by Victor Serge
Certainly we can fight in the streets. But with enough bread for one day or two at the maximum, with no food supplies for the citizens, with virtually no electricity, what would this struggle be like?
Prices of foodstuffs have leapt up. I note: flour, 300 roubles a pound (of 400 grams); bread, 90 to 120 roubles a pound; potatoes, from 60 to 90 roubles; a dozen eggs cost 600 roubles today.
The soviet
Two and now three nights of alarms have gone by. We have got used to the imminence of danger. We have worked feverishly to prepare the defences of the city which is bristling with fortifications. This Sunday (October 26),g it has not taken on its usual Sunday appearance, bleak and stern. The trams are operating, people are in a hurry, large groups of soldiers are going up and down the Sadovaia and the Nevsky Prospect. Trotsky and Zinoviev will speak to the soviet this afternoon, about the military situation.
The hall of the Tauride Palace—where so many crowds have thronged, where so many tragic words and tragic thoughts have sprung into life—seems to be misty. From the glazed roof a mournful autumnal light comes down, dull and colorless. The main hall with its red desks, its Doric columns, the sober ornamentation in Doric style colored in yellow shades, even the crowd of workers’ delegates and Red soldiers—everything is drowned in a greyish atmosphere.
The two speakers have arrived, and have received subdued applause. Zinoviev, weighty, solemn, tired and pale with his shaven face and curly hair. Trotsky, tall and slender, upright, still giving the same impression of tense strength, with his high forehead.
Zinoviev gives an account of the military situation in the approaches to the city. We have superiority in numbers and arms. But we are facing hardened enemy units, bold, well-trained, and led by former officers who know the terrain thoroughly. They may—this possibility is in no way ruled out in our forecasts, and that is stressed—succeed in forcing entry into the city. But in no circumstances will they be able to remain there in opposition to us. Zinoviev bitterly blames the railway workers for not having done everything in their power to facilitate the movements of troops and food supplies.
After he has spoken, Trotsky examines the situation of the republic in its totality. He scarcely develops an argument, merely cites facts from which he deduces consequences. He declares that there will soon be a reversal of the situation on the southern front. Here we shall undoubtedly be victorious. But let Petrograd be ready for everything!
There is no empty rhetoric in these speeches which are addressed, via the soviet, to the working population. Of course they are “official”; but I do not find in them the official optimism and falsehoods which are customary in other more “civilized” countries. On the contrary: in order to demand more effectively the great effort which is required, it seems to me that the danger is being deliberately overstated.
The meeting of the soviet is thinly attended. A number of its members are at the front. There are many army greatcoats, fur or leather jackets, revolvers on belts. Young women, workers, soldiers, Bashkirs.h Not a single intellectual in sight. It really is the people itself, the people which suffers, toils, labors, fights, the people with horny, chapped hands, the people which is inelegant, rough, a little brutal, with clumsy movements, with faces not refined by civilization. Nobody speaks to reply or to ask questions. This is not the time for debating; in any case, the soviet does not debate much, there is nothing parliamentary about it. As it is at the moment, it is nothing but a very simple apparatus for popular consultation and dictatorship. By a show of hands, almost unanimously, they accept the sober and concise resolution which Zinoviev reads out. It can be summed up in four words: Struggle to the death.
Nonetheless, the assembly is not passive. Such acceptance on its own would be worrying. But now, as people are leaving, someone shouts out: The Internationale. The whole hall rises to its feet, bare-headed, and two thousand manly voices intone the song of the “last fight.”
I have heard it sung by crowds many times before; but I don’t think I have ever seen such faces, resolute despite the wrinkles of weariness and the pale, worn complexions produced by these days of privation. A man in front of me grips the back of a deputy’s chair with his two broad, muscular hands; I observe his rough face, the veins standing out on his neck, his broad-shouldered athletic build. Here are some Communist girls with short hair, young and old soldiers who have probably just come back from the front, and men of whom it is impossible to say whether or not they are soldiers, their uniform is so minimal.
They are all singing. Every person present here knows that perhaps this very evening they will be fighting in front of their own house, that they will perhaps be killed, that if they are taken alive they will be hanged, or shot, or tortured, that the city has only enough bread for twenty-four hours, that the greatest powers in the world, the Entente, America, are relentlessly seeking their death and that of all their comrades. That is why they are so simple, so solemn, standing upright, bare-headed, armed, raising their unanimous voices with such great fervor.
A humble crowd, they have the faith, the will, the indomitable inner energy of masses who have discovered spiritual life. Cromwell’s Roundheads who founded the English republic, the Puritans and Quakers who built their homes on the sites that would later give birth to the opulent metropolises of the United States, the enthusiastic and stoical Calvinists who attempted, in the sixteenth century, throughout Europe, to achieve a moral and social revolution, must have been like this.
Slowly, following the rhythm of the singing, the crowd leaves the Tauride Palace. I think of the manly races which, in history, have taken on the role of beginning the human task afresh, on the bases of a new consciousness; the task of taking justice among men a step further forward. Chosen races, invincible and sacrificed. Oh! I understand that you are admired and also hated, Russian people, you who are unvanquished by poverty and fear, and who are going with all the energy of your immense strength, with your vast capacity for suffering, your patience, your endurance, your fervor, your elementary good sense, towards a goal which is so great—and still so distant—that the weak and cowardly will disown you, that the disillusioned will no longer believe in you, that the skeptics will mock you and that the great of this world will be afraid of you.
Moral force
And at certain moments one is profoundly aware that in the whole vast expanse of Russia, these men are the only ones in whom moral force resides. Disorganization, chaos, material deprivation and weariness are factors which operate equally on both sides of the barricades. But the consciousness of the very lofty goal, the will to win, the determination to make use of everything in order to win, to refuse to retreat in face of any sacrifice, in a word moral force, the idealism of a new faith, this decisive factor operates only among us, for us. That is why the Reds are the stronger—permanently. In its eternal struggle against the Black and the Grey (the image is Gorky’s) the Red, color of blood, flame, ardor and life, must inevitably triumph. Officers who have been educated and disciplined, who dispose of financial resources, who possess the sophisticated techniques of modern warfare, can drive against us, under threat of death, terrified herds of soldiers—prisoners—or launch against us gangs of drunken Cossacks.
What they cannot achieve at any price is that young men and women, bearers of the little pass covered in brown cloth issued by the Communist PK (Parteyni Komitet), should voluntarily put on the leather jacket and march into the gunfire singing The Internationale.
They have no ideal, they belong to a declining class, which has finished its task and must be replaced; we are those rising to replace them; that is why they cannot win, they can only kill.
Meanwhile Communists, workers, soldiers and ad hoc administrators are now working with feverish haste. In four days assistance has come from all parts of Russia. Zinoviev’s radio-telegram which simply said “Petrograd in danger!” has evoked responses from all over. Supply trains for destinations all over the country have come—without waiting for special instructi
ons—to unload their stocks of food at the Nicholas Station. From Cherepovetz, from Novgorod, from Moscow, from Schlüsselburg, workers and Communists have hastened here, while the regular divisions of the Red Army came by every route that was free. The most intense organizational work was carried out under enemy fire, under the determined leadership of Trotsky. Now that the surprise of the first moment has worn off, we understand that the enemy cannot win, that every hour lessens his chances.
Nonetheless, our forces have retreated to the hills of Pulkovo, the last line of defence. If they were to yield to another thrust, then we would be fighting in the suburbs. The surroundings of the Warsaw Station and the Narva Gate are being fortified in anticipation of a setback. Houses are transformed into fortresses, others are evacuated or demolished so as not to obstruct the line of fire from certain redoubts made of paving stones, firewood and sacks of earth built up at crossroads and dominating the streets. But a proclamation by Trotsky to the Red soldiers, to the commanders, to the commissars, urges them to go over to the offensive and announces to them—magic word—that our tanks will be going into action. The neutralization of the enemy attacks, states Trotsky, is a portent of victory. It must be true: it is impossible to capture a city which resists like this.
On the streets
The whole of Petrograd gives an impression of intense labor. Redoubts and barricades are springing out of the earth. At the Field of Mars, around the tombs of the martyrs of the revolution, groups of men and women are at work, digging trenches in the light rain. In front of the Peter-Paul Fortress, at the entry from the Troitsky (Trinity) Bridge, the trenches are ready, carefully prepared, even to the extent that, when there are snipers, they will have somewhere to rest their elbows. A few meters in front, working women are stretching out barbed wire.
A great many such wooden barriers, intersecting with tangles of barbed wire, have been erected in the vegetable gardens of Smolny. Now they are everywhere, blocking all the main thoroughfares. In a quarter of an hour, they can be planted amid the paving stones. Here and there, through the streets, groups of workers, men and women, are carrying sacks of earth or logs. Especially at night, in certain places, forced labor is on the increase. Unfortunately it is forced labor: there are not enough Communists to do the work, and it has been necessary to requisition the labor force from among the citizens; the committees of assistance to the poor have each had to supply a few persons.
Nevsky Prospect looks almost the same as usual. There are more people moving around there. But if you approach the Admiralty gardens, you find, behind the railings, skillfully concealed by a curtain of bushes, the earth banked up round a redoubt and the mouth of a cannon aimed at the roadway. Further on, on the corner of the Sadovaia, they have taken advantage of the arcades of Gostinny Dvor, formerly a bazaar and the local commercial center, to establish a guard-house surrounded on all sides with sacks of earth. The crossroads is confronted with ambushes on three sides.
Right at the other end of Nevsky Prospect, at Znamensky Square, you notice nothing to begin with. The massive bronze effigy of Alexander II looms up opposite the station. Enormous, heavy, the horseman with broad loins and a weighty jaw, mournful, his head lowered, is pushing forward his stocky horse which is visibly incapable of going any further. The sculptor, prince Trubestskoi, was a powerful ironist who erected in the very middle of imperial Petersburg this symbol of the impotent autocracy, bleakly halted at the edge of the abyss, massive but without strength! Today, the symbol has acquired a significant commentary. There is, to the left behind the bronze statue, a hollow dug out in the ground of the square, surrounded by a small, low barricade in wood and stone. Here there is a cannon to provide enfilading fire over the Ligovskaia, where the enemy would appear if they got that far.
Lev Davidovich Trotsky
Along Nevsky Prospect came two cars which stopped because of an obstacle. Amid the crowd of passers-by, brief signals were exchanged. A name was spread from mouth to mouth. Two open cars. It was the second one that I noticed first, large and clean with its black seats upholstered and comfortable. Seven or eight men in black leather jackets were standing in it, with guns in their hands. Their headgear struck me; they were wearing a sort of helmet made of felt or covered with stout green uniform cloth, with a high rounded point and decorated with the great red five-pointed star. It recalled the headgear of the Slav warriors in heroic times (but what times were more heroic than ours?).
Trotsky, I was told. And I glimpsed him in the first car, wearing the same headgear low over his eyes, and the grey coat worn by all soldiers. By his frown, by the eyeglasses behind which his sharp, dark gaze is concealed, by his little mustache and the beard on his chin, he can always be recognized immediately.
At this moment he was frowning; his expression was stern, a little bothered. I knew of his strenuous activity, his nights spent at Smolny with the executive committee of the soviet in permanent session, his trips to the front, and genuine anecdotes which later will become myth. Somewhere in the south, during a cavalry raid by General Mamontov (who recently laid waste Tambov, Koslov and Eletz) his train was surrounded by a band of Cossacks; he had to fight them and came off victoriously. During those days, at the front, Lev Davidovich slept in the trenches in the front line. It once happened that he arrived in a car when the Reds were being routed. The enemy was advancing and our men were fleeing in panic. Lev Davidovich leapt onto a horse and drove those fleeing back to face the enemy—or else himself led them into the attack, I’m not sure of the details. This personal courage is sometimes actually criticized as being rather imprudent in an organizer and a leader.
In these stories which are spread by word of mouth, how much is the product of popular imagination? I don’t care. If these precise details are not true, then other similar ones, which are unknown, certainly are true. The man before us is the organizer of a revolutionary army. He has made this army out of nothing: out of the nothingness of confused crowds of soldiers in revolt against the war, who seized trains by force, and, becoming peasants once again, were irresistibly going back to the land.
What a surprising and strong multifaceted personality which no one would have expected in this journalist, theoretician and agitator, whose typical intellectual’s face today seems so forceful.
He has a high forehead, and the way he holds his head is a little stiff, perhaps forced—in order to command you have to stand up very straight, with the head raised aloft, all the weariness of the past energetically shrugged off; there is a thin, powerful mouth like a bird of prey above the chin which seems very short when at rest; the three commas, mustache and goatee, give his face a Mephistophelean expression. I remember the broad, precise, affirmative, imperative gestures of the orator, his voice which declaims sentences as one would hammer a malleable metal, giving a clear sound; his threatening irony which gives the impression of a rapier blow aimed into the dark and hitting its target.
I don’t want to exaggerate. Leaders are forced on me, I don’t want idolatry towards them. I see in them the first servants of the proletariat, those who must be followed, but those too who must always be looked in the face with the eyes of a free man. But it seems to me that Petrograd really feels it is saved now that this leader has come.
The law of the sword
Here, today, Lev Davidovich Trotsky is the soul of the resistance. If, a few miles from here, the attack waves are being reformed and methodically launched into action, if trainloads of meat and ammunition, if all the forces of this poor exhausted country are being strained, organized and used systematically in the interests of victory, it is because they are channeled by his intelligence and directed by his will. It is a hard job! Siberian front, Ukrainian front, Polish and Latvian front, Petrograd front, Karelian front, Archangel front. The front of a civil war in the interior. A cruel job for the man who must think of everything and who must, as a revolutionary, act ruthlessly. This evening I read an order by Trotsky, laying down that the families of officers and Red soldiers who
have gone over to the enemy must be immediately arrested and treated as hostages. The names follow. Today they have arrested Marfa Andreevna and her daughter Vera, wife and daughter of X, a traitor who has gone over to the enemy.
Kill or be killed: the Commune also, the Commune which writes on its banners such elevated ideas, knows this old law of the sword.
At the Peter-Paul Fortress
We cross the Troitsky bridge. On both sides the Neva widens out, its rolling waves the color of sea-water. Opposite opens up Kameno-Ostrovsky Prospect, lined with the homes and gardens of the wealthy, now expropriated. Somewhere here, in the little palace belonging to a ballerina who was the Tsar’s mistress, Vladimir Ilyich worked, waiting to give the signal for the end of the old society. Here are the low, blue pinnacle turrets of Chinese appearance belonging to a little church dating from the days of Peter the Great: when this church was built the city scarcely existed. Further on, like an enormous sapphire placed on the tree tops, the cupola of the mosque, the minarets like exclamation marks. Our beautiful city!
We cross the drawbridge, and pass through an ugly portico built in red brick which is well guarded. A path opens up with a double row of old trees and antiquated single-storey guardhouses, yellow façades which could be taken for peaceful country dwellings. It is an idyllic scene. We are in the precincts of the Peter-Paul Fortress. Along this path, all the proud spirits and hearts beating with youth that Russia has known for the last century have passed, on their way to prison, penal servitude, torture and death. Names flood into the memory in confused fashion: The Decembrists, Nechayev, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, Lavrov, the narodnovoltsy, Kaliaev, Lenin’s brother who was hanged. The gilded spire of the church impassively looms over all these memories. How many eyes, lost to life, were drawn to that spire during their short exercise periods in the prison?
