A People's Tragedy (171 page)

— and they could not abide him. 'To us Russians,' wrote one Paris exile in 1922, 'Gorky is one of those who are morally and politically responsible for the great calamities that the Bolshevik regime has brought to our country. Years will pass, but he will never be forgotten.'9 The more anti-Soviet the emigres became, the more Gorky reacted by aligning himself with the Soviet regime. Moreover, the rise of Fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy made Gorky reject all his earlier ideals — ideals that had formed the basis of his opposition to the Bolsheviks — about Europe as a historic force of moral progress and civilization. The more disillusioned he became with Fascist Europe the more he was inclined to extol Soviet Russia as a morally superior system. No doubt this was wishful thinking but in the context of the times it is understandable.

Gorky went back to Russia in 1928. After five summer trips he settled there for good in 1932. His return was hailed by the Soviet regime as a great victory in its propaganda war against the West. The prodigal son was showered with honours: the Order of Lenin was conferred on him; he was given Riabushinsky's house in Moscow, a masterpiece of the
style moderne
which he filled with

treasures at the states expense; a trilogy of films was made about his life; Tverskaia Street in Moscow became Gorky Street; and his native city of Nizhnyi Novgorod was renamed Gorkii. All these honours were designed to buy Gorky's political support. The Soviet regime to which he had returned was deeply split between Stalin's supporters and the Rightists, such as Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who opposed Stalin's extreme policies on collectivization and industrialization. To begin with, Gorky occupied a place between the two, and this made him a valuable target for both sides. On the one hand Gorky saw Stalin's policies as the only way for Russia to escape its backward peasant past. Yet on the other he did not like Stalin as a human being (whereas he was close friends with Bukharin and Rykov) and opposed his policies on literature. Between 1928

and 1932, as far as one can tell from the sketchy sources, Gorky lent his support to Stalin while attempting to restrain his extreme policies. It was the same role that he had played with Lenin between 1917 and 1921. Gorky secured the release of many people from the labour camps, and, it seems likely, persuaded Stalin to write his famous article

'Dizzy with Success' in March 1930, in which the leader condemned the excesses of his local officials for the first murderous campaign of collectivization.10

To his former comrades, to those socialists who had made a stand against the Bolsheviks or had made a complete break with Soviet Russia, Gorky's return to Moscow seemed like a betrayal. Viktor Serge, who saw Gorky in 1930, later recalled him as a tragic figure, a once outspoken critic of the Soviet regime who had somehow allowed himself to become silenced:

What was going on inside him? We knew that he still grumbled, that he was uneasy, that his harshness had an obverse of grief and protest. We told each other: 'One of these days he'll explode!' And indeed he did, a short while before his death, finally breaking with Stalin. But all his collaborators on the
Novaia zhizn'
of 1917 were disappearing into jail and he said nothing. Literature was dying and he said nothing ... I happened to catch a glimpse of him in the street. Leaning back alone, in the rear seat of a big Lincoln car, he seemed remote from the street, remote from the life of Moscow, reduced to an algebraic cipher of himself. He had not aged but rather thinned and dried, his head bony and cropped inside a Turkish skull-cap, his nose and cheekbones jutting, his eye-sockets hollow like a skeleton's.

But the truth was more complex — and in this was Gorky's final tragedy. Shortly after his return in 1932 he began to think that perhaps he was mistaken to remain in Russia.

He found himself increasingly opposed to the Stalinist regime — but at the same time he could not escape it. He had become a Soviet institution, everywhere he went the public adored him, and although he felt himself a prisoner of this, he would or could not run away again. For one thing, his sales in Europe had declined, and he had become financially dependent on the Soviet regime. For another, Stalin would not let him go abroad.11

During these last years of his virtual imprisonment in Soviet Russia Gorky became a thorn in Stalin's side. He objected to the Stalinist cult of the personality and, after much prevarication, finally summoned the courage to refuse a commission to write a hagiographic portrait of Stalin, as he had once done for Lenin. Reading between the lines of Gorky's public writings one can detect a growing cynicism towards the Stalinist regime — his essays against Fascism, for example, could be read as a condemnation of all types of totalitarianism, whether in Europe or the USSR — while in what remains of his private writings one cannot miss his contempt for Stalin. After Gorky's death a large oil-skin notebook was found in his belongings in which he compared Stalin to a

'monstrous flea' which 'propaganda and the hypnosis of fear have enlarged to incredible proportions'. There is evidence to suggest that by 1934 Gorky had become involved in a plot against Stalin with the two Rightists, Rykov and Bukharin, along with Yagoda, the chief of the NKVD, and Kirov, the party boss of Leningrad, who was assassinated in 1934. This would account for the murder of Gorky's son Maxim, almost certainly on Stalin's orders, since Maxim had been acting as a messenger between his father and Kirov. It may also account for Kirov's murder — also most likely on the orders of Stalin

— and perhaps for the murder of Gorky himself.12

The circumstances of Gorky's death remain a mystery. His health had been in decline for several years. Along with the old problem of his lungs there was a growing list of ailments, including heart disease and chronic influenza. By 1936 it had become a race to finish his great epic
The Life of Klim Samgin
before he died. 'End of the novel, end of the hero, end of the author,' Gorky said in June. Shortly after, on the 17th, he went into a fever, started spitting blood and died the next day. Those who were with him in his final days testify that Gorky died a natural death. But two years later, during the show trial of March 1938, two of Gorky's doctors were found guilty of his 'medical murder' (i.e.

administering fatal doses of improper medicines) on Yagoda's orders as part of the 'plot against Soviet Power' of which Bukharin and Rykov were said to be the ringleaders.

Now it may well be that Stalin merely used what in fact had been the writer's natural death as a pretext to destroy his enemies. But Gorky's involvement with the opposition makes it just as likely that Stalin murdered him. Certainly, his death came at a highly convenient time for Stalin — just two months before the show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev which Gorky had intended to expose as a lie — and we all know what the butcher in the Kremlin did with people who got in his way. Many years later it was claimed that the

doctors involved in Gorky's autopsy had found traces of poison in the corpse. Ekaterina, Gorky's widow, was quite certain that her former husband had been murdered when she was asked about this in 1963; and many Russians now agree with her.13 The truth will probably never be known.

Gorky was buried with full Soviet honours, with Stalin himself leading the funeral procession. There was a march past in Red Square and the writer's ashes were placed in a niche in the Kremlin wall behind the Lenin Mausoleum. Thus Gorky became a Stalinist institution.

* * * The Russian Revolution launched a vast experiment in social engineering —

perhaps the grandest in the history of mankind. It was arguably an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity's historic striving for social justice and comradeship. Yet born as it was of the First World War, when Europe had been brought to the brink of self-destruction, it was also one that many people believed was essential at that time. By 1918 most European socialist parties subscribed to the view that capitalism and imperial competition had been the fundamental causes of the war and that to prevent another war like it they would somehow have to be swept away. It seemed to them, in short, that the old world was doomed, and that only socialism, in the words of the Internationale, could 'make the world anew'.

The experiment went horribly wrong, not so much because of the malice of its leaders, most of whom had started out with the highest ideals, but because their ideals were themselves impossible. Some people might say that it failed because Russia in 1917 had not been advanced enough for socialism, at least not on its own without the support of the more advanced industrial societies. Thus, in their
view,
it was Russia's backwardness and international isolation that led it down the path of Stalinism rather than the logic of the system itself. This is no doubt in part true. None of the Bolsheviks of 1917 had expected Soviet Russia to be on its own — and even less to survive if it was. Their seizure of power in October had been predicated upon the assumption that it would provide the spark for a socialist revolution throughout Europe, and perhaps throughout the colonial world. When this revolution failed to come about, they almost inevitably felt themselves bound to adopt a strategy that, if only in the interests of defence, put industrialization before all else. And yet since the Soviet model has so often led to the same disastrous ends — despite having been applied in different local forms and in such diverse places as China, south-east Asia, eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Cuba

— one can only conclude that its fundamental problem is more to do with principles than contingencies.

The state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human beings. All it can do is to treat its citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their free activities are directed towards the general good. After a century dominated by the twin totalitarianisms of Communism and Fascism, one can only hope that this lesson has been learned. As we enter the twenty-first century we must try to strengthen our democracy, both as a source of freedom and of social justice, lest the disadvantaged and the disillusioned reject it again. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that the emerging civil societies of the former Soviet bloc will seek to emulate the democratic model. This is no time for the sort of liberal-democratic triumphalism with which the collapse of the Soviet Union was met in many quarters in the West. Reformed (and not-so-reformed) Communists may be expected to do well electorally — and may even be voted back into power — as long as the mass of the ordinary people remain alienated from the political system and feel themselves excluded from the benefits of the emergent capitalism. Perhaps even more worrying, authoritarian nationalism has begun to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Communism, and in a way has reinvented it, not just in the sense that today's nationalists are, for the most part, reformed Communists, but also in the sense that their violent rhetoric, with its calls for discipline and order, its angry condemnation of the inequalities produced by the growth of capitalism, and its xenophobic rejection of the West, is itself adapted from the Bolshevik tradition.

The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.

Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four