The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Sergei Witte, now Count Witte in recognition of his success at the negotiating table, was exasperated at this procrastination. ‘His Majesty does not tolerate those whom he does not consider mental inferiors nor those whose opinions differ from those of the court camarilla, i.e., his household slaves,’ he moaned. ‘Being a weak man, he believes above all in the use of force … to destroy his real or fancied enemies, and he considers those who oppose the unlimited, arbitrary, serf regime to be his personal enemies.’ As the strike movement gathered renewed force, even the arch-reactionary Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich advised his nephew that the troops in the capital were too few even to guard the railways, let alone put down a full-scale revolution. The Tsar finally gave in and signalled that he might be willing to allow a Duma, despite rumours assiduously spread by members of his entourage that the constitutional option was a bid for power by Witte himself, who already fancied himself president of a Russian republic.

  On 10 October a well-organized general strike paralysed the country. There were no railways and no trams, no newspapers and no electricity, nor telegraphs and telephones, and the Russian troops fighting in Manchuria no longer received ammunitions and supplies. From drosky drivers to the ballet dancers of the Marinskii Theatre, from doctors and stockbrokers to some 40,000 factory workers, the stoppage brought Russia to a complete standstill. No country had ever seen a greater demonstration of force by its working population. Faced with general insubordination, the police had all but ceased to operate, and bands of men roamed the streets, pillaging, robbing and looting what they could. Cut off from all communication in his Siberian headquarters, General Kuropatkin, commander in chief of the army, was unsettled by reports from agents of the Russian-Chinese Bank who told him that parts of the army had joined the revolutionaries, that Moscow was burning, fighting in St Petersburg had cost thirty thousand lives and the Tsar and Tsarina had fled to Kronshtadt and Denmark respectively.

  On 17 October the Tsar finally sacked his interior minister, Bulygin, and issued a decree calling for the free and universal election of a State Duma the following May. It was not a decision he had taken lightly. Two days later he wrote in a letter to his mother: ‘you can’t imagine what I went through before that moment ... From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it and around me many - very many - held the same views … There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for.’

  There were celebrations in the streets when the decree was published. To the liberals, 17 October was the beginning of a new democratic era. The power of the autocracy was broken (it would be quickly regained), and Russia could now take her place among the modern nations. But there was more bitterness to come. Moscow suffered the hot breath of civil war when the funeral of a worker murdered by a group of Black Hundreds activists turned into a mass demonstration attended by some 200,000 people and resulted in street fighting between demonstrators, Black Hundreds militias, and the army.

  Barricades were thrown up and several plants, particularly the Schmidt furniture factory and the Prokhorov textile factory into which the workers had retreated with their families, were shelled by the army. Just under a thousand people were killed in Moscow by bombs and bullets before the insurrection was finally put down. Nikolai Pavlovich Schmidt, the twenty-year-old owner of the Schmidt factory and revolutionary sympathizer, was arrested at his house at 16 Novnsky Boulevard. Had the police bothered to look in his basement, they would have found cases of rifles and revolvers, ‘still in shipping transport grease’. As it was, they interrogated the young man whose fortune had helped support the insurrection, deprived him of sleep and food for eight days and threatened to execute him. Schmidt finally signed a confession. On 12 February he wrote to his sister saying that the night had been terrifying and that he feared the next one. He was found the next morning lying in his cell, with cuts to his neck, hands and lower arms and bruises to his face. The police recorded suicide as the cause of death.

  Seizing Control

  As the bourgeois camp threw itself excitedly into the business of creating political parties and electing a parliament, support for the strikes faltered and collapsed. Order slowly returned to the country, or rather, it was imposed with brutal force, as the government embarked on a long series of reprisal missions. The Semyonov and the 16th Lettish regiments were particularly notorious for their indiscriminating brutality as they moved through towns and villages throughout the empire in an orgy of summary executions, rapes, floggings and destruction. Villagers were herded together and beaten until they delivered the leaders of local rebellions, who were hanged from nearby trees without a trial. Drunken Cossacks were allowed to go on a rampage, and tens of thousands of buildings were burned.

  Between October 1905 and April 1906, an estimated 15,000 peasants and workers were hanged or shot, a further 20,000 injured, and 45,000 sent into exile, while in the cities 5,000 revolutionaries were sentenced to death and another 38,000 punished with prison or penal servitude. Cela ma chatouille! (That tickles me!) exclaimed a delighted Tsar Nicholas on hearing news of the successful punitive expeditions and other reprisals by rightist forces as the settling of accounts began. A wave of savage pogroms against Jewish populations swept the country. Once more, the Tsar was firmly in the saddle. The disturbances were regrettable, but his world-view had remained intact, as he wrote in a letter to his mother:

  The people are indignant at the insolence and the audacity of the revolutionaries and the socialists and since nine-tenths of them are Jews all the hatred is directed against them. Hence the pogroms against the Jews. It is astonishing with what unity and how simultaneously these occurred in all the cities of Russia and Siberia. In England, naturally, they write that these disorders were organized by police. But this is already a well-known fable. Not only have the Jews suffered - also engineers, lawyers and all other kinds of bad people. What has happened at Tomsk, Simferopol, Tver and Odessa clearly shows what can happen in a storm of fury - the houses of the revolutionaries were surrounded and set afire. Those who were not burned to death were killed as they emerged. I have received very touching telegrams from everywhere with thanks for the gift of liberty but also with clear declarations that they wish autocracy to be preserved.

  It was all the fault of the Jews. Now calm had been restored. It was, as Friedrich Schiller had put it almost a century before, ‘the calm of the graveyard’.

  As an iron hand reimposed a semblance of order, the ferment below only intensified, indeed, the revolution was already beginning to devour its children. Father Gapon, unwitting instigator of Bloody Sunday and the ensuing revolt, had made several attempts to establish himself as a revolutionary leader. Unable to hold his own among the socialist theoreticians, he had returned to Russia and left again, been sighted in Monte Carlo, and finally attempted to set up a new workers’ organization in St Petersburg. His political bumbling and popular following made him a target for both revolutionaries and secret police. Sergei Witte’s long arm involved Gapon’s name in plots and betrayals to discredit him, and in a shady plot involving a notorious double agent, the amateur revolutionary Gapon was lured to a cottage near the Finnish lake resort of Ozersky for secret consultations. The true reasons for what followed remain unclear but an account survived: a handful of men awaited Gapon in the hut to sit in judgement over him. They voted unanimously that he deserved to die and began to tie his hands. ‘Brothers, darlings, stop! Give me a last word!’ cried the terrified priest as they strung him up on a hook on the wall which was so low that one of the assailants had to sit on Gapon’s shoulders until he had choked to death.

  Everyone Feared Something

  The experiences of 1905 imbued Russian society with a sense of dark foreboding. Every rational path forward out of its catastrophic stagnation seemed blocked by autocratic rule, a door so conclusively bolted shut that only an explosion could blast it open. Feeling oscillated between despondency and rage, between impotent frustration and a fatalistic certainty
that another, far more bloody apocalypse would only be a matter of time. The youngest generation of artists powerfully articulated the hopelessness of this vision of life. In Ivan Bunin’s story A Gentleman from San Francisco (1910), an ocean liner steams across agitated sea, its passenger’s hostages to fortune. Dancing in the ship’s elegant salons, they are unaware of the inferno of the flamelit boiler rooms and the murderous seas outside, and unable to influence their own fate.

  In his great novel Petersburg, Andrei Bely, too, evoked the haunted sense of his generation. Bely had happened to arrive in the capital on Bloody Sunday, and the events of the day had made such a deep impression on him that he wrote a novel set against the backdrop of the disturbances. Throughout it, the city is frightened by the spectre of the red domino, a ghostly appearance blown out of all proportion by the sensationalist press and in reality nothing but the son of a high official in a theatre costume. The hero’s predicament, though, is as terrible as it is absurd: having promised a terrorist to throw a bomb, he has discovered that his victim is to be his own father. Horrified, he has nevertheless primed the device, which is ticking away inside a sardine tin as he agonises over what to do. Amid the splendour of the classicist palace mayhem and destruction are only hours away.

  It is not only the protagonist who finds himself in a murderous dilemma; the entire city is gripped by a sense of menace:

  In the workshops, in print shops, in hairdressers’, in dairies, in squalid little taverns, the same prating shady type was always hanging around. With a shaggy fur hat from the fields of bloodstained Manchuria pulled down over his eyes, and with a Browning from somewhere or other stuck in his side pocket, he thrust badly printed leaflets into people’s hands.

  Everyone feared something, hoped for something, poured into the streets, gathered in crowds, and again dispersed.

  The fields of bloodstained Manchuria were the theatre in which Russia had played out its foolish war with Japan, a ‘primitive’ force from the east now threatening to engulf civilization:

  As for Petersburg, it will sink.

  In those days all the peoples of the earth will rush forth from their dwelling places. Great will be the strife, strife the like of which has never been seen in this world. The yellow hordes of Asians will set forth from their age-old abodes and will encrimson the fields of Europe in oceans of blood.

  This sense of fear and farce became all-pervasive in Russia after 1906. The Tsar clawed back powers from the Duma as soon as it was opened, and Witte was sent into bitter retirement once again. As the court retreated ever further into obscurantism and isolation while mystics and madmen like the thoroughly debauched monk Rasputin gained power over an imperial couple losing its last connections with reality, the Tsar looked over his country with eyes bleary from incense and alcohol. Meanwhile Russian culture exploded in an angry and radiant creativity. Nowhere in the world was the sense of precariousness more urgently felt than in this stifled society torn apart by the ineluctable forces of change, and nowhere was this clearer than in the works of many artists for whom their vocation was a continuation of revolution by other means - or a flight away from this absurdly downtrodden world into a realm of pure, mystically inspired symbolism.

  We have come to think of Paris and Vienna as centres of artistic innovation around the turn of the century, but surely Moscow and St Petersburg after 1906 cannot be far behind. Fuelled by wild dreams, an entire generation of artists set about to shape a new vision of the world - savage and strange, brutally mechanical, dark, and incomprehensible. The young Igor Stravinsky translated the bloody spasms of the revolution into the Sacre du printemps, a cruel ritual sacrifice of youth in ballets whose choreography used tutus for simple smocks and pirouettes for pounding rage; Alexander Skriabin made his sense of dislocation audible in piano pieces floating loosely between tonalities and in orchestral poems combining sound and light into overwhelming hallucinations; Kandinsky brought to his canvases the primeval symbols of shamanic rituals in restless and disjointed geometrical compositions; Kasimir Malevich found the uncompromising power of abstraction, and the painter Mikhail Larionov reproduced his view of a fractured, often frightening world in ragged shapes very similar to those conceived by Braque and Picasso. The old values were dead. ‘The genius of our day: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, airplanes, railways, magnificent ships. We deny that individuality has any value in a work of art,’ declared Larionov. Around 1905 his work evolved from tender and lyrical expressionist compositions to an uncompromisingly childlike primitivism with saturated colours and rough-hewn features. Having scraped off the thin veneer of civilization, Larionov found himself amid half-men and savage women, carousing lowlifes, Turks and circus performers who smoked and sat with parted legs. Other painters, such as Robert Falk, Piotr Konchalovsky and Larionov’s companion Natalia Goncharova underwent a similar development.

  The deep vein of darkness and absurdity that runs through the Russian imagination came to the surface in literary works for the period, and nowhere more so than in Valery Bryusov’s poem The Pale Horse. This took its central image not only from one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but also from the Bronze Horseman, the strutting statue of Peter the Great on a rampant stallion in St Petersburg which had dominated the minds of Russian writers ever since Pushkin’s poem by the same name. The Horseman rode through the nocturnal capital in Bely’s Petersburg, his steed reappeared, in bloody crimson, in paintings by Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and it thundered into Bryusov’s fearsome description of a brutal apparition that flashes through the bustling city of St Petersburg much as the revolution had ripped through the fabric of life some years before:

  The street was like a storm. The crowds passed by as if pursued by inevitable Fate. Cars, cabs, buses roared amid the furious endless stream of people. Signs whirled and sparked like changing eyes high in the heavens from the terrible heights of the 30th floor. Wheels hummed proudly, newsboys screamed, whips cracked. Suddenly amid the storm - a hellish whisper. There sounds a strange dissonant footfall, a deadening shriek, a tremendous crash. And the Horseman appears. The horse flies headlong. The air still trembles and the echo rolls. Time quivers and the Look is Terror. In letters of fire the Horseman’s scroll spells Death.

  Bryusov’s life was just as stormy as his morphine-sped imagination and he spent some years locked in an unhappy love triangle with Andrei Bely and the disturbed, delicate Nina Petrovskaya. The two men could only just be persuaded not to fight a duel over her.

  Like the revolutionaries who wanted to blast society away to start afresh, many artists of the avant-garde believed that there was nothing worth saving about the status quo. Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others went about Moscow with painted faces and wooden spoons or radishes in their lapels instead of flowers. Their clothes were adorned with letters and signs. Vasily Kamenskii claimed that much like anarchist terrorists they wanted to ‘throw a bombshell into the joyless, provincial street of the generally joyless existence’, while Larionov and a friend wrote in one of their Futurist manifestos: ‘We paint ourselves because a clean face is offensive, because we want to herald the unknown, to rearrange life.’

  A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was the title of a manifesto issued by a group of artists in 1912; it appeared that the members of the avant-garde tried to be as offensive, blasphemous and crude as they could. In Russian peasant lore, authority was nothing but the power to subdue by force. The writings of Russia’s young artists echoed this sentiment: ‘Wherever you look, the world lies before you in utter nakedness, around her tower beskinned mountains, like bloody chunks of smoking meat. Seize it, tear it, get your teeth into it, crush it, create it anew - it’s all yours, yours!’

  Avant-garde artists in Moscow and St Petersburg oscillated wildly between utopian hopes and utter despair, mad erotic entanglements and celibacy (never for too long), empty gestures and moments of sheer brilliance. In Bryusov’s astonishing story ‘The Republic of the Southern Cros
s’ he describes an artificial city state in Antarctica, protected from the elements by a gigantic roof. This pivotal achievement of human engineering houses the earth’s most advanced community, a magnificent, democratic society with overhead roads, comfortable houses, free education, libraries, fine food, and the most refined amusements. In truth, it is a sinister utopia some of whose traits have become familiar to those living a century after the text was written:

  It must be said that this democratic exterior concealed the purely autocratic tyranny of the shareholders and directors of a former Trust. Giving up to others the places of deputies in the Chamber they inevitably brought in their own candidates as directors of the factories. In the hands of the Board of Directors was concentrated the economic life of the country…The influence of the Board of Directors in the international relationships of the Republic was immense. Its decisions might ruin whole countries. The prices fixed by them determined the wages of millions of labouring masses over the whole earth. And, moreover, the influence of the Board, though indirect, was always decisive in the internal affairs of the Republic. The Law-making Chamber, in fact, appeared to be only the humble servant of the will of the Board.