The first attempt to bring in preliminary censorship, in Moscow in winter 1917, miscarried. A decree establishing it was not put into practice and on 2 January 1918 the censorship was revoked. However, inroads to press freedom continued to be made, creating antagonism against the Bolsheviks among the democratic intelligentsia who had fought so long for this freedom. ‘Truly, those whom the gods wish to punish they first make mad,’ wrote the Mensheviks’ paper. ‘Bolshevism’s worst enemy could not have done it more harm than is done by this wretched decree on censorship.’33 Besides, the first attempt to impose a censorship was not the last, and all independent oppositional newspapers were eventually suppressed both in Soviet Russia and in the territories where the counter-revolution was victorious for a time. Independent ‘thick journals’ continued to appear until the mid-twenties, but that was no substitute for a free press.
The question arises: How was it possible for the Bolsheviks, who had themselves emerged from the Russian intelligentsia and the freedom movement, to renounce democratic liberties? Boris Souvarine, who knew Lenin personally, explains it by referring to ‘cette aberration désastreuse, d’après laquelle est moral tout ce qui sert la révolution.’34 In fact, the revolution had to some extent been transformed from a means to the conquest of freedom into an end in itself. This religious attitude to the revolution, of which Merezhkovsky and Berdyaev spoke, was developed by the Russian intelligentsia itself in the prerevolutionary period, and Lenin’s way of thinking undoubtedly embodied one aspect of the intelligentsia’s mentality.
Despite later fantasies, none of the Bolsheviks was opposed in principle to pluralism and a multiparty democracy. When he became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky said: ‘The hand of the Praesidium will never oppress the minority.’35 Apparently he was sincere in saying this. At any rate — according to Sukhanov — three years later, in 1920, Trotsky, when reminded of this speech, exclaimed: What a happy time!’36 The American historian Abraham Asher wrote that even as late as 1919 Kautsky, who knew the Bolshevik leaders well, spoke ‘with remarkable naïveté’ of their possible return ‘to the path of democracy’.37 One of the leading figures in the Bolshevik political police wrote, at about this same time, that arrested members of the left-wing parties ‘must not be regarded as undergoing punishment but as temporarily isolated from society in the interests of the revolution. The conditions of their detention must not have a punitive character.’38 Even W. Scharndorf, in his crudely anti-Bolshevik booklet, admits that in the early days the Party leaders were tormented ‘by pangs of democratic conscience’.39
Reading the newspapers of those days, including the anti-Bolshevik ones, one observes at once that the suppression of opposition parties and the restriction of press freedom were unexpected not only by the Mensheviks and the democratic opposition but also by the Bolsheviks themselves. These measures had not been planned beforehand. It can be said, though, that they followed inevitably from the position of a minority party which had taken power in a period of revolutionary crisis. However, this is only part of the truth. Measures of this sort are often reversible. The Bolsheviks did nothing to ensure that their prohibitions remained merely ‘temporary’ and did not become permanent. Restriction of democracy had its limits, beyond which one must speak not of ‘restriction’ but of annihilation. With regret, it has to be said that the Bolsheviks went beyond those limits with amazing ease. It was this which predetermined their relations with the intelligentsia. Moreover, taking a long view, it was precisely these fatal mistakes in 1917-18 that marked the beginning of the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolutionary regime. The path of the revolutionary dictatorship was not doomed in advance to failure and, as Stephen Cohen has rightly observed, mass terror, the Stalinism of the thirties, was not ‘the logical, irresistible outcome of the Bolshevik revolution’,40 but the possibility of such an outcome was great from the very beginning. The path Lenin had taken was extremely risky, and the mistakes of 1917-18 predetermined the subsequent fate of the revolution, marking the start of the bureaucratic degeneration. Rosa Luxemburg warned at that time:
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.41
The force of political inertia carried the Bolsheviks from restricting the freedom of the press to dispersing the Constituent Assembly, from that to suppression of the opposition, and from that to terror. And each of these measures, far from uniting the nation around the regime, engendered new enemies, so making necessary a fresh series of repressive measures.
The results of the civil war were tragic for the Russian intelligentsia. The suppression of bourgeois-democratic institutions dealt a heavy blow to its hopes for a new, free Russia. The conflict between Reds and Whites, the cruel terror on both sides, could not but evoke its protests. Part of the intelligentsia adhered to the Bolsheviks; many joined the Whites; the majority tried to find some third way. Characteristic of the feelings of that majority is the diary of V.G. Korolenko, which was published in the second number of Pamyat'. ‘Utter brutalization,’ he wrote. ‘And each side denounces the other’s atrocities. The Volunteer Army denounces the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks denounce the Volunteer Army… But brutality enters in everywhere.’42 These words were written under Bolshevik rule; but then a few months later, after the arrival of the Whites, we find: ‘Eager informers, often the same who previously cried: “There’s a counter-revolutionary!”, have now taken to crying: “There’s a commissar!”’43
‘Mutual brutality is increasing,’ said Lenin’s former intimate Martov, as he watched the raging of the White and Red terrors.44
Under Nicholas Romanov it was sometimes possible, by pointing to the monstrous severity of a sentence, to prevent its execution and to wrest a victim from the hangman’s grasp. Under Vladimir Ulyanov this is not possible.45