Reading the newspapers of those days, including the anti-Bolshevik ones, one observes at once that the suppression of opposition parties and the restriction of press freedom were unexpected not only by the Mensheviks and the democratic opposition but also by the Bolsheviks themselves. These measures had not been planned beforehand. It can be said, though, that they followed inevitably from the position of a minority party which had taken power in a period of revolutionary crisis. However, this is only part of the truth. Measures of this sort are often reversible. The Bolsheviks did nothing to ensure that their prohibitions remained merely ‘temporary’ and did not become permanent. Restriction of democracy had its limits, beyond which one must speak not of ‘restriction’ but of annihilation. With regret, it has to be said that the Bolsheviks went beyond those limits with amazing ease. It was this which predetermined their relations with the intelligentsia. Moreover, taking a long view, it was precisely these fatal mistakes in 1917-18 that marked the beginning of the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolutionary regime. The path of the revolutionary dictatorship was not doomed in advance to failure and, as Stephen Cohen has rightly observed, mass terror, the Stalinism of the thirties, was not ‘the logical, irresistible outcome of the Bolshevik revolution’,40 but the possibility of such an outcome was great from the very beginning. The path Lenin had taken was extremely risky, and the mistakes of 1917-18 predetermined the subsequent fate of the revolution, marking the start of the bureaucratic degeneration. Rosa Luxemburg warned at that time:
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.41
The force of political inertia carried the Bolsheviks from restricting the freedom of the press to dispersing the Constituent Assembly, from that to suppression of the opposition, and from that to terror. And each of these measures, far from uniting the nation around the regime, engendered new enemies, so making necessary a fresh series of repressive measures.
The results of the civil war were tragic for the Russian intelligentsia. The suppression of bourgeois-democratic institutions dealt a heavy blow to its hopes for a new, free Russia. The conflict between Reds and Whites, the cruel terror on both sides, could not but evoke its protests. Part of the intelligentsia adhered to the Bolsheviks; many joined the Whites; the majority tried to find some third way. Characteristic of the feelings of that majority is the diary of V.G. Korolenko, which was published in the second number of
‘Mutual brutality is increasing,’ said Lenin’s former intimate Martov, as he watched the raging of the White and Red terrors.44
Under Nicholas Romanov it was sometimes possible, by pointing to the monstrous severity of a sentence, to prevent its execution and to wrest a victim from the hangman’s grasp. Under Vladimir Ulyanov this is not possible.45
Violence engendered violence, bloodshed provoked bloodshed, and those who had raised the banner of Red terror would, Martov prophesied, sooner or later themselves perish: