Everything Flows (26 page)

listened to the Appassionata
Lenin said that he once wept after listening to Beethoven’s
Appassionata
sonata. He famously went on to say that “a revolutionary cannot afford to give way to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat his enemies on the head instead of fighting them mercilessly.” (Slavoj Zizek,
Revolution at the Gates
[London: Verso, 2002], 197.)

Lenin’s unfinished portrait
The lines Grossman quotes are from a once well-known poem by Nikolay Gavrilovich Poletaev (1889–1935). Poletaev is now all but forgotten.

author of one memoir about Lenin
Grossman is referring to the author Maria Moiseyevna Essen (1872–1956).

law of the Gospel of Christ
This quote is from a famous speech given by Dostoevsky in June 1880, at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.

the bridges thunder
Grossman goes on to refer several times to this famous passage from the end of the first part of Gogol’s
Dead Souls
(translated by Donald Rayfield [London: Garnett Press, 2008], 267–68):

And what Russian does not enjoy riding fast? How can his soul, which feels the urge to whirl, to take the bit in his mouth, to say sometimes, “The devil take the hindmost,” how can his soul not love riding fast?...Oh, the troika of three horses and a carriage: bird-like troika, who invented you?...Russia, are you not also like the bold troika which no-one can overtake? The road is a cloud of smoke under your wheels, the bridges thunder, everything lags behind and is stranded in the rear. The beholder stops, struck by a divine miracle: is this a bolt of lightning from heaven? What does this awe-inspiring movement mean? What sort of unknown force propels these horses which the world has never seen before? Oh, horses, horses, what horses! Does the howling gale have its source in your manes? Is there a keen ear burning on your every sinew? You have caught the sound of a familiar song on high, you have girded your bronze chests together as one and, your hooves barely touching the ground, you have been transformed into just endless lines flying through the air, and the whole troika flies, inspired by God!...Russia, where are you hurtling to? Give an answer! There is no answer. The bell peals with a wonderful ringing; the air, ripped to pieces, roars and becomes wind; everything that exists on earth flies past, and other nations and empires look askance and stand back to make way for the troika.

our entire history
Like the passage Grossman quotes a few lines above, this is from Chaadaev’s letter to A. de Sircour of June 15, 1846.

move from one landlord to another
There are two festivals of St. Yury (St. George) in the Orthodox calendar, in the spring and in the autumn. Autumn Yury’s Day, celebrated on November 26, when the harvest has been completed, had a special importance. A Code of Law introduced in 1497 by Ivan III established the two-week period around Autumn Yury’s Day (one week before the feast and one week after it), as the only time of the year when a peasant was free to move from one landowner to another. A century later, Boris Godunov annulled this freedom, thus finalizing the evolution of serfdom.

And still more sternly carry on his cause
From “Lenin,” by Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925). “Lenin” is part of a longer poem,
Gulyay-polye
, written in 1924 (the year of Lenin’s death)
.

“party of a new type”
Lenin first used this phrase in 1903. He meant by it that the party would be a disciplined, quasi-military organization—not merely an association of more or less like-minded people.

“Little Apple” and “The Fried Chicken,”
“The Fried Chicken” describes how a fried chicken, walking down Nevsky Prospekt, is stopped by the police. Unable to produce his passport or pay a bribe, he is torn to pieces. The last line of the song is “But chickens want to live too!” “Little Apple” is another street song from the same period.

Proletkult
A portmanteau of
proletarskaya kultura
(proletarian culture). This movement, active in the early Soviet Union, aimed to provide the foundation for a truly proletarian art, free from bourgeois influence. Its main theoretician, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928), saw the proletkult as the third part of a revolutionary trinity. While the unions attended to the proletariat’s economic interests and the Communist Party to their political interests, the proletkult would care for their cultural and spiritual life.

boyars
The old Russian nobility.

oprichniki
The unofficial private army of Ivan the Terrible, used to destroy the power of the boyars, or old nobility. The
oprichniki
rode black horses, each with a dog’s head and a broom attached to his saddle—a reminder that their duty was “to bite the enemies of the tsar and sweep away treason.”

gravedigger of freedom
Grossman is probably alluding to the following passage of
The Communist Manifesto
: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

1547
– 84 Reign of Ivan the Terrible

1584–1605
Boris Godunov rules Russia; after his death, the country sinks into the period of confusion known as the Time of Troubles

1703
Peter the Great founds St. Petersburg

1762
– 96 Reign of Catherine the Great

1825
Decembrist Revolt: an unsuccessful coup by liberal members of the aristocracy; Tsar Nicholas I comes to the throne

1842
Publication of Gogol’s
Dead Souls

1861
Emancipation of the serfs

1881
Alexander II assassinated by members of The People’s Will

1891
Beginning of construction of Trans-Siberian Railway

1905
Birth of Vasily Semyonovich Grossman

1917
Tsar Nicholas II abdicates after February Revolution; workers’ soviets (councils) are set up in Petrograd and Moscow; Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seize power in the October Revolution

1918
– 21 Russian Civil War, accompanied by the draconian economic policies known as War Communism; although there were many different factions, the two main forces were the Red Army (Communists) and the White Army (anti-Communists); foreign powers also intervened, to little effect, and millions perished before the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the Whites in 1920 ; smaller battles continued for several years

1921
After an uprising in March by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the at least relatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted until 1928 ; many of the more idealistic Communists saw this as a step backward, as a shameful compromise with the forces of capitalism; the NEP was not, however, accompanied by any political liberalization

1924 Death of Lenin; Petrograd is renamed Leningrad; Stalin begins to take power

1928
– 1937 The first and second of Stalin’s five-year plans bring about a remarkable increase in the production of coal, iron, and steel

1929 Collectivization of agriculture begins

1932–33 Between three to five million peasants die in the Terror Famine in Ukraine

1934 Foundation of Union of Soviet Writers; Grossman publishes the story “In the Town of Berdichev” and the novel
Glyukauf
, about the life of the Donbass miners

1934–39 The Great Purges; at least a million people are shot and several million sent to the Gulag

1939 Stalin–Hitler pact; beginning of Second World War

1941 Hitler invades the Soviet Union; Leningrad is blockaded and Moscow under threat; Grossman begins to work as a war correspondent for
Krasnaya Zvezda
(the Red Army newspaper)

1945 End of Second World War

1946 Andrey Zhdanov, then seen as a possible heir to Stalin, tightens control over the arts

1948 Trofim Lysenko becomes more dominant than ever in Soviet biology, and especially agriculture; genetics is officially declared a bourgeois pseudoscience; around three thousand biologists are fired from their jobs and many are arrested

1953 January 13: Publication of article in
Pravda
about the Jewish Killer Doctors; preparations continue for a purge of Soviet Jews; Grossman’s recently published novel,
For a Just Cause
,
is fiercely attacked; March 5: Death of Stalin; April 4: Official acknowledgment that the case against the Killer Doctors was entirely false

1956 Khrushchev denounces Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress; millions of prisoners are released from the camps; start of a more liberal period known as “The Thaw”

1958 Publication abroad of
Doctor Zhivago
; under pressure from Soviet authorities, Pasternak declines to accept the Nobel Prize

1961 The KGB confiscates the manuscript of Grossman’s
Life and Fate

1962 Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

1964 Fall of Khrushchev. Death of
Vasily Grossman.

1974 Solzhenitsyn deported after publication in the West of
The Gulag Archipelago

1985 Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power; beginning of the period of liberal reforms known as perestroika; the next few years see the first publication in Russia of Grossman’s
Life and Fate
and
Everything Flows
, and of important works by Krzhizhanovsky, Platonov, Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn and many others.

1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union

These events are so tragic, and so vast, that they can seem entirely beyond understanding. Even Stalin’s Great Purges of 1934–39 are easier to understand; they were a successful attempt on Stalin’s part to destroy, or terrify into submission, any members of the Soviet elite who might conceivably oppose him. It is harder to understand why a ruler should choose to destroy a huge part of the peasantry that had, until then, produced much of the nation’s wealth.

What blinds us, perhaps, is the Soviet emblem—the hammer (representing the workers) and the sickle (representing the peasants). The Soviet government referred to itself as a “workers’ and peasants’ government”—and we have been too ready to believe them. In actual fact, few of the Bolsheviks ever seem to have had much sympathy with the peasants. Most of them probably felt much the same as Lenin’s friend, Maksim Gorky, who once declared, “You’ll pardon my saying so, but the peasant is not yet human...He’s our enemy, our enemy.” In 1917 Lenin had done his best to buy the support of the peasants with his slogan “Peace, Bread, and Land”; he had encouraged peasants to seize their landlords’ estates and burn down their houses. Nevertheless, even then, the peasants had voted not for the Bolsheviks but for the Socialist Revolutionaries, whom they rightly saw as more likely to represent their interests. And after 1917, after encouraging the peasants to rise up against their landlords and therefore destabilize the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks found themselves having to fight a fifteen-year war—with an uneasy truce in the mid-1920s—in order to reassert the power of the central government. The Bolsheviks saw the peasants not only as subhuman but also as wily proto-capitalists whose whole way of life threatened their cherished project of a strong, centrally planned State.

The first measure Stalin took was to collectivize the peasants, to destroy the independence of the individual peasants. Collectivization was imposed throughout the entire Soviet Union. Stalin’s second measure was directed primarily against the Ukraine; Ukrainian peasants were, for the main part, wealthier, and their opposition to collectivization was particularly strong. The story of the Ukrainian famine is still not widely known, even though Robert Conquest told it more than twenty years ago in
The Harvest of Sorrow.
I am grateful to Donald Rayfield for allowing me to include the following paragraphs to provide some general background to Grossman’s own painfully vivid account.
[1]

A famine which struck all the grain-producing areas of European Russia, and especially Ukraine, reached a climax in the summer of 1933. It began years earlier, however, when Stalin in the winter of 1929 and 1930 dispossessed, exiled and killed millions of the more prosperous peasants and harassed the remaining peasantry into surrendering land, animals and tools into collective farms; it was made inevitable in the second and final wave of collectivization in the winter of 1930–1931, when a disorganized and disillusioned peasantry was effectively enslaved. This achievement Stalin proclaimed to a congress of peasants in February 1933 to be one “such as the world has never known before and which no other state in the world has tried to achieve.” At the same time Stalin and his henchmen resolved to industrialize the Soviet Union by selling grain in order to buy machinery from America, Britain and Germany.

By June 1932, as a result of grain confiscation—khlebzagotovka, compulsory targets for grain to be delivered to the state—the Ukrainian countryside was already starving. The Secretary of the Ukrainian party, Stanislav Kosior, received letters from young communists, horrified to see, as they put it, “collective farmers go to the fields and vanish and a few days later the corpse is found an
d...
the next day they find the corpse of the man who buried the first one.”

The peasants’ attempts to evade grain confiscation or to glean grain from the field were severely punished. The Soviet secret police, OGPU, under the personal supervision of its ailing head, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and its ambitious deputy, Genrikh Yagoda, represented in Ukraine by Karl Karlson, monitored the situation and sent squads of men to enforce the containment of the starving peasantry, to punish (or occasionally to condone) cannibalism, and to keep the foreign press away from the countryside. They kept a tally, wherever they could, of deaths, as well as calculating how little food was left in what used to be Europe’s breadbasket. Their statistics are one of the foundations for calculating the size of the catastrophe that ensued.

Our sources of information are varied and none are comprehensive or, in themselves, conclusive. Contemporary sources include letters to relatives abroad (Soviet post offices still accepted such letters until 1935), letters to newspapers (which were then passed on to the secret police), and statistics from registry offices, which in most famine-struck areas soon gave up registering deaths. They also include tallies kept for certain months in some areas by OGPU itself, and of course correspondence between party leaders, which was classified until the 1990s. A very few testimonies came from foreign journalists and diplomats, ingenious enough to evade the bans on travel and honest enough to publish stories that were often as unpalatable to their readers in the West as to the Soviet authorities. Later sources for judging the extent of the catastrophe come first from the census figures of 1937, when a deficit of several million in the predicted population of the USSR had to be concealed. In post-Soviet times demographers have been free to look at the age structure of the population and of its mortality in Ukraine before and after the famine, to extrapolate for the Ukrainian countryside as a whole from data for a few areas or a few months the numbers of deaths over the famine period.

For Ukrainian famine areas, the death toll from famine in 1932–1933 appears to depend on the methodology and trustworthiness of the demographer involved. One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU’s tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these figures for the whole of the famine period, we get a plausible figure of over 7 million deaths. Even the Soviet census figures for 1939 indicate a catastrophe: whereas Ukraine in 1928 had 420,000 deaths and 985,000 births, in 1933 it recorded 1,582,000 deaths and only 34,000 births. Secret figures for the Ukrainian countryside show deaths rising from an acceptable 15,100 in January 1932 to a monstrous 196,200 in June 1932, not stabilizing to 12,000 (in a now much smaller population) until the end of 1934.

Thus, nobody can deny that, in the absence of war or severe droughts, a man-made catastrophe taking the lives of millions of Ukrainian peasants occurred. Because of the absence of full records, because death from starvation is not as easily defined as death from a bullet or in a gas chamber, since it may be disguised as dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis or suicide, and because it is impossible to say how many more people should have existed in 1934 who didn’t, we shall never be able to determine the exact figure, but clearly it is of the same order as the catastrophe that struck Europe’s Jews in 1942–1945 or Cambodia’s population in 1975–1979.

Mass murder, of course, requires intent, or at the very least the obvious prospect of death as a secondary result of the murderer’s actions. The figures for grain production and for grain confiscation in Ukraine, there is no doubt, were fully available to Stalin and
Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoyan, Menzhinsky, and Yagoda, the henchmen most
responsible for overseeing the Ukrainian famine, and could by simple subtraction only have led them to conclude that millions would die in these areas. Stalin himself deliberately toured the lower Volga area in August 1933, just after the climax of the famine, and saw for himself, without the slightest regret, what he had done. The correspondence of the Politburo members reveals a full awareness and determination to see the whole process through to the bitter end.

Some of today’s neo-Stalinists will admit this, but justify it on the grounds that (a) the grain was needed as the sole means for purchasing modern technology and (b) industrialization was essential to build a Soviet Union strong and well-armed enough to save itself from its enemies. The most cynical neo-Stalinists might add that there was a problem of surplus peasantry in Russia, a problem solved a century earlier by similar famines in countries such as Ireland, or elsewhere, as in Scandinavia, by mass emigration, and that one quick famine was preferable to many more decades of malnutrition. All these arguments are, of course, indefensible: the near defeat of the USSR by Nazi Germany shows that forced industrialization did not save the Soviet Union, so much as the desperation of its people and the help of the Allies. And the state of agriculture in post-Soviet societies is no argument for the murder of so many peasants. Were any of
the perpetrators of the famine alive and available for trial, they would
therefore have no defence in law against a charge of mass murder.