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

It was not so much the nature of the Soviet regime as its hostile policy towards the arts and its friendly policies towards the peasantry which kept him in exile during the NEP years. Although he had always opposed the rise of the Bolshevik dictatorship, he had also found a means of justifying it as a necessary antidote to the instinctive anarchism of the peasantry. Gorky was nothing if not contradictory. His rationalization of the Soviet regime became even more marked after Lenin's death, which filled him with remorse. Gorky had both loved and hated Lenin, and their relationship could not now be resolved. 'Yes, my dear friend,' Gorky wrote to Rolland, 'Lenin's death has been a very heavy blow for me. I loved him. I loved him with wrath.' Nina Berberova, who knew Gorky well during his years in Berlin and Marienbad, later wrote that Lenin's death had made him 'very tearful' and that he did not stop crying throughout the next weeks as he wrote his eulogistic Memories of him. 'Gorky was overwhelmed with repentance,' Berberova recalled. He 'reassessed his attitude to the October

Revolution and the early years of Bolshevism, to the role of Lenin, to his being right and Gorky being wrong... Quite sincerely he believed that Lenin's death had left him orphaned with the whole of Russia.' Gorky's Memories of Lenin were the first step towards his reconciliation with Lenin's successors in the Kremlin. In 1926, on Dzerzhinsky's death, he even wrote in praise of the Cheka leader ('a gifted man with a sensitive heart and a strong sense of justice'). And yet he was still not ready to return to Russia. No doubt he was frightened about what he might find there. For the Russia in his mind was always much rosier than the Russia of reality, and even Gorky, despite his ability to deceive himself, must have been aware of this. Certainly, his life-long attachment to the principles of individual liberty and human dignity was still strong enough to hold him back, especially as a creative artist whose own ability to continue to write had become increasingly dependent on the freedoms and the comforts he could enjoy only in the West. His work was flourishing in Europe, with The Artamonov Business, followed by the first two volumes of The Life of Klim Samgin, his two great didactic novels, written between 1925 and 1928. Meanwhile, in Russia the Soviet regime had drawn up an index of 'counter-revolutionary' books — which included Plato, Kant, Ruskin, Nietzsche and Tolstoy — to be withdrawn from all public libraries. Gorky was outraged by this censorship and began to write a letter to the government renouncing his Soviet citizenship. But then in anger he tore the letter up: however much he might despise the Soviet regime's 'spiritual vampirism', he could not bring himself to cut his links with it.⁸

In the end, as with Brusilov, it was good old-fashioned Russian nationalism that persuaded Gorky to return home. For one thing, he could not abide the Russian emigres — and they could not abide him. 'To us Russians,' wrote one Paris exile in 1922, 'Gorky is one of those who are morally and politically responsible for the great calamities that the Bolshevik regime has brought to our country. Years will pass, but he will never be forgotten.'⁹ The more anti-Soviet the emigres became, the more Gorky reacted by aligning himself with the Soviet regime. Moreover, the rise of Fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy made Gorky reject all his earlier ideals — ideals that had formed the basis of his opposition to the Bolsheviks — about Europe as a historic force of moral progress and civilization. The more disillusioned he became with Fascist Europe the more he was inclined to extol Soviet Russia as a morally superior system. No doubt this was wishful thinking but in the context of the times it is understandable.

Gorky went back to Russia in 1928. After five summer trips he settled there for good in 1932. His return was hailed by the Soviet regime as a great victory in its propaganda war against the West. The prodigal son was showered with honours: the Order of Lenin was conferred on him; he was given Riabushinsky's house in Moscow, a masterpiece of the style moderne which he filled with