A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

After its triumphs in the civil war it was no doubt tempting for the Bolsheviks to view the Red Army as a model for the organization of the rest of society. Po voennomy — 'in the army way' — became synonymous with efficiency in the Bolshevik lexicology. If military methods had defeated the Whites, why could they not be used to construct socialism? All that had to be done was to turn around the army so that it marched on the economic front, so every worker became a foot soldier of the planned economy. Trotsky had always argued that factories should be run on military lines.* Now, in the spring of 1920, he outlined this brave new world of Communist labour, where the 'headquarters' of the planned economy would 'send out orders to the labour front' and 'every

* The same idea was expressed at this same time by Gastev and the other pioneers of the Taylor movement in Soviet Russia (see pages 744—5).

evening thousands of telephones would ring at headquarters to report conquests on the labour front.' Trotsky argued that the ability of socialism to conscript forced labour was its main advantage over capitalism. What Soviet Russia lacked in economic development it could make up through the coercive power of the state. It was more effective to compel the workers than it was to stimulate them through the market. Where free labour led to strikes and chaos, state control of the labour market would create discipline and order. This argument was based on the view, which Trotsky shared with Lenin, that the Russians were bad and lazy workers, that they would not work unless driven by the whip. The same view had been held by the Russian gentry under serfdom, a system with which the Soviet regime had much in common. Trotsky extolled the achievements of serf labour and used them to justify his economic plans. He would have no truck with the warnings of his critics that the use of forced labour would be unproductive. 'If this is so,' he told the Congress of Trade Unions in April 1920, 'then you can put a cross over Socialism.'³

At the heart of this 'barracks communism' was the Bolsheviks' fear of the working class as an independent and increasingly rebellious force. Significantly from about this time the Bolsheviks began to talk of the 'workforce' (rabochaia sila or rabsila for short) rather than of the 'working class' (rabocbii klass). The shift implied the transformation of the workers from an active agent of the revolution into a passive object of the party-state. The rabsila was not a class, nor even an assortment of individuals, but simply a mass. The word for a worker (rabochii) was returning to its origins: the word for a slave (rah). Here was the root of the Gulag system — the mentality of dragooning long lines of half-starved and ragged peasants onto building sites and into factories. Trotsky epitomized this when he said that the labour armies were made up from a 'peasant raw material' (muzhitskoe syr'ie). It was the idea that human labour, far from being the creative force which Marx had extolled, was in fact no more than a raw commodity which the state could use up to 'build socialism'. This perversion was implicit in the system from the start. Gorky had foreseen this in 1917 when he wrote that 'the working class is for a Lenin what ore is for a metalworker'.⁴

The experience of the civil war had done nothing to boost the confidence of the Bolshevik leaders in their relationship with the working class. Shortages of food had turned the workers into petty traders and part-time peasants, shuffling between factory and farm. The working class had become nomadic. Industry was reduced to chaos by the constant absence of half the workers on trips to buy food from the countryside. Those in the factories spent most of their time making simple goods to barter with the peasants. Skilled technicians, in high demand, roamed from factory to factory in search of better conditions. Productivity fell to a tiny fraction of pre-revolutionary levels. Even vital munitions plants were brought to a virtual standstill. As the living standards

of the workers fell, strikes and go-slows became common. During the spring of 1919 there was a nationwide outbreak of strikes. Hardly a city was left untouched. Everywhere better food supplies topped the list of strikers' demands. The Bolsheviks answered with repression, arresting and shooting the strikers in their thousands, many of them on suspicion of supporting the Mensheviks.⁵

Without the stimulus of the market, which they still rejected on ideological grounds,* the Bolsheviks had no means to influence the workers apart from the threat of force. They tried to stimulate production by offering key workers high wage bonuses, often linked to piece rates, thus going back on the egalitarian promise of the revolution to eliminate pay differentials. But since the workers could not buy much with paper money this had not given them much incentive. To keep the workers in the factories the Bolsheviks were forced to pay them in kind — either in foodstuffs or in a share of the factory's production which the workers could then use to barter with the peasants. Local Soviets, trade unions and factory boards had bombarded Moscow with requests for permission to pay their workers in this way, and many had done so on their own authority. By 1920 the majority of factory workers were being partly paid in a share of their production. Instead of paper money they were taking home a bag of nails, or a yard of cloth, which they then exchanged for food. Willy-nilly, the primitive market was slowly reappearing at the heart of the planned economy. If this spontaneous movement had been left unchecked, the central administration would have lost its control of the country's resources and thus the power to influence production. So rather than trying to stop the movement, which it had tried but failed to do in 1918—19, it sought instead from 1920 to organize these natural payments, if only to make sure that they went first to the workers in vital industries. This was the basis of the militarization of heavy industry: strategic factories would be placed under martial law, with military discipline on the shopfloor and persistent absentees shot for desertion on the 'industrial front', in exchange for which the workers would be guaranteed a Red Army ration. By the end of the year 3,000 enterprises, mainly in munitions and the mining industry, had been militarized in this way. While soldiers were being turned into workers, workers were being turned into soldiers.

Linked with this was a general shift of power in the factory from the collegiate management boards, which had been partly elected by the workers, to the system of one-man management with managers increasingly appointed by the party hierarchy. Trotsky justified this by comparing it to the transition from

* Trotsky did put forward tentative proposals for an NEP-like market reform in February 1920, but these were turned down by the Central Committee. He swung back at once to the policy of militarization: radical reforms, whether by free trade or coercion, were needed to restore the economy.

elected to appointed military commanders, claiming that this had been the root of the Red Army's success in the civil war. The new managers thought of themselves as commanders of an industrial army. They saw trade union rights as a nuisance, an unnecessary hindrance to industrial discipline and efficiency, just as the soldiers' committees had been in the army. Trotsky even went so far as to advocate the complete subordination of the trade unions to the party-state apparatus: since this was a 'workers' state' there was no longer any need for the workers to have their own independent organizations.⁶

During 1920 the principle of forced labour was applied in other fields. Millions of peasants were drafted into labour teams to fell and transport timber, to build roads and railways and to collect the harvest. Trotsky envisaged the whole population being mobilized into labour regiments which would double up as a standing army or militia. It was similar to the military feudalism of Count Arakcheyev, the War Minister of the 1820s, who had established a network of colonies combining serf labour with army service on Russia's western borders. Trotsky's plan was the heir to a long line of tsarist 'administrative Utopias', stretching back to Peter the Great, which had all looked to the methods of the army to rationalize the irrational Russians, to regimentalize the anarchic peasants, to dress them, drill them and dragoon them for the needs of the absolutist state. Os'kin, like Trotsky, looked forward to the day when 'no foreign power would dare to invade Russia because the whole of its population would be ready, some at the Front with arms in hand, others in industry and agriculture, to defend the Fatherland. The whole country would be one armed camp.' All this was nothing but a bureaucratic dream. The peasant labour teams, like the labour armies, proved fantastically inefficient. It took fifty conscripts one whole day, on average, to cut down and chop up a single tree. Roads built by labour teams were so uneven that, in the words of one observer, they 'looked like frozen ocean waves' and to travel on them was 'worse than an amusement ride'. Desertion from labour duty was so common that in many districts there were more people engaged in chasing the deserters than in performing the duty itself. Villages were occupied, fines were imposed and hostages shot, including the leaders of the Soviet, if they were suspected of hiding deserters. Thousands of peasants were sent to labour camps, set up in every province as 'corrective institutions' for those workers who had been found guilty of violating labour discipline.⁷

Equally ineffective were the subbotniki, Saturday labour campaigns, when workers and students were dragooned as 'volunteers' into such noble socialist duties as clearing rubbish from the streets and squares. During the May Day week of 1920 over a million Moscow residents were involved in this 'festival of labour'. From then on it became a permanent feature of the Soviet way of life: not only days but whole weeks were set aside when people were called on to work without pay. The Bolsheviks hailed the subbotnik as the crowning achievement

of Soviet collectivism. Politically, it probably helped to enforce a sense of discipline, conformity and obedience in the urban population. Not to 'volunteer' for the subbotnik was, after all, to invite suspicion and perhaps persecution as a 'counter-revolutionary'. But economically it achieved very little. Professor Vodo-vozov records his impressions of the mass subbotnik held in Petrograd on I May:

On the square between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty there was a hive of activity. There were really an awful lot of workers, much more than required by the work in hand: they were clearing away the iron railings and piles of bricks that had been lying around for eighteen months since the [palace] fence was broken. Rosta [the Russian Telegraph Agency] proclaimed that at last the ugly fence was gone. But not quite: the bricks were indeed gone but the iron railings had merely been piled up at the far end of the square. And there they remain today. The whole square is still a pile of rubbish. No doubt it cost ten times more to dismantle the fence, albeit incompletely, than it cost to build it in the first place.⁸

One of the effects of the civil war was to depreciate the value of money. During 1918—19 the Bolsheviks were caught in two minds over this. Should they try to maintain the value of the rouble or abolish it? On the one hand, they recognized the need to continue printing money to pay for goods and services. They also knew that the mass of the population would judge their regime by the value of its money. On the other hand, there were some Bolsheviks on the extreme Left who thought that inflation should be encouraged in order to phase out money altogether. They wanted to replace the money system with a universal system of goods allocation on the basis of coupons from the state. They assumed (erroneously) that by getting rid of money they would automatically destroy the market system and with it capitalism, so that socialism would result. The economist Preobrazhensky dedicated one of his books: 'To the printing presses of the Commissariat of Finance — that machine-gun which shot the bourgeois regime in its arse, the monetary system'. By 1920 the left-wingers had got their way: money was being printed at such a furious rate that it was pointless to defend it any longer. The Mint was employing 13,000 workers and, quite absurdly, using up a large amount of Russia's gold reserves to import the dyes and paper needed to print money. It was costing more to print the rouble than the rouble was actually worth. Public services, such as the post and telegraph, transport and electricity, had to be made free because the state was losing money by printing and charging rouble notes for them.⁹ The situation was surreal — but then this was Russia.

Left-wing Bolsheviks saw the ration coupon as the founding deed of the Communist order. The class of one's ration defined one's place in the new

social hierarchy. People were classed by their use to the state. Thus Red Army soldiers, bureaucrats and vital workers were rewarded with the first-class ration (which was meagre but adequate); other workers received the second-class ration (which was rather less than adequate); while the burzhoois, at the bottom of the pile, had to make do with the third-class ration (which, in Zinoviev's memorable phrase, was 'just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it'). In fact by the end of 1920 there was so little food left in the state depots — and so many people on the rations system — that even those on the first-class ration were receiving only just enough to slow down the rate of their starvation. Thirty million people were being fed, or rather underfed, by the state system. Most of the urban population depended largely on work-place canteens, where the daily fare was gruel and gristle. Yet such were the trials of finding a canteen that was open, and then of standing in line for its meagre offerings, that more energy was probably wasted doing all this than was gained from the actual meal. This was not the only absurdity. In almost every field where rationing was introduced, from food and tobacco to clothing, fuel and books, more time and energy were wasted distributing the product than that product was actually worth. Factories and offices were brought to a standstill while workers stood in line to receive their rations. The average person spent several hours every day traipsing from one Soviet office to another trying to exchange well-thumbed coupons for the goods they promised to deliver but which were so seldom to be found. No doubt they noticed the well-fed and well-clothed appearance of the bureaucrats with whom they had to plead.

The Petrograd professor, Vasilii Vodovozov, a leading liberal of the 1900s and a friend of Lenin's in his youth, describes a typical day in his diary. Readers acquainted with the Soviet Union may find his observations familiar:

3 December 1920

I shall describe my day — not because the minor details are of interest in themselves but because they are typical of the lives of nearly everyone — with the exception of a few bosses.

Today I got up at 9 a.m. There is no point getting up before since it is dark and the house lights are not working. There is a shortage of fuel. I have no servant (why is another story) and have to do the samovar, care for my sick wife (down with Spanish 'flu) and fetch the wood for the stove alone. I drank some coffee (made from oats) without milk or sugar, of course, and ate a piece of bread from a loaf bought two weeks ago for 1,500 roubles. There was even a little butter and in this respect I am better off than most. By eleven I was ready to go out. But after such a breakfast I was still hungry and decided to eat in the vegetarian canteen. It is frightfully expensive but the only place in Petrograd I know where

one can eat with relative ease and without registration or the permission of some commissar. It turned out that even this canteen was closed, and would not be open for another hour, so I went on to the Third Petrograd University, in fact now closed as a university but where there is still a cafeteria in which I am registered to eat. There I hoped to get something to eat for myself, my wife and our friends, the Vvedenskys, who are also registered to eat there. But here too I had no luck: there was a long queue of hopeful eaters, tedium and vexation written on their faces; the queue was not moving at all. What was the problem? The boiler had broken down and there would be a delay of at least an hour.

Anyone reading this in the distant future may suppose that these people were expecting a banquet. But the whole meal was a single dish — usually a thin soup with a potato or cabbage in it. There is no question of any meat. Only the privileged few ever get that — i.e. the people who work in the kitchens.

I decided to leave and put off eating until after work. By I p.m. the tram had still not come so I returned to the canteen: there was still no food and no prospect of it for at least another half an hour. There was no choice but to go to work hungry.

At the Nikolaev Bridge I finally caught up with a No. 4 tram. There was no current on the line and the tram was stationary. I still don't understand this. All the trams had stopped but why had they started out if they knew that there was not enough fuel to complete their journeys? People remained seated — some at last gave up and got off to walk towards their destinations, while others sat there with Sisyphean patience. Two hours later I saw the trams were running but by 5 p.m. they had all stopped again.

By 2 p.m. I had reached the archive by foot. I stayed for half an hour and then went on to the University, where there was supposed to be a ration of cabbage handed out at 3 p.m. To whom I did not know. Perhaps to professors — it was worth the chance. But again I was out of luck: it turned out that the cabbage had not been delivered and would be given out tomorrow. And not to professors but only to students.

I also found out that there would be no bread ration for a week: some people said that all the bread had already been given out to the Communists who run all the committees.

From the University I went home, saw to my wife, did what was needed and went back to the vegetarian canteen with the hope of eating. Again out of luck: all the food was gone and there would be no more for at least an hour. I decided not to wait but went to the Vvedenskys to ask them if they could queue there later. From there I went back home at 5 p.m. And there I had my first piece of luck of the day: the lights in our

sector were switched on [Petrograd was divided into sectors for electricity and because of the power shortage each took its turn to have light in the evening]. That gave me one precious hour to read — the first hour of the day free from running around for meals, bread, or cabbage, or fetching wood. At six I went to the Vvedenskys to eat (at last!), and came back to write these lines. At nine it went dark. Luckily a friend of ours came to look after my wife for a couple of hours in the evening and that gave me more precious time. After nine I lit a candle, put on the samovar, drank tea with my wife, and at eleven went to bed.¹⁰

The key to this Communist Utopia was the control of the food supply: without that the government had no means of controlling the economy and society. The Bolsheviks were painfully aware of the fact that their regime lay at the mercy of a largely hostile peasantry. Their smallholding farms produced little for the market, and in the present climate, when there were no consumer goods to buy and any food surplus was claimed by the state, withdrew further into subsistence production and the autarkic nexus of the village. Lacking goods to trade with the peasants, the Bolsheviks resorted to brute force in the 'battle for grain', sending in armed squads to seize their foodstuffs and sparking peasant revolts across the country. This was another hidden civil war. Although the Bolsheviks were careful to pay lip-service to the smallholding peasant system consecrated by their own Decree on Land — this, after all, was what had brought them the support of so many peasants in the civil war against the Whites — they believed that the future of Soviet agriculture lay in gigantic collective and Soviet farms, kolkhozy and sovkhozy, producing directly for the state. The troublesome peasant — with his petty proprietary instincts, his superstitions and his attachment to tradition — would be abolished by these socialist farms since all those who worked in them would be recast as kolkhoz or sovkhoz 'workers'. Miliutin dreamed of 'agricultural factories producing grain, meat, milk and fodder, which will free the socialist order from its economic dependence on the petty-proprietary farms'. Here again the Bolsheviks were carried away by their utopianism, believing that they could create socialism by decree. The Russian peasant was cautious by nature: it would take decades of gentle education, backed up by visible agronomic proof, to persuade him that large-scale farming with modern technology and collective labour teams was really so advantageous for him that it warranted a break with the traditions — the family farm, the commune and the village — which had sustained his father and grandfather. Yet in February 1919 the Bolsheviks passed a Statute on Socialist Land Organization which, at one stroke, declared all peasant farming 'obsolescent'. All unfarmed land which had belonged to the gentry was now to be turned over to the new collectives, much to the annoyance of the peasantry, which saw its claim to the gentry's estates as

a sacrosanct achievement of the revolution. By December 1920 there were over 16,000 collective and state farms with nearly ten million acres of land and a million employees — many of them immigrant townsmen — between them. The largest, the sovkhozy, set up by the state, had over 100,000 acres; while the smallest, the various kolkhozy, set up by collectives of local peasants, could have fewer than fifty.

Many of the larger collective farms saw themselves as a microcosm of the experimental communistic lifestyle. Families pooled their possessions and lived together in dormitories. People ate and worked in their collective teams. Women did heavy field work alongside the men, and sometimes nurseries were set up for the children. There was also an absence of religious practice. This essentially urban lifestyle, modelled on the factory artel, did much to alienate the local peasantry, who believed that in the collectives not only the land and tools were shared but also wives and daughters; that everyone slept together under one huge blanket.

Even more scandalous to the peasants was the fact that most of the collectives were run by people who knew nothing about agriculture. The sovkhozy were largely made up of unemployed workers who had fled the towns; the kolkhozy of landless labourers, rural artisans, and the poorest peasants, who through misfortune, too much drinking, or simple laziness, had never made a success of their own farms. Peasant congresses were inundated with complaints about the poor way the collective farms were run. 'They have got the land but they don't know how to farm it,' complained the peasants of Tambov province. Even the Bolsheviks were forced to concede that the collective farms had become 'refuges for slackers' who could not 'stand up to the carping criticism of individual peasant farmers'. Despite their exemption from the food levy and generous state grants of tools and livestock, very few collectives ran at a profit, and many of them ran at a heavy loss. Less than a third of their total income was derived from their own production, the rest coming mainly from the state. Some collectives were so badly run that they had to conscript the local peasants for labour duty on their fields. The peasants saw this as a new form of serfdom and took up arms against the collectives. Half of them were destroyed in the peasant wars of 1921.¹¹

* * * It was not just the peasantry who rebelled against these Communist experiments. In industry too the policies of militarization gave rise to growing strikes and protests, passive resistance and go-slows by the workers. Policies designed to tighten discipline merely gave way to more indiscipline. Three-quarters of Russia's factories were hit by strikes during the first six months of 1920. Despite threat of arrests and execution, workers in cities across the country marched and shouted in defiance, 'Down with the Commissars!' There was a general sense of

anger that, long after the end of the civil war, the Bolsheviks were persevering with their warlike policies towards the working class. It was as if the whole industrial system had become trapped in a permanent state of emergency, that even in peace it was placed on a war footing, and that this state was being used to exploit and suppress the working class.¹²

Within the party too Trotsky's policies were meeting with growing opposition from the rank and file. His high-handed efforts to break up the railway union, which he blamed for the chaos on the railways, and to replace it with a general transport union (Tsektran) subordinated to the state apparatus, enraged Bolshevik trade-union leaders, who saw it as part of a broader campaign to end all independent union rights. The controversy over the role of the unions had been building up since the start of 1919. The party programme of that year had set out the ideal that the trade unions should directly manage the industrial economy — but only when the working class had been educated for this task. Until then, the role of the unions was to be limited to the fields of workers' education and discipline at work. As the trend towards one-man management continued, a growing number of union leaders became concerned that the promise of direct union management was being put off to the distant future. They managed to defeat the efforts of party leaders to impose the principle of one-man management at the Third Trade Union Congress in January 1920. At the Ninth Party Congress in April they forced the leadership to compromise and offer them a share of the managerial appointments in exchange for their acceptance of the principle.

This delicate balance — between the trade unions and the party-state — was upset by Trotsky's plans, put forward in the summer of 1920, to transform the transport unions into a branch of the state bureaucracy. The whole principle of union autonomy was now seen to be at stake. Nor were the union leaders alone in opposing Trotsky; much of the party leadership itself backed them. Zinoviev, a personal rival of Trotsky, denounced his 'police methods of dragooning workers'. Shliapnikov — joined in January by Kollontai — established the so-called Workers' Opposition to defend the rights of the trade unions and, more generally, to resist the spread of 'bureaucratism' which they said was stifling the 'spontaneous self-creativity' of the working class. The Workers' Opposition enjoyed widespread union support, especially from the metalworkers, among whom the sentiments of class solidarity — expressed both in the ideal of workers' control and in the hatred of the 'bourgeois specialists' — were most firmly rooted. It gave voice to widespread class hatred of factory managers and bureaucrats, whom the workers denounced as the 'new ruling class' and the 'new bourgeoisie'. Many of these sentiments were also expressed by the other major opposition faction in the party, the Democratic Centralists. This group of mostly intellectual Bolsheviks was opposed to the bureaucratic

centralism of the party and to the demise of the Soviets as organs of direct worker-rule. Some of their more radical comrades in Moscow, where their base was strongest, even opened the doors of the district party executives to the Bolshevik rank and file in an effort to promote glasnost, or openness, in local government. They were the first to use the term.

These two controversies — over the unions and the party-state — merged and developed into a general crisis during the autumn of 1920. At a Special Party Conference in September the two opposition factions combined to force through a series of resolutions whose aim was to promote democracy and glasnost in the party: all party meetings were to be opened up to the rank and file; the lower party organs were to have more say in the appointment of higher officials; and the higher organs were to be made more accountable to the rank and file. Strengthened by this victory, the opposition factions prepared for battle over the trade unions. At the Fifth Trade Union Congress in November Trotsky threw down the gauntlet by proposing that all union officials should be appointed by the state. This sparked a bitter conflict within the party, with Trotsky pushing for the immediate and, if necessary, forcible merger of the unions with the state apparatus and the opposition factions fighting tooth and nail for the independence of the unions. Lenin supported Trotsky's goal but advocated a less high-handed approach towards its implementation in order to avoid a damaging split within the regime. 'If the party quarrels with the trade unions,' Lenin warned, 'then this will certainly be the end of Soviet power.' The Central Committee was hopelessly divided on the issue, and for the next three months the conflict raged in the party press as each faction tried to mobilize support for the decisive battle which would surely come at the Tenth Party Congress the following March.¹³ With the government so patently in crisis, and the whole of the country engulfed by revolts and strikes, Russia was on the verge of a new revolution.

ii Engineers of the Human Soul

In October 1919, according to legend, Lenin paid a secret visit to the laboratory of the great physiologist I. P. Pavlov to find out if his work on the conditional reflexes of the brain might help the Bolsheviks control human behaviour. 'I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting,' Lenin explained. 'There was too much individualism in the Russia of the past. Communism does not tolerate individualistic tendencies. They are harmful. They interfere with our plans. We must abolish individualism.' Pavlov was astounded. It seemed that Lenin wanted him to do for humans what he had already done for dogs. 'Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of

Russia? Make them all behave in the same way?' he asked. 'Exactly', replied Lenin. 'Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be'.¹⁴

Whether it happened or not, the story illustrates a general truth: the ultimate aim of the Communist system was the transformation of human nature. It was an aim shared by the other so-called totalitarian regimes of the inter-war period. This, after all, was an age of Utopian optimism in the potential of science to change human life and, paradoxically at the same time, an age of profound doubt and uncertainty about the value of human life itself in the wake of the destruction of the First World War. As one of the pioneers of the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany put it in 1920, 'it could almost seem as if we have witnessed a change in the concept of humanity .. . We were forced by the terrible exigencies of war to ascribe a different value to the life of the individual than was the case before.'¹⁵ But there was also a vital difference between the Communist man-building programme and the human engineering of the Third Reich. The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment — it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx — which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathize with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to 'improve mankind', whether through eugenics or genocide, spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion. The notion of creating a new type of man through the enlightenment of the masses had always been the messianic mission of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, from whom the Bolsheviks emerged. Marxist philosophy likewise taught that human nature was a product of historical development and could thus be transformed by a revolution. The scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, which had the status of a religion among the Russian intelligentsia during Lenin's youth, equally lent itself to the view that man was determined by the world in which he lived. Thus the Bolsheviks were led to conclude that their revolution, with the help of science, could create a new type of man.

Lenin and Pavlov both paid homage to the influence of Ivan Sechenov (1829—1905), the physiologist who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external stimuli. His book, The Reflexes of the Brain (1863), was a major influence on Chernyshevsky, and thus on Lenin, as well as the starting point for Pavlov's theory on conditioned reflexes. This was where science and socialism met. Although Pavlov was an outspoken critic of the revolution and had often threatened to emigrate, he was patronized by the Bolsheviks.* After two years of growing his own carrots, Pavlov was awarded a

* It is tempting to conclude that Pavlov was the target of Bulgakov's satire, The Heart of a Dog (1925), in which a world-famous experimental scientist, who despises the Bolsheviks but accepts their patronage, transplants the brain and sexual organs of a dog into a human being.

handsome ration and a spacious Moscow apartment. Despite the chronic shortage of paper, his lectures were published in 1921. Lenin spoke of Pavlov's work as 'hugely significant' for the revolution. Bukharin called it 'a weapon from the iron arsenal of materialism'. Even Trotsky, who generally stayed clear of cultural policy but took a great interest in psychiatry, waxed lyrical on the possibility of reconstructing man:

What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be conceived on the basis of Socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but we surely cannot improve man. No, we can! To produce a new, 'improved version' of man — that is the future task of Communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: 'At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.'¹⁶

The New Soviet Man, as depicted in the futuristic novels and Utopian tracts which boomed around the time of the revolution, was a Prometheus of the machine age. He was a rational, disciplined and collective being who lived only for the interests of the greater good, like a cell in a living organism. He thought not in terms of the individual T but in terms of the collective 'we'. In his two science fiction novels, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913), the Bolshevik philosopher Alexander Bogdanov described a Utopian society located on the planet of Mars sometime in the twenty-third century. Every vestige of individuality had been eliminated in this 'Marxian-Martian society': all work was automated and run by computers; everyone wore the same unisex clothing and lived in the same identical housing; children were brought up in special colonies; there were no separate nations and everyone spoke a sort of Esperanto. At one point in Engineer Menni the principal hero, a Martian physician, compares the mission of the bourgeoisie on earth, which had been 'to create a human individual', with the task of the proletariat on Mars to 'gather these atoms' of society and 'fuse them into a single, intelligent human organism'.¹⁷

The ideal of individual liberation through the collective was fundamental to the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. 'Not "I" but "we" — here is the basis of the emancipation of the individual,' Gorky had written in 1908. 'Then

at last man will feel himself to be the incarnation of all the worlds wealth, of all the world's beauty, of all experience of humanity, and spiritually the equal of all his brothers.' For Gorky, the awakening of this collective spirit was essentially a humanist task: he often compared it to the civic spirit of the Enlightenment. Russia had missed out on that cultural revolution. Centuries of serfdom and tsarist rule had bred, in his view, a 'servile and torpid people', passive and resistant to the influence of progress, prone to sudden outbursts of destructive violence, yet incapable, without state compulsion, of constructive national work. The Russians, in short, were nekulturnyi, or 'uncivilized': they lacked the culture to be active citizens. The task of the cultural revolution, upon which the political and social revolutions depended, was to cultivate this sense of citizenship. It was, in Gorky's words, to 'activate the Russian people along Western lines' and to liberate them from their long history of Asiatic barbarism and idleness'.¹⁸

In 1909 Gorky, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky had established a school for Russian workers at the writer's villa on the island of Capri. Thirteen workers (one of them a police spy) were smuggled out of Russia at great expense and made to sit through a dry course of lectures on the history of socialism and Western literature. The only extra-curricular entertainment was a guided tour by Lunacharsky of the art museums of Naples. Bologna was the venue for a second workers' school in 1910. The object of this exercise was to create a group of conscious proletarian socialists — a sort of 'working-class intelligentsia' — who would then disseminate their knowledge to the workers and thereby ensure that the revolutionary movement created its own cultural revolution. The founders of the school formed themselves into the Vpered (Forward) group and immediately came into bitter conflict with Lenin. The Vperedists' conception of the revolution was essentially Menshevik in the sense that they saw its success as dependent upon the organic development of a working-class culture. Lenin, by contrast, was dismissive of the workers' potential as an independent cultural force and stressed their role as disciplined cadres for the party. The Vpered group also claimed that knowledge, and technology in particular, were the moving forces of history in a way that Marx had not envisaged, and that social classes were differentiated less by property than by their possession of knowledge. The working class would thus be liberated not just by controlling the means of production, distribution and exchange, but by a simultaneous cultural revolution which also gave them the power of knowledge itself. Hence their commitment to the enlightenment of the working class. Finally, and even more heretically, the Vperedists argued that Marxism should be seen as a form of religion — only with humanity as the Divine Being and collectivism as the Holy Spirit. Gorky highlighted this humanist theme in his novel Confession (1908), in which the hero Matvei finds his god through comradeship with his fellow men.

After 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with more pressing matters, cultural policy was left to these former Vperedists in the party. Lunacharsky became the Commissar of Enlightenment — a title that reflected the inspiration of the cultural revolution which it set as its goal — and was responsible for both education and the arts. Bogdanov headed the Proletkult organization, set up in 1917 to develop proletarian culture. Through its factory clubs and studios, which by 1919 had 80,000 members, it organized amateur theatres, choirs, bands, art classes, creative writing workshops and sporting events for the workers. There was a Proletarian University in Moscow and a Socialist Encyclopedia, whose publication was seen by Bogdanov as a preparation for the future proletarian civilization, just as, in his view, Diderot's Encyclopedic had been an attempt by the rising bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France to prepare its own cultural revolution.¹⁹

As with the Capri and Bologna schools, the Proletkult intelligentsia displayed at times a patronising attitude towards the workers they sought to cultivate. Proletkult's basic premise was that the working class should spontaneously develop its own culture; yet here were the intelligentsia doing it for them. Moreover, the 'proletarian culture' which they fostered had much less to do with the workers' actual tastes — vaudeville and vodka for the most — which these intellectuals usually scorned as vulgar, than it had to do with their own idealized vision of what the workers were supposed to be: uncorrupted by bourgeois individualism; collectivist in their ways of life and thought; sober, serious and self-improving; interested in science and sport; in short the pioneers of the intelligentsia's own imagined socialist culture.

* * * The revolution of 1917 came in the middle of Russia's so-called Silver Age, the first three decades of this century when the avant-garde flourished in all the arts. Many of the country's finest writers and artists took part in Proletkult and other Soviet cultural ventures during and after the civil war: Belyi, Gumilev, Mayakovsky and Khodasevich taught poetry classes; Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Eisenstein carried out an 'October Revolution' in the theatre; Tatlin, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky and Malevich pioneered the visual arts; while Chagall even became Commissar for Arts in his native town of Vitebsk and later taught painting at a colony for orphans near Moscow. This coalition of commissars and artists was partly born of common principles:.the idea that art had a social agenda and a mission to communicate with the masses; and a modernist rejection of the old bourgeois art. But it was also a marriage of convenience. For despite their initial reservations, mostly about losing their autonomy, these cultural figures soon saw the advantages of Bolshevik patronage for the avant-garde, not to speak of the extra rations and work materials they so badly needed in these barren years. Gorky was a central figure here — acting as a Soviet patron to the artists and as an artists' leader

to the Soviets. In September 1918 he agreed to collaborate with Lunacharsky's commissariat in its dealings with the artistic and scientific worlds. Lunacharsky, for his part, did his best to support Gorky's various ventures to 'save Russian culture', despite Lenin's impatience about such 'trivial matters', from the publishing house World Literature, where so many destitute intellectuals were employed, to the Commission for the Preservation of Historical Buildings and Monuments. Lunacharsky complained that Gorky had 'turned out completely in the camp of the intelligentsia, siding with it in its grumbling, lack of faith and terror at the prospect of the destruction of valuable things under the blows of the revolution'. The nihilistic wing of the avant-garde was especially attracted to Bolshevism. It revelled in its destruction of the old world. The Futurist poets, for example, such as Mayakovsky, practically threw themselves at the feet of the Bolsheviks, seeing them as an ally of their own struggle against 'bourgeois art'. (The Italian Futurists supported the Fascists for much the same reason.) The Futurists pursued an extreme iconoclastic line within the Proletkult movement which enraged Lenin (a conservative in cultural matters) and embarrassed Bog-danov and Lunacharsky. 'It's time for bullets to pepper museums,' Mayakovsky wrote. He dismissed the classics as 'old aesthetic junk' and punned that Rastrelli should be put against the wall (rasstreliat in Russian means to execute). Kirillov, the Proletkult poet, wrote:

In the name of our tomorrow we shall burn Raphael Destroy the Museums, crush the flowers of Art.²⁰

This was by and large intellectual swagger, the vandalistic pose of second-rate writers whose readiness to shock far outstripped their own talents.

Stalin once described the writer as the 'engineer of human souls'. The artists of the avant-garde were supposed to become the great transformers of human nature during the first years of the Bolshevik regime. Many of them shared the socialist ideal of making the human spirit more collectivist. They rejected the individualistic preoccupations of nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' art, and believed that they could train the human mind to see the world in a different way through modernist forms of artistic expression. Montage, for example, with its collage effect of fragmented but connected images, was thought to have a subliminal didactic effect on the viewer. Eisenstein, who used the technique in his three great propaganda films of the 1920s, Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October, based his whole theory of film on it. A great deal of fuss was made of the 'psychic revolution' which was supposed to be brought about by the cinema, the modernist art form par excellence, which, like the psychology of modern man, was based on 'straight lines and sharp corners' and the 'power of the machine'.²¹

As the pioneers of this 'psychic revolution', the avant-garde artists pursued diverse experimental forms. There was no censorship of art at this time — the Bolsheviks had more pressing concerns — and it was an area of relative freedom. Hence there was the paradox of an artistic explosion in a police state. Much of this early Soviet art was of real and lasting value. The Constructi-vists, in particular artists such as Rodchenko, Malevich and Tatlin, have had a huge impact on the modernist style. This could not be said of Nazi art, or of what passed for art in Stalin's day, the grim monumental kitsch of Socialist Realism. And yet, almost inevitably, given the youthful exuberance with which the avant-garde embraced this spirit of experimentalism, many of their contributions may seem rather comical today.

In music, for example, there were orchestras without conductors (both in rehearsal and performance) who claimed to be pioneering the socialist way of life based on equality and human fulfilment through free collective work. There was a movement of 'concerts in the factory' using the sirens, turbines and hooters as instruments, or creating new sounds by electronic means, which some people seemed to think would lead to a new musical aesthetic closer to the psyche of the workers. Shostakovich, no doubt as always with tongue in cheek, joined in the fun by adding the sound of factory whistles to the climax of his Second Symphony ('To October'). Equally eccentric was the renaming of well-known operas and their refashioning with new librettos to make them 'socialist': so Tosca became The Battle for the Commune, with the action shifted to the Paris of 1871; Les Huguenots became The Decembrists and was set in Russia; while Glinka's Life for the Tsar was rewritten as The Hammer and the Sickle.

There was a similar attempt to bring theatre closer to the masses by taking it out of its usual 'bourgeois' setting and putting it on in the streets, the factories and the barracks. Theatre thus became a form of Agitprop. Its aim was to break down the barriers between actors and spectators, to dissolve the proscenium line dividing theatre from reality. All this was taken from the techniques of the German experimental theatre pioneered by Max Reinhardt, which were later perfected by Brecht. By encouraging the audience to voice its reactions to the drama, Meyerhold and other Soviet directors sought to engage its emotions in didactic allegories of the revolution. The new dramas highlighted the revolutionary struggle both on the national scale and on the scale of private human lives. The characters were crude cardboard symbols — greedy capitalists in bowler hats, devilish priests with Rasputin-type beards and honest simple workers. The main purpose of these plays was to stir up mass hatred against the 'enemies' of the revolution and thus to rally people behind the regime. One such drama, Do You Hear, Moscow?, staged by Eisenstein in 1924, aroused such emotions that in the final act, when the German workers were shown storming the stronghold of the Fascists, the audience itself tried to join in. Every murdered

Fascist was met with wild cheers. One spectator even drew his gun to shoot an actress playing the part of a Fascist cocotte; but his neighbours brought him to his senses.

The most spectacular example of revolutionary street theatre was The Storming of the Winter Palace, staged in 1920 to celebrate the third anniversary of the October insurrection. This mass spectacle ended the distinction — which in any case had always been confused — between theatre and revolution: the streets of Petrograd, where the revolutionary drama of 1917 had been enacted, were now turned into a theatre. The key scenes were re-enacted on three huge stages on Palace Square. The Winter Palace was part of the set with various windows lit up in turn to reveal different scenes inside. The Aurora played a star role, firing its heavy guns from the Neva to signal the start of the assault on the palace, just as it had done on that historic night. There was a cast of 10,000 actors, probably more than had taken part in the actual insurrection, who, like the chorus in the theatre of the Ancient Greeks, appeared to embody the monumental idea of the revolution as an act of the people. An estimated 100,000 spectators watched the action unfold from Palace Square. They laughed at the buffoonish figure of Kerensky and cheered wildly during the assault on the palace. This was the start of the myth of Great October — a myth which Eisenstein turned into pseudo-fact with his 'docudrama' film October (1927). Stills from this film are still reproduced in books, both in Russia and the West, as authentic photographs of the revolution.²²

Art too was taken on to the streets. The Constructivists talked of bringing art out of the museums and into everyday life. Many of them, such as Rodchenko and Malevich, concentrated their efforts on designing clothes, furniture, offices and factories with the stress on what they called the 'industrial style' — simple designs and primary colours, geometric shapes and straight lines, all of which they thought would both liberate the people and make them more rational. They said their aim was 'to reconstruct not only objects, but also the whole domestic way of life'. Several leading avant-garde painters and sculptors, such as Chagall and Tatlin, put their hands to 'agitation art' — decorating buildings and streetcars or designing posters for the numerous revolutionary celebrations and festivals, such as I May or Revolution Day, when the whole of the people was supposed to be united in an open exhibition of collective joy and emotion. The town was literally painted red (sometimes even the trees). Through statues and monuments they sought to turn the streets into a Museum of the Revolution, into a living icon of the power and the grandeur of the new regime which would impress even the illiterate. There was nothing new in such acts of self-consecration by the state: the tsarist regime had done just the same. Indeed it was nicely ironic that the obelisk outside the Kremlin erected by the Romanovs to celebrate their tercentenary in 1913 was retained on Lenin's orders.

Its tsarist inscription was replaced by the names of a 'socialist' ancestry stretching back to the sixteenth century. It included Thomas More, Campanella and Winstanley.²³

As far as one can tell, none of these avant-garde artistic experiments was ever really effective in transforming hearts and minds. Left-wing artists might have believed that they were creating a new aesthetic for the masses, but they were merely creating a modernist aesthetic for themselves, albeit one in which 'the masses' were objectified as a symbol of their own ideals. The artistic tastes of the workers and peasants were essentially conservative. Indeed it is hard to overestimate the conservatism of the peasants in artistic matters: when the Bolshoi Ballet toured the provinces during 1920 the peasants were said to have been 'profoundly shocked by the display of the bare arms and legs of the coryphees, and walked out of the performance in disgust'. The unlife-like images of modernist art were alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with art was based on the icon.* Having decorated the streets of Vitebsk for the first anniversary of the October insurrection, Chagall was asked by Communist officials: 'Why is the cow green and why is the house flying through the sky, why? What's the connection with Marx and Engels?' Surveys of popular reading habits during the 1920s showed that workers and peasants continued to prefer the detective and romantic stories of the sort they had read before the revolution to the literature of the avant-garde. Just as unsuccessful was the new music. At one 'concert in the factory' there was such a cacophonous din from all the sirens and the hooters that even the workers failed to recognize the tune of the Internationale. Concert halls and theatres were filled with the newly rich proletarians of the Bolshevik regime — the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow was littered every night with the husks of the sunflower seeds which they chewed — yet they came to listen to Glinka and Tchaikovsky.²⁴ When it comes to matters of artistic taste, there is nothing the semi-educated worker wants more than to mimic the bourgeoisie.

* * * Alongside new art forms the 'dreamers' of the revolution tried to experiment with new forms of social life. This too, it was presumed, could be used to transform the nature of mankind. Or, more precisely, womankind.

Women's liberation was an important aspect of the new collective life, as envisaged by the leading feminists in the party — Kollontai, Armand and Balabanoff. Communal dining halls, laundries and nurseries would liberate women from the drudgery of housework and enable them to play an active role in the revolution. 'Women of Russia, Throw Away Your Pots and Pans!', read

* The Socialist Realism of the 1930s, with its obvious iconic qualities, was much more effective as propaganda.

one Soviet poster. The gradual dissolution of the 'bourgeois' family through liberal reform of the laws on marriage, divorce and abortion would, it was supposed, liberate women from their husbands' tyranny. The Women's Department of the Central Committee Secretariat (Zhenotdel), established in 1919, set itself the task to 'refashion women' by mobilizing them into local political work and by educational propaganda. Kollontai, who became the head of Zhenotdel on Armand's death in 1920, also advocated a sexual revolution to emancipate women. She preached 'free love' or 'erotic friendships' between men and women as two equal partners, thus liberating women from the servitude of marriage' and both sexes from the burdens of monogamy. It was a philosophy she practised herself with a long succession of husbands and lovers, including Dybenko, the Bolshevik sailor seventeen years her junior whom she married in 1917. and, by all accounts, the King of Sweden, with whom she took up as the Soviet (and the first ever female) Ambassador in Stockholm during the 1930s.

As the Commissar for Social Welfare Kollontai tried to create the conditions for this new sexual harmony. Efforts were made to combat prostitution and to increase the state provision of child-care, although little progress could be made in either field during the civil war. Unfortunately, some local commissariats failed to understand the import of Kollontai's work. In Saratov, for example, the provincial welfare department issued a 'Decree on the Nationalization of Women': it abolished marriage and gave men the right to release their sexual urges at licensed brothels. Kollontai's subordinates set up a 'Bureau of Free Love' in Vladimir and issued a proclamation requiring all the unmarried women between the ages of eighteen and fifty to register with it for the selection of their sexual mates. The proclamation declared all women over eighteen to be 'state property' and gave men the right to choose a registered woman, even without her consent, for breeding 'in the interests of the state'.²⁵

Little of Kollontai's work was really understood. Whereas her vision of the sexual revolution was in many ways highly idealistic, she was widely seen to be encouraging the sexual promiscuity and moral anarchy which swept through Russia after 1917. Lenin himself had no time for such matters, being himself something of a prude, and condemned the so-called 'glass-of-water' theory of sexual matters attributed to Kollontai — that in a Communist society the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as straightforward as drinking a glass of water — as 'completely un-Marxist'. 'To be sure,' he wrote, 'thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle?' Local Bolsheviks were dismissive of 'women's work', nicknaming Zhenotdel the 'babotdel' (from the word 'baba', a peasant wife). Even the women themselves were suspicious of the idea of sexual liberation, especially in the countryside, where patriarchal attitudes died hard. Many women were afraid that

communal nurseries would take away their children and make them orphans of the state. They complained that the liberal divorce laws of 1918 had merely made it easier for men to escape their responsibilities to their wives and children. And the statistics bore them out. By the early 1920s the divorce rate in Russia had become by far the highest in Europe — twenty-six times higher than in bourgeois Europe. Working-class women strongly disapproved of the liberal sexuality preached by Kollontai, seeing it (not without reason) as a licence for their men to behave badly towards women. They placed greater value on the old-fashioned notion of marriage, rooted in the peasant household, as a shared economy with a sexual division of labour for the raising of a family.²⁶

It was not just in sexual matters that Lenin disapproved of experimentation. In artistic matters he was as conservative as any other nineteenth-century bourgeois. Lenin had no time for the avant-garde. He thought that their revolutionary statues were a 'mockery and distortion of the socialist tradition — one projected statue depicting Marx standing on top of four elephants had him foaming at the mouth — and he dismissed Mayakovsky's best-known poem, '150,000,000', as so much 'nonsense, arrant stupidity and pretentiousness'. (Many readers might agree.) Once the civil war was over Lenin took a close look at the work of Proletkult — and decided to close it down. During the autumn of 1920 its subsidy was drastically cut back, Bogdanov was removed from its leadership, and Lenin launched an attack on its basic principles. The Bolshevik leader was irritated by the iconoclastic bias of Proletkult, preferring to stress the need to build on the cultural achievements of the past, and he saw its autonomy as a growing political threat. He saw it as 'Bogdanov's faction'. Proletkult certainly had much in common with the Workers' Opposition, stressing as it did the need to overthrow the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, as still manifested in the employment of the 'bourgeois specialists', and indeed shortly later in the NEP itself. There was in this sense a direct link between the anti-bourgeois sentiments of the Proletkult and Stalin's own 'cultural revolution'. From Lenin's viewpoint, closing down the Proletkult was an integral aspect of the transition to the NEP. While the NEP was a Thermidor in the economic field this cessation of the war on 'bourgeois art' was a Thermidor in the cultural one. Both stemmed from the recognition that in a backward country such as Russia the achievements of the old civilization had to be maintained as a base on which to build the socialist order. There were no short-cuts to Communism.

Lenin wrote a great deal at this time on the need for a 'cultural revolution'. It was not enough, he argued, merely to create a Workers' State; one also had to create the cultural conditions for the long transition to socialism. What he stressed in his conception of the cultural revolution was not proletarian art and literature but proletarian science and technology. Whereas Proletkult looked to art as a means of human liberation, Lenin looked to science as a

means of human transformation — turning people into 'cogs' of the state.* He wanted the 'bad' and 'illiterate' Russian workers to be 'schooled in the culture of capitalism' — to become skilled and disciplined workers and to send their sons to engineering college — so that the country could overcome its backwardness in the transition towards socialism.²⁷ Bolshevism was nothing if not a strategy of modernization.

Lenin's emphasis on the need for a narrow scientific training was reflected in the change in education policies during 1920—I. The Bolsheviks viewed education as one of the main channels of human transformation: through the schools and the Communist leagues for children and youth (the Pioneers and the Komsomol) they would indoctrinate the next generation in the new collective way of life. As Lilina Zinoviev, one of the pioneers of Soviet schooling, declared at a Congress of Public Education in 1918:

We must make the young generation into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists .. . We must rescue children from the harmful influence of family life . .. We must nationalise them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools. They will learn the ABC of Communism... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet State — that is our task.

The basic model of the Soviet school was the Unified Labour School. Established in 1918, it was designed to give all children a free and general education up to the age of fourteen. The practical difficulties of the civil war, however, meant that few such schools were actually established. During 1920 a number of Bolshevik and trade union leaders began to call for a narrower system of vocational training from an early age. Influenced by Trotsky's plans for militarization, they stressed the need to subordinate the educational system to the demands of the economy: Russia's industries needed skilled technicians and it was the schools' job to produce them. Lunacharsky opposed these calls, seeing them as an invitation to renounce the humanist goals of the revolution which he had championed since his Vperedist days. Having taken power in the name of the workers, the Bolsheviks, he argued, were obliged to educate their children, to raise them up to the level of the intelligentsia, so that they became the 'masters of industry'. It was not enough merely to teach them how to read and write before turning them into apprentices. This would reproduce the class divisions of capitalism, the old culture of Masters and Men separated by

* Stalin often referred to the people as 'cogs' (vintiki) in the vast machinery of the state.

their power over knowledge. Thanks to Lunacharsky's efforts, the polytechnical principles of 1918 were basically retained. But in practice there was a growing emphasis on narrow vocational training with many children, especially orphans in state care, forced into factory apprenticeships from as early as the age of nine and ten.²⁸

Lenin's patronage of Taylorist ideas ran in parallel with this trend. He had long hailed the American engineer F. W. Taylor's theories of 'scientific management' — using time-and-motion studies to subdivide and automate the tasks of industry — as a means of remoulding the psyche of the worker, making him into a disciplined being, and thus remodelling the whole of society along mechanistic lines. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylorism which flourished in Russia at this time. The scientific methods of Taylor and Henry Ford were said to hold the key to a bright and prosperous future. Even remote villagers knew the name of Ford (some of them thought he was a sort of god guiding the work of Lenin and Trotsky). Alexei Gastev (1882—1941), the Bolshevik engineer and poet, took these Taylorist principles to their extreme. As the head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, he carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a hammering machine so that after half an hour they had internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' (a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian verb to work, rabotat'). Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought this would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a brave new world where 'people' would be replaced by 'proletarian units' so devoid of personality that there would not even be a need to give them names. They would be classified instead by ciphers such as A, B, C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controllers. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer'. This nightmare Utopia was satirized by Zamyatin in his novel We (1924), which inspired Orwell's 1984. Zamyatin depicted a future world of robot-like beings, the 'we', who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are programmed in every detail. The satire was dangerous enough for We to remain banned in the Soviet Union for over sixty years.

Gastev's vision of the mechanized society was no idle fantasy. He believed it was just around the corner. The ABC of Communism, written by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in 1919, claimed that a 'new world' with 'new people and customs', in which everything was 'precisely calculated', would soon come into existence. The mechanistic motifs of Proletkult art were supposed to foster this new Machine World. There was even a League of Time, whose 25,000 members in 800 local branches by the time Zamyatin wote We, kept a 'chronocard' on which they recorded how they spent each minute of their day ('7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.01 a.m. went to the lavatory') so as to be more efficient in their use of time. The crusaders of this clockwork world wore oversized wristwatches (there is still a fashion for them in Russia today). As self-appointed 'Time Police', they went round factories and offices trying to stamp out 'Oblomovism', that very Russian habit of the wastage of time. Another one of their plans to save time consisted of replacing the long words and official titles of the Russian language with shorter ones or acronyms. Politicians were told to cut their verbose comments, and speakers at congresses to keep their speeches short.²⁹

* * * The war against religion played a vital role in this battle for the people's soul. The Bolsheviks saw religion as a sign of backwardness (the 'opium of the masses') and the Church as a rival to their power. In particular, they saw the religion of the peasants as a fundamental cultural gulf between their own Enlightenment ideals and the 'dark' people of the countryside, a people they could neither understand nor ever really hope to convert to their cause. The war against religion was thus an aspect of their broader campaign to conquer the 'otherness' of the peasantry.

Until 1921 the war against religion was fought mainly by propaganda means. The Bolsheviks encouraged the popular wave of anti-clericalism that had swept away the Church lands in 1917. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State in January 1918 aimed to place the clergy at the mercy of the local population by taking away its rights to own property — church buildings were henceforth to be rented from the Soviets — or to charge for religious services. Religious instruction in schools was also outlawed. Bolshevik propaganda caricatured the clergy as fat parasites living off the backs of the peasantry and plotting for the return of the Tsar. Most provincial newspapers had regular columns on the 'counter-revolutionary' activities of the local priests, although in fact most of the parish clergy had either gone or been dragged along with the peasant revolution. Needless to say, the Cheka jails were full of priests.

The aim of Bolshevik propaganda was to replace the worship of God with veneration of the state, to substitute revolutionary icons for religious ones. Communism was the new religion, Lenin and Trotsky its new arch-priests. In this sense the Bolshevik war against religion went one step further than the

Jacobin dechristianization campaigns: its aim was not just to undermine religion but to appropriate its powers for the state.

On the one hand was the Bolsheviks' iconoclastic propaganda. Christian miracles were exposed as myths. Coffins said to hold the 'incorruptible' relics of Russian saints were opened up and found to contain bare skeletons or, in some cases, wax effigies. The celebrated 'weeping icons' were shown to be operated by rubber squeezers that produced 'tears' when an offering was made. The peasantry's attachment to religious and superstitious explanations was ridiculed as foolish: harvest failures and epidemics were to be avoided by agronomic and meteorological science rather than prayer and rituals in the fields. 'Godless acres' were farmed beside 'God's acres' — the former treated with chemical fertilizers, the latter with holy water — to drive home the point. Peasants were taken for rides by aeroplane so that they could see for themselves that there were no angels or gods in the sky. Most of the local press had special columns for this sort of 'scientific atheism'. Hundreds of atheistic pamphlets and stories were also published. Literature and music deemed to be religious were suppressed. The works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Tolstoy were all banned on these grounds, as was Mozart's Requiem, nearly all of Bach and the Vespers of Rachmaninov. There was also an atheist art — one especially blasphemous poster showed the Virgin Mary with a pregnant belly longing for a Soviet abortion — and an equally iconoclastic theatre and cinema of the Godless. Then there were study groups and evening classes in this 'science' of atheism (a good grounding in it was essential for advancement in the party-state). A Union of the Militant Godless was established in 1921 with its own national newspaper and hundreds of local branches which held 'debates' with the clergy on the question: 'Does God Exist?' These debates usually involved the staged conversion of at least one priest, who would suddenly announce that he had been convinced that God did not exist, and would call on the Soviet authorities to forgive him his error. Most of these priests must have been tortured in the Cheka jails, or else threatened with imprisonment, in order to make them confess in this way. Even so, the victory of the Godless was by no means assured. In one debate the priest asked the Godless who had made the natural world. When they replied that Nature had made itself through evolution there were hoots of laughter from the peasant audience, to whom such a proposition seemed quite ridiculous, and a victory for the priest was declared.³⁰

On the other hand was the Bolshevik propaganda which held up Communism as the new religion. The festivals, rituals and symbols of the Communist state were consciously modelled on their Christian equivalents — which they sought to replace. Soviet festivals were scheduled on the same days as the old religious holidays: there was a Komsomol Christmas and Easter; Electric Day fell on Elijah Day; Forest Day (a throwback to the peasant-pagan

past) on Trinity Sunday. May Day and Revolution Day were heavily overladen with religious symbolism: the armed march past the Kremlin, the religious centre of Orthodox Russia, was clearly reminiscent of the old religious procession, only with rifles instead of crosses. The cult of Lenin, which flourished in the civil war, gave him the status of a god. The very symbol of the Communist state, the Red Star, was steeped in religious and messianic meaning deeply rooted in Russian folklore.

A Red Army leaflet of 1918 explained to the servicemen why the Red Star appeared on the Soviet flag and their uniforms. There was once a beautiful maiden named Pravda (Truth) who had a burning red star on her forehead which lit up the whole world and brought it truth, justice and happiness. One day the red star was stolen by Krivda (Falsehood) who wanted to bring darkness and evil to the world. Thus began the rule of Krivda. Meanwhile, Pravda called on the people to retrieve her star and 'return the light of truth to the world'. A good youth conquered Krivda and her forces and returned the red star to Pravda, whereupon the evil forces ran away from the light like owls and bats', and 'once again the people lived by truth'. The leaflet made the parable clear: 'So the Red Star of the Red Army is the star of Pravda. And the Red Army servicemen are the brave lads who are fighting Krivda and her evil supporters so that truth should rule the world and so that all those oppressed and wronged by Krivda, all the poor peasants and workers, should live well and in freedom.'³¹

In private life, as in public, religious rituals were Bolshevized. Instead of baptisms children were 'Octobered'. The parents at these ceremonies, which boomed in the early 1920s, promised to bring up their children in the spirit of Communism; portraits of the infant Lenin were given as gifts; and the Internationale was sung. The names chosen for these Octobered children — and indeed for adults who also changed their names — were drawn from the annals of the revolution: Marx; Engelina; Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg); Vladlen, Ninel, Ilich and Ilina (acronyms, nicknames or anagrams for Lenin); Marlen (for Marx and Lenin); Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution); Pravda; Barrikada; Fevral (February); Oktiabrina (October); Revoliutsiia (Revolution); Parizhkommuna (Paris Commune); Molot (hammer); Serpina (sickle); Dazmir (Long Live the World Revolution); Diktatura (Dictatorship); and Terrora (Terror). Sometimes the names were chosen on the basis of a misunderstanding or simply because they were foreign sounding and were thus associated with the revolution: Traviata, Markiza, Embryo and Vinaigrette. Red weddings were another Bolshevik ritual, popular among the Komsomol youth. They were usually held in a factory or some local club. Instead of the altar the couple faced a portrait of Lenin. They made their vows of loyalty both to each other and to the principles of Communism. In his satirical novel Dog's Wedding (1925), Brykin reproduced such a vow. 'Do you promise', asks the officiator, 'to follow the path

of Communism as bravely as you are now opposing the church and the old peoples customs? Are you going to make your children serve as Young Pioneers [the Komsomol organization for younger children], educate them, introduce scientific farming methods, and fight for the world revolution? Then in the name of our leader, Comrade Vladimir Ilich Lenin, I declare the Red Marriage completed.' Finally, there was the Red Funeral, mainly reserved for Bolshevik heroes, which drew on the funereal traditions of the revolutionary movement — with its guard of honour, the coffin set high on a bier draped in red, the dirgelike hymn 'You Fell Victim', the graveside orations and the gunfire salute — originally used at Bauman's burial, that first martyred Bolshevik, in 1905.³²

From 1921 the war against religion moved from words and rituals to the closure of churches and the shooting of priests. Lenin instigated this totally gratuitous reign of terror. Apart from the Academy of Sciences, the Church was the only remaining national institution outside the control of the party. Three years of propaganda had not undermined it — in many ways the civil war had made people turn to religion even more — so Lenin sought to attack it directly. The famine of I92I-2 gave him the pretext he needed. Although the Church had actively joined in the famine relief campaign, offering to sell some of its non-consecrated valuables to buy foodstuffs from abroad, Lenin found a strategy that enabled him to accuse it of selfishly turning its back on the crisis. He ordered the Church to hand over its consecrated valuables for sale as well, even though he must have known that it was obliged to disobey the order (the secular use of consecrated items was sacrilegious). This provocation would make the Church appear as it was charged — as an 'enemy of the people'. To rally the public against it the press called hysterically for all the Church's valuables to be sold for the famine victims: 'Turn Gold into Bread!' was the emotive slogan. In a last desperate effort to prevent the pillage of his churches, Patriarch Tikhon offered to raise money equivalent to the value of the consecrated items through voluntary subscriptions and the sale of other property; but his offer was refused. Lenin was not interested in the money; he wanted a pretext to assault the Church.

On 26 February 1922 a decree was sent out to the local Soviets instructing them to remove from the churches all precious items, including those used for religious worship. The decree claimed that their sale was necessary to help the famine victims; but little of the money raised was used for this purpose. Armed bands gutted the local churches, carrying away the icons and crosses, the chalices and mitres, even the iconostases in bits. In many places angry crowds took up arms to defend their local church. In some places they were led by their priests, at others they fought spontaneously. The records tell of 1,414 bloody clashes during 1922—3. Most of these were utterly one-sided. Troops with machine-guns fought against old men and women armed with pitch forks and

rusty rifles: 7,100 clergy were killed, including nearly 3,500 nuns, but only a handful of Soviet troops. One such clash in the textile town of Shuya, 200 miles north-east of Moscow, in March 1922, prompted Lenin to issue a secret order for the extermination of the clergy. The event was typical enough: on Sunday 12 March worshippers fought off Soviet officials when they came to raid the local church; when the officials returned three days later with troops and machine-guns there was some fighting with several people killed. The Politburo, in Lenin's absence, voted to suspend further confiscations. But Lenin, hearing of the events in Shuya, dictated contrary orders over the phone from his country residence at Gorki with strict instructions of top secrecy. This memorandum, first published in full by a Soviet publication in 1990, reveals the cruel streak in Lenin's nature. It undermines the 'soft' image of Lenin in his final years previously favoured by left-wing historians in the West who would have us believe that the 1920s were a hopeful period of 'Soviet democracy' before the onset of Stalinism. Lenin argued that the events in Shuya should be exploited to link the clergy with the Black Hundreds, to destroy the Church 'for many decades', and to 'assure ourselves of capital worth several hundred million gold roubles ... to carry out governmental work in general and in particular economic reconstruction'. It was 'only now', in the context of the famine, that the hungry peasants would 'either be for us or at any rate neutral' in this 'ferocious' war against the Church; later on we will not succeed.' For this reason, continued Lenin:

I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we must now wage the most decisive and merciless war against the Black Hundred clergy and suppress its resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget it for decades to come . . . The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot the better.

It has recently been estimated that 8,000 people were executed during this brutal campaign in 1922 alone. Patriarch Tikhon claimed to know of 10,000 priests in prison or exile, including about 100 bishops. It was only after 1925, under pressure from Russia's Western trading partners, that the persecution came to a temporary halt.³³

According to Gorky, the Bolsheviks deliberately used the Jews in their ranks to carry out confiscations of church property. He accused them of deliberately stirring up anti-Semitism to divert the anger of the Christian community away from themselves. In several towns, such as Smolensk and Viatka, there were indeed pogroms against the Jews following the confiscation of church property. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were closing down synagogues as part of their campaign against religion. The first to be closed were in Chagall's home town of Vitebsk in April 1921. The Soviet authorities claimed that six of the

city's eighty synagogues were needed for conversion to Yiddish schools. The Jews quickly occupied those synagogues which had been targeted for closure and held prayer meetings in them. But the authorities removed them with troops, smashing windows, chanting 'Death to the Yids!' and killing several worshippers in the process. None of the synagogues was used as a school: one became a Communist university; several were turned into workers' clubs; one even became a shoe factory. More closures followed in Minsk, Gomel, Odessa and Kharkov. Overall, 800 synagogues were closed down by the Communists between 1921 and 1925. There was more than just a tinge of anti-Semitism in all this. The lower party ranks were filled, in Gorky's words, with 'old Russian nationalists, scoundrels, and vagabonds, who despise and fear the Jews'. The Military and Workers' Oppositions, which mobilized their support from the lower party ranks, both used the rhetoric of anti-Semitism in their language of class animosity towards the 'bourgeois specialists'. The early years of the NEP, which witnessed a boom in the sort of small-scale trading where Jews were traditionally dominant, strengthened this anti-Semitism. For the lower-class Bolsheviks, in particular, it was galling to see the 'Jewish' traders 'taking over' Moscow. During the civil war these 'speculators' would have been arrested; now they lived better than the party rank and file, while half the Russian workers were unemployed. The revolution, it seemed to them, was in retreat both on the class and the racial fronts. It was in this context that many of the more militant Bolsheviks began to argue, as Marx himself had done, that the Jews as a social group were synonymous with capitalism — that all traders were essentially 'Jews'. Such ideas were prevalent in the Bolshevik campaign against Judaism which took off in 1921. The ultimate insult of this campaign was delivered on the Jewish New Year of 1921 when a mock 'trial' of Judaism was put on for propaganda purposes. It was staged in the same courtroom in Kiev where the innocent Beiliss (also read: Judaism) had been tried in 1913.³⁴

* * * The Bolshevik persecution of religion did little to weaken the hold of this 'opiate' on the minds of the population. Although the 1920s witnessed a decline of religion, especially among the rural youth who went to school or left the countryside for the city, this probably had less to do with the Bolsheviks' efforts than with the secularizing tendencies of modern life. It had been happening in any case for decades. In fact, if anything, the oppressive measures of the Bolsheviks had precisely the opposite effect — of rallying the believers around their religion. Despite the separation of Church and state, the local clergy continued to be supported by the voluntary donations of their parishioners as well as by fees and grants of land from the peasant communes. Ironically it was not that far from the dreams of the nineteenth-century liberal clergy for an organic self-supporting parish. Even those who no longer believed in their religion with the

same unquestioning faith often continued not merely to observe but also to show a strong attachment to its rituals. Octobered babies and Red Weddings failed to supplant their religious equivalents (which also happened to be more fun). People continued to bury their dead rather than cremate them, despite the shortages of coffins and graves and the free state provision of cremations, because, in the words of one morgue official, 'the Russians are still either too religious or too superstitious to part from the Orthodox burial traditions'.³⁵

As in religion, so in the fields of culture and social life, the attempt by the Bolsheviks to 'make the world and man anew' foundered on the rocks of reality. It was in many ways a Utopian dream — one of the most ambitious in history — to believe that human nature could be changed by simply altering the social environment in which people lived. Man cannot be transformed quite so easily: human nature moves more slowly than ruling ideologies or society. This is perhaps the one enduring moral lesson of the Russian Revolution — as it is indeed of the terrible history of this century.

iii Bolshevism in Retreat

A letter from Sergei Semenov:

Andreevskoe, 21 January 1921 Dear Anna,

Life in the village has become unbearable. True, we are much better off than the peasants in the rest of Russia. Neither the food requisitioning nor the labour duty has really yet affected us. But we still suffer from the daily acts of robbery, stupidity and dishonesty by our local bearers of Soviet Power which make normal life impossible. The labouring people, in whose name all this has been done, no longer support the new regime. I will not write another letter of complaint to Kamenev [chairman of the Moscow Soviet]. As the proverb goes, 'There is nothing worse than a deaf man who will neither listen.'

Despite the ending of the war and all the promises to get the country back on to its feet, our population does not believe the current authorities are capable of this. It is so fed up and angry, it is so devoured by the feeling of oppression, that it is incapable of positive thoughts and cannot see a way out of this situation. Many are despairing because Wrangel and the Poles were beaten — and yet nobody wants to admit that the answer to our problems lies not in changing things from the outside but in changing the way we live ourselves.³⁶

The sense of anger and despair which Semenov's letter expresses was shared by peasants throughout Russia. All the ideals of the peasant revolution had been destroyed by the Bolshevik regime. The peasant Soviets of 1917, which to a large extent had realized the old ideal of volia, of village freedom and autonomy, had been taken over by the Communists. What had been organs of peasant self-rule now became bureaucratic organs of the state. The revolution on the land, which had aimed to make the smallholding peasant farm universal, was now threatened by the collective farms. The gentry's estates which the peasants had thought would belong to them were being transferred to the state. And what sort of state was that? Not one that helped the peasants to prosper. It was one that took away their only sons and horses for the army, one that prolonged the devastations of the civil war, one that forced them into labour teams and robbed them of their food. 'The freedom we were given by the revolution was taken from us by the new regime,' complained one peasant to a foreign journalist in January 1921. 'Life in the village is now like it was under the Tsar.'

By 1921 much of peasant Russia had been brought to the brink of a terrible famine. While the famine crisis of 1921—2 was directly caused by a year of drought and heavy frosts, the worst affected areas were clearly those that had suffered most from the requisitionings of 1918—21. In Samara province, for example, the worst-hit region of the famine crisis, the amount of grain requisitioned during 1919—20 exceeded the actual harvest surplus by 30 per cent with the result that the average peasant household lost 118 kg of food, fodder and seed from its basic stores. In the harsh conditions of 1921 this often proved the difference between life and death. In the Balashov district of neighbouring Saratov province, where Cheremukhin's murderous brigade collected the levy, the amount of requisitioned grain even exceeded the total harvest so that the peasants were forced to pay it from stocks they had accumulated in previous years and in the autumn of 1920 there was, in the words of one official, 'no seed left to sow'. Throughout the grain-producing regions of Russia the Bolsheviks had deliberately set their food levies higher than the estimated harvest surplus on the grounds that the peasants would hide up to one-third of their actual food surplus. On this same basis the requisitioning brigades had indiscriminately seized whatever foodstuffs they could find in the village barns, often shooting peasants who resisted them as 'kulaks', even though, as many Bolshevik officials were forced to admit, these were usually the poorest peasants who would simply starve if they lost their last vital food stocks to the levy. During 1920, as the signs of the imminent crisis became clearer, provincial food officials pleaded with the Centre to call a halt to their disastrous levies. 'There is simply no grain left to take,' warned one official from the German Volga region in September 1920. And yet Moscow pressed for more. In the German Volga region 42 per cent of the paltry 1920 harvest was seized and shipped off to the hungry north.

Villages were ransacked, children held to ransom, peasants whipped and tortured to squeeze their last few grains from them.³⁷

To begin with the peasants defended themselves with the usual 'weapons of the weak': passive resistance and subterfuge. They buried their grain beneath the ground, fed it to their livestock, or turned it into moonshine rather than lose it to the Bolsheviks. They also began to take up arms in sporadic local revolts and rebellions of increasing frequency, size and violence. Two thousand members of the requisitioning brigades were murdered by angry peasants during 1918; in 1919 the figure rose to nearly 5,000; and in 1920 to over 8,000. By the autumn of 1920 the whole of the country was inflamed with peasant wars. Makhno's peasant army, still up to 15,000 strong after Wrangel's defeat, roamed across the Ukrainian steppe and, together with countless other local bands, succeeded in paralysing much of the rural Soviet infrastructure until the summer of 1921. In the central Russian province of Tambov the Antonov rebellion was supported by virtually the entire peasant population: Soviet power ceased to exist there between the autumn of 1920 and the summer of 1921. In Voronezh, Saratov, Samara, Simbirsk and Penza provinces there were smaller but no less destructive peasant rebel armies creating havoc and effectively limiting the Bolsheviks' power to the towns. Hundreds of small-scale bandit armies controlled the steppelands between Ufa and the Caspian Sea. In the Don and the Kuban the Cossacks and the peasants were at last united by their common hatred of the Bolsheviks. The rebel armies of the Caucasian mountains numbered well over 30,000 fighters. In Belorussia the nationalist-led peasants took over most of the countryside and forced the Soviets of Minsk and Smolensk to be evacuated. By far the biggest (though least studied) of the peasant revolts broke out in western Siberia: the whole of the Tiumen', Omsk, Cheliabinsk, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg and Tomsk regions, complete with most of the major towns, fell into the hands of peasant rebels, up to 60,000 of them under arms, and virtually the whole of the Soviet infrastructure remained paralysed during the first six months of 1921. And yet throughout Russia the same thing was happening on a smaller scale: angry peasants were taking up arms and chasing the Bolsheviks out of the villages. Less than fifty miles from the Kremlin, not far from Semenov's Andreev-skoe, there were villages where it was dangerous for a Bolshevik to go.³⁸

What is remarkable about these peasant wars is that they shared so many common features, despite the huge distances between them and the different contexts in which they took place.

Most of the larger rebellions had started out in 1920 as small-scale peasant revolts against the requisitioning of food which, as a result of their incompetent and often brutal handling by the local Communists, soon became inflamed and spread into full-scale peasant wars. The Tambov rebellion was typical. It had started in August 1920 in the village of Kamenka when a food

brigade arrived to collect its share of the new grain levy. At over eleven million puds the levy for the province had clearly been set much too high. Even Lenin wondered in September 'whether it should not be cut'. The 1920 harvest had been very poor and if the peasants had paid the levy in full they would have been left with a mere one pud of grain per person, barely 10 per cent of their normal requirements for food, seed and fodder. Already in October there were hunger riots. By January, in the words of the Bolshevik Antonov-Ovseenko, sent in to help put down the revolt, 'half the peasantry was starving'. The peasants of Kamenka were relatively wealthy — which meant they starved more slowly than the rest — and an extra levy was imposed on them. They refused to pay this levy, killed several members of the requisitioning brigade, and armed themselves with guns and pitchforks to fight off the Soviet reinforcements sent in from Tambov to put their revolt down. Neighbouring villages joined the uprising and a rudimentary peasant army was soon organized. It fought under the Red Flag — reclaiming the symbols of the revolution was an important aspect of these people's uprisings — and was led by the local peasant SR hero, Grigorii Plezhnikov, who had organized the war against the gentry estates in 1905 and 1917. Meanwhile, a network of Peasant Unions (STKs) began to emerge in the villages — often they were organized by the local SRs — which replaced the Soviets and helped to supply the insurgent army. Over fifty Communists were shot.

The speed with which the revolt spread caught the Bolsheviks in Tambov unprepared. The Soviet and party apparatus in the province had become extremely weak. People had been leaving the party in droves — many of them ex-SRs who soon joined the rebels — as industrial strikes and corruption scandals had made belonging to it a source of both danger and embarrassment. Because of the war against Poland there were only 3,000 Red Army troops, most of them extremely unreliable, in the provincial garrison. They had only one machine-gun for the whole of the insurgent district of Kirsanov. The rebels took advantage of this weakness and marched on the provincial capital. Thousands of peasants joined them as they approached Tambov. The Bolsheviks were thrown into panic. When reinforcements arrived they forced the rebels back and unleashed a campaign of terror in the villages. Several rebel strongholds were burned to the ground, whole herds of cattle were confiscated, and hundreds of peasants were executed. Yet this merely fanned the flames of peasant war. 'The whole population took to the woods in fright and joined the rebels,' reported one local Communist. 'Even peasants once loyal to us had nothing left to lose and threw in their lot with the revolt.' From Kirsanov the rebellion soon spread throughout the southern half of Tambov province and parts of neighbouring Saratov, Voronezh and Penza. It was at this point that the Left SR activist Alexander Antonov took over the leadership of the revolt, building it up by the

end of 1920 into what Lenin himself later acknowledged was the greatest threat his regime had ever had to face.³⁹

Soviet propaganda portrayed the peasant rebels as 'kulaks'. But the evidence suggests on the contrary that these were general peasant revolts. The rebel armies were basically made up of ordinary peasants, as suggested by their agricultural weapons — pitchforks, axes, pikes and hoes — although deserters from the civil war armies also joined their ranks and often played a leading role. In Tambov province there were 110,000 deserters, 60,000 of them in the woodland districts around Kirsanov, on the eve of the revolt. Many of the rebels were destitute youths — mostly under the age of twenty-five. Popov's peasant army in Saratov province was described as 'dressed in rags', although some wore stolen suits. The bands of the Orenburg steppe were, in the words of the Buguruslan Party, made up of:

people who have been completely displaced through poverty and hunger. The kulaks help the bandits materially but themselves take up arms only very rarely indeed. The bands find it very easy to enlist supporters. The slogan 'Kill the Communists! Smash the Collective Farms!' is very popular among the most backward and downtrodden strata of the peasantry.

Inevitably, given the general breakdown of order, criminal elements also attached themselves to the peasant armies, looting property and raping women, a factor which later helped the Bolsheviks to divide the rebels from the local population.⁴⁰

The strength of the rebel armies derived from their close ties with the village: this enabled them to carry out the guerrilla-type operations which so confounded the Red Army commanders. What the Americans later learned in Vietnam — that conventional armies, however well armed, are ill-equipped to fight a well-supported peasant army — the Russians discovered in 1921 (and rediscovered sixty years later in Afghanistan). The rebel armies were organized on a partisan basis with each village responsible for mobilizing, feeding and equipping its own troops. In Tambov and parts of western Siberia the STKs, which were closely connected to the village communes, performed these functions. Elsewhere it was the communes themselves. The Church and the local SRs, especially those on the left of the party, also helped to organize the revolt in some regions, although the precise role of the SR leadership is still clouded in mystery.⁴¹

With the support of the local population the rebel armies were, in the words of Antonov-Ovseenko, 'scarcely vulnerable, extraordinarily invisible, and so to speak ubiquitous'. Peasants could become soldiers, and soldiers peasants, at a moment's notice. The villagers were the ears and eyes of the rebel armies — women, children, even beggars served as spies — and everywhere the Reds were

vulnerable to ambush. Yet the rebels, when pursued by the Reds, would suddenly vanish — either by merging with the local population, or with fresh horses supplied by the peasants which far outstripped the pursuing Reds. Where the Reds could travel thirty miles a day the rebels could travel up to a hundred miles. Their intimate knowledge of the local terrain, moreover, enabled them to move around and launch assaults at night. This supreme mobility easily compensated for their lack of artillery. They literally ran circles around the Reds, whose commanders complained they were 'everywhere'. Instead of engaging the Reds in the open, the rebels stuck to the remote hills and forests waiting for the right moment to launch a surprise attack before retreating out of sight. Their strategy was purely defensive: they aimed not to march on Moscow — nor even for the most part to attack the local towns — but to cut themselves off from its influence. They blew up bridges, cut down telegraph poles and pulled up railway tracks to paralyse the Reds. It was difficult to cope with such tactics, especially since none of the Red commanders had ever come across anything like them before. The first small units sent to fight the rebels were nearly all defeated — Tukhachevsky said their 'only purpose was to arm the rebels' — and they soon became demoralized. Many Reds even joined the rebels.⁴²

The aims and ideology of the revolts were strikingly uniform and reflect the common aspirations of the peasant revolution throughout Russia and the Ukraine. All the revolts sought to re-establish the peasant self-rule of 1917—18. Most expressed this in the slogan 'Soviet Power without the Communists!' or some variation on this theme. The same basic idea was sometimes expressed in the rather confused slogans: 'Long Live Lenin! Down with Trotsky!' or 'Long Live the Bolsheviks! Death to the Communists!' Many peasants were under the illusion that the Bolsheviks and the Communists were two separate parties: the party's change of name in February 1918 had yet to be communicated to the remote villages. The peasants believed that 'Lenin' and the 'Bolsheviks' had brought them peace, that they had allowed them to seize the gentry's land, to sell their foodstuffs freely on the market and to regulate their local communities through their own elected Soviets. On the other hand, they believed that 'Trotsky' and the 'Communists' had brought civil war, had taken away the gentry's land and used it for collective farms, had stamped out free trade with requisitioning and had usurped their local Soviets.

Through the slogan of Soviet power, the peasant rebels were no doubt partly seeking to give their protest a 'legitimate' form. They sometimes called their rebel organs 'Soviets'. None the less, their commitment to the democratic ideal of the revolution was no less genuine for this pretence. All the peasant movements were hostile to the Whites — and it was significant that none of them really took off until after the Whites' defeat. Many of the rebel leaders (e.g. Makhno, Sapozhkov, Mironov, Serov, Vakhulin, Maslakov and Kolesov) had

fought with the Reds, and often with distinction, against the Whites. Others had served as Soviet officials. Antonov had been the Soviet Chief of Police in the Kirsanov district until the summer of 1918, when, like the rest of the Left SRs, he had broken with the Bolsheviks and turned the district into a bastion of revolt. Sapozhkov, who led a rebel peasant army in the Novouzensk district of Samara during the summer of 1920, had formerly been the Chairman of the Novouzensk Soviet, a hero of its defence against the Cossacks and a leader of the Bolshevik underground in Samara against the Komuch. Piatakov, a peasant rebel leader in the neighbouring Saratov province, had been a Soviet provisions commissar. Voronovich, one of the rebel leaders in the Caucasus, had been the Chairman of the Luga Soviet in 1917. He had even taken part in the defence of Petrograd against Kornilov.⁴³

The peasants often called their revolts a 'revolution' — and that is just what they aimed to be. As in 1917, much of the rural state infrastructure was swept aside by a huge tidal wave of peasant anger and destruction. This was a savage war of vengeance against the Communist regime. Thousands of Bolsheviks were brutally murdered. Many were the victims of gruesome (and symbolic) tortures: ears, tongues and eyes were cut out; limbs, heads and genitals were cut off; stomachs were sliced open and stuffed with wheat; crosses were branded on foreheads and torsos; Communists were nailed to trees, burned alive, drowned under ice, buried up to their necks and eaten by dogs or rats, while crowds of peasants watched and shouted. Party and Soviet offices were ransacked. Police stations and rural courts were burned to the ground. Soviet schools and propaganda centres were vandalized. As for the collective farms, the vast majority of them were destroyed and their tools and livestock redistributed among the local peasants. The same thing happened to the Soviet grain-collecting stations, mills, distilleries, beer factories and bread shops. Once the rebel forces had seized the installation 'huge crowds of peasants' would follow in their wake removing piecemeal the requisitioned grain and carting it back to their villages. This reclamation of the 'people's property' — in effect a new 'looting of the looters' — helped the rebel armies to consolidate the support of the local population. But not all the rebels were such Robin Hoods. Simple banditry also played a role. Most of the rebel armies held up trains. In the Donbass region such holdups were said to be 'almost a daily occurrence' during the spring of 1921. Raids on local towns, and sometimes the peasant farmers, were another common source of provisions. The appearance of these rebel forces, with their vast herds of stolen livestock and their long caravans of military hardware, liquor barrels and bags of grain must have been very colourful. Antonov's partisans made off from Kniazeva in the Serdobsk district with the entire contents of the costumes and props department of the local theatre, complete with magic lanterns, dummies

and bustles. One eye-witness described Popov's rebel army in the Volga town of Khvalynsk as a long train of machine-gun carriers each drawn by six horses:

the carriers were covered with bloodstains and the horses were decorated with brightly coloured ribbons and material. Ten of the carriers also bore gramophones, while others carried barrels of beer and vodka. All day long the bandits sang and danced to the music and the town was taken over by an unimaginable din.⁴⁴

By March 1921 Soviet power in much of the countryside had virtually ceased to exist. Provincial Bolshevik organizations sent desperate telegrams to Moscow claiming they were powerless to resist the rebels and calling for immediate reinforcements. The consignment of grain to the cities had been brought to a virtual halt within the rebel strongholds. As the urban food crisis deepened and more and more workers went on strike, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were facing a revolutionary situation. Lenin was thrown into panic: every day he bombarded the local Red commanders with violent demands for the swiftest possible suppression of the revolts by whatever means. 'We are barely holding on,' he acknowledged in March. The peasant wars, he told the opening session of the Tenth Party Congress on 8 March, were 'far more dangerous than all the Denikins, Yudeniches and Kolchaks put together'.⁴⁵ Together with the strikes and the Kronstadt mutiny of March, they would force that Congress to abandon finally the widely hated policies of War Communism and restore free trade under the NEP. It was a desperate bid to stem the tide of this popular revolution. Having defeated the Whites, who were backed by no fewer than eight Western powers, the Bolsheviks surrendered to the peasantry.

* * * The wave of workers' strikes that swept across Russia during February 1921 was no less revolutionary than the peasant revolts. Given the punishments which strikers could expect (instant dismissal, arrest and imprisonment, even execution), it was a brave act, an act of defiance, to stage a strike in 1921. Whereas earlier strikes had been a means of bargaining with the regime, those of 1921 were a last desperate bid to overthrow it.

'Workers, you have nothing to lose but your chains!' Marx's dictum had never been more true. The militarized factory had enserfed the working class. Lacking enough foodstuffs to stimulate the workers, the Bolsheviks depended on coercion alone. Workers were deprived of their meagre rations, imprisoned, even shot, if their factories failed to meet the set production quotas. With the poor harvest and the growing reluctance of the peasantry to relinquish their grain, food stocks in the cities shrank to dangerously low levels during the winter of 1920—I. The disruption of transport by heavy snows made the situation

worse. On 22 January the bread ration was cut by one-third in several industrial cities, including Moscow and Petrograd. Even the most privileged workers were given only 1,000 calories a day. Hundreds of factories across the country were forced to close their gates for lack of fuel. The Menshevik Fedor Dan saw starving workers and soldiers begging for food in the streets of Petrograd. Women queued overnight to buy a loaf of bread.⁴⁶ It was reminiscent of the situation on the eve of the February Revolution.

Moscow was the first to erupt. A rash of workers' meetings called for an end to the Communists' privileges, the restoration of free trade and movement (meaning their right to travel into the countryside and barter with the peasants), civil liberties and the Constituent Assembly. White flags were hung in the factories as a traditional mark of working-class protest. The Moscow printers took the lead: they had staged a similar protest in May 1920 and both the Mensheviks and SRs were strong within their union. But such was the general level of discontent that the protest movement needed little encouragement. The Bolsheviks sent emissaries to the factories to try to defuse the situation; but they were rudely heckled. According to one (rather questionable) report, Lenin himself appeared before a noisy meeting of metalworkers and asked his listeners, who had accused him of ruining the country, whether they would prefer to have the Whites. But his question drew an angry response: 'Let come who may — whites, blacks or devils — just you clear out.' By 21 February thousands of workers were out on strike. Huge demonstrations marched through the streets of the Khamovniki district and, after attempts to disperse the crowds had failed, troops were ordered in. But, as in February 1917, the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and special Communist detachments (ChON) had to be called in which killed several workers. The next day even bigger crowds appeared on the streets. They marched on the Khamovniki barracks and tried to get the soldiers out; but the soldiers were now locked inside and Communist detachments once again dispersed the crowds by force. On 23 February, as 10,000 workers marched in protest through the streets, martial law was declared in the capital.⁴⁷

Meanwhile, the strikes spread to Petrograd. Numerous factories held protest rallies on the 22nd. As in Moscow, the workers called for an end to the privileged rations of the Communists, the restoration of free trade and movement, and, under the influence of the Mensheviks and SRs, free re-elections to the Soviets and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Over the next three days thousands of workers came out on strike. All the biggest metal plants — the Putilov, Trubochny, Baltic and Obukhovsky — joined the movement, along with most of the docks and shipyards. It was practically a general strike. On the Nevsky Prospekt and Vasilevsky Island there were clashes between strikers and troops. Some of the soldiers fired on the workers, killing and wounding at least thirty, but several thousand soldiers, including the Izmailovsky and Finland

Regiments, went over to the crowd. Even the sailors of the Aurora, that floating symbol of Bolshevik power, docked in the city for winter repairs, disembarked to join the demonstrations.

It did not take a genius to realize that this was exactly the same situation that, four years before to the day, had sparked the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison which led to the downfall of the tsarist regime. The Bolsheviks were petrified of another mutiny and did everything they could to keep the soldiers in their barracks. They even took away their shoes, on the pretext of replacing them with new ones, to stop the soldiers going out. The city was placed under martial law on the 25th. All power was vested in a special Committee of Defence with Zinoviev at its head. The party boss, who was always inclined to panic in such situations, made a hysterical appeal to the workers, begging them to return to work and promising to improve their economic situation. Meanwhile the Cheka was arresting hundreds of strikers — together with most of the leading Mensheviks and SRs in the city — while thousands of others were locked out of their factories and thus deprived of their rations. All of which was bound to exacerbate the strikes. The workers now called openly for the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. On 27 February, the fourth anniversary of the revolution, the following proclamation appeared in the streets. It was a call for a new revolution:

First of all the workers and peasants need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies.

We demand the liberation of all arrested socialists and non-party working men; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press, and assembly for all who labour; free elections of factory committees, trade unions and Soviets.

Call meetings, pass resolutions, send delegates to the authorities, bring about the realization of your demands.⁴⁸

That same day the revolt spread across the Gulf of Finland to the Kronstadt naval base: a real revolution now moved one step closer. In 1917 Trotsky had called the Kronstadt sailors the 'pride and glory of the Russian revolution'.* They were the first to call for Soviet power, and they played a key role in the events of October. Yet Kronstadt had always been a troublesome bastion of revolutionary maximalism. Its sailors were Anarchist as much as Bolshevik. What they really wanted was an independent Kronstadt Soviet Republic — a sort of island version of the Paris Commune — as opposed to a

* The term had originally been used by the liberal press to describe Kerensky in 1917.

centralized state. Until the summer of 1918 the Kronstadt Soviet was governed by a broad coalition of all the far-left parties. Its executive was chosen for its competence rather than its party, and was strictly accountable to the elected Soviets (or 'toiling collectives') on the naval base. Such democracy was intolerable to the Bolsheviks. They purged the Soviet of all the other parties and turned it into a bureaucratic organ of their state. The sailors soon became disgruntled. Although they fought for the Reds during the defence of Petrograd, in October 1919, they only did so to defeat the Whites, whom they saw as an even greater evil than the Bolsheviks. Once the civil war was over the sailors turned their anger on the Reds. They condemned their treatment of the peasantry. Many of the Kronstadt sailors came from the countryside — the Ukraine and Tambov were especially well represented — and were shocked by what they found there when they returned home on leave. 'Ours is an ordinary peasant farm,' wrote one of the Petropavlovsk crew in November 1920 after learning that his family's cow had been requisitioned; 'yet when I and my brother return home from serving the Soviet republic people will sneer at our wrecked farm and say: "What did you serve for? What has the Soviet republic given you?" ' The feudal lifestyle of the Communist bosses was another source of mounting resentment among both the sailors and the party rank and file. Raskolnikov, the Kronstadt Bolshevik leader of 1917, returned to the base in 1920 as the newly appointed Chief Commander of the Baltic Fleet and lived there like a lord with his elegant wife, the Bolshevik commissar Larissa Reissner, complete with banquets, chauffeured cars and servants. Reissner even had a wardrobe of dresses requisitioned for her from the aristocracy. Half the Kronstadt Bolsheviks became so disillusioned that they tore up their party cards during the second half of 1920.⁴⁹

When news of the strikes in Petrograd reached the Kronstadt sailors they sent a delegation to the city to report on their development. When they returned, on 28 February, the crew of the Petropavlovsk, previously a Bolshevik stronghold, raised their own banner of revolt with a proclamation calling for free Soviet elections, freedom of speech, press and assembly (albeit only for the workers and peasants, the left-wing parties and the trade unions), 'equal rations for all the working people', and 'freedom for the peasants to toil the land as they see fit' provided they did not use hired labour. Whereas the workers' resolutions called for the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly, the sailors remained opposed to this. It had been an Anarchist group of Kronstadt sailors who had forcibly closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. Their programme remained strictly Soviet in the sense that they aimed to restore their own multi-party Soviet of 1918. Moreover, unlike the peasant rebels, whose slogan was 'Soviets without the Communists!', they were even prepared to accept the Bolsheviks in this coalition provided they accepted the principles of Soviet democracy and renounced their dictatorship. This helps to explain why—

uniquely among the revolts of 1921 — more than half the Bolshevik rank and file in Kronstadt chose to join the mutiny.

Embarrassed by the loss of this former stronghold, the Bolsheviks tried to claim that the Kronstadt rebels were not the same as those of 1917, that the best proletarian sailors had been lost in the civil war and replaced by 'peasant lads in sailors' suits' who brought with them from their village 'anarchist' and 'petty-bourgeois' attitudes. Yet, as Israel Getzler has shown, this was in fact a case of the Bolsheviks being abandoned by their own most favoured sons. The Kronstadt rebels of 1921 were essentially the same as those of 1917. The majority of their leaders were veteran sailors of the Kronstadt Fleet. Some of them, such as the SR-Maximalist Anatolii Lamanov, chief ideologist of the mutiny, had been prominent members of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917—18. On the two major ships involved in the mutiny, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, 94 per cent of the crew had been recruited before 1918.⁵⁰ In its personnel, as in its ideology, the mutiny was a return to the revolutionary days of 1917.

Revolutionary anger and excitement spilled on to the streets on I March. A mass meeting in Anchor Square attended by 15,000 people, nearly one-third of the Kronstadt population, passed a resolution calling for the Soviet to be reelected. Kalinin, sent to calm the sailors, was rudely heckled, while Kuzmin, a Bolshevik commissar of the fleet, was booed off the stage. The next day 300 delegates from the various ships and shipyards met to elect a new Soviet. The mutinous Bolsheviks made up a large minority of the delegates. Alarmed by rumours that Communist guards were about to storm the meeting, the delegates chose instead to select a five-man Revolutionary Committee, which hurriedly set about organizing the island's defence. The old spirit of revolutionary improvisation had returned.

Although these rumours turned out to be false, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd were indeed preparing to suppress the mutiny. They could not wait for it to peter out. Revolts in other cities, such as Kazan and Nizhnyi Novgorod, were already being inspired by it. The ice-packed Gulf of Finland, moreover, was about to thaw and this would make the fortress, with the whole of its fleet freed from the ice, virtually impregnable. On 2 March martial law was imposed on the whole of Petrograd province. Troops and artillery were amassed along the coastline opposite Kronstadt. As in the defence of Petrograd against the Whites, Trotsky was despatched to the old capital to take command of operations. He arrived on 5 March and ordered the mutineers to surrender at once. In an ultimatum that could have been issued by a nineteenth-century provincial governor to the rebellious peasants he warned that the rebels would 'be shot like partridges' if they did not give up in twenty-four hours. Trotsky ordered the families of the sailors living in Petrograd to be arrested as hostages. When

the head of the Petrograd Cheka insisted that the mutiny was 'spontaneous', Trotsky cabled Moscow to have him dismissed.⁵¹

The assault began on 7 March. For a whole day the Bolsheviks' heavy guns bombarded the fortress from the north-western coast. It was Women Workers' Day and amidst the noise of the exploding shells the Kronstadt radio sent out greetings to the women of the world. The distant thunder of heavy guns could be heard by Alexander Berkman twenty miles away on Nevsky Prospekt. The American Anarchist, whose faith in the revolution had been suddenly revived by the mutiny, noted in his diary at 6 p.m. that day: 'Kronstadt has been attacked! Days of anguish and cannonading. My heart is numb with despair; something has died within me.' The aim of the shelling was to 'soften' up the fortress in preparation for an assault across the ice. The troops would have to run across a terrifying five-mile stretch of ice exposed to the guns of the Kronstadt boats and forts. Morale was understandably low among the conscript troops and Tukhachevsky, who was put in charge of the operation, had to place special Communist security troops among their units and Cheka machine-guns behind their backs to make sure they did not run away. They moved forward early the next morning: a snowstorm provided them with cover and some of the forward troops were given white sheets. The assault, however, ended in disaster. The heavy guns of the mutineers made channels of water in the ice into which many of the assaulting troops, blinded by the snowstorm, fell and drowned. Two thousand soldiers were mown down by machine-guns from the outer forts. When the snowstorm lifted the huge expanse of ice was revealed to be littered with corpses.⁵²

Meanwhile, amidst all this fighting, the mutineers began to carry out their 'revolution'. This was a republic built under fire. In its hectic eighteen days of rule (I—18 March) the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee dismantled the Communist apparatus, organized the re-elections of the trade unions and prepared for Soviet re-elections. On 8 March its own Izvestiia published a statement of 'What we are fighting for'. It was a moving document of protest that summed up for the sailors — and indeed for the Russian people as a whole — what had gone wrong with the revolution:

By carrying out the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result has been an even greater enslavement of human beings. The power of the monarchy, with its police and its gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka, the horrors of which far exceed the rule of the gendarmerie under tsarism . . . The glorious emblem of the toilers' state — the sickle and the hammer — has in fact been replaced by the Communists with the bayonet

and the barred window, which they use to maintain the calm and carefree life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist commissars and functionaries. But the worst and most criminal of all is the moral servitude which the Communists have also introduced: they have laid their hands on the inner world of the toiling people, forcing them to think in the way that they want. Through the state control of the trade unions they have chained the workers to their machines so that labour is no longer a source of joy but a new form of slavery. To the protests of the peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers, whose living conditions have compelled them to strike, they have answered with mass executions and a bloodletting that exceeds even the tsarist generals. The Russia of the toilers, the first to raise the red banner of liberation, is drenched in blood.⁵³

This was the context in which the Tenth Party Congress assembled in Moscow on 8 March. Two critical problems confronted the leadership: the defeat of the Workers' Opposition — and to a lesser extent the Democratic Centralists — with their two dissident resolutions on the trade unions and party democracy; and the resolution of the revolutionary crisis in the country.

Lenin, as always in such situations, was in a rage. He would stop at nothing to ensure the defeat of the Workers' Opposition. Kollontai was targeted for personal abuse. Lenin would not speak to her and threatened those who did. During the debates he used the fact that Shliapnikov and Kollontai were known to have been lovers to ridicule their arguments for proletarian solidarity. 'Well, thank God,' he said to general laughter, 'we know that Comrade Kollontai and Comrade Shliapnikov are a "class united".' To sly sarcasm Lenin added slander, condemning the Workers' Opposition as a 'syndicalist deviation' and accusing it of sharing the same ideals as the Kronstadt mutiny and the workers' strikes. This was of course false: whereas both groups of protesters were demanding the overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the Workers' Opposition merely wanted to reform it. But such distinctions were harder to make than they were to blur. In the atmosphere of hysterical panic — which Lenin helped to create at the Congress with his constant warnings that Soviet power could be overthrown at any moment — the Bolshevik delegates were much too frightened to question Lenin's charge. They accepted his demagogic line that strict party unity was called for at this moment and that to tolerate such opposition factions could only benefit the enemy. No doubt, if it had come to a vote, Lenin's position on the trade union question would have received a substantial majority in any case. The 'Platform of Ten', as it was known, offered a welcome compromise between Trotsky's super-centralism and the 'syndicalism' of the Workers' Opposition, effectively restoring the position of the Ninth Party Congress whereby the state

would continue to run industry through the system of One-Man Management and consult the unions on managerial appointments. But Lenin's tactics made victory sure. His two resolutions condemning the Workers' Opposition received massive majorities, with no more than thirty of the 694 Congress delegates voting against them.⁵⁴

Lenin now consolidated his victory with one of the most fateful decisions in the history of the Communist Party — the ban on factions. This secret resolution, passed by the Congress on 16 March, outlawed the formation of all party groupings independent of the Central Committee. By a two-thirds vote of the Central Committee and the Control Commission such factions could be excluded from the party. The ban had been proposed by Lenin in a moment of vindictive anger against the Workers' Opposition. It was passed by a Congress which had clearly become bored and impatient with the factional squabbles of the past few months, and which in the present crisis was only too eager to rally round its leader against his opponents in the party. Neither Lenin nor the rank and file fully realized the ban's potential significance. Henceforth, the Central Committee was to rule the party on the same dictatorial lines as the party ruled the country; no one could challenge its decisions without exposing themselves to the charge of factionalism. Stalin's rise to power was a product of the ban. He used the same tactics against Trotsky and Bukharin as Lenin had used against the Workers' Opposition. Indeed it was mainly to enforce the ban and carry out the purge of the Workers' Opposition that Lenin created the office of a General Secretary of the Party, with Stalin as the first 'Gensek', in April 1922. By the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 that purge was accomplished — as was Stalin's ascendancy in the Central Committee. Shliapnikov and Kollontai, though spared the ignominy of expulsion from the party, were both sent into diplomatic exile — the former to Paris, the latter to Stockholm. Supporters of the Workers' Opposition were removed from their party and trade union posts. Most of them were harassed, some imprisoned, nearly all of them were later shot in Stalin's terror. Shliapnikov was murdered in 1937.

No less monumental than the ban on factions was the second historic resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, the replacement of food requisitioning by the tax in kind. This abandoned the central plank of War Communism and laid the foundations of the NEP by allowing the peasants, once the tax had been paid, to sell the rest of their surplus as they liked, including through the free market. It was a clear attempt to stimulate production: the overall burden of the tax was 45 per cent lower than the levy of 1920 (it was later reduced to a standard rate of 10 per cent of the harvest); there were tax rebates for peasants who increased their sowings and productivity; the individual peasant was made responsible for his own share of the tax, thus abolishing the collective responsibility of the commune; and there was to be a special fund of consumer goods

and agricultural tools for exchange with the most productive peasants. Lenin, it seems, had been moving towards this 'new deal' with the peasants for several weeks. A report on the Antonov uprising, delivered by Bukharin to the Politburo on 2 February after his return from a trip to Tambov, had made it clear that it was impossible to continue with the requisitionings in view of the strength of the peasantry's resistance to them there and in many other provinces. There can be no doubt that the timing of the introduction of the tax in kind was determined by the urgent need to pacify these peasant wars, which Lenin feared more than the Whites.⁵⁵

Fearful that the delegates would denounce the tax as a restoration of capitalism, Lenin attempted to limit its discussion by delaying the introduction of the resolution until 15 March, the penultimate day of the Congress, by which time many of the delegates had already left for the Kronstadt Front. Lenin's own lecture on the NEP monopolized the session, leaving little time for any other speakers. He stressed that the tax in kind was desperately needed to quell the peasant revolts and to build a new alliance — the smychka — with the peasants, based on the market. Soviet power could not survive without it, since the failure of the revolution in the West left the proletariat without other allies. The policies of the civil war had been a Utopian dream — it was impossible to create socialism by administrative fiat — and in a backward peasant country such as Russia there was no other way to restore the economy after the devastations of the past few years, let alone to accumulate the capital for the socialist transformation of the country, than through the market. He dismissed fears that restoring private trade would lead Russia back to capitalism: this was to be a socialized market. The capitalist classes in Russia, including the 'kulaks', had already been destroyed by the revolution. And as long as it controlled the 'commanding heights' of the economy, banking, heavy industry, transport and foreign trade, then the state could regulate the market and use fiscal pressures to encourage the smallholders towards the collective farms and co-operatives. Lenin's tactics clearly worked. His speech had lasted for nearly three hours and by the time he sat down most of the delegates were either too weary or too intimidated to engage in serious theoretical debate. Whereas on other issues there were up to 250 different speakers, there were only four, other than Lenin himself, on the tax in kind. All of them were chosen by the presidium, were strictly limited to ten minutes each, and none had any serious criticisms to make. Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin expressed a desire to speak on the new tax, although both had espoused contrary policies up until that time, and between them had spoken on no fewer than fourteen occasions during the other sessions of the Congress. Even Shliapnikov, who later condemned the tax as a retreat before the peasantry, remained strangely silent after his bruising of the past few days.⁵⁶ The defining

policy of the 1920s was passed virtually without discussion. The era of the stage-managed Party Congress had arrived.

Meanwhile the Bolsheviks focused their attention on the suppression of the popular revolts. On 10 March 300 delegates at the Tenth Party Congress volunteered to fight on the Kronstadt Front after hearing Trotsky's bleak description of the situation there. Eager to prove their loyalty, members of the Workers' Opposition were among the first to step forward. The delegates arrived in Petrograd the following day bringing news with them of the coming tax in kind to boost the morale of the troops. By this stage, the strikes in Petrograd had petered out: arrests and concessions — including a promise by Zinoviev as early as 27 February that free trade was about to be restored — proved enough to break them. Moscow's strikes followed the same pattern. On 16 March the final assault on the Kronstadt fortress commenced. After several days of heavy artillery shelling from the coast and bombing from the air, 50,000 crack troops advanced across the ice in the dark hours of early morning. The battle raged for eighteen hours. But by midnight on the 17th the rebellion had been defeated and most of the sailors had surrendered. Over 10,000 Red troops were killed, including fifteen delegates of the Tenth Party Congress who had joined in the assault. When the battle was over the government in Helsingfors requested Moscow to have all the corpses cleared away lest they should be washed up on the Finnish coast and create a health hazard following the thaw.

The next morning hundreds of prisoners from the Kronstadt base were marched through Petrograd on their route to prison. Near the centre they saw a group of workers carrying sacks of potatoes on their backs. 'Traitors!' the sailors shouted, 'you have sold our lives for Communist potatoes. Tomorrow you will have our flesh to eat with your potatoes.' Later that night some 500 rebels were shot without trial on Zinoviev's orders: the regular executioners refused to do it, so a brigade of teenage Komsomols was ordered to shoot the sailors instead. Some of the rebels managed to flee to Gorky's flat and tell him of these executions. Gorky was outraged — like many socialists he had supported the rebellion from the start — and at once called Lenin to complain. The Bolshevik leader ordered Zinoviev to explain his actions before a party meeting in Gorky's flat. But at the meeting Zinoviev promptly had a heart attack (Gorky later claimed that it was faked) and the result was that he was only lightly reprimanded for an action which, in any case, Lenin had probably approved. During the following months 2,000 more rebels were executed, nearly all of them without trial, while hundreds of others were sent on Lenin's orders to Solovki, the first big Soviet concentration camp on an island in the White Sea, where they died a slower death from hunger, illness and exhaustion. About 8,000 Kronstadt rebels escaped across the ice to Finland, where they were interned and put to public works. Some of them were later lured back to Russia by the

promise of an amnesty — only to be shot or sent to concentration camps on their return.⁵⁷

The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion had a shattering effect on socialists throughout the world. There could not be a more conclusive proof that the Bolsheviks had turned into tyrants. Alexander Berkman, with 'the last thread of his faith in the Bolsheviks broken', wandered in despair through the streets of Petrograd — the city where the revolution had been born and where it had now died. On 18 March he noted with bitter irony in his diary: 'The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871. Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels.'⁵⁸

Military might and ruthless terror also held the key to the suppression of the major peasant revolts, although in some places such as the Volga region famine and exhaustion did the job instead. The turning point came in the early summer, when the Bolsheviks rethought their military strategy: instead of sending in small detachments to fight the rebels they swamped the rebel areas with troops and unleashed a campaign of mass terror against those villages that supported the rebels whilst trying to ween away the others through propaganda. The new strategy was first applied in Tambov province, where Tukhachevsky, fresh from his success against Kronstadt, was sent in April to crush the Antonov revolt. By the height of the operation in June the insurgent areas were occupied by a force of over 100,000 men, most of them crack troops from the elite Communist security units and the Komsomol, together with several hundred heavy guns and armoured cars. Aeroplanes were used to track the movement of the bands and to drop bombs and propaganda on to their strongholds. Poison gas was also used to 'smoke the bands out of the forests'. Through paid informers, the rebels and their families were singled out for arrest as hostages and imprisoned in specially constructed concentration camps: by the end of June there were 50,000 peasants in the Tambov camps, including over 1,000 children. It was not unusual for whole village populations to be interned and later shot or deported to the Arctic Circle if the rebels did not surrender. Sometimes the rebel villages were simply burned to the ground. In just one volost of the Tambov district — and it was not even particularly noted as a rebel stronghold — 154 peasants were shot, 227 families were taken hostage, 17 houses were burned down and 46 were torn down or transferred to informers. Overall, it has been estimated that 100,000 people were imprisoned or deported and 15,000 people shot during the suppression of the revolt.⁵⁹

Along with the big stick there was also a small carrot to induce the peasants to abandon their support for the rebels. Villages that passed a resolution condemning the 'bandits' were rewarded from a special fund of salt and manufactured goods. The Bolsheviks were counting on the rebels, once they heard of these resolutions, to take reprisals against the treacherous villages so that they

could drive a wedge between them and undermine the rebels' social base. There was also an amnesty for the rebels, although those who were foolish enough to surrender, about 6,000 in all, were nearly all imprisoned or shot. Finally, there was a barrage of propaganda about the benefits of the NEP, although its rather questionable efficacy hardly warrants the claims later made for it by the Bolsheviks. Many peasants, even in the Moscow region, had never heard of the tax in kind, while most of those who had, as Tukhachevsky acknowledged at the time, were 'definitely not inclined to believe in the sincerity of the decree'.⁶⁰

By the late summer of 1921, when much of the countryside was struck down with famine, most of the peasant revolts had been defeated in the military sense. Antonov's army was destroyed in June, although he escaped and with smaller guerrilla forces continued to make life difficult for the Soviet regime in the Tambov countryside until the following summer, when he was finally hunted down and killed by the Cheka. In western Siberia, the Don and the Kuban all but the smallest peasant bands had been destroyed by the end of July, although peasant resistance to the Soviet regime continued on a smaller scale — and in more passive ways — until 1923. As for Makhno, he gave up the struggle in August 1921 and fled with his last remaining followers to Romania, although his strongholds in the south-east Ukraine continued to be a rebellious region for several years to come. To many Ukrainians Makhno remained a folk-hero (songs were sung about him at weddings and parties even as late as the 1950s) but to others he was a bogey man. 'Batko Makhno will get you if you don't sleep,' Soviet mothers told their children.⁶¹

The Mensheviks and SRs were suppressed along with the rebels. It was axiomatic to Bolshevik propaganda that the peasant revolts and workers' strikes had been organized by these parties. It was certainly true that they had sympathized with them, and in some cases had even supported them. But much more relevant was the fact that, as the popularity of the Bolsheviks had plummeted, so that of the SRs and Mensheviks had grown: they were a threat to the regime. By claiming that the SRs and Mensheviks had organized the strikes and revolts of 1921, the Bolsheviks sought both a pretext to destroy their last political rivals and an explanation for the protests that denied their popular base. The arrest of the 'counter-revolutionary' Mensheviks, some 5,000 in all, during 1921, and the grotesque show trial of the SR leaders the following year, when the whole party was in effect convicted as 'enemies of the people',⁶² were last desperate measures by the Bolsheviks to claim a popular legitimacy for their bankrupt revolution.

* * * The New Economic Policy was originally conceived as a temporary retreat. 'We are making economic concessions in order to avoid political ones,' Bukharin told the Comintern in July. 'The NEP is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat,

a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labour against the front of international capitalism,' Zinoviev added in December. Lenin also saw it in these terms. The NEP was 'a peasant Brest-Litovsk', taking one step backwards to take two steps forward. But, unlike many of the other party leaders, Lenin accepted that the period of retreat was likely to be long enough — he talked vaguely of 'not less than a decade and probably more' — to constitute not just a tactical ploy but a whole recasting of the revolution. The NEP, he reminded the party in May, was to be adopted ' "seriously and for a long time" — we must definitely get this into our heads and remember it well, because rumours are spreading that this is a policy only in quotes, in other words a form of political trickery that is only being carried out for the moment. This is not true.'⁶³

As Lenin saw it, the NEP was more than a temporary concession to the market in order to get the country back on its feet. It was a fundamental if rather ill-formulated effort to redefine the role of socialism in a backward peasant country where, largely as a result of his own party's coup d'etat in 1917, the 'bourgeois revolution' had not been completed. Only 'in countries of developed capitalism' was it possible to make an 'immediate transition to socialism', Lenin had told the Tenth Party Congress. Soviet Russia was thus confronted with the task of 'building communism with bourgeois hands', of basing socialism on the market. Lenin of course remained full of doubts: at times he expressed fears that the regime would be drowned in a sea of petty peasant capitalism. But in the main he saw the market — regulated by the state and gradually socialized through co-operatives — as the only way to socialism. Whereas the Bolsheviks up till now had lived by the maxim 'The less market the more socialism', Lenin was moving towards the slogan 'The more market the more socialism'.⁶⁴

But, like the leopard with its spots, the Bolsheviks could not easily erase their innate mistrust of private trade. Even Bukharin, who later became the main defender of the NEP, warmed to it only slowly during the course of 1921— 3. Many of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks, in particular, saw the boom in private trade as a betrayal of the revolution. What, only months ago, had been condemned as a crime against the revolution was now being endorsed and encouraged. Moreover, once the doors had been opened to the market it was difficult to stop the flood of private trade that was almost bound to follow after the shortages of the previous four years. By 1921 the whole population was living in patched-up clothes and shoes, cooking with broken kitchen utensils, drinking from cracked cups. Everyone needed something new. People set up stalls in the streets to sell or exchange their basic household goods, much as they do today in most of Russia's cities; flea-markets boomed; while 'bagging' to and from the countryside once again became a mass phenomenon. Licensed by new laws in 1921—2, private cafes, shops and restaurants, night clubs and

THE REVOLUTIONARY INHERITANCE

96-7 The people reject the Bolsheviks. Above: Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base, 16 March 1921. Below: peasant rebels ('Greens') attack a train of requisitioned grain, February 1921.

98-100 The famine crisis of 1921-2. Above: Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region, 1921. The crisis was largely the result of Bolshevik over-requisitioning. Below, the victims of the crisis; an overcrowded cemetery in the Buzuluk district, 1921. Opposite: cannibals with their victims, Samara province, 1921.

101-3 Orphans of the revolution. Above: street orphans in Saratov hunt for food remains in a rubbish tip, 1921. Opposite above: orphans were ripe for political indoctrination. This young boy, seen here giving a speech from the agit-train October Revolution, was the Secretary of the Tula Komsomol. He was part of the generation which, a decade later, pioneered the Stalinist assault on old Russia. Opposite below: orphans also made good soldiers: a national unit of the Red Army in Turkestan, 1920.

104 The war against religion: Red Army soldiers confiscate valuable items from the Semenov Monastery in Moscow, 1923.

105-6 The revolution expands east. Above: the Red Army arrives in Bukhara and explains the meaning of Soviet power to the former subjects of the Emir, September 1920. Below, two Bolshevik commissars of the Far East.

107 The dying Lenin, with one of his doctors and his younger sister Maria Ul'ianova, during the summer of 1923. By the time this photograph was taken, Stalin's rise to power was virtually assured.

brothels, hospitals and clinics, credit and saving associations, even small-scale manufacturers sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Foreign observers were amazed by the sudden transformation. Moscow and Petrograd, graveyard cities in the civil war, suddenly burst into life, with noisy traders, busy cabbies and bright shop signs filling the streets just as they had done before the revolution. 'The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market place,' recalled Emma Goldman:

Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese and meat were displayed for sale; pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased. Men, women and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle: what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.'⁶³

But could those hungry people afford such goods? That was the fear of the Bolshevik rank and file. It seemed to them that the boom in private trade would inevitably lead to a widening gap between rich and poor. 'We young Communists had all grown up in the belief that money was done away with once and for all,' recalled one Bolshevik in the 1940s. 'If money was reappearing, wouldn't rich people reappear too? Weren't we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? We put these questions to ourselves with feelings of anxiety.' Such doubts were strengthened by the sudden rise of unemployment in the first two years of the NEP. While these unemployed were living on the bread line the peasants were growing fat and rich. 'Is this what we made the revolution for?' one Bolshevik asked Emma Goldman. There was a widespread feeling among the workers, voiced most clearly by the Workers' Opposition, that the NEP was sacrificing their class interests to the peasantry, that the 'kulak' was being rehabilitated and allowed to grow rich at the workers' expense. In 1921—2 literally tens of thousands of Bolshevik workers tore up their party cards in disgust with the NEP: they dubbed it the New Exploitation of the Proletariat.⁶⁶

Much of this anger was focused on the 'Nepmen', the new and vulgar get-rich-quickly class of private traders who thrived in Russia's Roaring Twenties. It was perhaps unavoidable that after seven years of war and shortages these wheeler-dealers should step into the void. Witness the 'spivs' in Britain after 1945, or, for that matter, the so-called 'mafias' in post-Soviet Russia. True, the peasants were encouraged to sell their foodstuffs to the state and the cooperatives by the offer of cheap manufactured goods in return. But until the socialized system began to function properly (and that was not until the mid-1920s) it remained easier and more profitable to sell them to the 'Nepmen' instead. If some product was particularly scarce these profiteers were sure to

have it — usually because they had bribed some Soviet official. Bootleg liquor, heroin and cocaine — they sold everything. The 'Nepmen' were a walking symbol of this new and ugly capitalism. They dressed their wives and mistresses in diamonds and furs, drove around in huge imported cars, snored at the opera, sang in restaurants, and boasted loudly in expensive hotel bars of the dollar fortunes they had wasted at the newly opened race-tracks and casinos. The ostentatious spending of this new and vulgar rich, shamelessly set against the background of the appalling hunger and suffering of these years, gave rise to a widespread and bitter feeling of resentment among all those common people, the workers in particular, who had thought that the revolution should be about ending such inequalities.

This profound sense of plebeian resentment — of the 'Nepmen', the 'bourgeois specialists', the 'Jews' and the 'kulaks' — remained deeply buried in the hearts of many people, especially the blue-collar workers and the party rank and file. Here was the basic emotional appeal of Stalin's 'revolution from above', the forcible drive towards industrialization during the first of the Five Year Plans. It was the appeal to a second wave of class war against the 'bourgeoisie' of the NER the new 'enemies of the people', the idea of a return to the harsh but romantic spirit of the civil war, that 'heroic period' of the revolution, when the Bolsheviks, or so the legend went, had conquered every fortress and pressed ahead without fear or compromise. Russia in the 1920s remained a society at war with itself — full of unresolved social tensions and resentments just beneath the surface. In this sense, the deepest legacy of the revolution was its failure to eliminate the social inequalities that had brought it about in the first place.

16 Deaths and Departures

i Orphans of the Revolution

'No, I am not well,' Gorky wrote to Romain Rolland on his arrival in Berlin — 'my tuberculosis has come back, but at my age it is not dangerous. Much harder to bear is the sad sickness of the soul — I feel very tired: during the past seven years in Russia I have seen and lived through so many sad dramas — the more sad for not being caused by the logic of passion and free will but by the blind and cold calculation of fanatics and cowards ... I still believe fervently in the future happiness of mankind but I am sickened and disturbed by the growing sum of suffering which people have to pay as the price of their fine hopes.'¹ Death and disillusionment lay behind Gorky's departure from Russia in the autumn of 1921. So many people had been killed in the previous four years that even he could no longer hold firm to his revolutionary hopes and ideals. Nothing was worth such human suffering.

Nobody knows the full human cost of the revolution. By any calculation it was catastrophic. Counting only deaths from the civil war, the terror, famine and disease, it was something in the region of ten million people. But this excludes the emigration (about two million) and the demographic effects of a hugely reduced birth-rate — nobody wanted children in these frightful years — which statisticians say would have added up to ten million lives.* The highest death rates were among adult men — in Petrograd alone there were 65,000 widows in 1920 — but death was so common that it touched everyone. Nobody lived through the revolutionary era without losing friends and relatives. 'My God how many deaths!' Sergei Semenov wrote to an old friend in January 1921. 'Most of the old men — Boborykin, Linev, Vengerov, Vorontsov, etc., have died. Even Grigory Petrov has disappeared — how he died is not known, we can only say that it probably was not from joy at the progress of socialism. What hurts especially is not even knowing where one's friends are buried.' How death could affect a single family is well illustrated by the Tereshchenkovs. Nikitin

* It also excludes the reduced life expectancy of those who survived due to malnutrition and disease. Children born and brought up in these years were markedly smaller than older cohorts, and 5 per cent of all new-borns had syphilis (Sorokin, Sovremennoe, 16, 67).

Tereshchenkov, a Red Army doctor, lost both his daughter and his sister to the typhus epidemic in 1919; his eldest son and brother were killed on the Southern Front fighting for the Red Army in that same year; his brother-in-law was mysteriously murdered. Nikitin's wife was dying from TB, while he himself contracted typhus. Denounced by the local Cheka (like so many of the rural intelligentsia) as 'enemies of the people', they lost their town house in Smolensk and were living, in 1920, on a small farm worked by their two surviving sons — Volodya, fifteen, and Misha, thirteen.²

To die in Russia in these times was easy but to be buried was very hard. Funeral services had been nationalized, so every burial took endless paperwork. Then there was the shortage of timber for coffins. Some people wrapped their loved ones up in mats, or hired coffins — marked 'PLEASE RETURN' — just to carry them to their graves. One old professor was too large for his hired coffin and had to be crammed in by breaking several bones. For some unaccountable reason there was even a shortage of graves — would one believe it if this was not Russia? — which left people waiting several months for one. The main morgue in Moscow had hundreds of rotting corpses in the basement awaiting burial. The Bolsheviks tried to ease the problem by promoting free cremations. In 1919 they pledged to build the biggest crematorium in the world. But the Russians' continued attachment to the Orthodox burial rituals killed off this initiative.³

Death was so common that people became inured to it. The sight of a dead body in the street no longer attracted attention. Murders occurred for the slightest motive — stealing a few roubles, jumping a queue, or simply for the entertainment of the killers. Seven years of war had brutalized people and made them insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. In 1921 Gorky asked a group of soldiers from the Red Army if they were uneasy about killing people. 'No they were not. "He has a weapon, I have a weapon, so we are equal; what's the odds, if we kill one another there'll be more room in the land." ' One soldier, who had also fought in Europe in the First World War, even told Gorky that it was easier to kill a Russian than a foreigner. 'Our people are many, our economy is poor; well, if a hamlet is burnt, what's the loss? It would have burnt down itself in due course.' Life had become so cheap that people thought little of killing one another, or indeed of others killing millions in their name. One peasant asked a scientific expedition working in the Urals during 1921: 'You are educated people, tell me then what's to happen to me. A Bashkir killed my cow, so of course I killed the Bashkir and then I took the cow away from his family. So tell me: shall I be punished for the cow?' When they asked him whether he did not rather expect to be punished for the murder of the man, the peasant replied: 'That's nothing, people are cheap nowadays.'

Other stories were told — of a husband who had murdered his wife

for no apparent reason. 'I had enough of her and there is the end of it,' was the murderer's explanation. It was as if all the violence of the previous few years had stripped away the thin veneer of civilization covering human relations and exposed the primitive zoological instincts of man. People began to like the smell of blood. They developed a taste for sadistic forms of killing — a subject on which Gorky was an expert:

The peasants in Siberia dug pits and lowered Red Army prisoners into them upside down, leaving their legs to the knees above ground; then they filled in the pit with soil, watching by the convulsions of the legs which of the victims was more resistant, livelier, and which would be the last to die.

In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people.

They would open a prisoner's belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or telegraph pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine unwind through the wound. Stripping a captured officer naked, they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps, and knocked in nails in place of pips; they would pull off the skin along the lines of the sword belt and trouser stripes — this operation was called 'to dress in uniform'. It, no doubt, demanded much time and considerable skill.⁴

The single biggest killer of these years — it accounted in all for some five million lives — was the famine crisis of 1921—2. Like all famine crises, the great Volga famine was caused in part by man and in part by God. The natural conditions of the Volga region made it vulnerable to harvest failures — and there had been many in recent years, 1891—2, 1906 and 1911 just to name a few. Summer droughts and extreme frosts were regular features of the steppeland climate. Gusting winds in the spring blew away the sandy topsoil and damaged tender crops. These were the preconditions of the Volga famine in 1921: the crop failure of 1920 was followed by a year of heavy frost and scorching summer drought that transformed the steppelands into one huge dustbowl. By the spring it became clear that the peasants were about to suffer a second harvest failure in succession. Much of the seed had been killed off by the frosts, while the new corn stalks which did emerge were weedy in appearance and soon destroyed by locusts and field-rats. Bad though they were, these cracks in nature's moulds were not enough to cause a famine crisis. The peasants were accustomed to harvest failures and had always maintained large stocks of grain, often in communal barns, for such emergencies. What made this crisis so disastrous was

the fact that the peasant economy had already been brought to the brink of disaster, even before nature took its toll, by the requisitionings of the civil war. To evade the levies the peasants withdrew into subsistence production — they grew just enough grain to feed themselves and their livestock and provide for seed. In other words they left no safety margin, no reserves of the sort that had cushioned them from adverse weather in the past, since they feared that the Bolsheviks would take them. In 1920 the sown area in the Volga region had declined by a quarter since 1917. Yet the Bolsheviks continued to take more — not just surpluses but vital stocks of food and seed — so that when that harvest failed it was bound to result in the ruin of the peasants.⁵

By the spring of 1921 one-quarter of the peasantry in Soviet Russia was starving. Famine struck not only in the Volga region but in the Urals and Kama basins, the Don, Bashkiria, Kazakhstan, western Siberia and the southern Ukraine. The famine was accompanied by typhus and cholera which killed hundreds of thousands of people already weakened by hunger. The worst affected regions were on the Volga steppe. In Samara province nearly two million people (three-quarters of the population) were said to be dying from hunger by the autumn of 1921: 700,000 of them did in fact die by the end of the crisis. In one typical volost, Bulgakova, with a population of 16,000 in January 1921, 1,000 people had died, 2,200 had abandoned their homes and 6,500 had been paralysed by hunger or disease by the following November. Throughout the Volga region hungry peasants resorted to eating grass, weeds, leaves, moss, tree bark, roof thatch and flour made from acorns, sawdust, clay and horse manure. They slaughtered livestock and hunted rodents, cats and dogs. In the villages there was a deathly silence. Skeletons of people, children with their bellies bloated, lay down quietly like dogs to die. 'The villagers have simply given up on life,' one relief worker noted in Saratov. 'They are too weak even to complain,' Those with enough strength boarded up their ruined farms, packed their meagre belongings on to carts, and fled to the towns in search of food. At the town markets a few loaves of bread would be exchanged for a horse. Many people did not make it but collapsed and died along the road. Huge crowds converged on the railway stations in the vain hope of catching a train to other regions — Moscow, the Don, Siberia, almost anywhere, so long as it was rumoured there was food. They did not know that all transportation from the famine region had been stopped on Moscow's orders to limit the spread of epidemics. This was the scene at the Simbirsk railway station in the summer of 1921:

Imagine a compact mass of sordid rags, among which are visible here and there lean, naked arms, faces already stamped with the seal of death. Above all one is conscious of a poisonous odour. It is impossible to pass. The waiting room, the corridor, every foot thickly covered with people, sprawl-

ing, seated, crouched in every imaginable position. If one looks closely he sees that these filthy rags are swarming with vermin. The typhus stricken grovel and shiver in their fever, their babies with them. Nursing babies have lost their voices and are no longer able to cry. Every day more than twenty dead are carried away, but it is not possible to remove all of them. Sometimes corpses remain among the living for more than five days . . .

A woman tries to soothe a small child lying in her lap. The child cries, asking for food. For some time the mother goes on rocking it in her arms. Then suddenly she strikes it. The child screams anew. This seems to drive the woman mad. She begins to beat it furiously, her face distorted with rage. She rains blows with her fist on its little face, on its head and at last she throws it upon the floor and kicks it with her foot. A murmur of horror arises around her. The child is lifted from the ground, curses are hurled at the mother, who, after her furious excitement has subsided, has again become herself, utterly indifferent to everything around her. Her eyes are fixed, but are apparently sightless.⁶

Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: 'In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village — and all of them serve up young children.' The phenomenon really took off with the onset of winter, around November 1921, when the first snows covered the remaining food substitutes on the ground and there was nothing else to eat. Mothers, desperate to feed their children, cut off limbs from corpses and boiled the flesh in pots. People ate their own relatives — often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet. In some villages the peasants refused to bury their dead but stored the corpses, like so much meat, in their barns and stables. They often begged relief workers not to take away the corpses but to let them eat them instead. In the village of Ivanovka, near Pugachev, a woman was caught with her child eating her dead husband and when the police authorities tried to take away his remains she shouted: 'We will not give him up, we need him for food, he is our own family, and no one has the right to take him away from us.' The stealing of corpses from cemeteries became so common that in many regions armed guards had to be posted on their gates. Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who

killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh. In the Novouzensk region there were bands of children who killed adults for their meat. Relief workers were armed for this reason. There were even cases of parents killing their own babies — usually their daughters — in order to eat their flesh or feed it to their other children.

It is easy to say that such acts were simply a sign of moral depravity or psychosis. But it was often compassion which drove people to cannibalism. The agony of watching one's children slowly die of hunger can spur people to do anything, and in such extreme circumstances the normal rules of right and wrong can seem remote. Indeed when interviewed the flesh-eaters appeared quite rational and had often developed a new moral code to legitimize their behaviour. Many of them argued that eating human flesh could not be a crime because the living soul had already departed from the bodies, which remained 'only as food for the worms in the ground'. Moreover, the craving for human flesh which starving people can easily develop once they have eaten it was not peculiar to any social class. Hungry doctors often succumbed to eating it after long spells of relief work in the famine region, and they too stated that the worst part of the experience was 'the insuperable and uncomfortable craving' which they acquired for human flesh.⁷

Until July 1921 the Soviet government refused to acknowledge the existence of the famine. It was a major embarrassment. As in the crisis of 1891, the press was even forbidden to use the word 'famine'. It continued to report that everything was well in the countryside after the introduction of the NER This deliberate policy of neglect was even more pronounced in the Ukraine: although famine was widespread there by the autumn of 1921, Moscow continued to export large quantities of grain to the Volga until the following summer. Of course, this was taking from one hungry region to give to another, even hungrier. But it may also be, as Robert Conquest has argued convincingly for the famine of 1930—2, that Moscow sought to punish the Ukrainian peasants for their opposition to the Bolshevik regime.⁸

As in 1891, it was left to the public and foreign bodies to organize the relief campaign. Gorky took the lead. On 13 July he issued an appeal 'To All Honest People' which later appeared in the Western press:

Tragedy has come to the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka and other world-prized men. If humanitarian ideas and feelings — faith in whose social import was so shaken by the damnable war and its victors' unmercifulness towards the vanquished — if faith in the creative force of these ideas and feelings, I say, must and can be restored, Russia's misfortune offers a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humanitarianism. I ask all honest European

and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine. Maxim Gorky.

With a group of other public figures Gorky appealed to Lenin for permission to organize a voluntary body for famine relief. The All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry, or Pomgol for short, set up as a result on 21 July, was the first and the last independent public body established under Communism. It was partly as a concession to Gorky and partly as a means of securing foreign aid that Lenin agreed to its formation. The seventy-three members of Pomgol included leading cultural figures (Gorky, Korolenko, Stanislavsky); liberal politicians (Kishkin, Prokopovich, Kuskova); an ex-tsarist minister (N. N. Kutler) and a veteran Populist (Vera Figner); famous agronomists (Chayanov, Krondatev) and engineers (P. I. Palchinsky); doctors; and Tolstoyans. There was even a place for Alexandra Tolstaya, the writer's daughter, who had spent the past four years in and out of Cheka jails and labour camps. Pomgol sought to revive the public spirit that had saved the country in 1891: it made appeals to the public at home and abroad to contribute to the relief campaign. Prince Lvov, who had taken part in the relief efforts of thirty years before, collected money and sent off food supplies through the Paris Zemgor organization (even in exile, he continued with his zemstvo work). To make sure that Pomgol did not get involved in politics the Bolsheviks assigned to it a 'cell' of twelve prominent Communists led by Kamenev. Lenin was adamant that the famine crisis should not give rise to the same public opposition as that of 1891 had done.⁹

Responding to Gorky's appeal, Herbert Hoover offered to send the American Relief Administration to Russia. Hoover had established the ARA to supply food and medicines to post-war Europe. Hoover's two conditions were that it should be allowed to operate independently, without intervention by the Communist officials, and that all US citizens should be released from Soviet jails. Lenin was furious — 'One must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face so that the whole world sees,' he fumed — yet like any beggar he could not be choosy. Once Pomgol had secured American aid Lenin ordered it to be closed down, despite vigorous protests from Kamenev and Gorky. On 27 August all its public members — except Gorky and Korolenko — were arrested by the Cheka, accused of all manner of 'counter-revolutionary activities', and later sent into exile abroad or to restricted zones in the interior. Even Gorky was pressurized by Lenin to go abroad 'for his health'.¹⁰

By the summer of 1922, when its activities were at their height, the ARA was feeding ten million people every day. It also despatched huge supplies of medicine, clothes, tools and seed — the last enabling the two successive bumper harvests of 1922 and 1923 that finally secured Russia's recovery from the famine. The total cost of the ARA operation was sixty-one million dollars.

The Bolsheviks received this aid with an astonishing lack of gratitude: never has such a generous gift horse been so shamefully looked in the mouth. They accused the ARA of spying, of trying to discredit and overthrow the Soviet regime,* and constantly meddled in their operations, searching convoys, withholding trains, seizing supplies, and even arresting relief workers. The two conditions of aid set by Hoover — freedom from intervention and the release of all Americans from prison — were thus both blatantly broken by the Bolsheviks. Further outrage was caused in America when it was discovered that at the same time as receiving food aid from the West, the Soviet government was exporting millions of tons of its own cereals for sale abroad. When questioned, the Soviet government claimed that it needed the exports in order to purchase industrial and agricultural equipment from abroad. But the scandal made it impossible to raise extra US funds for the ARA in Russia, and in June 1923 it suspended its operations.¹¹

For Gorky the way the Soviet government had handled the famine crisis was both shameful and embarrassing. It was a major factor in his decision to leave Russia. When the worst of the famine was over the Bolsheviks sent a short formal note of gratitude to the American people. But Gorky was more generous in his thanks. In a letter that voiced many of his deepest ideals, Gorky wrote to Hoover on 30 July 1922:

In all the history of human suffering I know of nothing more trying to the souls of men than the events through which the Russian people are passing, and in the history of practical humanitarianism I know of no accomplishment which in terms of magnitude and generosity can be compared to the relief that you have actually accomplished. Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death. The generosity of the American people resuscitates the dream of fraternity among people at a time when humanity greatly needs charity and compassion.¹²

One of the saddest legacies of the revolution was the huge population of orphans who roamed the streets of every city. By 1922 there were an estimated seven million children living rough in stations, derelict houses, building sites, rubbish dumps, cellars, sewers and other squalid holes. These ragged, barefoot children,

* Hoover's motives are not entirely clear. Intensely hostile to the Soviet regime, he may indeed have sought to use the famine relief as a means of diplomatic leverage and political influence in Russia. But this does not negate a genuine humanitarian concern on Hoover's part. Nor does it merit the Bolshevik charge. See Weissman, Herbert, ch. 2.

whose parents had either died or abandoned them, were a symbol of Russia's social breakdown. Even the family had been destroyed.

These orphans of the revolution were a ghastly caricature of the childhood they had lost. The struggle for survival on the streets forced them to live like adults. They had their own jargon, social groups and moral codes. Children as young as twelve got 'married' and had their own children. Many were seasoned alcoholics, heroin or cocaine addicts. Begging, peddling, petty crime and prostitution were the means by which they survived. At stations they swarmed like flies, instantly swooping on any scraps of food thrown to them from the trains. Some child beggars maimed themselves or shamed themselves in public to gain some small gratuity. One boy who lived in the station at Omsk would smear his face with his own excrement if people gave him five kopecks. There was a close connection between them and the criminal underworld. Gangs of children stole from market stalls, mugged pedestrians, picked people's pockets and broke into shops and houses. Those who were caught were likely to be beaten in the street by members of the public, who had very little sympathy for the orphans, but it seemed that even this would not deter them. The following scene in a market square was witnessed by one observer:

I myself saw a boy of about 10 to 12 years of age reach out, while being beaten with a cane, for a piece of bread already covered with grime and voraciously cram it into his mouth. Blows rained on his back, but the boy, on hands and knees, continued hurriedly to bite off piece after piece so as not to lose the bread. This was near the bread row at the bazaar. Adults — women — gathered around and shouted: 'That's what the scoundrel deserves: beat him some more! We get no peace from these lice.'

Nearly all these orphans were casual prostitutes. A survey of 1920 found that 88 per cent of the girls had engaged at some time in prostitution, while similar figures were found among the boys. Some of the girls were as young as seven. Most of the sexual acts took place in the streets, in market-places, in station-halls and parks. The girls had pimps — themselves usually no more than teenage boys — who often used them to rob their clients. But there were also paedophil-iac brothels run by so-called 'aunties', who gave the children food and a corner of a room, whilst putting them to work and living off their earnings.¹³ For millions of children this was the closest thing they ever had to maternal care.

'There are twelve-year-old children who already have three murders to their name,' Gorky wrote to Lenin in April 1920. Once an orphan of the streets himself, Gorky was one of the first to champion the struggle against 'juvenile delinquency'. That summer he set up a special commission to combat the problem, which provided colonies and shelters for the children and taught them

how to read and write. Similar initiatives were undertaken by the League for the Rescue of Children established in 1919 by Kuskova and Korolenko with the approval of Sovnarkom. But with only half a million places in all the institutions put together, and seven million orphans on the street, this could only scratch the surface of the problem. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks turned to penal remedies, despite their own proclaimed principle of 1918 that there should be 'no courts or prisons for children'. Prisons and labour camps contained thousands of children, many under fourteen, the age of criminal responsibility. Another way of dealing with the problem was to allow factories to employ the children as sweated labour. Even in the civil war, when thousands of adult workers were laid off, there was a huge growth of child employment, with some workers as young as six, especially in the smaller factories where exploitative practices died hard. Despite widespread calls to limit the children to six hours of labour, and to make employers provide two hours of schooling, the authorities chose not to intervene, claiming it was 'better to have the children working than living from crime on the streets', with the result that many minors ended up by working twelve or fourteen hours every day.¹⁴

Children also made excellent soldiers. The Red Army had many young teenagers in its ranks. Having spent the whole of their conscious lives surrounded by the violence of war and revolution, many of them had no doubt come to think that killing people was part of normal life. These little soldiers were noted for their readiness to do as they were told — their commanders often played the role of surrogate fathers — as well as for their ruthless ability to kill the enemy, especially when led to believe that they were avenging their parents' murder. Ironically, many of these children were in fact much better off in the army — which treated them as its own children, clothing and feeding them and teaching them to read — than they would have been living on the streets.

* * * According to Nina Berberova, Gorky came to Europe angry not only at what had been done in Russia but profoundly shaken by what he had seen and experienced. She recalls a conversation he had with her husband, the poet Khodasevich:

Both (but at different times) in 1920 went to a children's home, or perhaps reformatory for pre-teenagers. These were mostly girls, syphilitics, homeless from twelve to fifteen; nine out of ten were thieves, half were pregnant. Khodasevich . . . with a kind of pity and revulsion remembered how these girls in rags and lice had clung to him, ready to undress him there on the staircase, and lifted their torn skirts above their heads, shouting obscenities at him. With difficulty he tore himself away from them. Gorky went through a similar scene: when he began to speak about it, horror was on

his face, he clenched his jaws and suddenly became silent. It was clear that his visit shook him deeply — more, perhaps, than his previous impressions of tramps, the horrors of the lower depths from which he took his early subject matter. Perhaps, now in Europe, he was healing certain wounds he himself was afraid to admit to; and at times ... he asked himself, and only himself: Was it worth it?

Gorky was himself an orphan of the revolution. All his hopes for the revolution — hopes by which he had defined himself — had been abandoned in the past four years. Instead of being a constructive cultural force the revolution had virtually destroyed the whole of Russian civilization; instead of human liberation it had merely brought human enslavement; and instead of the spiritual improvement of humanity it had led to degradation. Gorky had become deeply disillusioned. He described himself in 1921 as 'in a misanthropic mood'. He could not reconcile his own humanist and democratic socialism with the realities of Lenin's Russia. He could no longer 'turn a deaf ear' to the faults of the regime in the hope of doing good and reforming it later: all his efforts had come to naught. If his own ideals had been abandoned in Russia, there was nothing left for him to do but abandon Russia.¹⁵

Gorky's decision to emigrate from Russia was preceded by mounting conflict with the Bolsheviks. The mindless terror of the past four years, the destruction of the intelligentsia, the persecution of the Mensheviks and SRs, the crushing of the Kronstadt rebels, and the Bolsheviks' callousness towards the famine crisis — all these had turned Gorky into a bitter enemy of the new regime. Much of Gorky's enmity focused on Zinoviev, the party boss in his own Petrograd. Zinoviev disliked Gorky, he saw his house as a 'nest of counterrevolution', and placed him under constant surveillance: Gorky's mail was opened; his house was constantly searched; and his close friends were threatened with arrest. Gorky's most angry letters of denunciation during the Red Terror were all addressed to Zinoviev. In one he claimed that his constant arrests had made 'people hate not only Soviet Power but — in particular — you in person'. Yet it soon became clear that behind Zinoviev stood Lenin himself. The Bolshevik leader was scathing about Gorky's denunciations. In a menacing letter of July 1919 he claimed that the writer's whole 'state of mind' had been made 'quite sick' by the 'embittered bourgeois intellectuals' who 'surrounded' him in Petrograd. 'I don't want to thrust my advice on you,' Lenin threatened, 'but I cannot help saying: change your circumstances radically, your environment, your abode, your occupation — otherwise life may disgust you for good.'¹⁶

Gorky's disillusionment with Lenin deepened during 1920. The Bolshevik leader was opposed to the editorial independence of Gorky's publishing house, World Literature, and threatened to cease supporting it financially. Gorky

complained bitterly to Lunacharsky. He rightly suspected that Lenin was trying to bring all publishing under state control — something he found anathema — and claimed (or threatened) that the only way to keep the project going was to run it from abroad. But with the stern Lenin breathing down his neck there was little the commissar could do. In his play Don Quixote (1922) Lunacharsky re-enacted the strained triangular relationship between himself (in the part of Don Balthazar), Gorky (Don Quixote) and Lenin (Don Rodrigo). Here are Don Balthazar's parting words to Don Quixote. They summarize the clash between Gorky and Lenin — between the ideals of the revolution and its grim 'necessities':

If we had not broken the plots in the rear, we would have led our army to ruin. Ah, Don Quixote! I do not wish to aggravate your guilt, but here you played your fatal role. I will not hide the fact that it came into stern Rodrigo's head to bring down the threatening hand of the law on you, as a lesson to all the soft-hearted people who thrust themselves and their philanthropy into life, which is stern and complicated and full of responsibility.¹⁷

The deaths of two of Russia's greatest poets, Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev, were the last straw for Gorky. Blok had been struck down in 1920 by rheumatic fever as a result of living through the civil war in unheated lodgings and in hunger. But Blok's real affliction was despair and disillusionment with the outcome of the revolution. To begin with he had welcomed its destructive violence as a purgatory for the rotten old world of Europe out of which a new and purer world of Asiatics — the Scythians — would emerge. His epic poem 'The Twelve', written in 1918, had depicted twelve rough Red Guards marching 'in step with the Revolution' through a blinding snowstorm destroying the old world and making the new. At their head, bearing the Red Flag, wreathed in white roses, and walking lightly above the snow, was the figure of Jesus Christ. Blok later noted that while writing this sensational poem: 'I kept hearing — I mean literally hearing with my ears — a great noise around me, a noise made up of many sounds (it was probably the noise of the old world crumbling).' For a while Blok continued to believe in the messianic mission of the Bolsheviks. But by 1921 he had become disillusioned. For three years there was no poetry. Gorky, a close friend, compared him to a 'lost child'. Blok plagued him with questions about death and said that he had given up all 'faith in the wisdom of humanity'. Kornei Chukovsky recalled Blok's appearance at a poetry reading in May 1921: 'I was sitting backstage with him. On stage some "orator" or other . . . was cheerfully demonstrating to the crowd that as a poet Blok was already dead . . . Blok leaned over to me and said, "That's true. He's telling the truth, I'm dead." ' When Chukovsky asked him why he did not write

poetry any more, Blok told him: 'All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?' That same month Blok took to his death-bed. His doctor insisted that he needed to be sent abroad to a special sanatorium. On 29 May Gorky wrote to Lunacharsky on his behalf. 'Blok is Russia's finest living poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death.' For several weeks Gorky continued to plead for a visa. Lunacharsky wrote in support to the Central Committee on II July. But nothing was done. Then, at last, on 10 August, a visa came. It was one day late: the night before the poet had died.¹⁸

If Blok had died through despair and neglect, the death of Gumilev, just two weeks later, was much more straightforward. He was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial. Gumilev was accused of being involved in a monarchist conspiracy — an allegation that was almost certainly false, although he was a monarchist by sentiment. A committee of intellectuals formed at Blok's funeral had petitioned for his release. The Academy of Sciences had offered to guarantee his appearance in court. Gorky was asked to intervene and rushed to Moscow to see Lenin. But by the time he returned to Petrograd with an order for his release, Gumilev had already been shot. Gorky was so upset he coughed up blood. Zamyatin said he had never seen him 'so angry as he was on the night when Gumilev was shot'.¹⁹

Gumilev was the first great Russian poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks. His and Blok's deaths symbolized for Gorky, as for the intelligentsia as a whole, the death of the revolution. Hundreds of people — 'all that remained of literary Petersburg' in Zamyatin's words — turned out for the funeral of Blok. Nina Berberova, then only a young girl, recalls how on seeing the announcement of Blok's death she was 'seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly and sharply orphaned... The end is coming. We are lost.' Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev's first wife, similarly mourned, not just for a poet but for the ideals of a generation, at Blok's funeral:

In a silver coffin we bore him

Alexander, our pure swan,

Our sun extinguished in torment.²⁰

Two months later, plagued by ill health himself, Gorky left: Russia, seemingly for good.

ii The Unconquered Country

Fours years of revolution had not reunited the villagers of Andreevskoe. They remained divided between the two old rivals. On the one side stood Sergei Semenov, progressive farmer and reformer, who dreamt of bringing the trappings of the modern world to this poor and God-forsaken hole. On the other stood Grigorii Maliutin, the heavy-built and heavy-drinking peasant elder, an Old Believer and opponent of all change, who had now resisted Semenov's reform efforts for the best part of thirty years.

The feud between them had begun in the 1890s, when Maliutin's daughter, Vera, had killed her illegitimate baby and buried it in the nearby woods. The police had arrived to investigate, and the rich Maliutin had been forced to buy them off. He accused Semenov of informing the police and began a campaign of intimidation — burning his barn down, killing his livestock, accusing him of sorcery — to drive him from the village. Maliutin finally achieved his aim in 1905 when Semenov established a branch of the Peasant Union in Andreevskoe; this was enough to make him a dangerous revolutionary in the eyes of the local judiciary, and he was sent into exile abroad. But three years later he returned to Andreevskoe as a pioneer of Stolypin's land reforms. He tried to introduce the advanced farming methods he had learned in Western Europe on private plots hived off from the commune. Some of the younger and more progressive peasants joined his enclosure movement. But Maliutin was once again enraged — within the commune he was the boss — and along with the other elders of the village had succeeded in blocking his reforms. All my dreams for a better life', Semenov wrote to a friend in 1916, 'have been destroyed by this obstinate and jealous man.'

The revolution tipped the scales in Semenov's favour. The old power structure upon which Maliutin had depended, of the volost elder, the local police and the gentry land captain, was dismantled overnight. Within the village the voice of the younger and more progressive farmers was also becoming more dominant, while that of the old patriarchal leaders like Maliutin, who saw nothing good in the revolution, was increasingly ignored. As a champion of reform, Semenov became a dominant figure at the village assembly. He always spoke out against the old patriarchal order and the influence of the Church. In 1917 he helped to organize the land redivision in Andreevskoe, cutting down Maliutin's farm to half its size. He was active in both the district Soviet land department and the local co-operatives; established associations for the purchase of advanced tools, market gardening, improved dairy farming and flax cultivation; wrote pamphlets and gave lectures on agronomy; campaigned against alcoholism; set up a school and a library in the village; and even wrote plays for the 'people's theatre' which he had established with his schoolteacher friend in the nearby

township of Bukholovo. He even drew up plans on how to cover the villages of Volokolamsk with electric and telephone cables which he sent to the Moscow Soviet. Although Semenov's Tolstoyan beliefs prevented him from taking up office in the village or the volost Soviet, there was no doubt, as one local put it, 'that the peasants, not just of Andreevskoe, but of the whole region as well, saw him as their leader and champion'.

Meanwhile, Maliutin and his fellow elders continued to oppose his every move. They claimed that he was a Communist — and that his reforms in the village had merely brought upon it all the evils of the new regime. The local priest accused him of sorcery, and warned that his 'atheism' would lead to the devil. Archdeacon Tsvetkov of Volokolamsk joined in the denunciations, claiming that Semenov was the Antichrist. The new village school, organized by Semenov in 1919, enraged them especially, since it was built from timber taken from the woods that had belonged to Maliutin and the Church before they had been nationalized. Moreover, the school had no religious instruction. In place of the cross on the classroom wall there was the obligatory portrait of Lenin. One night Semenov's barn was burnt; on another his farm tools were taken and sunk in the lake. Anonymous denunciations were sent to the local Cheka claiming that Semenov was a 'counter-revolutionary' and a 'German spy': on more than one occasion Semenov was hauled in by the Cheka to answer for his actions, although a brief call to Kamenev, the Chairman of the Moscow Soviet, whom Semenov vaguely knew, was always enough to release him. During 1921, when Russia was hit by various cattle epidemics, Maliutin and his allies blamed the death of the livestock in the village on Semenov's 'evil reforms'. It was even claimed that he had 'made the cattle ill by sorcery'. Some of the peasants now became confused. Although they knew that throughout Russia cattle were dying from similar diseases, they wanted explanations for their own losses, and some now became suspicious of Semenov.

In the end, Maliutin organized his old rival's murder. On the night of 15 December 1922, as he was walking to Bukholovo, Semenov was ambushed by several men, including two of Maliutin's sons, who suddenly appeared from their sister Vera's house on the edge of the village. One of them shot Semenov in the back. As he turned to face his attackers they fired several more shots, and then, as he lay dead on the ground, blew off his face. They cut the blood-red sign of a cross into his chest.

It had been a cowardly murder. Semenov had always faced his rivals openly and had been fair to their points of view; yet they maligned him and shot him in the back. Later, when the murderers were arrested, they claimed that Semenov had been 'working for the devil' and that he had conjured up the cattle plague. They also confessed that Grigorii Maliutin and the Archdeacon Tsvetkov had ordered them to kill Semenov — 'in the name of God', as the

latter had told them. They were all convicted of conspiring to murder and sentenced to ten years of hard labour each in the Arctic north.

Semenov was buried on his own beloved plot of land in Andreevskoe: he became a part of the soil for which he had lived and struggled all these years. Thousands of people from the surrounding villages attended the funeral, including hundreds of schoolchildren whom Semenov had personally taught. 'It is tragic to lose such a life', his friend Belousov said in his address, 'just at the moment when his work and teachings have become so badly needed by the people.' To commemorate Semenov's achievements, the village school was named after him, while his farm was preserved by the state, and run by his son until 1929, as a model farm to show the peasants the benefits of the latest agricultural innovations. Semenov would have been deeply touched: it was something he had dreamed of all his life.²¹