The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I went to Moscow on the very first train, carrying a pass signed by Kushelev, the commissar of the Provisional Government.

Nobody saw me off. There was no time for farewells.

NOTES

Barkhatnye knigi were the ancient registers of the Russian nobility.

The stanzas cited do not correspond to the standard text of the Marseillaise.

Chapter Fourteen

Roman Gul, We’re in Power Now

Roman Gul was born in Penza in 1896, a city he romanticized and loved. After World War I he served briefly in the White Army during the opening phase of the Russian Civil War of 1918–1920. Barely managing to survive the early Red Terror, he wound up an émigré. He spent many years in Berlin, Paris, and ultimately New York. He chronicled the cultural life of Russian émigrés in Berlin and Paris in a two-volume memoir from which this selection is taken. He was well known as a novelist with several works, most notably Azef, being translated into several languages. In New York, in 1959, he was chosen to be editor of Novyi zhurnal (New Review), the leading Russian language quarterly in the United States. Taken from Roman Gul, Ia unes Rossiiu [I Carried Russia with Me]. New York:Most, 1981.

In those December days of 1917 Russia was at the height of its time of “damnation.” A previously unseen and unknown passion for universal destruction, universal extermination and a wild hatred for law, order, justice, peace, and tradition spewed forth from the bowels of the populace. Just as in [Dostoevsky’s novel] The Possessed, “everything shifted from its foundations.” As the formulations said, “Everything has to be turned over and placed bottom-side up.” “It is necessary to unleash the lowest, the most vile passions, so that nothing will hold back the populace in its hatred and thirst for extermination and destruction.” All these wild ravings of Bakunin were incarnated now in everyday Russian life. It was precisely the sort of all-out popular rebellion which Pushkin had called “senseless and merciless.” During this loathsome rebellion, we . . . lived. “Pillage what’s been pillaged!” went the slogan and in Penza they senselessly pillaged all the stores on Moscow Street. “Burn the landlords’ estates!” “Kill the bourgeoisie!” And they burned and

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killed all who were “marked for annihilation.” After all, there were no longer courts and judges, prisons nor police. Everything was torn from its foundations, just as Shigalev and Verkhovenskii desired.

In Penza on the square in front of the railroad station a captain passing through the city was killed by a mob just because he hadn’t taken off his insignia. After stripping the dead man naked they whooped and laughed while dragging the large white body to and fro through the snow of Moscow Street. Then a drunken frenzied soldier bellowed “The power is ours now! The people’s.” They burned Grushetskii, the notary, alive in his estate, not allowing him to escape from the burning house. The landowner Skripkin was killed in his estate and his naked corpse was stuffed into a barrel of sauerkraut “just for amusement.” All this was done with wild laughter. “The power is ours now! The people’s.”

In hatred and passion for extermination they killed not only people, but also animals: the non-plebian, non-proletarian kind. In the horse-breeding farm of an acquaintance they broke the backs of the trotting horses with iron bars because they belonged to the “master.” During the plundering of our estate a “revolutionary little peasant” took our female trotter named Volga and, harnessing her to a plow, began to whip her maliciously. Let her croak, she was the master’s. . . . “Trotters are of use to masters, but now there ain’t no masters.” In another estate they cut out the tongue of a stud horse, and in Days of Damnation Ivan Bunin described how on an estate near Elets peasant men and women (“the revolutionary people”) tore out all the feathers of the peacocks and let the bloodied birds loose “naked.” Why? Well, because “now there’s no need for peacocks, now everything is for the laboring classes, not the masters.” Bolshevik agitators screamed this now until they were hoarse. And this had a mystical effect. “Now everything is different,” “Now power belongs to the people,” “Now we are all free,” “Now there are no prisons!” “Now there aren’t any police or constables,” “Now everything is ours, the people’s.” I saw with my own eyes how the people believed in this now out of foolishness and blindness.

I’ll tell you about another wild, senseless murder. At the estate next to us in the village of Evlashev they murdered Maria Vladimirovna Lukina, an old woman landowner. Fearing for her, her friends tried to talk her into leaving the village and moving to town. But the stubborn old woman answered: “I was born in Evlashev and I’ll die in Evlashev.” She indeed died in Evlashev.