Violence engendered violence, bloodshed provoked bloodshed, and those who had raised the banner of Red terror would, Martov prophesied, sooner or later themselves perish:
But we cannot wait for that moment. Already now the counter-revolution rules, under the protection of German bayonets, on the Don and in the Crimea, in the Ukraine and in the Baltic provinces. And to every volley of Bolshevik rifles fired here at the political opponents of the Soviet power we hear the answering tenfold echo there of other rifles, shooting down the local revolutionary workers and peasants.46
V.M. Doroshevich also noticed the striking similarity of the Red and White terrors:
Just as, with the Reds, the word ‘bourgeois’ is applied to everyone who does not wear a Russian shirt, so, with the Whites, the word ‘socialist’ is applied to everyone out of military uniform. Mensheviks and SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries] are ‘second-grade Bolsheviks’, and are shot.47
The Whites studied closely the methods of the Red terror, and the Bolsheviks had only to introduce some ‘novelty’ for the Whites to begin applying it, only on a larger scale — ‘simply because the “Reds” do it’.48
Korolenko tried to stop the Red terror, as also did Kropotkin, who returned from abroad specifically for this purpose. The latter even met Lenin. Trying to persuade Lenin, he ‘referred to the French Revolution, which was “killed”, in his view, as a result, inter alia, of the policy of terror adopted as a weapon by the revolutionaries of 1793.’49 Even earlier he had warned Lenin in a letter: ‘The terror practised in the French Revolution held back its influence for fifty years.’50 When he had heard and read all this, Lenin proposed the publication, ‘at once and in the largest number of copies,’51 of Kropotkin’s book on the French Revolution, in which the writer’s attitude to the terror is as indulgent as could be. Korolenko addressed letters to Lunacharsky with equal lack of success, reminding him that the advance to socialism must rely
on the best side of human nature, presupposing courage in direct struggle and humanity shown even to opponents. Let cruelty and blind injustice remain wholly with the outlived past, not finding any place in the future.. 52
Martov, who was no less an intellectual than Korolenko and no less a revolutionary than Lenin, was utterly shaken by what had happened. He wrote of the ‘vicious encroachment by Lenin and Trotsky’ upon the principles of socialism and democracy53 and of the impossibility for him, or for any who had fought in previous years against the autocracy, to accept such a revolution.54 What had happened was for him above all a tragedy for the socialist movement. ‘Shame on the party’, he exclaimed, ‘that tries to sanctify with the name “socialist” the vile work of the hangman.’55
In justifying the Red terror, the Bolsheviks — Trotsky, Lenin, and ex-Menshevik Larin — referred to the French Revolution. Martov reminded them of the sad end of the French revolutionaries to whose shades Larin appealed. After all it was the Jacobin terror, the execution of the deputies to the Convention, the disrespect shown to the people’s will, that eventually led to the failure of the revolution and the establishment of the Thermidorian dictatorship. That same path, Martov foretold, would be trodden by the Bolsheviks who abandoned the principles of Marxism in favour of Jacobinism. They would share the fate of the French revolutionaries, for whoever is unable to learn from the past is fated to repeat it:
Had Danton and Robespierre lived to see that moment when, out of a series of ‘surgical operations’ performed on the Convention and later on the Legislative Assembly, Bonapartism emerged, they might perhaps have bequeathed the advice to Larin not to copy slavishly all the ‘primitives’ of previous revolutions.56
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the terror and the introduction of the censorship were actions that the left-wing intelligentsia could not excuse under any conditions:
We may agree with Larin that every great political revolution has been accompanied by foul deeds, and by the flourishing of rascality in the camp of the victors. But Larin is cruelly mistaken if he thinks that, contrariwise, an abundance of foul deeds and a flourishing of rascality always proves that what it happening is a great revolution.57
Such warnings as these did not go unremarked, but they produced no results except an increasing hostility among the members of the ruling party towards Marxist criticism coming from the ranks of the socialist intelligentsia. Pokrovsky wrote with irritation that ‘a “strictly Marxist” line leads straight into the swamp.’58 Not only the activists of the opposition parties, who were subjected to ‘temporary isolation’, but also many critically minded people in the worlds of science and art fell victim to repression. Zhores Medvedev writes:
The larger part of senior research and academic personnel backed the anti-Bolshevik forces, and during the first waves of ‘Red terror’ ‘professors’ and ‘academicians’ were almost automatically considered to be enemies of Soviet power. A large number of scientists and technical experts were harassed, arrested, sentenced and even executed during the beginning of the civil war in 1918–1919.59
Among those executed was the outstanding poet N. Gumilev.60 The gulf between the intelligentsia and the new government widened. ‘For the revolution’, writes Boffa, ‘this was a difficulty, for the intelligentsia it was a tragedy.’61
Refusing to accept the revolution, which had betrayed their expectations, while still — as before — hating the reaction, members of the intelligentsia found themselves at a parting of the ways. Stankevich noted during the civil war, among the intelligentsia of Moscow, ‘a fanatical hatred of the Bolsheviks’ together with not the slightest sympathy with the Whites.62 For him the choice was agonizingly hard. ‘Where am I to go?’ he pondered.
To Denikin, the representative of the military and national idea with which I worked all through the war, fighting along with most of my friends against the Bolsheviks, because they perverted the idea of revolution?… Or, finally, to the Bolsheviks? After all, they are what is left of Russian freedom and revolution, I should have greater scope with them, and even among their military I should find men with whom I could deal with complete respect.63
In 1925 Bukharin admitted that ‘in the initial period of the October Revolution it was the worst section of intelligentsia who came over to us,’ whereas ‘the majority of the honest intelligentsia were against us.’64 To some extent Bukharin was exaggerating, for among those who supported the Bolsheviks were not only oddities and careerists but also some prominent and prestigious members of the intellectual elite. Nevertheless, only a few ‘accepted’ the revolution: Mayakovsky, Blok, Bely. The Bolsheviks were joined also by the ‘extreme left’ of the aesthetes, who were totally alien to their ideology but felt a psychological kinship with them. Thus, for example, the idealist philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote some super-revolutionary articles, hailing in what had happened the rebirth of sobornost' [sense of community] and denouncing his opponents for their lack of loyalty to ‘the spirit of the present-day socialist movement’.65 The decadent N. Evreinov actively organized triumphal performances in honour of the revolution, which was destined, according to Ivanov, to be the expression of ‘the effective power of the artistically formulated masses’.66 The Futurists also attached themselves to the Bolsheviks and enjoyed the protection of the authorities in the person of A.V. Lunacharsky (and some other leading figures). Futuristic designs were even offered for the emblem of the Russian Federation and, later, of the Soviet Union.67 Only later did the rulers’ sympathy with the aesthetic ‘leftists’ fade away, when the latter became very disappointed with the new order. This mood is expressed, perhaps, in Malevich’s ‘enigmatic’ picture ‘Black Square’.