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

The circumstances of Gorky's death remain a mystery. His health had been in decline for several years. Along with the old problem of his lungs there was a growing list of ailments, including heart disease and chronic influenza. By 1936 it had become a race to finish his great epic The Life of Klim Samgin before he died. 'End of the novel, end of the hero, end of the author,' Gorky said in June. Shortly after, on the 17th, he went into a fever, started spitting blood and died the next day. Those who were with him in his final days testify that Gorky died a natural death. But two years later, during the show trial of March 1938, two of Gorky's doctors were found guilty of his 'medical murder' (i.e. administering fatal doses of improper medicines) on Yagoda's orders as part of the 'plot against Soviet Power' of which Bukharin and Rykov were said to be the ringleaders. Now it may well be that Stalin merely used what in fact had been the writer's natural death as a pretext to destroy his enemies. But Gorky's involvement with the opposition makes it just as likely that Stalin murdered him. Certainly, his death came at a highly convenient time for Stalin — just two months before the show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev which Gorky had intended to expose as a lie — and we all know what the butcher in the Kremlin did with people who got in his way. Many years later it was claimed that the

doctors involved in Gorky's autopsy had found traces of poison in the corpse. Ekaterina, Gorky's widow, was quite certain that her former husband had been murdered when she was asked about this in 1963; and many Russians now agree with her.¹³ The truth will probably never be known.

Gorky was buried with full Soviet honours, with Stalin himself leading the funeral procession. There was a march past in Red Square and the writer's ashes were placed in a niche in the Kremlin wall behind the Lenin Mausoleum. Thus Gorky became a Stalinist institution.

* * * The Russian Revolution launched a vast experiment in social engineering — perhaps the grandest in the history of mankind. It was arguably an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity's historic striving for social justice and comradeship. Yet born as it was of the First World War, when Europe had been brought to the brink of self-destruction, it was also one that many people believed was essential at that time. By 1918 most European socialist parties subscribed to the view that capitalism and imperial competition had been the fundamental causes of the war and that to prevent another war like it they would somehow have to be swept away. It seemed to them, in short, that the old world was doomed, and that only socialism, in the words of the Internationale, could 'make the world anew'.

The experiment went horribly wrong, not so much because of the malice of its leaders, most of whom had started out with the highest ideals, but because their ideals were themselves impossible. Some people might say that it failed because Russia in 1917 had not been advanced enough for socialism, at least not on its own without the support of the more advanced industrial societies. Thus, in their view, it was Russia's backwardness and international isolation that led it down the path of Stalinism rather than the logic of the system itself. This is no doubt in part true. None of the Bolsheviks of 1917 had expected Soviet Russia to be on its own — and even less to survive if it was. Their seizure of power in October had been predicated upon the assumption that it would provide the spark for a socialist revolution throughout Europe, and perhaps throughout the colonial world. When this revolution failed to come about, they almost inevitably felt themselves bound to adopt a strategy that, if only in the interests of defence, put industrialization before all else. And yet since the Soviet model has so often led to the same disastrous ends — despite having been applied in different local forms and in such diverse places as China, south-east Asia, eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Cuba — one can only conclude that its fundamental problem is more to do with principles than contingencies.

The state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human