Everything Flows (20 page)
Authors: Vasily Grossman
I
t was strange
. When Ivan Grigoryevich remembered the year 1937, and the women who had been sentenced to hard labor because of their husbands; when he recalled Anna Sergeyevna’s account of total collectivization and the famine in the Ukrainian countryside; when he thought about the laws according to which workers were sent to prison for getting to work twenty minutes late and peasants were sentenced to eight years in the camps for hiding a few grains of wheat; when Ivan Grigoryevich pondered these things, it was not a man with a mustache, not a man wearing a military tunic and boots, whom he saw in his mind’s eye. No, it was not Stalin he saw in his mind’s eye, but Lenin.
It was as if Lenin’s life had not come to an end on January 21, 1924.
Now and again Ivan Grigoryevich wrote down his thoughts about Lenin and Stalin in a school exercise book left behind by Alyosha.
All the victories of the Party and the State were associated with the name of Lenin. But Lenin also seemed responsible for all the terrible cruelties that had been carried out in the country.
The tragedies of the countryside, the year 1937, the new bureaucracy, the new bourgeoisie, forced labor—all of these found their justification in Lenin’s revolutionary passion, in Lenin’s speeches, articles, and appeals.
And little by little, over the years, Lenin’s features changed. The image of the young student called Volodya Ulyanov, of the young Marxist who went by the name of Tulin, of the Siberian exile, of the revolutionary émigré, of the political writer and thinker called Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; the image of the man who had proclaimed the era of the world socialist revolution; the image of the creator of a revolutionary dictatorship in Russia, the man who had liquidated every revolutionary party in Russia except the one that seemed to him the most revolutionary of all; the image of the man who had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, which represented every class and party of postrevolutionary Russia, and who had created soviets where only revolutionary workers and peasants were to be represented—this image changed. Features familiar from portraits changed; the image of the first Soviet head of state changed.
Lenin’s work continued—and as it acquired new features, so the image of the dead Lenin acquired new features.
Lenin was an intellectual. His family belonged to the working intelligentsia. His brothers and sisters belonged to the revolutionary movement. His elder brother, Aleksandr, became a hero and holy martyr of the Revolution.
The writers of memoirs all say that, even as the leader of the Revolution, as the creator of the Party, as the head of the Soviet government, he remained someone modest and simple. He did not smoke or drink and, in all probability, he never in his life cursed and swore at someone in truly foul language. There was a student purity about his idea of leisure: music, the theater, books, walks. He always dressed democratically, almost as if he were poor.
The little Volodya who was so loved by his mother and sisters, the young man who
listened to the
Appassionata
and read and reread
War and Peace
, the young man who wore a crumpled tie and an old jacket and sat in the gallery of the theater—can this really have been the man who founded a State that chose to adorn the chests of Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Merkulov, and Abakumov with its highest honor, with his very own Order of Lenin?
On the anniversary of Lenin’s death the Order of Lenin was awarded to Lydia Timashuk. Was this an indication that Lenin’s cause had dried and withered—or that it was truly triumphing?
Five-Year Plans passed. Decades passed. Events of incandescent immediacy cooled and hardened. Encased by the cement of time, they turned into great slabs—into the history of the Soviet State.
No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin.
Ages to come will complete
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? The character traits emphasized by the authors of memoirs and biographies, character traits which once seemed central and which charmed millions of minds and hearts—these traits proved in the end to be entirely incidental to the course of history. The history of the Russian State did not choose these human and humane sides of Lenin’s character but cast them aside as unwanted trash. The history of the State did not need the Lenin who admired
War and Peace
and who listened to the
Appassionata
with his face buried in his hands. It did not need Lenin’s modest and democratic tastes; it did not need his warmth and attentiveness toward drivers and secretaries; nor did it need his conversations with peasant children, his kindness toward domestic animals, or the deep pain he felt when Julius Martov ceased to be his friend and became his enemy.
But everything about Lenin that had been seen as temporary and accidental, everything that had been put down to the particular circumstances of the revolutionary underground and the desperate struggles of the first Soviet years—all this turned out to be of lasting, defining importance.
The authors of memoirs say nothing about the aspect of Lenin’s character that led him to order a search of Georgy Plekhanov’s apartment as he lay dying, but it is this aspect of Lenin’s character—the aspect that determined his total intolerance of political democracy—that proved dominant.
A man who has gone up in the world, a merchant or factory owner from a peasant family who now lives in a mansion of his own and travels on his private yacht—such a man may still display peasant traits; he may still love kvass, pickled-cabbage soup, and crude, vivid popular expressions. A field marshal in gold braid may still like to roll his own cigarettes from
makhorka
; he may still enjoy the basic humor of the aphorisms that soldiers come out with.
But do these traits, do these tastes and fond memories matter to the millions of people whose fates are determined by the factories owned by the ex-peasant, by the movements of stock prices or armies?
It is not through love of pickled-cabbage soup and
makhorka
that an industrialist acquires wealth or a general wins glory.
The
author of one memoir about Lenin
describes going for a Sunday walk with him in the Swiss mountains. Out of breath after a steep climb, they reached a summit and sat down on a rock. The young woman thought that Vladimir Ilyich’s intent gaze was taking in every smallest detail of the beautiful alpine landscape. She felt moved and excited, thinking of the poetry that was flooding his soul. All of a sudden he sighed and said, “These Mensheviks—they’re really fouling things up for us!”
This charming little story tells us a lot about Lenin. On one side of the scales—the whole of Creation. On the other side of the scales—the Party.
October selected those of Vladimir Ilyich’s traits that it needed. It cast away those that it did not need.
Throughout its entire history, the Russian revolutionary movement included within it the most contradictory qualities. The genuine love for the people to be found in many Russian revolutionaries—men whose meekness and readiness to endure suffering has been seen before only in the early Christians—coexisted with a fierce contempt toward human suffering, an extreme veneration of abstract principles, and an implacable determination to destroy not only one’s enemies but also one’s comrades-in-arms, should their interpretation of these principles differ in any slightest way from one’s own. This sectarian single-mindedness, this readiness to suppress today’s living freedom for the sake of a hypothetical future freedom, to transgress ordinary, everyday morality in the name of some future principle—all of this can be found in Pestel, in Bakunin and Nechaev, and in some of what was said and done by members of The People’s Will.
No, it was not only love, not only compassion that led such people along the path of revolution. To find what engendered these people, one needs to look far back into the thousand-year depths of Russian history.
Similar figures existed in previous centuries, but it was the twentieth century that brought them out from the wings and placed them center stage.
This kind of person is like a surgeon in a hospital ward. His interest in the patients and their families, his jokes, the arguments he takes part in, his struggles on behalf of homeless children, and his concern for workers who have reached the age of retirement—all of this is unimportant, trifling, a mere husk. His soul lies in his surgeon’s knife.
What is most important about this man is his fanatical faith in the omnipotence of the surgeon’s knife. It is the surgeon’s knife that is the twentieth century’s true theoretician, its greatest philosophical leader.
During the fifty-four years of his life, Lenin did more than listen to the
Appassionata
, reread
War and Peace
, have heart-to-heart talks with peasant delegates, admire the Russian landscape, and worry about whether his secretary had a proper winter coat. This goes without saying; it should be no surprise that Lenin possessed a real face, not only an image.
And one can imagine Lenin giving expression to any number of different character traits and peculiarities in his daily life—in that daily life that we all inevitably lead, whether we are dentists, leaders of nations, or cutters in a ladies’ clothing workshop.
These traits can manifest themselves at any moment of night or day, as a man washes his face in the morning, as he eats his porridge, as he looks out through the window at a pretty woman whose skirt has been caught by the wind, as he uses a match to pick his teeth, as he feels jealous about his wife or tries to make her feel jealous about him, as he looks at his bare legs in the bathhouse and scratches his armpits, as he reads scraps of newspaper in the toilet, trying to piece a torn page together, as he farts and at once tries to mask the sound by coughing or humming.
Such moments occur in the lives of both the great and the small, and they can, of course, be found in Lenin’s life.
Maybe Lenin developed a paunch because he ate too much macaroni and butter, preferring it to vegetables.
Maybe he and his wife had arguments, unknown to the world, about how often he washed his feet or brushed his teeth, or about his reluctance to change a worn shirt with a dirty collar.
And it may indeed be possible to break through the fortifications surrounding a supposedly human but in reality unreal and exalted image of the leader. It may be possible, creeping along silently on your stomach or with quick, sudden dashes, to reach a true, authentic Lenin that no memoirist has described.
But what would we gain from knowing the hidden truth of Lenin’s behavior in bathroom, bedroom, or dining room? Would this help us toward a deeper understanding of Lenin, the leader of the new Russia, the founder of a new world order? Would we be able to find any real correlation between the true nature of Lenin and the nature of the State he founded? In order to establish such a correlation, we would have to assume that Lenin behaved in the same way as a political leader as he did in his everyday life. This assumption, however, would be arbitrary and mistaken; such correlations, after all, are as likely to be inverse as to be direct—people behave differently in different spheres of their life.
In his personal relationships—when he gave someone help, when he stayed the night with friends or went out for a walk with them—Lenin was always polite, sensitive, and kind. Yet Lenin was always rude, harsh, and implacable toward his political opponents. He never admitted the least possibility that they might be even partially right, that he might be even partially wrong.
“Venal...lackey...groveler...hireling...agent...a Judas bought for thirty pieces of silver...”—these were the words Lenin used of his opponents.
It was never Lenin’s aim, in a dispute, to win his opponent over to his own views. He did not even truly address his opponent; the people for whom his words were intended were the witnesses to the dispute. Lenin’s aim was always to ridicule his opponent, to compromise him in the eyes of witnesses. These witnesses might be a few close friends, they might be an audience of a thousand conference delegates, or they might be the million readers of an article in a newspaper.
Lenin’s concern in an argument was not with truth but with victory. He needed, at all cost, to be victorious—and to this end he was happy to employ any rhetorical means. He was equally ready to trip his opponent from behind, to give him a metaphorical slap in the face, or to daze him with a metaphorical blow on the head.
It seems clear that Lenin’s behavior in his private, everyday life had no connection with how he behaved as the leader of a new world order.
And when the dispute moved from the pages of newspapers and magazines to the streets, when it moved to military battlefields or to fields of rye—then too there was nothing that Lenin shrank from, no tactics too vicious for him to employ.
Lenin’s intolerance, his unshakable drive to achieve his purpose, his contempt for freedom, his brutality toward those who did not share his views, his unwavering readiness to wipe off the face of the earth not only fortresses but also whole districts, regions, and provinces that challenged his view of the truth—all this was a part of Lenin long before October. All this was deep-rooted; all these aspects of Lenin’s character and behavior were present in the young Volodya Ulyanov.
All his abilities, all his will and passion were directed toward one end: the seizure of power.
To this end he sacrificed everything. In order to seize power he sacrificed what was most holy in Russia: her freedom. This freedom was childishly helpless; it was inexperienced and naive. How could this eight-month-old baby, born in a land with a heritage of a thousand years of slavery—how could this infant freedom have acquired experience?