities has been replaced by the more cordial External Partners.
But in pubs and in newspapers and even among the three institutions themselves, our foreign lenders are informally known by a word with altogether more sinister connotations: troika.
A Russian word meaning “group of three”, Troika first entered English in the
19th century to describe a team of three carthorses. The term acquired a darker meaning after the Bolshevik revolution when across Russia three-man committees called troikas were set up by the secret police to try dissidents extrajudicially. They sent hundreds of thousands to exile or execution.
When Lenin suffered a stroke in 1923, control of the Communist Party fell to three men: Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who became known as the first Soviet Troika. The alliance successfully marginalised its main antagonist, Trotsky, but quickly disintegrated and within two years Joseph Stalin assumed complete control.
Like Trotsky, mauled by an ice pick in Mexico, Zinoviev and Kamenev ultimately fell victim to one of Stalin’s purges. The pair were the chief defendants at the infamous Moscow Show Trial of 1936 and after Stalin had extracted false confessions with promises of clemency, he had his former triumvirs shot.
On Stalin’s own death in 1953, he was succeeded by the second troika, a dysfunctional alliance between the former foreign minister Molotov, the Central Committee secretary Malenkov, and the former secret police chief Beria.
Lavrenti Beria was an unsavoury character even by the high standards of Soviet leaders; he oversaw the expansion of the Gulags, the Katyn massacre, and is believed to have personally abducted and raped hundreds of women from the streets of Moscow.
His ambition alarmed his Communist Party colleagues. Just months after Stalin’s death, Beria was arrested and executed with Malenkov’s and Molotov’s assent.
Molotov secured his own notoriety by lending his name to two of history’s more lamentable developments: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the ill-fated Nazi-Soviet pre-war alliance; and the Molotov cocktail (or petrol bomb), which was used liberally by Finns against advancing Soviet tanks in the Winter War of 1939.
By comparison, the third Soviet troika was a model of stability. After ousting Krushchev in 1964, Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgomy cooperated for over a decade before Brezhnev sidelined his partners and cemented his grasp on power.
The word troika, then, carries some unfortunate historical baggage. Could the EC, ECB and IMF find a less tainted alternative? Triad is probably rendered unsuitable by its overtones of criminality, Trinity is certainly disqualified by its implication of divinity and Threesome is too lascivious altogether. Trio is too commonplace and triune, trine and ternion are too obscure.
While Triúr is incongruously Gaelic, Terzett has a suitably Germanic ring to it, though Les Trois might be more fitting given that both the ECB and IMF were headed by Gauls until recent events interjected.
It was in Greece that the European Commission, ECB and IMF had their first joint assignment in May 2010 and the troika moniker first took hold. It’s surprising that Cerberus didn’t catch on instead. The name of the three-headed hound that guarded the gates of Hades – the dog which Hercules overpowered with his bare hands as his 12th and final labour – might have been expected to take hold among the Greek people in the circumstances.
With a Roman tipped to take charge of the European Central Bank in October, perhaps triumvirate is the strongest candidate to replace troika, though the history of the word is hardly more auspicious. In fact, the trajectory of Roman triumvirates closely paralleled that of Russian troikas: a spell of uneasy co-operation followed by unsavoury disintegration and sometimes murder.
The first triumvirate of Caeser, Crassus and Pompey ruled Rome uneasily for six years. Then, after Crassus’s death, Julius Caesar cast the die, crossed the Rubicon and fought a civil war against Pompey, who was ultimately murdered on an Egyptian beach while on the run from Caesar’s armies.
The second triumvirate endured slightly longer: it was a decade before Caesar’s nephew Octavian ostracised Lepidus then fought a war against Mark Antony. Cornered, Antony stabbed himself and died in his lover Cleopatra’s arms. Octavian’s ascension to emperor marked the end of nearly 500 years of the Roman Republic.
Of course, all this counting in threes overlooks one important fact. Our bailout creditors are not actually three, but five: the EU, the IMF, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark.
Understandably, great care is taken never to mention the last three. The indignity of being reconquered by both the Vikings and the English at the same time would be too much for most of us.
It’s bad enough having a troika watching over us, let alone a pentad.