One may ask: Why didn't Bliumkin carry out his threat to take vengeance on M. for interfering in his "business" and even getting the better of him? In M.'s opinion, Bliumkin, terrible as he was, was by no means an utter savage. M. always said that Bliumkin never had any intention of killing him—on all the occasions when he threatened him, he allowed himself to be disarmed by other people present, and in Kiev he himself put away his revolver. Brandishing a revolver, shouting and raving like one possessed, Bliumkin was simply indulging his temperament and his love of external effects— he was by nature a terrorist of the flamboyant type which had existed in Russia before the Revolution.
Another question is: How could Bliumkin's revolting braggadocio about killing people and the contemptuous words about a "wretched intellectual" marked down for destruction be reconciled with the activity of his wife, who, however absurdly, had tried to save the intelligentsia? It may be, of course, that the woman I knew in the Ukrainian village was only one of Bliumkin's mistresses and did not share his views. But with people of Bliumkin's type one can never be sure of appearances, and there are people who think that he may have been playing a double game, and that all his talk about the shooting of "spineless intellectuals" was intended to cast doubt on the "new organization" which he had joined as a representative of the Left Social Revolutionaries.[9] If this was so, M.'s reaction was precisely the kind of effect he hoped to achieve—which could be why he never took vengeance on him. But only the historians may be able to make sense of this when they come to study this strange time and this outlandish man.
For my own part, I think that he was not playing a double game, but that the people who were making history in those days had all the cruelty and inconsistency of the children they were. Why is it so easy to turn young people into killers? Why do they look on human life with such criminal frivolity? This is particularly true in those fateful periods when blood flows and murder becomes an ordinary everyday thing. We were set on our fellow men like dogs, and the whole pack of us licked the hunter's hand, squealing incomprehensibly. The head-hunting mentality spread like a plague. I even had a slight bout of it myself, but was cured in time by a wise doctor. This happened in Ekster's studio in Kiev when some visitor or another (it was either Roshal or Cherniak) read out some couplets by Mayakovski about how officers were thrown into the Moika Canal in Petrograd to drown. This brash verse had its effect and I burst out laughing. Ehrenburg, who was also there, at once fiercely attacked me. He gave me such a talking-to that I still respect him for it, and I am proud that, silly as I was at the time, I had the sense to listen to him and remember his words forever afterward. This happened before my meeting with M., so that he did not have to cure me of the head-hunting mentality and explain to me why he stood up for the art historian.
This is something that hardly anyone here understands, and I am still always being asked why M. did it—that is, why he intervenedfor a stranger at a time when people were being shot on every side. They understand if it is for a relative or a friend, a chauffeur, or a secretary—even in the Stalin era this sometimes happened. But where there is no personal interest, one is not supposed to interfere. People living under a dictatorship are soon filled with a sense of their helplessness, in which they find an excuse for their own passivity. "How can I stop executions by speaking up? It's beyond my control. Who will listen to me?" Such things were said by the best of us, and the habit of not trying to pit oneself against superior force meant that any David who attacked Goliath with his bare hands met with puzzlement and shrugs of the shoulders. This was the case when Pasternak, at a most dangerous time, refused to sign a collective letter by the Soviet writers approving the latest shooting of "enemies of the people." No wonder it was so easy for the Goliaths to destroy the last of the Davids.
e must create a type of Russian revolutionary woman," said
Larisa Reisner on the one occasion when we visited her at
her home (this was after her return from Afghanistan). "The French Revolution created its own type. We must do the same." This did not mean that Larisa wanted to write a novel on the subject, but that she hoped to establish herself in this role. This was the purpose of her journeys back and forth across the battle fronts, and her visits to Afghanistan and Germany. She had found her vocation in life in 1917 and it was made easier for her by family tradition. Her father, Professor Reisner, had formed close links with the Bolsheviks in his Tomsk days, and Larisa thus found herself in the camp of the
victors.
During our meeting Larisa overwhelmed M. with stories and they all had about them something of the same light-headedness with which Bliumkin reached for his revolver or otherwise strove to cre-
We all took the easy way out by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed. It is even difficult to tell which among us were accomplices to murder, and which were just saving their skins by silence.
2 6 The Woman of the Russian Revolution
ate a sensation. Larisa also built up her image of the "Russian revolutionary woman" in a way reminiscent of Bliumkin. She had no time for those who sat at home moaning about their helplessness—she belonged to circles in which the cult of power reigned supreme. The right to use power has always been justified by reference to the good of the people: the people must be reassured, the people must be fed, the people must be protected. Larisa despised such arguments and had even cut the word "people" out of her vocabulary—it too seemed to smack of the prejudices of the old intelligentsia, against which the whole of her anger and the fire of her eloquence were directed. Berdiayev is mistaken when he says that the intelligentsia was destroyed by the people for which it once made such sacrifices. The intelligentsia destroyed itself, burning out of itself, as Larisa did, everything that conflicted with the cult of power.
At this meeting with M., Larisa at once remembered how she had betrayed her principles by going to see Dzerzhinski with him: "Why did you want to save that count? They're all spies." To me she complained rather coyly that she had "got into this business" because M. had rushed her into it against her better judgment. One may indeed ask why she went against her own beliefs by going to plead for a "wretched intellectual" whom she did not even know. M. thought it was out of a desire to show how influential she was, and how close to the new regime. But in my opinion she did it simply to humor M., whose verse she liked so much that she was ready to do anything for him. The one thing Larisa could not overcome was her love of poetry—though this too she was bent on doing, since it scarcely suited her image of the "Russian revolutionary woman." In the first few years after the Revolution there were many such poetry-lovers among the victors. How did they manage to reconcile it with their Hottentot ethic: "If I kill, it's good; if I'm killed, it's bad"?
Larisa not only loved poetry, but she also secretly believed in its importance, and for her the only blot on the Revolution's record was the shooting of Gumilev. She was living in Afghanistan at the time this happened, and she believed that if she had been in Moscow she would have been able to put in a good word and prevent it. During her meeting with us she kept coming back to this subject, and we were thus witnesses to the birth of the legend about Lenin's supposed telegram ordering a stay of execution. That evening Larisa gave us the legend in the following version: her mother, hearing what was about to happen in Petrograd, went to the Kremlin and persuaded Lenin to send a telegram. Nowadays it is Gorki who is credited with having informed Lenin about the impending execution. But there is no truth in either version. While Larisa was abroad we several times went to see her mother, who bitterly lamented that she had not taken Gumilev's arrest seriously and tried to reach Lenin —which might have made all the difference. As regards Gorki, it is true that people asked him to intervene—Otsup, for one, went to see him. Gorki had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something. He could not keep his promise because the sentence of death was announced and carried out with unexpected haste, before Gorki had got round to doing anything.