Having successfully
engineered the Balkan
crisis with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
Jonas set his sights on de-stabilizing the Russian constitution.
"Those Russians are so poor they still cover their windows
with paper!" he would shout angrily to himself.
"Peasants!"
Working through a series of middle-men he
made contact with, and fomented anti-Tsarist sentiment within,
a young Muscovite glazier named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. Ulyanov (right, seated, centre)
was the perfect puppet for Jonas' scheme: a small and strangely-shaped
man, he was frustrated by a lack of promotion prospects within
the Russian glazing fraternity. In his fifteen-year career,
the largest piece of glass he had been allowed to install
was only 8 centimetres square.
"I can do more," he
would scream at passers-by.
But what began simply as the formation of a glazier's union
with demands for larger commissions, by 1917 had transformed
into something altogether more sinister. Vladimir accompanied
the Bolsheviks during their latter days of revolution and
by crying:
"Mind the glass!" at regular intervals, was
able to ensure that not a pane was broken in the storming
of the Winter Palace.
Details of
the next stage of Selman-Troytt foreign expansion.