Chapter XXII: The Intelligentzia Objects

The Constituent Assembly never met again.

At the hour when the delegates were supposed to reassemble, the Tauride Palace was dark. In the white hall at Smolney the members of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet were gathered to discuss its dissolution. For all practical purposes, this had been accomplished that morning when the guard told the members to go home. The Central Executive Committee was merely planning to place its rubber stamp upon the proceedings.

In the chair was Sverdloff--the very same who the day before had presided at the historic gathering. The meeting opened in a storm. Half a dozen speakers demanded an investigation of the bloodshed. Rosanoff, the head of the labor unions, and several other men protested against the dissolution of the Assembly. Then Lenin arrived. As he walked down the aisle, Krameroff, the good-natured but irrepressible protestor at all meetings, arose to the full height of his six feet five and shouted:

“Long live the dictator!”

In a minute there was a mob of angry men upon their feet, angry at Krameroff and shouting violently:

“Put him out! Put him out!”

When the chairman had calmed them, Lenin took his place. He stood quietly for a moment, surveying his audience, with his hands in his pockets and an appraising expression in his brown eyes. He knew what was expected of him. He must win the wavering members of his own flock. He must reach out to the larger audience spread over the vast areas of Russia. He must speak so that he would be heard beyond the confines of his country, in that world whose attention was focused for the time on this group of strange new actors in the international drama. Lenin began quietly tracing the historical developments of the Soviet as an institution. He made a critical analysis of the workings of various parliaments, declaring that they had become merely a sparring-place for the verbal contests of socialists.

“In Russia,” he said, “the workers have developed organizations, which give them power to execute their aspirations. You are told that we ask you to jump a hundred years. We do not ask you to do anything. We did not organize the Soviets. They were not organized in 1917: they were created in the revolution of 1905. The people organized the Soviets. When I tell you that the government of the Soviets is superior to the Constituent Assembly, that it is more fundamentally representative of the will of the mass, I do not tell you anything new. As long ago as April 4, I told you that the Soviets were more representative of the people than this Constituent Assembly which you wanted to organize.”

He explained in detail the political break in the Social Revolutionary Party, and said:

“When the people voted for delegates of the Constituent Assembly, they did not know the difference between the Right S. R.’s and the Left. They did not know that when they voted for the Right Social Revolutionists they voted for the bourgeoisie, and when they voted for the Left they voted for Socialism.”

At first he spoke quietly, but before long his hands had come out of his pockets. These, and his brown eyes alternately snapping and smiling, and his eyebrows humorously expressive, all vigorously emphasized his phrases.

It was evident from the faces of the men before him that he was justifying himself and them to their satisfaction.

“The February Revolution was a political bourgeois revolution overthrowing Tsarism. In November a social revolution occurred, and the working masses became the sovereign authority. The Workmen’s and Soldiers’ delegates are not bound by any rules or traditions to the old bourgeois society. Their government has taken all the power and rights into its own hands. The Constituent Assembly is the highest expression of the political ideals of bourgeois society, which are no longer necessary in a Socialist state. The Constituent Assembly will be dissolved.

“If the Constituent Assembly represented the will of the people, we would shout: ‘Long live the Constituent Assembly!’ Instead we shout: ‘Down with the Constituent Assembly!’” he finished.

In the seat next to me was a little Bessarabian soldier with black beady eyes and a short, bristling mustache. He had a merry face that crinkled when he smiled. Every now and then he gave his head a queer little shake of amazed admiration and whispered:

“He’s a wise man. He’s a wise man.”

Lenin was saying for the simple Bessarabian just what he would like to have been able to say for himself.

A few of the most conservative men remained unconvinced. The irrepressible Krameroff shouted: “Stydno, Lenin, stydno!” (Shame.) But the vote proved that Lenin was voicing the will of all but a small minority.

Soukhonoff, of the Novia Jizn group, whose leader was Maxim Gorky, gained the floor, and protested against the suppression of the press.

“The people even in Petrograd don’t know what transpired in the walls of Tauride. It is more than a crime; it is a blunder,” he said.

Soukhonoff voiced the attitude of the _Intelligentzia_. The case of Maxim Gorky is rather typical, though Gorky is of a more extreme nature and expresses himself more violently than most of the _literati_. They were all theoretical advocates of revolution, but they shrank from the practice of it. The logic of events found them out of sympathy with revolution in the very stage of development that they had prayed and fought for.

During the Kerensky régime, Gorky, through his paper, blasted at the government, and his voice was the loudest, urging the crowd to more extreme measures. When the crowd moved, as crowds always move, in its own way, Gorky could not follow. Ever since the March Revolution he had been ill most of the time, and thus shut off from contact with facts. His opinions necessarily had to be based on reports carried in to him. The woman who has been his companion for many years was a Cadet, and bitter against the Bolsheviki. Much of his news sifted in through her, and naturally he has been influenced by her. Gorky has made his great contribution to Russian revolution--a contribution no man can deny. It is a pity that in his old age he should find himself out of step with his comrades.

The revolutionists of the literary group are not happy in the present situation. Through the years they fought for free speech, free press, and free ballot. Suddenly they found the new revolutionists, pragmatists to the last degree, being forced by the exigencies of the situation to use the very same weapons as those of monarchical invention. In order to accept the new gods set up in the economic temple by the proletariat leaders, the literati had to deny, for the moment at least, their old gods. Few of them could make the necessary mental somersault. They found themselves, by virtue of denouncing something in which they did not believe, forced into a defense of something in which they also did not believe.

They published one issue of “Paper Protest,” in which they expressed their ideas. Korolenko, Sologub, Kiryakoff, Mijoueff, Mereshkovsky, and several others of the Russian writers who played so vigorous a part in revolutionary education in Russia, wrote brief articles. On the whole the paper was a feeble thing, hardly worthy of the subject or the authors, but indicative of the state of mind of the _Intelligentzia_.

The strike of the _Intelligentzia_ continued through January. A few of the strikers in the various ministries went back to work, but most of them were still sabotaging. It was this sabotage that led to restrictions upon the amounts of money which might be drawn from the banks. The bourgeoisie, by paying the salaries of the officials, was making the continuation of the strike possible. With unlimited money at their command, the Soviets were powerless to make them go back to work.

“They’ll never stop sabotaging till we hit them in the pocket-book,” said one of the speakers at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee, when a proposed decree was under discussion.

It was decided that the gold hoarded in safe-deposit vaults should be seized, and the amounts found deposited to the credit of the owners. It was announced that the interests of small depositors would be protected, and investigation made of the accounts of large depositors.

Even if the Bolsheviki had been able to rally all the _Intelligentzia_ to their support, the task of feeding, warming, and clothing Russia would have been an almost impossible one. With starvation forever at their heels, they somehow staved it off from day to day. The black bread grew blacker and more uneatable, and sometimes we wondered what strange ingredients besides straw and chaff could have gone into its making.

Since the factories closed for lack of raw material with which to manufacture, the workmen were organized and armed as Red Guardsmen. Even if every factory in Russia had continued to operate, it would not have been possible to supply the needs of the peasants and the army. Just as Germany is one huge factory, Russia is one great granary. Even in peace times, she manufactured but a small part of her necessities. With imports and manufactures both stopped, her condition became desperate. As stocks in the shops dwindled, prices soared correspondingly.

Snow piled up in mountains and valleys on the streets, and driving an _izvostchik_ down the Nevsky was like riding on a roller-coaster. Sometimes the street-cars ran, but more often the snow was heaped so high that the tracks were impassable. Sometimes, when they were cleared for action, there was not sufficient coal to operate the electric plants. About half of the cars in Moscow and Petrograd were out of commission for lack of repairs, and thousands of engines and freight-cars were piled upon the sidings in the railroad yards. But for the faithfulness of the railroad employees, Russia’s condition must have been even worse. Repeatedly they put off their demands for higher wages because they were persuaded by each group of changing powers that the Revolution would suffer. The switchmen’s families were without the barest necessities as the price of food went up and the value of the ruble went down. Many times the men threatened strikes, but always their loyalty to the Revolution won the day and the strike would be postponed.

Petrograd, in the closing days of January, became more and more bleak.

The clanging swords and the clicking spurs of officers filing back and forth across the marble lobby in the War Hotel were gone. The hotel had been taken over by the People’s Commissaries. In the dining-room I sat down to frugal meals with peasants, workmen, soldiers, agitators, and poets.

Food was daily less plentiful. Cabbage soup, black bread, and _rabchik_, a wild bird for which we all acquired a deathless hatred, made up the daily menu. Only the glasses of steaming tea saved us from gastronomic despair. The supply of knives, forks, and spoons, dwindling ever since the beginning of the war, was now almost exhausted. Frequently a single knife served instead of a teaspoon for an entire table. Often we waited for tea until the people across the room finished with their glasses.

Most of the time we were in total darkness. There were no lamps or candles in the halls, and we groped our way up the dark staircases, bumping blindly into one another’s arms. There was an unhappy affinity between the electric light, the elevator, and the water system. They all stopped together. Frequently my face remained unwashed until the late afternoon, when I went to the Hotel Europe for tea. The Europe proudly boasted its own electric plant, and it was still possible to live there in comparative comfort and even luxury.

The waiters in the War Hotel complained that there was no money to buy food. A few of them, used to the generous tips of pre-revolutionary days, bemoaned the fall of the monarchy and prayed for the coming of the Germans. They were not the only ones who awaited Prussian deliverance. Most of the upper-class Russians no longer made any attempt to hide their willingness to have the Germans come to Petrograd.

Even my little princess friend, Orchidée, who had been educated in France and whose natural sympathies were all with the Allies, admitted to me that she hoped the Germans would come soon. We were lunching together. In the party were an English officer and a Russian who before the Revolution was in charge of the Grand Duchesses’ hospital train.

“You don’t really mean it,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” she answered. “I like the English, and I should like to have them come and rule us; but they will not. If the Germans come, we can keep our titles and our estates. Why shouldn’t we want them?”

“And you?” I asked, turning to the other Russian. “Do you feel the same?”

“Yes,” he answered. “It is the only hope for us. The Bolsheviki will take all.”

They were demonstrating the Marxian theory that one’s conduct is dictated by one’s economic desires. They were being forced by the new order to give up their privileges, and to ask them to like it was to expect the impossible. For some of them the situation was tragic. They were products of the system, just as were the uneducated Russian peasant and the class-conscious revolutionary workers.

One man characterized his country for me by saying:

“Russia is like a badly baked loaf of bread. It is raw on one side and burned on the other. The great peasant mass is left in ignorance and poverty, while the upper class has nothing but luxury and useless culture.”

The luxury was disappearing. The “useless culture” did them little good in a state that recognized no value but that of production. The land-owner, suddenly bereft of his estates, like the military man deprived of his epaulets and his salary, was frequently a pathetic figure. The life of the dying class is not easy. On the streets of Moscow and Petrograd, officers were shoveling snow, or selling newspapers, or trucking baggage to buy the barest necessities. In some cases, the women, proving less unfit than the men of the family, had become the bread-winners. The old picture money of the Tsar’s day disappeared, and the post-revolutionary issues of currency, practically the only exchange in the market, were accepted with a single sneering word--“Kerensky.”

The Anarchists grew more daring in the days immediately following the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly.

“What is the use of government?” the Anarchists asked. “The Bolsheviki promised you bread, and promised you peace. Where is your bread? Where is your peace? All governments are alike--the Bolsheviki just the same as the others! You must take the factories! Take the land! Why do you wait?”

The army had become a hungry horde of ill-shod and ill-clothed men with but a single desire upon earth--to get back to whatever corner of that vast land they called home. They had stayed in the trenches for nearly a year after they had made their first demand for peace. Their committee meetings had become pathetic recitals by the delegates of the conditions of their men. The horses were dying from lack of feed. The men were suffering hideously in the frozen trenches because of lack of boots and clothing.

Again and again the delegates declared:

“They say they’ll stand it just one more week and that’s all.”

When the week was up, in spite of the tortures of cold and hunger, most of them still stayed on. The committees were unequal to the task of provisioning the army. Given the same conditions, any group of officials, any dictator, any Tsar, would have failed equally; but the unthinking critics of Russia persisted in placing all the blame for the disorganization of the army and navy upon the committees. As a matter of fact, the disorganization came first, and the committees afterward. They were an outgrowth of the chaos that immediately followed the fall of the Tsar. They were the attempt of the men themselves to bring some sort of order out of the confusion that naturally resulted when the governor of the Russian engine was suddenly removed.

In July General Denikine, in command in Galicia during the disastrous offensive, made a report to the War Council in which he described conditions existing as early as June, saying:

“We no longer have any infantry. I will make the statement stronger, and say we no longer have any army. The army is in ruins.”

February was almost here.

Nothing had happened to improve the army--everything had happened to complete its disorganization. Considering the condition of that army, the miracle was not that they left the trenches so soon, but that they stayed so long. Considering the frightful conditions in Russia, the amazing thing was not that there was so much violence, but that there was not more.