The House of Government
Page 18
throughout this kingdom, all this kingdom wills
that which will please the King whose will is rule.108
To quote from another divine comedy, “It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”109
PART II
FULFILLMENT
4
THE REAL DAY
Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium. Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, and most of their followers did not.
But some did. Indeed, most definitions of “revolution”—at least “real” or “great” revolutions, such as the Puritan, French, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian ones—refer to regime changes in which apocalyptic millenarians come to power or contribute substantially to the destruction of the old order. “Revolutions,” in most contexts, are political and social transformations that affect the nature of the sacred and attempt to bridge the Axial gap separating the real from the ideal. As Edmund Burke wrote in 1791,
There have been many internal revolutions in the government of countries.… The present revolution in France seems to me to be quite of another character and description; and to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which have been brought about in Europe, upon principles merely political. It is a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma. It has a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part.
The last revolution of doctrine and theory which has happened in Europe is the Reformation…. The principle of the Reformation was such as, by its essence, could not be local or confined to the country in which it had its origin.1
According to Crane Brinton, revolution is the assumption of power by the “delirious” idealists who expect the realization of “heavenly perfection.” According to Martin Malia, it is a political transformation “perceived as the passage from a corrupt old world to a virtuous new one.” And according to S. N. Eisenstadt, it is “the combination of change of regime with the crystallization of new cosmologies.” Great revolutions (as opposed to Burke’s internal ones) are “very similar to the institutionalization of the Great Religions and of the great Axial Civilizations.” They are the best of times, they are the worst of times; everyone goes direct to heaven, everyone goes direct the other way.2
Revolution, in other words, is a mirror image of Reformation—or perhaps Revolution and Reformation are reflections of the same thing in different mirrors. The first refers to political reform that affects the cosmology; the second refers to cosmological reform that affects politics. The view that revolutions aspire to the creation of an entirely new world while reformations attempt to return to the purity of the original source is difficult to hold on to: Thomas Müntzer and the Münster Anabaptists were trying to bring about the fulfillment of a prophecy that had not yet been fulfilled. They believed that the way to perfection lay through the restoration of the Jesus sect, but they had no doubt that what they were building was “a new heaven and a new earth,” not the old Garden of Eden. The new Jerusalem was to prelapsarian innocence what the kingdom of freedom was to “primitive communism.” All reformations (as opposed to theological or ritual reforms) are revolutions insofar as they assume that “it is not enough to change some of these Lawes, and so to reforme them.” All revolutions are “revolutions of the saints” insofar as they are serious about “insatiable utopias.” As Thomas Case told the House of Commons in 1641, “Reformation must be Universall. All the wives, with such as are born of them, there must not be a wife or a child dispensed withall, in this publike Reformation…. Reform all places, all persons, all callings. Reform the Benches of Judgments, the inferior Magistrates…. Reform the Church, go into the Temple…, overthrow the tables of these Money-changers, whip out them that buy and sell…. Reform the Universities,… reform the Cities, reform the Countries, reform inferior Schools of Learning, reform the Sabbath, reform the Ordinances, the worship of God, etc.”3
There was more to reform; there was nothing that did not need reforming. They had everything before them; they had nothing before them. They were all going direct to heaven, they were all going direct the other way. The key to salvation was firmness:
You have more work to do than I can speak…. Give leave onely to present to you the Epitome and compendium of your great work, summ’d up by our Saviour, Matthew 15:13. Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Behold here a double Universality of number and extent.
Every plant, be it what it will, though it be never so like a flower, though it seems as beautifull as the Lilly, which Solomon in all his robes could not outshine. Every plant, whether it be thing, or person, order or ornament, whether in Church, or in Commonwealth, where ever, what ever, if not planted of God, you must look to it, not to prune it onely, or slip it, or cut it…, but pull’d up…. Not broken off, then it may grow, and sprout again; but pull’d up by the very roots. If it be not a plant of Gods planting, what do’s it in the Garden: out with it, root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant.4
And just as Jesus explained the meaning of his Parable of the Weeds (“the weeds are the sons of the evil one,” who will be thrown “into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”), so did Thomas Case, to the same effect. The Puritan Reformation, like the one Jesus launched, had little to do with forgiveness:
“I know men will crie out, Mercie, Mercie, but oh no mercie against poor souls; such mercie will be but foul murder…. Shew no mercie therefore, to pull guilt and bloud upon your own heads; now the guilt is theirs, if you let them goe, you will translate their guilt upon your own souls. You remember what the prophet told Ahab, I Kings 20:42. Because thou hast let go out of thy hand, a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.”5
■ ■ ■
Two days after the tsarist state collapsed and the Provisional Committee of the State Duma found itself in charge of what used to be the Russian Empire, nineteen-year-old Mikhail Fridliand went to the Duma headquarters in Tauride Palace, to bear witness to the revolution. The son of a Jewish cobbler from Kiev and later Bialystok, Fridliand was a student at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology and a regular contributor to the Student Path newspaper.6 Three years later, he recorded his impressions in an essay titled “March in February,” one of the first to be signed with the pen name “Mikhail Koltsov”:
I made my way to the palace through the menacing darkness, accompanied by the sound of random gunfire—now close at hand, then far away, then suddenly right next to my ear. The moon shone down in place of the streetlamps, which had long since been extinguished; the soft, warm snow fluttered down and tinted the streets a light blue. Trucks full of people kept rushing by every few minutes and then disappearing around the corner like screaming, rattling apparitions. The area in front of the palace, on Shpalernaia, was almost unbearably bright and noisy. Tauride had always been a quiet, old, cozy place, with silent doors and waxed floors, deputies strolling about arm in arm, and Duma marshals bobbing and gliding by. Now it was completely unrecognizable, with feverishly moving bright spots and a thousand sparkling lamps lighting up the darkness, exciting the city’s mutinous blood and sucking it in with its pale tentacles. Directly in front of the main entrance, in the middle of the white, fluffy garden, a large, magnificent automobile lay on its side, like a wounded animal, its bruised nose and headlights buried in the snow. One of the doors was open, and large snowy footprints were visible on the stylish rug and tender leather of the seats. The entire courtyard around it was filled with motorcycles, carts, sacks, and people—a whole sea of people and movement breaking against the entrance in waves.
Mikhail Fridliand (Koltsov)
as a student
(Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)
An old house invaded by the outside world was a
familiar image. What was new was the claim that this was the very last old house (or, to an orthodox Marxist, the penultimate, feudal one). The “Nest of Gentryfolk” had become the House of Revolution:
The sudden chaos of new creation had lifted up the ancient house, widened it, enlarged it, and made it enormous, capable of encompassing the revolution and all of Russia. Catherine Hall had become a barracks, parade ground, lecture hall, hospital, bedroom, theater, a cradle for the new country. Flooding in, all around me, were countless streams of soldiers, officers, students, schoolgirls, and janitors, but the hall never seemed to grow too full; it was enchanted; it could accommodate all the people who kept coming and coming. Chunks of alabaster from the walls crunched underfoot, amidst machine-gun belts, scraps of paper, and soiled rags. Thousands of feet trampled over this trash as they moved about in a state of confused, joyous, incomprehensible bustle.
The swamp had turned into a sea. Some chroniclers and eyewitnesses, including Koltsov himself, occasionally resorted to other elements (fire, blizzards, volcanic lava), but the dominant image was the sea and the rivers that fed it—because they were readily associated with the chaos of new creation; because they were alive, as well as deadly; because they could be peaceful, as well as stormy; and because they could be turned back into a swamp—and then into a sea again. “In this elemental, volcanic explosion, there were no leaders. They bobbed along, like wooden chips, in the flooding stream, trying to rule, to direct, or at least to understand and participate. The waterfall flowed on dragging them with it, twirling them around, lifting them up, and then casting them down again, into the void.”
The first to surface was Mikhail Rodzianko, the Speaker of the Duma, who stood up to welcome “the brave men of the Preobrazhensky Regiment” and left “in tired majesty, blowing his nose into a large handkerchief.” Next, “the waves threw up Miliukov,” the head of the liberal Kadet Party. He, too, wanted to speak to the sea, to rule over it:
“Citizens, I greet you in this hall!”
The sea listened to him and seemed to calm, while continuing to seethe and rumble below the surface with a deep, inextinguishable roar. The diplomat’s neatly packaged words dropped like pebbles into the water, leaving ripples on the turbulent surface before sinking without a trace. Another splash, and a new chip appeared on the crest of a wave. The Duma deputy, Kerensky, held up by strong arms, extended his lean torso upward and, straining his tired throat and screwing up his insomniac’s face, cried out to the elements:
“Comrades!”
This word was warmer and more to the point than “brave men” or “citizens.” The elements smiled on the responsive speaker, showered him with a waterfall of applause, enveloped him in the brass din of the Marseillaise.
Some speakers were more responsive than others. Tauride Palace had become the House of Revolution. The House of Revolution could encompass the world, but it could not—as Koltsov saw it after the fact—keep it whole. “Nearby, in a long, narrow room separated by a curtain, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was holding a meeting. They, too, had been swept up and flung here by the spring flood waters coming from the factories, the army units, and the navy crews. This incredible meeting had been going on, with constant interruptions, for two days now. The excitement and the packed bodies made it hard to breathe. What were they saying, all these Mensheviks, SRs, and populists? They were not saying what they meant to say or needed to say because no one knew what was needed in this hour of deluge and fire.”
And then there were the full-time prophets—those who had predicted the coming of the real day and could not believe it was here, at last:
Squeezed into a tiny room, labeled “Press Bureau,” was the Russian intelligentsia…. They were just as bewildered and confused as everyone else. Free to say whatever they wanted, freed at last from censorship and prohibitions, and drunk with boundless rapture, they had not yet been able to find their voices, which were trapped deep within each man’s breast.
German Lopatin pressed each passerby to his gray beard, mumbling tearfully: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”
“Yes, it’s over! We’ve lived to see the end….”
Leonid Andreev frowned, fiddling with his belt:
“The end? You think so? I think it’s just the beginning.”
And twirling a lock of hair around a finger on his left hand, he pointed with his right toward the window:
“Or rather, the beginning of the end.”
Through the window, they could see the pale snow awakened by the early dawn.7
German Lopatin was a former member of the General Council of the First International, a legendary terrorist mastermind, the first translator of Das Kapital into Russian, and the survivor of several prison terms and one commuted death sentence. Leonid Andreev was the author of a celebrated short story about the last days of seven convicted terrorists and the curse of knowing the hour of one’s end. Both wings of Russian post-Christian apocalypticism and both halves of Bukharin’s Gymnasium No. 1 class were represented in the House of Revolution. “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace” (nunc dimittis) was not only the most recognizable Christian formula of fulfilled prophecy (uttered by Simeon after he had seen the baby Jesus); it was also the title of the best-known part of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, op. 37, written a year and a half earlier. Rachmaninoff himself was in town during those days, performing his most recent composition, the Études-Tableaux, op. 39. Immersed in the Dies irae theme, it opens with an image of a deluge drowning out all calls of distress, continues with a mournful scene of doomed expectation (“seagulls and the sea”), and culminates in a blood-curdling Last Judgment (no. 6). This was the flood from Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman—as seen by its victim, “poor Evgeny.”8
■ ■ ■
Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were returning from prison and exile. Sverdlov spent several days with Kira Egon-Besser and her parents before leaving for Ekaterinburg to run the Urals Party organization. His difficult housemate from his Kureika days, now called “Stalin,” stayed on as one of the top Bolsheviks in Petrograd (as did Arosev’s friend Skriabin, now commonly known as “Molotov”). Piatnitsky arrived in Moscow straight from Siberia and was put in charge of Party cells in the Railroad District. Bukharin traveled from his New York exile to San Francisco, then by ship to Japan, suffering greatly from seasickness on the way, and finally to Moscow, where he joined Osinsky (who had recently defected from the Southwestern Front) in the regional Party bureau. Trotsky took the less circuitous Atlantic route from New York to Petrograd’s Finland Station, where he was greeted with solemn speeches. “Straight from the station,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I plunged into the vortex, with people and episodes whirling by like wooden chips in a stream.” Arosev interrupted his enforced journey to a penal battalion, reenrolled in the Moscow Warrant Officer School No. 4, from which he had been expelled, and went on to help found the Military Bureau of the Moscow City Party Committee. As he wrote five years later, “no sooner had the joyous spring sun of 1917 melted the winter snow with its golden rays than the whole expanse of Russia was touched by the purple wing of a rebellious angel…. From all of Moscow’s squares, the soldiers, flushed with happy intoxication from the almost bloodless revolution, sent skyward a thousand ‘hurrahs.’”9
Skobelev Square
One of those squares, named after General Skobelev and dominated by his huge equestrian statue, was, according to Arosev, the city’s heart. “From this square, the red beams extended their rays along the streets and alleyways to the farthest ends of Moscow. At the base of Skobelev’s mount, huge crowds would gather.” Across Tverskaia from the Skobelev monument was Moscow’s own House of Revolution: the former residence of the governor general and now home to the Provisional Government’s Provincial Commissar and the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. It was in front of its main entrance that “rallies lasted from early morning until late at night, with one speaker after another,” and it was the soviets
(councils), spreading steadily both inside and outside the building, that were, in Arosev’s words, “a lighthouse in the midst of the stormy popular sea.”10
In Arosev’s account, the “Governor General’s Building” was not only a metaphor for revolutionary politics—it was the main stage and perhaps the main point of the revolution. The “stormy popular sea” that had flooded the city needed a master; the equestrian General Skobelev had proven to be a false idol; the new, legitimate power (the true Bronze Horseman) had moved inside, whether he knew it or not: “The house on Tverskaia was not only the address of the social forces supported by the masses of workers and soldiers, but also the address of the institution that was preparing to take over power. When, at rallies and meetings, the workers proclaimed ‘All power to the Soviets,’ they knew perfectly well that it meant the power of the organization whose executive offices were located on Tverskaia Street.”11
One Bolshevik who did not yet know the right address of the revolution was Voronsky, who, as a Zemstvo Union inspector and Bolshevik propagandist at the Western Front, found himself at the very source of the flood. His memoir of those days is called The Eye of the Storm:
Governor General’s Building
Everywhere—at railway stations, in front of barracks and hospitals, in fields and on lawns, in courtyards and back alleys—soldiers were gathered together in tight groups, their irrepressible, boisterous speech, colorful and polyphonic, rising up and stirring the air. It was like a spring flood, when the river ice breaks up in the foggy haze of the night and predawn calm. The river begins to move, making mysterious rustling and gurgling noises, the ice floes crash into each other, their edges breaking off, and one huge ice block climbs on top of another, while somewhere far away the ice crumbles and dissolves into a deluge that spreads on and on, irrigating the flood plains and sweeping away winter debris.12