A people's tragedy

Dmitry Os’kin was a son of the new Russia. He joined Brusilov’s army in the First World War as an ordinary private; and yet by the time of the General’s death this peasant lad was a senior figure in the Soviet military establishment. After his command of the Second Labour Army during 1920 Os’kin was given command of the Soviet Republic’s Reserve Army, an important post which placed him in charge of nearly half a million men. He was held up by the regime as a shining example of a Red Commander whom it had always promised to promote from the ranks of the peasants and workers joining the Red Army in the civil war. Here was a soldier who had carried in his knapsack the baton of a general, if not of a field-marshal, and it was on the basis of this self-image as a likely peasant lad that he wrote his trilogy of military memoirs in the 1920s. Os’kin’s last years are obscure. During the later 1920s he became a military bureaucrat in Moscow. He died in 1934, possibly a victim of Stalin’s terror, at the tender age of forty-two.

That was certainly Kanatchikov’s fate. Like Os’kin, he was a son of the new Russia whose service to the party in the civil war brought him steady promotion through the ranks. It was only fitting that this peasant-son-cum-worker whose conversion to the cause had been so bound up with his own political education should concentrate his party career in that field. In 1921, at the age of forty-two, he was appointed to the rectorship of the Communist University in Petrograd, a prestigious post which he held for the next three years. In 1924 he became the head of the Central Committee’s Press Bureau; and in the next year he took over its Department of Historical Research. Not bad for a man with only four years’ schooling. Kanatchikov became one of the party’s leading publicists in its campaign against the Trotskyites: his History of a Deviation (1924) became the standard anti-Trotsky diatribe; and throughout the 1920s he produced a long line of similar hack works. But this did not save him from Stalin’s firing squads in his war against the Old Bolsheviks. In 1926 Kanatchikov sided with the ‘left opposition’ of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who criticized the policies of Stalin and Bukharin on the grounds (and this was significant for Kanatchikov) that they were too soft on the peasantry. For this ‘deviation’ Kanatchikov was punished with a posting in Prague as a TASS correspondent. Two years later he was allowed to return to Russia after he had written a grovelling letter to the Central Committee in which he confessed his ‘political mistakes’. His ardent support for collectivization — the logical conclusion of his rejection of the old peasant Russia — earned him a temporary ‘rehabilitation’. In 1929 he was made the editor of the newly founded Literary Newspaper, the weekly publication of the Soviet Writers’ Union. During the next few years he wrote a string of party pamphlets in support of Stalin, for which he was rewarded with a larger flat, all the usual party perks and a steady increase in his salary. But in Stalin’s Russia every party member was haunted by his past and when, from the end of 1935, Stalin moved to wipe out the ‘Zinovievites’, Kanatchikov’s star fell once again. He was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to eight years’ hard labour in the Gulag. Like so many Bolshevik victims of the Great Terror, he pleaded with Stalin to intervene and grant him mercy without realizing that it was Stalin himself who had ordered his arrest. Kanatchikov had served out half his sentence by the time he died in 1940.7

Exile for Gorky was a form of torture. While he could not bear to live in Soviet Russia, nor could he bear to live abroad. For several years he wavered in this schizophrenic state, homesick for Russia yet too sick of it to return home. From Berlin, Gorky wandered restlessly through the spa towns of Germany and Czechoslovakia before settling in the Italian resort of Sorrento. ‘No, I cannot go to Russia,’ he wrote to Rolland in 1924. ‘I feel like a person without a homeland. In Russia I would be the enemy of everything and everyone, it would be like banging my head against a brick wall.’