THE SPIRIT OF DESTRUCTION
The first task Lenin assigned to the proletarian revolution was the destruction of the state—the smashing of the old state machinery, in Marxist terminology. This had begun before the revolution, for the army had already fallen apart. After October the judicial system was abolished and replaced by revolutionary tribunals, which railroaded people to prison on the basis of "proletarian conscience and revolutionary duty." Pillaging, looting of wine cellars, and murders were daily occurrences in the revolutionary capital; they found an indignant chronicler in the person of Maxim Gorky. Until the newspaper Novaya zhizn was shut down in July 1918, in a column called "Untimely Thoughts," Gorky constantly and indignantly presented the facts and castigated the people's commissars who, in their efforts to prove their "devotion to the people," did not hesitate to "shoot, assassinate, and arrest those who did not think like them, did not hesitate to lie and slander their enemies."6 As an example, Gorky mentioned the case of the sailor Zheleznyakov, who, "translating the ferocious speeches of his leaders into the simple language of a man of the people, said that for the good of the Russian people, it would be all right to kill a million" opponents.7 Bonch-Bruevich, who after October 1917 was in charge of security in Petrograd, remembered that "to maintain public order in the city, from the end of October until February 1918, at a time when drunkenness and brawling were at their peak, the only reliable forces we had were the Latvian riflemen at Smolny, some soldiers of the Chasseurs, Preobrazhenzky, and Semenovsky regiments, who were guarding the State Bank, and some units from the Second Fleet."8 A few pages later, Bonch-Bruevich tells of his visit to the "loyal sailors" of the Second Fleet. They were commanded by two "politically conscious anarchists," the same Anatoly Zheleznyakov who closed down the Constituent Assembly and who, according to Gorky, was willing to kill a million people, and his brother, an alcoholic and a murderer. Bonch-Bruevich narrates the monstrous exploits of these sailors, "the pride and joy of the Russian revolution," with a bit of fear perhaps, but also with obvious satisfaction at knowing they were on "our side." One of the sailors described how he had put forty-three officers in front of a firing squad.9 When the Zheleznyakov brothers began to pillage and kill on a level unheard of even in revolutionary Petrograd, they were disarmed and sent to the front to defend Soviet power. Disarming them required "a strong detachment of Bolshevik Latvians." Also, "just in case, we alerted the Volynsky and Chasseurs regiments, who at that time had distinguished themselves by their sobriety, or rather, their tolerable degree of drunkenness."10
Clearing the city of anarchists, whether "conscious," "spontaneous," or "pure," did not mean an end to arbitrary justice. The suppression of the enemy took on an organized character. Room 75 was too weak to defend the government, though it had done its best. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, Bonch-Bruevich explained that he had obtained confessions from detainees by threatening to shoot them.11 (The death penalty had been abolished just a few days before.) Room 75 was only the forerunner of the true political police. On December 7, five weeks after the revolution, it was replaced by a new body that became a key instrument of Soviet power, the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage—the Cheka. The idea for such an agency had come to Lenin in the aftermath of October. He searched for the right man to head it up: "Is it impossible to find among us a Fouquier-Tinville to tame our wild counterrevolutionaries?"12 At the beginning of December a man was found who actually did resemble the bloody public prosecutor of the French revolution, whose standard sentence had been the guillotine. At a meeting of the Sovnarkom, this man, Felix Dzerzhinsky, recited his creed: "Do not believe that I seek revolutionary forms of justice. We don't need justice at this point. We are engaged today in hand-to-hand combat, to the death, to the end! I propose, I demand, the organization of revolutionary annihilation against all active counterrevolutionaries."13
The new organ of "revolutionary annihilation," directly under the authority of the Sovnarkom and its president, Lenin, gave priority to the struggle against "sabotage."
From its inception, the new government showed a complete mastery of vocabulary. A new art was born, the art of propaganda, of changing the meaning of things by changing their name. After the proletarian revolution, strikes, the weapon of the proletariat, lost their justification; so they were renamed. When, as we shall see, a general strike of civil servants began, it was denounced as "sabotage," a sinister term implying the need for severe punishment. Power was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, as the nation, and above all the intelligentsia, would learn all too quickly.
Among the ideas of Engels that are still relevant today are these prophetic words: "Nations that have boasted of making a revolution have always discovered on the day after that they had no idea what was happening, that the completed revolution had nothing to do with the one they wanted." In Russia the first to discover this truth "the day after" were the intellectuals. For over a century they had lived for the revolution, longed for it, worked for it. The more the monarchy weakened, the more active they became. As early as the turn of the century they had felt the underground tremors of impending disaster, had hailed the coming onslaught of the "new Huns," had called down fire from heaven, and had agreed to be trampled into the dust for the sake of Russia's regeneration. The February revolution, which brought freedom and lent a voice to the "great silent mass" of the people, at first seemed to be their dream come true. But the people bore little resemblance to the icon worshiped by the intellectuals, who although they controlled the Provisional Government, had no clear idea what to do with their power. Gorky noted in his diary the lament of an anonymous intellectual reflecting the sentiments of most of his kind: "I feel terrible, like a Christopher Columbus who has finally reached the shores of America but is disgusted by it."
The intellectuals did, however, find the strength to fight against the "shameless brute" who had violated their beloved. A strike of civil servants and municipal employees broke out first in Petrograd, then in Moscow, and spread to other cities as well. Urban transit systems and power plants shut down. Moscow's teachers went on -strike (for three months), as did those of Petrograd, Ekaterinburg, Astrakhan, and Ufa. Doctors, health workers, nurses, and pharmacists followed suit. University professors refused to recognize the new government. Many technicians also resisted, expressing their ideas mainly through the All-Russia Union of Engineers. One week after the October insurrection, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets invited the "creative intelligentsia" of Petrograd to a meeting at Smolny. Aside from two Bolsheviks, Rurik Ivnev and Larissa Reissner, only three intellectuals showed up, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Mey- erhold, and Alexander Blok. Mayakovsky, who in March 1917 had proclaimed, "Long live art free of politics," and Meyerhold, director of a spectacular show, The Masked Ball, at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater, represented the new revolutionary art.