The Empire Must Die: Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917

EPILOGUE

Only in history textbooks does the October Revolution seem like a watershed moment that changed the country forever. Most people in Russia do not notice any major upheavals either on 26 October 1917 or over the days that follow. The Petrograd City Duma does not recognize the Bolshevik government and sets up the Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution—a substitute for the Provisional Government and an alternative to the Bolsheviks’ Council of People’s Commissars.

No one believes that the Bolsheviks will be able to cling to power, which is why the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries withdraw from the Congress of Soviets—as a form of punishment. They are certain that without them the Bolsheviks are doomed. “The Bolsheviks might be able to seize power, but they will not keep it for more than three days,” the American journalist John Reed quotes one of the Mensheviks. “They do not have the people to run the country. The best thing is probably to let them try—they will fall flat on their faces.” On 29 October, however, the Bolsheviks disperse the Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and Revolution and consolidate their grip on Petrograd.

The Bolsheviks won popular support in the first place thanks to three bombastic slogans. Their first promise is peace. To that end, on 26 October the Congress of Soviets adopts the newly drafted Decree on Peace, which appeals to the warring parties to conclude a peace without annexations or indemnities. However, the war does not end. On 9 December Trotsky travels to Brest-Litovsk for talks with Germany, but refuses to accept Berlin’s conditions. Germany launches a new offensive and seizes additional territories, as a result of which the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is signed on 3 March 1918 under far more onerous terms: Germany annexes around one million square kilometers of Russian territory and forces Russia to pay an indemnity of 6 billion marks (2.75 million roubles^*). But even that does not put a stop to the killing. The end of one war sees the start of another—this time a civil conflict.

The Bolsheviks’ second promise is to provide land for the peasants. However, they do the opposite: on 27 October the Congress of Soviets adopts the Decree on Land, abolishing the right of private land ownership entirely. At that time, a fifth of all land in Russia belongs to the peasants, but now the state takes it away from them and implements a redistribution and utilization program. But that is not all: less than six months later, in the spring of 1918, a “food dictatorship” decree is issued under which “committees of the poor” confiscate “surpluses” from the peasants, which amounts in practice to almost everything they produce.

The third and most important promise—to hand over the factories to the workers—is also unfulfilled. All enterprises are nationalized. The workers’ dream of controlling the factories and receiving some of the profits is shattered.

More than six months after the February Revolution, people are still waiting for the Constituent Assembly to convene to determine the identity of the new Russian state. But having come to power, the Bolsheviks lose interest, contemptuously referring to it as the uchredilka.^*

Nevertheless, the long-awaited elections to the Constituent Assembly begin five days after the overthrow of the Provisional Government, on 30 October. But a month later, even before the results are announced, the new Bolshevik Government disbands the election committee which oversees the elections to the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky is appointed its new chairman.

On 28 October Lenin signs a decree banning the Kadets as “a party of enemies of the people”; all its leaders face arrest and a revolutionary tribunal. The Kadets Andrei Shingarev and Fedor Kokoshkin, former members of the Provisional Government and newly elected to the Constituent Assembly, are arrested that same day. They will die the next day after the opening session, for they are killed by sailors in a prison hospital in early January.

According to the official election results, the Bolsheviks win Petrograd and Moscow, but nationwide the Socialist-Revolutionaries are in front. On 5 January the Constituent Assembly convenes at the Tauride Palace in Petrograd for a single day. On this day, soldiers from the Petrograd garrison open fire on a demonstration of supporters of the Constituent Assembly and kill about fifty people. The next day the deputies return to the Tauride Palace only to find it closed—a carbon copy of how Prime Minister Stolypin dissolved the First and Second Dumas.

In the winter of 1918 the Bolshevik government relocates to Moscow, away from the front line and the fickle Petrograd garrison, which poses a threat to any regime.

Throughout the country, including Petrograd, the winter of 1918 sees the onset of famine. Politics gives way to the more basic question of how to put food on the table. What to do? Stay at home and wait? Flee to the Cossacks on the Don River, where opponents of the Bolsheviks are gathering? Try to sneak abroad? During this winter period, about a million people leave Petrograd to escape the hunger and cold.

However, not everyone has a choice. In March 1918 Zinoviev and Uritsky order the remaining members of the Romanov family to be exiled from Petrograd. In June-July 1918 Sverdlov and Lenin make the decision to execute the tsar and his family, who are already in exile in the Urals. The first to be murdered is the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. He (together with his personal secretary, an Englishman by the name of Johnson) is kidnapped in Perm, taken to a forest, and shot. A month later, in Yekaterinburg, in the basement of Ipatiev House, Nicholas II, Alexandra, their children, and four servants are shot by firing squad. The next day, one hundred and fifty kilometers from Yekaterinburg, in the city of Alapaevsk, eight people are dumped alive down a coalmine shaft, including Alexandra’s sister, Ella, and a number of grand dukes, where they die in agony from their wounds.

On 30 August, in Moscow, Fanny Kaplan, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, shoots Lenin three times in retaliation for the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, seriously injuring him. On the same day, Moisei Uritsky, the now former head of the Central Election Commission, who now runs the City Emergency Commission, is assassinated in Petrograd. In response to the attempt on Lenin’s life and the murder of Uritsky, the Soviet government launches what becomes known as the “Red Terror”: “The death of one of our fighters must be paid for by the lives of thousands of enemies,” writes the Petrograd newspaper Red Newspaper.

On 5 September Moscow’s Petrovsky Park witnesses the new regime’s first public execution: former tsarist officials and prominent members of the Union of the Russian People are shot, including the ex-ministers Nikolai Maklakov, Alexei Khvostov, and Ivan Shcheglovitov, and the former deputy minister Stepan Beletsky.

The papers publish a list of “hostages” who are to be shot if a single Soviet worker is killed. The list opens with the names of four grand dukes, including the liberal Nicholas Mikhailovich. Gorky tries to intercede for him, for the grand duke is a renowned historian. “The revolution does not need historians,” Lenin reportedly replies. The four grand dukes are executed at the Peter and Paul Fortress in late 1919. Yuly Martov, on learning of their death, pens an article entitled “Shame!”

Those members of the imperial family lucky enough to have made their way to Crimea are able to escape: Britain’s King George V dispatches the battleship HMS Marlborough to pick up his aunt, Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna, and other relatives (the late tsar’s sisters, Olga and Xenia, his brother-in-law Sandro, the former supreme commander Nikolai Nikolaevich, the Montenegrin princesses, and members of the Yusupov family). The ship takes them to Britain.

By this time, there exist two Russias: one Red, the other White, with its capital in Omsk. This alternative Russian state is led by the remnants of the Provisional Government, headed by the Socialist-Revolutionary Nikolai Avksentiev, and later by Admiral Kolchak, who establishes an anti-communist government in Siberia. It is his government, and not the Bolsheviks, that is de facto recognized by the international community.

The Russian Civil War lasts almost six years and ends in victory for the Bolsheviks. It claims the lives of more than 10 million people—five times more than the number of Russian casualties in the First World War, which the Bolsheviks promised to end. Of that figure, 2.5 million are killed in battle, another 2 million fall victim to the Red (and White) Terror, while around 6 million die from hunger and disease. On top of that, approximately 2 million emigrate. A significant portion of the country is destroyed; the coal industry in the Donetsk region (in modern Ukraine) and the oilfields of Baku (in Azerbaijan) are particularly affected.

In February 1919 the publicist Vasily Rozanov dies of hunger in the town of Sergiev Posad near Moscow. In April 1921 the founder of the Union of the Russian People, Alexander Dubrovin, is shot on the orders of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Yuly Martov initially fights to reform Soviet power from within, but admits defeat in 1920 and moves to Berlin, where he dies from tuberculosis.

Members of the creative intelligentsia react differently to the Bolshevik victory. The poet Alexander Blok, for instance, welcomes the October Revolution. Many of his friends break off contact with him. In 1919 Blok bumps into Zinaida Gippius on board a tram. “Will you give me your hand?” he asks. “Personally, yes. Publicly, the bridges between us have been blown up,” she replies.

Many dream of leaving Petrograd, but it is soon prohibited. The only way to get out of the city is by joining the Red Army. Merezhkovsky is lucky—he manages to obtain permission to give lectures to Red Army soldiers on the history of Ancient Egypt. But instead of lecturing, he, Gippius, and Filosofov make their way to Poland. There, the “Brotherhood of Three” disbands forever: Filosofov remains in Warsaw, with Savinkov, to fight against the Bolsheviks, while the Merezhkovskys depart for Paris.

Blok, too, eventually asks to leave the country. Gorky, Lunacharsky, and even Kamenev petition on his behalf. Lenin refuses several times. In August 1921 Blok dies from heart disease, still waiting for permission.

As for Gorky, he turns into a leading critic of the Bolsheviks, but is allowed to leave for treatment in Berlin for his past merits as an opponent of tsarism. Maria Andreyeva, Gorky’s ex-civil wife, and her lover, a secret police agent, follow Gorky to spy on him for the Soviet government. They keep tabs on his expenses, monitor all his publications, and report everything he does to Moscow. Only in 1924 does he manage to shake them off by moving to Italy.

Tsereteli and Chkheidze, together with other Georgian socialists, try to create an independent Georgian republic, but are forced to emigrate after a successful offensive by the Bolsheviks. Chkheidze commits suicide in Paris in 1921. Tsereteli, meanwhile, outlives his fellow countryman Stalin, dying in the United States in 1959.

The former monk Iliodor, now the layman Sergei Trufanov, returns to Tsaritsyn in 1918 and declares himself to be “Patriarch Iliodor.” In 1922 he leaves for the United States, becomes a Baptist, and works as a hotel doorman, dying in New York in 1952.

Relations between Russian émigrés are complex, to say the least. The liberal monarchists and the Black Hundreds are literally at each other’s throats: the latter blame the former for the revolution. In 1921, in Berlin, Guchkov is attacked by a group of radical monarchists. A year later the Black Hundreds try to gun down Milyukov for having insulted the empress in his infamous “Stupidity or Treason?” speech before the Duma. Milyukov survives, but Vladimir Nabokov, the father of the future writer, is killed on the spot and nine others are injured.

Most members of the Russian imperial family remain in France. In 1924 Miechen’s son, Grand Duke Kirill, declares himself “emperor in exile,” but he is recognized by neither Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna, nor the former supreme commander Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, nor Grand Duke Dmitry.

Nikolai Nikolaevich dies in Antibes in 1929, while Grand Duke Dmitry passes away in Switzerland in 1942 and Felix Yusupov in Paris in 1964. In the 1940s Felix’s daughter, Irina, meets and even befriends Rasputin’s daughter, Maria.

The arrested Anna Vyrubova miraculously escapes due to the slovenliness of the Red Army soldiers escorting her. She goes into hiding in Petrograd for a long time, before eventually moving to Finland with her mother. She lives to be eighty years old and dies in 1964, a few months before Brezhnev replaces Khrushchev as the head of the Soviet Union.

Many members of the nobility and intelligentsia who stayed in Soviet Russia and survived the civil war somehow build new lives: they find work in Soviet institutions and departments. In the 1920s it seems as if the upheavals are over. But their peaceful existence lasts barely a decade, ending abruptly with the onset of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s.

The former head of the “Masonic Supreme Council” and former deputy prime minister in the Provisional Government, Nikolai Nekrasov, changes his surname to Golgofsky, finds employment in various Soviet ministries and lectures at university, but in the 1930s he is arrested and sent to the White Sea Canal gulag. There, he works in the design bureau and even receives the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for delivering the project ahead of schedule. Despite that, he is shot in 1940.

He is not alone. Another seven former ministers of the Provisional Government are executed during the Great Terror, and the rest spend a significant part of their lives in Soviet prisons. Vladimir Lvov, the perpetrator of the “Kornilov putsch,” dies in jail in Tomsk in 1930.

Boris Savinkov agrees to cooperate with the Bolsheviks and is lured back to Russia in 1924. But it is a trap set by the OGPU, the Soviet body for combating counter-revolutionary activity. He is arrested and sentenced to death. He allegedly commits suicide at Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters in central Moscow. His friend Filosofov cannot believe Savinkov’s betrayal. He dies alone in German-occupied Warsaw in 1940.

When the purges of the “old Bolsheviks”—Stalin’s opponents—begin in the late 1920s, many describe it as an internal squabble among “spiders in a jar.” Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin initially unite against Trotsky to prevent him from becoming Lenin’s successor. But then Stalin turns against all his rivals. He manages to sideline Kamenev by having him appointed as the Soviet ambassador to Italy. In 1927 Zinoviev and Trotsky join forces and hold anti-Stalin opposition rallies, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the revolution, but crowds of Stalin’s supporters disperse the rallies with shouts of “Down with the oppositionist Yids!”

In 1929 Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Union and murdered by Stalin’s agents in Mexico in 1940. In 1936 Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev are tried and executed, followed by several hundred others inside the Soviet leadership. Despite the pervasive fear of the Great Terror, it still comes as a shock to its victims.

The Second World War challenges the belief system of many émigrés. Grand Duke Sandro, a childhood friend of Nicholas II, praises Stalin for having reconstituted the Russian Empire. Stalin’s actions also win the approval of Milyukov, now residing in France. He supports the war against Finland: “I pity the Finns, but Vyborg belongs to Russia.” Struve, too, opines that Nicholas II was too soft—all the revolutionaries, including himself, should have been physically eliminated, says the former Marxist and liberal. Milyukov dies in 1943, Struve in 1944.

In 1941 the Paris resident Merezhkovsky delivers an anti-Bolshevik speech for German radio (nobody hears it, but it quickly becomes the stuff of legend). Accused of harboring fascist sympathies, he and Gippius are totally isolated from the Russian émigré community. He dies in December 1941, she in September 1945, both at the age of seventy-six.

Alexander Kerensky outlives almost all his ill-wishers and only just fails to see his ninetieth birthday. He lives abroad in Britain, France, Australia, and the United States. In 1968 he tries to visit the Soviet Union. He asks permission from Brezhnev, stating that he has no regrets about what happened and that the October Revolution and all subsequent events were natural developments. But his return is stymied by the Prague Spring; the Soviet leadership has no time for Kerensky. He dies in 1970 in New York and is buried in London.

The beloved daughter of Leo Tolstoy, Sasha, who received the copyright to her father’s works, lives to the age of ninety-five. She spends the 1920s in the new Soviet Union working as a human rights activist. Arrested several times by the Cheka, she finally emigrates in 1929. She dies in the United States in 1979.

The Bolshevik empire itself collapses in 1991. From a historical perspective, those who predicted a speedy end to Bolshevik rule were almost right. For history, seventy years is the blink of an eye.

The Russian Revolution was an event on a planetary scale. It was a tectonic shift that plunged a vast, highly developed civilization into the depths of Hades. Moscow, the current capital of Russia, has preserved about as much of its pre-revolutionary heritage as the Italian capital has of Ancient Rome or Mexico has of the Maya Empire.

This disaster was not an act of God, but anthropogenic. I do not consider it much of an exaggeration to describe it as the biggest manmade catastrophe in history.

The colossal difference in wealth and education made the country extremely unstable, as indeed is any system based on segregation. Sooner or later, the prosperous minority becomes unable to withstand the pressure of the dispossessed majority pushing up from below.

The imperial family, the court, members of the government, the Black Hundreds—thousands of people were unable to renounce their belief in the medieval dogma of the divine origin of tsarist power. Their archaic conviction and stubborn resistance to the bitter end prevented reform and the country’s political development. Time and again they brushed aside all moderate evolutionary scenarios.

The tragic culmination was in no way the only possible outcome. The idea of preordained karma—that it was the Russian people’s destiny—is currently in vogue in Russia. I hope that this book will cast doubt on that theory. Nothing is known in advance, nothing is 100 percent predetermined. History is one long blunder. The protagonists of this book are forever making plans and predictions, acting on the basis of what always seems to them to be careful calculation. But they almost always delude themselves. Time passes, and all these delusions fade from memory. The protagonists themselves, and the historians who study them, begin to believe that the plan was indeed well-founded, that everything that happened was not accidental, but the fruit of their original intention.

During the writing of this book, I was constantly amazed by the recollections of those who took part in the events. Hundreds of eye-witnesses wrote the most detailed memoirs about what happened and why their (often wildly different) opinions were correct. This is not surprising. The cause of my amazement lay elsewhere. Most of the memoirs were written after the two revolutions of 1917. Their authors already know how the story ends, yet almost none revise their attitude or point of view. All are convinced that they are right. Few consider themselves complicit in the tragic dénouement. They all sank their utopian Atlantis together, but they all point the finger at each other. The gendarme believes that he was right to tighten the screws, and only regrets that he didn’t turn them all the way. The revolutionary is sure that he was right to throw bombs, and worries only that he did not hurl more of them. All believe that their intentions were good, but, alas, looking back, they recognize the road that their good intentions have paved—and where it leads.

The tragedy of the early twentieth century is imprinted in Russia’s cerebral cortex. Even a century later, the middle class unconsciously expects a recurrence. Russia in the early twenty-first century looks nothing like its early twentieth-century counterpart: society today is incomparably more educated and prosperous than a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the psychological trauma is still felt. The experience of the civil war and the Red Terror forces new generations of Russians to repeatedly ask themselves: Should I leave? Will it soon be too late?

Like a century ago, many people today share the values of the Black Hundreds, while others justify the purges and the Red Terror. For them, the departure of dissenters from the country is like the discharge of ballast water from a ship—something that will benefit Russia and allow it to sail more speedily. To this day, sections of Russian society continue to wage war on each other and on their historical predecessors.

For the country as a whole, this is yet another tragedy. The cleansing of the intellectual and business elite is eroding its future. Russia has never come to terms with its past; the historical traumas are still raw; the psychological hang-ups persist. Russian history is an illness. Our history has made us all sick. I do not want to die from this illness.

* About $36,208,333 in 2017.

* A pejorative contraction of Uchreditelnaya sobraniye (Constituent Assembly).