---

2

Demons

The dictatorship means - learn this once and for all - unrestrained power based on force, not on law.

V.I. LENIN

 
FOR ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, THE CHILD OF THAT WAR TIME romance, the house and estate of his maternal grandfather had a symbolic value similar to that of the ruined manor house in W. B Yeats's one-act drama Purgatory (1938). Once a year, a window of the ruin is lit up, revealer the degradation of a cultured girl by her husband, a drunken groom. Yeats was thinking, among many other things, of the richly cultured life of the Anglo-Irish aristocratic house, before the First World War, the Irish Civil War, and a leveling tide swept that life away. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, too, came to believe-though not until he had suffered under Stalinism- that the "Russia House" had been brutally, pointless destroyed.

But for first twenty-five years of his life he was an ardent supporter of Lenin's Revolution. Two facing pages of a 1994 anthology of Russian photography present the case for revolutionary upheaval in Nicholas II' s Russia: a case strengthened further by the miseries of war. Both of the facing photographs are from St. Petersburg-but they might be from different universes. One shows a glittering social occasion, the Ball of the Colored Wigs, held at a countess's palace. Seated around circular tables adorned with gazebos of flowers and even songbirds in cages are such fabulously rich families as the Tolstoys, Gorchakovs, Orlovs, and Dolgorukovs. Twenty or so smart waiters stand at the back of the chandeliered and columned dining room, ready to move swiftly between the tables. The ladies are wigged and powdered as if at Versailles, the men in military uniform. They gaze with trim-mustached smiles toward the camera lens. We know, looking in. that nemesis awaits, that within months (the photo is from early 1914) many of these officers will have been mown down by German machine guns in the forests of Tannenberg; but the living figures did not know this, and their complacent world did not include, did not even acknowledge the existence of, the soup kitchen on Vasilevsky Island of the facing photograph, which comes from the same period.

Ranks of former peasants, from those who have streamed into the capital seeking work in the factories, crowd at long plank tables smeared with slops. The dark, windowless, claustrophobic brick building, perhaps a derelict factory, provides a fitting backdrop to gray despair. Apart from a couple of faces that stare angrily at this intrusion upon their hunger, these are men who have no awareness of each other or of anyone: they don't even stare into the distance, but at some nothingness a few inches from their lowered eyes. The sadness of the picture, the sense of tragic waste, is emphasized by the air of thoughtfulness, of intelligence, in some of the deep-sunken eyes, in contrast to the fleshly vapidity of many of the faces at the countess's ball.

Pictures don't tell the whole story. Similar contrasts could easily be found in any city in the world today. Here was not - as there often was in Russia, and would be much more terribly in the USSR - absolute starvation; the photo was probably taken to draw attention to Christian charity rather than to the poverty. Russia was already the fourth greatest industrial nation, and conditions for the workers were not noticeably worse than in the West. With ninety days of religious holiday a year, they actually spent less time in the dark factories than their Western counterparts. Some of the power of this particular contrast comes from subjective factors, notably our knowledge of the coming catastrophe. But enough intrinsic potency remains to make it explicable why certain men - Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and so on - men who had never done a day's paid work in their lives, and who had no connection with the working class - thought the only answer was for the proletariat to take power. The slaves of the Petersburg soup kitchen could only have decent lives if the bewigged ladies and their sleek, pampered escorts were wiped out. Law could never achieve that, only dictatorship, harsh duress, and terror.

The fact of intolerable social injustice, and the fact that the privileged inside and outside Russia would stop at nothing to defend their position, made the most extreme action, "unrestrained, lawless power," seem rational to a dedicated minority. If some revolutionary seer had predicted in a memo to Lenin that sixty million people, most of them poor, would perish in bringing about and sustaining Bolshevism, he would probably have shrugged and scrawled "To be filed" on the memo. And the lawless dictatorship seemed rational - more, worth living and dying for –to many thousands of highly intelligent, idealistic, and decent people until long after Stalin's death. To Lev Kopelev, for instance, who became one of Solzhenitsyn's closest friends in imprisonment; a black-bearded giant, brilliant linguist, and convinced Stalinist. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in the Ukraine, he suffered the memory of his mother sending a valet to his school each day, bearing his dinner on a silver platter. Therefore, when he became a Komsomol member of the grain-collecting brigades in the thirties, he could think the famine killing the Ukrainian peasantry was justifiable, a necessary evil.

Kopelev and his wife, the late Raisa Orlova, are two of the most idealistic ex-Communists whose troubled memoirs try to make sense of the "rational" evil they condoned and even took part in. Orlova, an editor of the journal Foreign Literature, was at one time a trusted Communist functionary; she listened to Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin in the hall where Natasha Rostov, the fictional heroine of War and Peace, had once danced. Orlova looks back in her Memoirs at when she joined in expelling some innocent comrade, or denounced someone, as at a night full of bad dreams. She senses that there is ultimately no reasonable explanation for what she did, and what Communism did ....

All the time I keep seeking rational explanations, I keep seeking a comparatively simple, in any event basic, connection among the facts. Yet there is always something more important out of the realm of the irrational that does not submit to any "computation." There are some kinds of profound abysses in a person that Dostoyevsky knew about and that contemporary writers and artists know about.

In our falsely rational world we have denied this and continue to do so. I know that this world abyss does exist. I know it in my mind. And I don't know how to live with the knowledge that it does exist.

 

One of the signs of the "profound abyss" that opened up in Russia was the rational justification for illegality and savagery. This had first occurred among Russia's intelligentsia almost half a century before the October Revolution of 1917. Some of the idealistic young men and women who had donned peasant clothes and gone into the villages to help stir up the peasants, but who had found themselves jeered at and stoned, seethed with anger at Tsar and peasants alike; they formed a secret society called the People's Will, a terrorist organization. A symbolically crucial event was the trial of Vera Zasulich in 1878. Zasulich, a plain, rather confused woman, already a seasoned revolutionary at twenty-six, fired point-blank into the face of General Trepov, the brutal police chief of St. Petersburg, wounding but not killing him. There was absolutely no doubt of her guilt, but at her trial the jury calmly found her not guilty. And the educated classes burst into frenzied applause.

The police tried to re-arrest her, but she was spirited away to Geneva, where she became a leading revolutionary figure. In Russia, the sincere Kopelevs and Orlovas of their age began to understand and excuse the terrorism being practiced by others. That attitude was to become a hallmark of the intelligentsia in many countries for the next century and more.

With a "logic" that came partly from the evidence of their eyes, but also from their own unreasoning "abysses," the terrorists and revolutionaries

seemed to choose moments of hope in which to wreak destruction. It was so in 1881, when Alexander II, the "Tsar-Liberator" of the serfs, was returning to the Winter Palace in Petersburg after signing a limited form of constitutional movement. A member of the People's Will hurled a grenade at the racing carriage. About twenty bystanders were killed or maimed, but the Tsar escaped. He made the mistake, however, of ordering his carriage to stop so that he could comfort the dying. A nationalist Pole lobbed a grenade between his legs, blasting them off. ''I'm cold, so cold," he whispered to his guards. "Take me to the Palace ... to die." His son, Alexander III, immediately canceled the inadequate but promising constitution.

After the Revolution of 1905, Alexander Ill's successor, Nicholas II, was compelled to introduce a parliamentary assembly, or Duma. He chose as his First Minister Pyotr Stolypin, a man who was ardently patriotic, severe but just, honest, and with brilliant organizational ability. Having controlled terrorism by stem measures (exceedingly light by later standards), he set about agrarian reform. The new laws freed peasants from all legal restraints, and encouraged the brighter, more go-ahead peasants to buy land for themselves, then cooperate with their neighbors to form their own communes. Productivity greatly increased; indeed, the Soviet system of agriculture only caught up with pre-1914 productivity in the 1960s, with the aid of modem machinery and with a vastly increased population to feed.

In August 1914 Solzhenitsyn would depict Stolypin, not quite realistically, as very nearly a saint; but he is far from alone in valuing him highly. The British ambassador of the time, Sir Arthur Nicolson, thought him the most outstanding man in Europe. He would have succeeded in saving Russia, Solzhenitsyn is convinced - had not a Socialist Revolutionary and police informer called Bogrov stalked him into a Kiev theater and shot him at pointblank range. Stolypin - a tall, stiff man, with chalk white face and dead black beard- tuned to face the Emperor in his box, made the sign of the cross, and fell mortally wounded.

Still, if the Emperor had not plunged his nation into war, revolution almost certainly would have been avoided. Rasputin, half charlatan, half seer, sent this terrible prophecy to the Tsar from a Siberian hospital in July 1914: "Dear Friend again I say to thee there is storm cloud over Russia disaster much grief darkness and no break in the cloud. A sea of tears and is there no end to bloodshed? What shall I say? There are no words the horror is indescribable. I know that all want war from thee they know not that it is for ruin. God's punishment is heavy when he takes away reason. That is the beginning of war. Thou Tsar and father of thy people do not let the madmen triumph and destroy thee and thy people. Germany will be beaten but what of Russia? If you think there has truly been no worse martyr through the ages always drowning in blood. Great destruction grief without end. Grigori."

The Tsar on this occasion unwisely did not heed the advice of the wild and filthy peasant whom the Empress adored, convinced he was preserving

her hemophiliac son's life. And yet the apocalyptic imagery of Russia's writers makes one believe that Russia was fated to explore the profound abyss to go to its very depths. Pushkin's lyric "Demons" - written in 1830, one hundred years before Stalin's wrath fell on the peasants - portrays a coach that is wildly out of control in a blizzard; the horses are being tormented by swarms of demons, and led to their doom. By the time of Dostoyevsky's Demons (usually translated as The Possessed), the devils have become accepted as saviors by the liberal intelligentsia. If God was no longer believed in, Dostoyevsky warned, then everything was permitted. By the turn of the century, to the Symbolist poets, more concerned with aesthetics than morality, Dostoyevsky's warning had become transformed to a triumphant battle cry. "You are free, Godhead!" shouted Viacheslav Ivanov in a lecture attended by the greatest Symbolist poet Alexander Blok. "Everything is permitted, only dare!" Ivanov, who held famous salon evenings in his high-rise Petersburg apartment, the "Tower," believed in mixing Christ and Dionysus. He would never have shot anyone, but he was willing to encourage murder.

Akhmatova, for whom art and morality were one, saw the "real" century, in which "Man, raving, denied his image / And tried to disappear," as a shadow that moved quietly, inexorably, along the Neva's historic embankment . Almost alone among the poets, she predicted the horror, and became known as a modern Cassandra. After writing Requiem in the 1930s while standing in prison queues, hoping in vain for news of her son, who had been sentenced to death, she wrote an obsessional work of repentance for the amorality of artists before the Revolution.... - Poem Without a Hero.

Even the aristocracy seemed to have the abyss within them. How else to explain the reaction of court ladies to Rasputin? He would tell them temptations of the flesh should be yielded to, in order to gain God's forgiveness. "The first word of the Savior was repent, he told them. "How can we repent if we have not first sinned?" He gathered his female disciples, eager to repent. These women round it titillating to be ravished by a smelly peasant, who ate with his hands, tore at his food with blackened teeth, used the foulest language in their presence, described in coarse detail the sexual acts of the horses on his father's farm in Siberia, and violated them quickly and brutally, with the vaguely muttered assurance that 'now, Mother, everything is in order.'

The precise moment when the demons conquered is different, of course, [or every person who witnessed it. Sometimes it takes the form of an image, an event frozen as in a film. So, for the young virtuoso violinist Nathan Milstein, Rasputin's blood streaking the Neva water; or perhaps, another time, in the winter of 1917, seeing a procession of women in black, carrying a large white sheet on which was handwritten in huge letters, BREAD! The women moved slowly, silently, with dignity. And the police opened fire on them. Then the Cossacks, the Tsar's most loyal troops, reacted in an entirely unexpected way: "I saw one of the Cossacks bare his sabre and, bending over slightly, cut off the head of a policeman who was shooting. One blow - and the head flew off. All this was too much for me. Terrified, I ran home." That, Milstein adds, is how the revolution to overthrow the Russian Tsar began.

The February Revolution of 1917, which brought to power a moderate left movement under a young lawyer, Alexander Kerensky, bred initially a freedom-loving, tolerant spirit. It would long be remembered how Kerensky marched through angry crowds of soldiers, pale and with arm upraised, to save the lives of fallen tsarist ministers. He begged the vengeful mob to keep the Revolution undefiled by bloodshed, and the people acquiesced. Prisoners were released from Siberia. Capital punishment was abolished.

It was at this hopeful time that Isaaki Solzhenitsyn and Taissia Shcherbak met in Moscow and fell in love. Isaaki had to go back to the front, where, increasingly, Russian battalions were refusing to fight.

In the city that had been St. Petersburg but was now Russianzed into Petrograd, the city "tormented and dostoievsky,' the atmosphere became violent and ugly as the year went on. Gangs of armed soldiers, defecting from the front, roamed the streets. Someone saw a former colonel of the elite Imperial Guards begging a bowl of soup from the head waiter who  had once served him at the Evropeiskaya Hotel."

The Revolution was "designed" by supremely rational men, Marx and Engels among them, yet when it came it was no more rational than the symbolic blizzard raging through Pushkin's "Demons," Blok's "The Twelve," and Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero.

A French diplomat saw two soldiers shoot dead an old woman street vendor, close to the American embassy, rather than pay for two tiny green apples. In "The Twelve," a villainous gang of Red Guards stumble through black night and driving snow, ready to destroy everything in their path. (It may be among them is someone from the Vasilevsky soup kitchen.) They lust to drink, have pleasure, and uphold the Revolution. Nothing is sacred. "Now with my knife / I will slash, I will slash!" Behind them limps a starving dog - the old world. They think of sticking a bayonet in it, but turn their attention back to what goes always before them, barely visible in the thick snow, a red flag. Bearing that flag, leading the cutthroats, walking lightly above the storm - is Jesus Christ.

Christ and the Devil have changed places.

Throughout 1917 Isaaki Solzhenitsyn kept to his post. Two months before Kerensky's movement was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, small in numbers but "full of passionate intensity," Isaaki arranged for Taissia to come to the front in Belorussia, where they were married by the brigade chaplain. They spent their first night together in the shadow of an artillery gun. Then she retuned to Moscow and he went on serving.