The House of Government

4

THE REAL DAY

Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium. Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, and most of their followers did not.

But some did. Indeed, most definitions of “revolution”—at least “real” or “great” revolutions, such as the Puritan, French, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian ones—refer to regime changes in which apocalyptic millenarians come to power or contribute substantially to the destruction of the old order. “Revolutions,” in most contexts, are political and social transformations that affect the nature of the sacred and attempt to bridge the Axial gap separating the real from the ideal. As Edmund Burke wrote in 1791,

There have been many internal revolutions in the government of countries.… The present revolution in France seems to me to be quite of another character and description; and to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which have been brought about in Europe, upon principles merely political. It is a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma. It has a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part.

The last revolution of doctrine and theory which has happened in Europe is the Reformation…. The principle of the Reformation was such as, by its essence, could not be local or confined to the country in which it had its origin.¹

According to Crane Brinton, revolution is the assumption of power by the “delirious” idealists who expect the realization of “heavenly perfection.” According to Martin Malia, it is a political transformation “perceived as the passage from a corrupt old world to a virtuous new one.” And according to S. N. Eisenstadt, it is “the combination of change of regime with the crystallization of new cosmologies.” Great revolutions (as opposed to Burke’s internal ones) are “very similar to the institutionalization of the Great Religions and of the great Axial Civilizations.” They are the best of times, they are the worst of times; everyone goes direct to heaven, everyone goes direct the other way.²

Revolution, in other words, is a mirror image of Reformation—or perhaps Revolution and Reformation are reflections of the same thing in different mirrors. The first refers to political reform that affects the cosmology; the second refers to cosmological reform that affects politics. The view that revolutions aspire to the creation of an entirely new world while reformations attempt to return to the purity of the original source is difficult to hold on to: Thomas Müntzer and the Münster Anabaptists were trying to bring about the fulfillment of a prophecy that had not yet been fulfilled. They believed that the way to perfection lay through the restoration of the Jesus sect, but they had no doubt that what they were building was “a new heaven and a new earth,” not the old Garden of Eden. The new Jerusalem was to prelapsarian innocence what the kingdom of freedom was to “primitive communism.” All reformations (as opposed to theological or ritual reforms) are revolutions insofar as they assume that “it is not enough to change some of these Lawes, and so to reforme them.” All revolutions are “revolutions of the saints” insofar as they are serious about “insatiable utopias.” As Thomas Case told the House of Commons in 1641, “Reformation must be Universall. All the wives, with such as are born of them, there must not be a wife or a child dispensed withall, in this publike Reformation…. Reform all places, all persons, all callings. Reform the Benches of Judgments, the inferior Magistrates…. Reform the Church, go into the Temple…, overthrow the tables of these Money-changers, whip out them that buy and sell…. Reform the Universities,… reform the Cities, reform the Countries, reform inferior Schools of Learning, reform the Sabbath, reform the Ordinances, the worship of God, etc.”³

There was more to reform; there was nothing that did not need reforming. They had everything before them; they had nothing before them. They were all going direct to heaven, they were all going direct the other way. The key to salvation was firmness:

You have more work to do than I can speak…. Give leave onely to present to you the Epitome and compendium of your great work, summ’d up by our Saviour, Matthew 15:13. Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Behold here a double Universality of number and extent.

Every plant, be it what it will, though it be never so like a flower, though it seems as beautifull as the Lilly, which Solomon in all his robes could not outshine. Every plant, whether it be thing, or person, order or ornament, whether in Church, or in Commonwealth, where ever, what ever, if not planted of God, you must look to it, not to prune it onely, or slip it, or cut it…, but pull’d up…. Not broken off, then it may grow, and sprout again; but pull’d up by the very roots. If it be not a plant of Gods planting, what do’s it in the Garden: out with it, root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant.⁴

And just as Jesus explained the meaning of his Parable of the Weeds (“the weeds are the sons of the evil one,” who will be thrown “into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”), so did Thomas Case, to the same effect. The Puritan Reformation, like the one Jesus launched, had little to do with forgiveness:

“I know men will crie out, Mercie, Mercie, but oh no mercie against poor souls; such mercie will be but foul murder…. Shew no mercie therefore, to pull guilt and bloud upon your own heads; now the guilt is theirs, if you let them goe, you will translate their guilt upon your own souls. You remember what the prophet told Ahab, I Kings 20:42. Because thou hast let go out of thy hand, a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.”⁵

■ ■ ■

Two days after the tsarist state collapsed and the Provisional Committee of the State Duma found itself in charge of what used to be the Russian Empire, nineteen-year-old Mikhail Fridliand went to the Duma headquarters in Tauride Palace, to bear witness to the revolution. The son of a Jewish cobbler from Kiev and later Bialystok, Fridliand was a student at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology and a regular contributor to the Student Path newspaper.⁶ Three years later, he recorded his impressions in an essay titled “March in February,” one of the first to be signed with the pen name “Mikhail Koltsov”:

I made my way to the palace through the menacing darkness, accompanied by the sound of random gunfire—now close at hand, then far away, then suddenly right next to my ear. The moon shone down in place of the streetlamps, which had long since been extinguished; the soft, warm snow fluttered down and tinted the streets a light blue. Trucks full of people kept rushing by every few minutes and then disappearing around the corner like screaming, rattling apparitions. The area in front of the palace, on Shpalernaia, was almost unbearably bright and noisy. Tauride had always been a quiet, old, cozy place, with silent doors and waxed floors, deputies strolling about arm in arm, and Duma marshals bobbing and gliding by. Now it was completely unrecognizable, with feverishly moving bright spots and a thousand sparkling lamps lighting up the darkness, exciting the city’s mutinous blood and sucking it in with its pale tentacles. Directly in front of the main entrance, in the middle of the white, fluffy garden, a large, magnificent automobile lay on its side, like a wounded animal, its bruised nose and headlights buried in the snow. One of the doors was open, and large snowy footprints were visible on the stylish rug and tender leather of the seats. The entire courtyard around it was filled with motorcycles, carts, sacks, and people—a whole sea of people and movement breaking against the entrance in waves.

Mikhail Fridliand (Koltsov)

as a student

(Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

An old house invaded by the outside world was a familiar image. What was new was the claim that this was the very last old house (or, to an orthodox Marxist, the penultimate, feudal one). The “Nest of Gentryfolk” had become the House of Revolution:

The sudden chaos of new creation had lifted up the ancient house, widened it, enlarged it, and made it enormous, capable of encompassing the revolution and all of Russia. Catherine Hall had become a barracks, parade ground, lecture hall, hospital, bedroom, theater, a cradle for the new country. Flooding in, all around me, were countless streams of soldiers, officers, students, schoolgirls, and janitors, but the hall never seemed to grow too full; it was enchanted; it could accommodate all the people who kept coming and coming. Chunks of alabaster from the walls crunched underfoot, amidst machine-gun belts, scraps of paper, and soiled rags. Thousands of feet trampled over this trash as they moved about in a state of confused, joyous, incomprehensible bustle.

The swamp had turned into a sea. Some chroniclers and eyewitnesses, including Koltsov himself, occasionally resorted to other elements (fire, blizzards, volcanic lava), but the dominant image was the sea and the rivers that fed it—because they were readily associated with the chaos of new creation; because they were alive, as well as deadly; because they could be peaceful, as well as stormy; and because they could be turned back into a swamp—and then into a sea again. “In this elemental, volcanic explosion, there were no leaders. They bobbed along, like wooden chips, in the flooding stream, trying to rule, to direct, or at least to understand and participate. The waterfall flowed on dragging them with it, twirling them around, lifting them up, and then casting them down again, into the void.”

The first to surface was Mikhail Rodzianko, the Speaker of the Duma, who stood up to welcome “the brave men of the Preobrazhensky Regiment” and left “in tired majesty, blowing his nose into a large handkerchief.” Next, “the waves threw up Miliukov,” the head of the liberal Kadet Party. He, too, wanted to speak to the sea, to rule over it:

“Citizens, I greet you in this hall!”

The sea listened to him and seemed to calm, while continuing to seethe and rumble below the surface with a deep, inextinguishable roar. The diplomat’s neatly packaged words dropped like pebbles into the water, leaving ripples on the turbulent surface before sinking without a trace. Another splash, and a new chip appeared on the crest of a wave. The Duma deputy, Kerensky, held up by strong arms, extended his lean torso upward and, straining his tired throat and screwing up his insomniac’s face, cried out to the elements:

“Comrades!”

This word was warmer and more to the point than “brave men” or “citizens.” The elements smiled on the responsive speaker, showered him with a waterfall of applause, enveloped him in the brass din of the Marseillaise.

Some speakers were more responsive than others. Tauride Palace had become the House of Revolution. The House of Revolution could encompass the world, but it could not—as Koltsov saw it after the fact—keep it whole. “Nearby, in a long, narrow room separated by a curtain, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was holding a meeting. They, too, had been swept up and flung here by the spring flood waters coming from the factories, the army units, and the navy crews. This incredible meeting had been going on, with constant interruptions, for two days now. The excitement and the packed bodies made it hard to breathe. What were they saying, all these Mensheviks, SRs, and populists? They were not saying what they meant to say or needed to say because no one knew what was needed in this hour of deluge and fire.”

And then there were the full-time prophets—those who had predicted the coming of the real day and could not believe it was here, at last:

Squeezed into a tiny room, labeled “Press Bureau,” was the Russian intelligentsia…. They were just as bewildered and confused as everyone else. Free to say whatever they wanted, freed at last from censorship and prohibitions, and drunk with boundless rapture, they had not yet been able to find their voices, which were trapped deep within each man’s breast.

German Lopatin pressed each passerby to his gray beard, mumbling tearfully: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”

“Yes, it’s over! We’ve lived to see the end….”

Leonid Andreev frowned, fiddling with his belt:

“The end? You think so? I think it’s just the beginning.”

And twirling a lock of hair around a finger on his left hand, he pointed with his right toward the window:

“Or rather, the beginning of the end.”

Through the window, they could see the pale snow awakened by the early dawn.⁷

German Lopatin was a former member of the General Council of the First International, a legendary terrorist mastermind, the first translator of Das Kapital into Russian, and the survivor of several prison terms and one commuted death sentence. Leonid Andreev was the author of a celebrated short story about the last days of seven convicted terrorists and the curse of knowing the hour of one’s end. Both wings of Russian post-Christian apocalypticism and both halves of Bukharin’s Gymnasium No. 1 class were represented in the House of Revolution. “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace” (nunc dimittis) was not only the most recognizable Christian formula of fulfilled prophecy (uttered by Simeon after he had seen the baby Jesus); it was also the title of the best-known part of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, op. 37, written a year and a half earlier. Rachmaninoff himself was in town during those days, performing his most recent composition, the Études-Tableaux, op. 39. Immersed in the Dies irae theme, it opens with an image of a deluge drowning out all calls of distress, continues with a mournful scene of doomed expectation (“seagulls and the sea”), and culminates in a blood-curdling Last Judgment (no. 6). This was the flood from Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman—as seen by its victim, “poor Evgeny.”⁸

■ ■ ■

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were returning from prison and exile. Sverdlov spent several days with Kira Egon-Besser and her parents before leaving for Ekaterinburg to run the Urals Party organization. His difficult housemate from his Kureika days, now called “Stalin,” stayed on as one of the top Bolsheviks in Petrograd (as did Arosev’s friend Skriabin, now commonly known as “Molotov”). Piatnitsky arrived in Moscow straight from Siberia and was put in charge of Party cells in the Railroad District. Bukharin traveled from his New York exile to San Francisco, then by ship to Japan, suffering greatly from seasickness on the way, and finally to Moscow, where he joined Osinsky (who had recently defected from the Southwestern Front) in the regional Party bureau. Trotsky took the less circuitous Atlantic route from New York to Petrograd’s Finland Station, where he was greeted with solemn speeches. “Straight from the station,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I plunged into the vortex, with people and episodes whirling by like wooden chips in a stream.” Arosev interrupted his enforced journey to a penal battalion, reenrolled in the Moscow Warrant Officer School No. 4, from which he had been expelled, and went on to help found the Military Bureau of the Moscow City Party Committee. As he wrote five years later, “no sooner had the joyous spring sun of 1917 melted the winter snow with its golden rays than the whole expanse of Russia was touched by the purple wing of a rebellious angel…. From all of Moscow’s squares, the soldiers, flushed with happy intoxication from the almost bloodless revolution, sent skyward a thousand ‘hurrahs.’”⁹

Skobelev Square

One of those squares, named after General Skobelev and dominated by his huge equestrian statue, was, according to Arosev, the city’s heart. “From this square, the red beams extended their rays along the streets and alleyways to the farthest ends of Moscow. At the base of Skobelev’s mount, huge crowds would gather.” Across Tverskaia from the Skobelev monument was Moscow’s own House of Revolution: the former residence of the governor general and now home to the Provisional Government’s Provincial Commissar and the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. It was in front of its main entrance that “rallies lasted from early morning until late at night, with one speaker after another,” and it was the soviets (councils), spreading steadily both inside and outside the building, that were, in Arosev’s words, “a lighthouse in the midst of the stormy popular sea.”¹⁰

In Arosev’s account, the “Governor General’s Building” was not only a metaphor for revolutionary politics—it was the main stage and perhaps the main point of the revolution. The “stormy popular sea” that had flooded the city needed a master; the equestrian General Skobelev had proven to be a false idol; the new, legitimate power (the true Bronze Horseman) had moved inside, whether he knew it or not: “The house on Tverskaia was not only the address of the social forces supported by the masses of workers and soldiers, but also the address of the institution that was preparing to take over power. When, at rallies and meetings, the workers proclaimed ‘All power to the Soviets,’ they knew perfectly well that it meant the power of the organization whose executive offices were located on Tverskaia Street.”¹¹

One Bolshevik who did not yet know the right address of the revolution was Voronsky, who, as a Zemstvo Union inspector and Bolshevik propagandist at the Western Front, found himself at the very source of the flood. His memoir of those days is called The Eye of the Storm:

Governor General’s Building

Everywhere—at railway stations, in front of barracks and hospitals, in fields and on lawns, in courtyards and back alleys—soldiers were gathered together in tight groups, their irrepressible, boisterous speech, colorful and polyphonic, rising up and stirring the air. It was like a spring flood, when the river ice breaks up in the foggy haze of the night and predawn calm. The river begins to move, making mysterious rustling and gurgling noises, the ice floes crash into each other, their edges breaking off, and one huge ice block climbs on top of another, while somewhere far away the ice crumbles and dissolves into a deluge that spreads on and on, irrigating the flood plains and sweeping away winter debris.¹²

The main question was: “Will we be able to enter the main stream and direct its course, or will we drown in this new flood?” Voronsky’s literary alter ego Valentin is overcome with doubt. “Visions of the northern forests under the spell of ancient dreams, the long and gloomy halls of the seminary, the summer nights on the Tsna, the attics of Trans-Moskva, and the straight avenues of Petrograd kept appearing and disappearing before his mind’s eye…. What a strange feeling…. I spent the last ten years of my life as a wanderer, in prisons and exile, doing secret work, waiting for searches and arrests, losing friends. I used to be followed by traitors and spies. None of that exists anymore…. What will become of us all?” The answer was to enter the stream and take charge of its course by saying the “warmer words”—words that would not sink without a trace, words that would connect the Bolshevik truth to the happy intoxication of the crowd. The reward was omnipotence and, possibly, immortality.¹³

Arosev never slept. “The daily speeches in the streets and the barracks in front of the workers and soldiers, the heated arguments with those who were trying to betray our revolution, the feverish reading of leaflets and newspapers, of everything that screamed ‘revolution’ or smelled of revolution never seemed to tire me out, amazingly enough, but, instead, inspired me to work even harder.” Voronsky’s Valentin never slept, either: “He was warmed by the crowd, by its body, breath, movement, and murmur. These people … were now listening to him eagerly, their eyes glowing with the light of hope. They kept shaking Valentin’s hand, watching out for him, warning those who accidentally jostled him, hurrying to offer him matches, asking if it was too cold or windy. This shared, solicitous human warmth absorbed him, subdued him, made him a part of itself, and he, as never before, found himself thinking its thoughts and feeling its feelings…. It was the highest happiness that one could have on earth.”¹⁴

The most tireless and, by most accounts, most inspiring Bolshevik speaker was Trotsky, who seemed to talk continuously as he whirled around in the vortex of people and events:

I would make my way to the podium through a narrow trench of human bodies, occasionally being lifted above them and carried along…. Surrounded on all sides by tightly squeezed elbows, chests, and heads, I seemed to be speaking out of a warm cave of human bodies. Each time I made a broad gesture, I would brush against someone, and a grateful movement in response would intimate that I should not get upset or distracted, but should continue speaking. No exhaustion, no matter how great, could withstand the electric tension of that impassioned human throng. It wanted to know, to understand, to find its path. At certain moments it almost seemed I could feel on my lips the eager intensity of the crowd that had melded together to become one. At such moments, all the words and arguments prepared beforehand would wither and recede under the irresistible pressure of that sympathy, and other words and other arguments, new to the speaker but necessary to the masses, would emerge ready to do battle. It often felt as if I were standing a little to one side, listening to that speaker, unable to keep up with him and worried that he might fall off the edge of the roof, like a sleepwalker distracted by my promptings.¹⁵

Trotsky’s self-consciousness was a version of Sverdlov’s “habit of self-analysis” and Arosev’s and Voronsky’s attempts to reconcile their private selves with their Party-nicknamed doppelgängers. This could be a good thing—a form of “putting books to the test of life and putting life to the test of books”—but it could also be “intelligentsia weakness” leading to inaction. More pressing, in the spring of 1917, was another form of sectarian dialectic: free will versus predestination and the consciousness of historical necessity versus popular spontaneity. The Bolsheviks were the most exclusive and imminentist of the Russian millenarians, most suspicious of the swamp of daily routine and “appeasement,” and most willing “to fight not only against the swamp, but also against those who are turning toward the swamp.” The question now for all socialists, but especially for the Bolsheviks, was how much of the swamp had flowed into the sea. How close was life to the books? Was the stream clear enough, and was it flowing in the proper direction? Who was right—Trotsky the speaker, who threw away the script under the irresistible pressure of popular sympathy or Trotsky the prompter, who stuck to prepared arguments taken from books that put life to the test?

On the day Voronsky’s Valentin experiences the highest human happiness of being absorbed by a shared human warmth, he is asked to talk to a crowd of soldiers who have surrounded the local police station with the intention of lynching everyone inside. On the way over, Valentin looks up at the stars and thinks: “We are walking toward our children’s country, toward the faraway promised land. We are walking in the dark, without miraculous portents or burning bushes, with faith in ourselves only. Will we get there?” He does rescue the policemen (by arresting them “in the name of the revolution”), but is not happy with the speech he makes on the occasion.¹⁶

This is not how he had imagined his first address to the people after their liberation from the autocracy. He had been dreaming endlessly about this incomparable moment in prisons, exile, and attics. This hour had appeared to him again and again in a wondrous revelation. He was going to find words that would burn with the flame of the true dawn. He would say all the things he had been forced to conceal. The powerful “hosanna” escaping his breast would merge with the shouts of victory. And now the hour had come, and he stood before the exhausted, disease-ravaged people who only yesterday had been sitting in the trenches, with death behind their backs. What better, more noble audience could a revolutionary hope for during the days of the first victories? And yet something was missing. What could it be?¹⁷

The answer came on Easter Monday, when Lenin entered Petrograd on a train and declared that the time had come; the prophecy had been fulfilled; and the present generation would not pass away until all these things had happened. Life had passed the test of books, and books had passed the test of life. As for those “appeasers” (soglashateli) who had ears but did not hear, Lenin knew that they were neither cold nor hot, and so, because they were lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—he was about to spit them out of his mouth. Any non-Bolshevik, anyone who compromised with Babylon, was an appeaser.

The challenge of organizing a welcoming reception in the midst of Easter celebrations fell to the head of the Bolshevik Military Organization, Nikolai Podvoisky, the son of a priest and a former seminarian. Podvoisky, who saw the event as “the end of the agonizing search for the right course of the revolution,” managed to assemble a large crowd and procure an armored car. After being delivered to the Bolshevik headquarters in Krzesinska Palace, Lenin gave the good news to his bewildered followers. “It was so new to us,” wrote one of Lenin’s most loyal disciples and the secretary of the Central Committee, Elena Stasova, “that, at first, we simply could not get our minds around it.” Some Bolsheviks, according to Podvoisky, “were frightened by Lenin’s intolerance of the appeasers and the perspective of an immediate and complete split with them. Especially new and incomprehensible was his demand for the transfer of power to the soviets. There were those who were in total shock from Lenin’s words.”¹⁸

By the next morning, when Lenin unveiled his message to a packed joint meeting of all the Social Democrats in Tauride Palace, most Bolsheviks, according to Stasova, “perceived it as something absolutely sacrosanct and truly their own,” the source of “a firm conviction that from now on [they] were walking down an unerring path.” According to Podvoisky, “Vladimir Ilich began his speech by unmasking the appeasers as the lackeys of the bourgeoisie and its secret agents in the ranks of the working class…. Lenin’s words drove the Mensheviks into a frenzy, provoking jeers, furious swearing, and threats. With each new comment by Lenin, the hostility grew. Lenin’s statement that there could be no union between the Bolsheviks and Menshevik appeasers was met with rabid howling and roaring.”

Finally, Lenin got to his main point, the immediate takeover of power. “The appeasers leapt out of their seats. They began to whistle, scream, bang madly on their desks, and stamp their feet. The noise rose to a defeaning pitch. The Menshevik leaders—Chkheidze, Tsereteli, and other presidium members—became deathly frightened. In vain did they try to restore order, addressing their desperate pleas to the right, where their supporters were, and to the left, where the Bolsheviks sat. This continued for about ten minutes. Then the storm died down. It flared up again.” And so it continued, in response to every one of Lenin’s April Theses, until the end of the speech. “Amid all the raging elements, Lenin remained unperturbable. One had to see the incredible strength and serenity in his face, his whole figure, in order to understand Lenin’s true role and significance at that crucial moment…. He stood there like the helmsman of a ship during a terrible storm—full of inner peace, clarity, simplicity, and majesty because he knew where to steer.”¹⁹

Podvoisky’s and Stasova’s memoirs follow the Soviet hagiographic tradition, but there is no doubt that Lenin was the only socialist who knew where to steer. He was a true prophet who could both lead his people through the parting waves and attend, one way or another, to their every petulant complaint. “The agonizing search for the right course” was finally over.

■ ■ ■

“The peculiarity of the current situation in Russia,” wrote Lenin in his April Theses, “consists in the transition from the first stage of the revolution, which has given power to the bourgeoisie owing to the insufficient consciousness and cohesion of the proletariat, to its second stage, which must give power to the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry.” The power, in other words, was to be handed to those who lacked sufficient consciousness or cohesion to recognize their inheritance. “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people.” “If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!”²⁰

The solution was to find the words that would align the people’s wishes with the prophecy’s fulfillment. According to Podvoisky,

Vladimir Ilich explained to us the surest and fastest way to convince the soldiers who did not have much consciousness, found themselves under the influence of the agents of the bourgeoisie, or had a poor understanding of their complex environment.

“They don’t need long speeches,” Lenin told us. “A long speech touches on too many things, and the soldier’s attention dissipates. He can’t absorb it all. You won’t satisfy him, and he will be unhappy with you. You should talk to him about peace and about land, and there’s not much you need to say about that: the soldier will know what you are talking about right away.”…

And who did Vladimir Ilich recommend as the best agitators among the soldiers? He said that during the February Revolution the sailors (along with the workers) had played one of the most prominent roles. And this meant that they should be the ones sent to the soldiers!²¹

The strategy seemed to work. “Revolution” was universally understood to mean the end of the old world and the beginning of a new, just one. The longer the delay in the coming of the new world and the more acute the sense that the “provisional” government was becoming, in some sense, permanent, the greater the attraction of the Bolshevik message. And the message was, indeed, simple: the desirable and the inevitable were one and the same; all that was needed was for the exhausted and disease-ravaged to make one final push.

Later that same spring, Voronsky’s Valentin went to a rally on the Western Front. The first speaker was Comrade Veretyev from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had spent the previous ten years in Siberian prisons. A pale man with a goatee, flaxen hair, a “high clear forehead,” and “intelligent eyes,” Veretyev talked about the sanctity of democratic freedoms, the special duty of the soldiers at the front, and the unrealistic promises made by irresponsible people. “He would sometimes pause and make a motion with his right hand; his nervous fingers fluttered, imparting a peculiar expressive mobility to his words and whole figure. The wind from the meadow ruffled his hair. One lock kept falling over his right eye, and Veretyev would throw it back with a quick, impatient movement.”

The next to speak was a sailor from the Baltic Fleet, who said that soldiers covered in “piss, shit, dirt, and lice” do not care about rights and freedoms and that all they wanted was peace and bread and land, right away, as the Bolsheviks kept saying. He got some of his Bolshevik lines wrong, but he was saved by the “power of a newly converted zealot” and the “wild, passionate force” of his words. Veretyev stood next to the sailor, looking down at his feet and fumbling with his hat. “He looked like a man sentenced to death.”

What was happening was a tragedy for him. An old populist, he had worshipped the people and suffered for them. And now he was standing before the freed people, and they did not accept him and did not understand him…. And the person who reminded the soldiers of that was not an old political prisoner but a semi-literate sailor who had barely mastered the ABCs of revolutionary struggle. Verily, “you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”!…

According to the biblical legend, God showed Moses the Promised Land from a remote mountain in the Land of Moab. Moses was luckier than Veretyev. History brought him to Canaan, the Land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but Veretyev did not recognize it.²²

Moses was luckier, but not by much: he was shown the promised land from a distance, but not allowed to cross the Jordan because he had broken faith with God in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah Kadesh in the Desert of Zin. After his death, the people he had led out of captivity were able to enter the land of their inheritance but did not find it flowing with milk and honey and “prostituted themselves to the foreign gods.”²³

The power of Lenin’s conviction persuaded most Bolsheviks, and at the April Party conference his views prevailed. Some doubters continued to waver, but, as Podvoisky put it, “the party ship, guided firmly and confidently by its helmsman, set out on a new course.” The person who did more than anyone to help Lenin with the practicalities of translating convictions into votes was Sverdlov, who returned to Petrograd as head of the Urals delegation and stayed on as Lenin’s executive plenipotentiary. At the conference, (according to Stasova) “he called meetings if agreement was needed on a controversial issue, organized and put together commissions on various questions, and drew up lists of Central Committee members to be discussed, among other things. Whatever needed to be done, Yakov Mikhailovich was tireless in making sure it was taken care of. It was amazing how he managed to be everywhere at once and still chair all the countless meetings and conferences.” One of the things he did was to remove Stasova’s name from the Central Committee list and replace her as head of the Central Committee Secretariat, which she had been running with the help of Tatiana Slovatinskaia, Stalin’s former friend and correspondent and Valentin Trifonov’s wife.²⁴

As the Party prepared for the coming revolution, it had two central tasks. One was administrative and organizational: objectives had to be defined, personnel assigned, weapons stockpiled, followers trained, contacts maintained, accounts kept, funds distributed, conferences organized, and meetings chaired (and manipulated). Sverdlov presided over most of these things, with the help of several women, including Polina Vinogradskaia, who remembered his notebook “filled with hieroglyphs that only he could understand. It was a magic notebook! With a quick glance, Sverdlov could tell you everything you needed to know about a comrade: where he was working, what kind of person he was, what he was good at, and what job he should be assigned to in the interests of the cause and for his benefit. Moreover, Sverdlov had a very precise impression of all the comrades: they were so firmly stamped in his memory that he could tell you all about the company each one kept. It is hard to believe, but true.”²⁵

Sverdlov continued to live with the Egon-Bessers. He got Kira a job in the editorial offices of the Soldiers’ Truth newspaper, next to his secretariat in Smolny Palace (the new House of Revolution, as far as the Petrograd Bolsheviks were concerned). After a few weeks, however, Kira’s parents insisted on moving her to the countryside for health reasons (her “protests notwithstanding”), and in early July, Sverdlov’s wife and children arrived from Siberia. Novgorodtseva joined the Central Committee Secretariat, and the children were sent to their grandfather in Nizhny Novgorod. Some sections of the Secretariat and the Bolshevik publishing house, The Surf, were moved into the building of an Orthodox confraternity, with crosses over the main entrance and a back door leading into the church. It became known as “the place under the crosses.”²⁶

The Bolsheviks had always been good at administrative and “technical” work. The party’s raison d’être was “fighting the enemy, not stumbling into the nearby swamp”; its self-description was “a fighting army, not a debating society”; and its organizational principle was “democratic centralism,” not the other way around. Now, on the eve of the real day and under Sverdlov’s supervision, they redoubled their efforts. “As the frequency and intensity of rallying subsided,” wrote Arosev, “the center of gravity of the work of the soviets moved to their executive committees, and along with them, naturally enough, to record keeping.” And when it came to record keeping, it was, naturally enough, the Bolsheviks who, “even during the most romantic revolutionary days, … distinguished themselves as ‘apparatchiks.’” The Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was run by its Bolshevik secretary, Arkady Rozengolts, and the only room assigned to the Soldiers’ Soviet, which was dominated by the SRs, was occupied by its Bolshevik faction. “In those days, people acquired positions of power by being active and presenting the world with a fait accompli. The Bolsheviks, as the most active element, found themselves in almost all the administrative jobs.”²⁷

The Party’s second task was “agitation,” which consisted of making speeches at large rallies and writing articles in Party newspapers. The speeches revolved around concise slogans; the articles provided specific links between the changing slogans and the general prophecy. One of the most skillful and prolific Bolshevik “dialecticians” was Bukharin, who could offer instant sociological analysis in the light of both the foundational texts and immediate tactical objectives. “Because the proletarian masses proved insufficiently conscious and well-organized,” he wrote in May 1917, echoing Lenin’s April Theses, “they did not proceed immediately to the establishment of state power by the revolutionary lower classes.” But, as they became more conscious and better organized, and as the true interests of the proletariat prevailed over those of its peasant allies, the soviets would take over power and clash openly with the imperialist bourgeoisie. The efforts of the enemy were both doomed and dangerous: “consequently, what was needed was feverish work everywhere without exception.”²⁸

As Cromwell had put it, “we are at the threshold;—and therefore it becomes us to lift up our heads, and … endeavor this way; not merely to look at that Prophecy … and passively wait.” What was needed was the constant reading of the signs and feverish work everywhere without exception. “In the depths of the popular masses,” wrote Bukharin on June 6, “there is a permanent process of fermentation, which, sooner or later, will manifest itself.” The surest sign of the approaching end was the emergence of two clearly branded armies. “The bourgeoisie is emerging as a force bringing death and putrefaction; the proletariat, as the carrier of life-creating energy, is marching ahead.” On July 30, at the Sixth Party Congress, Bukharin suggested that the peasant as property owner had entered into a temporary alliance with the bourgeoisie; his friend Osinsky (who, during the congress, was camped out next to him on the floor of a friend’s apartment) responded by saying that the Communist Manifesto had predicted otherwise; but Stalin explained that there were different kinds of peasants and that the poor ones were “following the bourgeoisie because of their lack of consciousness.” On October 17, one week after the Bolshevik Central Committee, chaired by Sverdlov, made the decision to stage an armed uprising, Bukharin wrote: “Society is inexorably splitting into two hostile camps. All intermediary groups are rapidly melting away.” All that was needed was one last burst of feverish activity.²⁹

“In the days of the last coalition,” wrote the Menshevik N. N. Sukhanov, “the Bolsheviks demonstrated colossal energy and engaged in feverish activity throughout the country” (including his own apartment, where, secretly from him, his Bolshevik wife hosted the “uprising meeting” of the Central Committee). On October 21, Sukhanov listened to Trotsky speak about peace, land, and bread.³⁰

The mood around me bordered on ecstasy. It seemed that, without any command or prior agreement, the crowd might suddenly burst into some kind of religious hymn…. At one point, Trotsky formulated a short general resolution or proclaimed a general formula to the effect that “we will defend the cause of the workers and peasants to the last drop of blood.”

“Who’s in favor?”

The crowd of thousands raised its hands as one man. I could see the raised hands and burning eyes of all the men, women, adolescents, workers, soldiers, peasants, and petit bourgeois. Were they in a state of spiritual fervor? Could they see, through the slightly raised curtain, a corner of that “holy land” they had been longing for?³¹

Two days earlier, after a different Trotsky speech, Sukhanov and his wife missed their streetcar. It was late at night, and the rain was pouring down; Sukhanov was in a bad mood because of the streetcar and the rain—and because Trotsky had said that the rumors of an imminent uprising were inaccurate insofar as they were not accurate. At last, they were able to catch a streetcar that would take them part of the way home.

I was extremely angry and sullen as I stood in the back of the streetcar. Next to us was a small, modest-looking man in glasses, with a black goatee and radiant Jewish eyes. Seeing my anger and sullenness, he seemed to want to try to cheer me up, comfort me, or distract me with some kind of advice about which route to take, but I responded curtly and monosyllabically.

“Who was that?” I asked my wife when we got off the streetcar.

“That was Sverdlov, one of our old Party men and a Duma member.”

Despite my bad mood, I am sure I would have cheered up and had a good laugh if I had been told that within two weeks this man would become the official head of the Russian Republic.³²

■ ■ ■

Most accounts of the October takeover in Petrograd center around Smolny Palace, former home to the Institute of Noble Maidens, which, since August, had housed the Petrograd Soviet and Bolshevik military headquarters. “The whole of the revolution was taking place in Smolny” (as well as, possibly, in the workers’ suburbs), wrote Sukhanov. “Everywhere, armed groups of sailors, soldiers, and workers could be seen scurrying around. There was always a line of peasant emissaries and army unit delegates winding its way up the stairs to the third floor, where the Military-Revolutionary Committee was located.”³³

“The whole of Smolny was brightly lit up,” wrote Lunacharsky, an old friend of Sukhanov’s. “Excited crowds scurried up and down the halls. All the rooms bubbled over with life, but the highest human tide, a truly passionate blizzard, was raging in the corner of the upstairs hall, where, in the back room, the Military-Revolutionary Committee held its meetings.… Several completely exhausted girls were coping heroically with the indescribable upsurge of people with requests, complaints, and demands. If you got caught up in that whirlpool, you could see all the excited faces and the many hands reaching out for a directive or a written order.”³⁴

Mikhail Koltsov’s “October” offers a faithful restaging of his “March in February”:

In the evening twilight, the heavy shape of Smolny, with its three rows of lit-up windows, could be seen from far away.

Hurrying along the wide, hard, frost-covered road and dipping occasionally into potholes, soldiers and sailors, civilians with raised collars and squeaky galoshes, rattling automobiles and motorcycles all streamed toward the stone cavern of the main entrance.

… Pressing forward in a nervous, jostling throng, they could not be contained within the walls of the building; they kept streaming in and then seething ponderously and eerily, before finally spilling over.

It used to be quiet inside with schooldames walking solemnly by in soft kid shoes, quick-footed daughters of doomed rulers running up and down stairs, and, every so often, gold-embroidered old men with empty eyes floating by in clouds of reverent whispers.

But now it was full of noise. Orders rang out and the hundred feet of a changing guard tramped by under the black arches. Patrols, crews, and pickets flowed out in thick gray streams.

… Comrades! To the Winter Palace!³⁵

The canonical memory of the October Revolution, like that of its February precursor and French model, was about moving from one building to another—until such time as “the city of pure gold, like transparent glass,” could be built. This time the flood swept into Smolny, surged up to the third floor, whirled around the entrance to the Military-Revolutionary Committee office, and then flowed, in orderly streams, toward the Winter Palace, where old men with empty eyes sat waiting. A member of the bureau of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Nikolai Podvoisky, remembered guiding “the stormy stream” toward the palace and watching it “flood the porch, entrances, and stairways.” Having sent the arrested government ministers to the Peter and Paul Fortress, he returned to headquarters and found Lenin writing a decree on land. “No sooner had the reign of the bourgeoisie been toppled by armed people in the Winter Palace than Lenin began turning the first page of the emerging new world in Smolny.”³⁶

Nikolai Podvoisky

In Trotsky’s account, around that time or perhaps a little later, Lenin looked at him “in a soft, friendly way and with an awkward shyness that suggested a desire for intimacy. ‘You know,’ he said hesitantly, ‘after all the persecutions and a life underground, to come to power …’—he was searching for the right word, and suddenly switched to German, making a circular motion around his head: ‘es schwindelt’ [it makes one’s head spin].”³⁷

According to Lunacharsky, who was also in Smolny in those days, some people were afraid that “the peasant sea was going to open up and swallow us,” but “Lenin faced the enormous challenges with astonishing equanimity and took hold of them the way an experienced pilot would take hold of the helm of a giant ocean liner.” Lunacharsky wrote this in 1918, on the first anniversary of what had already become “the October Revolution” and in the certainty that Smolny would be turned into “the temple of our spirit.” But even in the midst of the revolution, on October 25, 1917, when he still had no idea what was happening around the Winter Palace, preferred a “democratic coalition” to a Bolshevik takeover, and thought the chances of victory were “dim and bleak,” he had written to his wife, “These are frightening, frightening days on a knife-edge. They are full of suffering and worries and the threat of a premature death. And yet still it is wonderful to live in a time of great events, when history does not trot along lazily and sleepily, but flies like a bird into unknown territory. I wish you were here with me, but thank god you are not.”³⁸

Arkady Rozengolts

In the event, nothing frightening actually happened. (“The ease with which the coup was carried out came as a surprise to me,” wrote Lunacharsky two days later.) It was in Moscow, where the government forces put up some resistance, that the fate of the revolution was decided. According to Arosev, who, as one of the very few Bolsheviks with formal military training, had been put in charge of military headquarters, “that great uprising of the human mass in the name of humanity began simply and without hesitation—exactly the way the old books describe the creation of the world.” It began in a small room on the third floor of the Governor General’s (Soviet) Building. “One might have thought that it was not a room but a stage represention of a room, in which a fierce battle of the cigarette butts had taken place the previous night.” The secretary of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Arkady Rozengolts, who could “make revolution with the same ease and inspiration with which a poet writes poetry,” ordered Arosev to occupy the telegraph, telephone exchange, and post office, and then quietly disappeared. “It was as if he had inhabited those rooms for hundreds of years, like an eternal ghost, for he knew where everything was and seemed to move from one room to another through the walls.”³⁹

Arosev found the commander of the Moscow Red Guards, A. S. Vedernikov, and the two of them set off to carry out the order:

Comrade Vedernikov and I emerged from the Soviet Building onto Skobelev Square. It felt strange: all the people in the square were scurrying about as usual, all rushing someplace and worried about something, just like the day before, or the day before that. Two newspaper boys were loitering near the Skobelev Monument, and a young lady was haggling with a cabby. Everything was just as it always was.

“Do you have a revolver?” Vedernikov asked me.

“No.”

“Me neither. We’ve got to find one. Let’s go to the Dresden and see if one of the comrades can give us something.”

Everything all around was so peaceful, and we weren’t being attacked by anyone. The uprising in Petrograd had already taken place, and half the ministers were in prison, so why did we need a revolver? Comrade Vedernikov’s going off in search of a gun reminded me of a silly comedy in which the characters think they are more important than they actually are.”⁴⁰

Vedernikov found a gun, and the two of them went to the Pokrovsky Barracks, where Arosev made a short speech, and one company agreed to join them. Within two hours the telegraph, telephone exchange, and post office had all been occupied. The great uprising of the human mass in the name of humanity had begun.

In Moscow, the enemy were the students of Moscow’s military schools, who had professional officers and a strong sense of duty, but no organized support, no single command, and—most important for Arosev—no address they could call their own. “While the Bolsheviks had one organization that was preparing to seize power—the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies with its executive offices in the right wing of the Soviet Building—the government, which was fighting for its existence, had several command centers … that vied with each other for supremacy.” After the Bolsheviks formed the Military-Revolutionary Committee and demanded full power, the non-Bolshevik members of the Soviet moved out of the building and “found themselves without a territorial center.” The great uprising of the human mass had acquired a home. “Its address had to be known to people in the districts, to regional commanders, scouts, and others.”⁴¹

The military headquarters, headed by Arosev, moved into a small ground-floor room facing a side street (the Chernyshev/Voznesensky Alley); the Military-Revolutionary Committee moved in next door; and the adjoining room became the secretariat, where young women issued permits and screened visitors, and where, according to one of the women, there were always “thick throngs of people pushing and shoving.” The rest of the building was “one long barracks.” Or rather, “it was a soldiers’ anthill,” with detachments “in constant circulation: from the soviet to their positions at the battle sites and then back to the soviet to rest.”⁴²

The soviet building was Moscow’s Smolny, but there was no Moscow Winter Palace. The Kremlin changed hands twice, but there was no one there to topple. There were no “White forces,” either: groups of cadets attacked or defended various buildings looking for a tactical advantage but without any overall plan. There were times, wrote Arosev, when “it seemed as if the earth were shaking beneath our feet, our arms and feelings growing numb, and we, along with our soldiers, sliding along a knife’s edge, frightful and fateful, with victory on one side and death, on the other.” Most of the fighting, however, took place far from the soviet building, closer to the river and especially around the bridges connecting the city center to Trans-Moskva.⁴³

The Swamp was solidly pro-Bolshevik. The soldiers guarding the Main Electric Tram Power Station had handed their weapons over to the local Red Guards, who posted their detachments on the station towers, in the Salt Yard, and at the entrance to the Big Stone Bridge. The soldiers quartered at the Einem candy factory and Ivan Smirnov vodka distillery had given them a machine gun, which they placed on top of the bellfry of St. Nicholas. A field phone connected the station to the Gustav List plant, which provided the largest Red Guard detachment in the area (between forty and one hundred men). Some of the armed Gustav List workers were sent to guard the bridges; others converted the riverside bathhouse into a fortified bunker. “We used to shoot at the Kremlin through holes we had made in the stone wall, either from a standing or lying position, and sometimes we had to take turns because there weren’t enough guns to go around,” remembered one of them. “It was even easier at night because we could aim at the different colored lantern flashes that must have been some kind of signals from the cadets who were running along the top of the wall to their lines below.”⁴⁴

After a week of fighting, the last loyalist bastion, the Alexander Military College, just up the street from the Big Stone Bridge, laid down its arms. In the small room occupied by the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Rozengoltz asked Arosev, who was sitting on the couch next to him, to write an order appointing Nikolai Muralov commissar of the Moscow Military District.

“Commissar or Commander?” I asked.

“District Commissar—but it’s the same as commander.”

“Commander,” “Commissar,” I thought, not really comprehending how such an important thing could be done so simply. All I needed to do was scribble down “hand over” and “appointed,” put it to a vote, and, lo and behold, you have a new government. It was hard to believe….

But that is just what I did. I scribbled it down. A girl typed up the order. It was put to a vote, and Comrade Muralov became not simply Muralov, but District Commander….

This is how the new military government was created—simply and naturally. Or rather, it was not created, but born, and, as with any natural birth, washed in blood.⁴⁵

Arosev spent much of the rest of his life remembering that day. In the 1932 version of his memoir, he wrote:

During those nights when no one slept and each thought we might come out victorious or might all be slaughtered, it occurred to me that no matter what was written in literature or what was created by an author’s imagination, nothing could be as powerful as this simple and austere reality. People were actually fighting for socialism. The socialism we used to dream and argue about was finally manifesting itself—in the flashing bayonets of the soldiers and raised collars of the workers swarming down Tverskaia, Arbat, and Lubianka Streets, gripping their Mausers and Parabellums and continuously advancing, tramping down harder and harder on the chest of the decaying, stinking bourgeoisie, that was infecting the weak ever so slightly with the smell of its decomposition. I have read almost everything lofty and solemn that we have in our old and new literature, looking in vain for something akin to the feeling we had on that cloudy morning when, in our trench coats smelling of rain and gunpowder, we climbed into an old, beat-up military car to be driven to headquarters as the new power.⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Rachmaninoff was sitting in his apartment on Strastnoy (Christ’s Passion) Boulevard, a short walk from Skobelev Square. According to his wife, “he was busy revising his First Piano Concerto and was concentrating on his work. Because it was dangerous to turn the light on, the curtains in his study, which faced the courtyard, were drawn, and he was working by the light of a single candle.” As he told his biographer in 1933, “I sat at the writing-table or the piano all day without troubling about the rattle of machine-guns and rifle-shots. I would have greeted any intruder with the answer that Archimedes gave the conquerors of Syracuse.” Many people around him “were hoping that each new day would, at last, bring them the promised heaven on earth,” but he was not one of them. “I saw with terrible clearness that here was the beginning of the end—an end full of horrors the occurrence of which was merely a matter of time.” Three weeks later, he and his family left for Petrograd. On December 20, he went to Smolny to request exit visas. On December 23, he and his wife and two daughters arrived at the Finland Station and boarded the Stockholm train (probably the same one that had brought Lenin to Russia). He died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. His wish to have Nunc dimittis (“Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,” op. 37, no. 5) sung at his funeral could not be fulfilled. According to Rachmaninoff’s biographer, who cites a letter from the composer’s sister-in-law, “the choir was thought unable to cope and in any case the sheet music was not available at the time.”⁴⁷

■ ■ ■

A few days after Rachmaninoff’s departure, the newly elected delegates of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly were gathered in Tauride Palace in Petrograd. According to Trotsky, Lenin had argued for postponing the elections indefinitely, but “Sverdlov, more closely connected to the provinces than the rest of us, protested vehemently against the postponement.” Too much had been invested in the idea of a national legislative body, and too many promises had been made on its behalf (by the Bolsheviks, among others). The elections had been held; the SR’s had won the majority of the seats, and Lenin had responded by saying that formal parliamentarism was a betrayal of the revolution. The leaders of the largest nonsocialist party had been arrested; martial law (to be enforced by Podvoisky) had been introduced, and a demonstration in support of the Constituent Assembly had been dispersed by gunfire. Late in the afternoon, the delegates were allowed to open the proceedings:⁴⁸

Constituent Assembly member Lordkipanidze (SR) states from his seat: “Comrades, it is 4 p.m., and we propose that the oldest member of the Constituent Assembly open the session. The oldest member of the SR faction is Sergei Petrovich Shvetsov … (loud noise on the left, applause in the center and on the right, booing on the left … nothing can be heard; loud noise and booing on the left; applause in the center). The oldest member of the Constituent Assembly, S. P. Shvetsov, mounts the platform.

SHVETSOV (rings the bell). I declare the meeting of the Constituent Assembly open. (Noise on the left. Voices: Down with the usurper! Prolonged noise and booing on the left; applause on the right.) I declare an intermission. (Sverdlov, the Bolshevik faction representative and chairman of the Central Executive Committee, mounts the platform.)

SVERDLOV. The Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies has directed me to open the meeting of the Constituent Assembly. (Voices on the right and in the center: Your hands are covered with blood! We’ve had enough blood! Tumultuous applause on the left.) The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies … (Voice on the right: It was rigged!) hopes that the Constituent Assembly will fully recognize all the decrees and resolutions of the Council of People’s Commissars. The October Revolution has kindled the fire of the socialist revolution not only in Russia, but in all countries … (laughter on the right and noise)…. We have no doubt that the sparks from our fire will spread all over the world … (noise) … and that the day is near when the working classes of all countries will rise up against their exploiters as the Russian working class rose up in October, followed by the Russian peasantry … (tumultuous applause on the left).⁴⁹

This episode would enter the Soviet canon as the moment when the Bolsheviks made their final break with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. According to Lunacharsky, all great revolutionaries were characterized by “[their] calm and absolute serenity at times when nerves should be overstrained and it seems impossible not to lose one’s composure.” No one could compare, however, to the “endlessly self-confident” Sverdlov, whose calm and serenity were “monumental and, at the same time, extraordinarily natural.” On that occasion, the “tension had reached its highest point” when “Sverdlov suddenly appeared out of nowhere. In his usual unhurried, measured gait, he approached the platform and, as if not noticing the venerable SR elder, pushed him aside, rang the bell, and, in an icily calm voice that showed no sign of tension, declared the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly now open.” According to Sverdlov’s assistant, Elizaveta Drabkina, a sixteen-year-old Bolshevik who was sitting in the balcony booing the appeasers, “he walked up the stairs with steady, calm steps, as if there were no thousand-strong rabid mob raging behind his back, ready to tear him apart.” And according to Sverdlov’s own account, as reported by another young assistant,

I came up behind the old man and snatched the bell from his trembling hand. Ringing the bell sharply, I called for silence and order in my lowest bass voice. Shvetsov was taken aback. He froze, with his hand suspended in midair and his mouth open in astonishment. His whole feeble body was like a question mark. Finally, he crawled down from the stage. Immediately, silence and order were restored. Many of those present were so dumbfounded that they were unable to speak. And I was able to read out the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People that had been proposed by our Bolshevik faction.⁵⁰

The Declaration proclaimed the Constituent Assembly illegitimate. In the exchange that followed, the main Bolshevik speech was delivered by Bukharin, who said that no revolutionary change was possible for as long as the government included fainthearted appeasers, who were “the faithful lackeys and guard dogs of our oppressors and the exploiters of the working masses.” The time was fulfilled, the real day had come, and this generation would certainly not pass away until all those things had happened:

We are, indeed, facing a truly great moment. The watershed that divides this assembly into two irreconcilable—let’s not kid ourselves and paste over the obvious with too many words—two irreconcilable camps—this watershed is about who is for socialism and who is against socialism. Citizen Chernov [the head of the SRs] has said that we need to manifest a will for socialism. But what kind of socialism does Citizen Chernov have in mind? The kind of socialism that will arrive in two hundred years, the kind that our grandchildren will be building—that kind? We, on the other hand, are talking about a living, active, creative socialism, the kind of socialism we want not only to talk about, but to implement … (applause on the left)….

We are saying, comrades, right now, when the revolutionary fire is about to set the whole world aflame—we are declaring, from this podium, a war to the death against the bourgeois parliamentary republic … (loud applause on the left, turning into an ovation).… We Communists, we the Workers’ Party, are striving to create, starting in Russia, a great Soviet workers’ republic. We are proclaiming the slogan put forth by Marx half a century ago: let the ruling classes and their toadies tremble before the Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing but their chains to lose, and a whole world to gain. Proletarians of all countries, unite! (Ovation on the left. Voices: Long live Soviet power!)⁵¹

Having declared civil war, the Bolsheviks left the hall. At 4:40 a.m., the remaining deputies were driven out of the building. When they came back the next day, the door was locked.⁵²

Nikolai Bukharin

Trotsky claims that, after the takeover, Lenin once asked him: “If the White Guards kill you and me, do you think Sverdlov and Bukharin will be able to manage?” At the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, with Lenin among the spectators and Trotsky in Brest-Litovsk, they seemed to manage quite well. Bukharin was one of the most eloquent prophets of the coming conflagration; Sverdlov was, in Lunacharsky’s account, a perfect “underground Bolshevik”: “he had a lot of inner fire, of course, but outwardly, that man was made entirely of ice.” Since November 1917, Sverdlov had been both the secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.⁵³

Two days after the Constituent Assembly was evicted, Sverdlov and Novgorodtseva moved into Tauride Palace. They shared a suite with Varlam Avanesov (Suren Martirosian), a former member of the Armenian Dashnak Party and now Sverdlov’s second in command at the Central Executive Committee, and Vladimir Volodarsky (Moisei Goldstein), a former member of the Jewish Bund and now commissar of print, propaganda, and agitation. They lived as a commune, the way they had in exile. “All the residents of the apartment,” wrote Novgorodtseva, “would get up at eight, gather around the table for breakfast, and leave by nine. The regime was very strict: no one could be late for breakfast, and no one was allowed to eat separately from the others. Breakfast did not last long: we would exchange a few jokes and run off, leaving any long conversations until later.” Volodarsky would get back around midnight, Sverdlov and Avanesov, at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., often accompanied by other people. Novgorodtseva, as the only woman, poured the tea. “Sitting around the table, we would discuss the events of the day, recount any amusing incidents, and exchange plans for the next day.” The guests would usually stay for the night.⁵⁴

While the house of failed parliamentarism was being downgraded and partially domesticated, the “temple of the Bolshevik spirit” was being transformed into a proper House of Revolution. In the words of Smolny’s commandant, “though not right away and not without difficulty, we finally managed to rid Smolny of outsiders: all those schooldames, housemistresses, boarding school girls, servants, and others.” Sverdlov’s Central Executive Committee, Lenin’s Council of Peoples’ Commissars, and the Bolsheviks’ Party Headquarters had all acquired their own rooms, secretaries, guards, and passes. There was a cafeteria (with mostly millet porridge on the menu), a basement jail, a commandant who answered directly to Podvoisky (now the commissar for military affairs), and about five hundred Latvian riflemen, who were thought to combine military discipline with a “proletarian spirit.” (Latvia, along with the Caucasus and the Jewish Pale of Settlement, was one of the most radicalized parts of the Russian Empire; Latvian military units were a mainstay of Bolshevik power.)⁵⁵

The transformation was never completed, however. In March 1918, as the German troops were approaching Petrograd, the new government moved its headquarters to Moscow (leaving behind Volodarsky, who was twenty-seven, single, and, according to Novgorodtseva, disconsolate). Most top offices and officials were housed in the Kremlin; those who did not fit were put up in several downtown hotels, renamed “Houses of Soviets” (the National became the First House of Soviets, the Metropol, the Second House of Soviets, and so on). Once again, “people whose presence was deemed unnecessary” had to be evicted (mostly monks and nuns, in the case of the Kremlin), a cafeteria set up, rooms assigned, icons and royal statues taken down, and Latvian riflemen armed and quartered. Once again, Sverdlov took care of all these things by appointing officials who were capable of appointing other officials. “He seemed to have learned absolutely everything about the tens of thousands of people who made up our party,” wrote Lunacharsky. “He kept in his memory a kind of biographical dictionary of Communists.” In the words of Elizaveta Drabkina, who worked for him in the Kremlin, “for each more or less important Party official, he could say something like: ‘This one is a good organizer; in 1905, he worked in Tula and after that, in Moscow; he spent time in the Orel central prison and was in exile in Yakutia. That one is not a great organizer but is an excellent public speaker.’”

Almost every more or less important party official owed his or her job to Sverdlov or one of his appointees—from Trotsky, the commissar of foreign affairs; to Bukharin, the chief editorial writer; to the sixteen-year-old Drabkina, who typed up the questionnaires he put together. Boris Ivanov, the “barely literate and politically underdeveloped baker” whom Sverdlov had tutored in Siberian exile, was made the head of the Main Directorate of the Flour Industry. Ivanov tried to refuse, saying that he was a baker, not a miller, and certainly not a manager, but Sverdlov allegedly responded: “You’re a baker, and I’m a pharmacist, and an inexperienced one, at that. And here I am, sent by the party to do a job I never dreamed of.” According to another memoirist, Sverdlov “viewed every matter, big and small, through the prism of particular people,” and viewed particular people as both fallible and perfectible. “‘The sun also has spots,’ said Sverdlov [in March 1919]. ‘People—even the best of them, the Bolsheviks—are made up of the old material, having grown up under the conditions of the old filth. Only the next generations will be free of the birthmarks of capitalism. What is important is to be able to pull a person up by playing on his strengths.’”⁵⁶

Three years earlier, in a letter to Kira Egon-Besser from Siberia, he had written that, under capitalism, there could be no ideal individuals. “But already today you can see in some people certain traits that will outlive this life of antagonisms. The future harmonious person, as a type, can be discerned in these traits. The study of the history of human development leads to the certainty in the coming kingdom of such a person.” Now that he was in charge of building that kingdom, he was following his own advice. All Bolsheviks assumed that present-day nonharmonious people could contribute to the destruction of the old economic “base,” and that the new economic base would ensure the creation of future harmonious people. They also assumed, unlike the doubters and appeasers, that this could be done in their lifetimes. Their socialism, as Bukharin had explained, was not the kind that their grandchildren would still be building. According to Drabkina, Sverdlov’s favorite stanza by his favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, was

A different song, a better song,

will get the subject straighter:

let’s make heaven on earth, my friends,

instead of waiting till later.⁵⁷

Meanwhile, they were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways: sharing hallways, kitchens, and bathrooms; leaving doors unlocked and children unattended; and talking late into the night over tea that women poured. Osinsky left his wife and son and moved in with Anna Shaternikova, the recipient of his “Blacksmith” letter. The Sverdlovs brought their son, Andrei, and daughter, Vera, back from Nizhny Novgorod and moved to a larger apartment in the Kremlin. Their most frequent guest was Sverdlov’s closest friend and Siberian housemate Filipp (Georges) Goloshchekin, the “regular Don Quixote.” Most of the other visitors were also former coconspirators and fellow prisoners, too. When they got together, they would reenact their days of innocence by singing revolutionary songs and wrestling on the carpet.⁵⁸

The only exception were various family members. Sverdlov’s father visited regularly, accompanied by his two sons from a second marriage and once, by Yakov’s eldest daughter, who lived with her mother in Ekaterinburg. Sverdlov’s sisters had both become doctors. Sofia was married to a former entrepreneur, Leonid Averbakh, and had two children, Leopold and Ida. Sarra had briefly worked with Novgorodtseva in the Central Committee secretariat. Sverdlov’s brother Veniamin had emigrated to America and become a banker but had recently returned at his brother’s invitation to become the commissar of transportation—and the husband of Yakov’s former lover, Vera Dilevskaia. The family, in Novgorodtseva’s words, was “large, merry, and close-knit.” Only Sverdlov’s older brother, Zinovy, had left the fold for good. As the godson of Maxim Gorky, he had converted to Christianity; adopted Gorky’s last name (Peshkov); studied at the Moscow Art Theater school; worked as a laborer in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand; interpreted for Gorky during his tour of the United States in 1906 (including the conversations he had with Mark Twain and John Dewey); lived with him on Capri (where he met Lenin, Bunin, and Lunacharsky, among others); joined the French Foreign Legion; lost his right arm during the fighting in France; returned to Russia in 1917 as a member of the French military mission; and left again after the Bolshevik Revolution, having failed in his efforts to keep Russia in the war. Zinovy and the rest of the Sverdlovs did not recognize each other’s existence.⁵⁹

The most important Sverdlovs of all were the children. The parents might have to sacrifice themselves to socialism; their grandchildren would be born too late to take part in the toil of creation. It was the children, “reared under the new, free social conditions,” who would walk into the kingdom of freedom and “discard the entire lumber of the state” (as Lenin, quoting Engels, had written in State and Revolution). According to Novgorodtseva, when eight-year-old Andrei heard about the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, he asked:

“Daddy, wasn’t Liebknecht a revolutionary and a Bolshevik?”

“Yes,” answered Yakov Mikhailovich, “a real revolutionary.”

“Was he killed by the bourgeoisie?”

“Yes, of course by the bourgeoisie.”

“But Daddy, you are also a revolutionary. Does that mean they might kill you, too?”

Yakov Mikhailovich looked the boy in the eye, gently ruffled his hair, and said very seriously and very calmly:

“Of course they might, son. But you shouldn’t be afraid of that. When I die, I will leave you an inheritance that is better than anything else in the world. I will leave you my name and my unblemished honor as a revolutionary.”⁶⁰

■ ■ ■

To be a revolutionary meant being both a herald and agent of the coming transfiguration. Voronsky, having been transferred from the Western Front to the Romanian Front before becoming a top Bolshevik propagandist in Odessa, prophesied the imminent consummation of the promise two weeks before the event. “The new and final wave of the revolution is coming. We are on the brink of a new revolutionary era, when, for the first time, the social element will pour into the revolution like a huge wave.” The aquatic imagery, tempered by repeated references to “the revolution,” accommodated both Christian and Marxist formulas (some of them identical). “The Russian Proletarian Revolution,” he wrote when the hour finally struck, “will triumph as a world revolution no matter what trials await her because, for capitalist society, ‘the time and all the prophecies are fulfilled.’” The apocalypse was the ultimate mixed metaphor:

The Russian workers’ and peasants’ government represents the first buds that have appeared as a result of the coming proletarian socialist spring. The Russian Revolution has many enemies. Her paths are hazardous and thorny…. The frosts may damage the first buds, but they will never stop the triumphant march of spring….

Shrivelling, decaying bourgeois society is entering the New Year with, in one of the world’s largest countries, a socialist workers’ government allied with the poorest peasantry, a government whose every word is like a thunderous tocsin spreading the news of a worldwide revolutionary fire.⁶¹

The enemies were preparing for one last battle and weaving their “international cobweb,” but “before an army ablaze with the enthusiasm of world liberation, the cannons would fall silent.” The Third Congress of Soviets, which had legitimated the Bolshevik takeover and the dissolution of the Assembly, was the focus of “that bubbling, seething, genuinely revolutionary ferment of existence, which was capable of igniting worlds and working miracles.”⁶²

Once in power, the Bolsheviks did what all millenarians do: waited for the inevitable while working to bring it about. The Marxist blueprint was no more specific than any other, but the basic goal of turning society into a sect was accepted by all true Bolsheviks (as Sverdlov understood the term). As usual, this included attacks on private property, trade, money, the family (especially inheritance, but ultimately all forms of kin loyalty), and “the rich” (determined according to an oft-revised table of social elements). The main principles were inherent in the Bolshevik version of Marxism; the disagreements over scale, timing, and sequence came down to the central question of any apocalyptic prophecy: they who have ears, will they hear?

As Voronsky wrote on the day the news of the uprising in Petrograd reached Odessa, “the achievement of the sacred goals of the revolution … is only possible with the cooperation and assistance of the masses themselves and their independent creativity.” The Revolution was not the embodied creativity of the masses—it was a transcendental event that required their cooperation and assistance. “In this terrible hour of judgment, when the fate of the country is being decided, let us all, as one man, take the solemn oath of loyalty to the new revolutionary government.” The government equaled the Revolution in the same way that Moses equaled the exodus. Loyalty to the prophet was the key to the fulfillment of the prophecy. Bolshevik eschatology was based on the assumption that the masses would stream toward the appropriate room in the appropriate building. In October 1917, the masses had acquitted themselves gloriously. The question was whether they would continue to do so.⁶³

The answer was not always or perhaps not at all. When, during the German offensive of spring 1918, the time came to create an army ablaze with the enthusiasm of world liberation, the cannons did not fall silent. And when the government needed to “organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service” (as Lenin had outlined in The State and Revolution), the sea turned back into a swamp. At the Einem Candy Factory, according to its early Soviet historian, “The attitude of the underdeveloped workers—and they were in the majority—toward the factory committee was so distrustful that some workers would come to the committee office during work hours to argue and curse over irrelevant things and insult the factory committee and its members…. During the most important and intense working hours, the members of the factory committee had to waste their time on explanations, arguments, and debates—all the more so because everyone felt that they had the right to abuse the committee, citing ‘equal rights,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ etc.”⁶⁴

Throughout 1918, the new state-sponsored factory committee struggled with the owner, the shareholders’ board, and the workers as raw materials continued to disappear, production to drop, and other factories and shops around the Swamp to close down. “Against the background of the difficult economic situation, the discontent of the underdeveloped workers with low consciousness kept growing while work discipline kept falling; some workers would only show up in the morning and then again in the evening in order to punch their time cards. At the same time, drunkenness and the theft of both raw materials and finished products became rampant.”⁶⁵

With the introduction of rationing, what little sugar remained in circulation ended up in the hands of private traders and confectioners, and most mechanized candy factories went out of business. The state’s war on private entrepreneurs drove them (and their sugar) farther underground or out of existence altogether; much of Einem’s equipment broke down; and most of the sober workers left for their native villages. On December 4, 1918, the candy industry was nationalized. Einem became “State Candy Factory No. 1,” run by the Main Candy Trust; the former owner, Vladimir Heuss, became a salaried “bourgeois specialist”; and the chairman of the board, Adolf Otto, left for Finland. Boris Ivanov, who had been appointed by Sverdlov to preside over the nationalization of the flour industry, was sent to the Astrakhan fisheries to work as an “agitator.”⁶⁶

All the debates and “oppositions” among the Bolsheviks were ultimately about whether the bubbling and seething ferment around them was a sea or a swamp. The most consistent optimists and imminentists among the Bolsheviks were the leaders of the Moscow distict party organization (and graduates of Moscow University): Bukharin, Osinsky, Osinsky’s brother-in-law, Vladimir Smirnov, and a few of their friends and followers. Having defined themselves as “Left Communists,” they lost to Lenin’s appeasers on the question of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, but won briefly on the factory-committee front. (Osinsky was the first chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, with Bukharin and Smirnov on the board.) In 1919, as the “independent creativity of the masses” and the Bolshevik pursuit of the “goals of the revolution” continued to diverge, Osinsky and Smirnov led the “Democratic-Centralist” opposition to the “one-man rule principle.” Since Communism was about spontaneously desiring the inevitable, trust in the independent creativity of the masses equaled confidence in the imminence of the millennium. As Osinsky wrote to Shaternikova on the day of the February Revolution, the shortest path to the “insatiable utopia” of natural morality lay through immersion in the “sacred fury” of the masses. At the time of the revolution, all Bolsheviks (officially renamed “Communists” in March 1918) believed that Communism would arrive very soon. The Left Communists believed that it would arrive even sooner.

On January 7, 1918, Lenin wrote that the triumph of the socialist revolution—beginning with a “period of ruin and chaos” and ending with a decisive victory over all forms of bourgeois resistance, was a matter of “several months.” In early spring 1919, he wrote that “the first generation of fully trained Communists without blemish or reproach” would take over in about twenty years (and that, in the meantime, bourgeois specialists would have to keep working, whether Osinsky liked it or not). And in fall 1919, Bukharin argued that it might take “two to three generations formed under completely new conditions” for Communism to become fully developed, the state to wither away, and “all law and all punishments to disappear completely.” There was, of course, room for argument about what constituted a complete victory of the socialist revolution, a Communist without blemish or reproach, or a fully developed Communist society, but, in the meantime, “very soon” had to keep moving, and the “Left” had to keep losing. Time, if nothing else, had to be appeased.⁶⁷

One very large section of “the masses”—the peasantry—made too close an identification with popular creativity doctrinally suspect at the outset and practically impossible as the revolution unfolded. Osinsky’s Left Communism collapsed over the peasants’ unwillingness to give up their produce (as class solidarity would have dictated). In agriculture, he wrote in 1920, “the most important aspect of socialist construction is massive state coercion.” Peasants were to be told when to sow, what to sow, and where to sow. They were to be forced to work wherever their work was needed. “The militarization of the economy and the implementation of universal labor conscription should begin in agriculture.” Any attempts to shirk compulsory labor were to be met with “repressive measures” ranging from penal detachments to revolutionary tribunals. As Bukharin explained, violence against the peasants made good theoretical sense insofar as it represented a “struggle between proletarian state planning, which embodies socialized labor, and the peasant commodity anarchy and unbridled profiteering, which stands for fragmented property and market irrationality.”⁶⁸

Violence generally made good theoretical sense. All the Bolsheviks expected it as part of the revolution, and no one could possibly object to it in principle. Marxism was an apocalyptic movement that looked forward to the times of woe on the eve of the millennium, and the Bolsheviks, of all Marxists, defined themselves in opposition to appeasement. As Marx had written, in a passage made famous by Bukharin, “We say to the workers: ‘You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves.’” And as Bukharin wrote two and a half years into the age of civil wars and national struggles, “only such a class as the proletariat, the Promethean class, will be able to bear the terrible torments of the transition period in order, at the end, to light the torch of Communist society.” Lenin had called for civil war long before October; warned of the “ruin and chaos associated with civil war” right after October; and, in June 1918, urged the workers to launch “that special war that has always accompanied not only great revolutions but every more or less significant revolution in history, a war that is uniquely legitimate and just, a holy war from the point of view of the interests of the toiling, oppressed, and exploited masses.” In a July 1918 article titled “Prophetic Words,” he cited Engels’s prediction of a “world war of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.”⁶⁹

The Marxist version of the “iron scepter” rule of the saints was known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” According to Lenin, Marx’s formula was a summary of the “historic experience of all revolutions” in the matter of a “complete suppression of all the exploiters as well as all the agents of corruption.” Every Bolshevik knew that the road to Communism must pass through dictatorship, “but,” wrote Lenin in April 1918, “dictatorship is a big word, and big words should not be thrown about carelessly. Dictatorship means an iron rule, a rule that is revolutionarily bold, swift and ruthless in suppressing both exploiters and hooligans. But our rule is excessively mild, frequently resembling jelly more than iron.”⁷⁰

The opposition of hard iron to something resembling jelly was central to Bolshevism. The swamp could take many forms and seep into many spaces. The new rulers had to overcome “all manner of weakness, hesitation, and sentimentality” within themselves in order to win the war of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Arosev’s friend Skriabin had become “Molotov” (from “hammer”), Sverdlov’s housemate Dzhugashvili had become “Stalin” (from “steel”), and Sverdlov himself, in Lunacharsky’s words, “had found—probably instinctively—a costume that fit his appearance and inner character: he started going around clad from head to foot in leather.” According to Trotsky, “from him, as the central organizing force, that costume, so befitting the temper of the age, spread very widely. The comrades who knew Sverdlov in the underground remember him differently, but in my memory, the figure of Sverdlov will always be covered in black armor.”⁷¹

One comrade who remembered Sverdlov differently was Kira Egon-Besser, who wrote of his “mild humor,” his “faith in people,” and their embrace when he came back from exile. A year had passed since then.

Once, in the winter, on a gloomy, foggy St. Petersburg day, Yakov Mikhailovich came over to say goodbye before moving to Moscow. My mother and I were at home alone. Yakov Mikhailovich looked tired and thin. I noticed a change in his face. Later, when I looked at the last photographs of him (all photographs distorted his inimitable face, often lit up by a lovely smile), I understood: it was his lips that had changed. They had tightened somehow, and his expression had become stern and preoccupied. The leather jacket he was wearing imparted an unwonted hardness to his appearance. That was our last meeting.⁷²

Sverdlov in 1918

One of Sverdlov’s housemates from those days, Varlam Avanesov, had accompanied Sverdlov to Moscow and become a top official of the secret police (among other things). The other, the young Vladimir Volodarsky, had become, according to Lunacharsky, the most hated Bolshevik in Petrograd—not because he was the new regime’s chief censor but because he was ruthless. “He was suffused not only with the thunder of October, but also with the thunderous salvoes of the red terror that followed. We should not try to hide this fact: Volodarsky was a terrorist. He was absolutely convinced that if we hesitated to strike our steel blows to the head of the counterrevolutionary hydra, it would devour not only us but the hopes of the world awakened by October. He exulted in struggle and was ready to face any danger, but he was also ruthless. He had something of Marat in him.”⁷³

Volodarsky was assassinated on June 20, 1918. Sverdlov had arrived in Moscow the previous March, soon after saying goodbye to Kira. On one of his first evenings in the new capital, he appeared in the Moscow Soviet, which still thought of itself as the city’s House of Revolution.

The meeting of the presidium had ended, many of the members had left, and the Soviet had settled into its usual nighttime routine—with telephones ringing, typewriters clattering, executive committee members on duty sitting at their desks, and soldiers from the guard scurrying to and fro.

Suddenly, a man clad from head to foot in a kind of black leather shell arrived on the scene. There was something efficient and vigorous in Sverdlov’s trim figure. Small and slender, he looked very young. His gestures and movements were full of energy and vitality, and he had an impressive bass voice.

It was not a very friendly meeting, however. With barely a hello, Yakov Mikhailovich began scolding everyone he found in the Soviet for not taking care of the new arrivals and for their poor choice of buildings and insufficient preparation. The comrades Sverdlov was dressing down were people he had known in exile and had continued to be friends with after October, but that was the kind of person Sverdlov was: business always came first.⁷⁴

“That man,” wrote Lunacharsky, “was like a diamond that had to be exceptionally hard because it was the pivot around which an intricate mechanism constantly rotated.” That mechanism was the dictatorship of the proletariat, and dictatorship meant “iron rule, a rule that is revolutionarily bold, swift, and ruthless in suppressing both exploiters and hooligans.” The exploiters and hooligans, by contrast, were always soft: the fat moneybags, the shuffling old men, the wavering appeasers, and the intellectuals who could not tell ends from beginnings. As Lenin wrote two months after the October takeover, “this sloppiness, carelessness, messiness, untidiness, fidgetiness, the tendency to substitute discussion for action and talk for work, and the tendency to take on everything and accomplish nothing are characteristics of ‘the educated,’” most of whom are the “intelligentsia lackeys of yesterday’s slaveowners.” All these people—non-people, anti-people, enemies of the people—were creatures from under the “murky, dead film” of Voronsky’s swamp. Lenin was at his most biblical and “Barebonian” when he talked about “those dregs of humanity, those hopelessly rotten and dead limbs, that contagion, that plague, those ulcers that socialism has inherited from capitalism.” The revolution’s “single common goal” was “to purge the Russian land of all harmful insects: fleas—thieves, bedbugs—the rich, and so on and so forth.”⁷⁵

The first step was to identify the two armies of Armageddon. Speaking at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee on May 20, 1918, Sverdlov said:

When it comes to the cities, we can say that the Soviet revolutionary rule is strong enough to withstand the various attacks by the bourgeoisie. With regard to the villages, we cannot, by any means, say the same thing. That is why we should seriously consider the question of social differentiation in the village—the question of the creation of two opposing hostile forces; the objective of setting the poorest strata of the peasantry against the kulak elements. Only if we succeed in splitting the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, only if we succeed in inciting the same civil war that was recently being waged in the cities, …—only then will we be able to say that we’ve done for the village what we’ve been able to do for the cities.⁷⁶

The next step was to put special seals on their foreheads. In The Economics of the Transition Period, Bukharin singled out nine main groups to be subjected to “concentrated violence”:

1) the parasitic strata (former landowners, rentiers of all kinds, bourgeois entrepreneurs not directly involved in production; trade capitalists, traders, brokers, bankers);

2) the unproductive administrative aristocracy recruited from the same strata (the top bureaucrats of the capitalist state, generals, archbishops, etc.);

3) the bourgeois entrepreneurs as the organizers and directors (managers of trusts and syndicats, the “operators” of the industrial world, the top engineers, the inventors directly connected to the capitalist world);

4) the skilled bureaucrats—civilian, military, and clerical;

5) the technical intelligentsia and intelligentsia in general (engineers, technicians, agronomists, veterinarians, doctors, professors, lawyers, journalists, most teachers, etc.);

6) the officers;

7) the well-off peasantry;

8) the middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie;

9) the clergy, even the unskilled kind.⁷⁷

“Concentrated violence” included arrests, searches, killings, censorship, forced labor, suppression of strikes, takeover of property, confiscation of produce, and confinement in concentration camps. The targets were identifiable by their marks of social status and defined according to a flexible class taxonomy ultimately derived from the kings who had committed adultery with the Whore of Babylon and the merchants who had grown rich from her excessive luxuries.⁷⁸

One of the earliest mass executions carried out by the Bolsheviks was that of the tsar, his wife, son, four daughters, doctor, cook, maid, and valet on July 17 in a basement in Ekaterinburg. The killings were ordered by Sverdlov, presumably in consultation with Lenin, and supervised in Ekaterinburg by Goloshchekin, who had visited Moscow shortly before (staying with the Sverdlovs, as usual). According to the commander of the firing squad, Mikhail Yurovsky,

The shooting lasted for a long time, and although I had hoped that the wooden wall would prevent ricocheting, the bullets kept bouncing off of it. For a long time I was unable to stop the shooting, which had become disorderly. But when I finally managed to stop it, I saw that many of them were still alive. For example, Doctor Botkin lay on his side, leaning on his right elbow, as if he were resting. I finished him off with a shot from my revolver. Aleksei, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Olga were still alive, too. Demidova was also alive. Comrade Ermakov tried to finish them off with his bayonet, but was not able to. Only later did the reason become clear (the daughters were wearing diamond breast plates, sort of like brassieres). I had to shoot them one by one.⁷⁹

According to another executioner, “The last to fall was [Demidova], who tried to defend herself with a little pillow she had in her hands. The former heir continued to show signs of life for a very long time, even though he had been shot many times. The youngest daughter of the former tsar fell down on her back and pretended to be dead. When Comrade Ermakov noticed this, he killed her with a shot to the chest. He stood on her arms and shot her in the chest.”⁸⁰

A third member of the firing squad had run up to the attic to look out of the window. “Having come down from the attic to the place of execution, I told them that the shots and the howling of the dogs could be heard all over the city; that lights had gone on in the Mining Institute and in the house next to it; and that the shooting had to stop and the dogs, killed. After that, the shooting stopped, and three of the dogs were hanged, but the fourth, Jack, remained quiet, so he was not touched.” Goloshchekin waited outside. According to another executioner, when the body of the tsar was brought out on a blanket, he leaned over to take a look. Then “a Red Army soldier brought out Anastasia’s lapdog on his bayonet … and threw the dog’s corpse next to the tsar’s. ‘Dogs deserve a dog’s death,’ said Goloshchekin contemptuously.”⁸¹

The White Army investigators who arrived on the scene several days later inspected the blood-stained wallpaper in the basement and found the inscription:

Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht

Von seinen Knechten umgebracht.

[“Belsatzar” was, that night,

Killed by his own knights.]

The lines come from Heinrich Heine’s poem “Belsazar” (Belsazar ward aber in selbiger nacht / Von seinen Knechten umgebracht). The person who left the inscription dropped the aber (“but”), presumably so the lines could stand on their own, and added the “t” in “Belsazar,” perhaps to draw attention to the pun or, possibly, because German was not his native language. It is also possible that Goloshchekin, who was probably better read than the other participants, shared his friend’s love of Heine. The poem is based on the biblical story of the Babylonian king Belshazzar (Balthazar), who had offended God by drinking wine from gold and silver goblets taken from the temple in Jerusalem. A disembodied human hand put an end to the feast by writing an inscription (the original “writing on the wall”) prophesying the end of the king and his realm. Belshazzar was slain that night.⁸²

In his diary, Trotsky claims to have heard about the execution after the fall of Ekaterinburg:

In a conversation with Sverdlov, I asked in passing:

“So what about the tsar?”

“It’s over,” he said. “He’s been shot.”

“And the family?”

“The family, too.”

“All of them?” I asked, probably with a note of surprise.

“All of them!” answered Sverdlov. “What of it?”⁸³

Mikhail Koltsov’s essay on the fate of the tsar begins with a reference to his essay on the fall of tsarism: “The spring flood is huge. It threatens to inundate an entire Moscow suburb. The rivers will rise mightily and carry the tired winter dirt toward the seas. Well-rested after many winters, having finally slept its fill, Russia is languidly stretching its limbs…. It was during just such a mighty and tempestuous spring that the snow melted one day in Petrograd and dissolved, without a trace, the ‘most autocratic tsars of all Russia.’” Although, as Koltsov goes on to argue, there had been nothing left to dissolve. The vanquished evil had been everywhere and nowhere. “There was a regime. And besides the regime? Nothing. Nothing at all. Zero. Just like in Gogol’s ‘The Nose’: ‘a smooth, empty place.’ It was not for nothing that the late historian M. N. Pokrovsky used to write the name ‘Romanov’ in quotation marks…. Quotation marks. Nothing in the quotation marks. An empty quote. Like a winter coat without a person inside.”

The essay goes on to describe the late tsar as both winter dirt and nothing at all, both a cruel tyrant and a smooth, empty place. The conclusion, too, combines a victor’s glee with an ironist’s shrug:

The Justice Minister of the Kolchak government, S. Starynkevich, sent a telegram to the allied council in Paris about the results of the investigation into the death of Nicholas and the location of his remains:

“Eighteen versts from Ekaterinburg, some peasants uncovered a pile of ashes, which contained: a suspender buckle, four corset frames, and a finger, with regards to which doctors mentioned that the nail was very well groomed, and that it belonged to the hand of a well-bred person.”

That’s it. All that’s left. Of Nicholas. Of the Romanovs. Of the symbol that crowned a three-hundred-year-old order of unbearable oppression in a great country.

In this early, powerful, and ardent spring, who in Russia will remember the pile of ashes outside Ekaterinburg? Who will give another thought to Nicholas?

No one. Who would they remember? Someone who was not even there?⁸⁴

In fact, 42 gold objects, 107 silver objects, 34 objects made of fur, and 65 other items classified as valuables were delivered to the Kremlin by Yurovsky, the commander of the execution squad. Some other property of the family was taken out of Ekaterinburg by train, in two special cars. When the Whites arrived, they found 88 items, including Alexei’s diary and cross, in the apartment of one of the guards. The guard was discovered when someone recognized his dog as Alexei’s spaniel Joy (not Jack), the dog that had not barked. Around 140 more items were found in other private apartments. Among the family things that no one had taken were sixty icons and about fifty books, mostly Christian devotional tracts. The finger found by the investigators was judged to have belonged to a middle-aged woman, and to have been cut off with a sharp blade.⁸⁵