The House of Government
Page 42
In a written explanation to the chief censor (head of Glavlit) I. I. Lebedev-Poliansky, Pilniak claimed that the novella was based on a conversation he and Voronsky had had once—“about how an individual … always follows the wheel of the collective and sometimes dies under that wheel”—and that it was during the same conversation that Voronsky had told him “about the death and various habits of Comrade Frunze.” In his letter to the editor approved by the CC Secretariat, Voronsky wrote that Pilniak’s dedication was “highly offensive” to him as a Communist, and that he rejected it “with indignation.”32
The proletarian writers were triumphant: the destruction of “Voronsky’s Carthage” was now a matter of time (and method). Writing in the May issue of Red Virgin Soil, Voronsky addressed his official boss, People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky: “I love life, and it is hard for my soul to part with my body. But if it is fated that I accept the end, then let it not be from the hand of Averbakh. It would not be dignified to die that way. It is hard but honorable to die on the battlefield from a frontal attack—‘there is joy in battle’—but to suffocate from Averbakh’s ‘literary gases’—let this cup pass from me.”33
Voronsky’s wish was partially granted. The attack was not frontal, but it came from Bukharin, not Averbakh. On January 12, 1927, Pravda published Bukharin’s “Angry Notes,” in which he attacked Voronsky by attacking some of Voronsky’s protégés. The “peasant poets” that Red Virgin Soil was championing, and especially Voronsky’s favorite, Sergei Esenin, were, according to Bukharin, guilty of “blini nationalism” and “chauvinistic swinishness.” “Eseninism” was a “disgustingly powdered and gaudily painted Russian obscenity,” and the “broad Russian nature” that Esenin stood for was nothing but “internal sloppiness and lack of culture.” “If in the old days the traditional intelligentsia admiration for its own mawkishness, impotence, and pathetic flabbiness was disgusting enough, it has become absolutely intolerable in our own day, when we need energetic and resolute characters, not the rubbish that should have been thrown out a long time ago.”34
The attack was, in a sense, justified. Voronsky did admire peasant poets and published them regularly in his journal, and his memoirs, which he had recently begun writing, did represent “blini Russia” as an aesthetic and perhaps moral value to be reckoned with. (“The light-colored river lay tranquil, its gentle curves gleaming with copper flashes. Behind the river, fields stretched into the distance. Little hamlets dotted the hills. Behind them was the silent, solemn pine forest. The cadenced tones of distant church bells floated slowly through the air.”)
More to the point, the “broad Russian nature” as understood by Voronsky was but a special case of “intuition,” which represented a way of getting at the truth “by going beyond conscious, analytic thought.” Lenin, in his clairvoyance, was “Russian from head to toe.” He had had “something of the roundness, nimbleness, and lightness of [Tolstoy’s] Platon Karataev, of the spontaneity of the muzhik stock, of Vladimir and Kostroma, of the Volga region and our insatiable fields.” The “broad Russian nature” was, of course, about “hooliganism, drunkenness, gratuitous mischievousness, idleness, and indifference to organized work and culture,” but it was also about “the huge reserves of fresh, unspent strength and powerful vital instincts; the blooming health; the wealth and variety of thoughts and emotions.” Both Tolstoy and Lenin had possessed it, and both had been the greater for it.35
This view was unacceptable to the rationalist (Calvinist) wing of the Party. According to one of Voronsky’s most consistent opponents, Platon Kerzhentsev, what the Party needed was “healthy literature,” and what proletarian readers needed to learn was English-style “love of responsibility.” And according to the concluding paragraph of Bukharin’s “Angry Notes,”
What we need is literature for healthy people who march in the midst of real life: brave builders who know life and are disgusted by the rot, mold, morbidity, drunken tears, sloppiness, self-importance, and saintly idiocy. The greatest figures of the bourgeoisie were not drunken geniuses like Verlain, but such giants as Goethe, Hegel, and Beethoven, who knew how to work. The greatest geniuses of the proletariat—Marx, Engels, and Lenin—were great workers, with extraordinary work ethic. Let us stay away from the martyred “poor in spirit,” the holy fools for Christ’s sake, and the café “geniuses for an hour”! Let us stick closer to the wonderful life that is flourishing all around us, closer to the masses remaking the world!36
The rest was up to Averbakh’s RAPP and the Press Section of the Central Committee, headed at the time by Sergei Gusev (Yakov Drabkin, the father of Sverdlov’s last secretary, Elizaveta Drabkina). In April 1927, Voronsky lost influence over the editorial policy of Red Virgin Soil, and on October 13, 1927, the Politburo removed him from the board. His friendship with Trotsky had contributed to the outcome.37
■ ■ ■
Of the Party’s three main tasks of the 1920s—suppressing the enemy, converting the heathen, and disciplining the faithful—the third was by far the most important. As Bukharin reminded the Party in 1922, soon after the introduction of NEP and the banning of internal “factions,” “unity of will” had always been the key to Bolshevism:
What the Philistines of opportunism considered “antidemocratic,” “conspiratorial,” “personal dictatorship,” “stupid intolerance,” and so on, was, in fact, the best possible organizing principle. The selection of a group of like-minded people burning with the same revolutionary passion while being totally united in their views was the first and most necessary condition for a successful struggle. This condition was fulfilled by means of a merciless persecution of all deviations from orthodox Bolshevism. This merciless persecution and constant self-purging welded the core party group into a clenched fist that no force in the world could pry open.
The core group of leaders was surrounded by a wide circle of disciplined “cadres”:
The harsh discipline of Bolshevism, the Spartan unity of its ranks, its “factional cohesion” even during the moments of temporary cohabitation with the Mensheviks, the extreme uniformity of its views, and the centralization of all its ranks have always been the most characteristic features of our Party. All the Party members were extremely faithful to the Party: “Party patriotism,” the extraordinary passion with which Party directives were carried out, and the ferocious struggle against enemy groups wherever they could be found—in the factories, at rallies, in clubs, even in prisons—made our Party into a sort of revolutionary monastic order. This is why the Bolshevik type was so unsympathetic to all the liberal and reformist groups, to everything “leaderless,” “soft,” “generous,” and “tolerant.”
And this is why Christ, according to the Revelation of St. John, was going to spit the lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—out of his mouth. Growing up on Bolshaia Ordynka, across the Drainage Canal from the Swamp, Bukharin had read the Apocalypse “carefully, from cover to cover.” His article on Party discipline ends with the following words: “Having survived a terrible civil war, famine, and pestilence, this great Red country is getting on its feet, and the trumpet of victory is sounding its call for the working class of the entire world, and the colonial slaves and coolies to rise up for the mortal battle against capital. And at the head of that countless army, under glorious flags cut through by bullets and bayonets, there marches the courageous phalanx of battle-scarred warriors. It marches in front of everyone, it calls on everyone, it directs everyone. Its name is: the Iron Cohort of the Proletarian Revolution, the Russian Communist Party.”38
At a time when the Party was gathering strength before the final battle, the challenge was all the greater. “The more our Party grows,” wrote the “Party’s Conscience,” Aron Solts, in 1924, “the harder it is to preserve the comradely relations that were formed during the common struggle, but also the more necessary, and the comrades must feel and understand all the more strongly what is needed in order to maintain such voluntary discipline. It is easier t
o preserve good, comradely relations when there are twenty of us than when we are a group of eighty thousand, as is the case in the Moscow party organization.” Sects in power tend to become churches, and churches tend to become more hierarchical and less exclusive (or, as the Bolsheviks put it, “bureaucratized”), especially at a time when the swamp “engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.” In order to remain an iron cohort, the Party had to heed Lenin’s call: “Fight against this scum over and over again, and, if this scum crawls back in, clean it out over and over again, chase it out and watch over it.”39
The first precondition for internal unity was a strict membership policy. The Bolshevik rites of admission were similar to those of the Puritans. A preliminary screening by the Party cell’s bureau (the congregation’s elders) was followed by a public confession before a general assembly. Candidates presented their spiritual histories and answered questions from the audience. The point was to demonstrate the genuineness of the conversion by presenting a detailed account of one’s earthly career as well as the inner doubts, comforts, temptations, and blessings attendant on the process of regeneration. Witnesses vouched for the candidates’ character and corroborated certain parts of their accounts; the interrogation centered on errors, omissions, and inconsistencies. The principal innovation introduced by the Bolsheviks was the division of all candidates into three categories according to social origin: “proletarians” were more naturally virtuous than “peasants,” who were more naturally virtuous than “others.” The principal innovation introduced by the New Bolsheviks, as distinct from the Old ones, was the relatively low priority given to scriptural knowledge. Before the Revolution, proletarian Party members had needed to become intellectuals; under the dictatorship of the proletariat, most Party intellectuals had to become proletarians of one sort or another (or “Averbakhs,” as Voronsky put it). The only exceptions were the original Old Bolsheviks, who presided, at least nominally, over the dictatorship of the proletariat.40
Within the Party, discipline was maintained by means of regular “checkups” or purges by special committees and constant mutual surveillance by rank-and-file members. As Walzer wrote of the Puritans who had passed various tests of godliness, “Those who remained were drawn into the strange, time-consuming activities of the Puritan congregation: diligently taking notes at sermons, attending endless meetings, associating intimately and continously with men and women who were after all not relatives and, above all, submitting to the discipline and zealous watchfulness of the godly. Puritanism required not only a pitch of piety, but a pitch of activism and involvement.”41
Bolshevism required the same thing—or, as Gusev, Voronsky’s nemesis, put it at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, “Lenin used to teach us that every Party member should be a Cheka agent—that is, that he should watch and inform.” But Bolshevism was in a difficult position: “If we suffer from one thing,” continued Gusev, “it is that we do not do enough informing.” The Party ruled over a vast empire, most residents of which knew little of Bolshevism; it believed that the entry into the first circle of the kingdom of freedom (“socialism in one country”) was possible only after most of those residents had converted to Bolshevism; and it assumed that the most promising converts were workers and peasants, who combined the purity of Jesus’s target audience (“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”) with the “backwardness” that made them susceptible to “that contagion, that plague, those ulcers that socialism had inherited from capitalism.” The Bolsheviks had to keep expanding their missionary work, keep producing new missionaries, and keep recruiting new untutored members, who did not do enough informing and did not have enough resistance to contagion.42
Bolshevism required a pitch of activism and involvement, but it also required strict top-down policing. It could not afford to rely solely on the daily public confessions and mutual criticism sessions common among coresidential sectarians (such as the Shakers, Harmonists, and Oneida Communists), or on the mutual “instruction and admonition” practiced by the New England Puritan congregations (whose salvation did not depend on the conversion of other settlers, let alone the Indians). The Party was a large bureacracy with a monopoly on state power and special access to scarce goods, which tried to remain cohesive and exclusive even as it continued to offer substantial material benefits to potential proletarian recruits. Increasingly, Solts’s “voluntary discipline” had to be manufactured and monitored by special agencies, not least by the Party Control Commission over which Solts presided.
Party “purges” were periodic restagings of admissions rituals with the purpose of cleaning out the scum that had crawled back in or had been missed at the time of joining. Most of those reprimanded or excommunicated were new members, and most infractions had to do with character flaws and lack of self-discipline: “squabbling,” “excessive consumption,” sexual license, drunkenness, violations of Party discipline (“in the form of nonattendance at Party meetings, nonpayment of membership fees, etc.”), nepotism, careerism, embezzlement, indebtedness, and “bureaucratism.” Related to them was “participation in religious rites,” which was common among peasant members and considered a sign of backwardness, not genuine apostasy. More serious were “links with alien elements” (especially by marriage). The least common, and by far the most dangerous, were acts of willful heterodoxy.43
Within sects, different interpretations of revealed truth may lead to schisms and the formation of new sects. Every orthodoxy presupposes the possibility of heresies (“choice” in the original Greek), and all true prophets must warn of false ones (“for false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect”). When one sect acquires the monopoly on political power—by building its own state, as in the case of Islam and Taiping, or taking over an existing polity, as in the case of Christianity, Bolshevism, and the Taliban—heresy can finally be suppressed. The intensity of persecution depends on the state of the orthodoxy: the greater the millenarian expectation and the more beleagered the elect, the greater the need to expose the deceivers and spit out the lukewarm.44
The Bolshevik equivalent of the First Council of Nicaea (the banning of factions at the Tenth Party Congress) coincided with the postponement of the final fulfillment. The politics of NEP consisted of the Central Committee’s defense of the reconciled, routinized, and bureaucratized status quo from a variety of reformations that urged the return to the original millenarian maximalism and sectarian egalitarianism. The Left (the Trotsky opposition, Kamenev-Zinoviev opposition, and United Trotsky-Kamenev-Zinoviev Opposition, among others) kept returning to Lenin’s warning about small-scale production engendering capitalism “daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale,” and urging the immediate uprooting of every whit of every plant while inveighing against “the division of the Party into the secretarial hierarchy and the ‘laity.’” Names, members, and arguments of various oppositions kept changing, but the core claims remained the same: NEP as a retreat from socialism had to end, and the Party as the locomotive of history had to stop being “bureaucratic.”45
Substantively, “the question of questions” (as NEP’s Grand Inquisitor, Bukharin, put it) was what to do with the peasants. Bukharin kept warning against a return to “War Communism” and the desire, on the part of some “eccentrics,” “to declare a St. Bartholomew’s Night against the peasant bourgeoisie.” The opposition kept accusing “the Stalin-Bukharin group” of “denying the capitalist elements in the development of the contemporary village and minimizing the class differentiation among the peasantry.”46
Both sides used statistics produced by Soviet agrarian economists, who were themselves divided into two factions analogous to the Voronsky and Averbakh camps in literary criticism. The Organization-Production school, rooted in prerevolutionary
agronomy and led by the director of the Institute of Agricultural Economics at the Timiriazev Academy, A. V. Chayanov (whose father had been born a serf), argued that the Russian peasant household was not capitalist in nature; that its purpose was not to maximize profit but to satisfy its members’ subsistence needs; that the main cause of rural differentiation was the ratio of workers to consumers (which varied according to family composition); and that the development of capitalism in the Russian village was both unlikely and undesirable. The Agrarian-Marxist school, composed of young Party members and led by the director of the Agrarian Section of the Communist Academy, Lev Kritsman (who had never lived in a village), argued that rural differentiation was caused by unequal access to the means of production; that the Soviet peasantry was becoming increasingly polarized between rural capitalists and agricultural wage laborers; that, given the Party’s monopoly on power, this polarization was a good thing (but probably not as good as the opposition claimed); and that the solution to the “question of questions” consisted of either the victory of socialism as a result of the growth of the cooperative movement (as Lenin predicted in 1923), or the victory of socialism as a result of the victory of capitalism (as Lenin predicted in 1899).47