imágeneshistóricas.blogspot.es: Anna Ajmátova

On January 9, 1905, a group of unarmed Petersburg workers led by a priest undertook a march to the palace to present a petition of their grievances to the tsar. They were fired upon by mounted troops, and in the close quarters of the crowded street, casualties were heavy—ninetytwo deaths, according to the official figures; several times that, according to unofficial ones. ‘‘Bloody Sunday,’’ a

In October 1905, as Tsar Nicholas II was preparing to issue the semiconstitution known as the October Manifesto,

By February 25, 1917, the unrest in Petrograd reached a critical mass, as a number of labor demonstrations and protests against food shortages coalesced into a citywide general strike. Troops were called out to disperse the crowds. For two days they obeyed orders to fire on the demonstrators, hundreds of whom were wounded or killed. But on February 27, a mutiny spread through the troops, and they refused to leave their barracks. The government’s authority collapsed as crowds of workers, students, and soldiers roamed the streets attacking police stations and other symbols of royal authority.

Out of this chaos emerged two claimants to power. Nicholas II formally yielded power to a Provisional Government made up of leading members of the Duma (the prerevolutionary Russian parliament). The Revolution and Civil War 25 street demonstrators, however, regarded this body as concerned primarily with the interests of the upper classes and organized their own representative body, the Petrograd Soviet (the Russian word for ‘‘council’’) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

The class conflict reflected in the existence of these two bodies soon reached the army, where peasant soldiers began to challenge the authority of upper- and middle-class officers. Ordinary soldiers saw no reason why they should get killed in the name of Russia’s geopolitical interests, which meant nothing to them, their families, or their villages; many of them took the position that while they would fight if attacked, they would not engage in offensive actions. To the officers, this disintegration of military authority and fighting capability was infuriating.

But the government could not make peace. The socialist program of a no-fault peace, with no annexations or indemnities paid by either side, was not supported by either the French or the British government. If Russia broke with its allies to make a separate peace, the weakness of its position meant surrender on whatever terms Germany cared to name. Thus, for lack of any alternative, the war dragged on, while the deep class divisions in Russian society gave rise to assertions that the real reason the Provisional Government did not make peace was that it was under the influence of profiteers whose income depended on continued hostilities.

One important reason for the continuing political tension was that the economic problems which had caused the February Revolution had not eased. Breakdowns of the overstrained transport system continued, as did shortages of food, fuel, and raw materials for factories. Workers regarded the ongoing hardships as the result of a plot by the rich to keep them from enjoying the fruits of the Revolution and repeatedly challenged their managers, while managers, who had to deal with steadily falling productivity, were in no mood to negotiate with workers. The number of strikes and layoffs mounted. Crime rose, and a sense of general insecurity prevailed.

In late September, Leon Trotsky, a leading figure in the Revolution of 1905 who had recently joined the Bolsheviks, was elected chairman of the Petersburg Soviet; soon afterward, the party took control of the Moscow Soviet as well. Lenin took this as a sign that the majority of the people was on his side and argued that the time had come for the party to seize power.

The more moderate delegates to the Congress of Soviets, members of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties, were infuriated with the Bolsheviks’ action and fiercely denounced the radicals’ presumption for launching an attack which could lead to civil war and the destruction of the Revolution. They walked out of the chamber, followed by Trotsky’s taunt, ‘‘Go where you belong—into the dustbin of history!’’ The rump Congress, now consisting only of the Bolsheviks and a minority faction of Left Socialist Revolutionaries, continued its session without the moderates and approved the appointment of an all-Bolshevik government, the Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin as its chairman. The moderates subsequently challenged this action and demanded that the government be broadened to include members of other socialist parties, but the Bolsheviks refused to compromise, and events had made it clear that the moderates did not have sufficient armed support to make them back down. The losers consoled themselves with the thought that the Sovnarkom was in any case merely a temporary government, which was to hold power only until the convening of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks moved quickly to consolidate their hold on power. The peasants’ demand for gentry land was met by a decree that declared the abolition of private landownership; all land belonged to the people, and its fruits belonged to those who cultivated it. For the workers, a decree on ‘‘workers’ control’’ significantly increased the powers of their factory committees at the expense of management’s power. For the soldiers, the fighting came to a stop almost immediately, as a truce for negotiations was declared

In the elections for the assembly, the Bolsheviks did well in the urban areas of Petrograd and Moscow. But Russia was still primarily a rural country, and the majority of delegates elected were members of the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR). On the day the Constituent Assembly convened, January 5, 1918, the SRs elected one of their party leaders as the assembly’s chairman and took their party’s platform as the basis for the assembly’s agenda. The armed Bolshevik sailors who were serving as self-styled guards for the representatives took this amiss and strongly suggested to the chairman that it was time for the session to adjourn. Since the SRs, whatever their strength in the country as a whole, did not control the capital, this adjournment turned out to be permanent. The Bolsheviks—who now renamed themselves the Communists— had successfully seized power, and they intended to hold on to it.

Marriage had become just as informal as divorce: whereas before the Revolution there had been no civil marriage, now that was the only legally recognized type of union, and the abrupt change had produced confusion as to what exactly a couple needed to do to be legally married and whether it was even worth the bother

The forced dismissal of the Constituent Assembly had left the opponents of the Communist government no peaceful means of protest, and in spring 1918, civil war broke out. The government remained in control of the two capital cities and of Russia’s heartland, but there was fighting all around the periphery, in Ukraine, southern Russia (the Azov and Black Sea coasts and the northern Caucasus), the Volga and Ural regions, western Siberia, and the far north around Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.

Aside from the direct economic impact of the war itself, the catastrophic breakdown of transport and infrastructure that had been going 32 Biographical and Historical Background on throughout 1917 continued and intensified. The Bolshevik panacea of workers’ control, based on the assumption that the problem was merely the fault of counterrevolutionary managers, did nothing to address the actual causes of the steady drop in production. By early 1918, the flow of consumer goods had simply dried up. Peasants who brought grain to market could find nothing to buy with their money. At the same time, reckless government printing of money had led to soaring inflation, so that money not immediately spent on goods became worthless. The peasants’ response was simple: if they couldn’t get anything for their grain, they wouldn’t sell it. Urban food stocks dropped precipitously

The Bolsheviks, who had little sympathy for what they regarded as a backward rural class, assumed that the disappearance of grain from the markets was an act of ideological sabotage and chose to treat the peasantry as an enemy. Armed detachments were sent into the countryside to confiscate what were officially described as surplus grain supplies. In fact, the armed detachments that descended upon a village would take everything not sufficiently well hidden. The villagers’ protests to the ‘‘people’s government’’ were ignored. The anger of the countryside exploded in violence. There were 245 of what the government itself characterized as ‘‘major anti-Soviet uprisings’’ in 1918 in the twenty provinces of Central Russia, whose proximity to the central government made them particularly subject to heavy requisitioning.14

In a measure of how much damage was done to the rural economy, in a country in which virtually all plowing was done by horses, the number of horses decreased Revolution and Civil War 33 from thirty-five million in 1916—already a war year—to twenty-four million in 1920.16

The civil war years were thus a time of hunger for city dwellers: the government did not have the resources to track down and commandeer enough food for the entire urban population. Food rationing was instituted, workers being entitled to larger rations than members of the former upper or professional classes. Yet only a third of the total urban food supply came from official sources; the rest came from a black market supplied by enterprising peasants who smuggled food past the roadblocks set up to prevent such trade.17 Given the risks the sellers ran, the prices—paid in goods, not money—were correspondingly high. The formerly rich traded their jewelry and carpets for bread, while factory workers ignored their assigned tasks and worked on handicrafts that they could barter. Anyone who could escape the city did so: workers, many of whom had migrated to the cities within the past generation, returned to their relatives in the villages. The population of Petrograd was 2.5 million in 1917 and one-third of that number in 1919. Educated and professional people, who could not take up peasant labor, were left behind in the dark, cold, empty buildings. Malnutrition took a steadily rising toll among them, undermining health and increasing mortality: the death rate in Petrograd was 25 per thousand in 1917, 44 per thousand in 1918, and 81.5 per thousand in 1919.18

By early 1921, although the war was over, privation and misery had risen to such a level that the Soviet government could not count upon the loyalty even of those segments of the population that had originally been its most fervent supporters. In March 1921, the Red sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt—the very ones who had supported the Bolsheviks so decisively in October 1917 and January 1918—rebelled against the regime. They demanded that new elections be held to seat a government that would contain representatives of all left-wing parties. The rebellion was crushed with heavy casualties, but it frightened even the most doctrinaire Communists sufficiently to allow the ever-pragmatic Lenin to push through a series of measures (the New Economic Policy) intended to revive the moribund economy by allowing limited amounts of capitalism. For the countryside, the new policy was too little, too late. To the man-made catastrophe already visited upon the villages was added a natural catastrophe, drought. By summer 1921, peasants in the Volga region were beginning not merely to suffer from malnutrition, but actually to die of starvation. Survivors fled the most devastated villages, looking for places where there was still food. If they found a village with food, they would massacre the inhabitants and seize their supplies— unless, of course, the inhabitants had had the foresight to arm themselves, in which case the starving refugees were slaughtered instead. Cases of cannibalism were reported. The drought-affected area was the home of some thirty-five million people. The situation was so dire that Lenin overcame his suspicion of capitalists’ motives and accepted aid from the American Relief Association, headed by Herbert Hoover. The 36 Biographical and Historical Background association was active in Russia from October 1921 to June 1923, and at the height of its activity was feeding ten million people. In spite of even this heroic effort, the famine resulted in five million deaths.19 Some ten million people died during the civil war (not counting the famine deaths), the majority as a direct result not of violence, but of typhus, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, all the diseases that found easy prey in a malnourished, exhausted, cold, dirty, and lice-ridden populace. Death had become commonplace in Russia—not just individual death, but death on a catastrophic scale. Bodies lay unburied by the roadside or were tossed en masse into shallow pits where they might be dug up by scavenging animals. To the extent that any authority existed in this chaos, it belonged to men who had guns and did not hesitate to use them. To the new rulers, such values as compassion and decency were no more than the pathetic shibboleths of a bourgeois culture rightfully swept away by the Revolution. The humanist culture of the old Russian intelligentsia was dying.

In summer 1921, Akhmatova left Shileiko and moved into the apartment of the composer Artur Lourie, who had gone from being a habitué of the Stray Dog to a brief stint as people’s commissar of music.

When Lenin died in January 1924, he left no obvious successor, although in the collective leadership of the Politburo, Trotsky and Stalin were more equal than their colleagues. Within four years, Stalin had successfully sidelined Trotsky

The great question facing Lenin’s heirs was how to transform an industrially backward agricultural country like Russia into the type of advanced industrial country which alone, in classic Marxist doctrine, could

prove hospitable to Communism. There were two possible approaches,

gradualist and militant. The gradualists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, argued

that the key was to make agriculture more profitable so that prosperous peasants would demand more consumer goods, which would in turn create more factory jobs. Such a policy described what was happening in Russia in 1921–28, the years of the so-called NEP, and it actually worked, for by 1928 Russia had largely regained the economic level of the pre– World War I years. But it was not a vision to inspire a party of selfdescribed revolutionaries impatient to change the world. And there was still the old Communist fear, dating from civil war days, that prosperous peasants—or, as they were pejoratively called, kulaks (‘‘fists’’)—would be more sympathetic to capitalism than to socialism. The alternative was a return to the requisitioning and heavy-handed state control of the civil war years, regarded by Communists as a heroic period rather than an economic catastrophe. Under this approach, the peasants would be compelled to surrender their grain to the state for export, and the money thus obtained would be used to finance rapid industrialization

In 1929, Stalin aligned himself with the program of rapid industrialization. That April, the first Five-Year Plan was proclaimed. Its figures called for a 180 percent rise in industrial output, with even higher increases in key sectors

When it turned out that so-called voluntary collectivization did not inspire the peasants to volunteer, it was announced that any peasant, even the poorest, who refused to join the collective would be regarded as a ‘‘kulak henchman’’ and subjected to the same penalties as the kulaks themselves. In a desperate last outburst of resistance, peasant families slaughtered and ate their livestock rather than surrender it to the collective farm. In 1928, the total number of cattle in the Soviet Union was sixty million; during the most intensive period of collectivization, in January and February 1930, fourteen million cattle were slaughtered

In late 1931 a drought hit the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, key agricultural regions already severely disrupted by collectivization. Both areas produced a poor crop that year, followed by a total failure in 1932. Soon peasants were eating dogs, cats, and rats and were trying to eat tree bark. People with the grossly swollen bellies of severe malnutrition became a common sight. As in 1921–22, cases of cannibalism were reported. But in contrast to 1921–22, no aid was offered. The quotas of grain that collective farms were compelled to deliver to the state were not lowered. Over a million tons of grain were exported in 1932. In 1921–22, hordes of peasants had fled their ruined villages and stormed any available train, and some of them had reached Moscow, only to collapse from hunger and die in the city’s railroad stations.

This time, urbanites would not have the reality of famine brought home to them by the sight of emaciated bodies: armed detachments were stationed in the countryside to stop any peasant exodus. No mention of the famine could be found in the media. The denial of its existence was so systematic that even city dwellers who were in contact with their village relatives and were fully aware of the suffering in a specific area might fail to grasp the overall dimensions of the devastation. As a result of this policy of concealment, it will never be possible to make an accurate count of the number of deaths in the 1932–33 famine: estimates run from 3.5 million to 7 million.1

On December 1, 1934, a disgruntled party member named Leonid Nikolayev walked into Kirov’s office and fatally shot him.

In January 1935 Zinoviev and his close associate Lev Kamenev were tried for ‘‘moral and political responsibility’’ for Kirov’s death. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison, Kamenev to five.

Stalin had already succeeded in destroying any effective opposition to him by the Old Bolsheviks, the one-time companions of Lenin. The most fortunate among them, like Bukharin, had been sidelined in relatively unimportant positions; others, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been found guilty of moral responsibility for Kirov’s assassination, were in prison; Trotsky had been exiled.

In August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were produced for a show trial, accused of responsibility for the death of Kirov and of having planned to kill Stalin next. In response to a private promise that they would not be put to death, they made the required public confession, after which they were executed anyway. In September 1936, Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the NKVD, was dismissed and subsequently arrested on the grounds he had not shown sufficient vigilance against enemies of the people.

In early 1937, a second show trial was directed against several important secondary figures among the Old Bolsheviks. The defendants were strongly encouraged to implicate Bukharin in their ‘‘Japanese-GermanTrotskyist’’ plots to restore capitalism, and the Party Central Committee plenum of February-March 1937 resolved that at the least Bukharin must have had sufficient guilty knowledge to justify expelling him from the party and to warrant further investigation by the NKVD. The inevitable result, a year later, was yet another show trial, which sentenced both Bukharin and Yagoda to death. By May, the wave of arrests reached the armed forces: the highest-ranking officer in the Red Army, Field Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was arrested along with a number of generals

The same source gives the total number of executions in the years 1937– 38 as 681,692, a figure that may be incomplete. An equal number of deaths may have occurred in those two years among the newly arrived inmates of Gulag, many of whom were unable to adapt to a regime of extremely demanding physical labor and near-starvation rations. Political arrests were typically made under Article 58 of the Soviet law

The highest ranks of society were devastated: of the Central Committee’s seventy-one members in 1934, only sixteen were still alive by the purge’s end in 1939; similarly, 90 percent of the Red Army’s generals and 80 percent of its colonels were purged.7 Also prone to arrest were anyone who had lived in a foreign country (including Communists from Fascist countries who had fled to Moscow, Russian veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and members of the USSR’s own espionage service) or who showed an interest in international organizations (including Esperantists and stamp collectors); members of smaller ethnic groups who were active in preserving their cultural traditions (these were charged with ‘‘bourgeois nationalism’’); engineers, who were the obvious scapegoat for every industrial accident or shortcoming; and, of course, anyone who had been previously arrested.

The family of an arrested person was not told where he was taken.Family members would go from one prison to another bearing money to be paid over to their missing relative, but the money would be accepted only if the addressee’s name was found on the list of inmates of that particular prison. Similarly, no information was provided to the family on the status of the investigation, which might last for months. Families learned of a conviction indirectly: once a prisoner was convicted, he was transferred out, which meant that a relative delivering a parcel to the prison would reach the window only to have the package refused on the grounds that the addressee was no longer there.

the obvious candidate was Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. On November 25, 1938, he was dismissed from his position and replaced by the supposedly more moderate Lavrenty Beria. In early 1939, at the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party, Stalin accused Yezhov of allowing the security forces to get carried away, so that while many class enemies had indeed been dealt with appropriately, some innocent people had gotten caught up as well. A few days after this denunciation, Yezhov was arrested. Interestingly, precisely at the time of Yezhov’s

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lunes, 28 de septiembre de 2020

Anna Ajmátova

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