The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  “Some need bread, and some need blood. I supply the blood.”

  “And what about me? What am I supposed to supply?”

  “You’ll supply the bread.”

  “No I won’t!”

  “Yes, you will.”50

  He does, of course. His job is to baptize the grass with the plow.

  In Chapaev, the proletarian commissar Klychkov initiates the peasant warrior Chapaev into the secret knowledge of Communist prophecy. He molds him “like wax” until Chapaev is ready to embrace the “life-giving spirit of the dialectic.” Chapaev’s sacrifice by drowning means that Klychkov has learned how to mold the people, and the people have learned how to follow Klychkov.51

  The twin dangers of straying too far in either direction are—as usual—represented by Platonov and Babel. Platonov’s Communists are indistinguishable from other village idiots (he created folklore, not myth, whatever his original intentions). Babel’s narrator, with glasses on his nose and autumn in his soul, never masters “the simplest of skills” and suffers silently from an unrequited longing and secret revulsion for his Cossack listeners.52

  Platonov, Babel, and their characters strive to “pull heaven down to earth” but fail—and suffer for it. In the hands of an unbeliever, the exodus can become an eternal march through hell. Lev Lunts’s short story, “In the Desert” (1921), has no beginning and no end. “It was frightening and boring. There was nothing to do—except walk on and on. To escape the burning boredom, hunger, and desert gloom and to give their hairy hands and dull fingers something to do, they would steal each other’s utensils, skins, cattle, and women, and then kill the thieves. And then they would avenge the killings and kill the killers. There was no water, but plenty of blood. And before them lay the land flowing with milk and honey.”53

  ■ ■ ■

  The inferno, by most accounts, is Exodus without the promised land. The inferno justified by an eventual homecoming is a purposeful “tempering of steel,” or Exodus the way it is meant to be. The most canonical Bolshevik representation of the Civil War is also the most complete Soviet version of the Exodus myth.

  Aleksandr Serafimovich’s The Iron Flood, published in 1924, was immediately hailed as a great accomplishment of the new Soviet literature and remained required reading in Soviet schools until the end of the Soviet Union. It is based on the story of the march of about sixty thousand Red Army soldiers and civilian refugees across the Caucasus Mountains in August–October 1918. Serafimovich, who was sixty-one at the time of publication, was a veteran radical writer and the official patriarch of “proletarian” literature. He was born into the family of a Don Cossack officer and raised in the Upper Don settlement of Ust-Medveditskaia (which was also the home of Filipp Mironov, who was nine years younger and several social rungs lower). Having been caught up in student “circle” life at the University of St. Petersburg in the 1880s, he had started writing in exile (on the White Sea, like Voronsky and Arosev) and later worked as a reporter, editor, and fiction writer in the Don Area and eventually in Moscow (for Leonid Andreev’s Moscow Courier). During the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow, he had served as chief literary editor of the Moscow Soviet’s Izvestia. In early summer 1919, he traveled to the southern front as a Pravda correspondent and wrote an article against de-Cossackization. “The victories blinded [the Red Army] to the local population, its hopes for the future, its needs, its prejudices, its expectations of a new life, its tremendous desire to know what the Red columns were bringing, and its unique economic and cultural traditions.” One of Serafimovich’s two sons served as a commissar in the Special Expeditionary Corps for the suppression of the Upper-Don uprising (with Valentin Trifonov) and was killed at the front in 1920 at the age of twenty.54

  The Iron Flood begins with a scene of utter confusion: “From all sides came the din of voices, the barking of dogs, neighing of horses, and clanking of metal; the crying of children, rough swearing of men and shouting of women; and the raucous, drunken singing to the accompaniment of an accordion. It was as though a huge beehive had lost its queen, and its hum had become chaotic, frenzied, and discordant.” The only force that can give shape to this chaos is the army commander, who makes his appearance as a nameless and motionless bearer of the revolutionary will. “Near the windmill stood a short, stocky man, with a firm, square jaw, who looked as though he were made of lead. His small, grey, gimlet eyes glittered under his low brows as he surveyed the scene, missing nothing. His squat shadow lay on the ground, its head trampled by the feet all around him.”55

  His name is Kozhukh, and he is slow of tongue and speech. “Comrades! What I mean to say is … well … our comrades are dead … and … we must honor them …’cause they died for us…. I mean … why did they have to die? Comrades, what I mean to say is that, Soviet Russia is not dead. It will live till the end of time.’” For the prophecy to come true, the people have to cross the wilderness. “The last station before the mountains looked like a scene from the Tower of Babel. Half an hour later Kozhukh’s column set out and no one dared try to stop them. But the moment it set out thousands of panic-stricken soldiers and refugees took off behind them with their carts and cattle, jostling and blocking up the road, trying to pass one another and shoving into the ditches anyone who got in their way. And the long column began to creep up the mountain like a monstrous serpent.”56

  The first miracle they encounter after they reach the top is the sea, which “rose, unexpectedly, like an infinite blue wall, whose deep hue was reflected in their eyes.”

  “Look, the sea!”

  “But why does it stand up like a wall?”

  “We’ll have to climb over it.”

  “Then why, when you stand on the shore, does it look flat all the way to the end?”

  “Haven’t you heard about how, when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery, like us now, the sea stood up like a wall and they passed over on dry land”?57

  They do pass over on dry land, and keep going, on and on—a “dishevelled, ragged, blackened, naked, screeching horde, pursued by the sweltering heat, by hunger and despair.” Enemy armies and “myriads of flies” stalk, attack, and lie in wait, but the column crawls on—“in order to reach the top of the range and then slither back down to the steppe where the food and forage are abundant and their own people await them.”58

  The other two Civil War plots—the crucifixion and the apocalypse—perform their usual functions. When all the heat, dust, flies, roar, and exhaustion become unbearable, Kozhukh orders a detour, so that the people may see both the heroic self-sacrifice made on their behalf and the reason for the slaughter they are about to unleash.

  In the heavy silence, only the tramping of feet could be heard. All heads turned, and all eyes looked in one direction—toward the straight line of telegraph posts, dwindling into the distance like tiny pencils in the shimmering haze. From the four nearest posts, motionless, hung four naked men. The air around them was black with flies. Their heads were bent low, as if pressing down with their youthful chins on the nooses that held them. Their teeth were bared, and the sockets of their eyes, pecked out by the ravens, gaped emptily. From their bellies, also pecked and torn, hung green, slimy entrails. The sun beat down. Their skin, bruised black by the beatings, had burst open in places. The ravens flew up to the tops of the posts and watched with their heads cocked to one side.

  Four men, and then a fifth … and on the fifth hung the blackened body of a girl, naked, with her breasts cut off.

  “Regiment, ha-alt !”59

  The violence visited on the poor and the hungry—back in Egypt, here in the desert, or anywhere since the beginning of time—is returned a thousandfold. They grind the Edomites, Moabites, Bashanites, and Amorites into the sand, raze their fortresses, and kill them all to the last man. “Neck-deep in the water, the Georgian soldiers stood with arms outstretched towards the vanishing steamers. They shouted and cursed, begging for mercy in the name of their children, but the swift sabers came down upon t
heir necks, heads, and shoulders, staining the water with blood.” The Cossacks did not beg for mercy. “When the sun rose above the hills and over the limitless steppe, one could see all the Cossacks with their long, black moustaches. There were no wounded, no prisoners among them—they all lay dead.”60

  Before entering one of the towns they come to, Kozhukh gives orders to two of his commanders. To the first he says: “Annihilate them all!”; to the second—“Exterminate them all!” And so they do: “The embankment, pier, streets, squares, courtyards, and highways were strewn with dead bodies. They lay in heaps in various poses. Some had their heads twisted round, and some were missing their heads. Brains were scattered over the pavement like lumps of jelly. As if in a slaughter-house, dark, clotted blood lay in pools along the houses and stone fences, and blood trickled through the cracks under the gates.”61

  Most of the violence is in the biblical mode of indiscriminate mass murder, but Serafimovich has enough faith and mythopoeic consistency to take a guiltless closer look. The scenes of individual sacrifice he pauses to describe do not substitute for Armageddon, the way they do in Platonov and Babel: they explain and illustrate it with the same scrupulous thoroughness with which Kopenkin killed:

  From the priest’s house they led out some people with ashen faces and golden epaulettes—part of the Cossack headquarters’ staff had been taken. They cut off their heads by the priest’s stable, and the blood soaked into the dung.

  The din of the cries, gunshots, curses, and groans drowned out the sound of the river.

  The house of the Ataman was searched from top to bottom, but he was nowhere to be found. He had fled. The soldiers began shouting:

  “If you don’t come out, we’ll kill all your children!”

  The Ataman did not come out.

  They began to slaughter the children. Grovelling on her knees with her braids streaming down, the Ataman’s wife clutched desperately at the soldiers’ legs. One of them turned to her and said reproachfully:

  “Why are you yelling like a stuck pig? I had a daughter just like yours—a three-year-old. We buried her up there in the mountains, but I didn’t yell.”

  And he hacked down the little girl and then crushed the skull of the hysterically laughing mother. 62

  The Iron Flood became the canonical Book of the Civil War because it was the most complete realization of the flood metaphor, the most elaborate Soviet version of Exodus, and the most successful solution of the Moses puzzle—the “life-giving dialectic” between the transcendental and the local, the conscious and the spontaneous, predestination and free will. As the human mass turns into an iron flood, the Commander acquires a measure of humanity. By the time they arrive in the promised land, they come together for good.63

  “Our father … lead us where you will! We will lay down our lives!”

  A thousand hands reached out to him and pulled him off; a thousand hands lifted him over their heads and carried him. And the steppe shook for many versts, roused by countless voices:

  “Hurrah -a-ah! Hurra-a-a-a-a-ah for Kozhukh!”

  Kozhukh was carried to the place where the men stood in orderly ranks and then to the place where the artillery stood. He was carried past the horses of the squadrons—and the horsemen turned in their saddles and, with shining faces and mouths opened wide, let out a continuous roar.

  He was carried among the refugees and among the carts, and the mothers held up their babies to him.

  They carried him back again and set him down gently upon the cart. When Kozhukh opened his mouth to speak, they all gasped, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Look, his eyes are blue!”

  No, they did not cry out because they could not put words to their emotions, but his eyes, when seen up close, really were blue and gentle, with a shy expression, like a child’s….

  The orators spoke until nightfall, one after another. As they talked, everyone experienced the ever-growing, inexpressibly blissful feeling of being linked to the enormity that they knew and did not know, one that was called Soviet Russia.64

  ■ ■ ■

  By the mid-1920s, the sacred foundations of the Soviet state had come to include the “October Revolution,” which centered on the storming of the Winter Palace, and—much more prominently—the Civil War, which consisted of the Civil War proper (the war on the battlefield) and “War Communism” (the war on property, market, money, and the division of labor). War Communism was the murkiest part of the “glorious past”: it represented the heart of Bolshevism (the transformation of a society into a sect), but it was scrapped in 1921 as unenforceable and later given its posthumous name, which suggested contingency and perhaps reluctance. The definitive Soviet text on its meaning and significance was written by one of its designers, the economist, Lev Kritsman. It was published in 1924 under the title The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution (An Analytical Essay on So-Called “War Communism”).

  Kritsman grew up in the family of a People’s Will activist (who was also a dentist), attended Khaim Gokhman’s Odessa Commercial Institute, joined his first reading circle at the age of fourteen, studied at the Odessa (New Russia) University before being expelled for revolutionary activity, graduated from the University of Zurich as a chemist, returned to Russia in a sealed train after the October Revolution, engineered (at the age of twenty-seven) the nationalization of the sugar industry, participated in the writing of the decree on the nationalization of all large industry, and, in 1924, became a member of the Communist Academy and a leading Bolshevik expert on rural economics and the “peasant question.”65

  According to Kritsman, the “Great Russian Revolution” (the term was modeled on the standard Bolshevik name for the French Revolution) made “the unthinkable real.” It proved “the correctness of Marxism, which, decades earlier, had predicted the inevitability of everything that occurred in Russia after 1917: the collapse of capitalism, the proletarian revolution, the destruction of the capitalist state, the expropriation of capitalist property, and the onset of the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Revolution’s socioeconomic dimension, or “so-called War Communism,” was “the proletarian organization of production and reproduction during the decisive period of the proletarian revolution; in general, therefore, it was not something that was imposed on the revolution from the outside.” In fact, it was “the first grandiose experiment in building an autarkic proletarian economy—an experiment in taking the first steps in the transition to socialism. In its essence, it was not an error on the part of certain individuals or a certain class; it was—although not in its pure form and not without certain perversions—an anticipation of the future, a breakthrough of that future into the present (now already past).”66

  This “heroic” phase of the revolution rested, according to Kritsman, on five fundamental principles, all of them sacred, still relevant, and necessary for the transition to socialism. The first was the “economic principle,” which meant that members’ labor contributions were not distorted by “commercial, legal, and other considerations unrelated to production.” Emancipated labor finally resolved the bourgeois contradiction “between the abstract, and therefore hypocritical, political system, in which individual citizens are seen as ideal, interchangeable atoms, and the economic system, in which real individuals coexist with other individuals in real life (and, most important, in relations of class domination and subjection.)” The state of the revolutionary proletariat was one of unprecedented transparency and consistency. It was a state without “politics” in the Babylonian sense.

  The second was “the class principle,” or “the spirit of ruthless class exclusivity.” A member of the former ruling classes “was not simply deprived of his superior status—he was expelled from Soviet society and forced to huddle in dark corners, like barely tolerated dirt. A bourgeois was a contemptible outcast, a pariah devoid of not only property, but also honor.” Proof of “untainted worker or peasant origins” replaced titles and money as a ticke
t to social advancement: “The stigma of belonging to the class of exploiters could guarantee a place in a concentration camp, prison or, at best, a hovel left behind by proletarians who had moved to better houses. Such ruthless class exclusivity, such social extermination of the exploiting class was a source of tremendous moral inspiration, of a passionate enthusiasm of the proletariat and all the exploited classes. It was a mighty call to the victims of domination, an assertion of their inner superiority over the dirty world of exploiters.”

  The third “organizing principle of the era” was the “labor principle,” or the uncompromising adoption of St. Paul’s motto, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” In Kritsman’s Marxist formulation, “the path to the realm of freedom passed through necessary labor.” This involved forced labor for the former exploiters and more labor for the laborers. Contrary to the petit bourgeois view of production (rooted in unspecialized small-scale work), “modern productive labor is not an expression of man’s free creative potential; it is not pleasurable as such. In this regard, the proletarian revolution does not bring about any fundamental change. On the contrary, because it presupposes a continued development of large-scale production, it leads to a further intensification of the necessary character of productive labor.” What was different was the fact that, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, hard work would—eventually, lead to leisure, and leisure, under socialism, would become an expression of free human creativity. “The proletarian revolution returns necessary labor to its original purpose of achieving leisure by restoring the connection, severed by capitalism, between productive labor and leisure, thus creating a powerful incentive for a further intensification of labor.” To conclude (in the style of the original scripture), “the emancipation of necessary labor from elements of free creativity means the emancipation of free creativity from the chains of necessary labor.”