A People's Tragedy (84 page)

Gorky's own beloved Petersburg, the capital of Russia's Western civilization, was, as he saw it, being destroyed and profaned by 'this Asiatic revolution'. On 14 June he wrote to Ekaterina in Moscow:

This is no longer a capital, it is a cesspit. No one works, the streets are filthy, there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards ... It hurts me to say how bad things have become. There is a growing idleness and cowardice in the people, and all those base and criminal instincts which I have fought all my life and which, it seems, are now destroying Russia.72

Twentieth-century Russia seemed to be returning to the barbarism of the Middle Ages.

Gorky was especially outraged by the spread of lynch law
(samosudy)
in the cities. In December 1917 he claimed to have counted 10,000 cases of summary justice since the collapse of the old regime. It seemed to him that these mob trials — in which the crowd would judge and execute an apprehended criminal on the street — utterly negated the ideals of justice for which the revolution had been fought. The Russian people, having been beaten for hundreds of years, were now beating their own enemies with a morbid sensuality.

Here is how the democracy tries its sinners. A thief was caught near the Alexandrovsky Market. The crowd there and then beat him up and took a vote — by which death should the thief be punished: drowning or shooting? They decided on drowning and threw the man into the icy water. But with great difficulty he managed to swim out and crawl up on to the shore; one of the crowd then went up to him and shot him.

The middle ages of our history were an epoch of abominable cruelty, but even then if a criminal sentenced to death by a court fell from the gallows, he was allowed to live.

How do the mob trials affect the coming generation?

A thief, beaten half to death, is taken by soldiers to the Moika to be drowned; he is all covered with blood, his face is completely smashed, and one eye has come out. A crowd of children accompanies him; later some of them return from the Moika and, hopping up and down, joyfully shout: 'They sunk him, they drowned him!'

These are our children, the future builders of our life. The life of a man will be cheap in their estimation, but man — one should not forget this! — is the finest and most valuable creation of nature.73

Gorky's pessimism was of course the view of a man of letters repulsed by violence in all its forms. He judged the revolution, not in its own terms, but in terms of how far it matched up to his own cultural values and moral ideals. This he made clear in a brave and daring speech, never before published, to commemorate the first anniversary of the February Revolution:

A revolution is only a revolution when it arises as a natural and powerful expression of the people's
creative
force. If, however, the revolution is simply a release of the instincts of the people accumulated through slavery and oppression, then it is not a revolution but just a riot
[bunt]
of malice and hatred, it is incapable of changing our lives but can only lead to bitterness and evil. Can we really say that one year after the Russian Revolution, the people, having been liberated from the violence and oppression of the old police state, have become better, kinder, more intelligent, and more honest people? No, no one could say that. We are still living as we lived under the monarchy, with the same customs, the same prejudices, the same stupidity and the same filth. The greed and the malice which were inculcated in us by the old regime are still within us. People are still robbing and cheating one another, as they have always robbed and cheated one another.

The new bureaucrats take bribes just like the old ones did, and they treat the people with even more rudeness and contempt. . . The Russian people, having won its freedom, is in its present state incapable of using it for its own good, only for its own harm and the harm of others, and it is in danger of losing everything that it has been fighting for for centuries. It is destroying all the great achievements of its ancestors; gradually the national wealth, the wealth of the land, of industry, of transport, of communications, and of the towns, is being destroyed in the dirt.74

There is much that one might admire in Gorky's brave stand against the destruction of the revolution. His despairing voice was an isolated one — which made it all the more noble and tragic. As far as the Left was concerned his 'untimely thoughts' were heretical

— they were 'politically incorrect' — because it was the received view that violence and destruction were both natural and even justified by the wider goals of the revolution; and yet Gorky's contacts with the Bolsheviks made them just as unwelcome on the Right. His own circle around
Novaia zhizn
was not so much a political faction as a loose assortment of disaffected Marxists who had no party they felt they could join. 'I should form my own party,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina on 19 March, 'but I wouldn't know what to call it.
In this party there is only one member
—
and that is me!75

And yet, as Gorky himself acknowledged, his own position was full of prejudices and contradictions which only an intellectual could afford. He made sweeping moral and cultural judgements about the violence of the revolutionary crowd without ever attempting to understand this violence in its historical or social context. In his many writings on the mob trials, for example, he never considered the simple social fact that, with the cities full of crime and violence, and with no police force to uphold the law, these acts of street justice had become the only way for ordinary citizens to protect their property and themselves. Gorky did not really understand the problem; he simply judged it from a moral viewpoint.

Gorky's cultural prejudices were nowhere more apparent than in his efforts to explain the origins of this violence. Of course he saw the need to place it in the context of the legacies of tsarism:

The conditions in which the Russian people lived in the past could foster in them neither respect for the individual, nor awareness of the citizen's rights, nor a feeling of justice

— these were conditions of absolute lawlessness, of the oppression of the individual, of the most shameless lies and bestial cruelty. And one must be amazed that with all these conditions, the people nevertheless retained in themselves quite a few human feelings and some degree of common sense.

And he was the first to stress that the barbarism of the revolution was born in the barbarism of the First World War. The mass slaughter of the trenches and the hardships of the rear had brought out the cruelty and brutishness of people, Gorky explained to Romain Rolland, hardening them to the suffering of their fellow human beings. People had developed a taste for violence and few of them, he maintained, had been shocked by the killing of the February Days. The unwritten rules of civilized behaviour had all been forgotten, the thin veneer of civilization had been stripped away, in the revolutionary explosion.76

Yet Gorky was always rather more inclined to explain this violence in terms of the Russian national character than in terms of the context in which it took place. 'The environment in which the tragedy of the Russian Revolution has been and is being played out', he wrote in 1922, 'is an environment of semi-savage people. I explain the cruel manifestations of the revolution in terms of the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people.' He never stopped to think that all social revolutions are, by their very nature, violent. Here Gorky's view was prejudiced by his ardent Westernizing sympathies. It was his belief that all human progress and civilization derived from the West, and that all barbarism derived from the East. Socially, historically and geographically, Russia was caught between Europe and Asia. The Petrine state tradition and the Russian intelligentsia were both Westernizing influences; the peasantry were Asiatic; while the working class was in between, derived as it was from the peasantry yet capable of being civilized under the intelligentsia's guidance. The Russian Revolution, which, Gorky realized in 1917, came essentially from the peasant depths, was an Easternizing and barbaric force. He had no illusions, as Lvov did, about the goodness or the wisdom of the simple Russian people. 'I am turning into a pessimist, and, it seems, a misanthrope,'

he wrote to Ekaterina in mid-March. 'In my view the overwhelming majority of the population in Russia is both evil and as stupid as pigs.'77

The 'savage instincts' of the Russian peasants, whom Gorky hated with a vengeance, were, in his
view,
especially to blame for the violence of the revolution. The sole desire of the peasants, Gorky often argued, was to exact a cruel revenge on their former masters, and on all the wealthy and privileged elite, among whom they counted their self-appointed leaders among the intelligentsia. Much of the revolutionary violence in the cities — the mob trials, the anarchic looting and the 'carting out' of the factory bosses — he put down, like many of the Mensheviks, to the sudden influx of unskilled peasant workers into cities during the war. It was as if he refused to believe that the working class, which, like all Marxists, he saw as a force of cultural progress, might behave like peasants or hooligans. And yet he often expressed his own deep fear that the urban culture of the working class was being 'dissolved in the peasant mass', that the world of school and industry was being lost to the barbaric customs of the village.78

Gorky blamed the Bolsheviks for much of this. Lenin's April Theses had, as he saw it, called prematurely for a new revolution, and in Russia's state of backwardness this was bound to make it hostage to the peasantry. As he wrote in 1924: I thought that the Theses sacrificed the small and heroic band of politically educated workers, as well as the truly revolutionary intelligentsia, to the Russian peasantry. The only active force in Russia would be thrown, like a pinch of salt, into the flat bog of the village, and it would dissolve without a trace, without changing the spirit, the life, the history of the nation.79

It seemed to Gorky that the cultural ideals of the socialist intelligentsia were being sacrificed by the Bolsheviks in the interests of their own political ends. The Bolsheviks were guilty of stirring up class hatred and of encouraging the 'nihilistic masses' to destroy the old order root and branch.

The violent clashes on the Nevsky Prospekt during the demonstrations of 20—1 April, which many people blamed on the Bolsheviks, filled Gorky with a sense of deep revulsion. His 'untimely thoughts' for the 23rd:

The bright wings of our young freedom are bespattered with innocent blood. Murder and violence are the arguments of despotism .. . We must understand that the most terrible enemy of freedom and justice is within us; it is our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings . . . Are we capable of understanding this? If we are incapable, if we cannot refrain from the most flagrant use of force on man, then we have no freedom ... Is it possible that the memory of our vile past, the memory of how hundreds and thousands of us were shot in the streets, has implanted in us, too, the calm attitude of the executioner toward the violent death of a man? I cannot find harsh enough words to reproach those who try to prove something with bullets, bayonets, or a fist in the face. Were not these the . . . means by which we were kept in shameful slavery? And now, having freed ourselves from slavery externally, we continue to live dominated by the feelings of slaves.80

The role of the Bolsheviks in the abortive demonstrations of 10 June also angered him.

He wrote to Ekaterina on 14 June:

I have come to the end of my tether. Physically I am still holding out. But every day my anxiety grows and I think that the crazy politics of Lenin will soon lead us to a civil war. He is completely isolated but his slogans are very popular among the mass of the uneducated workers and some of the soldiers.81

It seemed to Gorky that the 'plebeian anger' aroused by the Bolsheviks' militant slogans might all too easily degenerate into a force of destruction and chaos in a peasant country such as Russia, where the mass of the people were 'ignorant and base'. Hatred of the
burzhoois
would soon give way to a senseless pogrom, a class war of retribution, a 'looting of the looters', to adopt the Bolsheviks' own slogan.

Distrust of the democratic parties, equally fostered by the Bolsheviks, would soon become a general negation of the intelligentsia and its humanist values.

In a sense it was not just the Bolsheviks but all the political parties which Gorky despaired of in 1917. 'Polities', he wrote on 20 April, 'is the seedbed of social enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual.

Name anything bad in man, and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with abundance.' His
cri de coeur
was based on the belief that the role of the intelligentsia, in which he included the political parties, was to defend the moral and cultural values of the Enlightenment against the destructive violence of the crowd. Its role was to safeguard the revolution as a constructive and creative process of national civilization. Gorky, in this respect, was moving closer to the viewpoint of the liberals and the Soviet leaders, who were just as concerned by the growing tide of anarchy. And like them, during the spring and early summer he was becoming increasingly inclined to view a new offensive on the Front as a galvanizing and disciplining force. For, as Gorky put it on 18 June, 'although I am a pacifist, I welcome the coming offensive in the hope that it may at least bring some organization to the country'.82 How wrong he would be.

10 The Agony of the Provisional Government

i The Illusion of a Nation

At their first meeting Kerensky made Brusilov the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army. The new Minister of War had gone down to see Brusilov at his headquarters on the South-Western Front and, after inspecting the troops, had driven with him through the night to the town of Tarnopol. There was a violent storm and the lonely motor-car seemed in constant peril as it trundled along the muddy country roads. Huddled together inside the car, with the rain beating down against the windows and lightning flashing overhead, the two men drew closer together. They started to talk informally, telling each other their private thoughts, as if they were old friends. Both men agreed on the need to launch a summer offensive, and it was this, as he recalled in his memoirs, that made Kerensky decide 'there and then that Brusilov should be given the command of the entire army in time for the opening of the offensive'.1