In Arosev’s The Notes of Terenty the Forgotten (1922), the Chekist Kleiner wears “the same leather jacket winter, summer, day, and night.” He is full of a “hidden inner enthusiasm,” and he kills people as a matter of personal vocation and historical inevitability. One of his ideas is to project the executions onto a large screen outside the Cheka building. “What is necessary does not corrupt,” he says. “Try to understand. What is necessary does not corrupt.” Arosev’s literary patron, Aleksandr Voronsky, agrees: “Absolutely right is Arosev’s Kleiner, who states that ‘what is necessary does not corrupt.’” The trampling of arms and legs and the slaughtering of women is part of the providential plan, and therefore beyond morality. “There can be no justice, no categorical imperatives; everything is subordinated to necessity, which, at the moment, knows only one commandment: ‘Kill!’”37
Some scriptural texts produced by the Bolshevik gospel-writers rival the Revelation of St. John in their exuberant sense of moral clarity and rhetorical elevation; others are, to varying degrees, touched by self-reflexivity and ambivalence. Andrei Platonov and Isaak Babel, in particular, struggled to produce myth but seemed unable to escape irony. As Bakhtin wrote about Dead Souls, “Gogol imagined the form of his epic as a Divine Comedy, but what came out was Menippean satire. Once having entered the sphere of familiar contact, he could not leave it, and could not transfer into that sphere his aloof positive characters.” Platonov and Babel, too, kept imagining Paradiso, but getting stuck in Purgatorio, in full view of the Inferno. Their characters tend to be saintly simpletons: senile children (all of them orphans, one way or another) in the case of Platonov, and infantile warriors (“monstrously huge, dull-witted”), in the case of Babel. In Platonov’s Chevengur (1928), the chief dragon slayer is a Soviet Don Quixote called Stepan Kopenkin. He rides a horse named Proletarian Power, worships the image of “the beautiful young maiden, Rosa Luxemburg,” and fights the ghostly enemies of the Revolution as he rides toward Communism. “He did not understand and did not have any spiritual doubts, considering them a betrayal of the Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg had thought of everything on everyone’s behalf—all that was left were the great deeds of the sword for the sake of the destruction of the visible and invisible enemy.”38
By parodying medieval romance, Cervantes invented the novel; by parodying Cervantes, Platonov attempted to return to the innocence of medieval romance: “Unlike the way he lived, [Kopenkin] normally killed indifferently, though efficiently, as if moved by the force of simple calculation and household utility. In the White Guardists and bandits, Kopenkin saw unimportant enemies, unworthy of his personal fury, and he killed them with the same scrupulous thoroughness with which a peasant woman might remove weeds in her millet patch. He fought precisely, but hastily, on foot and on horseback, unconsciously saving his emotions for future hope and movement.”
Platonov’s problem as an orthodox gospel-writer was that he could not write the way Kopenkin killed. In the Communist town of Chevengur, Kopenkin’s fellow Bolshevik orders the extermination of the town’s bourgeoisie as part of the general plan for the end of the world. The Second Coming is scheduled for Thursday, because Wednesday is a day of fasting and the bourgeoisie will be able to prepare itself “more calmly.” When the former exploiters (those who, in Luke 6:24, “have already received their comfort,”) have assembled on the cathedral square, the head Chekist, Comrade Piusya, fires a bullet from his revolver into the skull of a nearby bourgeois, Zavyn-Duvailo. “Quiet steam rose from the bourgeois’s head—and then a damp, maternal substance resembling candle wax oozed out into his hair; but instead of toppling over, Duvailo just sat down on his bundle of belongings.” After shooting another member of the bourgeoisie, the Chekist returns to Zavyn-Duvailo.
Piusya took hold of Duvailo’s neck with his left hand, got a good, comfortable grip, and then pressed the muzzle of his revolver against it, just below the nape. But Duvailo’s neck was itching, and he kept rubbing it against the cloth collar of his jacket.
“Stop fidgeting, you fool. Wait—I’ll really give you a good scratch!”
Duvailo was still alive, and not afraid. “Take my head between your legs and squeeze it till I scream out loud. My woman’s nearby and I want her to hear me!”
Piusya smashed him on the cheek with his fist, so as to feel the body of this bourgeois for the last time, and Duvailo cried out plaintively: “Mashenka, they’re hitting me!”
Piusya waited till Duvailo had pronounced the last drawn-out syllables in full, and shot him twice through the neck. He then unclenched his gums, which had grown hot and dry.39
The district executive committee secretary and town intellectual (as well as hidden enemy), Prokofy Dvanov, expresses the official Soviet objection to such a representation of the apocalypse. “Prokofy had observed this solitary murder from a distance, and he reproached Piusya: ‘Communists don’t kill from behind, comrade Piusya!’” The Chekist’s answer to Prokofy is Platonov’s response to his critics: “Communists, Comrade Dvanov, need Communism—not officer-style heroics. So you’d better keep your mouth shut, or I’ll pack you off to heaven after him! Nowadays every f——ing whore wants to plug herself up with a red banner—as if that’ll make her empty hole heal over with virtue! Well, no banner’s going to hide you from my bullet!” But Prokofy is right. By dispensing with the red banner and describing Armageddon as a solitary murder, Platonov undermines his identification with the “great deeds of the sword,” dooms his attempt to write a great revolutionary epic, and consigns his narrator to the empty hole of ironic detachment. Once having entered the “sphere of familiar contact,” he cannot leave it—much to the benefit of his posthumous (post-Communist) reputation.40
Babel, too, gains his share of immortality by failing to get a firm grip on the sacred. His Red Cavalry narrator, like Abraham, is ready but unwilling to sacrifice a human being and is given an animal instead: “A stern-looking goose was wandering about the yard, serenely preening its feathers. I caught up with it and pressed it to the ground; the goose’s head cracked under my boot—cracked and spilled out. The white neck was spread out in the dung, and the wings flapped convulsively over the slaughtered bird. ‘Mother of God upon my soul!’ I said, poking around in the goose with my saber. ‘I’ll have this roasted, landlady.’”41
Babel’s Cossacks, unlike Babel’s evangelists, do not accept substitutes. They—like Comrade Piusya—slaughter humans with the same scrupulous thoroughness with which a peasant woman might remove weeds in her millet patch. They do to Abraham what Abraham was unwilling to do to Isaac:
Right under my window several Cossacks were preparing to shoot a silver-bearded old Jew for spying. The old man was squealing and struggling to get away. Then Kudria from the machine-gun detachment took hold of the old man’s head and tucked it under his arm. The Jew grew quiet and stood with his legs apart. With his right hand Kudria pulled out his dagger and carefully slit the old man’s throat, without splashing any blood on himself. Then he knocked on the closed window.
“If anyone’s interested,” he said, “They can come and get him. He’s free for the taking.”42
Voronsky, Babel’s chief sponsor and publisher, admitted that “Babel’s Red Cavalry never did any fighting” and that, in his stories, “there was no Red Cavalry as an entire mass—no thousands of armed men advancing like lava.” Instead, there were solitary individuals and “what certain circles refer to as beastliness, brutality, animal stupidity, and savagery.” The truth, however, was that those individuals were “almost all truth-seekers,” and that Babel had a talent for seeing saintliness in savagery. Comrade Piusya was right: Communists could kill from behind as long as the killing was “for the benefit and victory of Communism.” But Babel knew better (and could not help himself). As he would say at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, “Bad taste is no longer a personal defect; it is a crime. Even worse, bad taste is counterrevolution.” For a true believer, to represent the guiltless mass murder of the apocalypse as s
olitary acts of ritual sacrifice was in bad taste.43
The apocalypse is a version of the myth about dragon slaying. Dragon slaying, when seen from the point of view of an individual dragon, is self-sacrifice (crucifixion). The second Civil War plot is about the death and rebirth of a martyr. Ivanov’s Partisans, Libedinsky’s A Week, Lavrenev’s The Forty-First, Fadeev’s The Rout (1926), Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapaev (1923), and, in their “empty-hole” way, Platonov’s Chevengur and Babel’s Red Cavalry are partly or wholly about the death and resurrection of Bolshevik saints. The revolutionary commander Chapaev, like Moses, can see the promised land but is not allowed to cross the Ural River. He is killed midstream; most of his men—the rank-and-file as well as the Levites—are captured while still ashore: “Jews, Commissars, and Communists—come forward! And they did, hoping to keep the Red Army soldiers from being executed, though they could not always save them in this way. They stood before the ranks of their comrades, so proud and beautiful in their silent courage, their lips trembling and eyes shining with wrath, cursing the Cossack whip as they fell under the blows of sabers and hail of bullets.”44
The counterrevolutionary uprising in Libedinsky’s novella takes place during the Holy Week of the Christian calendar, and the slaughter of the town’s Communists is followed by church bells announcing the beginning of the all-night Easter vigil. This completes the conversion of one of the central characters. “Listening to the chiming of the bells, Liza realized that she was here—not in church, not at Vespers, but at a Party meeting.”45
The two plots—the apocalypse and the crucifixion—are either two ways of looking at the same event or one way of looking at cause and effect. In the Christian New Testament, the apocalypse is revenge for the crucifixion, and the permanent branding of the combatants is a way to keep the two armies separate (and, in the apocalyptic mode, anonymous). In the center of Malyshkin’s Babylon can be found the reason for its destruction: “The night of the world was falling. In the murky doom of the squares, three figures hung on lampposts, with heads meekly bent and gaping black eye sockets gazing down at their chests.” Calvary justifies the apocalypse. What follows the vision of the crucifixion is the dashing and scampering of terrifying carts, the raking of bullets through a cloud of men on horseback, and the trampling into a pulp of solemn hymns of dominion. But in describing the recent and still lingering Bolshevik past, as opposed to the sudden explosion of an imminent Christian future, it is difficult to end the story with countless armies of nameless and faceless enemies being thrown into a lake of fire. Even Malyshkin, who tries to avoid all “familiar contact,” cannot help taking a closer look. In the novel’s finale, the apocalypse reverts to the Passion of Christ as the last of Babylon’s defenders are shot by a Red Army firing squad. “Pale, with eyes like still candle flames, they were silently and hastily lined up against the stone wall. Beyond the hush of the deserted alley, the rumble and noise that heralded the new dawn kept growing. Abruptly and eerily in the gloom, a truck rattled past the gate. With a sudden, muffled cry, unheard by anyone, Death passed on its way.” The crucifixion is followed by the apocalypse, which is followed by the crucifixion. And so on.46
The main challenge of all salvation myths is to avoid falling into the trap of eternal return. Communism—like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their incalculable progeny—is a comedy, in which the world of youth rebels against the tyranny of corrupt old age and, after a series of trials and misrecognitions, expels or exterminates the incorrigible, converts the undecided, and celebrates its victory with a wedding or its happily-ever-after equivalent. A prophecy’s promise is that the honeymoon will never end; the young lovers will never turn into old tyrants; and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”
For the Soviet gospel writers of the 1920s, one way to avoid ironic circularity is to focus on the journey separating the Passion from the apocalypse. The third and most important Civil War master plot is the exodus, or the story of the march from Egypt to the promised land, from suffering to redemption, and from a band of “stiff-necked people” to “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Most Civil War stories involve all three plots; the exodus chapter focuses on the hardships of the journey and the joy of homecoming, not on the original martyrdom or the eventual retribution.
In Lavrenev’s The Forty-First, a Red Army unit wanders through the desert until it finds salvation in the waters of the Aral Sea (or so they think before the flood comes). In Furmanov’s Chapaev, the “doomed Red regiments” embark on “the last exodus” that takes them to the shores of the Caspian Sea. In Malyshkin’s The Fall of Dair, thirsty “hordes” march through the steppe and the swamp to the land of “milk, meat, and honey,” where “summer never ends” and “evenings are like fields of golden rye.”
In Ivanov’s Colored Winds, the partisans emerge from the mountains and forests to find the spring fields of blue-green grass. “Baptize it with the plow! The pale golden wind is thrashing about—bleed it by sowing! It is your birth we’re celebrating, earth, your birth!” And in Fadeev’s The Rout, the partisans emerge from the swamp to find “the vast sky and the earth, which promised bread and rest.”
The forest ended abruptly and a vast expanse of high, blue sky and bright russet fields, freshly mown and bathed in sunshine, stretched out on either side as far as the eye could see. On one side, beyond a knot of willows, through which the gleaming blue surface of a swollen river could be seen, lay a threshing-ground, resplendent with the golden crowns of the fat haystacks…. Beyond the river, propping up the sky and rooted in the yellow-tressed woods, loomed the blue mountain ranges, and through their toothed summits a transparent foam of pinkish-white clouds, salted by the sea, poured into the valley, as frothy and bubbly as milk fresh from the cow.47
Platonov would not write his own Soviet Exodus—Dzhan—until 1935. In the 1920s, he was still unable to escape the confines of the exodus’s profane double—the knightly road quest. His Stepan Kopenkin was Don Quixote, not Moses: “Although it was warm in Chevengur, and smelled of comradely spirit, Kopenkin, perhaps from exhaustion, felt sad, and his heart yearned to ride on. He had not yet noticed in Chevengur a clear and obvious socialism—that touching but firm and edifying beauty in the midst of nature that would allow a second little Rosa Luxemburg to be born, or the first one, who had perished in a German bourgeois land, to be scientifically resurrected.”48
In the original Exodus story, the failure to discover milk and honey remains outside the narrative, and the main characters are two larger-than-life questing heroes: Moses and the Israelites. The chosen people walk from slavery (a forced submission to false, transitory authority) to freedom (a voluntary submission to true, absolute authority); Moses must remain himself even as he represents God to the chosen people and the chosen people to God. He belongs to both and can play his role only if he remains in the middle: close enough to ultimate knowledge to know where to lead, and close enough to his people to know that he will be followed. It was a line too thin for anyone not fully divine to tread. The original Moses both succeeds and fails: he talks to God, but he is “slow of tongue and speech” and has difficulty talking to his people. He takes them to the edge of the promised land but is not allowed to enter because he had broken faith with God in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah Kadesh in the Desert of Zin.
What was needed in the Soviet version of Exodus, according to Voronsky, was “the life-giving spirit of the dialectic.” All literary Bolsheviks were to combine “universalism and internationalism” with a “connection to our factories, our villages, and the revolutionary movement of past eras and decades.” In the meantime, the Moses puzzle remained unsolved. Ivanov’s Red commander, Vershinin, is a “rock and a cliff” (and his last name is derived from the word for “summit”), but he remains a Russian peasant, with few signs of universalism. Pilniak’s leather men are “the best of the sluggish, unruly Russian people,” but “none of them has ever read Karl Marx.” Fadeev’s Re
d commander, Levinson, has read Karl Marx, but he is not from the Russian folk at all, and Voronsky does not believe that Bolsheviks should appear as “foreign conquerors.” The same is true of Malyshkin’s “army commander,” whose “stone profile” makes him “a stranger to the peaceful dusk of the peasant hut,” and of Leonid Leonov’s Comrade Arsen, whose eyes, words, veins, and scars are all blue “from iron.” These people, according to Voronsky, are “strangers, who live by themselves.” Even Libedinsky’s Communists, led by the human-size Comrade Robeiko (who is slow of tongue and speech and says “exodus” instead of “escape”), are, in Voronsky’s words, “a closed heroic caste that has almost no links to the surrounding world.”49
One solution is to split Moses in two: a commissar who talks to History and a popular hero who leads the march through the desert (and becomes a crusader in the process). In Ivanov’s Colored Winds, the wild, truth-seeking peasant, Kalistrat, is paired with the merciless Bolshevik, Nikitin, who explains their division of labor as follows:
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