A People's Tragedy (109 page)

All swept away. You can no longer see on the street a rich
barin
[gentleman] in a fur coat reading the
Russkie vedomosti
[a liberal newspaper closed down after October 1917]. There is no
Russkie vedomosti,
no fur coat for the
barin;
he is living in the Ukraine or the Kuban, or else he is exhausted and grown thin from living on a third-class ration; he no longer even has the appearance of a
barin.
63

This plebeian war on privilege was in part an extension of the violence and destruction which Gorky had condemned in the wake of the February Revolution. There was the same hatred and mistrust of the propertied classes, the same cruel desire for retribution, and the same urge to destroy the old civilization. To the propertied classes, it all seemed part of the same revolutionary storm. They compared the violence of 1917 to the
Pugachevshchina,
the anarchic wave of peasant destruction — 'senseless and merciless', as Pushkin had described it — which had haunted Russia since the eighteenth century.

They talked of the 'dark' and 'savage' instincts of the people, which the Bolsheviks had inflamed, just as their predecessors had talked in the nineteenth century of Pugachev's followers. Yet such crude and value-laden stereotypes probably tell us more about those who used them than they do about those they were meant to describe. It was, in other words, only the social pretensions of those who saw themselves as 'civilized' and

'respectable' which defined the violence of the crowd as 'anarchic', 'dark' and 'savage.' If one looks at the violence in its own terms, there are important distinctions between the war against privilege after October and earlier forms of violence against the propertied classes.

For one thing, the violence after October was articulated and legitimized by a new language of class, and class conflict, which had been developed by the socialist parties during 1917. The old and deferential forms of address for the members of the propertied classes
(gospodin
and
barin)
were phased out of use. They soon became a form of abuse, or of sarcastic mocking, for those who

had lost their title and wealth. These were the 'former people'
(byvshchie liudi),
as the Bolsheviks came to call them. The proliferation of egalitarian forms of address —

'comrade' (for party members and workers) and 'citizen' (for all others) — seemed to signify a new republican equality, although of course, in reality, the comrades, to adapt George Orwell's phrase, were rather more equal than the others. The word 'comrade'

(tovarishch)
had long had connotations of brotherhood and solidarity among the most class-conscious industrial workers. It became a badge of proletarian pride, a sign to distinguish and unite the avenging army of the poor in the class war against the rich.

This new language of class awakened a sense of dignity and power in the once downtrodden. It was soon reflected in a greater assertiveness in the dress and body-language of the lower classes. Servicemen and workers tilted back their caps and unbuttoned their tunics in a show of cocky defiance. They went around with a pistol sticking out visibly from their belts and behaved in a generally aggressive manner. They spoke rudely to their 'social betters', refused to give up their tram-seats to women, and sat in the theatre, smoking and drinking, with their feet up on the chairs in front of them.

In the minds of the ordinary people, who had never read their Marx, class divisions were based much more on emotion than objective social criteria. The popular term
burzhooi,
for example, had no set class connotations, despite its obvious derivation from the word 'bourgeois'. It was used as a general form of abuse against employers, officers, landowners, priests, merchants, Jews, students, professionals or anyone else well dressed, foreign looking or seemingly well-to-do. Hungry workers condemned the peasants as
burzhoois
because they were thought to be hoarding foodstuffs; while peasants — who often confused the word with
barzhui
(the owners of a barge) and
birzhye
(from the word for the Stock Exchange,
birzh)
— likewise condemned the workers, and all townsmen in general, because they were thought to be hoarding manufactured goods. The
burzhoois,
in other words, were not so much a class as a set of popular scapegoats, or internal enemies, who could be redefined almost at will to account for the breakdown of the market, the hardships of the war and the general inequalities of society. Villagers often described the
burzhooi
as a 'hidden' and 'crafty'

enemy of the peasants who was to blame for all their problems: he could be a townsman, a trader or an official. In urban food queues, where endless theories of sabotage were spun to explain the shortage of bread, the words
burzhooi,
'speculator',

'German' and 'Jew' were virtually synonymous. This was a society at war with itself —

only everyone thought they were fighting the
burzhooi
.64

The socialist press encouraged such popular attitudes by depicting the
burzhoois
as

'enemies of the people'. The best-selling pamphlet of 1917 — which did more than any other publication to shape the political and class consciousness of the mass of the ordinary people — was
Spiders and Flies
by Wilhelm (not to be confused with Karl) Liebknecht. Several million copies of it were sold in more than twenty different editions sponsored by all the major socialist parties.
Spiders and Flies
divided Russia into two warring species:

The spiders are the masters, the money-grubbers, the exploiters, the gentry, the wealthy, and the priests, pimps and parasites of all types!.. . The flies are the unhappy workers, who must obey all those laws the capitalist happens to think up — must obey, for the poor man has not even a crumb of bread.*

The rich and educated, by being labelled
burzhooi,
were automatically vilified as antisocial. 'The
burzhooi
', wrote one socialist pamphleteer, 'is someone who thinks only of himself, of his belly. It is someone who is aloof, who is ready to grab anyone by the throat if it involves his money or food.' As the social crisis deepened, the
burzhoois
were increasingly condemned as 'parasites' and 'bloodsuckers', and violent calls for their downfall were heard with growing regularity, not just from the extreme left-wing parties but also from the streets, the factories and the barracks. 'We should exterminate all the
burzhooi',
proclaimed one factory worker in January 1918, 'so that the honest Russian people will be able to live more easily.'65

The Bolsheviks encouraged this war on privilege — and even made it their own popular
raison d'etre.
Lenin had always been an advocate of using mass terror against the enemies of his revolution. In 'How to Organize Competition?', written in December 1917, he called for a 'war to the death against the rich, the idlers and the parasites'. Each village and town should be left to develop its own means of: cleansing the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on.

In one place they will put into prison a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job ... In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow tickets [such as prostitutes were given] after a term in prison, so that everyone knows they are harmful and can keep an eye on them. In a fourth one out of every ten idlers will be shot. The more variety the better ... for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle.66

On many occasions he stressed that the 'proletarian state' was 'a system of

* Right-wing pamphleteers before the war used the image of the spider to depict the Jew

'sucking the blood of the harmless flies (the Russian people) it has caught in its web'

(Engelstein,
Keys,
322-3).

organized violence' against the bourgeoisie: this was what he had always understood by the term 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. Licensing popular acts of plunder and retribution was an integral element of this system, a means of 'terrorizing the bourgeoisie' into submission to the Proletarian State. Here were the origins of the Red Terror.

Historians have tended to neglect the connections between this plebeian war on privilege and the origins of the Red Terror. Most of them have seen the Terror as exclusively political. They have shown how it was imposed by the Bolsheviks — either deliberately to build up their power, so that terror became the fundamental basis of their regime (the view of the Right), or as a largely pragmatic response to the threats and problems of the civil war (the view of the Left). Neither is a satisfactory explanation.

The Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror. The main institutions of the Terror were all shaped, at least in part, in response to these pressures from below. The anarchic plunder of bourgeois, Church and noble property was legitimized and institutionalized by the Bolshevik decrees of revolutionary confiscation and taxation, which the local Chekas then enforced through the arrest of 'bourgeois' and

'counter-revolutionary' hostages. The mob trials of bourgeois employers, officers, speculators and other 'enemies of the people' were institutionalized through the People's Courts and the crude system of 'revolutionary justice' which they administered — which in turn became a part of the Cheka Terror.

The Cheka system, as centrally organized political terror, did not really take off until the late summer of 1918 (see pages 627—49). During the early months of the Bolshevik regime, the Cheka system was, like the rest of the state apparatus, extremely decentralized; and this often meant that social pressures, such as the desire of the local population to despoil the rich and powerful, or even the desire of one community to pursue a vendetta against another, could determine whom the local Cheka bosses chose to arrest or execute. This 'mass terror' is analysed here, the aim being to understand the social roots of the Cheka's Terror. For, however much one may condemn it, and however hard it may be to admit, there is no doubt that the Terror struck a deep chord in the Russian civil war mentality, and that it had a strange mass appeal. The slogan 'Death to the Bourgeoisie!', which was written on the walls of the Cheka interrogation rooms, was also the slogan of the street. People even called their daughters Terrora.

* * * In January 1918, at a meeting of party agitators on their way to the provinces, Lenin explained that the plunder of bourgeois property was to be encouraged as a form of social justice by revenge. It was a question of looting the looters'.

Under this slogan, which the Bolsheviks soon made their own, there was an orgy of robbery and violence in the next few months. Gorky described it as a mass pogrom.

Armed gangs robbed the propertied — and then robbed each other. Swindlers, thieves and bandits grew rich, as law and order finally vanished. 'They rob artistically,' Gorky wrote in a bitter editorial on 16 March:

no doubt history will tell of this process of Russia's self-robbery with the greatest inspiration. They rob and sell churches and museums, they sell cannons and rifles, they pilfer army warehouses, they rob the palaces of former grand dukes; everything which can be plundered is plundered, everything which can be sold is sold; in Theodossia the soldiers even traffic in people — they bring Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish women from the Caucasus and sell them for twenty-five roubles apiece. This is very 'original', and we can be proud — there was nothing like it even in the era of the Great French Revolution.67

In the provinces the establishment of Soviet power was often accompanied by such acts of looting and violence. Most of it was perpetrated by unruly elements in the crowd, though the local party leaders were often involved, or else urged the crowd on from the sidelines. In Ekaterinoslav the local Bolshevik leader told his followers to 'wrest from the bourgeoisie the millions taken from the masses and cunningly turned into silken undergarments, furs, carpets, gold, furniture, paintings, china. We have to take it and give it to the proletariat and then force the bourgeoisie to work for their rations for the Soviet regime.' In Stavropol the Bolshevized soldiers systematically plundered shops and houses, and arrested hostages from the bourgeoisie; the local Soviet, which shared power with the leaders of the Duma and the zemstvos, was too weak to stop this terror and chose instead to license it as the first step towards the seizure of outright power.

The violence soon spread to the surrounding countryside, as the Russian peasant soldiers vented their old class and ethnic hatred of the land-rich Kalmyk pastoralists by setting fire to their houses and killing their families with quite unspeakable brutality (pregnant women had their babies cut out of their wombs). The Kalmyks then retaliated by attacking the Russian peasant farms. It was common for the terror to spiral in this way as long-suppressed ethnic and social conflicts suddenly exploded and there was no neutral power to stop them. In the Don industrial town of Taganrog the Red Guards reaped a savage revenge on the military cadets, mostly bourgeois sons, whom they had defeated in the seizure of power. Fifty cadets, who had surrendered on the promise of an amnesty, were marched off to a metal factory, tied by their hands and feet, and thrown, one by one, into the blast furnace. In Evpatoria, a Crimean coastal town, the Bolshevized sailors were allowed by the

Soviet leaders to go on the rampage: in three days they massacred 800 officers and bourgeois residents. Most of them were killed in a tortuous fashion, with broken arms and legs tied around their head before their bodies were thrown into the sea. Similar massacres took place in Yalta, Theodossia and Sevastopol.68 This war against the bourgeoisie was paralleled by a number of Bolshevik decrees sanctioning the looting of the looters'. Soviet officials, bearing flimsy warrants, would go round bourgeois houses confiscating typewriters, furniture, clothes and valuables 'for the revolution'. Factories were taken out of private ownership, shares and bonds were annulled, and the law of private inheritance was later abolished. Banks were nationalized and the holders of accounts were restricted to withdrawals of no more than 1,000 roubles per month (a sum that was soon made worthless by hyperinflation). The owners of bank safe deposits were ordered to appear with their keys so that the boxes could be inspected: foreign money, gold and silver, and all other precious items were subject to confiscation.