20

The years passed, the dust and the fog cleared, and it became possible to make out what had happened. What had once seemed like chaos or insanity, like self-destruction, like a chain of absurd coincidences, what had once driven people out of their minds because it seemed so mysteriously and tragically senseless—all this gradually became recognizable as the clear, distinct attributes of the new reality.

The fate of the generation of the Revolution now ceased to seem mystical and extraordinary and began to seem entirely logical. And Ivan Grigoryevich felt able, at last, to understand his country’s new fate—the fate that had been built on the bones of that generation.

The Bolshevik generation had been formed in the days of the Revolution, in the days when the ideal of a World Commune held sway, when people took part in inspired, hungry, voluntary working Saturdays. That generation took on its shoulders the legacy of the World War and the Civil War—chaos, famine, typhus, anarchy, crime, and banditry. Through Lenin’s lips it proclaimed that there was a party that could set Russia on a new path. Without hesitation, it accepted the legacy of hundreds of years of Russian despotism, during which dozens of generations had come and gone, knowing no rights except that of a master to do as he pleased with his serfs.

Under Lenin’s leadership the Bolshevik generation dissolved the Constituent Assembly and destroyed the democratic revolutionary parties that had struggled against Russian absolutism.

The Bolshevik generation did not—in the context of bourgeois Russia—believe in the value of individual freedom; it did not believe in the value of freedom of speech or of freedom of the press.

Like Lenin, it saw as irrelevant nonsense the freedoms of which the intelligentsia and many revolutionary workers had long dreamed.

The young State destroyed the democratic parties, clearing the way for Soviet construction. By the end of the 1920s, these parties had been liquidated. Men who had been imprisoned under the Tsar were either back in prison or carrying out forced labor.

The year 1930 saw the total collectivization of agriculture.

Not long after this the ax was raised yet again. This time, however, it was on the generation of the Civil War that the ax fell. A small part of this generation survived, but its soul, its faith in a World Commune, its romantic and revolutionary strength disappeared with those who were destroyed in 1937. Those who were left, those who went on living and working, managed to adapt to the new time and its new people.

The new people did not believe in the Revolution. They were the children not of the Revolution but of the new State that the Revolution had created.

The new State had no need of holy apostles, of frenzied, possessed builders, of faithful disciples. The new State no longer even needed servants; it needed employees. And the State’s only misgiving with regard to these employees was that they did, on occasion, turn out to be very petty-minded indeed—and thieving rascals into the bargain.

Terror and dictatorship swallowed up their creators. The State, which had seemed to be a means, had now proved to be an end in itself. The people who had created this State had seen it as a means of realizing their ideals. It turned out, however, that their dreams and ideals had been a means employed by a great and terrible State. The State was no longer a servant but a grim autocrat. It was not the people who needed the Red Terror of 1919. It was not the people who did away with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It was not the people who needed the death of millions of peasants—most of the people, after all, were peasants. It was not the people who chose, in 1937, to fill the prisons and camps. It was not the people who needed the murderous deportations, the resettlement in Siberia and Central Asia, of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, and Volga Germans, of Russified Bulgarians and Greeks. Nor was it the people who destroyed the workers’ right to strike or the peasants’ right to sow what they chose. It was not the people who added huge taxes to the price of consumer goods.

The State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell. Thus was made manifest, with tragic clarity, a sacred law of life: Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.