A people’s militia is to be established on the streets.
All offices and trade enterprises are to continue working without interruption.
The garrison stationed in Efremov (a reserve company) is to swear allegiance to the new government, following the example of the garrisons in Pet-rograd, Moscow, and other cities of Russia.”
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At dawn Rachinskii appeared at the printer’s, looking tired and pale, but determined. Pinned to his coat was an enormous red ribbon.
He entered and, in a theatrical gesture, with great clamor, flung a gendarme’s saber and a holstered revolver onto a table. It turned out that the railway workers had disarmed the bearded gendarme at the station, and Rachin-skii, who witnessed the incident, claimed the weapons as the first trophy of the revolutionary committee.
Then came a tall gray-haired man with a kind, bewildered face—the new commissar of the Provisional Government, Kushelev. He didn’t even ask how it came about that he was appointed to this high office.
Instantly a new decree was issued, over his signature, congratulating the populace of the little town on Russia’s liberation from her age-old yoke. A meeting of representatives from all levels of society was scheduled for 1:00 PM in order to discuss immediate concerns related to the latest events.
Never in my life have I seen as many happy tears as in those days. Kushelev wept as he signed the decree.
His daughter had come with him—a tall, shy young woman wearing a kerchief and a short sheepskin coat. As her father was signing the decree, she stroked his graying hair and spoke in a trembling voice:
“Papa, don’t get so agitated.”
In his youth Kushelev had spent ten years in exile in the far north. He had been sentenced for belonging to a revolutionary student group.
A boisterous, incoherent, happy time began.
A people’s assembly met for days on end in the hall of the zemstvo administration. This zemstvo administration became known as the “convention.” It was steamy in the “convention” from the breath of hundreds of people.
Red flags fluttered in the February wind.
People from the villages streamed into town for news and instructions. “If only they’d hurry it up with our land,” said the peasants. All the streets around the zemstvo were blocked with wide sledges and strewn with hay. Everywhere people shouted about land, redemption payments, and peace.
Elderly men with red armbands and revolvers at their belts—the people’s militia—stood at the intersections.
The astounding news would not cease. Nicholas abdicated the throne at the Pskov railway station. Passenger train service was interrupted throughout the country.
Prayer services were conducted in honor of the new government in Efre-mov’s churches. Almost all convicts were released from prison. Classes were suspended, and schoolgirls ran around the town ecstatically distributing orders and announcements of the commissar.
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On the fifth or sixth day, I met the shoemaker from Bogovo at the “convention.” He told me that Shuiskii, having learned of the revolution, was preparing to leave for the city. Just before leaving he climbed a ladder to the top of his tiled stove and pulled out from beneath the uppermost tile a small bag of gold coins; then he missed a step, fell, and was dead by evening. The shoemaker had come to town to hand over Shuiskii’s money to the commissar of the Provisional Government.
It was as if the town and people were no longer themselves. Russia had found its voice. Out of the blue, inspired orators appeared in tongue-tied Efre-mov. They were, for the most part, workers from the railway yard. Women cried their hearts out listening to them.
Gone was the typical dejected and sullen appearance of Efremov’s residents. Their faces grew younger, and their eyes thoughtful and kind.
They were passive townspeople no longer. They were all citizens now, and this word brought with it obligations.
And, as if on purpose, the days stayed sunny; crystalline ice thawed, and a warm breeze rustled the flags and carried joyous clouds over the little town. The breath of early spring was in the air—in the thick blue shadows, and in the damp nights that hummed with people’s voices.
I was in a frenzy. I was exhilarated. I could hardly grasp what would happen next. I couldn’t wait to go to Moscow, but the trains were not running yet.
“Wait and see,” Osipenko was saying to me, “this is only a prologue to the great events advancing on Russia. So try to keep a cool head and a warm heart. Save your strength.”
I went to Moscow on the very first train, carrying a pass signed by Kushelev, the commissar of the Provisional Government.
Nobody saw me off. There was no time for farewells.
NOTES
Barkhatnye knigi were the ancient registers of the Russian nobility.
The stanzas cited do not correspond to the standard text of the Marseillaise.
Chapter Fourteen
Roman Gul, We’re in Power Now
Roman Gul was born in Penza in 1896, a city he romanticized and loved. After World War I he served briefly in the White Army during the opening phase of the Russian Civil War of 1918–1920. Barely managing to survive the early Red Terror, he wound up an émigré. He spent many years in Berlin, Paris, and ultimately New York. He chronicled the cultural life of Russian émigrés in Berlin and Paris in a two-volume memoir from which this selection is taken. He was well known as a novelist with several works, most notably Azef, being translated into several languages. In New York, in 1959, he was chosen to be editor of Novyi zhurnal (New Review), the leading Russian language quarterly in the United States. Taken from Roman Gul, Ia unes Rossiiu [I Carried Russia with Me]. New York:Most, 1981.
In those December days of 1917 Russia was at the height of its time of “damnation.” A previously unseen and unknown passion for universal destruction, universal extermination and a wild hatred for law, order, justice, peace, and tradition spewed forth from the bowels of the populace. Just as in [Dostoevsky’s novel] The Possessed, “everything shifted from its foundations.” As the formulations said, “Everything has to be turned over and placed bottom-side up.” “It is necessary to unleash the lowest, the most vile passions, so that nothing will hold back the populace in its hatred and thirst for extermination and destruction.” All these wild ravings of Bakunin were incarnated now in everyday Russian life. It was precisely the sort of all-out popular rebellion which Pushkin had called “senseless and merciless.” During this loathsome rebellion, we . . . lived. “Pillage what’s been pillaged!” went the slogan and in Penza they senselessly pillaged all the stores on Moscow Street. “Burn the landlords’ estates!” “Kill the bourgeoisie!” And they burned and
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killed all who were “marked for annihilation.” After all, there were no longer courts and judges, prisons nor police. Everything was torn from its foundations, just as Shigalev and Verkhovenskii desired.
In Penza on the square in front of the railroad station a captain passing through the city was killed by a mob just because he hadn’t taken off his insignia. After stripping the dead man naked they whooped and laughed while dragging the large white body to and fro through the snow of Moscow Street. Then a drunken frenzied soldier bellowed “The power is ours now! The people’s.” They burned Grushetskii, the notary, alive in his estate, not allowing him to escape from the burning house. The landowner Skripkin was killed in his estate and his naked corpse was stuffed into a barrel of sauerkraut “just for amusement.” All this was done with wild laughter. “The power is ours now! The people’s.”
In hatred and passion for extermination they killed not only people, but also animals: the non-plebian, non-proletarian kind. In the horse-breeding farm of an acquaintance they broke the backs of the trotting horses with iron bars because they belonged to the “master.” During the plundering of ou
r estate a “revolutionary little peasant” took our female trotter named Volga and, harnessing her to a plow, began to whip her maliciously. Let her croak, she was the master’s. . . . “Trotters are of use to masters, but now there ain’t no masters.” In another estate they cut out the tongue of a stud horse, and in Days of Damnation Ivan Bunin described how on an estate near Elets peasant men and women (“the revolutionary people”) tore out all the feathers of the peacocks and let the bloodied birds loose “naked.” Why? Well, because “now there’s no need for peacocks, now everything is for the laboring classes, not the masters.” Bolshevik agitators screamed this now until they were hoarse. And this had a mystical effect. “Now everything is different,” “Now power belongs to the people,” “Now we are all free,” “Now there are no prisons!” “Now there aren’t any police or constables,” “Now everything is ours, the people’s.” I saw with my own eyes how the people believed in this now out of foolishness and blindness.
I’ll tell you about another wild, senseless murder. At the estate next to us in the village of Evlashev they murdered Maria Vladimirovna Lukina, an old woman landowner. Fearing for her, her friends tried to talk her into leaving the village and moving to town. But the stubborn old woman answered: “I was born in Evlashev and I’ll die in Evlashev.” She indeed died in Evlashev.
Her murder was conducted according to all the rules of “revolutionary democracy.” The peasants of Evlashev debated the bloody deed in a village gathering. Anyone could speak. A deserter from the front, the Bolshevik hooligan Budkin, incited the people towards murder, but other peasants spoke
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up against murder. When the majority, enflamed by Budkin, voted to kill the old woman, those who did not agree asked for a decree stating that they were not involved. The gathering pronounced a “resolution” to kill the old woman and to grant those who did not agree a decree.
Straight from the gathering, armed with fence stakes, the crowd thronged to the Lukin estate to kill the old woman together with her daughter, whom the whole village had known since childhood and half-affectionately and half-jokingly called “little chick.” One of the peasants warned M.V. Lukina that they were coming to kill her. But the old woman didn’t even make it to the barn. The “revolutionary people” killed her in the yard with the stakes. But “little chick” experienced a miracle. All bloody, she came to her senses near the carriage house with her Irish setter licking her face. Accompanied by the setter, she managed to crawl to the nearby farmstead of the Sbitnevs and they took her to the hospital in Saransk.
I emphasize that the whole peasantry was not totally possessed by the madness of murder, pillaging, and arson. There was also a minority which did not agree, but it was overwhelmed by the Bolshevik fervor of the deserters, who gushed into the countryside from the front.
I remember how “little chick” Natalia Vladimirovna Lukina came to see us. Her head was bandaged, and she could move her neck only with great difficulty. Telling about the murder of her mother, she cried plaintively, while pathetically smiling at something. As strange and as unnatural as it may seem, she didn’t bear any malice towards those who murdered her mother and the peasants who nearly beat her to death.
“They’re beasts, simply beasts. . . . But when they found out that I wasn’t dead, but in the hospital, women from Evlashev started to visit. They took pity on me, cried, brought eggs, cottage cheese . . .”
“Oh, they were probably afraid that they would have to answer for their deeds!”
“No, what are you saying? Whom would they have to answer to? There are no authorities. No, it’s true. They pitied me . . .” Then “little chick” cried, drooping her bandaged head. In my opinion, in her spiritual condition there was something Christian, but at the same time there was a submission to an all-engulfing evil that I found unpleasant.
I would like to emphasize one fact of the Russian Revolution that has never been written about by anyone, i.e., how Russian people of wealth and means (whom the Marxists called the “propertied classes,” “bourgeoisie,” “exploiters,” and “capitalists”) accepted the loss of their property. Bolshevik writings talk about the “resistance of the bourgeoisie,” the “conspiracy of the bourgeoisie” and how the “heroic Bolsheviks” finally triumphed over the pernicious bourgeoisie. It is all a shameless lie. The Russian “bourgeoisie” (if
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one wishes to call it by that name) lost its property in isolation (without trying to organize), without a whimper, without resistance. While it is true that during the February Revolution there was a so-called “Union of Landholders,” it existed primarily on paper. All it did was send reports to the revolutionary Minister of Land Affairs about disorders, pillaging, and arson. The minister, busy with revolutionary affairs, probably never even answered any of these communications since he had other concerns. By October, this “union” had already dissolved.
In general, Russians easily part with material things. In my opinion, they do so much more easily than Westerners. I recall what the chairman of the Penza local government, a young well-educated landowner named Er-molov (a relative of the famous general Ermolov), said when at a huge gathering some Bolsheviks and Mensheviks began to interrupt his speech with demagoguery: “Well, what about your land?!” He answered scornfully: “My land? You know gentlemen, I won’t stoop down to join the crush of the crowd rushing to pick up fallen apples. I once had land. Now I won’t. That’s it.”
The same gloating shouts were heard at a meeting in Petrograd at which the chairman of the State Duma M.V. Rodzianko was speaking. “That’s all fine and good,” they shouted, “but what about your land?” He replied: “As the Constituent Assembly decides, that’s how it will be.” Like all sound-minded people, he clearly understood that in Russia all land belonging to landlords, the state, and the nobility would be transferred to the peasantry. There wasn’t any attempt at “resistance” by property owners.
In Penza during those accursed days I ran into Olga L’vovna Azarevich (her first husband was prince Drutskii-Sokol’ninskii, and by birth she was a princess of the Golitsyn family). She had lost everything. Through ill fortune there wasn’t even any money left in the bank. In fact she had much to lose: her estate Muratovka with 3000 desiatinas of land [8,100 acres], a distillery, a sheep-raising enterprise, many horses, cows, a well-furnished home. Everything was plundered and pillaged. She managed to donate some valuable paintings to the museum of the Penza art school so that they would not perish. In spite of everything she did not despair. “Oh well,” she said, “God gives, God takes away.” I don’t think the Lord our God could ever be involved in parceling out latifundia, much less employing insane, wild, drunken soldiers to misappropriate them. Nonetheless, such a degree of not being bound by the bounties of this world is, in my opinion, wonderful. And this very Russian feeling I have observed among many property owners. Russians are not strongly bound to land. As Marina Tsvetaeva wrote: “I know, I know that earthly wonder is a wonderful carved cup, which is no more ours than the air or the stars.”
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In emigration, in the city of Nice, Olga L’vovna ran a tiny café for Russian emigrants. Day after day she worked, went to the market, and cooked. She died in Nice at a venerable old age. Nobody ever heard a complaint from Olga L’vovna, or lamentations about lost silver and gold, although she once possessed it in abundance. In her life, as in many others, there was something else, something more precious than silver or gold.
Chapter Fifteen
Sergei Mamontov, Civil War: A White Army Journal
The Russian Civil War (1918–1920) is the setting here. A soldier in the White Army, Mamontov provides a unique perspective on the war in his book of memoirs. He notes: “It is often difficult to distinguish one’s feelings. Simultaneously there was fear and valor, loathing and compassion, timidity and a sense of duty, desperation and
hope.” He is relentlessly truthful and markedly dispassionate in his judgments. His two-page introduction to the memoirs is as cogent a summation of the Civil War as one can find anywhere. Taken from Sergei Mamontov, Pokhody i koni [Marches and Stallions]. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981.
TO THE UKRAINE
My brother and I became totally convinced of the inability of various political groups to get us south. I even doubt whether such groups existed, and if they did, whether they were not Bolshevik fronts. It was easy to fall into a trap and best to count on our own resources. Once in the hallway my brother simply said to me:
“Let’s go.”
“Let’s go. But when?”
“Now. Why put it off?”
“Good. Let’s go.”
And that was all. Mother silently packed a small suitcase for the two of us. Father saw us off at the Briansk Railway Terminal, gave us money, and blessed us. We parted forever. He died of typhus in 1920.
A railroad man put us into a freight car. The train set off southward into the unknown. The next day we arrived in Zernovo, the last town under Bolshevik
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control. Beyond lay the Ukraine, occupied by the Germans. We were lucky; there were no border guards in Zernovo. I waited at the station while my brother went to the farmer’s market. He found a peasant from the Ukraine who agreed to take us south for a hundred rubles. In the meantime he advised us to walk out of town and hide in a wheat field along a road where he would pick us up at night. That’s what we did.
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