A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Gorky took up the cause of the starving intelligentsia. He publicized their desperate plight in his editorials in Novaia zhizn. Professor Gezekhus, the famous physicist, now an old man of seventy-two, was ill in hospital, 'blown up with hunger', like some African famine victim. Vera Petrova, a zemstvo physician, was 'dying of hunger, helpless, dirty, in a dusty awful room'. Glazunov, the famous composer, had grown 'thin and pallid', and lived with his aged mother in two unheated rooms in Petrograd. When H.G. Wells came to visit him, Glazunov begged him to send him some paper so that he could write out his compositions. Even Pavlov, Russia's only Nobel scientist, was forced to spend his time growing carrots and potatoes. Gorky appealed to the Bolshevik leaders for special rations, a better flat and other requirements on behalf of these starving geniuses. Lenin indulged most of his requests: he had always retained a special fondness for Gorky and, perhaps more relevantly, was very aware of his influence abroad. Gorky used this to save as much of the old Russian culture as he could: he became its self-appointed curator (sometimes using his position to buy up works of art cheaply for himself). The threat to culture posed by the revolution had been one of Gorky's constant themes. On the morning of the Bolshevik seizure of power he had headlined his column in Novaia zhizn CULTURE IS IN DANGER! He established a writers' refuge in the former house of Yeliseev, a wealthy merchant, on the corner of the Nevsky Prospekt and the Bolshaia Morskaya. At night the pointed building looked like a boat, so that it became known as the 'ship of fools'. Later Gorky set up a House of Artists too. He also established his own publishing house, World Literature, to publish cheap mass editions of the classics. Its offices employed hundreds of writers, journalists, academics, musicians and artists as translators and copy-editors who would otherwise have been left to fend for themselves. Gorky saw it less as a business than as a charity. And indeed many of the greatest names of twentieth-century literature — Zamyatin, Gumilev, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasevich, Mandelstam, Shklovsky, Piast, Blok and Zoshchenko — owed their survival through these hungry years largely to the patronage of Gorky. Although in later years many of them condemned Gorky for his close links with the Bolsheviks, they themselves would not have survived the civil war without his contacts.³¹

Gorky turned his enormous flat on the Kronversky Prospekt into a

refuge for the penniless and the persecuted victims of the civil war. Compared with the cold and the dampness in which most of the population lived, it was something of a paradise. Viktor Serge described it as 'warm as a greenhouse'. Gorky accumulated various 'wives' and 'sisters', 'daughters' and 'brothers', all of them in some way victims of the terror, whom he allowed to shelter in his home. So many people came to Gorky's flat — at first simply to drink tea and chat but they somehow ended up by staying several years — that the wall between it and the neighbouring flat had to be knocked through and the two apartments made into one. Gorky's mistress, Moura Budberg (then still Baroness Benckendorff), lived in one room, and cooked most of the meals with a girlfriend of the artist Tatlin, who lived in another. There was always an interesting and motley collection of people around the lunch and dinner tables. Famous writers and artists would rub shoulders with the workers and the sailors whom Gorky had picked up on the streets. H. G. Wells stayed when he came to Russia in 1920. Shaliapin was a frequent visitor, and always cursed the Bolsheviks; yet so too were the Bolshevik leaders, Lunacharsky and Krasin, and the deputy head of the Petrograd Cheka, Gleb Bokii, who must have met many of his victims there. There was even a former Grand Duke, Gavril Konstantinovich Romanov, together with the former Grand Duchess and their dog. Gorky had taken pity on them and rescued them from the Cheka jails after Gavril had fallen ill. The couple lived on the top floor, in a room filled with antique furniture and Buddhist statues, and hardly ever left the house for fear of arrest. At meals they would sit in haughty silence. For, as the former Grand Duke later wrote, there were the sort of people at Gorky's table 'that rejoiced at our misery', and 'it was distasteful for us to have to mix in such society'.³²