January 1 / 14, 19181

This damn year is finally over. But what will be next? Perhaps things will get worse. And that seems even likely.

But something remarkable is happening: almost everyone is unusually happy for some reason—no matter whom you meet on the street, you see a simply radiant face.

“Enough moping around, old boy! In two or three weeks you’ll be ashamed of how you’re feeling. . . .”

Hale and hearty, he squeezes my hand tenderly but firmly (he pities me for my stupidity), and takes off at a trot.

Today I again met with Speransky from Russian News.2 Then I ran into an old woman on Merzlyakovsky Street.³ She stopped, and with shaking hands, leaned on her crutch as she burst out crying:

“Good sir, tell me what’s going on! Just where are we heading? Everyone is saying that Russia has perished, that it’s been going downhill for thirteen years!”⁴

January 7 / 20, 1918

At a meeting of the Writers’ Publishing House⁵ I heard stunning news: the Constituent Assembly⁶ has been disbanded!

I also heard about Bryusov: he keeps going more and more to the left and is now “almost a regular Bolshevik.” I’m not surprised. In 1904 he hailed autocracy, demanding (a regular Tyutchev!)⁷ that Constantinople be seized without delay. But in 1905 he published his poem “The Dagger” in Gorky’s newspaper Struggle. Then, when war broke out with the Germans, he became an ultrapatriot. Now he’s a Bolshevik.⁸

February 5 / 18, 1918

Beginning February 1st we have been ordered to observe new style [to keep track of calendar time]. So, according to the Soviets, it is now February 18th.

Yesterday there was meeting of [the literary group] “Wednesday.”9 Many “young people” were there. Mayakovsky behaved rather decently most of the time, though he kept acting like a lout, strutting about and shooting off his mouth. He was wearing a shirt without a tie. The collar of his jacket was raised up for some reason, just like those poorly shaven people who live in wretched hotel rooms and use public latrines in the mornings.

[At the meeting] Ehrenburg and Vera Inber read from their works. Sasha Koiransky said about them:

Ehrenburg howls

And Inber follows in tow—

But Moscow and Petersburg

Wouldn’t give up Berdichev¹

For all their collective woe.

February 6 / 19, 1918

The newspapers report that the Germans have begun their attack.² Everyone says: “Oh, if it were only so!”

We took a walk to Lubyanka. There were “meetings” everywhere. [In one of them] a red-haired fellow talked on and on about the injustices of the old regime. He was wearing a coat with a round, dark-brown collar. His face was freshly powdered and shaven; he had red curly eyebrows and gold fillings in his mouth. A snub-nosed gentleman with bulging eyes kept objecting hotly to what the red-haired fellow was saying. Women were fervidly adding their two cents’ worth, but always at the wrong time. They kept breaking into the argument (one that was based on “principle,” so the red-haired fellow said) with details and hurried stories from their own lives, by which they felt compelled to prove God-knows-what. Several soldiers were also there. They acted as though they understood nothing; but, as always, they had their doubts about something (or more accurately, everything) and kept shaking their heads suspiciously.

A peasant approached the crowd. He was an old man with pale, swollen cheeks and a grey triangular beard, which he curiously kept sticking into the mob as he approached, finally driving it in between the sleeves of two gentlemen who had kept silent but were listening to all that was going on. The peasant also began to listen attentively, but it was apparent that he too understood nothing and that he didn’t believe anyone or anything. A tall blue-eyed worker likewise made his way into the crowd along with two more soldiers who were carrying sunflowers in their hands. Both of the soldiers were short-legged, chewing sunflower seeds and looking at everything in a gloomy and mistrustful way. The worker’s face had a look of scorn on it and also a smile that was lighthearted but evil. He stood to the side of the crowd, pretending that he had stopped only for a minute to amuse himself, as if to say, “I know, even before I get there, that everyone is talking nonsense.”

A lady complained hurriedly that now she didn’t have a piece of bread to her name, even though once she had had a school. She had had to let all her students go because she had nothing to feed them.

“Whose life has gotten better with the Bolsheviks?” she asked. “Everyone’s worse off and we, the people, most of all!”

A heavily made-up little bitch interrupted her, breaking in with naive remarks. She started to say that the Germans were about to arrive and that everyone would pay through the nose for what they had done.

“Before the Germans get here, we’ll kill you all,” a worker said coldly and took off.

The soldiers nodded in agreement: “If that isn’t true!” they said, and they also left.

In another group a worker was arguing with an ensign of the tsarist army. The ensign tried to speak as softly as possible, attempting to be logical and choosing the most inoffensive expressions to make his point. He almost had won the crowd to his side when a worker started screaming at him.

“Your brother should put a bigger lock on your mouth, that’s what he should do! You shouldn’t be spreading propaganda among the people!”

K. said that R. had come to visit them again. He was there for four hours; and for no reason at all he kept reading a small book on magnetic waves, which had been lying on the table. He then drank some tea and ate up an entire loaf of bread which had been given to K. and his family. By nature, R. is a gentle, quiet, and utterly polite type of individual; but now he comes to visit, sits, and without any conscience eats an entire loaf of bread and doesn’t give a damn about his hosts. How quickly he is falling apart!

Blok has openly joined with the Bolsheviks. He has published an article which Kogan (P. S.) has praised.3 I still haven’t read it, but I guessed at its contents and told them to Ehrenburg—it turned out I was correct. In general, Blok’s tunes aren’t all that complicated; he’s a very stupid man.4

From Gorky’s newspaper New Life:⁵

“Today even the most naive simpleton knows that he must not talk about the [Soviet of] People’s Commissars,⁶ and, in particular, not about their lack of courage and revolutionary merit or the basic integrity of their politics. Before us stand a group of political adventurers who, in order to advance their own personal interests and to prolong the agonies of a dying autocracy for several weeks more, are ready to commit the most shameful treachery and to betray the interests of the homeland, the Revolution, and the Russian proletariat in whose name they commit all types of excesses on the vacant throne of the Romanovs.”

From the newspaper Power of the People:⁷

“As it is our persistent observation that, every night, people under arrest are meeting their end when being interrogated by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,⁸ we ask that the Soviet of People’s Commissars step in and prevent similar hooliganlike actions and escapades in the future. . . .”

This complaint [is from someone] from Borovichi.9

From the newspaper Russian Word:¹

“Tambov peasants from the village of Pokrovskoye² have put together this protocol:

‘On January 30th, we as a collective society prosecuted two thieves, the citizens Nikita Alexandrovich Bulkin and Adrian Alexandrovich Kudinov. And by the agreement of our collective society, they were indicted and immediately put to death.’ ”

Here is the personal legal code that [Pokrovskoye] “collective society” drew up as regards punishments for various crimes.

“If someone strikes someone else, then the one who has been struck must hit the offender ten times.”

“If someone strikes someone else and causes injury or a bone to be broken, then the offender shall lose his life.”

“If someone commits theft or accepts stolen goods, then this person shall lose his life.”

“If someone commits arson and is observed doing so, then this person shall lose his life.”

Soon after this “code” was accepted, two thieves were caught red-handed. They were quickly “judged” and sentenced to be executed. One was killed right off: his head was bashed in with a steel bar, his side was pierced with a pitchfork, and his body was thrown out stark naked onto the highway. Then they took care of the other one. . . .

One reads things like this every day:

Monks [have been sentenced to] break up ice over on Petrovka Street. Passersby are exultant, gloating:

“Aha! So you’ve been chased out! Now, pal, they’ll make you work!”

In the courtyard of a house on Povarskaya Street, a soldier in a leather jacket is cutting wood. A peasant passerby stops and looks for a long time. He then shakes his head and says sadly:

“Ah! You should go fuck yourself! Ah, you dizzerter, you should go fuck yourself! Ras’sia has perished!”3

February 7 / 20, 1918

The lead article from Power of the People: “The fateful hour has come—Russia and the Revolution will perish. Everyone to the defense of the revolution which has only recently begun to shine radiantly over the entire world!”—When did it shine? I ask. When did your shameless eyes see it shine?

From Russian Word: “General Yanushkevich, former head of staff, has been executed. He was arrested in Chernigov and, by order of the local revolutionary tribunal, was to be moved to Petrograd to the Peter-and-Paul Fortress.⁴ Two soldiers of the Red Army were to accompany him there. But one night, one of them shot him four times when the train pulled up at the station at Orebyozh.”5

It is still winter; snow glistens about. But, like spring, the sky shines brightly through clouds of luminous steam.

Over on Strastnaya Street, people are advertising that Yavorskaya will give a benefit performance. An old woman, fat, rosy-red, mean-spirited, and coarse, cries out:

“Just take a look at that! They’re smearing paste all over the place! And who’s going to clean up the mess? And the bourgeois will be going to the theaters. They shouldn’t be allowed to go. After all, we don’t go. And everyone’s afraid of the Germans; ‘They’re coming, they’re coming!’ people say, but somehow they never get here!”

A woman in a pince-nez walks down Tverskaya Street. She wears a soldier’s sheepcoat, a red, plush jacket, a torn skirt, and a pair of galoshes in absolutely wretched condition.

A crowd of ladies, high school girls, and officers stand on the street corners, selling things.

A young officer gets into a tram, and, his face red with embarrassment, he says that unfortunately he cannot pay for a ticket.

It was just before evening. A blinding sun lay low on Red Square; smooth, well-trodden snow was all around. It was sleeting. We stopped by the Kremlin. The sky had a moon and rose-colored clouds. It was quiet; there were huge snowdrifts. Near an artillery base, a soldier in a sheepskin coat was making crunching noises with his boots; his face seemed as if hacked from wood; but how pointless this guard now seems!

We walked out of the Kremlin—little boys were running about all excited, crying out in unnatural tones:

“The Germans have taken Mogilyov!”⁶

February 8 / 21, 1918

Andrei (my brother Yuly’s servant) is acting more and more insane. It is even horrifying to watch.

He has served my brother for almost twenty years, and he has always been simple, kind, reasonable, polite, and devoted to us. Now he’s gone completely crazy. He still does his job carefully, but it is apparent that he’s forcing himself to do so. He cannot look at us and shies away from our conversations. His whole body inwardly shakes from anger; and when he can keep silent no longer, he lets loose with wild nonsense.

For instance, this morning, when we were visiting Yuly, N. N. said, as always, that everything has perished and that Russia was flying into an abyss. Andrei was setting the table for tea. He suddenly began waving his arms, his face aflame:

“Yes, yes, Russia’s flying into an abyss, all right! But who’s to blame, who? The bourgeois, that’s who! Just you wait, you’ll see how they’ll be cut to pieces! Remember what happened to your General Alexeev!”7

Yuly asked:

“Please, Andrei, tell us once and for all, why is it that you hate precisely him more than anyone else?”

Not looking at us, Andrei whispered:

“I cannot explain why. . . . You yourselves can understand. . . .

“But it was just a week ago that you were firmly on his side. What in God’s name happened?”

“What happened?” he said. “Just you wait, you’ll understand soon enough.”

Derman came by—he had just escaped from Simferopol’. There, he says, “indescribable horror” is going on. Soldiers and workers are “walking up to their knees in blood.” An old colonel was roasted alive in the furnace of a locomotive.8

February 9 / 22, 1918

Yesterday we visited B. There were quite a number of people there—and everyone was unanimous in saying that, thank God, the Germans were advancing and that they had taken Smolensk and Bologoye.⁹

This morning I took a trip into the city.

There was a crowd on Strastnaya Street.

I approached and listened. There was a lady with her hands in a muff and an old peasant woman with a snub nose. The lady was speaking hurriedly, turning red, and getting confused from excitement.

“No way is it a stone about my neck,” the lady said hastily. “This monastery¹ is for me a sacred place, but you’re trying to tell me that . . .”

“I’m not telling you anything,” the peasant woman interrupted in an insolent way. “For you it’s sacred, but for us it’s a stone that gets bigger and bigger. We know. We saw these monasteries in Vladimir!2 A painter takes a board, smears something on it, and there you have it—God. So go pray to him.”

“After what you said, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“So don’t talk!”

An old man with yellow teeth and grey stubble on his cheeks was arguing with a worker:

“You’ve got nothing left now, neither God, nor conscience,” the old man said.

“Yes, you’re right, there’s nothing left.”

“And you’ve gone and shot a fifth of all law-abiding people!”

“Oh, you should talk! As if you didn’t go about shooting people for three hundred years?”

On Tverskaya Street a poor old general wearing silver glasses and a black fur cap was selling something. He stood timidly, meekly, like a beggar. . . .

It is simply amazing how everyone has given up, how they have all lost heart!

There are rumors about some Polish legions who are supposedly coming to save us.³ By the way—why precisely the word “legion”? What a wealth of new and increasingly highfalutin words! Everything is a game, a puppet show, “high” style and pompous lies. . . .

The wives of all these sons of bitches who live in the Kremlin now use all the direct lines to talk just as if they were their personal telephones.

February 10 / 23, 1918

“Peace, peace, but there is no peace. Dishonest ones live among My people. They keep watch like bird-catchers. They appear on earth, setting traps and capturing people. But My people love this. Listen, O Earth, for I will bring this people to their destruction, the fruit of their thoughts.”

This is from Jeremiah4—I’ve been reading the Bible all morning long. It is amazing. Especially the words: “But My people love this. . . . I will bring this people to their destruction, the fruit of their thoughts.”

I am also reading the galleys for my Village for Gorky’s publishing house, The Sail.⁵ The devil got me involved with this institution! Nonetheless The Village is a remarkable thing; but only those who know Russia understand it. But who [outside of Russia] knows it?

I then looked through my verse from ’16 (also for The Sail).

The master has died, the home’s in ruins,

The windows flash hot like iron,

Fields with manure, nettles and more,

And the pot, long empty, not fryin’ . . .

Heat and toil all around

And through the estate runs a mad hound.⁶

I wrote this in the summer of ’16, while at Vasilevskoye,⁷ fearing what many likely feared in those days, especially those who lived in the village close to the people.

And in the summer of last year, our fears were fully realized:

The rye’s on fire, the seed’s all dead,

But who will save it and risk his head?

The smoke wafts high, the alarm bell shames,

But who will try to put out the flames?

An army of madmen has broken loose,

And like Mamai, they’ll score all Rus’. . . .8

Until now I did not understand how we could bring ourselves to sit out the entire summer of ’17 in the village and how and why we didn’t lose our heads in the bargain!⁹

“The time has not yet come for us to understand the Russian Revolution impartially, objectively. . . .” This you now hear every minute. Impartially! All the same, there will never be any genuine impartiality. But the main thing is that our “partiality” will one day be very, very valuable for the future historian. After all, are the “passions” of “revolutionaries” the only important ones? And who the hell are “we” if not also the people?

Yesterday at a gathering of [the group] Wednesday, Auslender read some wretched thing, in the style of Oscar Wilde. Auslender’s entire body was somehow sickly-looking; but his dark, wizened eyes had a golden gleam, like dried violet ink.

The Germans are apparently not acting as they usually do in a war. They are not fighting and conquering but “simply coming by train”—to occupy Petersburg. And all this is supposed to happen in the next forty-eight hours, neither more nor less.1

An article in Izvestia compares the “Soviet councils”² to Kutuzov. The world has never seen more brazen rogues [than these “councils”].

February 14 / 27, 1918

There’s a warm snow out.

But hell is going on in the trams. Swarms of soldiers with knapsacks on their backs are fleeing Moscow, fearing that they’ll be sent to defend Petersburg against the Germans.

Everyone is certain the Germans have already begun to occupy Russia. About this the people say: “Well, let the Germans come. They’ll restore order to our land.”³

As always, a frightful number of people gathers around the movie houses and greedily reads the posters. Evenings they cram the places full. And it’s been like that all winter long.

At Nikitsky Gates4 a cabby crashes into an automobile and dents its fender. The cabby, a giant with a red beard, is completely beside himself:

“Forgive me, for God’s sake, I’ll get down on my knees before you!”

The driver is pockmarked, sallow, stern-looking but merciful:

“Why on your knees! You’re a worker just like me. Only next time, take care you don’t run into me!”

The driver behaves as though he were the boss, and not without reason. These are the new masters.

Newspapers have empty columns—the result of censors.⁵ Muralov “has slipped away” from Moscow.⁶

A cabby alongside the Prague restaurant⁷ says with laughter and joy: “What the hell, let the Germans come. After all, it’s all the same. They’ve ruled us before.⁸ People say that there, in their own country, they’ve already arrested some thirty key Jews.⁹ So what the hell, why not the same thing here? We’re a gruesome bunch. Tell one of us to ‘get going’ and the others will follow.”

February 15 / 28, 1918

After yesterday evening’s news alleging that the Germans have already taken Petersburg, the newspapers are all in despair. All the same, though, the newspapers issue calls “to stand as one in the struggle with the German members of the White Guard.”1

Lunacharsky is even calling up high school students to enlist with the Red Guard, “to fight Hindenburg.”²

So far we are surrendering thirty-five provinces to the Germans and have lost millions of cannons, armored cars, trains, and shells. . . .³

Again there’s a heavy snow. High school coeds walk about, covered with it—all beauty and joy. One of them is especially beautiful, with charming blue eyes that peek out from under a raised fur collar. . . . What lies ahead for these youth?

Toward evening everything is springlike, aflame from the sun; golden clouds hang in the west. There are also puddles and soft, white snow that has not vet melted.

February 16 / March 1, 1918

Yesterday evening I was at T.’s. Of course, everyone kept talking about one and the same thing: what is going on. Everyone is horrified, except for Shmelyov who has not given into despair and keeps exclaiming:

“No, I believe in the Russian people!”

All morning long I wandered through the city. I came across two soldiers who were passing by; their conversation was hale and hearty:

“Moscow’s now worth sh-t, pal.”

“The provinces are also sh-t.”

“Well, the Germans will come; they’ll bring order.”

“Of course, and we won’t object. People are gettin’ screwed everywhere.”

“And if you and I weren’t gettin’ fucked here, we’d have perished in the trenches.”

In Belov’s store,4 a young soldier with a fat, drunken face orders almost a ton of butter and loudly says:

“We ain’t ashamed to buy anything. After all, our present commander-in-chief Muralov is a soldier just like me, and just the other day his men polished off twenty thousand rubles’ worth of vodka.”

Twenty thousand! Most likely this guy is suffering from his own grand delusions, his own boorish fantasies. But God knows—perhaps it’s true.

At four o’clock a group of journalists met at the Artists’ Circle⁵ “to draft a protest against censorship by the Bolsheviks.” Mel’gunov presided. Kuskova urged that publishers stop printing newspapers as a sign of protest. Imagine, that would really scare the Bolsheviks! Then everyone passionately assured each other that the Bolsheviks were on their last legs. They’re already evacuating their families from Moscow. Friche, for example, has moved [his loved ones out].

People were talking about Salikovsky:

“Wouldn’t you know it! He was a lousy journalist and now you have this crazy Rada making him the governor general of Kiev!”6

We came back with Chirikov, who told me the latest and highly trustworthy news: General [Mikhail] Kamenev has shot himself;⁷ the main German headquarters are over on Povarskaya Street;⁸ it’s dangerous to live there because that’s where the most heated fighting will take place; the Bolsheviks are in contact with the monarchists and big-shot merchants; and, with Mirbach’s consent, it has been decided to elect Samarin as the new tsar.⁹ . . . But if that’s so, who’s all this heated fighting going to be with?

Nighttime, the same day

I said goodbye to Chirikov and ran into a very young soldier on Povarskaya Street. He was in rags, scraggly, filthy, and dead drunk. He first stuck his mug into my chest, but then having stepped back a bit, spat at me and said:

“Despot, son of a bitch!”

I’ve been sitting at my desk and going through my manuscripts and notes—it’s time to get ready to head south—and I’ve just run across some proof of my “despotism.” Here’s a note that I made on February 22 / March 7, 1915:

“Our maid Tanya apparently loves to read a great deal. She goes under my desk, takes out my basket with all my torn papers in it, selects a couple of things, folds them, and whenever she has a free moment, reads them—slowly, and with a slight smile on her face. But she’s afraid to ask me for one of my books, she’s shy. . . . How cruelly, repulsively we live now!”

Here’s another one that I wrote in Vasilevskoye during the winter of ’16:

“It’s late evening, I’m sitting and reading in the study, in an old easy chair, in comfort and warmth, and next to a marvelous old lamp. Maria Petrovna walks in and gives me an envelope made of dirty-grey paper:

“They’re raising the prices again. The people have become absolutely shameful.”

As always, the person at the Izmalkovo telegraph office1 has written, “Pay the courier 70 kopecks,” in a flamboyant way and with purple-colored ink. And, again as always, this “courier”—the old peasant woman, Maxotochka, who also brings us our telegrams—had a kid who took a pencil and changed the number 7 to 8, but in a crude way. I got up and went through the dark dining room and the hall into the foyer. There stood a small peasant woman wrapped in a shawl that was covered with snow, a whip in her hand. The air was rife with the smells of a sheepskin coat, along with those of a hut and the cold.

“Maxotochka,” I said, “was it you who marked up the price? Are you again asking for more money?”

“Master,” Maxotochka replied in a voice made wooden by the weather outside, “just take a look how bad the road is. It’s one pothole after another. It knocks the wind out of you. You should be ashamed of yourself again. It’s so cold that it knocks the stuffin’ out of you. After all, it’s twenty miles this way and back.”

I shook my head, and, with a reproachful look, I thrust a ruble into Maxotochka’s hand. Going back through the dining room, I look through the windows: an icy, moonlit night shines very brightly out on the snowy yard. And all of a sudden I see a bright boundless field, a shining road filled with potholes, frost-covered sleds noisily making their way down it, and a nag hitched to the side of one of them, running at a light trot, all covered with frost, and with huge eyelashes grey with rime. . . . What was Maxotochka thinking about as she shrank from the cold and the fiery wind and leaned on the corner of her carriage?

Back in my study, I opened the telegram: “Together with everyone in Strel’na,2 we drink to the glory and pride of Russian literature!” For this Maxotochka had to make her way over twenty miles of potholes.

February 17 / March 2, 1918

Yesterday the journalists unanimously affirmed that they did not believe that peace had really been signed with the Germans.

“I can’t imagine,” A. A. Yablonovsky said, “Hohenzollern’s signature right next to Bronstein’s!”³

Today I visited Zubov’s place (on Povarskaya). There Kolya4 was going through some books. Spring was everywhere: it was very bright from the sun and snow; the sky was especially lovely, light and dark blue among the branches of the birch trees.

At 4:30 Arbat Square⁵ was filled with bright sun. Crowds of people were tearing copies of Evening News⁶ from the hands of the newspaper boys: peace had been signed!

I called Power of the People. Was it true that peace had been signed? They answered that they themselves had just called Izvestia and that they had received a firm reply: “Yes, it had been signed.”

So for those who said, “I can’t imagine such a thing,” take that.

February 18 / March 3, 1918

This morning there was a meeting at Writers’ Publishing House. Before it began I kept cursing out the Bolsheviks with the worst words I could find. Klestov-Angarsky—he is some kind of commissar—didn’t say a word.⁷

Someone had pasted posters up on the walls of buildings, indicting Trotsky and Lenin for their ties to the Germans, saying that the two had been bought by them.⁸ I asked Klestov:

“Well, and just how much did these scoundrels get?”

“Don’t you worry,” he answered with a confused grin, “I’m sure it was plenty.”

One hears one and the same thing all over town:

“Only Russia has signed the peace; the Germans have refused to do so. . . ,”9

A foolish self-delusion.

Toward evening the crosses of the churches give off a matted rose-gold light.

February 19 / March 4, 1918

Kogan told me about Steinberg, the commissar of justice: He’s an old-fashioned, devout Jew; he does not eat nonkosher food, and he keeps the Sabbath holy. . . . Then Kogan spoke about Blok: he’s in Moscow now, a passionate Bolshevik, and Lunacharsky’s personal secretary.¹ Kogan’s wife says with emotion:

“But don’t judge him so harshly! After all, he’s still just a kid!”²

At five o’clock this evening I learned that some drunken soldiers threw a bomb at the Officers’ Economic Society on Vozd-vizhenka Street. People say that somewhere between sixty and eighty people were killed.

I have just read a document that came from Sevastopol’:³ “A Resolution Endorsed by the Crew of the Battleship Liberated Russia.”

“To everyone both here and abroad who takes pointless and foolish fire at Sevastopol’!

“Comrades! You’re wasting your fire and to your own peril. Soon you’ll have nothing to hit, but you’ll keep firing all the same and get nothing for your pains; and then, dear ones, we’ll come and kill you with our bare hands.

“Comrades! The bourgeois are swallowing those who now lie in coffins and graves. You traitors and shooters, you have lost your cartridges; so you are helping the bourgeois to swallow everyone around. We call on all comrades to join with us and forbid the shooting of all those who wear the hats of enlisted men.

“Comrades! Let us agree on the following, that from today on any firing we hear will say to us: ‘One less bourgeois, one less socialist among the living!’ Every bullet you shoot must hit a fat belly; it must not raise foam on the shore.

“Comrades! Take care of your cartridges more than your eyes. You can still live with one eye, but you can’t live without cartridges.

“If people resume shooting close to funerals taking place either in town or on the shore, then remember that we, too, the sailors of the battleship Liberated Russia, will fire one round. Only don’t blame us if your eardrums break, and the glass in your windows shatters to boot.

“And so, comrades, let there be no more foolish or pointless firing in Sevastopol’. Let the firing have only one purpose: to shoot the counterrevolution and the bourgeois, not at the water or in the air; for no one can live without these even for a minute!”

February 20 / March 5, 1918

I went to Nikolaevsky Station.4

It was very sunny out, almost too much so, with a light frost. From the hill behind Myasnitsky Gates⁵—I saw a blue-grey haze, clusters of homes, and the golden cupolas of churches. Ah, Moscow! Snow was melting on the square in front of the station. The entire place shone like gold, mirrorlike. I was taken by the massive, powerful sight of carts with boxes on them. Can it really be that all this power, this wealth is coming to an end? There were a great many peasants, soldiers in many kinds of old overcoats, wearing them any old way, and with various types of weapons—one had a saber at his side, another had a rifle, another had a huge revolver in his belt. . . . These are now the masters of everything, the heirs of a colossal heritage. . . .

Of course, there’s all kinds of pushing and shoving going on in the tram.

Two old ladies savagely curse out the “government”:

“They should all drop dead. They give you a few crumbs that I’m sure have been sitting around somewhere for a year. You chew on them—and the smell is so bad that it really burns you up!”

Next to them stands a peasant. With an idiotic smile on his lips, he looks and listens in a strange, dull, and dead way. The dirty remains of a white Manchurian hat hang down on his brown face. His eyes are pale.

A giant soldier looms over the other people who are sitting and standing there. He’s a full head taller than anyone else, in a magnificent grey overcoat drawn in tightly with a handsome belt at the waist, and wearing a grey round hat like Alexander III used to wear. Everything about him is massive. He’s a genuine thoroughbred, with a full triangular brown beard and a Bible in his gloved hand. He is so unlike anyone else there, the last of the Mohicans.6

The street that I take on the way back is so blinding that it seems to go directly into the sun. Suddenly everyone makes an appearance and takes a good look: a scene of ancient Moscow, like a picture by Surikov. A crowd of peasant men and women in sheepskin coats surround another peasant who wears a red calfskin hat and an armyak⁷ the color of rye bread. He is hurriedly unharnessing a horse that is lying down and thrashing about on the pavement. The animal was pulling a huge sleigh filled with straw. When the horse fell to the ground, it dislocated the shaft and the sleigh ran up on the sidewalk. The peasant cries out at the top of his voice: “Hey lads, give me a hand!” but no one moves to help him.

We went out again at 6 p.m. We met M. He said he had just heard that the Kremlin was being mined and that people wanted to blow it up if the Germans came.8 At that very moment I looked into the magnificent green sky over the Kremlin, at the aged gold of its ancient cupolas . . . the Great Princes, the Terem Palace, the Church of the Savior in the Forest, Archangel Cathedral⁹—all so native and intimate; only now do I understand them as I should! Blow it up? Anything is possible now.

Rumors: In two weeks there will be a monarchy and a government made up of Adrianov, Sandetsky, and Mishchenko. All the best hotels are being prepared for the Germans.¹

The Social Revolutionaries² are said to be preparing for a revolt. The soldiers are allegedly on their side.

February 21 / March 6, 1918

Kamenskaya was here. Like hundreds of others, she and her family are being evicted from their homes. They were given a deadline of only forty-eight hours to get out, but it will take more than a week to pack up their apartment.

I met Speransky. He said that, according to Russian News, a German commission is coming to Saint Petersburg to count the losses suffered by German nationals there, and that the German police will keep a presence in the city. [He also said] that the German police will also be in Moscow; that the German military staff is already there; and that Lenin is in Moscow, sitting inside the Kremlin. That is why the Kremlin has announced that it is in a state of siege.3

February 22 / March 7, 1918

This morning, a sad job: we are going through our books, deciding which ones to keep and which ones to sell. (I am getting money together for our departure.) . . .

[My brother] Yuly told me the “most reliable news” from Power of the People: Petersburg has been declared a free city, and Lunacharsky has been designated its mayor. (Mayor Lunacharsky!)⁴ Also: tomorrow all banks in Moscow will be transferred to the Germans;⁵ and the German attack continues. . . . In general, the whole place is going to the devil!

This evening we were at the Bolshoi Theater. As always now, the streets are dark; but the square in front of the theater has several lights on it, making the gloom in the sky seem even thicker. The façade of the building is dark and funereally sad. The carriages and cars that used to park in front of it are no longer there. The theater was empty inside, only a few boxes were taken. A Jew, with a brownish-looking bald spot and a grey clipped beard, was wearing golden spectacles. He kept pulling back his daughter, who insisted upon sitting on the barrier in front of her. Her blue dress made her look like a black ram. People told me that he’s some kind of “emissary.”

When we left the theater I looked between the columns of the theater and saw a blue-black sky with two or three dusky-blue patches of stars. A cold wind was blowing sharply. Driving was difficult. Nikitskaya Street was without lights, sepulchrally dark. Four homes rose in the dark green sky. They seemed to be very big, as if making their presence known for the first time. There were almost no passersby, and whoever was around was walking almost at a trot.

It was like the Middle Ages! But then, at least, everyone was armed and the homes were almost impregnable. . . .

Two soldiers were standing on the corner of Povarskaya and Merzlyakovskaya streets. Were they patrolmen or robbers? Probably both.

February 23 / March 8, 1918

“Bourgeois newspapers” are again being published—but with large empty [censored] columns in each issue.

I met K. “The Germans will be in Moscow in a few days,” he says. “But it’s a terrible thing. People say that Russians will be sent to the front to fight against the allies.”6 Yes, everything is the same. Everything is still the same: anxious, tedious, and unresolved waiting.

We keep talking about where to go. This evening I was at Yuly’s, and on the way home we came under fire. People were madly shooting from rifles somewhere above Povarskaya Street.

P. was having the floors of his house cleaned. One of the workers was stooped, with black greasy hair and wearing a wine-colored shirt. Another was pockmarked and had wild curly hair. They began dancing about and pulling each other by the hair. Their faces were glossy, their foreheads sweaty. We asked them:

“Well, tell us, gentlemen, how’s it going? Good?”

“What can you say? It’s all bad.”

“What do you think is going to happen?”

“God knows,” the curly one said. “We’re a gruesome bunch. What do we know? I can barely read, and he’s completely blind. What will happen? Why this: criminals have been let out of prison, they’re the ones who are ruling over us now. They should have never been set free; they should have been shot with a sawed-off shotgun a long time ago. They knocked the tsar off the throne; nothing like this ever happened when he was around. And you can’t stew over the Bolsheviks now. The people have gotten weak. I couldn’t skin a chicken, but I could easily give the folk a good swift kick in the pants. No, the people have gotten weak. There’s only about a hundred thousand Bolsheviks in all; and we’re so many millions and can’t do nothin’. They can now open a state liquor store, or they could give us our freedom, but we could drag them all from their apartments and tear them to shreds.”

“They’re all kikes,” the black one said.

“And Polacks to boot. People say that this Lenin we got now is not the real one—that the real one was killed a long time ago.”

“And what do you think about peace with the Germans?”

“There won’t be no peace. The Germans will end it soon enough, though. But the Polacks will again be ours.7 The main problem is that there’s no bread. Yesterday my friend here bought himself a small doughnut for three rubles, and I had to get along on some thin soup. . . .”

February 24 / March 9, 1918

The other day I bought a pound of tobacco; I hung it on a rope between the window frames and the fortochka8 so that it wouldn’t dry out. The window looked out onto a courtyard. Today about 6 a.m. something went flying through the glass. I jumped up and found a rock on the floor. The glass was broken, the tobacco was gone, and someone was running away from the window—robbers everywhere!

There are featherlike clouds, sunshine every now and then, and puddles like blue patches. . . .

A prayer service is going on in the house across from us. People are carrying the icon of “Unexpected Joy”⁹ and the priests are singing. How very strange all this seems now. And how very touching. Many are crying.

Again there’s a rumor that the Bolsheviks have many monarchists in their ranks and that, in general, all this bolshevism is geared to bring back the monarchy. Again this is nonsense that the Bolsheviks themselves have made up, of course.

Savich and Alexeev are supposedly now in Pskov “to establish a government.”¹

I put in a call to Power of the People: “Give me telephone 60-42,” I said. They put me through. But it seemed that the line was busy—Power of the People had unexpectedly eavesdropped on someone’s conversation with the Kremlin:

“I have fifteen officers and Lieutenant Kaledin. What should I do with them?”

“Shoot them right away.”

I have always thought that anarchists were unusually happy and kind people; but the Bolshevik soviet fears them greatly. The editor, Barmash, is a completely crazy individual from the Caucasus.

In Sevastopol’ the sailors have an “ataman”2—one Rivkin whose tattered beard is almost three feet long; he’s robbed and murdered without end, but he’s “a most gentle individual.”

Many people now pretend they have news that no one else has.

In Filippov’s coffeehouse, people supposedly saw Adrianov, the former mayor of Moscow. He’s also allegedly one of the most important privy councilors in the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

February 25 / March 10, 1918

Yurka Sablin—is commander of the armed forces! He’s a twenty-year-old kid, a specialist in black American dances, and a sickeningly sweet individual. . . .

There is a rumor that the Allies—now it’s their turn!—have entered into agreement with the Germans and have charged them with bringing order to Russia.₃

Again there are demonstrations, banners, posters, music; one goes one way, one goes another, and a hundred people yell:

“Stand up, rise up, working people!”

Their voices are hollow, primitive. The women have Chuvash and Mordvinian faces;⁴ and the men have criminal features that make them look like a matched set. Some seem to have come right from Sakhalin.5

The Romans used to brand the faces of their prisoners with the words: “Cave furem.”⁶ But these Russian faces need nothing; they show it all without any branding.

And then there’s the “Marsellaise,” the national hymn of the French themselves, which the revolutionaries have changed in the most vulgar way!⁷

February 26 / March 11, 1918

On the corner of Povarskaya Street, someone, either a worker or a peasant, reads aloud a notice about the newspaper Evening Hour,⁸ listing the names of its staff. He finishes reading it and says:

“They’re all bastards. And famous ones at that!”

The editorial officers of Russian News report that Trotsky is a German spy, also that he was a detective for the police in Nizhny-Novgorod.⁹ Stuchka published this in Pravda, out of spite for Trotsky.

February 27 / March 12, 1918

Today is another holiday—the anniversary of the Revolution.1 But there are no people on the streets, and not at all because winter storms have again made their appearance. Everyone is just tired of it all.

What savage, horrible nonsense. Our phone has been ringing off the hook all day long and giving forth burning news.

“People are being dispersed all over the place! Karakhan has been named ambassador to Constantinople, and [Lev] Kamenev—to Berlin.² . . .”

We read a small article by Lenin. It was a trivial, dishonest piece—discussing first the international and then “the Russian national surge.”

February 28 / March 13, 1918

It’s winter again. There’s a lot of snow out; it’s sunny, and the windows of buildings shine brightly.

News from Sretenka Street—German soldiers have taken the Spassky barracks.³

German troops also have supposedly entered Petersburg. Tomorrow there will be a decree to denationalize the banks.⁴ But I think that once again the Bolsheviks are out to make fools of us.

The telephone has been ringing all day long—it crackles, jingles, and throws off fiery red sparks!

March 1 / 14, 1918

We spent the evening at Shklyar’s place.

On the way there we saw the lawyer Teslenko. He was approaching his home on Red Square. We stopped and greeted him. Hale and hearty, he said the Bolsheviks are now engaged in one thing: “To rob and get hold of as much money as possible, since they themselves know very well that their end is near.”

Besides us, Derman and Gruzinsky were also at Shklyar’s place. When they were in a tram, a soldier told Gruzinsky this story:

“I was going around without any work, so I went to the Council of Deputies to ask for a job—they said they didn’t have anything for me; but they gave me two search warrants so that I could rip off others. I really cursed them out, though, for I’m an honest type. . . .”

Derman has received news from Rostov:5 the Kornilov movement⁶ is weak there. Gruzinsky objected that just the reverse was true—the movement was strong and growing. Derman added: “The Bolsheviks are committing horrible atrocities in Rostov. They’ve dug up Kaledin’s grave and have shot six hundred nurses. . . .” Well, if not six hundred—and that most likely—a good number of them nonetheless. This is not the first time that our Christ-loving peasants—the very ones about whom these nurses have spread so many legends—have raped and murdered them.

People say that Moscow will be in the hands of the Germans by March 17 / 30, and that Budberg will be the mayor.⁷

A cook from the Ravine restaurant⁸ told me that he has been robbed of everything it took him thirty years of hard work to accumulate, and that now he has been reduced to hovering by the stove amidst ninety-degree heat. “But Orlov-Davydov,” he added, “sent a telegram to his peasants telling them—I myself read it—to burn down the house, kill the cattle, and cut down the forests. He told them to leave one birch tree standing, though, so that he would have rods to beat them and something to hang them on.”

There is a rumor that the Germans have organized a criminal investigation department in Moscow, and they are supposedly watching the slightest steps of the Bolsheviks, noting everything and writing it all down.9

News from our village:¹ the peasants are returning stolen things to the landowners.²

The last item is absolutely true. I heard this on the streets:

“Now the soldiers are shitting in their pants. They’re going out and bragging, calm and carefree—let the Germans come, they say, the devil with them—but now things have gotten so serious that they’re really afraid. We’re going to get it good, they say, and to tell the truth, it serves us right: we’ve really become like pigs!”

But if, in fact, something “serious” is in the air, then the “primordial nature of the great Russian Revolution” should have quieted down somewhat. But how wild the village got in the summer of last year; how terrible it was to live in Vasilevskoye! But suddenly there was this rumor: Kornilov began ordering the death penalty—and almost all during July, Vasilevskoye became stiller than water, lower than grass. In May and June it had been terrifying to go out into the streets; and every night one would see here and there the red glow of fire on the black horizon. One time at dawn, near where we lived, the peasants had set a barn on fire; and then they had run around, screaming that the “masters” themselves had done it to burn down the entire village. But at noon on that same day a neighbor’s cattle yard caught fire; and again people came running from all over, screaming that I had done it and wanting to throw me into the fire. The only thing that saved me was the fury with which I threw myself at the crowd.

March 2 / 15, 1918

People talk about: “The profligate, the drunkard Rasputin, the evil genius of Russia.” He was a good peasant, of course. What about you people who have yet to crawl out of all those Bears or Stray Dogs?3

To all appearances, the new decline in literature could not go any lower. A Musical Snuffbox⁴ has opened up in a most vile tavern. Speculators, cardsharps, and prostitutes sit, gobble up meat pies at a hundred rubles a crack, and drink moonshine from teacups, while poets and writers (Alyoshka Tolstoy,⁵ Bryusov, and others) read their own pieces and those of others, choosing the most vile ones. Bryusov, people say, has read Pushkin’s “Gavriliada,”6 filling in the blanks with words. Alyoshka had the nerve to suggest that I also read there—“We’ll pay you a big fee,” he said.

“Get out of Moscow!” It’s pitiful, what’s going on. The city was particularly repulsive this afternoon. It was raining, everything was all wet and dirty, the sidewalks and the pavement had potholes, lumps of ice were everywhere, not to mention the crowds of people who were out walking. But the city was empty during the evening and night, and the few lit lamps made the sky seem thick, gloomy, and black. I went along an alley that was quiet and completely dark—and I immediately saw some open gates. Behind them was the splendid profile of an ancient home standing deep in the recesses of the courtyard, and looking softly dark against a night sky that was totally different from the sky I had seen on the street. In front of this house stood a hundred-year-old tree, its spreading branches looking like a huge tent.

Today I read a new story by Trenyov (“The Farmworkers”).⁷ It was repulsive. As is always the case now, the thing reeked of something false and pretentious. It talked about the most terrible things, but it didn’t seem terrible at all because the author was not serious about what he was doing. That is, he was exhausting his “talent for observation” and using an extreme “folksy” language to boot. In fact, his entire narrative style was so bad that I wanted to throw up. But no one sees or understands this, no one even thinks like this—just the opposite, they’re in raptures over what Trenyov is doing. “What juicy language, how beautiful!” they say.

The Congress of Soviets.8 A speech by Lenin. Oh, how beastly this all is!

I read in a newspaper about corpses lying at the bottom of the sea: murdered, drowned officers. And then they go put on A Musical Snuffbox.

March 3 / 16, 1918

The Germans have taken Nikolaev and Odessa.⁹ And people say that Moscow will be taken on the 17th, but I don’t believe it and still intend to head south.

Mayakovsky is being called “Idiot Polyfemovich”¹ in the high schools.

March 5 / 18, 1918

It’s grey out with some sparse snow. There was a crowd of people alongside the banks on Il’inka Street—the smart ones were taking their money out. Generally speaking, many people are preparing to leave in secret.

Tonight’s paper reported that the Germans have taken Kharkov.² The man who sold me the newspaper said to me: “Better the devil than Lenin.”

March 7 / 20, 1918

People are saying in town:

“[The powers-to-be] have decided to kill off anyone who is seven years old and younger so that no one will remember our time.”

I asked a doorman.

“What do you think? Can it be true?”

He sighed and said, “Anything can happen, anything is possible.”

“But will the people allow such a thing to happen?”

“They’ll let it happen, my dear barin; they’ll really let it happen! But what can you do with them? The Tatars, they say, ruled over us for two hundred years,3 but could the folk really have been that weak even then?”

At night we went along Tverskaya Street: Pushkin⁴ bowed his head low and sadly against a sky that was cloudy but shot through with rays of light. He seemed to be saying: “Good Lord, how sad my Russia is!”

There was not a single person around, except for occasional soldiers and Bol—viks.

March 8 / 21, 1918

Ekaterina Peshkova said about Spiridonova:

“I was never attracted to her. She’s a revolutionary hypocrite, a hysterical person. Her early things merely plagiarized the dumb things that Figner wrote.”

Yes, but what a heroine this Spiridonova once was.

The magnificent homes next to us (on Povarskaya Street) are being requisitioned one after another. Their owners keep moving stuff out and taking it somewhere else: furniture, rugs, paintings, flowers, plants. Today I saw a huge palm tree, all wet from the snow and rain, and looking deeply unhappy as it stood the entire day in a wagon next to the doorway. And at the same time people were carrying into those homes all the things “government” institutions must have—new office furniture and the like. . . .

Are these people really so sure of their jobs? Do they really think that they’re going to be around for a while?

“Weariness has shattered my heart. . . .”5

March 9 / 22, 1918

Today Vasily Vasilievich Vyrubov—he was wearing long shoes and a light, tight-fitting coat made of fur—is still acting like a “hussar”—he again said what has become absolutely repugnant to hear or read:

“Russia was destroyed by a sluggish, self-interested power that did not heed the wishes of the people, their hopes, their dreams. . . . In light of this, the revolution was inevitable.”

My answer to his:

“The people did not start the revolution; individuals like you did. The people spat on absolutely everything we wanted, on all we were dissatisfied with. I am not talking to you about the revolution—let it be inevitable, splendid, anything you like. But don’t lie about the people—they need all your executive ministries, the successions of the Shcheglovitovs by the Malyantoviches, and the abolition of all kinds of censorship like they need snow during summertime. This the people showed firmly and cruelly when they abandoned, to the devil, the Provisional Government, the Constituent Assembly, and ‘everything that generations of the best Russians died for,’ as you yourself have expressed it, and ‘including your victorious end,’ to boot.”

March 10 / 23, 1918

The only way that people are saving themselves is not to use the talents they have—their talents to imagine, pay attention, or think—otherwise they would not be able to live.

[Leo] Tolstoy once said about himself: “All my troubles come from the fact that my imagination is a bit more lively than those of others. . . .”

My troubles, too.

The weather is dirty black out; snow sometimes flies through the air.

We’ve been going through our books, choosing the ones to sell. I’ve been getting money together. I have to get out of here; I cannot physically endure such a life.

Yesterday I was at Veselovsky’s. He talked about Friche, whom he saw the other day. “Yes, yes, it was not all that long that Friche was the most pitiful and unassuming creature in a worn-out jacket—but now he’s a person of substance, a commissar for foreign affairs, and wearing a frock coat with satin lapels!”

Veselovsky then played on a harpsichord—Bach and Hungarian folk songs. It was charming. Then we looked through some ancient books—what vignettes, what initial letters on the pages! And all of this was from a golden age that has been destroyed forever. But this decline has been continuing for a long time already.

How spitefully and reluctantly did the doorman open the door for us today! Everyone has the most cruel revulsion to any kind of work.

March 11 / 24, 1918

The wife of the architect Malinovsky is a dull woman with a large forehead. All her life she has never had the slightest thing to do with the stage, but now she is commissar for the theaters;6 and only because she and her husband were friends with Gorky in Nizhny. This morning we were at the Writers’ Publishing House, and Gontaryov told us how Shklyar waited a full hour for Malinovskaya somewhere by the entrance when suddenly a car approached with her in it, and he rushed forward to help her out with truly abject servility.

Gruzinsky said: “With every fiber of my being, I now avoid going out on the street unless I really have to. And not at all from fear that someone is going to mug me, but merely because of the faces that I see out there now.”

I understand him like never before, for I also experience the same thing, only, I think, still more sharply.

The wind scatters sparse, completely springlike clouds through the white and light blue sky; spring water glistens and runs along the sidewalks.

March 12 / 25, 1918

I met the lawyer Malyantovich. He was once a minister. Even now everything with him is a holiday, everything is like water off a duck’s back. All rose-colored and lively, he told me:

“No, don’t be upset. Russia cannot perish if only because Europe won’t allow it. Don’t forget, a European balance of power is necessary.”

I visited Tikhonov (as regards an edition of my works to be published by The Sail). Tikhonov is always sponging off Gorky. Yes, this is a very strange publishing house! Why did Gorky feel compelled to get this Sail up and running, and why did it take a whole year to publish only a small book by Mayakovsky?7 And why did Gorky buy me, pay me seventeen thousand rubles in advance, but has yet to publish a single volume of mine? What is this Sail covering up? And, in particular, how does this entire company—Gorky, Tikhonov, Gimmer-Sukhanov—get on with the Bolsheviks? I doubt if they’re “fighting” with them; for when Tikhonov and Gimmer came to Moscow, they stayed at the National Hotel,⁸ which the Bolsheviks took over for their own. I got in there only after I had gotten a pass from the Bolshevik who “managed” the place and then passed through an entire chain of soldiers who were sitting on the step landings with rifles in their hands. Tikhonov and Gimmer, though, see it as home. Portraits of Lenin and Trotsky hang on the walls. But as regards the reason why I am there, Tikhonov just fidgets and says: “We’re just about to publish your works. Don’t worry.”

Tikhonov also told me that until now the Bolsheviks have been amazed that they have managed to seize power and are still holding on to it:

“After the Revolution, Lunacharsky ran around for about two weeks with wide-open eyes: ‘Just think,’ he said, ‘we only wanted to organize a demonstration and suddenly we had this unexpected success!’ ”9

March 13 / 26, 1918

What garbage! The patriarch and all the princes of the church are going to the Kremlin with their hats in their hands!¹

I saw Vyrubov. He passionately cursed out the allies: they have entered into negotiations with the Bolsheviks instead of coming to occupy Russia!²

I also had dinner and spent the evening with Gorky’s first wife, Ekaterina Pavlova [Peshkova]. Bakh (a well-known revolutionary and old emigré), Tikhonov, and Mirolyubov were also there. The latter kept praising the Russian people, that is, the peasants: “A merciful people, a splendid people!” he said. Bakh added (though he essentially does not have the slightest understanding of the people, since he has spent his entire life abroad):3

“But what are we arguing about, gentlemen? After all, was the French Revolution without its cruelties? The Russian people are like everyone else. They have, of course, negative features; but most of them are good. . . .”

We came home with Tikhonov. On the way he spoke for a long, long time about the Bolshevik ringleaders, as someone who was quite close to them. He said: “Lenin and Trotsky have decided to keep Russia in chaos and not to stop the terror and the civil war until the European proletariat enters upon the scene. Are they in cahoots with the Germans?⁴ No, that’s ridiculous. They’re fanatics, they believe in universal conflagration. But they fear everything like fire and suspect plots everywhere. And up until now they have also been in trembling for their power and for their lives. They, I repeat, never expected they would succeed in October. After Moscow had fallen, they were terribly confused. They ran over to us at New Life and begged us to be ministers, and presented us with briefcases. . . .”

March 15 / 28, 1918

It’s the same cold weather outside. There is no heat anywhere, and the cold in the apartments is terrible.

Russian News was shut down because of an article that Savinkov wrote.⁵

Many believe that Savinkov will kill Lenin.⁶

“The Commissar of the Press,” Podbel’sky, has closed and sued [the newspaper] The Lantern7—“for including articles that incite anxiety and panic in the population.” Such concern for a population that is being robbed and murdered every minute!

March 22 / April 4, 1918

Yesterday evening, when the lights were beginning to shine behind some wet trees, I saw the first rooks.

Today it was grey and overcast, but there was a great deal of light in the clouds.

I keep reading the newspapers and I almost cry from malicious delight. Generally speaking, this past year will take no less than ten years from my life!

Tonight the dark-blue sky had plump white clouds with occasional bright stars between them. The streets were dark. The homes merge into one; they stand very tall and dark in the sky; the lighted windows in them are soft, rose-colored.

March 23 / April 5, 1918

All of Lubyanskaya Square shines in the sun. Watery mud flies from the wheels of carriages and cars. And Asia, Asia everywhere—soldiers, boys, people selling gingerbread, halvah, cookies with poppy seeds, and cigarettes. I hear Eastern cries and speech—and I see all those loathsome dark faces, their yellow and mouselike hair! Soldiers and workers, always on thundering trucks, have triumphant mugs. . . .

The old bookseller Volnukhin wears glasses and a sheepskin coat. He’s a dear, intelligent man; but he has a sad, attentive look.

At a name-day party for N., people kept toasting any word that had a religious air. The “old regime” is still strong.

We also attended [a reading] of Premirov’s “The Tavern.”⁸ Without a doubt there’s talent out there. But what good is it? Literature is at an end. But The Lower Depths is again playing at the Art Theater. That’s to be expected! And again there’s that boring Luka!9

Up until now Ekaterina Pavlovna [Peshkova] has been firmly convinced that only [Osip] Minor can save Russia.

[I’ve been reading] the Menshevik newspaper Forward.¹ Always the same thing, always the same thing!

The wives of all the commissars have also been made commissars.

[I saw] a company of the Red Guard. They were all awkwardly going along and stumbling about, one on the pavement, another on the sidewalk. The “instructor” kept crying: “Pay attention, comrades!”

A man selling newspapers, a former soldier, said to them:

“Hey, you filthy bastards! You go off to war and take the girls with you! Just look, barin—one’s got a hooker on his arm right now!”

The night is very dark and springlike. Shafts of light coming from the clouds over the church heighten the darkness; the stars give off a playful, white light.

The house where the Tseitlins live on Povarskaya Street has been taken over by anarchists. A black sign with white letters hangs over the entranceway. Inside, behind the curtains, magnificent chandeliers bathe everything with a suffused light.

March 24 / April 6, 1918

Now people—these poor, deluded things—are talking about Japan coming to help Russia, and about a landing in the Far East.² They also say that the ruble will be worth absolutely nothing, that flour will cost a thousand rubles a pound, and that people should stock up on reserves. . . . We say we can do nothing: we’ll buy two pounds of flour and stay calm.3

We visited N. V. [Orlov]-Davydov on Bol’shoy Levshinsky Prospekt. He lives in a small, yellowish home (it once belonged to the writer Zagoskin) with a black roof in the front and a yellow fence with black iron chalices on the gates. A turquoise sky shone from behind latticelike trees. Old Moscow, gone forever.

We also visited P. In the kitchen stood a soldier with a large fat mug and eyes that were varicolored, like a tomcat’s. He said that socialism is now impossible, of course, but that the bourgeois should be cut to pieces nonetheless. “Trotsky’s a great guy,” he said, “he’ll really give it to them.”

I saw a dried-up, serious-looking lady and a youth wearing glasses. They were selling cigarettes on the street.

I also bought a book about the Bolsheviks, published by Commune,⁴ What a terrible gallery of convicts! The young Lunacharsky has a neck more than a foot long.⁵

1. During the years between 1917 and 1920, Russia used two different systems of dating simultaneously. The official calendar of the Russian Empire had been the Julian, which in the twentieth century is thirteen days behind the Gregorian, used in the West. (Russian animosity toward the papacy was a key reason why Moscow refused to accept the Gregorian calendar when it was created by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.)

On January 26, 1918, the Soviet government announced that Russia would adopt the Gregorian calendar on February 1, 1918—which then became February 14 in the so-called “new style.” Anti-Bolshevik forces, though, continued to adhere to the old calendar throughout the Russian civil war. For this reason, all dates for the text of Cursed Days and Bunin’s articles in Southern Word are given in both old and new styles. All other dates are rendered in new style, when this can be ascertained.

2. Russian News (Russkie vedomosti) was a liberal newspaper of public and political affairs published in Moscow from 1863 to 1918.

3. In general, Bunin’s travels in this section are all in the vicinity of Red Square in the center of Moscow.

4. That is, since the Revolution of 1905.

5. The Writers’ Publishing House in Moscow (Knigoizdatel’stvo pisatelei v Moskve) was a cooperative publishing company that existed from 1912 to 1919. It published works by Bunin, Maxim Gorky, and Alexander Serafimovich, as well as several literary series. Bunin was one of its founders and also its chief editor until November 1914.

6. The Constituent Assembly (Uchreditel’noe Sobranie) was a popularly elected group of representatives from throughout the Russian Empire. It sought to determine the course of Russian political life after the March and October revolutions of 1917. The Assembly was short-lived, however, meeting only for thirteen hours. It was closed by the Bolsheviks on January 6, 1918.

7. Bunin is referring to the Slavophile views of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev.

8. Bryusov’s highly romantic “The Dagger” (“Kinzhal”) was actually published in October 1904. Bryusov formally joined the Communist party in July 1920. Struggle (Bor’ba) was a Bolshevik newspaper published from December 10 to December 19, 1905.

9. Wednesday (Sreda) was a literary circle that existed in Moscow from 1899 to 1916. Its members included such writers as Bunin, Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, and Leonid Andreev; such actors and musicians as Vasily Kachalov and Fyodor Chaliapin; and such artists as Isaak Levitan and Alexander Golovin.

1. At this time Berdichev was the fourth largest city in the Ukraine, and a major commercial and industrial city. It was also an important Hasidic center, with Jews comprising between 80 and 90 percent of the population. From 1917 to 1920 Berdichev was, for the most part, under Ukrainian rule but suffered terribly in the revolution and the civil war. For instance, in 1914 Berdichev counted more than eighty thousand inhabitants, but by 1920 it had less than half that number. Even more darkly, Berdichev was a site of the Holocaust on Soviet soil during World War II. See John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York, 1996).

2. After the Central Powers concluded a separate peace with the independent Ukrainian government on February 9, 1918, Leon Trotsky, the negotiator for the Bolsheviks, walked out of the talks and began negotiating with the Allies. The German response, a major offensive into Russia which began on February 18, 1918, met with no resistance.

3. The article in question is “The Intellectual and the Revolution” (“Intelligent i revoliutsiia”), which Blok wrote on January 8, 1918. Kogan’s article, entitled “Voice of a Poet” (“Golos poeta”), was published on February 15, 1918, and hailed Blok’s piece as a “requiem to the old world, an exultant hymn of greeting to socialism and democracy.”

4. The dislike was mutual, Blok disdaining what he saw as the dryness, monotony, and tendentiousness of Bunin’s writing. “It is a sin,” Blok wrote of Bunin in 5908, “to force the soul to sing when it does not want to sing.” See A. Blok, “Stikhi Bunina,” Zolotoe runo, No. 10 (1908), 50.

5. New Life (Novaia zhizn’) was a daily newspaper with Menshevik leanings which began publication on May 1, 1917. Openly hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet state, it was closed by the new regime in July 1918.

6. The Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovet nardonykh komissarov) (1917–1922) succeeded the Soviet of Ministers that had functioned during both the Imperial Regime and the Provisional Government. Its purpose was to take over the existing government and implement Bolshevik policy. From the very beginning, the Soviet of People’s Commissars aroused controversy because of the vast political powers it assumed and maintained. (Lenin was its chairman.) By late November 1918 it was a regularly functioning body, and by early 1919 it effectively controlled all administrative operations, ending whatever hopes Russians may have had for democracy in their country. For more on the Soviet of People’s Commissars, see W. B. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York, 1989), 103–105.

7. Power of the People (Vlast’ naroda) was a newspaper published by the Social Revolutionaries from April 28, 1917, to April 2, 1918.

8. The Soviets of Workers’ Deputies (Sovety Rabochikh Deputatov) were elected political organizations that first appeared in Russia during the Revolution of 1905–1907. They attempted to take control of the strike movement in Russia and to win gains for the working class. In 1917 they reappeared in industrial areas and included military personnel, creating soviets of deputies in these two classes. The complaints against the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies were legitimate. See V. Brovkin, ed., Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War (Stanford, 1991), 117.

9. Borovichi is a manufacturing city about 175 miles southeast of Saint Petersburg.

1. Russian Word (Russkoe slovo) was a liberal daily, published in Moscow from 1894 to 1917, which contained extensive information on the Russian Empire and foreign countries.

2. Tambov is both a city and a province, approximately 260 miles southeast of Moscow. It is a major agricultural and industrial center in western Russia.

3. The peasant uses the word dezelter instead of dezerter (deserter), and Rassiya for Rossiya (Russia).

More than two million men had deserted the Russian army by November 1917. See N. Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War (New Haven, 1931), 124; and Lincoln, Red Victory, 40.

4. Chernigov is both a city and an administrative region, northeast of Kiev in the Ukraine. Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd after August 1914, when Russia entered World War I. The Peter-and-Paul Fortress was built in 1703 in Saint Petersburg and is best known as the prison in which such political offenders as Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Alexander Ul’yanov, the older brother of Lenin, were detained.

5. The name of the city is actually Oredyosh, a town about ninety miles directly south of Saint Petersburg.

6. German forces actually reached Mogilyov, a city located in western Belarus, on February 27, 1918.

7. At this time, General Mikhail Alexeev was a founder of the new White Volunteer Army in Rostov in southern Russia. In late February, Bolshevik troops forced Alexeev and his troops to abandon the city and to retreat southward down the Don River into the Kuban region. For more on General Alexeev, see Lincoln, Red Victory, 76–78.

8. Simferopol’ is the capital of the Crimea, about fifty miles northeast of Yalta. At the time the city was a place of ongoing violence, including pogroms against Jews and the murders of wounded officers. It was captured by Soviet forces on January 26, 1918, and again on November 13, 1920. See D. Pasmanik, Revoliutsionnye gody v Krymu (Paris, 1926), 79.

Derman’s story was based in fact. Raw cruelty and fanaticism marked the Russian civil war from the beginning. For instance, Red soldiers chained White officers to planks and slowly pushed them into furnaces or boiling water. They also blinded and/or disemboweled their enemies, subjecting them to sexual mutilation, severing their tongues, ears, and noses, and cutting off their arms, legs, and heads.

The barbarism was mutual. For instance, White troops placed the frozen corpses of Red soldiers in obscene positions, packed them on freight cars, and returned them to their comrades with labels that said, “fresh meat, destination Petrograd.” See Lincoln, Red Victory, 48–49, 383–385.

9. Smolensk is an administrative and cultural center, 350 miles south of Saint Petersburg; Bologoye, a town, roughly 210 miles southeast. Although the Germans were literally “on the doorstep” of Smolensk, they did not capture the city; Bologoye was not even inside their line of fire.

1. The religious edifice in question is the Strastnoi or “Passion” Monastery, which was built in Moscow during the 1640s and which commemorated the arrival of the miraculous icon of the Mother of God to that city. After the civil war the Soviets dissolved the religious community living at Strastnoi and turned the monastery into a museum under the aegis of the League of Militant Atheists. The entire complex was torn down during urban renewal projects in Moscow during the 1930s.

2. Vladimir is a city located about 110 miles northeast of Moscow.

3. A so-called Polish Corps of Legionnaires (founded by the Russian Provisional Government in July 1917) had captured Minsk on February 19, 1918. They remained in Belarus, though, until they were disbanded by the German military command in May 1918.

4. Bunin is paraphrasing excerpts from Jeremiah, e.g., 5:26, 31, and 6:14, 19.

5. Bunin’s The Village (Derevnia) had already appeared in book form in Russia in 1910 and 1912. Gorky’s The Sail (Parus), 1915–1918, sought to put forth such “proletarian” writers as Mayakovsky (hence Bunin’s antipathy toward the institution). Although Gorky had advanced Bunin seventeen thousand rubles for a planned collection of his works, The Sail for some reason published only the tenth volume, taking in works written only in 1915 and 1916. The Village was thus not included in this volume, nor was it ever printed by The Sail at a later date.

6. From Bunin’s poem “The Vigil” (“Kanun”).

7. Vasilevskoye was an estate that belonged to Bunin’s cousin, Sofya Nikolaevna Pusheshnikova. Bunin often spent his summers at Vasilevskoye, and wrote many stories there, including “The Gentleman from San Francisco” in 1915.

8. Bunin is continuing to quote from “The Vigil.” “Rus’,” or more accurately, “Kievan Rus’,” was the name of the first state into which the various East Slavic tribes of the forest steppe and forest zones united during the pre-Mongol period. “Kievan Rus’ ” is also used as the collective term for the autonomous principalities that converged after the disintegration of the Kievan state, beginning from about 1150 and ending with the Mongol conquest of these territories between 1236 and 1240.

9. For more information on Bunin’s “summer of ’17,” see Grin, Ustami, 160–162.

1. Bunin’s comment that the Germans were entering Russia “by train” was true. Russians were aghast that the Germans were conducting an Eisenbahnfeidzug, or “Railway War,” and that they were using Russian roads and railways as if they were “tourists” and “pilgrims.” “It is the most comical war I have ever known,” the German Max Hoffmann wrote in his diary on February 22, 1918. “We put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns . . . on a train and rush them off to the next station. They take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops, and go on. This procedure has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.”

German troops pushed to a depth of 125 miles or more along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians, during what Lenin called “The Eleven Days War.” (The main fighting actually lasted fourteen days, but the Soviet delegation arrived at Brest to sue for peace on the eleventh day.) The Germans, though they never entered Saint Petersburg, got as far as Narva, the easternmost city in Estonia, eighty-five miles from their goal. See Mawdsley, Civil War, 35.

2. Generally speaking, the “soviets” (“sovety”) were representative institutions of authority and self-government that came into being as a result of the Revolution of 1905, and that sought to direct strike activities among workers. By the fall of 1917 the soviets became Bolshevized, with more than half of their members becoming Communists or Communist sympathizers.

3. Such sentiments were common. Even Lenin felt compelled to tell his followers: “Learn discipline from the Germans. We must produce order.” See Lincoln, Red Victory, 52.

4. The Nikitsky Gates (Nikitskie vorota) were one of several defense barriers built into the wall of the White City (Belyi gorod) section of Moscow in the sixteenth century. They were destroyed when city planners rehabilitated the center of Moscow during the reign of Catherine the Great. The square upon which the gates opened, though, still retains its name.

5. Censorship was abolished in the wake of the February Revolution; but on November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks reinstated strictures on publishing with the famous “Decree Concerning the Press.”

6. This was not true. Nikolai Muralov had commanded the Moscow Military District since the October Revolution; but he left the city in March 1919, on assignment, to serve on the eastern front in the Russian civil war.

7. The Prague restaurant on Arbat Street was one of the most famous eating establishments in Moscow.

8. The Germans entered into Russia’s political life on several occasions. For instance, in the thirteenth century, German (Teutonic) knights occupied the area around Pskov until they were routed by Alexander Nevsky in 1242. In the 1730s Germans were active in all spheres of Russian political and social life. Ernst Biron was a grand chamberlain and favorite in the court of Empress Anna Ivanovna. After Anna’s death, for three weeks he was also regent for the child tsar, Ivan VI.

9. Bunin may be referring to the fact that, early in 1918, Germany was rocked by strikes from workers demanding higher wages for their labor. Russian revolutionary propaganda, unprecedented profits in German iron and steel industries, and civil disturbances in Vienna and in other industrial centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were causes for their unrest. For more information, see G. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966), 407–518.

1. The panic was justified. On February 27 a German airplane dropped bombs on the Fontanka Embankment inside the city.

2. In an appeal entitled, “To Student Youth” (“K uchashchieisia molodezhi”), published in Izvestia on February 27, 1918, Lunacharsky wrote: “We, the members of the Committee for Enlightenment, know that there exist many passionate hearts who beat with radiant love for the workers’ cause, and that they can be found amidst student youth, those of the upper classes of high-schools’. . . universities . . . and other educational institutions. And we call upon these to walk alongside working youth and to act as a bulwark against the imperialist beast. Women among student youth can supplement the ranks of the army with medical and hospital assistance.”

The Red Guard (Krasnaia gvardiia) Nvcre armed bands of factory workers who came into being with the February Revolution of 1917. Their members sought to maintain public safety and to spread the revolution throughout Russia. For individuals like Bunin, the Red Guard represented disorder, anarchy, and menace to people and property.

3. Bunin’s count is somewhat exaggerated. By late February the Germans controlled between zo and 25 Russian provinces, and by one count had captured 63,000 Russian prisoners, 2,600 pieces of artillery, and 5,000 machine guns. See M. Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York, 1994), 401.

4. Belov’s was a specialty foodstore in Moscow.

5. The Literary-Artistic Circle (Literaturpo-khudozhestvennyi kruzhok) was founded in 1899 in Moscow and brought together authors, playwrights, and artists. It was in the Circle that Bunin launched his savage attack on the Modernists on October 8, 1913.

6. “Rada” is the Ukrainian term (equivalent to “council”) for any representative governing body. After the Revolution of 1917, the Central Rada and the Ukrainian National Rada were the highest ruling organizations in the Ukraine. Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, changed hands no less than sixteen times in thirty-six months. See Lincoln, Red Victory, 303.

7. Bunin is misinformed on some of these points. It was General Kaledin, not Kamenev who committed suicide on January 28, 1918. See D. Lehovich, White Against Red: The Life of General Anton Denikin (New York, 1974), 189; and Lincoln, Red Victory, 82.

8. The German embassy in Moscow was located in the Berg Palace, the former home of a sugar industrialist, and was one of the most sumptuously furnished dwellings in Moscow.

9. The rumor was not true.

1. The village of Izmalkovo was several miles immediately west of Elets, about two hundred miles directly south of Moscow.

2. Strel’na was a famous restaurant in Moscow, known for its gypsy chorus.

3. Bronstein was the real name of Leon Trotsky. As a result of the German offensive into Russia, and after serious debate, Lenin persuaded his comrades on the Council of People’s Commissars to accept the harsh terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was signed on March 3, 1918, and ended the war between Germany and Soviet Russia. Under the treaty, Russia lost control over most of the Baltic provinces, part of Belorussia, the Ukraine, and the oil port of Batumi on the Turkish frontier. In economic terms the treaty meant the loss of over a quarter of Russia’s population, agricultural land, and railways, and about three-quarters of its coal, iron, and steel. Militarily the Russian army was to be completely demobilized, and the navy was disarmed and its warships detained in Russian ports. The Soviets not only lost the Ukraine but were obliged to evacuate it, to make peace with its Rada, and to recognize the Rada’s separate treaty with Germany and its allies, Estonia, Livonia, and Finland.

Lincoln elaborates: “[With the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk] three hundred years of triumphs won by Russian arms and diplomacy dissolved in a single moment. Sixty million people and two million square kilometers of territory, including land that had produced nearly a third of Imperial Russia’s crops, slipped from the Bolsheviks’ grasp” See Lincoln, Red Victory, 89.

4. Bunin’s nephew, Nikolai Alexeevich Pusheshnikov.

5. Arbat Square was one of Moscow’s most fashionable districts, the domain of the aristocracy and the upper middle class.

6. Evening News (Vechernie izvestiia) was the late-day edition of Power of the People.

7. Klestov-Angarsky recalls: “Bunin was a man ‘of another time.’ . . . [When I first met him] he received me with a dry and haughty air. Everything about him conveyed the impression of an impoverished aristocrat-gentryman who sought to hide his indigence with arrogance and conceit.” See M. Angarskaia, Po sledam ottsa (Moscow, 1992), 152.

8. The rumor was true. The Bolsheviks did, in fact, use German subsidies for purposes of party organization and propaganda. See R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990), 411. One diplomat of the time remarked that although Trotsky was for him “the greatest Jew since Christ,” the Germans had bought a “lemon,” if Trotsky indeed was on their payroll. See Lincoln, Red Victory, 166.

9. This was not true.

1. Blok was never Lunacharskv’s personal secretary.

2. Blok was thirty-eight years old at the time.

3. Sevastopol’ is an important port on the Black Sea in the Ukraine. At this time it was under Soviet control.

4. Nikolaevsky Station (Nikolaevskii vokzal), renamed Leningrad Station (Leningradskii vokzal), is located northeast of Red Square.

5. The Myasnitsky Gates (Miasnitskie vorota), also known as the Red Gates (Krasnye vorota), were removed in the 1928 reconstruction of Lermontov Square in the northeast quarter of Moscow.

6. A designation that Bunin later also used to describe himself as the last “gentry” writer of Russia.

7. An armyak is a peasant’s coat of heavy cloth, with no collar or buttons, worn with a sash.

8. The rumor had no basis in fact.

9. The Terem Palace (Teremnoi Dvorets) is a palace in the Kremlin. The Church of the Savior in the Forest (Spas na Born), also known as the Cathedral of the Transformation (Preobrazhenskii Sobor), and the Archangel Cathedral (Arkhangel’skii Sobor) are among the religious edifices there.

1. These rumors were untrue.

2. The Social Revolutionaries, a political party founded in 1901, represented the older populist tradition of Russian radicalism. Their program was to transform Russia’s agricultural life along socialistic lines. In 1917 the Socialist Revolutionary party (with the exception of its left wing) declared its hostility to the October Revolution and to the Bolshevik seizure of power. Their movement received widespread support from the Russian public. For instance, in the elections for the Constituent Assembly held in November of that year, the Socialist Revolutionary party received more than 50 percent of the popular vote, and counted 440 of the Assembly’s approximately 700 delegates. From January 1918 on the Social Revolutionaries sought to restore the Constituent Assembly; and when the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they decided on armed resistance against the Soviet government.

3. None of these stories had any basis in fact. For instance, Lenin was not in Moscow on March 6; the new Soviet government did not move there until March 11.

4. Both rumors were false. For instance, in the spring of 1917 Lunacharsky was named tovarishch gorodskoi golovy, or, loosely translated, “assistant to the mayor” of Petrograd.

5. The rumor was not true. In fact, though, financial exchanges in Moscow and Petrograd were responding to the German advance by raising the exchange rate for securities, thereby causing the public to believe that the Germans would restore private ownership of land and capital. See I. Ksenofontov, Mir, kotorogo khoteli i kotoryi nenavideli (Moscow, 1991), 364–365.

6. Neither rumor was true.

7. The Russian Provisional Government had recognized Poland’s right to independence on March 30, 1917; but it was not until early October 1918 that the Polish Regency Council announced the formation of an independent government for the country.

8. “I’he fortochka is a small hinged pane in the windows of Russian houses, used for ventilation.

9. The icon of “Unexpected Joy” (“Nechaiannaia Radost”) depicts this story: The Virgin Mary shows a sinner the wounds on the hands and legs of the Christ Child, asserting that whenever he does evil, her Son suffers pain. The sinner begs forgiveness and begins to lead a righteous life.

1. This was a rumor—and false. Its possible source is the fact that both Savich and Alexeev actively worked to persuade Nicholas II to give up his throne.

2. Historically the ataman was a Cossack chieftain. In colloquial Russian the word means “gang leader” or “chief.”

3. The rumor was not truc. In a rare moment of agreement, Western leaders and their representatives in Russia agreed to support the Bolsheviks once the Russians had resumed hostilities with Germany. (Only the American government dissented from this decision.) See R. Debo, Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917–1918 (Toronto, 1979), 135–136. Trotsky, though, believed just the opposite. “All of us,” he wrote, “including Lenin, were of the impression that the Germans had come to an agreement with the Allies about crushing the Soviets and that a peace on the Western front was to be built on the bones of the Russian revolution.” See J. Bunyan and H. Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, 1934), 514–515.

4. Bunin displays his “Russian” and “aristocratic” biases. The Chuvash are an indigenous, Turkic-speaking people who live along the right bank of the middle Volga. The Mordvinians are a Finno-Ugric group and inhabit the eastern part of the Volga basin.

5. Sakhalin is an island of Russia lying close to the mainland of northeastern Asia between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. From 1869 to 1906 Sakhalin was a penal colony. More than thirty thousand individuals served terms there, enduring corporal punishment and forced labor in forests and mines. Revolts were common, the largest occurring in 1888. Chekhov visited Sakhalin in 1890 and recorded his experiences in Sakhalin Island (Ostrov Sakhalin) in 1893–1894. The exiling of prisoners to Sakhalin was curtailed by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905 and abolished completely in 1906.

6. “Beware the Madman.”

7. In July 1875 Pyotr Lavrov published a revolutionary song, entitled the “Worker’s Marsellaise” (“Rabochaia Marsel’eza”), which had the same melody as the “Marsellaise” and which became popular with workers and intellectuals in Russia during the 1880s and 1890s.

8. Evening Hour, more accurately, New Evening Hour (Novyi vechernii chas), was a newspaper published in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and 1918.

9. Neither rumor was true. Trotsky never worked in Nizhny-Novgorod (a city approximately two hundred miles directly east of Moscow), though he and Lenin were often called “spies” by opposition forces.

1. Bunin is referring to the February Revolution of 1917 which began on March 8, 1917, and which, having toppled the Romanov dynasty, established the Provisional Government with a mandate to govern until the founding of a popularly elected Constituent Assembly.

2. In truth, Kamenev was sent to England and France to propagandize the revolution and to gauge the militancy of Western socialist parties. He was unsuccessful in both endeavors.

3. This was not true.

4. Red Guards and loyal Bolshevik sailors occupied Russia’s banks in December 1917; a month later Lenin declared them national property. See Lincoln, Red Victory, 111–112.

5. Rostov, also known as Rostov the Great, is one of the oldest cities in Russia and is located roughly two hundred miles northeast of Moscow.

6. After the Bolsheviks had seized power, Kornilov joined Generals Alexeev and Kaledin to organize a resistance movement in the Don region. No such coalition could be successful, however, because the population there was unenthusiastic about an anti-Bolshevik crusade and because Kornilov and his colleagues could not agree on a common strategy and goals.

7. Neither event came to be.

8. The Ravine (Iar) was a restaurant in Moscow and, like the Strel’na, also known for its gypsy chorus.

9. The rumor was false.

1. Most likely Glotovo, near Elets.

2. In response to Lenin’s 1917 decree abolishing private ownership of the land, peasants everywhere had looted livestock, farm implements, and valuables from local manor houses. See Lincoln, Red Victory, 63.

3. The Bear (Medved’) was a restaurant in Saint Petersburg. The Stray Dog (Brodiachaia sobaka) was a nightclub also in Petersburg and a favorite of writers and artists; it closed in 1915.

About the Stray Dog, Bunin wrote in his Memoirs in 1950: “The Stray Dog in Petersburg, where Akhmatova said, ‘We all are sinners here, we all are whores,’ was also the setting for ‘The Flight of the Virgin Mary with the Child into Egypt.’ It was some kind of ‘liturgical thing’ for which Kuz’min wrote the words, Sats composed the music, and Sudeikin thought up the decorations and costumes.

“As regards the ‘action’ of the piece, the poet Potyomkin had a donkey that was severely swaybacked and walked along on two crutches. On its back, it carried Sudiekin’s spouse who played the Mother of God. . . .

“Among the frequenters of the Stray Dog were quite a few future ‘Bolsheviks’: Alexei Tolstoy, then still a young and strapping individual with a huge fat face, and hair cut in a peasant style, and looking like an important barin in his raccoon coat and in top hat; Blok, who had the impenetrable, stonelike face of a handsome poet; and Mayakovsky, who, dressed in a yellow jacket, had lips that were crooked, pursed, and toadlike, and eyes that were extremely dark and provocative in a bold and gloomy way.” See Bunin, Vospominaniia, 46.

“The Stray Dog,” Lincoln writes, “was a cellar cabaret . . . where the stench of sweat and cheap tobacco . . . [mingled] with [the smells of] urine from a perpetually malfunctioning toilet.” See Lincoln, Red Victory, 347. For more on these “poetry inns,” see ibid., 346.

4. A Musical Snuffbox (Muzykal’naia tabakerka) was a literary café in Moscow in 1918 and home to such poet-Imagists as Vadim Shershenevich.

5. There are three Tolstoys in Bunin’s narrative: Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817–1875), poet and novelist; Alexei Nikolaevich, (Alyoshka) Tolstoy (1883–1945), the emigré (later Soviet) writer; and Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), the great novelist.

6. The “Gavriliada,” a parody of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception, was written by Pushkin in 1821.

7. Trenyov wrote the “Farmworkers” (“Batraki”) in 1912.

8. The Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in Moscow from March 5 to 18, 1918. On March 16 delegates ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by a majority of 784 to 261, with 115 abstentions.

9. Nikolaev lies roughly one hundred miles northeast of Odessa. Both Odessa and Nikolaev were occupied by German and Austrian troops from mid-March to November 1918.

1. From the mythical character Polyphemus the Cyclops, whom Odysseus blinded in Book Nine of The Odyssey.

2. Kharkov is a major industrial, cultural, and scientific center in northeast Ukraine. It was captured by German and Austrian forces on April 8, 1918.

3. The Tatars or Mongols ruled Russia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century.

4. The famous statue of Pushkin in Moscow, erected in 1880.

5. Bunin is paraphrasing from Psalms 55:4 and 102:4.

6. Bunin’s misgivings were correct. Elena Malinovskaya zealously sought to bring Communist ideals to theatrical art.

7. The work in question is Mayakovsky’s forty-seven-page War and Peace (Voina i mir), published in Petrograd in 1918.

8. The National Hotel, one of the most famous hotels in Moscow, was built in 1903.

9. So quickly had the October Revolution succeeded that even Lenin seemed momentarily stunned. “You know,” he confided to Trotsky on the evening that Kerensky’s government fell, to pass so quickly from persecutions and living in hiding to power—es schwindelt—it makes one’s head spin!” See Lincoln, Red Victory, 44.

1. The Bolsheviks saw Russian Orthodoxy only as a counterrevolutionary force, and announced a formal separation of church and state in early January 1918. In response the patriarch of Moscow, Tikhon, pronounced anathema against the Soviet authorities on February 1, 1918, and encouraged the church’s members to oppose the new Russian leaders. On March 14, 1918, a group of churchmen, led by Tikhon, tried to meet with Lenin to protest the church-state separation, but they were unsuccessful in their quest.

2. In early March 1918 Trotsky was conducting separate negotiations with the Allies in case the Germans ignored the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk or the Soviets failed to ratify the agreement. The Allies were willing to do anything to maintain an eastern front during the war and to prevent the Germans from focusing their efforts in the west.

3. Bakh had lived as an emigré in France, the United States, and Switzerland. He did not return to Russia until 1917.

4. Rumors that the Germans had sided with the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war were common.

5. Russian News (Russkie vedmosti) was closed on March 24, 1918, allegedly for publishing B. Savinkov’s article “From the Road” (“S dorogi”), opposing the new Soviet order. The editor, P. Egorov, was sentenced to three months’ solitary confinement.

6. In March 1918 Savinkov established in Moscow the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, an underground, counterrevolutionary group which sought to overthrow Soviet power and to establish a military dictatorship. It lasted until June 1918.

7. The Lantern (Fonar’) was an illustrated weekly published in Petrograd in 1918.

8. Premirov’s “The Tavern” (“Kabak”) was published in 1913.

9. Gorky wrote The Lower Depths (Na dne) in 1902. Luka is a sixty-year-old pilgrim in the play. The Moscow Art Theater, founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislaysky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, championed theatrical realism in Russia.

1. The newspaper Forward (Vpered) was published in Moscow from March 1917 through April 1918.

2. The rumor was true. As the revolution moved eastward and the Bolsheviks prepared to seize Vladivostok, the Allies worried that the huge stockpile of military supplies destined for the eastern front might fall into German hands. Also, the Japanese looked with apprehension upon Soviet expansionism, since Vladivostok was Russia’s major trading and military center on the Pacific Coast. On April 5, 1918, a Japanese force of five hundred marines landed in Vladivostok, but withdrew several weeks later. For more on the Japanese intervention into Russia, see Lincoln, Red Victory, 97–99.

3. Only a month before, the daily bread ration in Moscow had fallen below a quarter of a pound, and the workers’ entire daily ration produced a pitiful 306 calories, less than a tenth of what experts thought necessary for a “healthy diet.” See Lincoln, Red Victory, 59.

4. The work in question is The Bolsheviks: Documents in the History of Bolshevism from 1903 Through 1916, Taken from the Former Moscow Police Division (Bol’sheviki: Dokumenty po istorii bol’shevizma s 1903 po 1916 god byvshego Moskovskogo Okhrannogo Otdeleniia), published in 1918. Commune (Zadruga) was a cooperative publishing venture founded in Moscow in 1911 but moved abroad in 1922.

5. Bunin was indeed justified in judging Lunacharsky and such other Bolsheviks as Kamenev, Lenin, Krupskaya, Sverdlov, and Trotsky as “convicts,” since most of the pictures in the book were mug shots from police files.