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It was a fine voyage, in first-class berths. A destroyer escorted our steamer, and now and then took long shots at floating mines. A dark gush would rise from the waves and the child hostages applauded. From mist and sea there emerged the massive outline of Elsinore’s gray stone castle, with its roofs of dull emerald. Weak Prince Hamlet, you faltered in that fog of crimes, but you put the question well. “To be or not to be,” for the men of our age, means free will or servitude, and they have only to choose. We are leaving the void, and entering the kingdom of the w ill. This, perhaps, is the imaginary frontier. A land awaits us where life is beginning anew, where conscious will, intelligence and an inexorable love of mankind are in action. Behind us, all Europe is ablaze, having choked almost to death in the fog of its own massacres. Barcelona’s flame smolders on. Germany is in the thick of revolution, Austro-Hungary is splitting into free nations. Italy is spread with red flags. .. this is only the beginning. We are being born into violence: not only you and I, who are fairly unimportant, but all those to whom, unknown to themselves, we belong, down to this tin-hatted Senegalese freezing under his fur on his dismal watch at the foot of the officers’ gangway. Outbursts of idealism like this, if truth be known, kept getting mixed up with our heated discussions on points of doctrine. [...]
[...] The Red divisions on the Estonian front, exposed to lice and hunger, were demoralized. In the shattered trenches I saw emaciated, dejected soldiers, absolutely incapable of any further effort. The cold rains of autumn came, and the war went by dismally for those poor fellows, without hope, or victories, or boots, or provisions; for a number of them it was the sixth year of war, and they had made the Revolution to gain peace! They felt as though they were in one of the rings of Hell. Vainly the ABC of Communism explained that they would have land, justice, peace, and equality, when in the near future the world revolution was achieved. Our divisions were slowly melting away under the ghastly sun of misery.
[...] From honest dealers in Helsinki we would buy excellent weapons, Mauser pistols in wooden cases which were delivered to us on a quiet sector of the front (quiet because of this minor traffic) fifty or so kilometers from Leningrad. To pay for these useful commodities, we printed whole casefuls of beautiful 500-ruble notes, watery in appearance, with the image of Catherine the Great and the signature of a bank director as dead as his bank, his social order, and the Empress Catherine. Case for case, the exchange was made silently in a wood of somber firs—it was really the maddest commercial transaction imaginable. Obviously the recipients of the Imperial banknotes were taking out a mortgage on our deaths, at the same time furnishing us with the means for our defense.
lmao this is crazy
[...] Socialism isn’t only about defending against one’s enemies, against the old world it is opposing; it also has to fight within itself against its own reactionary ferments. A revolution seems monolithic only from a distance; close up it can be compared to a torrent that violently sweeps along both the best and the worst at the same time, and necessarily carries along some real counterrevolutionary currents. It is constrained to pick up the worn weapons of the old regime, and these arms are double-edged. In order to be properly served, it has to be put on guard against its own abuses, its own excesses, its own crimes, its own moments of reaction. It has a vital need of criticism, therefore, of an opposition and of the civic courage of those who are carrying it out. And in this connection, by 1920 we were already well short of the mark.
Winter was a torture (there is no other word for it) for the townspeople: no heating, no lighting, and the ravages of famine. Children and feeble old folk died in their thousands. Typhus was carried everywhere by lice, and took its frightful toll. All this I saw and lived through, for a great while indeed. Inside Petrograd’s grand apartments, now abandoned, people were crowded in one room, living on top of one another around a little stove of brick or cast iron which would be standing on the floor, its flue belching smoke through an opening in the window. Fuel for it would come from the floorboards of rooms nearby, from the last stick of furniture available, or else from books. Entire libraries disappeared in this way. I myself burned the collected Laws of the Empire as fuel for a neighboring family, a task that gave me considerable satisfaction. [...]
[...] Bolshevik thought draws its inspiration from the feeling of possession of the truth. In the eyes of Lenin, of Bukharin, of Preobrazhensky, dialectical materialism is both the law of human thought as well as that of the development of nature and of societies. Bolshevik thinking is grounded in the possession of the truth. The Party is the repository of truth, and any form of thinking that differs from it is a dangerous or reactionary error. Here lies the spiritual source of its intolerance. The absolute conviction of its lofty mission assures it of a moral energy quite astonishing in its intensity— and, at the same time, a clerical mentality which is quick to become Inquisitorial. Lenin’s “proletarian Jacobinism,” with its detachment and discipline both in thought and action, is eventually grafted upon the preexisting temperament of activists molded by the old regime, that is by the struggle against despotism. I am quite convinced that a sort of natural selection of authoritarian temperaments is the result. Finally, the victory of the revolution deals with the inferiority complex of the perpetually vanquished and bullied masses by arousing in them a spirit of social revenge, which in turn tends to generate new despotic institutions. I was witness to the great intoxication with which yesterday’s sailors and workers exercised command and enjoyed the satisfaction of demonstrating that they were now in power!
[...] In Petrograd I could see what was happening to the book trade: the stocks of the bookshops, which had been confiscated, were rotting away in cellars that as often as not were flooded with water in the spring. We were most thankful to the thieves who salvaged a goodly number of books and put them back, clandestinely, into circulation. The book trade could, if it had been turned over to associations of book lovers, have speedily recovered its health. In a word, I was arguing for a “Communism of associations”— in contrast to the Communism of the State variety. The competition inherent in such a system and the disorder inevitable in all beginnings would have caused less inconvenience than did our stringently bureaucratic centralization, with its muddle and paralysis. I thought of the total plan not as something to be dictated by the State from on high, but rather as resulting from the harmonizing, by congresses and specialized assemblies, of initiatives from below. However, since the Bolshevik mind had already ordained other solutions, it was a vision confined to the realms of pure theory.
I am well aware that terror has been necessary up till now in all great revolutions, which do not happen according to the taste of well-intentioned men, but spontaneously, with the violence of tempests; that the individual has as much weight as straw in a hurricane; and that the duty of revolutionaries is to employ the only weapons that history affords us if we are not to be overwhelmed through our own folly. But the perpetuation of terror, after the end of the Civil War and the transition to a period of economic freedom, was an immense and demoralizing blunder. I was and still am convinced that the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had henceforth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and the rights of all individuals without exception. I still ask myself, having closely observed the probity and intelligence of its leaders, why it didn’t. What psychoses of fear and of power prevented it?
[...] Twenty-five years old, he is a young rogue who argues like a cynic. He has an infant prodigy’s capacity for absorbing knowledge, a sense of history, merciless views on his elders, and a love for a theoretical working class beside which the actual working class is only highly imperfect human material.
[...] I saw a woman hit in the face and thrown down the steps with her clothes half torn off. The manager came over to talk to me and told me quite coolly, “ What are you so shocked about? She’s nothing but a whore! Just put yourself in my shoes!” He is a Communist, this manager: we belong to the same Party.
what, in the end, is the party for?