by Victor Serge
What a wave of enthusiasm was aroused at that time among the working masses by the mere thought of the Russian Revolution! Cloistered behind prison walls, we only got an inkling of it from occasional clandestine letters. We were suddenly made fully aware of it as we were leaving France, in a small town on the Channel coast, where we arrived after nightfall.
Abbeville. The little town had been shelled; some roofs had been blown off, the windows were darkened and the streets unlit. Accompanied by plain-clothes police we went to a little restaurant to get some nourishment for our poor comrade Barakov, a sailor suffering from tuberculosis who was returning to Russia to die on the soil of the revolution; his health had been destroyed—because of his refusal of discipline as an active trade unionist—in the prison cells of the great American ships. The tiny room was full of British soldiers, and thick clouds of pipe-smoke rose up towards the paraffin lamps. Our group of pale people surrounding a sick man, and watched over by two gentlemen of such a special demeanor, attracted their attention.
“Who are you?”
“Bolsheviks. Prisoners. On our way to Russia …”
I shall never forget the impact this revelation made. We were immediately surrounded by an excited group of men; every face was that of a friend, hands were stretched out to shake ours, we were offered wine and cigarettes, and emotional voices declared: “So are we! So are we! We’re part of it too! You’ll see later on!” They went to fetch their mates from the other cafés nearby; these embittered, battered soldiers didn’t know what to do to convince us that that they were on our side with all their workers’ hearts. What they said was quite true. At this very time serious mutinies were taking place in the British army not far from Calais.
Fifteen days at sea brought us from Dunkirk to Finland. On board ship, treated with great care, we were guarded by Senegalese soldiers. In their helmets, their greatcoats covered with sheepskin, their heavy peasant hands gripping their bayonets, they seemed to be the most silent, the hardest, the most unconscious of gaolers. But when they were alone with one of us on the empty deck, they sometimes gave us broad smiles.
I reached Petrograd one day in February. The first time that I visited some distant relatives, I found myself in the presence of an old lady with a pince-nez and angular features, who spoke in a very low voice and a conspiratorial, wailing manner. When she found out I had come from France, she displayed excessive delight. “My goodness!” she muttered, “how lucky you are! You were still in France, twenty days ago!” Then she began to question me eagerly:
“Tell me! Won’t the British come and rescue us from the Bolsheviks? … Aren’t the French getting ready? … They say the Romanians? … Why is Finland afraid?” When she heard me reply that nobody would come, the old lady with the pince-nez began to cry. It was my first contact with the obyvatelschina2 of the civil war. Ever since then I have imagined it with the symbolic features of that tearful old petty bourgeois woman, living in fear and anticipation: in fear of the new life clearly and harshly proclaimed by the proletarian revolution, in the insane anticipation of interventions by providence which were now impossible. Throughout the civil war we constantly found ourselves up against this obyvatelschina, a petty bourgeoisie steeped in hatred, powerless, hopelessly mediocre.
It was Year Two. Other years, since the two assaults of the Whites on Petrograd, the second of which seemed for a while to be on the point of succeeding—have brought us other sorrows and other victories. But it seems to me more and more that every memory of that year and of those battles should be preserved. Such is the justification for these observations and reflections from an observer who had come from afar.
Second attack by General Yudenich’s White army on Petrograd, October 23-30, 1919
Perpetual danger facing Petrograd
Is the city of the revolution not permanently in danger?
As a result of its geographical situation, Red Petrograd lives under the permanent threat of an attack. It is an object of fear—and sometimes of envy—to Finland, which is scarcely thirty miles away with no natural obstacles in between. It is blockaded by a British naval squadron, whose guns have been trained on Kronstadt for months. It is attacked or threatened by the White army of some counter-revolutionary pseudo-government which has taken refuge in Tallinn; it is attacked or threatened by the Estonian army. It has faced so many direct threats!
The Kaiser’s armies threatened it, when they had taken Riga and were continuing their offensive northwards. After the February revolution, Kornilov, aspiring to military dictatorship, marched on Petrograd, which was saved by its revolutionary enthusiasm. After the October revolution, Kerensky, surrounded at Gatchina by cadets from the military colleges and a few loyal battalions, wanted to try an attack on the capital. The Bolshevik Red Guards broke his offensive at Pulkovo. And how many times since then has Mannerheim’s Finland seemed to be on the brink of opening hostilities? In Helsinki people were making commercial deals about real estate in Petrograd. Then the Estonian White army’s successive offensives were unleashed, each beginning with a victory (the first time, capture of Narva; the second time, capture of Yamburg; and this time, capture of Yamburg, Gatchina and Krasnoe Selo, that is, of districts immediately adjoining the capital).
Petrograd is a front-line city. The air you breathe there is more vibrant than elsewhere. You can feel the nervous tension and the awakening of a crowd living on permanent alert.
But since it has lived through so many crises and critical periods, the Red city has become used to not easily getting upset about the dangers it is threatened with. It has acquired a sort of confidence in its good fortune.
People cannot conceive that it could fall, be captured, defeated, crushed underfoot by outsiders. And we can be sure that they are not mistaken. The causes which have thus far made it unyielding are continuing to protect it.
Its enemies are divided by profound hatreds and irreconcilable conflicts of interest; they loathe each other. Its defenders are aware of the historic greatness of their task. Petrograd, a revolutionary capital and an intellectual capital; Petrograd where the whole history of a social war lasting fifty years is written on the stones of the buildings and on the pavements of the streets; Petrograd, gateway to a vast Russia open to the seas of northern Europe, remains one of the centers of the revolution. “The republic,” says Trotsky, “has three trump cards which it must not lose in any circumstances: Petrograd, Moscow, Tula.” What splendid things are at stake in these battles!
The rout
Since the last alert (mid-June 1919), what is called normal life had resumed its course. The theaters were packed with people every night, concerts, lectures and meetings brought their usual audiences together; even trade was “picking up.” In fact a large number of shops had opened.
Jewelers, antique dealers, perfume sellers, traders in luxury items, booksellers, grocers—in whose shops, alas!, you find nothing but drinks and substitutes for coffee—and assorted speculators were doing excellent business. Trade in the markets, swarming with motley crowds, was in full swing.
Familiarity with an undefined, distant danger, which was considered fatalistically, allowed life to follow its normal course and people scarcely got excited when among the reports from the front the newspapers published three short lines announcing that “under pressure from superior enemy forces our troops have abandoned their positions at Yamburg”—though this is a position of crucial importance, since, 72 miles from Petrograd, opposite Narva, it is the Red city’s only defensive advanced post. Once Yamburg was lost, the Red Army could rely only on Krasnoe Selo and Gatchina.
Isn’t official information wonderful! The news had been known by almost the entire population for nearly two days. And it is a noteworthy phenomenon how quickly news—even when kept secret—spreads through the crowds.
What had happened? Well-informed people, party members, working with the executive committee of the soviet, were not surprised. “Our troops have had enough. Pretty badly fed, inadequate
ly clothed, kept at the front without being replaced for weeks and months, they are also demoralized amid the inactivity of the Estonian front. A few tanks (five) were sent against them and it was panic flight, rout, every man for himself.” While a female comrade was saying this to me in the tram taking us to Smolny, explaining in such simple terms that there is no relief because there are no trained combat units, and that at “the very word tank panic spreads through the ranks,” I remembered a humble soldier, my companion during a hard night’s work, and I understood.
The soldier’s mentality
He had come with me one night when we were making house-to-house searches. We were tired and depressed by the job we had to do; we stopped outside the locked doors of houses, where sometimes we had to hammer with rifle-butts. Then as the reddish candlelight made enormous shadows dance around us, giving a strange illumination from below to his rough peasant face, we exchanged a few words. He was cold; his gun pressed against his chest, he rubbed his hands vigorously and said to me:
“I shall soon have done eight years … When the war started, I had nearly finished my period of service. I fought in Bukovina, in Galicia, outside Riga. Then we thought there would be peace at last, but the civil war started up.”
He wasn’t blaming anyone. He summed up the causes briefly:
“Ah! The Entente, the Allies!”
And he didn’t find any better way of expressing his feelings than a vague insult, almost muttered, directed at those who, surrounded by comfort and honors on the other side of Europe, were deciding on the killing to take place over here:
“Scum!”
No. I’m not surprised they sometimes run away, terrified by a tank or about to drop with terrible weariness, our poor grey troop of soldiers, whose blood has been shed every day for so many years.
I didn’t know what to say to that particular soldier, for words seemed so empty and worthless in the face of reality. The old regime had robbed this man, like all his fellows, of three years of life; the old world, committing its great crime, had turned him for four years into a thing that kills, a being that is killed. The revolution promised so much to him, it suffered and struggled for his sake, but what has it done for him?
He is doing virtually the same job as before. He is still trapped in the infernal cycle of war, my brother the soldier, and perhaps—what a terrible thought!—he doesn’t understand the reason for this one any better than for the other. The trenches, the lice, the wounds, the shrapnel, the buildings that are captured, the buildings that are lost, the comrades who fall; that is what it still is, what it always is for him!
Now this man has not become a soldier. He has remained a worker of the land. His land, his isba (log hut), his wife are waiting for him somewhere, and that is where his life is.
So sometimes he has moments of weakness. His head spins, he doesn’t know where truth and justice are, where are the enemy—those who want his eternal enslavement—or where are his friends.
There is a terrible irony in this fact: the revolution has been fighting on five fronts, for two years, because it proclaimed that the worker must no longer fight against his brother—and that all men of goodwill are brothers in labor; this irony and this profound injustice perturb him.
Alone, in a group, or in whole companies, he “goes over to the enemy,” that is, he flees towards the enemy, with the crazy hope that this will be the end. But over there, he is mobilized afresh, this time to fight for the rich, under the disdainful eye of generals who know how to train muzhiks for obedience. He crosses the front line again in the opposite direction, he comes back to us and fights stoically, he who doesn’t want to fight at all.
The Versailles troopse have forced a door open
The fact remains that this time the shock is terrible. In twenty-four hours the atmosphere of the city has been transformed. From tranquility and indifference we have gone over to the nervous tension that is felt on the eve of battle. On Thursday October 23, Pravda publishes the declaration of martial law, with a series of draconian measures: closing of theaters and cinemas; ban on going out after 8.00 p.m. without a special permit; closing of shops and markets. This last measure seems to be a mistake, and I see no reason for it. The communal shops have so few goods that it is impossible not to turn to the market and the trade in secret contraband.
The same day, prices double: for the order having been given, it doesn’t actually stop anything, but in an irritating fashion makes things more complicated. Who gave the order? Why? No checking mechanism is functioning. No mechanism for criticism exists at this time of total implacable dictatorship. And certainly if I am right in thinking it is a mistake, it is a serious one, because it immediately antagonizes two thirds of the population by making it even more difficult to obtain food supplies. All it needed was a badly drafted, ill-conceived order, the ill will or whim of somebody, somewhere in an improvised general staff. For the combat apparatus of the general staff of internal defence is being feverishly improvised. The enemy is less than twenty-five miles away, and in several places our troops are fleeing in panic: the fate of Red Petrograd will be at stake in a final battle which may end up being fought in our own streets. The Versailles troops have forced a door open.
The next day, October 24, the situation is worse. Krasnoe Selo, Gatchina, Pavlovsk, Dietskoe Selo (formerly Tsarskoe3) have been occupied by the White army. It has only one more stage to complete. Never has the danger been so great. The whole working-class population up to the age of forty-five has been mobilized.
At Smolny the broad corridors are filled with a mass of armed people who are being rapidly equipped. They are factory workers, in overcoats, in touloups (sheepskin coats): they are fitting cartridge-belts on their civilian clothes and taking rifles, which gives them the appearance of being rebels.
The Communist Party has mobilized all its members, men and women. The women are also going to the front, in contingents of fighters or of stretcher bearers. A decision of the central committee is sending immediately to the front those militants who hold “positions of trust.”
But the city still looks normal. You can just about distinguish additional activity in the great thoroughfares where motorcycles, cars and lorries from the army or the internal defence forces are moving in all directions.
The newspapers say that Trotsky is coming. He has not been here for a long time. The situation here must be considered very serious for him to leave Moscow at a time when things are going rather badly on the Southern front. General Denikin’s army has taken Kursk and Orel, two cities in Greater Russia, which had never been occupied since the revolution. He is threatening Tula, the arsenal of the Red Army, and Moscow. People shake their heads. On the trams and in the streets you can pick up significant scraps of conversation. Clearly the majority of the population, those who are not workers or Communists and who have no revolutionary education, all those who have no interest in maintaining the new regime, are awaiting events without confidence; and many think it is the beginning of the end. You would think so if you observed the fatal apathy of all these passers-by who are getting on with their usual activities, in a manner showing no concern about events that are too immediate, while perhaps tomorrow the Petrograd Commune will shed its blood on the barricades.
It is a grey, damp day; a wearisome drizzle is falling.
There was a time …
I know. There was a time when everything seemed lost. Everything? No. Petrograd. But for me, for thousands of others, now, Petrograd is everything. Its fall would be something inconceivable, like the first stage of the collapse of the revolution.
The humming telephone wires that linked Smolny to the Kremlin carried grave voices and grave words. Lenin. Zinoviev. In both places attentive brains were striving to assess the balance of forces, and to weigh up the chances, which seemed very slight. These men could see closing around the frontiers of the former sixteenth-century Grand-Duchy of Muscovy the circle of death of the counter-revolution. Paris Commune, 1905 in Russia, Finla
nd. The proletariat seemed to be advancing only from one defeat to another, and they knew it. Would 1919 be an ill-omened date? How could we resist everywhere? Could we avoid sacrificing Petrograd? At a certain moment there were grave doubts. They say that even Lenin was convinced. Zinoviev wanted to stand firm. But Trotsky’s train was making its way to the endangered city.
My friend M. saw Lenin during these days. Vladimir Ilyich had his usual calm, solid forehead, his usual brisk laugh, jovial and sarcastic: “Well, what about it?” he said, with a triumphant burst of laughter. “We’ll go back to underground activity.”
Two trains packed with our people’s children, whom the executioners would not spare despite the courage of their parents, have set off for Volga, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Votkinsk. Comrades are preparing to remain behind if Petrograd falls, to begin illegal work straightaway. They are equipping themselves with passports from the old regime. Others are studying the map, making vague plans, wondering whether, if the battle in the streets goes badly, it is possible to cross the Neva, whether…a risky retreat, on foot, without supplies, along the river, without being quite sure where they would be going to.
