The Gulag Archipelago (53 page)

What remained for the leaders of the workers to do at this point? What was the final, infallible method? A denunciation to the Cheka! Sedelnikov resorted to just that! He "painted a picture of the conscious wrecking of the water system by Oldenborger." He did not have the slightest doubt that "a counterrevolutionary organization" existed "in the water system, in the heart of Red Moscow." And, furthermore, a catastrophic situation at the Rublevo water tower!

At this point, Oldenborger was guilty of a tactless act of rude- ness, the outburst of a spineless, interim intellectual. They had refused to authorize his order for new boilers from abroad— and at the time, in Russia, it was quite impossible to fix the old ones. So Oldenborger committed suicide. (It had been just too much for one man—after all, he hadn't undergone the condition- ing for that sort of thing.)

The cause was not lost, however. They could find a counter- revolutionary organization without him. RKI men would now undertake to expose the whole thing. Some concealed maneuver- ing went on for two months. But such was the spirit at the beginning of the NEP that "a lesson had to be taught both one side and the other." So there was a trial in the Supreme Tribunal. Krylenko was moderately severe. Krylenko was moderately merci- less. He was understanding: "The Russian worker, of course, was right to see in every person
not of his own class
someone more likely to be an enemy than a friend." Nevertheless: "Given the further change in our practical and general policy, perhaps we must be prepared for still greater concessions, for retreating and maneuvering. Perhaps the Party will be forced to adopt a tactical program of action which the primitive logic of
honest, dedicated warriors
is going to protest."

Well, it's a fact, the workers who testified against Comrade Sedelnikov and the RKI men were "easily brushed off" by the tribunal. And the defendant Sedelnikov replied brazenly to the threats of the accuser. "Comrade Krylenko! I know all those articles. But after all,
no one is judging class enemies here
, and those articles relate to class enemies."

However, Krylenko laid it on good and thick. Deliberately false denunciations to state institutions ... in circumstances aggravating guilt, such as a personal grudge and the settling of personal accounts ... the abuse of an official position . . . political irresponsibility . . . abuse of power and of the authority of govern- ment officials and members of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) . . . disorganization of the work of the water- supply system . . . injury done the Moscow Soviet and Soviet Russia, because there were few such specialists, and it was im- possible to find replacements for them.
"And we won't even begin to speak of the individual, personal loss. ...
In our time, when struggle is the chief content of our lives, we have somehow grown used to not counting these irrevocable losses." The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal must utter its weighty word: "Punishment must be assessed with all due severity! . . . We didn't come here just to crack jokes."

Good Lord, now what are they going to get? Could it really be? My reader has gotten used to prompting:
all of them to be sh------!

And that is absolutely correct. All of them were to be publicly shamed—bearing in mind their sincere repentance! All of them to be sentenced to—ostracism and ridicule.

Two truths . . .

And Sedelnikov, allegedly, got one year in jail.

You will just have to forgive me if I don't believe it.

Oh, you bards of the twenties, painting your pictures of their bright and bubbling happiness! Even those who touched only their farthest edge, who touched them only in childhood, will never forget them. And those plug-uglies, those fat faces, busy per- secuting engineers—in the twenties, too, they ate their bellies full. And now we see also that they had been busy from 1918 on. In the two trials following we will take leave of our favorite supreme accuser for a while: he is occupied with his preparations for the major trial of the SR's.

[The provincial trials of the SR's took place even earlier, such as the one in Saratov in 1919.]

This spectacular trial aroused a great deal of emotion in Europe beforehand, and the People's Commissariat of Justice was suddenly taken aback: after all, we had been trying people for four years without any code, neither a new one nor an old one. And in all probability Krylenko him- self was concerned about the code too. Everything had to be neatly tied up ahead of time.

The coming church trials were
internal
. They didn't interest progressive Europe. And they could be conducted without a code.

We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separa- tion of church and state was so construed by the state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was in- stalled in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay
within the heart
. And in 1918, when political victory seemed to have been attained faster and more easily than had been expected, they had pressed right on to con- fiscate church property. However, this leap had aroused too fierce a wave of popular indignation. In the heat of the Civil War, it was not very intelligent to create, in addition, an internal front against the believers. And it proved necessary to postpone for the time being the dialogue between the Communists and the Christians.

At the end of the Civil War, and as its natural consequence, an unprecedented famine developed in the Volga area. They give it only two lines in the official histories because it doesn't add a very ornamental touch to the wreaths of the victors in that war. But the famine existed nonetheless—to the point of cannibalism, to the point at which parents ate their own children—such a famine as even Russia had never known, even in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. (Because at that time, as the historians testify, unthreshed ricks of grain survived intact beneath the snow and ice for several years.) Just one film about famine might throw a new light on everything we saw and everything we know about the Revolution and the Civil War. But there are no films and no novels and no statistical re- search—the effort is to forget it. It does not embellish. Besides, we have come to blame the
kulaks
as the
cause
of every famine— and just who were the kulaks in the midst of such collective death? V. G. Korolenko, in his
Letters to Lunacharsky
(which, despite Lunacharsky's promise, were never officially published in the Soviet Union), explains to us Russia's total, epidemic descent into famine and destitution.

[Published in Paris in 1922, and in the Soviet Union in samizdat in 1967.]

It was the result of productivity having been reduced to zero (the working hands were all carrying guns) and the result, also, of the peasants' utter lack of trust and hope that even the smallest part of the harvest might be left for them. Yes, and someday someone will also count up those many carloads of food supplies rolling on and on for many, many months to Imperial Germany, under the terms of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk—from a Russia which had been deprived of a protesting voice, from the very provinces where famine would strike—so that Germany could fight to the end in the West.

There was a direct, immediate chain of cause and effect. The Volga peasants had to eat their children because we were so impatient about putting up with the Constituent Assembly.

But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people's ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one shot.
So now let the priests feed the Volga region!
They are Christians. They are generous!

1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the church.

2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches.

3. In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign ex- change and precious metals.

Yes, and the idea was probably inspired by the actions of the church itself. As Patriarch Tikhon himself had testified, back in August, 1921, at the beginning of the famine, the church had created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starv- ing and had begun to collect funds. But to have permitted any
direct
help to go straight from the church into the mouths of those who were starving would have undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat. The committees were banned, and the funds they had collected were confiscated and turned over to the state treasury. The Patriarch had also appealed to the Pope in Rome and to the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance—but he was rebuked for this, too, on the grounds that only the Soviet au- thorities had the right to enter into discussions with foreigners. Yes, indeed. And what was there to be alarmed about? The news- papers wrote that the government itself had all the necessary means to cope with the famine.

Meanwhile, in the Volga region they were eating grass, the soles of shoes, and gnawing at door jambs. And, finally, in Decem- ber, 1921, Pomgol—the State Commission for Famine Relief —proposed that the churches help the starving by donating church valuables—not all, but those not required for liturgical rites. The Patriarch agreed. Pomgol issued a directive: all gifts must be strictly voluntary! On Febraury 19, 1922, the Patriarch issued a pastoral letter permitting the parish councils to make gifts of objects that did not have liturgical and ritual significance.

And in this way matters could again have simply degenerated into a compromise that would have frustrated the will of the proletariat, just as it once had been by the Constituent Assembly, and still was in all the chatterbox European parliaments.

The thought came in a stroke of lightning! The thought came— and a decree followed! A decree of the All-Russian Central Execu- tive Committee on February 26:
all
valuables were to be requisi- tioned from the churches—for the starving!

The Patriarch wrote to Kalinin, who did not reply. Then on February 28 the Patriarch issued a new, fateful pastoral letter: from the church's point of view such a measure is sacrilege, and we cannot approve the requisition.

From the distance of a half-century, it is easy to reproach the Patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian church ought not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources might not be available to the Soviet government, and
who
it was who had driven the Volga to famine. They ought not to have clung to those treasures, since the possibility of a new fortress of faith arising—if it existed at all—did not depend on them. But one has also to picture the situation of that unfortunate Patriarch, not elected to his post until after the October Revolution, who had for a few short years led a church that was always persecuted, restricted, under fire, and whose preservation had been entrusted to him.

But right then and there a sure-fire campaign of persecution began in the papers, directed against the Patriarch and high church authorities who were strangling the Volga region with the bony hand of famine. And the more firmly the Patriarch clung to his position, the weaker it became. In March a movement to re- linquish the valuables, to come to an agreement with the govern- ment, began even among the clergy. Their still undispelled qualms were expressed to Kalinin by Bishop Antonin Granovsky, a mem- ber of the Central Committee of Pomgol: "The believers fear that the church valuables may be used for
other purposes
, more limited and alien to their hearts." (Knowing the general principles of our Progressive Doctrine, the experienced reader will agree that this was indeed very probable. After all, the Comintern's needs and those of the East in the course of being liberated were no less acute than those of the Volga.)

The Petrograd Metropolitan, Veniamin, was similarly impelled by a mood of trust: "This belongs to God and we will give all of it by ourselves." But forced requisitions were wrong. Let the sacrifice be of our own free will. He, too, wanted verification by the clergy and the believers: to watch over the church valuables up to the very moment when they were transformed into bread for the starving. And in all this he was tormented lest he violate the censuring will of the Patriarch.

In Petrograd things seemed to be working out peacefully. The atmosphere at the session of the Petrograd Pomgol on March 5, 1922, was even joyful, according to the testimony of an eye- witness. Veniamin announced: "The Orthodox Church is pre- pared to give everything to help the starving." It saw sacrilege only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was un- necessary! Kanatchikov, Chairman of the Petrograd Pomgol, gave his assurances that this would produce a favorable attitude toward the church on the part of the Soviet government. (Not very likely, that!) In a burst of good feeling, everyone stood up. The Metropolitan said: "The heaviest burden is division and enmity. But the time will come when the Russian people will unite. I myself, at the head of the worshipers, will remove the cover [of precious metals and precious stones] from the ikon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan. I will shed sweet tears on it and give it away." He gave his blessing to the Bolshevik members of Pomgol and they saw him to the door with bared heads. The newspaper
Petrogradskaya Pravda
, in its issues of March 8, 9, and 10, confirmed the peaceful, successful outcome of the talks, and spoke favorably of the Metropolitan.

[See the articles entitled "Tserkov i Golod" ("The Church and the Famine") and "Kak budut izyaty tserkovnye tsennosti" ("How the Church Valuables Will Be Requisitioned").]

"In Smolny they agreed that the church vessels and ikon coverings would be melted down into ingots in the presence of the believers."

Again things were getting fouled up with some kind of com- promise! The noxious fumes of Christianity were poisoning the revolutionary will.
That kind of
unity and
that way of
handing over the valuables
were not
what the starving people of the Volga needed! The spineless membership of the Petrograd Pomgol was changed. The newspapers began to howl about the "evil pastors" and "princes of the church," and the representatives of the church were told: "We don't need your
donations!
And there won't be any
negotiations
with you!
Everything belongs to the government
—and the government will take whatever it considers necessary."