The Thinking Reed

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the terror and the introduction of the censorship were actions that the left-wing intelligentsia could not excuse under any conditions:

We may agree with Larin that every great political revolution has been accompanied by foul deeds, and by the flourishing of rascality in the camp of the victors. But Larin is cruelly mistaken if he thinks that, contrariwise, an abundance of foul deeds and a flourishing of rascality always proves that what it happening is a great revolution.57

Such warnings as these did not go unremarked, but they produced no results except an increasing hostility among the members of the ruling party towards Marxist criticism coming from the ranks of the socialist intelligentsia. Pokrovsky wrote with irritation that ‘a “strictly Marxist” line leads straight into the swamp.’58 Not only the activists of the opposition parties, who were subjected to ‘temporary isolation’, but also many critically minded people in the worlds of science and art fell victim to repression. Zhores Medvedev writes:

The larger part of senior research and academic personnel backed the anti-Bolshevik forces, and during the first waves of ‘Red terror’ ‘professors’ and ‘academicians’ were almost automatically considered to be enemies of Soviet power. A large number of scientists and technical experts were harassed, arrested, sentenced and even executed during the beginning of the civil war in 1918–1919.59

Among those executed was the outstanding poet N. Gumilev.60 The gulf between the intelligentsia and the new government widened. ‘For the revolution’, writes Boffa, ‘this was a difficulty, for the intelligentsia it was a tragedy.’61

Refusing to accept the revolution, which had betrayed their expectations, while still — as before — hating the reaction, members of the intelligentsia found themselves at a parting of the ways. Stankevich noted during the civil war, among the intelligentsia of Moscow, ‘a fanatical hatred of the Bolsheviks’ together with not the slightest sympathy with the Whites.62 For him the choice was agonizingly hard. ‘Where am I to go?’ he pondered.

To Denikin, the representative of the military and national idea with which I worked all through the war, fighting along with most of my friends against the Bolsheviks, because they perverted the idea of revolution?… Or, finally, to the Bolsheviks? After all, they are what is left of Russian freedom and revolution, I should have greater scope with them, and even among their military I should find men with whom I could deal with complete respect.63