by Victor Serge
Everything must be paid for! Grand-dukes, generals, admirals, bankers, plutocrats, ministers, dignitaries, a whole opulent crowd, laden with honors, passed by here, beaten, spattered with mud, shameful, wretched, before suffering the implacable law that they had taught us.
Now, in one of these unassuming old buildings, where the rooms are tiny and the corridors so narrow that you can’t walk two abreast, in the largest room I saw our local commander, Avrov, working. Around his office there is a network of telephone apparatuses, where the wearisome ringing scarcely ever stops. Avrov is a young man. Perhaps thirty-five? A very open face, broad at the top and tapering down to an angular chin. A face with delicate features, like a refined peasant. His eyes seemed grey to me. I don’t know whether they noticed me while we were talking. Little drops of sweat were forming on his temples, on his swollen veins. The collar of his tunic was unbuttoned as if this man for whom command had become a harsh physical task, were struggling against a feeling of being suffocated. It is the city, I thought, which he feels is suffocating with every throb of his veins.
As I leave his office, a comrade shows me a map of Petrograd marked in various places with signs in blue pencil. This map was captured one night not long ago less than fifteen minutes from this headquarters. The marked points indicate where the enemy within intended to strike us.
Reversal
These things are possible only in Russia. These things are possible only during a revolution. During hurricanes, there are sudden moments of calm. Here there is calm amid the storm. Especially in tropical regions where intense, burning, feverish life hastens constantly to die and be reborn, these sudden changes are, it is said, miraculous. The glorious sunshine pours out over the plains and forests which, only a moment ago, were battered by ferocious winds, whipped by rainstorms and shaken by the raging of the elements. The unforeseen regains its capricious rights in societies which are prey to the unleashing of opposing forces.
Normal time no longer exists
For the mad and resolute hearts
Of these hyperbolic crowds.
These fine lines by Verhaeren come into my memory as I think of the amazing contrast between this Russian life today and any normal life at the present time in the so-called civilized world—or even here, scarcely two years ago.
This morning, October 30, a total change in the situation—which was beginning to become apparent over the last two days—becomes clear and asserts itself. Petrograd is indeed saved! The Red republic is saved! On three vast fronts, a series of victories, so unexpected and inexplicable to the outside eye that they seem miraculous, have turned the situation round.
Krasnoe Selo, Pavlovsk, Tsarkoe, Gatchina on the outskirts of Petrograd have been recaptured. Now the White gangs will have to retreat hastily to Yamburg or Narva. And in addition their communications are threatened by the Red cavalry which, having recaptured Luga, is closing on Gdov, hitherto the inaccessible lair of the “National army.”
Similar news from the southern front. We have the initiative in the fighting. Orel and Voronezh have been recaptured, Denikin’s offensive has quite unquestionably been broken. The Red troops are advancing on Kursk.
And far over there, on the Siberian front, beyond the summits of the Urals, the Communist army, which has just recaptured Tobolsk, is undertaking an offensive against Omsk.
We are a starving country, exhausted by more than five terrible years; for nearly two years we have endured a blockade which has not allowed a spool of thread or a tin of food to enter our territory; we are the most sorely tried, the worst fed, the most ill-clothed, the worst heated people on earth. Horses fall over and die of hunger in our streets (and sometimes people too). Why do they need British and French tanks, or international military missions?
The European strategists and armchair politicians who, for two years, have been predicting that Lenin and Trotsky would be hanged “within a week” will understand nothing of it. For it is psychologically impossible for them to understand anything about the revolution. Nourished on “normal” bourgeois culture and incapable of understanding the profound historical causes of the class struggle which they approach blindly, even more incapable of conceiving, with their miserable brains and their desiccated hearts, the reality of a class’s determination, they drag up childish explanations for this new phase of the great revolutionary drama.
What “German officers” are they going to invent to put them at the head of our Red troops? What Chinese or Latvian fusiliers will they claim were defending Petrograd?
In fact an issue of Pravda, of which the whole second page is devoted to obituaries, will one day give history the very simple solution to the enigma. Pravda names a few of those who have just fallen on the Petrograd front, the flower of the militants amid the heroic crowds. There is Justin Zhuk, a worker from the Schlüsselberg factories, an anarcho-syndicalist, unit commissar, killed on the Finnish frontier; Vladimir Mazin, intellectual, formerly a Menshevik, on the editorial staff of Communist International, commissar of the Sixth Division, killed at Kipen; the Communist worker Chekalov and many, many others.
Did all those men go to war because they had been called up? But it was they who organized the call-up: for ten years, in some cases for twenty, these men gave their freedom, their life to the revolutionary task. They foresaw and accepted this outcome. And when such men are leading a people which is defending its vital interests, the freshly won gains of a social revolution, when they do everything themselves, everything: the work of the factories, the railways, the military command, the schools, and war—then they certainly can be killed, but they can never be defeated.
The party’s effort
Various scenes glimpsed in the street during these difficult days explain many things. While equivocal Communists were disappearing, the sector committees in the city were gaining several thousand new recruits amidst the danger. At least it cannot be said that these were motivated by self-interest. They constitute indisputable evidence of devotion and trust towards the soviet regime, defended by the Bolshevik party. I understood what these new recruits meant in practice when I saw, outside the premises of a committee, about a hundred women workers from factories and offices, still poorly clad like working women, queuing up for a roll-call before leaving for the front. For the front, where they were to give a very good account of themselves. So we may have been short of medical supplies, of bandages, of stretchers—for those could be taken away from us—but the dedication of the women was not absent. And that was the main thing.
The whole party has made an immense effort, supported by the entire working population, that is by all the energetic elements in the population. This effort, and the social and moral causes responsible for it, explain everything. The party at this time is the only organization capable of inspiring, channeling and directing the energies which have just triumphed (and moreover let us note that it maintains its unique situation in dictatorial fashion), but it is nonetheless true that they exist outside it, that they constitute its strength only because it represents them knowingly, because it is, in short, only one of the means of the revolution, in some sense the most powerful lever of the proletariat. A truth which is all the more obvious in that the revolution also makes use of enemies of the party.
The party? I have long sought to define its role in relation to the class and the revolution. Here, at such times, this role seems to be self-evident. The party is in a sense the nervous system of the class. Simultaneously the consciousness and the active, physical organization of all the dispersed forces of the proletariat, which are often ignorant of themselves and often remain latent or express themselves contradictorily.
The anarchists
This is the appropriate point to note that the anarchists, the Anarchist Federation of Petrograd, short of militants because it has sent the best of its forces to the front and to the Bolshevik party, has found itself, in these solemn days, as in the time of Kerensky, entirely on the side of the party. Not without critical attit
udes and not without friction. The anarchist manifesto posted in the streets began with a reference—both very much deserved and terribly unjust—to the “soldiers, mobilized by force, who are now fleeing before the enemy,” and called on revolutionaries to contribute freely, as partisans, to the defence of Petrograd. Anarchist partisans, formed into two or three select groups, strong in their close mutual understanding, were among the first to be at their posts. During the first night of danger (October 24-25), the anarchists, almost the only ones to be completely ready, came, by a curious irony of circumstances, to occupy, in order to defend them if necessary, the premises of Pravda, the intransigent Marxism of which is rather hostile towards them. What did that mean, except that in face of the common enemy, the great revolutionary family—where there are so many enemy brothers—is one; and that at the most critical moments, class instinct wins out over ideological deviations and sectarian spirit?
In these times of struggle, the most serious divergences of opinion become secondary; for the very life of the first socialist society is at stake.
A gesture
However, the anarchist spirit—with its perpetual flights towards Utopia and their usual disastrous consequences in practice—has not lost its influence over its supporters, even when good sense comes out on top. In this connection here is a very significant episode.
The headquarters of the body of anarchist volunteers was situated five minutes away from the Nicholas Station, in a wrecked flat on the ground floor of a tall, grey building. In general anyone who wanted to could enter this anarchist club where nobody was checked other than on the basis of personal contacts. When they organized to fight, anyone who wanted to could turn up. A few strangers appeared. “We’re anarchists too,” they said, “against all forms of power, against all authority, for the total revolution.” The great family of this hundred or so idealists welcomed them without question. They were given their allocation of cartridges and grenades. Then one day, by chance, comrades found some bombs in the club, very probably intended to blow them all up. Suspicion fell on two of the newcomers. Here began the absurd dilemma of anarchism and reality. The suspects were arrested and locked up. An armed sentry was put at the door of the room where they were imprisoned. They were interrogated and tried. The anarchists who did that were horrified and heartbroken at having to do it. “Here we are like members of the Cheka!” they said with remorseful smiles. They saw the brutal necessity of scorning their own generous metaphysical principles. (“Thou shalt not judge!”) But the case was a serious one. Two Whites confessed—more or less.
Should they be executed? In Makhno’s organization nobody would have hesitated for five seconds. The Petrograd anarchists, to extricate themselves from the quandary, adopted the most unsatisfactory solution; they decided to hand the two suspects over to the local military commander. In their own minds nobody doubted that the latter would have them shot immediately.
My good comrade B.i was given the job of taking them to the Peter-Paul Fortress. Thin, tubercular, consumed by activity, agile, alert, eloquent, confused, with handsome blue eyes, child-like and bubbling with enthusiasm, B. during his long life as a revolutionary had done ten years penal servitude. His courage stood up to all tests and his loyalty was such that the Petrograd soviet had complete confidence in him. He told me himself what strange emotion he was gripped by when he found himself, a revolver in his belt, sitting opposite two pale-faced prisoners in the car making its way to the Peter-Paul Fortress, which meant prison and death for these men.
From time to time he cast a glance out of the car windows onto the road as it sped by. And he recalled the day when he himself had been arrested and taken in the same way to the same fortress, through the very same streets. They were coming up to the Troitsky Bridge. The gilt spire of Peter-Paul was already silhouetted against the sky above the pillboxes. “And now I’m the one, I’m the person taking men who are going to be executed!” thought B., his nerves on edge. He thought he was going to choke. They were nearly there.
“Stop!” he shouted to the driver.
The car stopped two hundred meters from the gateway of the fortress. B. must have been more overwhelmed than his prisoners. He quickly opened the door and waved his arm towards the deserted street:
“Off you go!”
“You can’t imagine,” he said to me afterwards, “what relief I felt at that moment.”
Yes I can. In an way I do understand this action. Haven’t I too suffered years of imprisonment? But this act seems to me to be mad, a peculiar libertarian madness. Was it not a crime to release White terrorists onto the streets of Red Petrograd?
If it had occurred at all frequently, such magnanimity would have meant the suicide of the revolution. The success of a revolution requires the implacable severity of a Dzerzhinsky—who of course was an ex-convict himself.
Six weeks have gone by since those epic, nightmare days. The victory of the Reds has been magnificently confirmed. The second anniversary of the October revolution could be celebrated, soberly, in an atmosphere of strength and confidence.
Since then, in about forty days, Western Siberia up to Tomsk and the Ukraine—Kiev, Kharkov, Poltava—right up the Don, have been recaptured.
What remains of the “national army” of the north-western government is struggling before the walls of Narva in an iron grip. In certain White Russian newspapers published in Finland the defeat of Yudenich is being openly discussed. Incapacity in command, red tape, arbitrariness, abuse of authority by the NCOs, lack of foresight. These are the explanations given. When they got to Gatchina, the Whites, far from being able to feed the population whom they had come to “liberate,” did not have any bread left themselves. Thus, in the tiny pond where the toads of the old order, who also “want a king,” croak, all the mistakes of Tsarism, of Lyao-Yang, of Tsushima,j of Poland, of Galicia, of Romania, are being committed again. These émigrés, like those of yesteryear, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
But they have taught us how to put up barricades; on the approaches to Smolny, there is a proper redoubt made of sacks of earth, equipped inside with an armored telephone post; it is still waiting for the return of the two cannon which have just been removed. Now it is covered with snow. And we have a picturesque image with an epic touch to it of all these fortifications—calling to mind the thought of a far-sighted and wise uprising—scattered in the city which is infinitely peaceful under its cloak of snow.
Petrograd, November–December 1919
Yudenich: What happened on the other side of the front?
On the subject of the “battle of Petrograd” we possess two books written by our enemies. One of them, which is unreadable, is by Major-General A-P Rodzianko; the other, At the Gates of Petrograd, is over-detailed and confused; it is by Mr. Kirdetsov who experienced the campaign as editor of a semi-official White newspaper. He provides us with ample and instructive documentation.
In the circle of iron and fire
Here is the military situation in the Soviet Republic in the summer of 1919. Generals Miller and Ironside, supported by British and American troops, are occupying Archangel and Murmansk, and moving down towards Chenkursk. The Latvians, backed up by von der Goltz’s ruffians, have just taken Riga. The Poles are occupying Mozyr. Kolchak is advancing on Samara and Kazan. Denikin is occupying the Kuban and the Don country, and is advancing. Petlura, Makhno and Grigoriev are devastating the Ukraine. Between Narva and Pskov, to the south west of Petrograd, the White army of the northwest, led by the cut-throats Rodzianko (Major General) and Bulak-Balakhovich, is in control of the countryside. On January 1 the British fleet appeared in the Gulf of Finland, sinking one Red destroyer and capturing two, the Spartacus and the Astroil, which Admiral Cowan handed over to the Estonian government. The circle of iron and fire is complete and has been closed. Lord Churchill and M. Pichonk are full of hope. “The Bolsheviks, we’ll have them!” “All the reformist Socialists,” writes Mr. Kirdetsov, “are in favor of intervention.”
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In May and June, Rodzianko attempted an attack on Petrograd. His forces were made up of reactionary officers, the Russian mercenaries of Count Livien, equipped and trained by von der Goltz, and Bulak-Balakhovich’s cavalry. The national army of the northwest took Pskov, Yamburg and Gdov, leaving bodies dangling from gallows along its route. It was a war of banditry and treachery: Semenov’s Red regiment, undermined by the Social Revolutionaries, cut the throats of its commissars and went over to the Whites; the Krasnaia Gorka fort was handed over to them at one point by officers who had pretended to rally to the cause of the soviets.4
On June 14, an edict from Admiral Kolchak, the Supreme Ruler, appointed Yudenich as Commander-in-Chief of the northwest. Yudenich? He is the hero—by accident—of Erzurum. “A gentleman aged about fifty, stocky, with a bloated face, bull neck and drooping mustache”; he is a worthless person, of limited capacity, incapable of initiative or of any flash of intelligence. But he knows how to obey when it is a question of restoring order. A perfect hangman if required. He lives at Helsinki, surrounded by former leading figures of the Russian reactionary milieu such as Kartachev and Kuzmin-Karavaev, in the “unbearable atmosphere of espionage created by the Entente agents.” Behind him are two high authorities: Kolchak who left Siberia dripping with blood, and the Paris National Conference, a sort of émigré government in exile, in which could be found side by side former lackeys of Tsarism, Sazonov and Isvolsky (the men of August 1, 1914), the former Social Revolutionary terrorist Savinkov, Kerensky’s former ambassadors Bekhmetiev and Maklakov, the former “revolutionary” scholar Chaikovsky; in short, a coalition of all the reactionary forces. A French destroyer brought Yudenich to his troops, from Helsinki to Estonia.
