Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917–1978

Ronald Hingley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000386714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This book, first published in 1979, provides a systematic anatomy of Russia's modern authors in the context of their society at the time. Post-revolutionary Russian literature has made a profound impact on the West while still maintaining its traditional role as a vehicle for political struggle at home. Professor Hingley places their lives and work firmly in the setting of the USSR's social and political structure.

Part One

The Historical
and Literary
Setting

1 General Perspectives

To citizens of non-Communist countries the literary and social background of the Soviet Union can seem even more unfamiliar and mysterious than that of the long-defunct Russian Empire. Soviet Russian experience differs markedly from that of the Western world in three respects. Western – especially English-speaking – populations have not on the whole undergone comparably sweeping social upheavals; they have suffered less or for less prolonged periods from foreign invasion, from famine and from penal procedures imposed by their own rulers; and they have not experienced the pressure of politics on everyday life to the same extent.

We shall begin by considering these topics in turn (under the headings Revolution, Ordeals and The Political Dimension) before ending the chapter with a general survey of the USSR, its geography, demography and economy.

Revolution

Since the Russian Revolution is often conceived as a single episode it is important to remember that a complex sequence of separate events is involved. In the Russia of 1917 two successive upheavals, divided by an interval of eight months, each created a change of government by violence: in February and October. Nor were these the country’s only revolutions, having been preceded by an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Russian monarchy in 1905; but we are not here directly concerned with the 1905 Revolution, which falls outside our period, except to note that it is often called ‘the dress rehearsal for 1917’.

By contrast with the bloody but ineffectual assault of 1905, both 1917 revolutions were conspicuously successful in the sense that an existing form of government was in each case irretrievably overthrown in a matter of days. In February 1917 the ancient dynasty of the Romanovs fell from power, 304 years after the first Romanov Tsar had ascended the throne, and nearly two hundred years after the foundation of the Russian Empire with the proclamation of Peter the Great as its first Tsar-Emperor in 1721. After being overthrown by the February Revolution, the Russian Imperial Government was succeeded by a so-called Provisional Government. Then, after eight months of uncertainty and semi-anarchy, that government was in turn overthrown by the Bolshevik October Revolution, and was superseded by the form of government that continues to this day.

The February Revolution was more a collapse than a takeover. By early 1917 the cumbrous, autocratically misruled Empire had become widely discredited with its own citizens. It had lost the confidence of most sections of Russian society, it had been undermined by two and a half years of world war against the Central Powers led by Germany, and it had been eroded by decades of revolutionary propaganda. But when the last Tsar-Emperor, Nicholas 11, abdicated on 2 March in response to a few days of rioting in his capital city, the fall of the monarchy surprised Russia and the world. As for Russia’s Bolsheviks (or Communists, as they were soon to call themselves), February 1917 found them as a small party of some 24,000 members, many of its leaders being dispersed in exile and emigration. Neither the Bolshevik nor any other revolutionary party played a notable direct part in overthrowing the Imperial state.

By October 1917 the Bolsheviks had grown in power and confidence, and in numbers about tenfold, spurred on by their militant leader Lenin. They were particularly strong in the capital, Petrograd (now Leningrad), and especially among factory workers and troops garrisoned there. They were accordingly able to mount a victorious coup d’état against the Provisional Government in the city on the night of 24-25 October. After a week’s fighting in Moscow (then the Empire’s second city) and certain sporadic engagements elsewhere they made themselves masters of large parts of the country without much opposition.

Soviet Russia had been born. It was termed Soviet because the Bolsheviks proclaimed their new government at the opening session of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a body representing workers and soldiers. The word sovet, meaning ‘council, counsel or advice’, had first acquired revolutionary significance during the abortive 1905 Revolution, when numerous Soviets consisting of workers’ and peasants’ delegates had briefly come into being. Owing little or nothing of their genesis to activity by any revolutionary party, they are generally regarded as a spontaneous creation of the masses, being frequently described in popular histories as having ‘sprung up everywhere’. Though they temporarily disappeared after the 1905 Revolution they left a much-prized tradition behind them, for which reason it was natural for workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ Soviets to emerge in 1917 and to play a significant role in the upheavals of that year.

As for the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets and its first, momentous session on 25 October 1917 – though the Bolsheviks had recently acquired a majority on it, other left-wing parties were also substantially represented. The Bolshevik decision to rule in the name of the Soviets therefore had the effect of suggesting that their government was more broadly based than was actually the case. In order to strengthen and justify their position further the Bolsheviks also ruled for a few months (from December 1917 to March 1918) in direct coalition with another party, that of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

For the Russian revolutions of 1917, as for many other major events in history, official descriptive formulas have been evolved in the USSR. The earlier upset has been defined as the ‘February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution, which overthrew Tsarism and established a diarchy in Russia: the bourgeois Provisional Government and the Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’.¹ The second upheaval is naturally regarded as the more significant of the two. According to the official formula it was:

‘the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, accomplished by the working class of Russia in alliance with the poorest peasantry under the leadership of the Communist Party headed by V. I. Lenin. It overthrew the supremacy of the bourgeoisie and landowners, established the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and created a new type of state – the Soviet Socialist state; it created conditions for the building of Communist society and laid the foundations of that structure.’²

Not only were the two revolutions of 1917 both small-scale operations effecting the transfer of power from one regime to another quickly and with few casualties, but they also had this in common: that the second upheaval surprised Russia and the world no less than the first, and that it too led to the establishment of a new form of government widely presumed vulnerable and temporary. Indeed, for several years the infant Soviet state seemed no less precarious than the avowedly provisional regime that it had swept aside in October. Many of the very Bolsheviks believed, at least into the early 1920s, that the maintenance of their political system could only be ensured if a sympathetic revolution should break out in other countries and come to their rescue.

Swift, unexpected, easily accomplished and relatively casualty-free though the transfer of power had been, both in February and in October, these events eventually provoked a sequel resulting in the death of many millions: the Civil War between the Reds (Bolsheviks) and Whites (anti-Bolsheviks). Since this represented a concerted, though ill-coordinated, attempt by Lenin’s opponents to overthrow his government, it was in effect a revolutionary struggle, and for this reason the elastic term Russian Revolution is sometimes extended to cover not only the changes of power in February and October but the entire sequence of events of 1917 and the next three or four years. ‘Revolution’ may even be loosely extended in usage beyond that, as when for example the years 1917 to 1937 are described as the first two decades of the Revolution. We shall avoid this last use here, but shall not shrink from the phrase ‘after the Revolution’, meaning in effect after the two 1917 revolutions and the events that they set in motion.

Though the Civil War was the direct outcome of the events of 1917 it was separated by the better part of a year from the Bolshevik seizure of power, for not until the summer of 1918 did hostilities gather momentum. They ended, apart from certain isolated and relatively unimportant actions, two years later with the defeat of the Whites in 1920.

So much for the immediate sequel to 1917. But it must not be forgotten that the momentous upsets of that year took place during the First World War and in the wake of bloody battles fought by Russia on the Eastern Front against Germany and the other Central Powers since August 1914. Nor must we forget, though it is easy to do so, that the war continued throughout both the February and October Revolutions. But the fighting was less fierce from early 1917 onwards, for the Germans and their allies were fully extended in the West and no longer needed to commit their fullest efforts to prosecuting hostilities against an eastern enemy who already seemed to be defeating himself through internal strife. In order to weaken Russia still further the Kaiser’s government had already begun to give secret financial subsidies to Russian revolutionaries opposed to the war. The Germans also made it possible for Lenin to leave Switzerland, where he was living in exile in early 1917, and to travel across Germany by train, reaching Petrograd on 3 April.

The events of 1917 caught Russia’s writing fraternity as much by surprise as the rest of the community, but to politically alert Russians as a whole the surprise was tactical rather than strategic. Unable to foresee that Tsarism would be replaced at precisely this time and in precisely this way, Russian intellectuals had long discussed and predicted revolution in general terms. Many of them had anticipated it as a relief from the stuffiness and oppressiveness of the Imperial state, which had made little distinction between its most violent internal enemies and those who merely sought peaceful reform. Lumping terrorist assassins and liberal reformists together as equally pernicious, the Tsar’s government had persecuted them with such insulting inefficiency that, while their contempt for the system had increased, their freedom to conspire against it had been little impaired.

Though writers’ reactions to revolutionary events were far from uniform, there was a widespread tendency to welcome 1917 enthusiastically. This reaction was shared by many who later came to deplore, and to suffer from, the oppressions of the new state. ‘There wasn’t a man alive who didn’t experience periods of hope in the revolution’, according to the critic and memoirist Viktor Shklovsky.³ Pasternak regarded revolution as a liberating experience, and the words which he puts into the mouth of his hero Yury Zhivago may be taken to express his own sentiments: ‘Revolution erupted forcibly like a breath held too long. Everyone revived, became transformed, transfigured, changed. Everyone seemed to experience two such upheavals, his own personal revolution and a second one common to all.’⁴

Among writers most closely in sympathy with revolutionary aims was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was to be posthumously appointed the Soviet Union’s poet laureate on Stalin’s orders in the mid-1930S. In his poem At the Top of My Voice (1930) Mayakovsky described himself as ‘a sewage disposal operative... mobilized and drafted’ by revolution. He even added that he had ‘deserted that moody bitch Poetry’ in order to ‘go off to the front’ – which was untrue in any military sense. Mayakovsky also expressed himself as willing ‘to do anything’ for the Revolution, a promise that he was to keep most loyally in his own idiosyncratic manner.⁵ Even among Bolshevik sympathizers, however, early reactions to October were not uniformly favourable. Though Maksim Gorky was literature’s most famous recruit to the Leninist cause, he strenuously opposed the Bolshevik takeover; he also denounced the new government’s authoritarian assumptions in a series of articles, Untimely Thoughts, published in his journal Novaya zhizn (‘New Life’) until Lenin suppressed it on 16 July 1918.⁶

Whatever specific form revolutionary events might take, the abstract concept of revolution continued to fascinate, almost to hypnotize, Russian writers. So acutely sensitized to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Historical and Literary Setting
• Part Two: The Social and Political Spectrum
• Part Three: The Literary Profession
• Reference Notes
• Bibliography
• Index