by Victor Serge
Now the White army is hastening towards Petrograd, which Denikin’s newspapers are already announcing as captured. Panic-stricken rumors are circulating in the city. The Whites who are living among us can scarcely conceal their joy. Ah! They’ve really won the game this time.
We are given lists of the names of regiments which have gone over to the enemy. The Red Army is collapsing. “Jewish rule” is at an end!
The fact is that the Whites are just outside Gatchina. Zinoviev urges all the northern towns to send detachments “which may be weak but must be experienced” to assist Petrograd. “Comrades, hasten, for every hour is precious. Leave everything else till later. Petrograd must be saved at all costs.”
June 2-4, 1919
After a miraculous escape from the bullets of the firing squad, the wife of commissar Kupche has returned to Petrograd. After the execution of her husband—from whom she was separated only a few moments before his death—she was taken away together with the wives of several other Reds. Their fate was not yet settled, though it seemed almost certain. The next morning they were lined up at the edge of a wood and told to take their clothes off. They understood what would happen to them. Comrade Kupche fell beneath the bullets of the White guns, miraculously unscathed, while all the other women lay dead. The executioners did not bother to finish off their victims, being quite certain that no human assistance could come to them. Comrade Kupche reached our outposts virtually naked—having kept nothing but a ragged shirt—her feet lacerated and starving with hunger. She is a small woman with brown hair, very unaffected; she speaks softly, almost in a whisper, and when she speaks you would think something inside her was broken. In her pale face her eyes are anguished, with a look of exhaustion.
The White army is gathering outside Petrograd. Everywhere it has gone it has left a trail of blood behind it. Certainly during the Great War men of all nations fell in some very squalid barbarities. But I don’t think that ever, anywhere, the contempt for life and for human suffering have been systematically developed in such a degraded fashion. A few miles from a civilized city, prisoners are being wantonly murdered. Our newspapers are full of such stories—whose authenticity I can vouch for—and in fact they give only a very weak impression of the horror of what is going on. “All Jews, Communists and former officers fall out!” That was the formula used. Torture, hanging, shooting, slaughter with cold steel, beatings and sham trials—these were the alternative outcomes. As for the Red soldiers who were taken prisoner, they were simply sent to the rear for a few days, long enough to give them new officers and to make them march against us—willingly or under compulsion.
The law is: kill or be killed. I know very well that if the Whites enter the city all those who are dear to me can expect no mercy. Everyone knows this as well as I do. The air is permeated with a vague smell of blood, creating among us a state of mind in which terror cannot fail to grow. We can sense the approach of terror just as before thunderstorms you can feel the air charged with electricity.
On May 31, Pravda carried two significant and terrible paragraphs: “Death to Spies!” Lenin and Dzerzhinsky have addressed an appeal to everyone to be vigilant in stamping out espionage. Fortunately we are in no way predisposed to spy mania. Otherwise the situation would be very grave. For in time of civil war the spy can be virtually anyone. But perhaps just because the terrible threat hangs over everyone, it has to remain, and in fact generally does remain, ineffective. Nonetheless it is a direct order to show no pity. And in such circumstances such an order must be taken quite literally. On the third page of the same issue of the official organ of the Communist Party, the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Third Army announces: deserters will be shot. “Several dozen deserters, fugitives, looters and spreaders of panic have been punished with all the severity that traitors deserve.” “We were defeated near Yamburg because all the comrades of the Red Army have not yet acquired, to an equal degree, the sense of duty towards the working class and the revolution.” Why does the revolution also have to have recourse to this sickening use of military force? We don’t ask about that any more. This is not the time for arguments. The revolution is at war. If it doesn’t suppress panic, the physical cowardice of the masses at certain times, the demented, cowardly selfishness of individuals, then it is lost: and its loss will mean that the blood of these same people will flow in huge quantities.
The treachery of the Semenov regiment—which was not an isolated occurrence—has borne fruit. The Special Commission (the Cheka) has published a list of twelve people, most of them women, belonging to the families of the officers of the Third Regiment of fusiliers, which shamefully went over to the enemy; these twelve have been arrested as hostages. The same commission has announced that it has shot twenty-seven people: seven Whites, all former officers, one of whom held a position of trust in the Red Army, the captain of a destroyer and his senior officers; three accomplices of the ataman Bulak-Balakhovich who went over to the Whites with a whole detachment of cavalry and who today is notorious for his atrocities; the eight thieves who stole a lorry load of sugar belonging to the City Food Committee.
June 8, 1919
The life of our fine hungry city, which is a battlefield, does not stop for a second. Hunger is permanently established in at least 300,000 homes; anxiety is everywhere. Like tunnels dug in opposing directions, mingled in the depths of the soil, treachery, plots and terror pursue each other all around us, amongst us. Lines of fifty to a hundred people stand outside the bakeries where the commune distributes to everybody the bread it has available. The same day, I heard the commissar in charge of supplies, the athletic Badayev, who was a deputy in the Duma and then a convict in Siberia, say with a frown: “I have reserves for less than four days”; and a comrade from the Special Commission added, “… within a week the Whites will try something at the rear.” The same evening, I stopped by a canal with a group of idlers who were watching British airplanes maneuvering above us. In the distance we could hear explosions. A woman told us that the previous day railway workers had been killed by a bomb at the station; a sailor spoke to us about the fire at the Kronstadt supply depot which was still burning. It was a light, mild evening, and we were outside a smart gardening shop.
For despite everything life goes on. Perhaps we shall be slaughtered tomorrow; that doesn’t matter. The main thing is to keep calm and resolute today, and to be able to think of something else from time to time. Today, Sunday, during the funerals of Tolmachev, Rakov, Kupche and Tavrin, there was an artistic oasis amid the sorrowful and threatened city. Hundreds of people came to the small white hall of the Conservatory to listen to music by Glazunov. The great composer was there himself, tall and stooping, his broad shoulders gaunt, with pallor, weariness and anemia visible in the heavy creases of his face. For, though he is a great artist, he is not one of those who fiddle things in order to live comfortably during these days of starvation. The blockade creates three main categories of victims: children, old people, and artists and scholars—three vulnerable groups whom we strive to protect (but how is it possible to save them all?). It was a charming morning of good music. There was a young woman, blonde, graceful and slender like a Greek statue, a wonderful artist. For a long time she too held this audience charmed by her violin-playing. Then, in a smart black dress-coat, as though at a fashionable reception in the old days, Maximov sang Heine’s Lieder.
One day, when these things are discussed with a concern for justice and truth, when, in the society of the future that we shall ultimately build, where all the wounds of humanity will have been healed, then the revolution will be praised because it never, even in its most tragic days, lost the concern for art; it never neglected rhythms, fine gestures, beautiful voices full of pathos, dream-like settings, poems, anthems played on the organ, the sobbing notes of violins. Never. And I cannot help discovering in this obstinate quest for beauty, at every hour of the civil war, stoicism, strength and confidence. Doubtless it is because the Red city is suffering and fighting so th
at one day leisure and art shall be the property of all.
Certainly no other city at war has the solemn countenance of Petrograd today. Elsewhere often even under shellfire you find musical cafés, drunkenness, women dolled up in bars to distract those whose job it is to kill others or to get themselves killed. Here, on this grey, rainy Sunday I have seen only two things—and I have travelled all over the city—art and mourning.
It is an austere mourning. In an almost deserted street—there is very little movement on Sundays, outside the main thoroughfares—I met Communists who were going to the funeral. Young men and women, all with similar clothes and similar hair-styles, in military dress of greenish brown and black leather, with revolvers at their side and red flags in their hands—each group of brave young people looks the same, with candid faces in many of which there is still something childlike.
We shall not be destroyed! This soul of the revolutionary city contains too much beauty, this flesh and blood of the city contain too much energy!
June 10, 1919
Lull. Yudenich is forty miles away at the most. The situation is imperceptibly getting ever more tense. Work carries on without excessive excitement, and the roads show the normal signs of life. Just now, not far from the Warsaw Station, at the exact spot where, in July 1904, Sazonov’s bomb blew Plehve’s carriageb to pieces, I passed a regiment on its way to the front, that is, to the outer suburbs. Women and friends were mingling with the soldiers, carrying their haversacks. Pitiable faces on the verge of separation, with trembling lips and swollen eyelids—and often they were trying very hard to still look brave! Men no longer go off to the front drunk, singing patriotic songs, with panic in their hearts and madness in their brains. That was all right for the other war, for the insane war. This one, where they understand why they are fighting, is a dirty job, nothing more, which they accept without weakness—but with sadness, because now it’s not a question of being soldiers but simply of being men.
Further on, young men are training in the street. At a given signal the groups of kneeling men jump up, spread out and advance towards an imaginary enemy. Three lads have just taken shelter behind a pile of sand that has been brought here for some maintenance work. They are laughing. A worker stops to tell them his experiences as a former soldier.
This evening at the Great Dramatic Theater, Smirnova dances. She is slender, sinewy and graceful, and seems to be carried away by the rhythms that surround her. They perform a scene from l’Arlésienne, Glazunov’s Salome, and an exquisite little piece called Liebesleid (sufferings of love), melancholy and luminous.
On the Karelian front, White bands have appeared. If a serious attack were launched in the north, we could well be lost.
June 12, 1919
The Red city knows nothing as yet. But it is on the very verge of disaster.
This evening’s Izvestia announces that tomorrow, at the People’s Hall, there will be a meeting to mark the funeral ceremonies for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. An instruction from Trotsky, countersigned by Zinoviev, is published on the front page: “You are instructed to establish the family situation of all former officers who have been integrated into the command structure of the Red Army and to inform them that the consequences of any treachery will fall on their families. Make all former officers sign a statement that they have received this information.” This precautionary measure, agreed a long time ago, had never been put into practice. For it is important to stress that the measures enforced by the revolution, terrible as some of them maybe, have been made necessary by the audacity, perseverance, and unscrupulousness of its enemies. This manner of taking hostages is necessitated by the relentless amorality of the civil war. When White officers kill our soldiers do they think of the families of those whom they are killing?
All Communists have been told to assemble at seven o’clock, by the sector (or administrative district) committees of the city. The instruction has been spread by word of mouth. Between seven o’clock and eight or nine, quite a crowd assembles outside the various party premises. It is made up of working men and women, office workers, and a number of young women. In this district where I live, about two thousand people have responded to the call, without being very sure what it is all about. Shall we have to take arms? People are ready to do so, without any visible display of nerves. The crowd arranges itself, splits up and gets organized, something which is quite difficult, after much tramping about on the deserted square—for under martial law nobody is allowed to move around the streets after eight o’clock at night. The party committees issue special permits which are valid for three days. Around eleven, soldiers and sailors arrive, in an orderly fashion with rifles on their shoulders. Among the soldiers, in the front row, I notice the long hair of a proletarian poet who is highly rated in Communist circles. Here it is party members who occupy positions of responsibility, so important officials from the administration, well-known agitators and commissars are to be found alongside laborers and women who are employed in their offices. News is passed on in a whisper: the Kronstadt forts have been handed over to the Whites by an act of treachery, the Krasnaia Gorka fort, the only defense for Petrograd, on the coast, is in the hands of traitors who are flying the White flag. I dare not believe that these things are true. Doubtless they are exaggerations, as always. For if it’s true … At midnight the Communists are finishing organizing themselves into squads, each of which must contain two armed men, soldiers or sailors, two women and several helpers; meanwhile, in a small hall in the Committee building, a pale, thin young man is reading aloud the instruction on house-to-house searches. And I find out that the rumors are true.
The comrade who tells me this has just come from Smolny. He has seen Zinoviev. Over there, people are very worried.
“So,” I ask, “is this the end?”
My acquaintance shrugs his shoulders.
“Nonsense! We’ll hold out again this time!”
This is the dominant attitude in people’s minds. Nobody believes that the situation is as serious as it is. They’ve seen it all before. They feel confident, with a certain casualness; after all, that is the state of mind of victors, albeit exhausted victors.
A sleepless midnight. A limpid, rather pale twilight gives a faint blue tinge to the far ends of the streets. You might think it was morning, very early morning. The squads set off. We hear their footsteps, lively but harsh, on the paving stones. They have to disarm the Whites in a single night. There must not be one gun left in the attics, the cellars and the private apartments. Twelve thousand Communists and sympathizers (recruited exclusively among working people) are taking part in these house-to-house searches. In the “White” districts, that is, all the districts that are not exclusively inhabited by poor people, houses are ransacked, room by room. The inhabitants’ papers are examined. Rifle-butts echo on the thresholds. The squads of civilians and soldiers, in which men and women of all ages are mixed together, are like bands of insurgents. And that is what they are. Insurgents, who tomorrow will be shot, every single one of them, if today they spare those who are spying on them from innocent-seeming rooms out of the windows of which automatic pistols and Nagant revolvers are being thrown. Bill-posters are going through every street pasting up an order signed Peters: “All weapons remaining in the hands of individuals must be surrendered within twenty-four hours, on pain of death.”
Nothing out of the ordinary has yet happened in this peaceful district of Petrograd. But nonetheless there is often a very clear sense that these are decisive hours. The white light of night seems to become colder and paler; the lifeless streets seem strangely empty; it appears that the city is holding its breath, in the expectation of a sudden outcome.
The telephones are ringing. At the Committee headquarters, some bits of fragmentary conversation are still echoing in my ears.
“There’s no gasoline for the armored cars. The seventeen bourgeois who have been arrested …” Out in the street, two squads pass, and stop to talk for a minute. “Kronsta
dt is on fire … the fleet is deciding what to do …” they say. But they know nothing precise, except that things are happening from one minute to the next.
Three o’clock in the morning. It is light, as on a slightly misty morning, light and cold. Outside a house which is being searched, a young soldier and a schoolgirl are laughing and smoking. Through the window I can see a family group sitting beneath a hanging lamp which has just been switched on, and for some reason the contrast between the electric light and the pale daylight makes me feel sad. There is an old woman and some girls. A sailor has gone up to them, is reading their identity papers, then looking carefully round the room, examining the chests of drawers, the couch, the heavy furniture where a gun could be concealed.