the Whites (a motley collection of monarchists, democrats and socialists opposed to the Soviet regime) and the interventionary forces of Britain, France, Japan, the USA and a dozen other western powers which supported them in the civil war of 1918-21.
Popularly seen as a war against all privilege, the practical ideology of the Russian Revolution owed less to Marx - whose works were hardly known by the semi-literate masses - than to the egalitarian customs and Utopian yearnings of the peasantry. Long before it was written down by Marx, the Russian people had lived by the idea that surplus wealth was immoral, all property was theft, and that manual labour was the only true source of value. In the Russian peasant mind there was Christian virtue in being poor - a fact the Bolsheviks exploited brilliantly when they called their newspaper The Peasant Poor (Krestianskaia bednota). It was this striving for pravda, for truth and social justice, that gave the Revolution its quasi-religious status in the popular consciousness: the war on private wealth was a bloody purgatory on the way to a heaven on earth.
By giving institutional form to this crusade, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements among the poor who derived satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether such destruction brought about any improvement in their own lot. They licensed the Red Guards and other self-appointed groups of armed workers to raid the houses of 'the rich' and confiscate their property. They rounded up the leisured classes and forced them to do jobs such as clearing snow or rubbish from the streets. Akhmatova was ordered to clean the streets around the Fountain House.5 House Committees (usually made up of former porters and domestic servants) were instructed to move the urban poor into the apartments of the old privileged elites. Palaces like the Fountain House were sub-divided and made into apartment blocks. Soon after their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks unleashed a campaign of mass terror, encouraging the workers and the peasants to denounce their neighbours to Revolutionary Tribunals and the local Cheka, or political police. Almost anything could be construed as 'counterrevolutionary' - hiding property, being late for work, drunkenness or hooligan behaviour - and the prisons were soon filled. Most of those
arrested by the Cheka in the early years of the Bolshevik regime had been denounced by their neighbours - often as a result of some vendetta. In this climate of mass terror no private space was left untouched. People lived under constant scrutiny, watched all the time by the House Committees, and always fearful of arrest. This was not a time for lyric poetry.
Akhmatova was dismissed as a figure from the past. Left-wing critics said her private poetry was incompatible with the new collectivist order. Other poets of her generation, such as Pasternak, were able to adapt to the new conditions of the Revolution. Or, like Mayakovsky, they were made for it. But Akhmatova was rooted in a classical tradition that had been thrown out in 1917, and she found it hard to come to terms - as did Mandelstam - with her new Soviet environment. She wrote very little in the early Soviet years. Her energy was consumed by the struggle to survive the harsh conditions of the civil war in Petrograd, where chronic shortages of food and fuel reduced the population by more than half, as people died or fled the hungry city for the countryside. Trees and wooden houses were chopped down for firewood; horses lay dead in the middle of the road; the waters of the Moika and Fontanka were filled with rubbish; vermin and diseases spread; and the daily life of the Tsars' capital appeared to return to the prehistoric age, as desperate people scavenged for a piece of bread to eat or a stick of wood to burn.6
And confined to this savage capital,
We have forgotten forever
The lakes, the steppes, the towns,
And the dawns of our great native land.
Day and night in the bloody circle
A brutal languor overcomes us…
No one wants to help us
Because we stayed home,
Because, loving our city
And not winged freedom,
We preserved for ourselves
Its palaces, its fire and water.
A different time is drawing near,
The wind of death already chills the heart,
But the holy city of Peter
Will be our unintended monument.7
For the old intelligentsia conditions were particularly harsh. In the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they were put to the bottom of the social pile. Although most were conscripted by the state for labour teams, few had jobs. Even if they received food from the state, it was the beggarly third-class ration, 'just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it', in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd.8 Gorky took up the defence of the starving Petrograd intelligentsia, pleading with the Bolsheviks, among whom he was highly valued for his left-wing commitment before 1917, for special rations and better flats. He established a writers' refuge, followed later by a House of Artists, and set up his own publishing house, called World Literature, to publish cheap editions of the classics for the masses. World Literature provided work for a vast number of writers, artists and musicians as translators and copy editors. Indeed, many of the greatest names of twentieth-century literature (Zamyatin, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasev-ich, Mandelstam, Piast', Zoshchenko and Blok and Gumilev) owed their survival of these hungry years to Gorky's patronage.
Akhmatova also turned to Gorky for help, asking him to find her work and get her a ration. She was sharing Shileiko's tiny food allowance, which he received as an assistant in the Department of Antiquities at the Hermitage. They had no fuel to burn, dysentery was rife among the inhabitants of the Fountain House, and, extravagant though it may appear, they had a St Bernard dog to feed which Shileiko had found abandoned and which, in the spirit of the Sheremetev motto, they had decided to keep. Gorky told Akhmatova that she would only get the most beggarly of rations for doing office work of some kind, and then he took her to see his valuable collection of oriental rugs. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, 'Akhmatova looked at Gorky's carpets, said how nice they were, and went away empty-handed. As a result of this, I believe, she took a permanent dislike to carpets. They smelled too much of dust and a kind of prosperity strange in a city that was dying so catastrophically. Perhaps Gorky was afraid to help
Akhmatova; perhaps he disliked her and her poetry. But in 1920 she did at last find work as a librarian in the Petrograd Agronomic Institute, and perhaps Gorky helped.
In August 1921, Akhmatova's former husband Nikolai Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial on charges, which were almost certainly false, of belonging to a monarchist conspiracy. Gumilev was the first great poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks, although many more would soon follow. With his death, there was a feeling in the educated classes that a boundary had been crossed: their civilization had passed away. The moving poems of Akhmatova's collection Anno Domini MCMXXI (In the Year of Our Lord 1921) were like a prayer, a requiem, for her ex-husband and the values of his age.
The tear-stained autumn, like a widow
In black weeds, clouds every heart…
Recalling her husband's words,
She sobs without ceasing.
And thus it will be, until the most quiet snow
Takes pity on the sorrowful and weary one…
Oblivion of pain and oblivion of bliss -