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

treasures at the states expense; a trilogy of films was made about his life; Tverskaia Street in Moscow became Gorky Street; and his native city of Nizhnyi Novgorod was renamed Gorkii. All these honours were designed to buy Gorky's political support. The Soviet regime to which he had returned was deeply split between Stalin's supporters and the Rightists, such as Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who opposed Stalin's extreme policies on collectivization and industrialization. To begin with, Gorky occupied a place between the two, and this made him a valuable target for both sides. On the one hand Gorky saw Stalin's policies as the only way for Russia to escape its backward peasant past. Yet on the other he did not like Stalin as a human being (whereas he was close friends with Bukharin and Rykov) and opposed his policies on literature. Between 1928 and 1932, as far as one can tell from the sketchy sources, Gorky lent his support to Stalin while attempting to restrain his extreme policies. It was the same role that he had played with Lenin between 1917 and 1921. Gorky secured the release of many people from the labour camps, and, it seems likely, persuaded Stalin to write his famous article 'Dizzy with Success' in March 1930, in which the leader condemned the excesses of his local officials for the first murderous campaign of collectivization.¹⁰

To his former comrades, to those socialists who had made a stand against the Bolsheviks or had made a complete break with Soviet Russia, Gorky's return to Moscow seemed like a betrayal. Viktor Serge, who saw Gorky in 1930, later recalled him as a tragic figure, a once outspoken critic of the Soviet regime who had somehow allowed himself to become silenced:

What was going on inside him? We knew that he still grumbled, that he was uneasy, that his harshness had an obverse of grief and protest. We told each other: 'One of these days he'll explode!' And indeed he did, a short while before his death, finally breaking with Stalin. But all his collaborators on the Novaia zhizn' of 1917 were disappearing into jail and he said nothing. Literature was dying and he said nothing ... I happened to catch a glimpse of him in the street. Leaning back alone, in the rear seat of a big Lincoln car, he seemed remote from the street, remote from the life of Moscow, reduced to an algebraic cipher of himself. He had not aged but rather thinned and dried, his head bony and cropped inside a Turkish skull-cap, his nose and cheekbones jutting, his eye-sockets hollow like a skeleton's.

But the truth was more complex — and in this was Gorky's final tragedy. Shortly after his return in 1932 he began to think that perhaps he was mistaken to remain in Russia. He found himself increasingly opposed to the Stalinist regime — but at the same time he could not escape it. He had become a Soviet institution,

everywhere he went the public adored him, and although he felt himself a prisoner of this, he would or could not run away again. For one thing, his sales in Europe had declined, and he had become financially dependent on the Soviet regime. For another, Stalin would not let him go abroad.¹¹

During these last years of his virtual imprisonment in Soviet Russia Gorky became a thorn in Stalin's side. He objected to the Stalinist cult of the personality and, after much prevarication, finally summoned the courage to refuse a commission to write a hagiographic portrait of Stalin, as he had once done for Lenin. Reading between the lines of Gorky's public writings one can detect a growing cynicism towards the Stalinist regime — his essays against Fascism, for example, could be read as a condemnation of all types of totalitarianism, whether in Europe or the USSR — while in what remains of his private writings one cannot miss his contempt for Stalin. After Gorky's death a large oil-skin notebook was found in his belongings in which he compared Stalin to a 'monstrous flea' which 'propaganda and the hypnosis of fear have enlarged to incredible proportions'. There is evidence to suggest that by 1934 Gorky had become involved in a plot against Stalin with the two Rightists, Rykov and Bukharin, along with Yagoda, the chief of the NKVD, and Kirov, the party boss of Leningrad, who was assassinated in 1934. This would account for the murder of Gorky's son Maxim, almost certainly on Stalin's orders, since Maxim had been acting as a messenger between his father and Kirov. It may also account for Kirov's murder — also most likely on the orders of Stalin — and perhaps for the murder of Gorky himself.¹²