Much has been written about Blok’s support for Bolshevism, but it must be remembered that this support was of a rather peculiar kind. To begin with he was close to the Left SRs rather than to the Bolsheviks, and was even arrested after the Left SRs’ revolt in July 1918. All his well-known articles about the revolution were printed by the Left SRs. That is not, however, the essential point. Blok considered, not without justification, that since all the previous activity of the intelligentsia had been directed towards preparing for the revolution, now, when the revolution had taken place, intelligenty had no right to disavow it, even if this revolution turned out to be not at all as they had expected. In fact, the idea of the coming revolution permeated Blok’s poetry long before 1917. These vague expectations and hopes can be found even in the quite ‘non-political’ plays of Chekhov. Blok’s idea was not without inner logic.
In his notes Gorky quotes, inter alia, this remark by Blok:
Having invoked the spirit of destruction from the darkness, it is not honest for the intelligentsia to say: this was not done by us but by those people over there. Bolshevism is the unavoidable result of the work of the intelligentsia in various pulpits, in editors’ offices, and in their ‘underground’ teachings.68
One ought probably to agree with Gorky, who shared this idea of Blok’s, which he introduces with the words: ‘he remarked very justly…’.69 The value of this note of Gorky’s is especially great if we take into account the fact that he published it in Berlin in 1924, at a time when he had not yet become an obedient tool of the Soviet government. Berdyaev later voiced a similar idea when he wrote: ‘The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia was a preparation for Communism.’70
It must be said that both the acceptance and the non-acceptance of the 1917 Revolution by the Russian intelligentsia had their tragic aspects, and Blok felt this keenly and gave it expression. The Bolshevik revolution was that social revolution of which they had dreamed, yet it had not brought the democracy for which they had hoped. The Soviet scholar V. Orlov, author of a very fashionable biography of Blok, writes that, with him, ‘his faith in the future was at odds with his trust in the present.’71 He blames the poet for this:
His morbid feeling, that what was happening in the world and in Russia was a drop into a ‘chink of history’ (in other words, a gap in the historical process) indicated that his awareness of complete accord with the spirit of the times, without which, he held, a poet could not write, had become fatefully blunted.72
In reality it was Blok, perhaps more than anyone else, who felt the tragic character of what was happening around him. The failure of the revolution as a democratic revolution ominously foreboded its future failure as a social revolution. That was why Blok could not write. After ‘The Twelve’, indeed, the great poet wrote remarkably little. How few verses! To be sure, he wrote articles and gave lectures, but he almost completely stopped writing poetry. This tragedy of a great Russian poet expresses the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia.
A search for a third way and neutrality in conditions of civil war can seldom be successful, in any case, if its implies some sort of active position. A substantial section of the neutral intelligentsia were obliged to emigrate. Among those who left Russia were the prominent scientists I. Sikorsky, V. Korenchevsky, G. Kistyakovsky, P. Sorokin and V. Leont'ev, and such notable members of the creative intelligentsia as I. Bunin, I. Stravinsky, S. Rakhmaninov, A. Pavlov and F. Chaliapin. The ranks of the émigrés included also the ‘proletarian writer’ Maxim Gorky. Those who stayed in Russia were to a considerable extent demoralized.
In the period of the New Economic Policy, in connection with the transition from ‘war Communism’ to a more moderate economic line, there was not only a quickening of economic activity in both the state and the private sectors and an improvement in living conditions, but also a certain revival of the Russian intelligentsia: a cultural upsurge. Nobody can deny that for Russian literature, painting, art criticism and spiritual life generally, the twenties were an extremely fruitful epoch. Under the NEP a neutral position towards Bolshevism and the revolution was quite tenable: it entailed no personal catastrophes or inevitable repressions, at any rate so long as only the sphere of culture and science was affected.
The first attempts to induce the intelligentsia to come over to the Bolsheviks had been made already during the war with the Whites. Zhores Medvedev writes:
The real danger of the ‘brain drain’ as a result of civil war and emigration became all too apparent as soon as the Bolsheviks began to take measures to restore industry for military purposes in order to fight the dangerously prolonged civil war. Any large-scale war needs technological support, and civil wars are no exception. The change of attitude towards military and scientific experts became evident from the beginning of 1919 and particularly at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party.73
In this particular case the Bolsheviks were interested primarily in the scientific and technical intelligentsia, whose work began to be supported by the state:
A historian of science might well be astonished by the number of new educational and research institutions created during the most dramatic period of the civil war when the very existence of the Soviet system was seriously at stake.74
The Bolsheviks were justly proud of the material support that they gave to the intelligentsia, despite the difficult conditions prevailing. ‘A professor’s ration’, wrote Pokrovsky, ‘was 136 per cent of that which a worker had to make do with without any supplements, and it was issued with “academic” regularity, more regularly than any others.’75
The Bolshevik Party’s effort to preserve and restore modern civilization, to save it from perishing in Russia, the new rulers’ relative tolerance in matters of artistic creation, the traditional links between the Bolsheviks and the old anti-monarchist movement (to which the left-wing Cadets belonged) and the rapprochement between the state and a section of the ‘experts’ could not fail to influence the main mass of the democratic intelligentsia, mitigating its oppositional attitude to the new regime. But the chief factor here was that the experience of the civil war proved once and for all that the Whites were even worse than the Reds. Compared with Denikin, Lenin clearly appeared as ‘the lesser evil’. Furthermore, after the civil war a considerable part of the intelligentsia saw the Bolshevik Party as having been ‘chosen’ by the majority of the people. Stankevich, who was in the White camp during the conflict, wrote: ‘This was not now a mere one-tenth of the nation, as at the beginning of the revolution, but the most numerous party, with the greatest influence among the masses. It was obviously stupid to wage armed struggle against this party.’76 The very fact that Bolsheviks were now supported by substantial masses of the working people gave cause for hope that the regime would evolve towards democracy. If the government was a people’s government, then sooner or later it would become a democratic government: the possibility that it might develop in the opposite direction was not given sufficient weight. If the people recognized the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil — and the peasantry, after some hesitation, supported the Reds against the Whites, at whose hands they suffered even more — then advanced members of the scientific and cultural communities thought it proper to follow their example. Science developed more or less freely. ‘At this stage,’ writes Zhores Medvedev, ‘there was still nothing to suggest the future long isolation of Soviet science. All the tendencies were against it.’77