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

Nobody knows the full human cost of the revolution. By any calculation it was catastrophic. Counting only deaths from the civil war, the terror, famine and disease, it was something in the region of ten million people. But this excludes the emigration (about two million) and the demographic effects of a hugely reduced birth-rate — nobody wanted children in these frightful years — which statisticians say would have added up to ten million lives.* The highest death rates were among adult men — in Petrograd alone there were 65,000 widows in 1920 — but death was so common that it touched everyone. Nobody lived through the revolutionary era without losing friends and relatives. 'My God how many deaths!' Sergei Semenov wrote to an old friend in January 1921. 'Most of the old men — Boborykin, Linev, Vengerov, Vorontsov, etc., have died. Even Grigory Petrov has disappeared — how he died is not known, we can only say that it probably was not from joy at the progress of socialism. What hurts especially is not even knowing where one's friends are buried.' How death could affect a single family is well illustrated by the Tereshchenkovs. Nikitin

* It also excludes the reduced life expectancy of those who survived due to malnutrition and disease. Children born and brought up in these years were markedly smaller than older cohorts, and 5 per cent of all new-borns had syphilis (Sorokin, Sovremennoe, 16, 67).

Tereshchenkov, a Red Army doctor, lost both his daughter and his sister to the typhus epidemic in 1919; his eldest son and brother were killed on the Southern Front fighting for the Red Army in that same year; his brother-in-law was mysteriously murdered. Nikitin's wife was dying from TB, while he himself contracted typhus. Denounced by the local Cheka (like so many of the rural intelligentsia) as 'enemies of the people', they lost their town house in Smolensk and were living, in 1920, on a small farm worked by their two surviving sons — Volodya, fifteen, and Misha, thirteen.²

To die in Russia in these times was easy but to be buried was very hard. Funeral services had been nationalized, so every burial took endless paperwork. Then there was the shortage of timber for coffins. Some people wrapped their loved ones up in mats, or hired coffins — marked 'PLEASE RETURN' — just to carry them to their graves. One old professor was too large for his hired coffin and had to be crammed in by breaking several bones. For some unaccountable reason there was even a shortage of graves — would one believe it if this was not Russia? — which left people waiting several months for one. The main morgue in Moscow had hundreds of rotting corpses in the basement awaiting burial. The Bolsheviks tried to ease the problem by promoting free cremations. In 1919 they pledged to build the biggest crematorium in the world. But the Russians' continued attachment to the Orthodox burial rituals killed off this initiative.³

Death was so common that people became inured to it. The sight of a dead body in the street no longer attracted attention. Murders occurred for the slightest motive — stealing a few roubles, jumping a queue, or simply for the entertainment of the killers. Seven years of war had brutalized people and made them insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. In 1921 Gorky asked a group of soldiers from the Red Army if they were uneasy about killing people. 'No they were not. "He has a weapon, I have a weapon, so we are equal; what's the odds, if we kill one another there'll be more room in the land." ' One soldier, who had also fought in Europe in the First World War, even told Gorky that it was easier to kill a Russian than a foreigner. 'Our people are many, our economy is poor; well, if a hamlet is burnt, what's the loss? It would have burnt down itself in due course.' Life had become so cheap that people thought little of killing one another, or indeed of others killing millions in their name. One peasant asked a scientific expedition working in the Urals during 1921: 'You are educated people, tell me then what's to happen to me. A Bashkir killed my cow, so of course I killed the Bashkir and then I took the cow away from his family. So tell me: shall I be punished for the cow?' When they asked him whether he did not rather expect to be punished for the murder of the man, the peasant replied: 'That's nothing, people are cheap nowadays.'

Other stories were told — of a husband who had murdered his wife

for no apparent reason. 'I had enough of her and there is the end of it,' was the murderer's explanation. It was as if all the violence of the previous few years had stripped away the thin veneer of civilization covering human relations and exposed the primitive zoological instincts of man. People began to like the smell of blood. They developed a taste for sadistic forms of killing — a subject on which Gorky was an expert: