November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  And what, I ask you, was bad about it?

  Subscription banquets, a tidal wave of banquets! A feast of freedom! How copiously the speeches flowed! Never, in all its centuries, had so much been uttered in Russia! All those toasts and speeches, it seemed, were setting the wheels of history turning! Just a shout or two more and the walls would come tumbling down! And no one was guillotined or shot or imprisoned for banqueting.

  Not true. In Siberia, for instance, even a banquet could land two hundred at a time in the lockup. (All right, it was only for an hour and a half.)

  No, what troubled us was the thought that we were fighting for an illusion. Would revolution ever, at any time, be possible in this hopelessly inert country?

  Meanwhile, the immoderately liberal zemstvo men ungrudgingly spent the pennies collected from peasants on revolutionary propaganda.

  Every important assassination was greeted with pious approval, gloating smiles, and gleeful whispers.

  Don’t call it murder! Where there’s a party, an ideological basis, terror is not murder, it is the supreme expression of revolutionary energy. Not an act of revenge, but a summons to action, an affirmation of life! Terrorists are people of the highest moral sensitivity.

  Educated society moved leftward, both out of conviction and with an anxious ear for shouts from farther to the left. Paralyzed by the clamor to their left, people refused to take a stand: let whoever wants try to stop it, I won’t. They would sign any sort of protest, whether or not they agreed with it.

  The chief executive of the Nikolai Railway hired the “Vienna” Theater for his striking workers, at his own expense. One factory manager apologized to his workers: “I’m an anarchist at heart myself, but I have no choice …”

  Ah, but the fait accompli! What an inspiration! The Publishers’ Union’s proclamation: “I am now in being! And I forbid you to submit so much as a page to the Censorship Committee!” And at once everybody, even the rightists, happily complied! In a flash—censorship was no more! With nary a drop of blood shed.

  But then the compositors established their own, revolutionary censorship: what they didn’t like they wouldn’t set into type.

  The green-ribboned transport workers wrecked locomotives—their way of wresting a constitution from the Tsar. Only revolutionaries had the use of the telegraph—and they transmitted what they saw fit.

  Why didn’t we accept the Manifesto, why didn’t we take advantage of it? Wasn’t it enough? No, it only exacerbated us. We don’t want your Manifesto, we want to crush the serpent underfoot! We don’t want Duma elections—but to crush the serpent once and for all!

  Come to think of it—this is the eleventh anniversary of the Manifesto.

  On the 30th the Manifesto, on the 31st a call from the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies: give weapons to the proletariat and the students!

  “Down with the whole bunch of them—and it’s all ours!” “There will be worldwide rebellion! They’ll kill all the cabbies!”

  General strike in Moscow. No electricity. Dark nights. Students fell trees, light bonfires, sing revolutionary songs in the university courtyard. Socialist Revolutionaries argue with Social Democrats. One woman student, a colonel’s daughter, calls out to her comrades, “Come on, let’s go and get food and revolvers!” They steal through the gates onto Nikitskaya Street. “Alms for the students, food and revolvers!” French rolls and hunks of sausage rain into their baskets, there’s a rustle of banknotes, here a revolver, there a knife is slipped into a pocket!

  Next—pogrom time! Demonstrations with portraits of the Tsar! Any passing student who fails to doff his cap is beaten up!

  But in the hospital left-wing doctors treat only revolutionaries and soldiers. Any simple soul who makes the sign of the cross is refused admission.

  The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies puts out a “financial manifesto": Overthrow the government! Let’s take away its gold, and it will fall! Don’t pay what you owe to the state, accept payment from the state only in gold! The country lies in ruins! (Though it was pretty well intact.) Trade is at a standstill. (Though it showed no sign of stopping.) We want a Con-stit-u-ent Ass-emb-ly!

  Kronstadt sailors agitated for a Constituent Assembly, wrecked a hundred and forty stores and shops, and then calmed down.

  The legal “humorous” journals openly threatened the Tsar with assassination. Freedom of speech! Yes—but only for orators of whom the majority approved. Those who were out of tune with the crowd were howled down, pummeled, bundled off the platform.

  In Baku one gendarme engaged in revolutionary propaganda, and a secret police agent set up a printshop to turn out proclamations.

  The provocateurs in power were driving the people to revolt!

  In the autumn of 1905 many people took fright, left the country, and transferred their money abroad.

  Two bombs were planted in the café of the Bristol and anarchist proclamations said it was “so that we can see the vile bourgeois writhing in their death throes.”

  A governor marched in a street demonstration with students, and they flaunted the red skirts of his coat as banners.

  All Moscow bristled with barricades, mostly a display of hooligan high spirits—overturned police boxes and tramcars. A lady in a fur cloak rides in a hansom cab with bombs under her seat, and the patrol does not, of course, dare to search her. Nobody stood guard on the barricades, no shots were fired from them. There were only a couple of hundred volunteer militia on the Presnya, and they dispersed without trouble, mingling with the general public.

  Intellectuals bought themselves revolvers, although they didn’t know how to use them. Later the problem was getting rid of them. Incapable even of burying the things, they abandoned them in lavatories. Or handed them to the servants. “Here, get rid of this.”

  It hurt to remember: they had held the revolution in their hands and had let it slip away.

  In reality there had been no revolution! It was all window dressing. Talking big.

  What had happened was something more significant than revolution! Russia was in ferment, caused by an excess of accumulated energy, an excess of wealth. There would have been no revolution if the government had been farsighted and bold enough to trust society and open a channel for those forces. Revolution is always the sign of fundamental error on the part of the government.

  What sort of revolution was it anyway? It was all improvisation. Nothing was planned in advance. Two general strikes, sporadic minor mutinies, one urban uprising. All that really mattered had gone before, or began afterward: Terror! Terror! And more terror!

  The sword of justice I yield to the crowd.

  The blind man shall wield it.

  With it son shall pierce mother.

  And daughter slay father …

  In Siberia, though, it had been a bit more serious. Krasnoyarsk was in the hands of revolutionaries for a whole month, administered by the Union of Unions. The troops had to take it in pitched battle. And Chita held out for two months, though it then surrendered to Rennenkampf without a fight. In Vladivostok officers opened fire on a public meeting, and were massacred by sailors. In Elan, and right along the Trans-Siberian, General Meller-Zakomelsky had railwaymen and telegraphers either hanged or stripped naked and beaten with rubber truncheons out in the freezing cold.

  A thousand amnestied criminals were moved from Sakhalin to Irkutsk and dumped there. They joined the revolutionaries and formed gangs of armed robbers. These desperadoes even attacked groups of men in broad daylight, on the main street.

  A soldier in a punitive company was paid thirty kopecks a day. (Thirty is always the figure, for some reason!) And each company jealously insisted on taking its turn to “suppress.”

  While certain Academicians demanded the removal from their staircase of soldiers trying to keep warm there.

  Back in 1895 a skilled workman of peasant origin, who had educated himself by reading, had argued against strikes at his place of work. This was recalled in 1905, and he was shot in the bac
k.

  That year was a testing time for many Russian minds. A year in which it was possible to stop believing that Russia had any future.

  Or was it rather a celebration of what life lived boldly could be, a proud hymn to freedom and the open spaces? Was there any hope that it would return?

  The revolution ran its course, and bread was still a kopeck and a half a pound, meat was still twenty kopecks.

  At the elections to the First Duma, with the police standing by, there were still calls for an armed uprising. And nothing happened.

  Later came the “robberies movement": savings banks, post offices, state liquor shops were plundered wholesale. There were daring raids every day.

  The Moscow Merchants’ Bank was robbed of 800,000 rubles.

  Instructions to terrorists recommended that bombs should be made of cast iron, so that there would be more splinters, and packed with nails.

  A Rostov “laboratory” even issued an illustrated catalogue with testimonials from purchasers of bombs.

  And the field courts-martial? Punitive actions like those against the enemy in a conquered country!

  It was bloody work! Done in a hurry, to quench the bonfires of revolution with blood!

  The field courts-martial were not an initiative, they were a response. They were used in flagrant cases of murder, robbery, bombing, violent crime generally, when there was no need for investigation and when delay in punishment would contribute to the collapse of society. If someone throws a bomb today, hang him tomorrow, and the next bomb thrower may think twice. They’re so brave only if they think they can escape before they’re executed, or benefit from an amnesty.

  In their haste they executed innocent people! Or people who were guilty but did not deserve the death penalty!

  Did that make revolutionary terrorism any more just than field courts-martial? Those clandestine revolutionary tribunals, where sentence of death was passed in the obscurity of the underground, obeyed no code of law but only the dictates of their hatred. Who could see, who could check on those anonymous judges who decided whether a man should live or die?

  He who has drained the heady draft of wrath

  Must either executioner be, or else the hangman’s victim.

  The revolutionary deliberately puts himself in mortal danger, sacrifices himself for his cherished ideals.

  But then his judge may be killed tomorrow for passing sentence.

  It isn’t a trial, it’s rough justice, dealt out by people beside themselves with anger. A bloody revenge, exacted by the government.

  If the revolutionaries kill people, that’s Liberation with a capital “L.” If the government kills someone, that’s hangman’s justice. Night arrests and house searches are a loathsome abuse, whereas an underground bomb factory is a house of prayer for the people’s happiness?

  If you want the bloodshed to stop, if you do not want young men to take up Brownings, don’t encourage them with your approval. Why won’t educated public opinion condemn robbery and murder? If the State Duma had just once condemned terrorism, the need for field courts-martial would never have arisen.

  Gentlemen, the subject of Robespierre’s first speech was: the abolition of capital punishment.

  But what sort of Christian regime is it, you ask, that answers terror with terror?

  Well, the whole civilized world is Christian, yet capital punishment is retained. There are forces so evil that there is no other defense against them. Abolish the field courts-martial—and you’ll get lynch law. After the San Francisco earthquake a man was shot for washing his hands in drinking water.

  Overworked executioners could not hang them all, and long trains crawled across Siberia to the penal colonies.

  Just look at the figures, gentlemen! During the first year of Russian “freedom,” counting from the day of the Manifesto, 7,000 people were killed and 10,000 wounded. Of these, official punitive action accounts for fewer than one-tenth. Twice as many government officials were killed. Who was being terrorized by whom? The rest were ordinary citizens unlucky enough to be killed or wounded by expropriators, revolutionaries, plain hooligans, bandits—or punitive squads.

  For example: A priest in church was reading from the Epistle about reconciliation. A student took a shot at him and ran out of the church.

  Another example: An artisan entered an apartment where he was known. A five-year-old boy approached him trustingly. He cut the boy’s throat and stole … some linen.

  Another incident: Two old people murdered, for what turned out to be forty-four kopecks.

  The record also includes a guest who murdered his hosts because they failed to offer him beer.

  Random shots were fired at train windows.

  Trains were wrecked for no particular reason.

  One terrorist shot and killed a cabby’s horse.

  In Petersburg a twelve-year-old boy killed his mother because she wouldn’t let him go out to play. And a girl of thirteen killed her brother with an ax.

  I will stir the thrill of killing in the girlish heart.

  Awaken bloodstained dreams in children’s minds.

  You only have to make a start, start killing, in the name of the rights of man and the citizen, say, and the epidemic of killings soon gets out of control. We, the Russian intelligentsia, had nourished our enlightened intellects on this for some twenty-five years. Remember the letter written by a member of the People’s Will Party to his friends, on the eve of his execution: “The pity is that we are perishing to bring shame on a dying monarchy, and for little else. We wish you a more productive death than ours. God grant you, dear brothers, every success in your terrorist activity!”

  “Tell me, though, tell me, do you or don’t you believe in the people?”

  “The people by itself is not enough.”

  “What is more important than the people? What else is there?”

  “There’s the roof under which the people live. A common home for the people, otherwise known as the Russian state. As long as the roof exists, we do not value it. No need, we say, to treasure and preserve anything in Russia—pilfer and burn, as though it all belonged to somebody else.”

  “But we can’t avoid following the universal path of progress either!”

  “In the West progress has a powerful mainspring of its own, which governs the whole of Western life. Here it’s obviously rather different. Anyway, is progress what we want for ourselves? We say ‘progress,’ but the word pounding in our hearts is ‘revolution.’ What makes Europe so interesting to us, so seductive? The fact that revolution emanates from there. Anyway, what is progress? Nobody has yet explained why millions of people crowded together in one place are supposed to be cleverer than people settled at comfortable intervals over a great expanse. Why should the experience of the first group be preferred to that of the second? Besides, whoever takes the lead and moves quickly ahead risks missing the fork in the road and marching on to nowhere. Western Europe has made some very dubious choices since the Middle Ages and yet we are unwilling to try anything of our own, we just follow them, treading where they have trodden.”

  To keep her post the professor would obviously have to conceal her true views from her students, dealing only with the dim and distant Middle Ages—and in Western Europe at that. If she had taught Russian history she would have been driven out of the Bestuzhev Institute long ago.

  Past the Grenadiers’ barracks. Then down Monetnaya. Three tram stops—only there was no such route.

  But why was Dmitriev so long? Was he unhurt? Was he still alive? Vera shivered.

  Beyond the windows—a normal quiet evening. No shots, no fires. Was it all a mistake? Maybe they’d got it wrong?

  How could you have a revolution when there were no longer any revolutionaries?

  In any assembly, any gathering of educated people, Andozerskaya felt out of things and quickly tired. Making friends was difficult for her. Perhaps she ought not to go out at all?

  A marvelous flow of argument. A clever woman!
But Vorotyntsev was too tired to go on debating.

  There’s just one thing I want to tell you … But I can’t find the right moment … But you know what I mean, don’t you?

  No, no … I thought we just had the same way of looking at things …

  Why don’t you ask me, your sister? Why won’t you look at me? This isn’t a joke. You’re putting a rope around your neck!

  The younger lady wouldn’t sit down for a moment, she was like a new bride sleeplessly awaiting her bridegroom. One moment muttering some outrageous lines by Voloshin, the next shuddering at scenes which only she could see. And suddenly she stopped, there was no one behind her—embraced them all with her eyes, their yearning, the expectation that transcended all differences, the uniqueness of that evening!—shuddered at the beauty of it all, eager to share with them the beauty of this, their own moment, before the knock at the door, before the spell of expectation was broken by crude reality!

  She felt with all her fingers for the wall behind her and, propped against it, spoke as if she was delivering a monologue to a piano accompaniment.

  “Friends! How beautiful and how terrible is this feeling! Whither are we bound? What is about to happen? Something grandiose and terrifying is imminent. We are rushing toward the abyss—of that there is no doubt! Rushing ahead in a train with an idiot driver! Faster and faster! Faster, ever faster! A steep incline! Derailment is inevitable, the carriages rock wildly, the crash will come any moment, nothing can save us! But ah, the terrible beauty of it! You must admire it! And how thrilled those who survive will be to know! Our destruction is inevitable, but what form it will take we cannot even imagine, and in that there is a certain fascination.”

  Her words found some response. Some of the others were affected.

  The atmosphere was oppressive. A brooding calm. If only the storm would break!

  It is “fatally inevitable.” Something is about to happen!

  The sooner it breaks, the less dreadful, the less dangerous it will be!