#glebnalysis post

[blue3ski]

"as he meets personally the person he was taught to hate, questions his own beliefs system and chooses to break away from being that symbol. " lmao he meets her by chance on patrol, she runs away, its implied that he *looks* for her. he doesnt actively *meet* her !!! he searches for information. he doesnt question his belief system, he questions whether children deserved to die. and he never breaks away from being that symbol !!! he goes straight back to russia ! also look up history, (1/2)

the bolshevik did WAY worse than kill the romanovs, stop romanticizing them & saying they’re “unfairly villainized” :)

Thank you for responding to my statement, anon. I’ll address this point by point under a cut because this will, again, get quite long.

First, let’s look at what we have in canon.

“ lmao he meets her by chance on patrol, she runs away, its implied that he *looks* for her. he doesnt actively *meet* her” - I’m sorry, this statement confuses me a bit? Does he meet her by chance or does he not? Based on what we have in story, Gleb and Anya meet on the streets, with him not knowing who she is. Is that not a chance meeting? How can he look for someone he doesn’t believe to be alive?

I don’t think we can say he actively looked for Anastasia because he didn’t even buy the rumors he was being fed, since he believes her to be dead. He was looking for an impostor based on the tips. When Anya is brought in as that person, he does not press a charge despite being aware that she is lying to him (as the lyrics of Still indicate), but gives a warning about the dangers of posing as Anastasia in the current climate. Up to this point, I don’t see anything particularly wrong about their interaction, because he’s right, isn’t he? Is he supposed to encourage her behavior? No, because it is a crime in that environment. When he looks into her eyes and sees the Romanov eyes, he could very well have turned her in merely on the suspicion that she is Anastasia, and I doubt anyone would have questioned him on that. But he lets her go, again with a warning. That by itself was already to some extent an act of rebellion against his government, because he placed a personal interest over the good of the state.

We don’t hear from him again until the train escape. Based on the dialogue, he seeks to arrest Anya, Vlad and Dmitry. And then his superior ups the ante by commanding him to kill if she is Anastasia. The commissioner has to remind Gleb of what his position and office cost, so I think it’s made clear enough the Gleb isn’t exactly over the moon about receiving this assignment. We get Still after, which essentially confirms this.

In Paris, Gleb has a chance to kill Anya at the ballet. He fails and just waxes poetic about his feelings and how his mind and heart are “at war”. If that’s not an internal conflict, then I’m not sure what is. If we look at how his part in Quartet at the Ballet is sung, the lyrics he sings are meant to convince and remind himself of his duty. Why would he need to remind himself of this? Because he no longer holds his ideals as dearly to him as he used to. Something has become so important to him that it has made him unable to do what he “needs” to in that moment as per his beliefs system. That something is his love for Anya - again, a personal interest that would have gone against what he was most probably taught as a soldier and a Bolshevik. So his love for Anya does in fact symbolize a questioning of his beliefs system.

So up to this point, Gleb has had a minimum of 3 chances to apprehend or kill Anastasia, or at least the girl posing as her, all prior to their final confrontation. He essentially fails at all of them. So if he does in fact stay as the symbol of the Bolsheviks throughout the story, then he does a rather poor job of symbolizing them, doesn’t he?

Now let’s look at the confrontation scene. I believe his superior referred to him as the “sword and shield of the revolution.” Yet we meet a character at this point who is anything but. if we gather the context clues based on Gleb’s arc, I think it’s fairly clear that Gleb was never going to be capable of pulling the trigger. He goes through the motions, but he’s intensely torn at this point. And as Anya reminds him of the trauma he saw in the past, he tries to parrot the lines he once said with such conviction and confidence, but now he’s saying them brokenly and weakly. Again, why is this so? Because they’re no longer absolute truth to him at this point. He’s seeing that there is a choice other than “simple duty.” He’s recognizing that a revolution is not a simple thing. I don’t see how we can look at this scene and think Gleb never made a choice to break away from being a symbol of the regime. He tells Anastasia that he’s “not his father’s son.” What is his father? The actual symbol of the Bolsheviks. The effective symbol. Gleb has tried to emulate that symbol, but in the end, he realizes that he is not that man. And so he ends things on a civil note with Anastasia. He recognizes her royal status honestly, and chooses to walk away wishing her nothing but a long life. He calls her comrade, because he has accepted that they can co-exist.

“he goes straight back to russia“ - And what do you think happened to him, anon? You asked me to look up history to be more aware of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, which I am in fact aware of as a university graduate with some background in International Studies. Do you think that they celebrated Gleb’s glorious return to Leningrad? Do you think that, when he returned with neither Anya nor a confirmation that he had killed her, they just clapped him on the back and said, “you’ll get her next time, champ!“ No. Best-case scenario, Gleb lied about what happened in Paris and protected them both BUT I find this unlikely because he never knew that she wouldn’t claim her identity. Rather, what most likely happened is that Gleb was himself made an example of after his pretty speech in the finale, and was shot and killed by the same government he had served so zealously for the change in his beliefs that led him to spare Anastasia.

Second, assumptions about my thoughts on the Bolshevik regime

“also look up historythe bolshevik did WAY worse than kill the romanovs” - as mentioned in the previous point, I do know my history. In fact, I had to look it up again in the process of doing research for my fic (yes, even AU fanfic writers do historical research for accuracy), so it’s quite fresh in my mind. Yet I find this requirement to be irrelevant because when I joined the Anastasia fandom, I was under the impression that i was enjoying a fictional work that was loosely based on history. I was not aware that I needed to have a degree in Russian history in order to be considered a proper Fanastasia, that I needed to be able to defend my love of a fictional character in this work and my desire for him to have a happy ending in over 2,000 words of essay with a bullet-point analysis of the text. I was under the impression that I would be able to just have fun with others who shared this interest since this is Tumblr, but well, I suppose I expected too much for having an opinion that contradicted that of the majority.

“stop romanticizing them & saying they’re “unfairly villainized“ - I’m…not sure where you got this out of my posts? I stated previously that my political stand is “anti-authority anarchist” because I frankly am of the opinion that all governing regimes, to put it bluntly, suck. Communists have done terrible things - I have family who suffered in Communist China. The monarchy has done terrible things, again as evidenced in international history. Even democracy has done and has allowed terrible things to happen - just look at the current climate. It is my dislike of governmental authority in general that allows me to able to say, that’s the nature of politics - there is always good AND bad on all sides. I will not pretend the Bolsheviks were saints, but neither will I say that every single person who worked under that regime was scum and nothing more. In the same way, the Romanovs weren’t devils, but neither were they angels.