Guilty!

[WITH the death of Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko passed away the last of the Russians who, like Leo Tolstoy, ‘could not be silent’ in face of what they regarded as evil, however powerful that evil was, and however wise silence seemed under the circumstances. ‘A gadfly stinging the conscience of his countrymen,’ was Korolenko’s image of Socrates, in one of his early stories; and precisely such a mission the author performed through his long years of open warfare against all oppression and violence. A convinced Narodnik, an exile to the Siberian tundras under the tsars, an ardent champion of the revolutionary cause, Korolenko found himself after November, 1917, like Prince Kropotkin, Madame Breshkovsky, Plekhanov, and other veteran rebels, antipathetic to the newregime. It was not so much the aim of the Bolskeviki that Korolenko opposed, as the means they employed; for, like Roma in Rolland, he considered the means more important than the ends for the shaping of man’s mind.

In the summer of 1920, A. V. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, visited Poltava (Ukraine), called on the ailing and fastaging Korolenko, and heard from him straightforward bitter words of denunciation against the Government. As a fellow writer and journalist, Lunacharsky suggested that Korolenko write to him from time to time personal letters, which he promised to publish in the Bolshevist daily, Pravda (Truth), with his comments. One must state with regret that under the present regime Korolenko found more obstacles to free expression than before the Revolution. Pravda has failed to publish his Remarkable letters, and only recently were they smuggled abroad and issued by the Sovremennyia Zapiski. The letters portray so eloquently their author’s personality that they render all comment superfluous.—A. K.]

You know that in the course of my literary life I have ‘sown not roses alone.’ (An expression of yours in one of your essays about me.) Under autocracy I wrote a great deal against capita! punishment, and had even won for myself the privilege to say about it in the press considerably more than was generally permitted by the censorship. At times, I even succeeded in saving doomed victims of military courts; there were cases when, after the deferment of the execution, they received proofs of the accused man’s innocence (e.g., in the case of Yousupov), though it also happened that such proofs arrived too late (in the case of Glousker and of others).

But executions without trial, executions ‘in administrative order’ — such things were an extraordinary rarity, even then. I recall only one case, when the infuriated Skalon [Governor-General of Warsaw] had two youths shot without trial. But this aroused such indignation, even in the spheres of military courts, that only the post facto ‘approval ’ by the stupid Tsar saved Skalon from indictment. Even the members of the Chief Military Court assured me then that the repetition of such an act would be impossible.

Many improbable monstrosities had been committed both then and afterward, but not once did one meet with a direct admission that it was legal to combine in one the examining power and the power pronouncing verdicts (of capital punishment). The activity of the Bolshevist extraordinary commissions presents such an instance, perhaps the only one in the history of cultured nations. Once a prominent member of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission, on meeting me at the Poltava Cheka, whither I often came with all kinds of pleas, asked me what were my impressions. I replied: ‘If under the Tsar’s régime the district police bureaus had been given the right not only to exile to Siberia but also to execute, it would have been similar to what we see now.’

To this my interlocutor answered: —

‘But don’t you see that this is for the benefit of the people?’

I think that not every means can in reality be turned for the benefit of the people; and to me it is beyond doubt that the administrative executions which have been made into a system, and which have been going on these two years, do not belong to such means. Last year I happened to describe in a letter to Christian Gcorgiyevich Rakovsky [Premier of the Ukraine], how the Chekists shot in the street several so-called ‘counter-revolutionists.’ They were being led on a dark night to the graveyard, where in those days they used to place the convicted over open graves and shoot them in the back of the head without further ceremonies. Maybe they, indeed, attempted to flee (small wonder), and they were shot down right there in the street from hand machine-guns.

Be it as it may, the people gathering the next morning on the market place could still see pools of blood, which the dogs were lapping, and could hear in the crowd the story of the night event related by inhabitants of the vicinity. I asked then of Ch. G. Rakovsky whether he thought that those few executed men, even though they had been agitators, could have told the crowd anything more dazzling and provoking than this picture.

I must admit that both the local Provincial Executive Committee and the central authorities of Kief stopped (on two occasions) attempts at such collective shootings, and demanded transfer of the cases to the Revolutionary Tribunal. The court: exonerated one of those who had been sentenced to death by the Extraordinary Commission, and the entire public met this verdict with applause. Even the sentinels of the Red army put their rifles aside, and applauded. Later, when the Denikinists came, they dragged out of one common pit sixteen decomposing corpses, and laid them out for exhibition. The impression was horrible, but — by that time the Denikinists themselves had executed without trial several persons. I asked their adherents whether they thought that the corpses of those whom they had shot would have a more attractive aspect when dragged out of the pit.

Yes, bestialization has already reached the extreme limits, and it pains me to think that the historian will have to refer this page of the Cheka’s ‘administrative activity ’ to the history of the first Russian Republic, and moreover, not to the eighteenth century, but to the twentieth.

Do not tell me that the Revolution has its own laws. It is true that there have been explosions of the passions of revolutionary mobs, which have crimsoned the streets with blood, even during the nineteenth century. But those were flashes of an elemental, not of a systematized, fury. Like t he shooting of hostages by the Communards, they remained for a long time bloody beacons, arousing the indignation, not only of the hypocritical Versailles crowd, which far excelled the Communards in cruelty, but of the workers and their friends as well. For a long time that event cast a black shadow on the very movement of Socialism.

It pains me to think that even you, Anatoly Vasilyevich, instead of an appeal to sobriety, to justice, to respect for human life which has become so cheap, have expressed in your speech a feeling of solidarity, as it were, with these ‘administrative shootings.’ This is how it sounds in the reports of the local press. From the depth of my soul I wish that in your heart rang once more the echo of that mood which used to unite us in the main problems, when both of us considered that the movement toward Socialism must be based on the best elements of human nature, presupposing valor in the open struggle and humaneness even toward your opponents. Let brutality and blind injustice be relegated to the outlived past, without penetrating into our future.

The course of historical destinies has perpetrated on Russia a well-nigh magic and malicious joke. A certain logical screw has suddenly turned in millions of Russian heads: from blind submission to autocracy, from complete indifference toward politics, our people has gone over at once — to Communism; at any rate, to a Communist government.

The morals have remained the same; so, too, the order of life. The cultural level could not have risen very much for the time of the war, and yet the conclusions drawn by the people have become radically reversed. From the dictatorship of the nobility we have passed over to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.1 It was proclaimed by you, Eolsheviki, and the people came to you straight from autocracy, and said, ‘Build our life.’

Carlyle used to say that governments perish most often from falsehood. I know that at present such categories as truth and falsehood are least of all in vogue, and seem ‘abstractions.’ Historical processes are influenced only by the ‘interaction of egoisms.’ Carlyle was convinced that the questions of truth and falsehood are ultimately reflected in the most tangible results of this interaction of egoisms; and I think that he was right. Your dictatorship was preceded by the dictatorship of the nobility, which had been based on a gigantic falsehood that oppressed Russia for a long period. Why is it that, since the emancipation of the peasants, the wealth of the country, instead of increasing, has diminished, and we suffer from ever worse famines? The dictatorship of the nobility used to answer: Because of the muzhik’s laziness and drunkenness. The famines have grown worse, not because of the reign of deadening stagnation in our land, not because our mainstay, agriculture, has been chained by evil land-laws, but exclusively because of the insufficient tutelage over a people of idlers and drunkards. During the famine years our group had to fight this monstrous lie very often, both in the press and at gatherings. That we have had much drunkenness, is true, but only partially true. The basic activity of the peasantry as a class consisted, not in drunkenness, but in toil; and at that, in toil that was poorly rewarded, and presented no hopes of a durable betterment of conditions. The whole policy of the last decades of tsarism was founded on this falsehood. Hence the omnipotence of the Zemsky Nachalnik (land chief), and the predominance of the nobility itself. But the masses of the people believed only in the tsars, and helped them crush every movement toward liberation. The autocratic régime had no wise men who would understand that this lie, supported by a blind force, led that order most inevitably to dest ruction.

Carlyle’s formula, as you see, may perhaps fit as the definition of the cause for the fall of autocracy. Instead of heeding the truth, autocracy enhanced the falsehood, arriving finally at the monstrous absurdity of an ‘autocratic constitution,’ that is, at an effort to preserve by deceit the substance of absolutism in a constitutional form.

And the order collapsed.

Now I put this question: Is everything based on truth in your order? Are there no traces of a similar falsehood in what you have instilled into the minds of the people?

It is my deep conviction that such a falsehood exists, and, strange to say, it has a similarly broad ‘class’ character. You have persuaded the rebellious and excited people that the so-called bourgeoisie (bourzhouy) presents a class of sheer idlers, robbers, coupon-clippers, and — of nothing else.

Is this so? Can you confirm it?

In particular, you, Marxians — can you assert this?

You, Anatoly Vasilyevich, surely remember well those not very remote days when you, Marxians, carried on a ferocious battle with us, the Narodniki. You argued that for Russia it was necessary and beneficial to pass through the ‘ stage of Capitalism.’ What was it that you understood by this beneficial stage? Is it possible that it was merely idleness, bourzhouy, and coupon-clippings?

Evidently, you had then in mind something else. The capitalist class appeared to you then, as a class, responsible for the organization of production. Despite its defects, you considered such an organization, in perfect agreement with the teaching of Marx, beneficial for industrially backward countries, such as Rumania, Hungary, and Russia.

Why then has the foreign word, bourgeois, become transformed with your aid, in the eyes of our people, ignorant of the past, into a simplified conception of the bourzhouy, nothing but an idler, a robber, who does nothing save clip coupons.

Just as the falsehood of the dictatorship of the nobility substituted the class-significance of the peasantry by the notion of an idler and drunkard, so has your formula substituted the idea of a sheer robber for the role of an organizer of production, however poor an organizer. Again, observe how correct is Carlyle’s formula. Bandit instincts were developed in our midst, at first by the war, and then by the riots which are inevitable during any revolution. These instincts should have been fought by a revolutionary government. In your case, the sense of truth should have impelled you, Marxians, to expound sincerely and honestly your view of the role of Capitalism in backward countries. This you have not done. You have sacrificed your sense of truth to tactical considerations. For tactical purposes it was in your interest to fan the popular hatred for Capitalism, as one incites a fighting company to attack a fortress. You did not stop before distorting the truth. A part ial truth you presented as the whole (drunkenness also was a true fact).

Now the fruits are ripe. You have taken the fortress, have sacked and plundered it. You forgot only that this fortress is the nation’s possession, acquired by a ‘beneficial process’; that in the apparatus created by Russian Capitalism there is much which has to be perfected and further developed, but not destroyed. You have inspired the people with the notion that all this is the result of plunder, which deserves to be plundered in its turn. In saying this, I have in mind not only material values, in the form of factories and foundries, machines and railroads, created by Capitalism, but also those new processes and habits, that new social structure, which you, Marxians, had in view when you endeavored to prove the benefit of the ‘capitalistic stage.’

The struggle against the capitalist order has assumed the character of besieging an enemy’s stronghold. Every damage to the besieged fortress, every conflagration in it, every destruction of its stores, is beneficial to the besiegers. You, too, have regarded as your success every ruination brought upon the capitalist order, forgetting that the true victory of the social revolution would consist, not in the destruction of the capitalist productive apparatus, but in taking possession of it and in managing it on new principles.

Now you have come to reason, at a time when the country faces a terrible danger at the one front you have overlooked. This front is — the hostile forces of nature.

Casting aside that which may be regarded as polemical exaggeration, the fact still remains. The European proletariat have not followed you. . . . They are of the opinion that, even in Western Europe, Capitalism has not yet accomplished its mission, and that its work may still be useful for the future. At the transition from the present to this future, not everything must be subjected to destruction and sacking. Such things as freedom of thought, of assembly, of speech, and of press, are to them not mere ‘bourgeois prejudices,’ but a necessary instrument for a progressive future, a sort of a palladium acquired by humanity through a long struggle. Only we who have never fully known these liberties, and have not learned how to use them in common with the people, we declare them a ‘bourgeois prejudice’ which only impedes the cause of justice.

You will probably grant that I love our people not. any less than a good Bolshevik; you will also grant that I have proved this with all my life, which is now coming to an end. But I do not love them blindly, not as a convenient soil for experiments of one sort or another; I love them just as they are in reality. When I traveled in America, for instance, I meditated with pleasure on the fact that in Russia it would be impossible to have such lynchings as those which took place at that time in one of the Southern states.

The Slavic nature of our people is softer than that of the Anglo-Saxon. With us, capital punishment was not introduced until the advent of the Greeks, with their Christianity. Yet this does not prevent me from admitting that America possesses a higher moral culture.

By its character, by its natural traits, our people is not beneath the best people in the world, and this is what compels one to love it. But it is far behind in the development of its ethical culture. It lacks that self-respect which induces one to refrain from certain actions, even when no one may learn about them. This we must acknowledge.

We still have to go through a long and severe schooling. You speak about Communism. Aside from the fact that Communism is something unformulated and indefinite, and that you have not yet made clear what you yourself understand by it, for a social revolution in this direction different morals are required. Out of the same substance of carbon we obtain both the wonderful diamond crystal and the amorphous coal. There is evidently a certain difference in the inner structure of atoms, too. The same one must say concerning human atoms out of which society is composed: a given society cannot crystallize into any form. In many Swiss towns you may safely leave any object on the boulevard, and find it in the same place on your return. While with us, let us speak frankly. A precise computation in such a matter is, of course, difficult; but, as you know, we have a saying, ‘ Don’t let things lie loose, don’t lead the thief into sin.’

Since you have proclaimed Communism, this trait has not grown weaker.

Here is a small but significant instance. In order to alleviate somewhat the lack of provisions, the city administration of Poltava (then still bourgeois) encouraged the cultivation of all vacant lots. The land in front of the houses was planted with potatoes, carrots, and the like. The same was done with free spots in the city park. It had become a tradition of several years.

This year the potato crop was excellent, but — it became necessary to dig it out before it had ripened, because of night-thieves. Who was stealing the potatoes is unimportant to state. The point is that some people toiled, while others made use of their toil.

One third of the crops perished because the potatoes did not grow up; the rest could not be stored, because the unripe fruit rotted. I saw groups of poor women standing over their patches, which were ruined during the night, and weeping. They had worked, planted, dug, weeded. Others came, broke down the plants, trampled the ground, dug out some little bits that needed two months yet to mature, and accomplished this in less than an hour.

This is an example which shows that one can express in figures such a thing as the moral qualities of a people. At a certain level of morality the crops would have been bigger, and the population of the city would have been safeguarded in some measure against winter starvation. ‘Under Communism’ an enormous portion of the crops was destroyed because of our morals. A still greater damage looms ahead, in view of the fact that people are going to think twice before cultivating empty places for next year: no one wants to toil for thieves. Against such an elemental notion your shooting will be of no avail. Here you need something else; we are far from Communism.

You have defeated Capital, and now it is lying at your feet, mutilated and crushed. But you have failed to note that it is knit to production by such living threads that, in killing it, you have killed production, too. Rejoicing at your victories over Denikin, Kolchak, Youdenich, and the Poles, you have failed to observe that you have suffered a complete defeat on a considerably wider and more important front. This is the front along the whole extent of which man is assaulted on every side by nature’s hostile forces. Infatuated with your one-sided destruction of the capitalist order, paying attention to nothing outside of pursuing this scheme of yours, you have brought the country to a terrible condition. Long ago, in my book, A Hungry Year, I tried to picture the lugubrious state into which autocracy had led Russia: enormous regions of agricultural Russia were starving, and famines were on the increase. Now it is by far worse; now all Russia is stricken by hunger, beginning with the capitals where there occurred on the streets deaths from starvation. At present, they say, you have succeeded in organizing food-distribution in Moscow and Petrograd (for how long, and at what a price). But then, the famine has struck considerably larger areas in the country than during 1891 and 1892.

And the main thing is that you have destroyed the organic link between the city and the village; the natural relations of exchange. You are forced to replace it by artificial measures, by ‘coercive expropriations,’ requisitions, with the aid of punitive squads. At a time when the village not only does not get. any agricultural machinery, but has to pay two hundred rubles and more for one needle — at such a time you announce such fixed prices on grain as are obviously disadvantageous for the village. You address the villagers in your newspaper articles where you argue that it is in the interest of the village to support you. But, putting aside for the moment the substance of the question, you speak different languages: our people have not learned as yet to generalize. Each landowner sees only that his produce is being taken away from him, for a compensation which is far from equivalent to his labor, and he draws his own conclusion. He hides his grain; you find it, requisition it; you pass through the villages of Russia and the Ukraine ‘with hot iron’; you burn whole villages, and you rejoice at the success of your alimentary policy. If we add to this that from the famine-stricken provinces crowds of hungry people flee blindly into our Ukraine, that fathers of peasant families from Kursk and Riazan, in the absence of beasts, harness themselves and drag the carts with their children and baggage — then the picture obtained is more striking than anything I have noticed during the ‘Hungry Year.’ The privations are not confined to the regions where the crops have failed.

Two months ago I met a man in Poltava, who ‘had not seen bread’ for six days, feeding somehow on potatoes and vegetables. Now, in addition, winter is coming, and cold will be added to hunger. For a wagon of firewood, brought from the neighboring forests, they demand twelve thousand rubles! This means that the large majority of the inhabitants, even those who are comparatively better off, like your Soviet officials, will be absolutely unprotected from cold (with the exception, perhaps, of the Communists). The interiors will be the same as outdoors. On this front you have delivered the whole city population (and in part also the rural) to the mercy of nature’s hostile forces, which will be felt equally by the suspected, despoiled, ‘disloyal’ man in a frock coat, and by the man in a workman’s blouse.

In the past one regarded the will of the Tsar as reigning absolutely over Russia. But whenever the will of that unhappy autocrat appeared to be not in complete agreement with the intentions of t he ruling bureaucracy, the latter exercised thousands of means for bringing the autocrat to submission. Is not the same taking place with regard to a similar poor wretch, our present ‘dictator’? How do you learn, and how do you express, his will? We have no freedom of the press, nor treedom of voting. A free press is, in your opinion, merely a bourgeois prejudice. But in the meantime the absence of a free press makes you deaf and blind to life’s phenomena. In your semiofficial organs reigns internal well-being, at the time when people blindly ‘wander severally’ (an old Russian expression) from hunger. They announce the victories of Communism in the Ukrainian village, at the time when rustic Ukraine is seething with hatred and wrath, and when the Chckas are planning to shoot the village hostages. Hunger has begun in the cities, a grave winter is approaching, while you are anxious only about falsifying the opinion of the proletariat. As soon as anywhere in the midst of the workmen an independent idea begins to manifest itself, not quite in accord with the tendencies of your policy, the Communists at once take measure. The board of a certain professional union — trade-union — is declared white or yellow, its members arrested, the board is dismissed as a whole, and then in your semiofficial organ appears a triumphant article: ‘Give way for the Red printer,’ or for some other Red group of workers, which has been heretofore in a minority. Out of the sum of such facts is composed that which you call the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’

Logic is one of the mighty means of thinking, but not, indeed, the only one. There is yet imagination, which allows one to grasp the complexity of concrete phenomena. This quality is necessary in such a task as ruling a large country. With you, the scheme has completely crushed the imagination. You do not clearly conceive the complexity of reality. A mathematician calculates, for instance, how much time it will take a shell, charged with a certain velocity, to reach the moon; but even the physicist clearly perceives the infeasibility of this task, at least at the present level of technology. You are only the mathematicians of Socialism, its logicians and schematics. You say: ‘We should have achieved everything, were it not for the obstruction of the world bourgeoisie, and for the treachery of the Western leaders of Socialism and of their followers, the majority of the working class. They are not doing in their countries what we are doing here; they are not destroying Capitalism.’

But, first, of all, you have accomplished the easiest thing: you have destroyed the Russian bourgeois, unorganized, stupid, weak. We know that the Western bourgeois is much st ronger, and that the Western workers are not a blind herd, which may be hurled into Maximalism at the first call. They understand that it does not take long to destroy an apparatus, but that you must change it as you go ahead, in order not to disturb production, the only means by which man protects himself against ever-hostile nature. The Western workmen have a better sense of reality than you Communist leaders have, and for this reason they are not Maximalists. After the correspondence between Segru and Lenin, it appears beyond doubt that the Western working masses will, on the whole, not support you in your Maximalism. They will remain neutral.

In our Poltava the municipal government was changed immediately after the Revolution. It became democratic, and intervened in the method of supply. Among other things, it established a municipal depot of firewood; and whenever the merchants inflated the prices, the municipality augmented its sales, and the prices would fall. There were shouts then that this was Socialism. The orthodox adherents of Capitalism prefer absolute ‘free trade.’ To you this may appear too modest an achievement, but Poltava was protected from cold.

This, of course, is a trifle, but it outlines very clearly my idea. Only in this way is it possible to intervene in public supply ‘as you go ahead,’ without disturbing or destroying it. Later, one may increase this interference, introducing it into ever wider provinces, until at length society will pass over to Socialism. This road is slow, but it is the only one that is feasible. But you discontinued at once the bourgeois methods of supplying the foremost necessities, and now Poltava, the centre of a grainproducing region, surrounded with near-by forests, lies utterly unprotected from hunger and cold, in the face of the approaching winter.

And it is the same everywhere, in all branches of supply. Your newspapers announce triumphantly that in Wrangel’s Crimea bread is being sold at a hundred and fifty rubles per pound; but in our (that is, in your) Poltava, the very granary of Russia, bread costs four hundred and fifty rubles per pound, that is, three times higher.

You have killed the bourgeois industry, and have created nothing in its place, and your Commune is an enormous parasite, which feeds on the corpse. . . . You are building everything on egoism, yet you demand selfsacrifices.... In general, this process of distribution, which you have undertaken with such a light heart, requires a process of long and difficult preparation of ‘objective and subjective conditions,’ necessitating a strenuous social self-activity and, most important, freedom. . . . Having constructed nearly nothing, you have destroyed a great deal; in other words, by introducing immediate Communism, you have destroyed the sentiment for plain Socialism, the establishment of which is the most urgent task of modern times.

The minds have to be regenerated. And for this it is imperative for institutions to regenerate first. This, in its turn, requires freedom of thought and of initiative for the creation of new forms of life. To stop by force this selfactivity is a crime which the recently overthrown Government used to commit. But there is another, perhaps a greater crime — to impose by force new forms of life, whose convenience the people have not yet realized, and have had no opportunity for learning to know through creative experience. And of this you are guilty. Instinct you have replaced by a decree, and you expect that human nature will change by your order. For this infringement upon freedom, you must expect a day of reckoning.

Social justice is a very important matter, and you rightly indicate that no full liberty is possible without it. But without freedom it is impossible to attain justice. The ship of the future has to be manned between the Scylla of slavery and the Charybdis of injustice. No matter how much you try to assert that bourgeois freedom is only a deception, enslaving the working class, you will not succeed in convincing the Western workmen of this. The English workers who hope to carry out your experiments (in case they are successful, of course) through Parliament, cannot forget that the bourgeois Gladstone, acting in the name of autonomous freedom, fought nearly all his life for the expansion of suffrage rights. Each political reform in this spirit has led to the possibility of struggling for social justice, while each political reaction has given reverse results. There have been many political revolutions, and not one social revolution. You are demonstrating the first experiment of introducing Socialism by means of suppressing freedom.

[These letters present the gravest indictment of the Communist policy, and the most authoritative and trustworthy as yet, coming as it does from the pen of the one man whom even his enemies respected for his sterling honesty, thorough knowledge of, and unselfish love for, the people. It may be consoling to know that not only has the melancholy prophecy of Korolenko been fulfilled, but also some of his ardent wishes are in process of being realized. Since the writing of his letters, the Soviet administration has definitely adopted a ‘healthy reaction,’ trying to resuscitate industry and Capitalism. The Extraordinary Commissions (Cheka) have been abolished. But the freedom of speech and press remains a pious desire, the fulfillment of which may bring back to Russia the homesick Intelligentsia, which is longing to inoculate the people with those elements of culture the lack of which among the Russian masses men like Korolenko and Gorky have so repeatedly lamented.—A. K.]