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

poetry any more, Blok told him: 'All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?' That same month Blok took to his death-bed. His doctor insisted that he needed to be sent abroad to a special sanatorium. On 29 May Gorky wrote to Lunacharsky on his behalf. 'Blok is Russia's finest living poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death.' For several weeks Gorky continued to plead for a visa. Lunacharsky wrote in support to the Central Committee on II July. But nothing was done. Then, at last, on 10 August, a visa came. It was one day late: the night before the poet had died.¹⁸

If Blok had died through despair and neglect, the death of Gumilev, just two weeks later, was much more straightforward. He was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial. Gumilev was accused of being involved in a monarchist conspiracy — an allegation that was almost certainly false, although he was a monarchist by sentiment. A committee of intellectuals formed at Blok's funeral had petitioned for his release. The Academy of Sciences had offered to guarantee his appearance in court. Gorky was asked to intervene and rushed to Moscow to see Lenin. But by the time he returned to Petrograd with an order for his release, Gumilev had already been shot. Gorky was so upset he coughed up blood. Zamyatin said he had never seen him 'so angry as he was on the night when Gumilev was shot'.¹⁹

Gumilev was the first great Russian poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks. His and Blok's deaths symbolized for Gorky, as for the intelligentsia as a whole, the death of the revolution. Hundreds of people — 'all that remained of literary Petersburg' in Zamyatin's words — turned out for the funeral of Blok. Nina Berberova, then only a young girl, recalls how on seeing the announcement of Blok's death she was 'seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly and sharply orphaned... The end is coming. We are lost.' Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev's first wife, similarly mourned, not just for a poet but for the ideals of a generation, at Blok's funeral:

In a silver coffin we bore him

Alexander, our pure swan,

Our sun extinguished in torment.²⁰

Two months later, plagued by ill health himself, Gorky left: Russia, seemingly for good.

ii The Unconquered Country

Fours years of revolution had not reunited the villagers of Andreevskoe. They remained divided between the two old rivals. On the one side stood Sergei Semenov, progressive farmer and reformer, who dreamt of bringing the trappings of the modern world to this poor and God-forsaken hole. On the other stood Grigorii Maliutin, the heavy-built and heavy-drinking peasant elder, an Old Believer and opponent of all change, who had now resisted Semenov's reform efforts for the best part of thirty years.

The feud between them had begun in the 1890s, when Maliutin's daughter, Vera, had killed her illegitimate baby and buried it in the nearby woods. The police had arrived to investigate, and the rich Maliutin had been forced to buy them off. He accused Semenov of informing the police and began a campaign of intimidation — burning his barn down, killing his livestock, accusing him of sorcery — to drive him from the village. Maliutin finally achieved his aim in 1905 when Semenov established a branch of the Peasant Union in Andreevskoe; this was enough to make him a dangerous revolutionary in the eyes of the local judiciary, and he was sent into exile abroad. But three years later he returned to Andreevskoe as a pioneer of Stolypin's land reforms. He tried to introduce the advanced farming methods he had learned in Western Europe on private plots hived off from the commune. Some of the younger and more progressive peasants joined his enclosure movement. But Maliutin was once again enraged — within the commune he was the boss — and along with the other elders of the village had succeeded in blocking his reforms. All my dreams for a better life', Semenov wrote to a friend in 1916, 'have been destroyed by this obstinate and jealous man.'