November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No, even now Vorotyntsev refused to believe that he too, as he grew older, would find himself unwanted and unused, and would fade away ingloriously like Nechvolodov.

  They walked on at a funereal pace, with the general complaining bitterly.

  “The left, though, can get away with anything. As soon as they kick up a fuss everybody gives in to them. It’s plain sailing for anybody who’s out to damage the regime. When Hannibal was threatening Rome the mighty senate itself took the field against the plebeian Varro, who was already responsible for disgrace and disaster—merely in order to reinforce the authority of the military. While our State Duma, in time of war, openly incites the people to disobey ministers, and the army in the field reads insulting reports in the newspapers.”

  Walking slowly between lampposts, they entered what seemed to be a long tunnel under the trees and were suddenly invisible to each other. The sides of the tunnel swayed overhead, the trees sighed, struggled in the wind, lashed themselves and shed their last leaves. (Listen to the rustling of the boughs! That will be me!)

  “Actually, all they care about is the triumph of their own party. What all those Kadets fear is not that the government will lose the war but, on the contrary, that it will win, and without their aid. That’s why they are so eager to form a Kadet government right away. They have always assumed that the war cannot be won without them. But we now have shells, the front is firm, we can get on very well without them—and they’re back where they started. What will they use for a springboard after the war?”

  Vorotyntsev had seen something of the Kadets, and his impressions had been different. It obviously wasn’t true of Shingarev. But Mili Izmailovich? It might be. And Pavel Nikolaevich?

  Other muddles incensed the general more than his stagnant career.

  “ ‘Reactionary internal policy’! I ask you! Who’s talking about policy at present? Win—that’s the only policy for us. It’s reached the point where local governmental bodies in the towns are in opposition to higher authority. Who ever heard of such a thing? And the press? It’s all leftist. All destructive. Vilifies the Church, vilifies patriots—they narrowly avoid mentioning the throne directly, they’ve learned to yap about what they call the regime. Every fly-by-night journalist speaks in the name of Russia. They shower us with sewage, but never print our denials, that’s their idea of freedom. And any newspaper that stands up for the government is called reptilian or said to be on the government payroll. Nobody has yet managed to create a great Russian national newspaper. Nor even an official government newspaper, for that matter. Russia must surely be the only country which hasn’t gotten around to it. Why do we have to listen year in and year out to nothing but abuse of the government?”

  “Yes, but look …” Vorotyntsev, feeling the superiority of the happy man over the unhappy one, mildly demurred. “There has to be freedom of speech. Things have to be called by their own names, abuses must become public knowledge, so that rogues will tremble in their hiding places.”

  “Yes, of course! But do you really think they’ll publicize the misdeeds of their own Zemgor people? Or the industrialists? Or the black marketeers who corner the food supplies? Those people they cover up for, the biggest rogues of all have nothing to fear from them. Their abuse is reserved for the government.”

  True enough.

  “And the people learn what is going on in the country only as malicious detractors portray it. The majority of our people, thank God, are untouched by this plague. But only because they do not read the newspapers.”

  “If it was only the majority of our people, Aleksandr Dmitrich … But the fact is that the majority of officers too have no real understanding of what’s going on. All we think of is rank, promotion, medals, sword knots, traditions of the unit, traditions of the training school, how the last parade went off—but as far as social problems are concerned we’re nothing but lamebrained ignoramuses. We think things will look after themselves and can carry on very well without us.”

  “Yes! Yes!” said the general in a brisker voice.

  “Anyway,” said Vorotyntsev, not quite sure where his thoughts would lead him, “the majority never decide anything. It’s always a minority. Those who act.”

  “Or those who shout loudest.”

  “All the same, Aleksandr Dmitrich,” Vorotyntsev went on in the same calm tone of voice, “people must be free to express their opinions. And there must be some outlet for it. The Duma, the newspapers …”

  “Yes, but whose freedom are we talking about?” To judge from his voice in the darkness Nechvolodov had halted, horrified. Vorotyntsev also came to a standstill.

  “There is in Russia some sort of ‘education league,’ teeming with hundreds and thousands of teachers. But what does ‘education’ mean to them? To them there is nothing sacred in Russia, it has no historic rights, no national foundations. They hate everything Russian, everything Orthodox, everything that goes back into the depths of time. Education, to them, means revolution. They call it ‘freedom’ to make it less alarming. But what sort of freedom do they have in mind? Eight out of ten of our fellow countrymen are peasants, and one in every ten belongs to the urban lower middle class. These ‘parties’ never speak for them. Nor for the clergy. At best they represent some section of the gentry. But they really speak only for themselves. It’s all one gang. When they talk about ‘the people’s rights’ they mean power for themselves. You can open as many parliaments as you like—those sitting there will be lawyers. Start all the newspapers you please—you’ll have nothing but journalists. Each and every one of them yapping at Russia. While Russia is voiceless. The country consists of peasants, but its Duma is packed with lawyers from the two capitals.”

  “If that’s so, our electoral law is useless. Let’s change it.”

  “That won’t help, the lawyers and journalists will worm their way in just the same. Parliament is an institution specially made for them. And if they ever get their ‘responsible government’ they’ll go completely berserk. We simply must not let Russia fall into the hands of such madmen! Surely you don’t expect anything good from our Duma? What is it they’re asking for? Ministers accountable only to them. In other words, they want to undermine the fundamental laws of the state. Also an amnesty for terrorists and revolutionaries. In other words, they want to free the enemies of the state, so that they can start all over again. One more thing—they don’t want the least little law to be enacted without the Duma’s consent. And they can, of course, sink any law in a morass of verbiage.”

  “So where does that leave us? What’s your solution?”

  “Dismiss them immediately!” It sounded like an order.

  So there! Vorotyntsev began to feel uncomfortable.

  Nechvolodov’s voice took on a solemn tone.

  “Dissolve the Duma! The Tsar has only to lift his hand and say, ‘Hear me, my country! We are restoring Russia to herself!’”

  Such grandiloquent extremism, which caused the listener to smile or to doubt, had always embarrassed Vorotyntsev. Such pontifications floated somewhere above the humdrum concerns of today’s society and could never capture its imagination.

  Because of the wind his words were louder than their meaning required.

  “Wouldn’t dismissing the Duma mean more and worse disorders?”

  Out of the darkness Nechvolodov’s hand descended unerringly on Vorotyntsev’s shoulder.

  “A cowardly argument. Quite the opposite. It’s the first sure step away from revolution. How feebleminded can you be—trying to combat revolution with concessions? The state only weakens itself by giving way to windbag civilians. The revolution is already upon us. Can’t you see that? It took over I don’t know how many years ago. It’s bouncing and knocking us around as we speak. It has almost triumphed! Yet here we are, so afraid of stirring it up, of provoking it, that we do nothing about it!”

  So! Revolution was no longer imminent—it had arrived already! Vorotyntsev himself had seen no sign of it. He had argued with Guchkov ab
out it. Then, earlier in the day, Svechin, wreathed in fragrant pipe smoke in his comfortable office, had laughed off talk of revolution as mere fantasy. But now, in the wind-torn darkness with the general’s firm hand resting on his shoulder, he was struck by the coincidence: Guchkov and Nechvolodov had arrived at the same conclusion from opposite poles. All the pessimistic things he had heard on this trip crowded into his mind again, and he asked himself—could it be true? Was revolution already at the door?

  They had stood long enough. Nechvolodov took Vorotyntsev by the elbow—a downward movement, given the difference in height between them—and steered him farther across the Rampart. The hot, crazy wind gamboled among the trees, hugged them, buffeted them, wrestled with them, sent fallen leaves scampering noisily along the ground. The walkers occasionally stepped on something hard, a pebble or a chestnut, and crushed it underfoot.

  We have traveled by different routes, Vorotyntsev thought, but are not Nechvolodov’s anxieties for Russia and my own identical?

  “Surely, Colonel, you can see what Russia has been reduced to? The war is not to blame for the catastrophe which has befallen us! The reason isn’t our casualties, and it isn’t the breakdown of the supply system. It is the fact that we were defeated in advance by the leftist spirit! Long before the war the country was badly shaken by wild talk as well as by bombs. For a long time now it has been dangerous to stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to assist it. Those who have renounced all traditional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation. All honest people have a panicky fear of this word, so they pass by in silence any incitement to unrest. Certificates of honesty have to be obtained from the left. The whole press, the whole academic establishment, the whole intelligentsia all mock the regime. The gentry follow suit. And we too are dumbstruck in the face of the leftist Russophobe clichés which everyone finds so natural and so modern. Utter just one word in defense of Orthodox Christianity and they will howl you down, cry shame. The Pirogov Society holds its congress, and you expect these doctors to behave like doctors—but what do they talk about? In wartime, remember. The wounded and how to treat them? Oh no. It’s the same old subject—how to change our governmental system!”

  The voice that brooked no contradiction reached Vorotyntsev from some invisible location in the darkness.

  “The whole life of Russia is caught in a spiritual trap. Three stigmata, three infectious fears have reduced us all to impotence: if you argue with the left you are a “Black Hundreder,” if you argue with the young you are a die-hard conservative, if you argue with the Jews you are an anti-Semite. By these means they are forcing us to surrender Russia not only without a struggle but without argument, without demur. And what follows will be the triumph of progress! On the face of it Russia is still ruled by the Emperor. In reality it has long been ruled by a swarm of leftist locusts.”

  Now he was going too far! It was not yet true that the left ruled Russia. But, of course, the Tsar ought not to be a nonentity. You had to know how to rule.

  (He kept this to himself, however. Open disrespect for the monarch would be embarrassing.)

  Nechvolodov gripped his elbow more firmly and strode on with a firmer step across the Rampart into the chaotic darkness, into the unseemly vortex of the wind.

  “It’s a sickness—this muddying of the nation’s spirit. Think how thrilled the educated class was with the bomb throwers, and how it exulted in our defeats in the Far East. We were no longer ourselves, usurpers had supplanted us, some sort of airborne pestilence had come upon us. It was as if some creature of the depths had uncoiled itself when we liberated the serfs, and writhed upward, eager to wrestle Russia into the abyss. A handful of prancing horned devils appeared and all Russia was in turmoil. There is some kind of universal process at work here. It isn’t just a political trend, it is a cosmic turbulence. Perhaps these unclean spirits, though they have appeared first in Russia, are meant to sweep across the entire world. It fell to Dostoevsky to observe the earliest years of this visitation and he understood it at once and warned us. But we ignored him. Now the ground is being snatched from under our feet. The doughtiest defenders are losing heart and giving up.”

  The walk, begun out of pure sympathy, had already jolted Vorotyntsev out of his amorous mood, and was beginning to disorient him still further. A malaise borne by an ill wind? Was he catching the general’s sickness? A new way of looking at Russia—ugly and extreme—such as Vorotyntsev had never encountered before. But it too was concerned with the country’s roots—and he had heard them snapping while he was at the front. Three weeks ago he had been traveling to the main centers of Russian life, his ideas, or so it seemed to him, all of a piece, unfragmented. But at each encounter he had changed, begun to doubt, swerved, stumbled. All that he had learned for sure was that things were much more complicated than he had thought.

  He was stumbling again. But he tried to argue.

  “Still, we had centuries in which to prevent it. To ensure that no backwoods village would be short of pickled cabbage for the winter. Where were our eyes? Where were our hearts? And what of the august fingers that wrote ‘reject’ on every bold proposal? Why didn’t we liberate the peasants a hundred years before the visitation? And when we did get around to it, why couldn’t we have been more generous, why did we leave them short of land? What sort of despicable greed on the part of landowners prevented peasants for decades from resettling in Siberia, and forcibly brought them back if they did, just to push up the price of land rented from the gentry? What sort of sense did it make, not allowing resettlement in Siberia, which was all ours, and empty?”

  Start brooding about the past and the image of the thwarted and murdered Stolypin loomed at every turn.

  “There was a man capable of dragging Russia out of the slough by sheer force. And who started hounding him first? Wasn’t it the right? Wasn’t it they who murdered him? He knew how to get things moving—so they tied his hands.”

  No rightist, however far to the right his views, had the understanding of the peasant mind which Vorotyntsev had been lucky enough to absorb in Zastruzhe. The rightists skimmed the surface, but were ignorant of the depths.

  “All those leftist academics, of course, have no real sympathy with the peasants. But what a splendid boost their flights of rhetoric were given!”

  They moved so slowly into the lamplight, and out of it again, that Vorotyntsev had time to imprint his companion’s image on his mind and afterward connect it with the voice in the darkness: the greatcoat with no claim to elegance buttoned tightly around the tall, sturdy frame, the bearing—that of a man despondent but unbowed, the face gaunt, yet every feature infused with energy. From the grip on his elbow, and the occasional pressure on his ribs, Vorotyntsev could tell that his companion’s body was still muscular and supple. There was nothing except his bitter words to show how much he had aged.

  “Yes. True. The professors don’t feel for Russia, the revolutionaries still less. But what of us? Where do we stand? Why are we paralyzed in the face of the plague of locusts? Why are we overcome by lethargy? Why are our forces so scattered? Why are we, each and every one of us, so isolated?”

  His “we” confidently bracketed Vorotyntsev with himself. But what made him so certain? Perhaps this whole conversation was meant to establish a basis for joint action?

  “We can’t even find a pen to defend us, let alone a sword. We have nobody who can write. We’re all inarticulate.”

  Why, indeed, had they no writers? Why were the right-wing newspapers so feeble, and always sniping at each other? Why could none of them take a broader view?

  People speak of “the right.” But do we really have a “right”? There’s no such party, no stabl
e structure. No orators. No leaders. No funds. That is the reality of the mysterious visitation: those who should resist it are impotent. (Or cretinous? Why are they all so clumsy, so ham-fisted, so crude, so impatient, why are they doomed always to fail?) They lack the perspicacity to realize that the struggle is inevitable, and that it can be won only by spiritual strength and purity. (Ah, but where is that “high personage” of yours? And why have you allowed the very word “rightist” to be made into an insult?)

  “Let us behave in such a way that we have no cause for shame. I myself am not in the least ashamed. I will openly admit, anywhere you like, that I am proud to be credited with membership in the Black Hundred. The term, by the way, originates with the ‘black hundred’ monks who successfully defended the Monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius against the Poles, and so saved a Russia in turmoil. Then, in 1905, the name Black Hundred was bestowed on the bewildered ‘dark’ (uneducated) millions who rallied to the defense of the regime when it proved incapable of defending itself. But today—today, find me a hundred if you can! Just one hundred, ready to act—where are they?”

  They had now reached the point on the outermost path at which the Rampart was interrupted by a steep footpath down to the embankment below. Facing them across the gorge, the governor’s gardens occupied a slope just as steep. There was no lamp near them here, but from beyond the fence around the governor’s gardens electric lights blinked through the second-story windows of the Tsar’s residence, as though swayed by the rough wind blowing through the bare trees.

  In the Tsar’s residence the evening was probably taking its usual carefree course, untroubled by problems of state. Were they enjoying a leisurely dinner, or sitting over a late cup of tea, or playing cards, or exchanging stories of army life?

  While here, a hundred sazhens away, unsummoned, unwanted, forgotten, a servant of the throne stood and waited. In the weak light from afar his face was not clearly visible, but if you strained your eyes you could see his tall, upright figure, and the hand resting on what might be either a tree stump or a post.