RETURN TO MY HOMETOWN
FOR THE FIRST TIME in Petersburg. It is August, but it is nevertheless cold and drizzling. Dostoyevsky saw the cloudy, Scandinavian weather as a feature of this city: “At last the damp autumn day, muggy and dirty, peeped into the room through the dingy window pane with such a hostile, sour grimace that Mr. Golyadkin could not possibly doubt that he was not in the land of Nod but in the city of Petersburg” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Double”).
The author of Notes from the Underground often suggested that the irritations, angers, and melancholias of his heroes were related to the climate and atmosphere of the city: “From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, anyone is entitled to ask who ‘everyone’ was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights).
I was walking from the station (I had arrived on the overnight train from Moscow) thinking about Mr. Golyadkin and his extraordinary adventures. But not only about him. Petersburg has figured in so many novels, poems, and legends that it seems to be not so much a real city as an invented one; and because of the talents of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, at moments their heroes seem to us more real than the people whom we are just now passing in the street.
The street is called Nevsky Prospekt and cuts across old Petersburg from the east to the west. The closer it gets to the Neva River, the larger and more ornate become the apartment buildings and other edifices that stand on either side of it. The architecture alone, as it becomes increasingly grand and dignified, announces that we are approaching a place of special, momentous, highest importance. And in fact, at the end of Nevsky Prospekt, on the right, suddenly, as if someone had raised the curtains, appears the vast panorama of the Palace Square.
An imposing view!
On the left side of the square, along its entire length, stretches the mass of the Winter Palace — green, azure, and white, decorated with artful latticework and pilasters — the seat of the czars.
Opposite, on the other side of the square, stands the long, monumental edifice of the General Staff, painted a light ocher.
And between these splendid structures lies the broad, flat, and empty expanse — so enormous that I am tempted to call it immeasurable — of the Palace Square. Something glimmers at one end of it, somewhere a vehicle will pass, a human figure will scurry by, but all this only underscores the immensity of this place, its imperturbable immobility.
The panorama of this square, its conception, plan, and composition, possesses a profound symbolism that says more about this country than dozens of dissertations and handbooks could. For this square exemplifies the character and structure of power. Its highest form is represented by the Winter Palace — the seat of the ruler. Whereas its right arm, its only and most important one, is neither spiritual power (no church is visible here) nor legislative power (there is no Parliament building in sight), but the military, troops, and weapons housed in the building of the General Staff.
The monarch and his army — is that why the Russian eagle, the coat of arms and the symbol of the state, has two heads, and not one?
One can walk endlessly around the streets of old Petersburg. There is so much interesting architecture here, so many canals, so many squares, so many nooks and crannies. From here Pushkin left for his fatal duel (at the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Moyka); here Akhmatova wrote her shocking “Requiem”; this way passed the coach of Apollon Apollonovich, hero of the novel Petersburg by Andrei Bely, who said: “After Petersburg, there is nothing.” When I wander thus along streets lined with thousands of solid, bourgeois apartment buildings, one question keeps arising in my mind: How, in such a fortress of capital, private property, and wealth, could the Bolsheviks have triumphed? These buildings, after all, were the repository of an enormous social force, of major interests, of financial and organizational might! Where were all these people, what were they thinking, what were they doing, when Lenin was reaching for power?
The American historian Richard Pipes (The Russian Revolution, 1990) answers in this way:
Curzio Malaparte describes the bewilderment of the English novelist, Israel Zangwill, who happened to be visiting Italy as the Fascists were taking power. Struck by the absence of “barricades, street fighting and corpses on the pavement,” Zangwill refused to believe that he was witnessing a revolution. But, according to Malaparte, the characteristic quality of modern revolutions is precisely the bloodless, almost silent seizure of strategic points by small detachments of trained shock troops. The assault is carried out with such surgical precision that the public at large has no inkling of what is happening.
This description fits the October coup in Russia (which Malaparte had studied and used as one of his models). In October, the Bolsheviks gave up on massive armed demonstrations and street skirmishes, which they had employed, on Lenin’s insistence, in April and July, because the crowds had proven difficult to control and provoked a backlash. They relied instead on small, disciplined units of soldiers and workers under the command of their Military Organization, disguised as the Military-Revolutionary Committee, to occupy Petrograd’s principal communication and transport centers, utilities and printing plants — the nerve centers of the modern metropolis. Merely by severing the telephone lines connecting the government with its Military Staff they made it impossible to organize a counterattack. The entire operation was carried out so smoothly and efficiently that even as it was in progress the cafés and restaurants along with the opera, theaters, and cinemas were open for business and thronged with crowds in search of amusement.
What comes to mind immediately is the astonishment of Alexis de Tocqueville describing the mood on the eve of the French Revolution: “This may help to explain the singular fact that at the very moment when the Revolution was knocking at the door so few apprehensions of any kind were felt by members of the upper and the middle classes, and why they went on blithely discoursing on the virtues of the people, their loyalty, their innocent pleasures, and so forth. Such was the blindness, at once grotesque and tragic, of these men who would not see!” (The Old Regime and the French Revolution).
The other side of Europe, 125 years later, and yet there are similarities. In both instances, the same factor brings victory to the attackers — the factor of surprise.
THE GOAL of my journey was not Petersburg but Novgorod, 150 kilometers to the south, and Professor Aleksander Grekov, who lived there.
Novgorod was a famous city in the Middle Ages, something along the lines of a Florence or an Amsterdam of the north — a dynamic concentration of commerce and craftsmanship, a long-flowering center of various arts, especially of sacred architecture and icon painting. A unique political system existed here. For hundreds of years (from the eleventh to the fifteenth century) Novgorod was a kind of independent, self-governing feudal republic in which the highest authority rested with a council composed of different elements of the city’s population and the neighboring free peasantry. The people elected a prince who ruled in their name and could be recalled at any moment. For those times and in that part of the world, these were unheard-of practices. The symbol of the freedom and independence of this city-state was a great bell with which the residents were summoned to the council. Thus, when Ivan II of Moscow finally conquered Novgorod in 1478 and ordered the bell removed, that act alone signified that the city had lost its independence. There are historians who believe that this was one of those critical moments that determined the direction in which Moscow, and all of Russia, would go. Novgorod was a democratic city, open to the world, maintaining contacts with all of Europe. Moscow was expansionist, permeated with Mongol influences, hostile toward Europe, already slowly entering the dark epoch of Ivan the Terrible. Therefore, if Russia had gone the way of Novgorod, it might have become a state different from the one at whose head Moscow came to stand. But things turned out otherwise.