The Guillotine at Work, by G. P. Maximoff. Chicago: The Chicago Section of the Alexander Berkman Fund, 624 pages. $3.50.
The seven years of Lenin’s regime cost Russia from 8 to 10 million lives; it took Stalin ten years to add another 10 million; thus, according to Mr. Maximoff’s “very conservative estimate,” between 1917 and 1934 there perished about 20 million people, some being tortured and shot, others dying in prisons, others again falling in the Civil War, with famine and epidemics eagerly participating. The appearance of this tragic and terse book is especially welcome because it may help to dispose of the wistful myth that Lenin was any better than his successor. The remarkably vicious and dishonest methods of Vladimir Ilyitch1 are examined here with scholarly precision, and although a staunch communist might argue that in revolution splendid ends justify the meanest of means, nothing can justify—in Mr. Maximoff’s proletarian opinion—the way Ilyitch bamboozled the Russian peasantry. This, rather pathetically, is set down to Lenin’s belonging by birth to the Russian gentry.
A political creed based on some pet dream of mankind (and without the impetus of such dreams this world would soon cease to turn) is rather like the glib advertisement of a product which cannot be criticized until it has been tested; with this difference, however, that in politics no money is refunded in case you are not satisfied with the results. Mr. Maximoff, it would seem, happens to be one of those people to whom the notion of human misery is so utterly revolting that they will plunge into any adventure that holds the faintest chance of improving the world; after which they go and denounce Lenin’s Elixir because, whatever its ingredients, it has resulted in bringing more pain into the world than it was supposed to allay. A noble passion for justice may excuse many delusions; it is the sneaky, clammy-handed, humorless keepers of Utopian books that make the most ferocious killers. The party to which Mr. Maximoff belongs accepted the Bolsheviks without any misgivings except “fractional” ones. He claims now that this party was cheated out of existence by Bolshevik liars and blackguards. The implication that everything would have been all right if Kropotkinism had triumphed over Leninism from the start discloses the kind of unconscious optimism which man, perhaps fortunately, will never forsake.
Theoretically speaking, and barring such things as the old-fashioned café-bomb, black flags and sundry emblems of death, there is something rather attractive about your true Anarchist, especially when his high-spirited condemnation of all shackles is compared to the dreadful smugness of Communism. But once a program is fixed and tactics established, and an ism has chosen its hiss, the freest dreamer unconsciously accepts certain limits which are the interests of his party, and not the wider ones of humanity. That is why Mr. Maximoff’s book, although essentially honest, has its awkward limitations. His coy predilection for a cutthroat chieftain called Makhno (who, with his army of brigands, romped over South Russia, getting in the way of the Reds and Whites) just because he happened to term himself an Anarchist, affects the author’s statistics, as he fails to take into account the thousands who died in Makhno’s lusty pogroms. This, however, is the only serious flaw in the book. The general impression that the author is totally unconcerned about what the regime he condemns did to people holding less extreme political views than his own is not really so bad as it seems. Indeed, a certain type of reader who is apt to view any criticism directed at the Soviet Union as prompted by class hatred, malicious misinterpretation and the fury of a bourgeois deprived of his cigar and top hat, will be less reluctant to believe an author who limits himself to a narrowly proletarian point of view.
On the other hand, the more dispassionate student of Russian affairs comparing this book with other critical works, will note the mosaic way in which a difficult truth is built. Practically, all Russian classes, groups and parties that have their representatives abroad, from the Bolshevik’s meek, bespectacled brother, the Menshevik, through different shades of Liberalism, pink, salmon and flesh-colored; down to various Counts de Popoff balalaiking in Hollywood dives, could tell a similar woeful tale about people of their particular set; and Mr. Maximoff’s shortcomings are in a way less irritating than those of most other émigré publications.
What is really important is that Mr. Maximoff’s book is an intelligent historical survey, a careful classification of the varieties of physical pain so thoroughly inflicted since 1917 upon the very enduring bodies of millions of men and women in silent Russia, while the rest of the world was having, on the whole, rather an easy time.
* V. Nabokov, “Sickle, Hammer and Gun,” New York Sun [?], 1941[?]. Maximoff’s Guillotine at Work was published in 1940, and VN’s address on the corrected typescript, LCNA, box 8, folder 9, is 35 West 8[7]th Street, New York, where he lived from Sept. 22, 1940, to May 26, 1941.