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

One Friday night in March 1925 Lvov returned from Paris feeling ill. He went to bed — and died of a heart attack in his sleep. The funeral was held at the Russian Orthodox church in rue Daru in Paris. The whole emigre community was in attendance, and the press was full of tributes to this 'sincere servant of the people'.⁴

In a more settled and peaceful country a man of Prince Lvov's background and talents might have expected to serve for many years as a minister for agriculture or, say, education. In England he would have served in the Liberal government of Gladstone or Lloyd George, and today there would no doubt be a statue to him in one of London's many parks and squares. But in the Russia of Lvov's own lifetime figures like him were destined not to last in the revolutionary storm; and today his statue does not stand in any Russian city.

Great Russian nationalism did for Brusilov what the NEP had done for Prince Lvov: it reconciled him, despite his hostility to Communism, with

the Bolshevik regime. For Brusilov the collapse of the Russian Empire rather than the downfall of the monarchy had been the real tragedy of 1917; and now that the Empire had been reconstructed, with the loss of only Poland, the Baltic lands and Finland, he could rest assured that the Russian national spirit would also be restored. 'Bolshevism will one day pass away,' the General liked to prophesy, 'and all that will be left will be the Russian people and those who remained in Russia to direct the people on the correct path.' This was the basis of his National Bolshevism — that Russian patriots like him could redirect the revolution towards national ends if sufficient numbers of them joined the Red regime to turn it White from the inside.

After the campaigns against the Poles and Wrangel, the old General was put to work in the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, where he was responsible for increasing the stock of pedigree horses for the cavalry. It was a thankless task — most of the Red so-called 'military experts' seemed to think that one could mount the cavalry on peasant cart-horses — and he was relieved to be soon transferred to the Chief Inspectorate of Cavalry, where his expertise from the elite tsarist Guards was much better employed. During the latter half of 1921 Brusilov's health began to decline sharply: his wounded leg had developed gout; he was kept awake at night with chronic bronchitis; and his modest salary was not enough to keep his small flat warm. Over the next three years he constantly petitioned to be allowed to retire — he turned seventy in 1923 — but his Soviet masters would not grant him this. It was only in 1924, when Budenny was eager to purge the cavalry of all its 'White bones', that he was finally released.

To recuperate from his growing list of ailments Brusilov and his wife Nadezhda spent the following spring in the Czech town of Karlsbad, where there was a famous sanatorium. The war hero of 1916 was welcomed by the Czechs; President Masaryk, an old friend, laid on a special dinner for him in Prague Castle and (perhaps more importantly) gave him an allowance which enabled him to overcome the shock of how expensive things had become in post-war Europe. Brusilov found it 'extremely pleasant to be once again among civilized Europeans' after the long years of civil war in Russia which had done so much to sour personal relations. Indeed the only hostility he met was from the Russian emigre community, which would not forgive him for having joined the Reds. Perhaps it was this that finally convinced him to return to Russia, despite Masaryk's presidential promise that the Czechs would adopt him as their own. The emigres, as Brusilov saw it, were the real traitors for they had placed their own class interests above those of Russia, and, even if they were to accept him, he could not bring himself to live among them. Later that summer he and his wife returned to Moscow. As Nadezhda later explained, 'he wanted to be buried in Russian soil'.⁵

Brusilov died quietly in his sleep on 17 March 1926. The funeral was a grand affair, which was only fitting for a national war hero. Red Army delegations lined the Moscow streets, military bands played the funeral march, and church choirs sang as his coffin was carried on the shoulders of six soldiers to the Novodechie Monastery, where he was laid to rest in the cemetery. Hundreds of veterans from the First World War came to Moscow for the funeral from as far afield as Nizhnyi Novgorod and Tver, and the main church was too small to contain all the mourners. The three Red Army chiefs, Voroshilov, Egorov and Budenny, each read an address in praise of Brusilov, although they refused to bow before the priests or to take part in the prayers. It was a strange mixture of the old and the new — Soviet emblems mixed with icons and crosses — as perhaps befits this strangely mixed-up man. Nadezhda thought that the whole thing was symbolic: 'the new Russia was burying the old'.⁶