A People's Tragedy (170 page)

* * * 'Russia has changed completely in the past few years,' wrote Prince Lvov to Bakhmetev in November 1923.

It has become a completely new Russia. The people and the power are, as usual, two different things. But Russia more than ever before belongs to the people ... To be certain, the government is hostile to the people and their national feelings, standing as it does for international goals, it deceives the people and turns them into slaves, but nonetheless it still receives the support of this oppressed and enslaved people. They would still defend

the regime if it was attacked by an intervention or by an organization within Russia fighting under the old slogans or in the name of a restoration ... The people supports Soviet power. That does not mean they are happy with it. But at the same time as they feel their oppression they also see that their own type of people are entering into the apparatus, and this makes them feel that the regime is 'their own'.

The Prince's recognition of the Soviet regime was an extraordinary volte-face for a man who only five years earlier had confidently told the US President that the Russian people would rally to the Whites. His mind had been changed by the Whites' defeat — a defeat which, as he now recognized, had been brought about 'by the choice of the people' — and by the introduction of the NEP, which in his
view
had satisfied the main demands of his beloved peasants. 'The land question', Lvov wrote to Bakhmetev, 'has still not been resolved, it will still give rise to bloody conflicts, but in the mind of the ordinary peasant it has been decided once and for all — the land now belongs to him.'

For the exiled Prince, living now in Paris, the revolution had come full circle. In 1923

he received a letter from Popovka in Russia telling him that the peasants had divided up the land of the Lvov estate. The same peasants who forty years before had helped the young Prince and his brothers to restore its run-down farm economy had now taken possession of the estate themselves. It would surely not be over-generous to assume that Lvov was not unpleased by this news. All of his long life in public service had been dedicated to the peasantry. Even now, in his final years, he commuted every day from his small apartment in Boulogne-sur-Seine into Paris, where he worked for a Russian aid committee that collected money for the victims of the famine and helped place Russian refugees. It was a sort of Zemgor in Paris.

One Friday night in March 1925 Lvov returned from Paris feeling ill. He went to bed —

and died of a heart attack in his sleep. The funeral was held at the Russian Orthodox church in rue Daru in Paris. The whole emigre community was in attendance, and the press was full of tributes to this 'sincere servant of the people'.4

In a more settled and peaceful country a man of Prince Lvov's background and talents might have expected to serve for many years as a minister for agriculture or, say, education. In England he would have served in the Liberal government of Gladstone or Lloyd George, and today there would no doubt be a statue to him in one of London's many parks and squares. But in the Russia of Lvov's own lifetime figures like him were destined not to last in the revolutionary storm; and today his statue does not stand in any Russian city.

Great Russian nationalism did for Brusilov what the NEP had done for Prince Lvov: it reconciled him, despite his hostility to Communism, with

the Bolshevik regime. For Brusilov the collapse of the Russian Empire rather than the downfall of the monarchy had been the real tragedy of 1917; and now that the Empire had been reconstructed, with the loss of only Poland, the Baltic lands and Finland, he could rest assured that the Russian national spirit would also be restored. 'Bolshevism will one day pass away,' the General liked to prophesy, 'and all that will be left will be the Russian people and those who remained in Russia to direct the people on the correct path.' This was the basis of his National Bolshevism — that Russian patriots like him could redirect the revolution towards national ends if sufficient numbers of them joined the Red regime to turn it White from the inside.

After the campaigns against the Poles and Wrangel, the old General was put to work in the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, where he was responsible for increasing the stock of pedigree horses for the cavalry. It was a thankless task — most of the Red so-called 'military experts' seemed to think that one could mount the cavalry on peasant cart-horses — and he was relieved to be soon transferred to the Chief Inspectorate of Cavalry, where his expertise from the elite tsarist Guards was much better employed.

During the latter half of 1921 Brusilov's health began to decline sharply: his wounded leg had developed gout; he was kept awake at night with chronic bronchitis; and his modest salary was not enough to keep his small flat warm. Over the next three years he constantly petitioned to be allowed to retire — he turned seventy in 1923 — but his Soviet masters would not grant him this. It was only in 1924, when Budenny was eager to purge the cavalry of all its 'White bones', that he was finally released.

To recuperate from his growing list of ailments Brusilov and his wife Nadezhda spent the following spring in the Czech town of Karlsbad, where there was a famous sanatorium. The war hero of 1916 was welcomed by the Czechs; President Masaryk, an old friend, laid on a special dinner for him in Prague Castle and (perhaps more importantly) gave him an allowance which enabled him to overcome the shock of how expensive things had become in post-war Europe. Brusilov found it 'extremely pleasant to be once again among civilized Europeans' after the long years of civil war in Russia which had done so much to sour personal relations. Indeed the only hostility he met was from the Russian emigre community, which would not forgive him for having joined the Reds. Perhaps it was this that finally convinced him to return to Russia, despite Masaryk's presidential promise that the Czechs would adopt him as their own. The emigres, as Brusilov saw it, were the real traitors for they had placed their own class interests above those of Russia, and, even if they were to accept him, he could not bring himself to live among them. Later that summer he and his wife returned to Moscow. As Nadezhda later explained, 'he wanted to be buried in Russian soil'.5

Brusilov died quietly in his sleep on 17 March 1926. The funeral was a grand affair, which was only fitting for a national war hero. Red Army delegations lined the Moscow streets, military bands played the funeral march, and church choirs sang as his coffin was carried on the shoulders of six soldiers to the Novodechie Monastery, where he was laid to rest in the cemetery. Hundreds of veterans from the First World War came to Moscow for the funeral from as far afield as Nizhnyi Novgorod and Tver, and the main church was too small to contain all the mourners. The three Red Army chiefs, Voroshilov, Egorov and Budenny, each read an address in praise of Brusilov, although they refused to bow before the priests or to take part in the prayers. It was a strange mixture of the old and the new — Soviet emblems mixed with icons and crosses — as perhaps befits this strangely mixed-up man. Nadezhda thought that the whole thing was symbolic: 'the new Russia was burying the old'.6

Dmitry Os'kin was a son of the new Russia. He joined Brusilov's army in the First World War as an ordinary private; and yet by the time of the General's death this peasant lad was a senior figure in the Soviet military establishment. After his command of the Second Labour Army during 1920 Os'kin was given command of the Soviet Republic's Reserve Army, an important post which placed him in charge of nearly half a million men. He was held up by the regime as a shining example of a Red Commander whom it had always promised to promote from the ranks of the peasants and workers joining the Red Army in the civil war. Here was a soldier who had carried in his knapsack the baton of a general, if not of a field-marshal, and it was on the basis of this self-image as a likely peasant lad that he wrote his trilogy of military memoirs in the 1920s. Os'kin's last years are obscure. During the later 1920s he became a military bureaucrat in Moscow. He died in 1934, possibly a victim of Stalin's terror, at the tender age of forty-two.

That was certainly Kanatchikov's fate. Like Os'kin, he was a son of the new Russia whose service to the party in the civil war brought him steady promotion through the ranks. It was only fitting that this peasant-son-cum-worker whose conversion to the cause had been so bound up with his own political education should concentrate his party career in that field. In 1921, at the age of forty-two, he was appointed to the rectorship of the Communist University in Petrograd, a prestigious post which he held for the next three years. In 1924 he became the head of the Central Committee's Press Bureau; and in the next year he took over its Department of Historical Research. Not bad for a man with only four years' schooling. Kanatchikov became one of the party's leading publicists in its campaign against the Trotskyites: his
History of a Deviation
(1924) became the standard anti-Trotsky diatribe; and throughout the 1920s he produced a long line of similar hack works. But this did not save him from Stalin's firing squads in his war against the Old Bolsheviks. In 1926

Kanatchikov sided with the 'left opposition' of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who criticized the policies of Stalin and Bukharin on the grounds (and this was significant for Kanatchikov) that they were too soft on the peasantry. For this 'deviation' Kanatchikov was punished with a posting in Prague as a TASS correspondent. Two years later he was allowed to return to Russia after he had written a grovelling letter to the Central Committee in which he confessed his 'political mistakes'. His ardent support for collectivization — the logical conclusion of his rejection of the old peasant Russia —

earned him a temporary 'rehabilitation'. In 1929 he was made the editor of the newly founded
Literary Newspaper,
the weekly publication of the Soviet Writers' Union.

During the next few years he wrote a string of party pamphlets in support of Stalin, for which he was rewarded with a larger flat, all the usual party perks and a steady increase in his salary. But in Stalin's Russia every party member was haunted by his past and when, from the end of 1935, Stalin moved to wipe out the 'Zinovievites', Kanatchikovs star fell once again. He was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to eight years' hard labour in the Gulag. Like so many Bolshevik victims of the Great Terror, he pleaded with Stalin to intervene and grant him mercy without realizing that it was Stalin himself who had ordered his arrest. Kanatchikov had served out half his sentence by the time he died in 1940.7

Exile for Gorky was a form of torture. While he could not bear to live in Soviet Russia, nor could he bear to live abroad. For several years he wavered in this schizophrenic state, homesick for Russia yet too sick of it to return home. From Berlin, Gorky wandered restlessly through the spa towns of Germany and Czechoslovakia before settling in the Italian resort of Sorrento. 'No, I cannot go to Russia,' he wrote to Rolland in 1924. 'I feel like a person without a homeland. In Russia I would be the enemy of everything and everyone, it would be like banging my head against a brick wall.'

It was not so much the nature of the Soviet regime as its hostile policy towards the arts and its friendly policies towards the peasantry which kept him in exile during the NEP

years. Although he had always opposed the rise of the Bolshevik dictatorship, he had also found a means of justifying it as a necessary antidote to the instinctive anarchism of the peasantry. Gorky was nothing if not contradictory. His rationalization of the Soviet regime became even more marked after Lenin's death, which filled him with remorse.

Gorky had both loved and hated Lenin, and their relationship could not now be resolved. 'Yes, my dear friend,' Gorky wrote to Rolland, 'Lenin's death has been a very heavy blow for me. I loved him. I loved him with wrath.' Nina Berberova, who knew Gorky well during his years in Berlin and Marienbad, later wrote that Lenin's death had made him 'very tearful' and that he did not stop crying throughout the next weeks as he wrote his eulogistic
Memories
of him. 'Gorky was overwhelmed with repentance,'

Berberova recalled. He 'reassessed his attitude to the October Revolution and the early years of Bolshevism, to the role of Lenin, to his being right and Gorky being wrong... Quite sincerely he believed that Lenin's death had left him orphaned with the whole of Russia.' Gorky's
Memories
of Lenin were the first step towards his reconciliation with Lenin's successors in the Kremlin. In 1926, on Dzerzhinsky's death, he even wrote in praise of the Cheka leader ('a gifted man with a sensitive heart and a strong sense of justice'). And yet he was still not ready to return to Russia. No doubt he was frightened about what he might find there. For the Russia in his mind was always much rosier than the Russia of reality, and even Gorky, despite his ability to deceive himself, must have been aware of this. Certainly, his life-long attachment to the principles of individual liberty and human dignity was still strong enough to hold him back, especially as a creative artist whose own ability to continue to write had become increasingly dependent on the freedoms and the comforts he could enjoy only in the West. His work was flourishing in Europe, with
The Artamonov
Business,
followed by the first two volumes of
The Life of Klim Samgin,
his two great didactic novels, written between 1925 and 1928. Meanwhile, in Russia the Soviet regime had drawn up an index of 'counter-revolutionary' books — which included Plato, Kant, Ruskin, Nietzsche and Tolstoy — to be withdrawn from all public libraries.

Gorky was outraged by this censorship and began to write a letter to the government renouncing his Soviet citizenship. But then in anger he tore the letter up: however much he might despise the Soviet regime's 'spiritual vampirism', he could not bring himself to cut his links with it.8

In the end, as with Brusilov, it was good old-fashioned Russian nationalism that persuaded Gorky to return home. For one thing, he could not abide the Russian emigres