The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Russia at the dawn of the twentieth century knew no more magic word than “revolution.” The idea of revolution was viewed with fear and hatred by the propertied classes of the population, and was loved and revered by all who dreamed of liberty. To the Russians who longed for a new life, there was enchantment in the very sound of the word. Even as they conceived it, even as they pronounced the sacred words, “Long Live the Revolution,” Russians felt obscurely that they were already halfway to liberation.
Russia had known rebellions and mutinies of enslaved peasants before 1900 (for example, Pugachev or Rahzin), but the vision of a widespread and all-embracing liberation movement-that is, of revolution-arose only with the advent of the twentieth century. For the poorer classes this vision spelled land, bread, physical freedom, escape from the knout of the landowner, the Barm, a life of peace and security without poverty or shame. For intellectuals the word “revolution” rang with the ideals of spiritual freedom, of human dignity, social justice, released creativity. And for everybody in both groups it signified a thorough moral upheaval.
The idea of revolution reached Russia from Europe, particularly from France. Groups of aristocratic Army officers brought it back with them after their victory over Napoleon in 1815. They formed the first revolutionary organization and staged the first, though abortive, Dekabrist (or Decembrist) revolt in 1825. Since that year the idea of revolt wove itself like a silken thread through all progressive efforts of Russian letters, art, science and social thought.
There were infinite variations to Russian rebellious thinking. Russians were not merely liberal, democratic, republican or socialist. Even conservative thinkers preached in forthright terms the need for uncompromising spiritual rebellion. And when, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea of socialism reinforced that of revolution, the twin concept of “social revolution” emerged and, over the decades, crystallized in the moral conscience of the people.
True, right-wing radicals and Orthodox Christians (like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Vladimir Soloviev) rejected all thought of violent changes in the social structure; but even for them revolution was a living force in the spiritual atmosphere of Russia. The magnetism of the invisible, but impending, revolution was great despite the deep-rooted power of the Czar. Thus two symbolic battlements stood confronting one another in mutual hatred and repulsion: the historic edifice of czarism and the utopian palace of revolutionary vision. Russia was ruled not only by the Kremlin of the “divine right of kings,” but also by the catacombs of the revolution.
But revolution to most Russians did not mean only destruction and bloody battles; revolution to them implied a movement both humanitarian and liberating. When they sang the immortal strains of the Marseillaise, when they listened enraptured to the story of the storming of the Bastille, or of the barricades in Paris in 1791, and again in 1848 and 1871, they thought less about the fierce cruelties committed against the rulers, or about the fall of the mighty and proud-and more about the sacrifices of the people, about the revolutionary martyrs, about the redemption of the downtrodden and the humbled. The liberation of mankind far more than murder of men, love for the neighbor far more than hatred for the enemy, were contained in the throb of “revolution.” Its heroes differed basically from the official heroes of dynasties, churches and monarchies, despite external similarities in the violent means used by both groups to achieve their ends. The young people in Russia knew the danger but, as they invoked the images of the world-famed liberators of other countries and of other eras, they were sure that their revolution could escape the moral pitfalls resulting from violence.
Revolution appealed to the Russian masses also because its demands were fundamental or, rather, because it proclaimed one great challenging demand instead of scores of lesser demands. The masses-that is, each conscious individual among them-wanted an end to the old mouldy ways. As the anonymous bearer of Russian history, and of world history, the Russian wanted nothing less than paradise on earth and he heard a promise of this paradise in the tremors of the revolution. Men fight not only to gain freedom from something, but also to gain freedom for something. And that something is always more than personal, civil or political freedom.
In 1848, when a Republican Government was established on the barricades of Paris, the workers permitted their leaders to busy themselves with political reforms for a limited time. “Very well,” they said, “the people will wait. We will give you three months of our misery in the cause of the Republic.” But when the time was up, and the families of the revolutionary fighters felt need and hunger in their homes, the workers sent a delegation to Lamartine, poet and famous leader of the Republic, to tell him that they could grant no further lease to the political Republic. They now demanded the social Republic.
What the French workers wanted then, and what the workers in Russia demanded later, were far-reaching changes in the structure of society, changes that would alter the relationship between man and man spiritually and morally as well as governmentally and economically. “A new heaven and a new earth” is the Biblical formula that has come down through the ages. Was this, then, a new Messianism?
It was. One of the most sincere and sensitive poets of Russia, Alexander Block, spoke of it as such. “The duty of the artist,” he wrote in January, 1918, “is to visualize what has only been pondered, to hear the music that vibrates in the turbulent air.
“And what has been pondered?
“Change everything. Renew everything; let the falseness, the filth and the weariness of our life disappear and let it become free, just, pure and beautiful. Whenever such desires, which fill the souls of the people, break down the dams and gush out with a force that washes away whole sections of the shores, then we behold the revolution. Anything less, more moderate, is rebellion, revolt, insubordination. Only this is revolution.
“Revolution is related to nature. It is like a blizzard or typhoon, always different and always unexpected. It can drown good men, and it can wash up the evil, but these are only details. They do not change the direction of the storm or its ear-splitting din.
“The ambition of the Russian revolution is to envelop the whole world. A real revolution can have no lesser goal. Its hope is to touch off a tempest so mighty as to waft a warm wind and the scent of oranges into lands covered with snow, and the cool rain of the north into countries scorched by tropical heat. ‘Peace and friendship among peoples’ is the slogan that heralds the Russian Revolution. It is a song that all who have ears can hear.”
Alexander Block did not, of course, speak for all Russian writers and intellectuals. He had opposed the policy of social compromise pursued by the liberal and bourgeois cultural circles of Russia. But he did express the Russian people’s basic hopes, which did not always coincide with one or another social and political program. Sometimes consciously, and more often by instinct, the Russian wanted his revolution to assure him a chaste and decent life, to revive prostrate truth, to banish sin from the earth.
An educated peasant from a north Russian province wrote:
“Just two or three revolutionary concepts, purified by the martyr’s sacrifice, reached out with invisible hands and touched the heart of the people. Words like ‘The earth is the Lord’s,’ ‘All land belongs to the entire people,’ or ‘Change everything, however long it may take,’ have struck deep roots among the peasants in our land.
“And on the simple word ‘everything’ they played infinite variations. It meant that no longer would there be ‘sin,’ that the golden axle of the universe would take a turn toward the sun of truth, that the body would no longer bend beneath the yoke of drudgery. . . .”
This unknown peasant had used the same magic words as had the poet: “Change everything.” For the Russian had come to demand nothing less after generations of suffering, humiliation, rebellion. He wanted a revolution that would, as quickly as possible, find solutions for everything. Maria Spiridonova, one of the martyrs of the Russian liberation struggle, wrote many years later, in 1930: “I have always felt that socialism and the brotherhood of peoples will grow to maturity only when women have attached themselves to the movement far more than they have so far, and when they have come to love the revolution above everything in the world.”
And because, to the Russian mind, revolution was to be humanitarian and maximalistic, it was also expected, quite naturally, to be a world revolution, a destiny for all peoples in the world. Dawning in Russia, it would not stop at the borders of that country. It was international because liberation of man could not be checked by national frontiers. And during the years preceding the Revolution of 1917 itself, an extraordinary issue-World War I-accented the international nature of the upheaval.
The revolution was to bring liberation from serfdom, but serfdom itself came to be entangled in the cruel bloodletting on the battlefields. The Russian masses longed to be rid of war, and that meant making peace with the “enemy” nations. Peace, therefore, was liberation from the torment of death. And revolution came to mean not only a promise of freedom, justice, wellbeing in life-but life itself. Feeling acutely the sufferings of their own sons in the trenches, the Russian people instinctively and by extension shared in the universal sufferings of humanity. Liberation became part of the great desire for world peace, for the “friendship of all peoples.”
The people were readying themselves for revolution not in fear or in bitterness, but in joyousness and resolve. This movement was not conspiratorial subversion by a handful of fanatics, but an open movement of broad masses of the people. Men and women went out to meet it in a spirit of solemnity, as they might enter a religious service. They sensed that it was not only a break with the past but the beginning of a new future, a regeneration of life itself. The young grew wings, and the people as a whole felt young.
Revolution effervesced with all the hidden strength of passions bottled up for generations. Such storms have their source in two springs: one is human despair, poverty and degradation, and the pressure of war; the other is the burning ecstasy of protest against humiliation and poverty, of longing for liberation and rebirth. When these two springs meet, man rises above himself; his bent shoulders straighten and he can embrace the whole world with his love-"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
Often, in retrospect, it appears that long, dark periods in history were no more than a laboratory for those life-giving elements which reach their full maturity in the rare decisive hours of revolution. Those who have ever experienced the rapture of first love can surely understand what a people experiences during its historic love-storm, when its imagination, its faith, its virtue overflow all bounds. And even if such love-storms, such revolutions, bring hidden dangers of errors, confusion and crime- could these evils deter the people from their one hope for the future? No. They will do everything in their power to keep the revolution within moral bounds, but they will not abandon it. Its guardians are humanism, maximalism, and the universality of its aspirations. To the Russian people revolution meant a great deal more than full political, economic and national freedom; it was to be the beginning of a new moral world order.
Such was the revolution which in 1917 struck Russia in two mighty waves: in February and in October.