November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Black eyes blazed to either side of Svechin’s nose. “You refuse to realize,” he said, “that you are giving away all along the line. The War Industry Committees, for instance, have let themselves be diverted from helping the army in the field to sapping the regime. In your own way you too, Aleksandr Ivanych, are trying to set thatches on fire.”

  Guchkov did not close his mind to inquiry into his mistakes and no heated retort followed. Still holding the eloquent bridge of his unfathomable pince-nez in one hand, and shading his brow with the other, perhaps against his noisy interlocutor rather than the light, he spoke as though he was trying out the thought on himself.

  “But we cannot renounce the Liberation movement just because the Jews like it and have joined it …”

  And Vorotyntsev told Svechin, “You’re like the Kadets yourself, only the other way around. You’re stuck in an extreme position—it’s always the Jews, you have no eyes for anything else. If I’d wanted to talk about that I needn’t have left Bukovina. But I can mention a number of problems more important than that of the Jews. I’ve come two thousand versts and met the two of you so unexpectedly, and I want to …”

  Want to what?

  Guchkov withdrew his shading hand and looked up at Vorotyntsev. His hazel eyes were not those of an eager young man, and their prominence was perhaps a symptom of his illness, but his expression was still that of a fighter.

  Why this sudden alertness? It must mean something.

  … Want to … what?

  Surely he must need people like Vorotyntsev.

  But a little doubt crept in, did they both have the same thing in mind?

  … Want to …?

  Well, gentlemen, here we are. Don’t tell me that determined, intelligent, and energetic people like us can’t think up some way of saving the situation?

  A large joint of roast beef, surrounded by greens, had been brought in.

  Guchkov didn’t want any, but the waiter carved for the friends, and they got busy.

  They were silent while the waiter was in the room, but even when he left, the conversation was not resumed. Svechin’s silence was as decisive and uncompromising as his words had been before. He ate with enjoyment. Guchkov was obviously saving his appetite for the dinner to come—or perhaps he never ate much. He moistened his lips with red wine from time to time. And also remained silent. Vorotyntsev could not speak out directly, but he had to keep the conversation on course.

  “I’ve been wondering, Aleksandr Ivanych—did Alekseev reply to your letter?”

  Guchkov thoughtfully tapped his pince-nez against a finger.

  “No. But Stürmer answered for him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He forbade me, in the Emperor’s name, access to the army in the field. Or even to hospital trains. And above all, of course, to GHQ. Or to Army Group HQs. It was a cleverly calculated blow.” He frowned. “Without the army—what am I?”

  This was too much for Svechin, and he was ready with his objections again.

  “So what would you do in their place? If you were the head of state, and some public figure with no official post wrote to the Chief of Staff of your armed forces, telling him that your wretched, rotten, slimy regime was decaying at the roots—would you let him go around demoralizing the army still further? Anyway, they aren’t stopping you from visiting the Caucasian Front.”

  Again Guchkov was in no hurry to reply. Without his pince-nez his face was defenseless. His expression was half rueful, half ironic.

  “Stürmer also warned me that I might be banished from the capital. And the Police Department is keeping me under observation … I doubt whether any of the bombers were ever so closely watched … I take care not to mention names on the telephone or in letters. When I am talking to friends or to my brothers we use code names for some people. I shouldn’t be surprised if you too are under observation, Georgi Mikhalich, since you’ve telephoned me several times. A record is kept of all visitors to my house. Right now, I don’t doubt that plainclothesmen have followed my Packard here in a hansom cab and are keeping watch at the entrance.”

  “Well, Alekseev was in trouble too, don’t think he wasn’t,” Svechin said obstinately. “He had to do some explaining to the Emperor of course.”

  “Explain how he could exchange letters with a swine and treacherous spider like me?” Guchkov said sadly, trying hard to smile.

  “Probably. Something like that. And Alekseev presumably disavowed you.”

  Guchkov raised his eyebrows. Lowered them. Accepted it. What could you say? Politics was like that.

  “And that’s one of the main reasons for his illness.”

  “Come on, you said that wasn’t altogether true!”

  “I have heard that he is ill,” Guchkov said with a nod.

  “So now he’ll probably take a lengthy leave, to recover.”

  “Leave?” Guchkov was all ears, and immediately wanted to know who would take Alekseev’s place. He obviously had some special reason for asking.

  Who indeed? Nothing could be more important.

  Svechin obliged. “I don’t mind revealing what I’ve heard. In confidence, of course. They could, obviously, appoint any blockhead they like, but the rumor is that two candidates are under consideration—Golovin and Ruzsky.”

  Golovin? Surely they won’t promote him? Our very own Golovin!

  Guchkov put his pince-nez back on. They seemed to have acquired a more cheerful gleam.

  “Golovin—that would be marvelous.”

  For Vorotyntsev every word Guchkov spoke had to be scrutinized twice. Marvelous? For what purpose? In what sense?

  “He’ll move the army around boldly,” Vorotyntsev prophesied, “but he himself will move very cautiously. He’s changed a great deal, gentlemen. He’s with us now, QMG of the 9th. He acts only with the permission of his superiors. Without it his abilities seem to be paralyzed.”

  “Would it be for long?” Guchkov asked, keenly interested. “And what would you do in that case, Georgi Mikhalich? Go back to GHQ?”

  He had guessed … Vorotyntsev rubbed his beard vigorously. His eyes said more than his words.

  “In the first place, will Golovin want that? And will it be Golovin anyway? Second, Alekseev would be very unhappy about it. And in the third place—am I needed there, Aleksandr Ivanych? Is that where I’m needed? How can I decide?”

  He looked at Guchkov expectantly, hopefully.

  “Ruzsky?” Guchkov said as though running over a list of his own subordinates. “He’s a bit sluggish. And too full of himself. Who else could there be?”

  Guchkov no longer wore that look of “civilian sitting sadly at home with nothing to do.” He had pulled himself together, come to life again. He was thinking hard.

  “Why don’t you smoke, gentlemen? You’d no doubt like to.”

  Their fingers had in fact been itching for some time, but they had spared Guchkov. Now Svechin reached out and opened the ventilation pane. They started smoking—Svechin his pipe—lolling comfortably. Guchkov carefully ran a stiffly starched napkin over his lips, around his lips, under his mustache, and over the top of his beard. He laid the napkin down.

  Rose. And with one hand under his coattails, limping slightly, almost imperceptibly, started pacing the confined space of the private room. Just a few steps, this way and that. He seemed to gain strength, and even to look younger, before their very eyes.

  He sat down again and locked his hands before him.

  “Gentlemen. I hope I can rely on your silence in all circumstances? Have I your word of honor?”

  Of course, it went without saying.

  And suddenly, with his head tilted challengingly, they had before them the famous duelist. There was a sprinkling of gray, no more, at the front of his close-cropped hair and around the edges of his beard.

  “Gentlemen, I see nothing to prevent me from sharing with you some ideas which it is still not too late to … carry out.”

  At last! The moment Vorot
yntsev had been waiting for! He was not too late. He was there.

  Guchkov was looking mostly at him.

  Conscious of his fame and of his authority in their country.

  And fired by that daring, that eternal need to take risks, which had driven him all his life.

  “What I would like your views on is this: What ought patriots to do when, in their country’s time of distress, they see it ruled by court favorites and buffoons? What must courageous people with position, influence, and weapons do? People to whom everything has been given, but from whom history will demand a strict accounting?”

  [41]

  (ALEKSANDR GUCHKOV)

  Fyodor Guchkov, Aleksandr’s grandfather, was a house serf whose mistress owned land in the Maloyaroslavl district. At the end of the eighteenth century, aged thirteen, he found himself in Moscow, apprenticed to a cloth merchant for twenty kopecks a month (ten for his owner, ten for himself). He married a serf, redeemed himself and his family, and set up a mill with English looms at Preobrazhenskoye. According to family tradition, it was his idea to set fire to Moscow when Napoleon was advancing into the city. All that he had was destroyed in the fire, but he replaced and expanded it. He nonetheless handed over his factory and his business to his sons while he still had years to live, and was later banished to Petrozavodsk for contumacious adherence to the Old Belief. His son Ivan fell in love with a married French woman, stole into her apartment through the kitchen disguised as a coachman, took her away from her husband, and married her, thereby breaking with the Old Belief. There were four sons of that marriage, one of whom was Aleksandr. He was in some ways an embodiment of the Moscow merchant type, and was on the boards of various banks and joint-stock companies, but was not rich: he made over his inheritance to his brother Fyodor and was not in his father’s view much of a businessman. The pattern of Aleksandr’s life was, indeed, unusual for one of his origins and milieu, proving yet again that character is fate.

  He began to take a passionate interest in social matters while still a schoolboy. His family, descended from serfs, revered Aleksandr II, and when Zasulich shot Trepov, Sasha Guchkov took the side of the government at school: the would-be assassin had raised her hand against a trusted servant of the Emperor! His schoolmates beat him for it. But shortly afterward he felt the irresistible attraction of terrorism himself. After the humiliation of the Berlin Congress, and the appearance of a British fleet in the Bosphorus, Sasha decided to kill Disraeli with his own hand, punishing him for his anti-Russian policy, and so vindicating Russia’s honor. He bought a revolver, learned to shoot, saved money to run away to England, and was enraptured by the thought of dying for Russia on the scaffold. But he confided in his brother, his brother betrayed him to their father—and the whole plan was in ruins. (Thirty years later, as the head of a Duma delegation in London, he stood before Lord Beaconsfield’s monument: “And to think you might have died at my hands!”)

  He left the Moscow high school with a gold medal, and Moscow University with a “candidate’s” degree (also a mark of distinction), and went to Germany for five years to finish his education, attending courses in philosophy and economics, after which he wrote a number of works on social landownership, on insurance, on the economy of ancient Novgorod, and carried out research (how we unconsciously anticipate our future selves!) on the possible involvement of Catherine II in the Mirovich plot.

  At twenty-three Guchkov passed the examination for enrollment as an ensign in a grenadier regiment, and this was not just a matter of performing his military service in the manner expected of a university graduate, no more of a formality than his election at twenty-six as an honorary justice of the peace in Moscow, and at thirty-one as a member of the Moscow Municipal Board. Active participation in civil and military affairs always intersected and interacted in Guchkov’s life—he was at once a parliamentary orator, a statesman, the defender of the army, and a crack shot.

  We can be sure that early in life he was painfully conscious of a tendency widespread among the Russian intelligentsia not to be unduly fond of action, to prefer talk and argument, and, if something was undertaken, not to carry it through to the end, but to excuse yourself and others from the conclusive stages. Perhaps because he came from sturdy peasant and merchant stock Aleksandr Guchkov felt within himself the will and ability to act and to carry his actions through to completion. So while his former fellow student Pavel Milyukov was finding lectures and debates more and more enjoyable, Guchkov’s impatience tore him from libraries and lecture rooms, and drove him to fight student duels in Germany, to the battlefield, to the life of action. He was never a spectator but always a participant, and sometimes a reckless one.

  When he heard about the famine in Russia he abruptly left Berlin University and plunged into the wilds of Nizhny Novgorod province, to work as a rural district clerk and help feed the countryside. When the Turks were massacring Armenians, Guchkov rushed to the scene. Guarding the Manchurian Railway while it was under construction was a dangerous business, but Guchkov gave up his municipal activities in Moscow to serve as an officer out there, always eager for a fight. From there it was not far to Tibet, and he journeyed to that country’s holy places. He was tormented by a yearning for heroic action. The Boer War—remote and romantic—broke out, some people got excited over newspaper reports, some sang “The Transvaal Is in Flames,” but Aleksandr Guchkov and his brother Fyodor served as volunteers with the Boers, and even the brave Boers marveled at his coolness in battle: he stopped, under case-shot fire, to disentangle the traces of mules pulling an ammunition cart, saving them from certain death. In those years he wrote more than one farewell letter to his parents, in case death proved unavoidable. He almost lost a leg in the Boer War, and was lame for the rest of his life. He was also troubled by angina from the age of twenty-six. But when the rising of the Macedonian Chetniks against the Turks flared up, Guchkov was on his way to volunteer immediately. Too restless to marry until he was forty-one, he was away again at forty-two for the war with Japan—though this time not with rifle in hand, but as a representative of the Red Cross and the Moscow Municipal Board (which did not save him from a short spell as a prisoner of the Japanese).

  That would probably not have been the end of his instant responses to distant world events, had not the most important events of all (though no one as yet foresaw how profoundly they would affect the world at large) boiled up in the very heart of Russia.

  Everything that Guchkov had done so far, all his eagerness to rush to the rescue, now looked like nothing more than youthful excitability, the preparation of a man who could measure up to great events in the state. The time had come to try him out, to see what feats he could perform for Russia.

  His name was already quite well known, and he was a person of note in Moscow. On his return from Manchuria in the spring of 1905 he learned that he had been chosen by the Moscow City Duma as a delegate to the Conference of Zemstvos in May. More and more of those achieving prominence in that context were not real zemstvo men at all but people like Petrunkevich, Milyukov, Rodichev, the Dolgorukov brothers. The red-hot revolutionary mood of the conference astonished the newly arrived Guchkov. A deputation was elected to advise the Tsar to introduce a constitution, and many delegates fervently hoped that it would be refused an audience, so that they could foment revolution without qualms. The group of moderates around Shipov, Guchkov among them, found themselves a vilified minority. But Guchkov, who was not elected to the deputation, received a personal invitation, while the conference was in progress, to Peterhof to see the Tsar (who had been told of his work for the Red Cross and of his disputes with Milyukov). He was received, conversed with the Tsar for a whole hour, and the meeting took place in the gracious presence of the Empress (who could not possibly foresee that this lowly tradesperson would someday be her fiercest foe). This was immediately after Tsushima, and before the zemstvo deputation was granted an audience. Guchkov spoke as he thought he was entitled to: he was the man of courage offering advic
e to a timid stay-at-home monarch, shut off from real life; advice not to let internal weaknesses get the better of Russia, and in no event to make peace with Japan, which would mean that the machinations of outside powers would decide Russia’s fate, but, having committed himself to the war, to hold out against Japan, and at home to convene quickly, and without complicated elections, an Assembly of the Land, from the gentry, the peasants, and the townsfolk, to appear before it in person, and address it boldly, saying that many mistakes had been made in the past, that they would not be repeated, but that this was not the time for reform, what was needed was to finish the war, and if the country was united Russia could not lose to Japan, and would not lose! The strength that was missing at present would be drawn from the Assembly, and this would be felt by the army, whose spirits would soar, and also in Japan, which based all its expectations on social collapse in Russia. “Yes, you’re right, the Emperor said thoughtfully, and over and over again: “You’re absolutely right.” (While to another person more or less simultaneously advising him to the contrary—that an Assembly of the Land would strengthen the revolutionary movement, that continuation of the war threatened Russia with destruction, that peace must be concluded immediately, and at any price—the Emperor also repeatedly nodded agreement: “You are quite right. That is exactly how we must proceed.”)