The Thinking Reed

It was these anti-democratic measures, and not their revolutionary ideas, that caused the breach between the Bolsheviks and the intelligentsia. Novaya Zhizn declared more than once that attempts to introduce socialism otherwise than by democratic means could only ‘compromise the idea of socialism’.29 The first clashes between the left-wing intelligentsia and the new rulers were over the question of press freedom. On 28 January 1918 a ‘Revolutionary Press Tribunal’ was established, with the task of dealing with ‘crimes and misdemeanours against the people committed through use of the press’.30 This tribunal was empowered to inflict very severe penalties. However, compared with present-day Soviet notions, what prevailed at the beginning of 1918 was absolute liberalism in censorship matters, for the creation of the tribunal assumed the existence of independent newspapers which would be subject to control, and the absence of preliminary censorship. Regulations for the press were also issued by the Soviets of different towns, and in most of this legislation such disorder reigned that it was impossible to ensure a consistent censorship policy. The activity of the newspapers was governed by a mass of rules and regulations, of which Novaya Zhizn' wrote that they were ‘senseless and contradictory decisions which offered incredible scope for arbitrariness’.31 Such gagging of the press, in the view of the intelligentsia, could only delay ‘the triumph of radiant socialist ideals’.32 But real suppression of press freedom was yet to come.

The first attempt to bring in preliminary censorship, in Moscow in winter 1917, miscarried. A decree establishing it was not put into practice and on 2 January 1918 the censorship was revoked. However, inroads to press freedom continued to be made, creating antagonism against the Bolsheviks among the democratic intelligentsia who had fought so long for this freedom. ‘Truly, those whom the gods wish to punish they first make mad,’ wrote the Mensheviks’ paper. ‘Bolshevism’s worst enemy could not have done it more harm than is done by this wretched decree on censorship.’33 Besides, the first attempt to impose a censorship was not the last, and all independent oppositional newspapers were eventually suppressed both in Soviet Russia and in the territories where the counter-revolution was victorious for a time. Independent ‘thick journals’ continued to appear until the mid-twenties, but that was no substitute for a free press.

The question arises: How was it possible for the Bolsheviks, who had themselves emerged from the Russian intelligentsia and the freedom movement, to renounce democratic liberties? Boris Souvarine, who knew Lenin personally, explains it by referring to ‘cette aberration désastreuse, d’après laquelle est moral tout ce qui sert la révolution.’34 In fact, the revolution had to some extent been transformed from a means to the conquest of freedom into an end in itself. This religious attitude to the revolution, of which Merezhkovsky and Berdyaev spoke, was developed by the Russian intelligentsia itself in the prerevolutionary period, and Lenin’s way of thinking undoubtedly embodied one aspect of the intelligentsia’s mentality.

Despite later fantasies, none of the Bolsheviks was opposed in principle to pluralism and a multiparty democracy. When he became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky said: ‘The hand of the Praesidium will never oppress the minority.’35 Apparently he was sincere in saying this. At any rate — according to Sukhanov — three years later, in 1920, Trotsky, when reminded of this speech, exclaimed: What a happy time!’36 The American historian Abraham Asher wrote that even as late as 1919 Kautsky, who knew the Bolshevik leaders well, spoke ‘with remarkable naïveté’ of their possible return ‘to the path of democracy’.37 One of the leading figures in the Bolshevik political police wrote, at about this same time, that arrested members of the left-wing parties ‘must not be regarded as undergoing punishment but as temporarily isolated from society in the interests of the revolution. The conditions of their detention must not have a punitive character.’38 Even W. Scharndorf, in his crudely anti-Bolshevik booklet, admits that in the early days the Party leaders were tormented ‘by pangs of democratic conscience’.39