https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-aug-17-bk-23125-story.html
https://schkola4kotovo.ru/en/chas-muzhestva-probil-na-nashih-anna-ahmatova-muzhestvo/
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/akhmatova/courage.html
http://stevesilver.org.uk/blog/stalingrad-1942-the-hour-of-courage-had-struck-the-clock/
https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Akhmatova_Anna_The_Word_That_Causes_Deaths_Defeat.pdf
https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Akhmatova_Anna_The_Word_That_Causes_Deaths_Defeat.pdf
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
