A people's tragedy

‘There are twelve-year-old children who already have three murders to their name,’ Gorky wrote to Lenin in April 1920. Once an orphan of the streets himself, Gorky was one of the first to champion the struggle against ‘juvenile delinquency’. That summer he set up a special commission to combat the problem, which provided colonies and shelters for the children and taught them how to read and write. Similar initiatives were undertaken by the League for the Rescue of Children established in 1919 by Kuskova and Korolenko with the approval of Sovnarkom. But with only half a million places in all the institutions put together, and seven million orphans on the street, this could only scratch the surface of the problem. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks turned to penal remedies, despite their own proclaimed principle of 1918 that there should be ‘no courts or prisons for children’. Prisons and labour camps contained thousands of children, many under fourteen, the age of criminal responsibility. Another way of dealing with the problem was to allow factories to employ the children as sweated labour. Even in the civil war, when thousands of adult workers were laid off, there was a huge growth of child employment, with some workers as young as six, especially in the smaller factories where exploitative practices died hard. Despite widespread calls to limit the children to six hours of labour, and to make employers provide two hours of schooling, the authorities chose not to intervene, claiming it was ‘better to have the children working than living from crime on the streets’, with the result that many minors ended up by working twelve or fourteen hours every day.14

Children also made excellent soldiers. The Red Army had many young teenagers in its ranks. Having spent the whole of their conscious lives surrounded by the violence of war and revolution, many of them had no doubt come to think that killing people was part of normal life. These little soldiers were noted for their readiness to do as they were told — their commanders often played the role of surrogate fathers — as well as for their ruthless ability to kill the enemy, especially when led to believe that they were avenging their parents’ murder. Ironically, many of these children were in fact much better off in the army — which treated them as its own children, clothing and feeding them and teaching them to read — than they would have been living on the streets.

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According to Nina Berberova, Gorky came to Europe angry not only at what had been done in Russia but profoundly shaken by what he had seen and experienced. She recalls a conversation he had with her husband, the poet Khodasevich:

Both (but at different times) in 1920 went to a children’s home, or perhaps reformatory for pre-teenagers. These were mostly girls, syphilitics, homeless from twelve to fifteen; nine out of ten were thieves, half were pregnant. Khodasevich … with a kind of pity and revulsion remembered how these girls in rags and lice had clung to him, ready to undress him there on the staircase, and lifted their torn skirts above their heads, shouting obscenities at him. With difficulty he tore himself away from them. Gorky went through a similar scene: when he began to speak about it, horror was on his face, he clenched his jaws and suddenly became silent. It was clear that his visit shook him deeply — more, perhaps, than his previous impressions of tramps, the horrors of the lower depths from which he took his early subject matter. Perhaps, now in Europe, he was healing certain wounds he himself was afraid to admit to; and at times … he asked himself, and only himself: Was it worth it?

Gorky was himself an orphan of the revolution. All his hopes for the revolution — hopes by which he had defined himself — had been abandoned in the past four years. Instead of being a constructive cultural force the revolution had virtually destroyed the whole of Russian civilization; instead of human liberation it had merely brought human enslavement; and instead of the spiritual improvement of humanity it had led to degradation. Gorky had become deeply disillusioned. He described himself in 1921 as ‘in a misanthropic mood’. He could not reconcile his own humanist and democratic socialism with the realities of Lenin’s Russia. He could no longer ‘turn a deaf ear’ to the faults of the regime in the hope of doing good and reforming it later: all his efforts had come to naught. If his own ideals had been abandoned in Russia, there was nothing left for him to do but abandon Russia.15