Everything Flows (22 page)

Russian revolutionary thinkers failed to appreciate the importance of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The emancipation of the serfs—as we can see from the history of the following century—was more truly revolutionary than the October Revolution. The emancipation of the serfs shook Russia’s thousand-year-old foundation, a foundation that neither Peter the Great nor Lenin had so much as touched: the dependence of the country’s evolution on the growth of slavery.

After the emancipation of the serfs, the revolutionary leaders, the students, and the intelligentsia fought violently, passionately, and with self-abnegation for a human dignity that Russia had never known, for progress without slavery. This new law was something entirely alien to Russian tradition, and no one knew what would become of Russia if she were to renounce the thousand-year link between her evolution and slavery. No one knew what would become of the Russian character.

In February 1917, the path of freedom lay open for Russia. Russia chose Lenin.

The destruction of Russian life carried out by Lenin was on a vast scale. Lenin destroyed the way of life of the landowners. Lenin destroyed merchants and factory owners.

Nevertheless, Lenin was fated by history. However bizarre this may sound, he was fated by Russian history to preserve Russia’s old curse: this link between progress and non-freedom.

The only true revolutionaries are those who seek to destroy the very foundation of the old Russia: her slave soul.

And so it was that Lenin’s obsession with revolution, his fanatical faith in the truth of Marxism and absolute intolerance of anyone who disagreed with him, all led him to further hugely the development of the Russia he hated with all his fanatical soul.

It is, indeed, tragic that a man who so sincerely loved Tolstoy and Beethoven should have furthered a new enslavement of the peasants and workers, that he should have played a central role in reducing to the status of lackeys—State lackeys—such outstanding figures of Russian culture as the writer Aleksey Tolstoy, the physical chemist Nikolay Semyonov, and the composer Dmitry Shostakovich.

The debate begun by the supporters of Russian freedom was finally resolved. Once again, Russian slavery proved invincible.

Lenin’s victory became his defeat.

But Lenin’s tragedy was not only a Russian tragedy. It became a tragedy for the whole world.

Did Lenin ever imagine the true consequences of his revolution? Did he ever imagine that it would not simply be a matter of Russia now leading the way—rather than, as had been predicted, following in the path of a socialist Europe? Did he ever imagine that what his revolution would liberate was Russian slavery itself —that his revolution would enable Russian slavery to spread beyond the confines of Russia, to become a torch lighting a new path for humanity?

Russia was no longer drinking in the spirit of freedom from the West. Instead the West was gazing in fascination at this Russian spectacle—of modernization through non-freedom.

The world saw the bewitching simplicity of this path. The world saw the strength of this People’s State built upon non-freedom.

The words of Russia’s prophets seemed to have been fulfilled.

But they were fulfilled in the strangest and most terrible of ways.

Lenin’s synthesis of non-freedom and socialism stupefied the world more than the discovery of nuclear energy.

The European apostles of national revolutions saw the flame coming from the East. First the Italians and then the Germans began to develop the concept of national socialism in their own ways.

And the flame kept spreading. It was taken up by Asia and Africa.

Nations and States could develop in the name of power! They could develop in contempt of freedom!

This was not nourishment for the healthy. It was a narcotic for failures, for the sick and the weak, for the backward and beaten.

Through the will, passion, and genius of Lenin, Russia’s thousand-year-old law of development became a worldwide law.

So history decreed.

Lenin’s intolerance, his forcefulness, his intransigence in the face of disagreement, his contempt for freedom, the fanaticism of his faith, the cruelty he showed toward his enemies—all the qualities that brought victory to his cause were born and forged in the thousand-year-old depths of Russian slavery. That is why his victory served the cause of non-freedom. And in the meantime other aspects of Lenin did not cease to exist; the traits that have charmed millions, the traits of a kind, modest Russian working intellectual continued to exist—but they existed immaterially, without significance.

So. Is the Russian soul still as enigmatic as ever? No, there is no enigma.

Was there ever an enigma? What enigma can there be in slavery?

But is this really a specifically and uniquely Russian law of development? Can it truly be the lot of the Russian soul, and of the Russian soul alone, to evolve not with the growth of freedom but with the growth of slavery? Can this truly be the fate of the Russian soul?

No, no, of course not.

This law is determined by the parameters—and there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of such parameters—within which Russian history has unfolded.

“Soul” is neither here nor there; it simply does not come into it. If the French or the Germans, the Italians or the English, had been placed a thousand years ago within the same parameters of forest, steppe, bog, and plain, in the force field between Europe and Asia, amid Russia’s tragic vastness, then the pattern of their history would have been no different from that of Russian history. Anyway, it is not only the Russians who have known this path. There are many people on every continent of this Earth who have come to know the bitterness of the Russian path—some of them only vaguely and from a distance, some of them closely and clearly, suffering bitterness of their own.

It is time for the students and diviners of Russia to understand that the mystique of the Russian soul is simply the result of a thousand years of slavery.

And in admiration of the Byzantine purity and Christian meekness of the Russian soul there lies an involuntary recognition of the inviolability of Russian slavery. The sources of this Christian meekness and Byzantine ascetic purity are the same as the sources of Lenin’s passion, intolerance, and fanatical faith—they lie in the thousand years of Russian serfdom, Russian nonfreedom.

And this is why the Russian prophets were so tragically mistaken. Where, where can we find this “Russian soul, all-human and all-unifying”—that Dostoevsky told us would “speak the final word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly concord of all tribes according to the law of the Gospel of Christ”?

Where indeed, O Lord, is this all-human and all-unifying soul to be found? Did the prophets of Russia ever imagine that their prophecies about the coming universal triumph of the Russian soul would find their fulfillment in the unified grating and grinding of the barbed wire stretched around Auschwitz and the labor camps of Siberia?

Lenin was in many ways opposed to the great prophets of Russia. He is infinitely far from their ideals of meekness, of Christian, Byzantine purity and the laws of the Gospel. But he is also strangely and surprisingly close to these prophets. While going his own very different way, he made no effort to save Russia from her thousand-year-old quagmire of non-freedom. Like them, he recognized Russian slavery as something unshakable. Like them, he was born of our non-freedom.

The Russian slave soul lives both in Russian faith and in Russian lack of faith, both in Russian meek love of humanity and in the Russian propensity to reckless violence. It lives in Russian miserliness and philistinism, in Russian obedient industriousness, in Russian ascetic purity, in the Russian capacity for fraud on a supreme scale, in the redoubtable braveness of Russian warriors, in the Russian lack of any sense of human dignity, in the frenzy of Russian sectarians, and in the desperate ferocity with which Russian rebels rebel. The Russian slave soul is manifest in Lenin’s revolution, in Lenin’s passionate embrace of Western revolutionary teachings, in Lenin’s fanaticism, in Lenin’s violence, and in the victories of the Leninist State.

Wherever slavery exists in the world, it gives birth to souls of the same kind.

What hope is there for Russia if even her great prophets were unable to distinguish freedom from slavery?

What hope is there for Russia if her geniuses see submissive slavery as the expression of the meek, bright beauty of her soul?

What hope is there for Russia if Lenin, the man who did most to transform her, did not destroy but only strengthened the tie between Russian progress and Russian non-freedom?

When will we see the day of a free, human, Russian soul? When will this day dawn?

Or will it never dawn?

Lenin died
. But Leninism did not die. Lenin’s party did not let go of the power that Lenin had won. Lenin’s comrades, helpers, and disciples continued his work.

The men he left behind
Must bind with concrete dikes
Lands overwhelmed by flood.
No grief can make them pause;
They don’t cry, “Lenin’s died.”
They execute his laws;
And still more sternly carry on his cause.

Lenin bequeathed Russia many things: the dictatorship of the Party, the Red Army, the militia, the Cheka, the campaign against illiteracy, the special educational faculties for the workers. He also left twenty-eight volumes of his Collected Works...Who then among Lenin’s comrades would prove best able to absorb the innermost essence of Leninism and express it through his heart and mind, through his whole way of being? Who would take up Lenin’s banner and carry it further? Who would finish building the vast State whose foundations Lenin had laid? Who would lead his
“party of a new type
” from victory to victory? Who would consolidate the new order?

Would it be the brilliant, impetuous, magnificent Trotsky? The charming Bukharin, with his talent for theory and generalization? The ox-eyed Rykov, the practical-minded statesman who most closely identified with the true interests of the people, of the workers and peasants? The well-educated, self-confident Kamenev, with his sophistication, with his grasp of affairs of state, with his ability to come out victorious from Party conventions and their complex battles? Would it be Zinoviev, the internationally respected polemicist, with his understanding of the international workers’ movement?

The character, the spirit of each of these men was in harmony with one facet or another of Lenin’s character. But not with the facets that proved fundamental, not with the facets that determined the essence of the new world that was coming into being.

Fate willed it that all the aspects of Lenin’s character expressed in the character of Trotsky, who was so nearly a genius—or in the characters of Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev, or Zinoviev—turned out to be seditious. They led these men to the scaffold, to their death.

These character traits, far from expressing Lenin’s essence, were signs of his weakness, his eccentricity, his seditiousness, his capacity for self-delusion. The essence of the new lay elsewhere.

In the Lenin who loved the
Appassionata
and
War and Peace
, there was, after all, something of Lunacharsky. But it was not for poor old Lunacharsky to “execute his laws” and “sternly carry on his cause.” Nor did history choose Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev, or Zinoviev to express what was innermost and most essential in Lenin.

Stalin’s hatred for the Old Bolsheviks who opposed him was also a hatred for those aspects of Lenin’s character that contradicted what was most essential in Lenin.

Stalin executed Lenin’s closest friends and comrades-in-arms because they were all, each in his own way, hindering the realization of the main goal—of true Leninism.

Struggling against them, executing them, it was as if he were struggling against Lenin, executing Lenin. But, by doing this, he was also victoriously affirming Lenin and Leninism, raising Lenin’s banner over Russia and securing it there.

T
he name
of Stalin is inscribed for all eternity in the history of Russia.

By looking at Stalin, postrevolutionary Russia came to know herself.

The twenty-eight volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works—speeches, reports, programmes, economic and philosophical studies—did not help Russia to know herself and her fate. The result of confusing Western revolution and Russian ways of life was a chaos greater than that of the Tower of Babel.

It was not only the Russian peasants and workers, not only Budyonny’s cavalry and the Red Sailors, who were unable to grasp what was really happening; in this respect, Lenin himself was equally helpless. The roar of the revolutionary storm, the laws of the materialist dialectic, the logic of
Das Kapital
—these blended with the whoops of accordions, anarchist street songs like
“Little Apple” and “The Fried Chicken,”
the hum of moonshine distilleries, and the appeals of Bolshevik propagandists to Petrograd sailors and students attending the new workers’ faculties, urging them to resist the poisonous heresies of Kautsky, Cunow, and Hilferding.

The wild violence—the arson and rioting that gripped the entire country—brought to the surface of the Russian cauldron all the grievances that had accumulated over the centuries of serfdom.

From the romanticism of the Revolution, from the craziness of
Proletkult
, from the headiness of peasant rebellion and Green Armies fueled on moonshine, from the fury of the Bolshevik sailors during the battle for Odessa, there emerged a new police chief—a more powerful police chief than Russia had ever seen.

The peasantry passionately aspired to be the master of the land that it plowed. This desire, which Lenin understood and encouraged, presented a danger to the State that Lenin had founded. Peasant ownership of the land was incompatible with the very existence of this State. The State therefore dealt ruthlessly with this aspiration.

In 1930 the State founded by Lenin would become the sole and indivisible owner of all the lands, forests, and waters of the Soviet Union. No longer would the peasantry have the right to own plowland.

During the years after the Revolution, however, a fog of confusion and contradiction reigned not only in docks and railway junctions, not only on the crowded roofs of trains that were overflowing with people, not only in the aspirations of peasants and the inflamed minds of poets. There was no less confusion in the field of revolutionary theory, in the stupefying contradictions between Lenin’s crystal-clear theses and what was actually happening.

Lenin’s fundamental slogan in 1917 was “All Power to the Soviets!” It is entirely clear, however, that Lenin’s soviets have never possessed any power whatsoever. They have always been of secondary importance to the Party, their function either merely administrative or entirely formal.

The young Lenin devoted all his energies to the struggle against The People’s Will and the Socialist Revolutionaries; the aim of all this zealous theorizing was to prove that Russia could not bypass the capitalist stage of development. But in 1917 Lenin devoted his energies to proving that Russia, bypassing capitalism and its attendant democratic freedoms, could and should take the path of proletarian revolution.

Could Lenin have imagined that by founding the Communist International and by proclaiming at its Second Congress the slogan of world revolution, “Proletarians of the World Unite!” he was preparing the ground for an unprecedented growth of the principle of national sovereignty?

The power of State nationalism and the crazed nationalism of people deprived of freedom and of their human dignity determined the history of the twentieth century. They became the main lever, the thermonuclear warhead of a new order.

Stalin taught Russia to think straight, to put the turmoil of October and Lenin behind her. A reprimand for everyone or—as the saying has it—“earrings for every sister.” Or, if you were deemed unworthy of this, your earrings were torn off—along with your ears, if not your head.

The Bolshevik Party was destined to become the Party of a national State. This fusion of Party and State found its expression in the person of Stalin. In the mind and will of Stalin, the State expressed its own mind and will.

It seemed as if Stalin was constructing the Russian State—the State founded by Lenin—in his own image and likeness. In reality, however, it was the other way around. Stalin’s image was the likeness of the Russian State—which is why he became Tsar.

Although there appear to have been times—and especially toward the end of his life—when Stalin saw the State as his servant.

It was Stalin—who was both a European Marxist and an Asian despot—who gave true expression to the nature of Soviet statehood. What was embodied in Lenin was a Russian national principle; what was embodied in Stalin was a statehood that was both Russian and Soviet.

Russian statehood, engendered by Asia but dressed in European clothes, is a supra-historical phenomenon. Its principles are universal and unshakable, applicable to all the structures that Russia has known during the thousand years of her history. With Stalin’s help, all the revolutionary categories that Lenin had seen as a temporary, necessary expedient—dictatorship, terror, the suppression of bourgeois freedoms—were transformed into the essence, into the very foundation of Soviet life. Fusing with Russia’s thousand-year-old tradition of non-freedom, these categories became the essential content of the Soviet State. The remaining vestiges of Social Democracy, in the meantime, were relegated to the realm of stage decor, of mere external form.

Stalin united within him all the most ruthless traits of slave Russia.

In Stalin’s improbable cruelty and perfidy, in his capacity for pretense and hypocrisy, in his resentfulness and vindictiveness, in his coarseness, in his humor—we see a lordly Asiatic.

In Stalin’s knowledge of revolutionary doctrines, in his use of the terminology of the progressive West, in his familiarity with the works of literature and theater dear to the Russian democratic intelligentsia, in his quotations from Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, in his mastery of the subtlest and most complex conspiratorial tricks, in his amorality—we see a revolutionary in the model of Nechaev, one for whom any means are justified by the future end. But Nechaev himself would, of course, have shuddered if he had known to what extremes Iosif Stalin would take the principles of
Nechaevism.

In Stalin’s faith in official documents and the supremacy of police power, in his passion for medals and uniforms, in his unparalleled contempt for human dignity, in his deification of order and a rigid bureaucracy, in his readiness to kill those who have infringed some holy letter of the law and then to flout this same law as he himself carried out some act of monstrous violence—we see a police boss, a top gendarme.

Stalin was a fusion of these three figures.

And it was these three Stalins who created the Stalinist State—a State bordering both cruel, treacherous, vengeful, hypocritical Asia and enlightened, democratic, mercantile, mercenary Europe; a State in which law is simply a weapon of tyranny and in which tyranny is the law; a State whose roots reach far back into the centuries of Russian serfdom, which made slaves of the peasants, and into the centuries of the Tatar yoke, which made slaves even of those who lorded it over the peasants.

This Asiatic in kid boots, quoting Saltykov-Shchedrin, skillfully employing the vocabulary of revolution while he lived by the laws of tribal vengeance, brought clarity into the postrevolutionary chaos. And he expressed himself—he realized his own character—through the character of the State.

The most important principle of the State he constructed is that it is a State without freedom.

In this country, huge factories, artificial seas, canals, and hydroelectric power stations do not serve people; they serve a State without freedom.

In this State a man cannot sow what he wants to sow. A man is not the master of the field on which he works; he is not the owner of the apple trees he grows or of the milk he produces. Whatever the earth bears, it bears according to the instructions of the State without freedom.

In this State not only are the national minorities deprived of their freedom but so is the Russian nation itself. Where there is no individual freedom, there can be no national freedom—since national freedom is, above all, the freedom of the individual human being.

In this State there is no such thing as society. Society is founded on people’s free intimacy and free antagonism—and in a State without freedom, free intimacy and free hostility are unthinkable.

The thousand-year-old principle nurtured by the Russia of the
boyars
,
by Ivan the Terrible, by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the principle according to which Russian enlightenment, science, and industrial power develop by virtue of a general increase in the degree of human non-freedom—this principle achieved its most absolute triumph under Stalin.

And it is truly astonishing that Stalin, after so totally destroying freedom, continued to be afraid of it.

Perhaps it was this fear that caused Stalin to display such an astonishing degree of hypocrisy.

Stalin’s hypocrisy was a clear expression of the hypocrisy of his State. And it was expressed, first and foremost, in his demand that people play at being free. The State did not openly spit on the corpse of freedom—certainly not! Instead, after the precious, living, radioactive content of freedom and democracy had been done away with, this corpse was turned into a stuffed dummy, into a shell of words. It was like the way savages, after getting their hands on the most delicate of sextants and chronometers, use them as jewelry.

The freedom that had been done away with became an adornment of the State—but not, in fact, a useless adornment. This dead freedom became the lead actor in a piece of theater on a gigantic scale. The State without freedom created a mock parliament; it created mock elections, mock trade unions, a mock society, and a mockery of social life. In this State without freedom mock groupings of every kind—mock collective-farm administrations, mock governing boards of writers’ and artists’ unions, mock presidiums of district and provincial executive committees, mock bureaus, and mock plenums of district, provincial, and central committees of national Communist parties—held discussions and passed resolutions that had already been resolved; they took decisions that had already been taken elsewhere. Even the presidium of the Party Central Committee was no more than theater.

This theater reflected Stalin’s nature. And it reflected the nature of the State without freedom. That is why the State needed Stalin, a man whose character fitted him to bring out the character of the State.

What was real—
really
real, and not theater? Who
really
made decisions—and did not merely appear to make them?

The real power was Stalin. The decisions were made by him. But he could not, of course, personally decide every question—whether Semyonova should be granted a holiday from teaching, whether the Dawn collective farm should plant peas or cabbages.

The principle of the State without freedom did, in fact, require exactly this: that Stalin should make every decision himself, without exception. This, however, was physically impossible, and so questions of secondary importance were decided by Stalin’s trusted agents. And they always decided them in the same way—in the spirit of Stalin.

That indeed is why they were Stalin’s agents, or the agents of his agents. The decisions made by them had one thing in common: whether these decisions related to the construction of a hydroelectric power station in the lower reaches of the Volga or to the possibility of a milkmaid called Anyuta Feoktistova being sent on a two-month course of study, they were made in the spirit of Stalin. The spirit of Stalin and the spirit of the State were, after all, identical.

It was always easy, at any congress, meeting, or briefing of any kind, to recognize the trusted agents of Stalin-and-the-State. They were people whom no one argued with; they spoke, after all, in the name of Stalin-and-the-State.

That the State without freedom always acted in the name of freedom and democracy, that the State was afraid to take a step without invoking the name of freedom and democracy, bears witness to the strength of freedom. There were few people whom Stalin feared, but he feared freedom constantly; he feared it to the end of his life. After killing it, he fawned on its corpse.

It is wrong to see what happened during collectivization and during the
Purges simply as a senseless expression of cruelty, simply as a senseless expression of the unlimited power possessed by a single man.

In reality, the bloodshed of 1930 and 1937 was necessary to the State. As Stalin himself said, this blood was not shed for nothing. Without it, the State would not have survived. It was non-freedom that brought about the bloodshed, in order to conquer freedom. And it all began long before, under Lenin.

It was not only in politics and public activity that freedom was overcome. Freedom was overcome everywhere, from the realm of agriculture—the peasants’ loss of the right to sow freely and harvest freely—to the realms of poetry and philosophy. It is the same whether we are talking about shoemaking, the choice of reading matter, or moving from one apartment to another; in every sphere of life, freedom was overcome. It was the same with regard to factory work: work norms, pay, safety measures—all depended on the will of the State.