A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

campaign against the Trotskyites: his History of a Deviation (1924) became the standard anti-Trotsky diatribe; and throughout the 1920s he produced a long line of similar hack works. But this did not save him from Stalin's firing squads in his war against the Old Bolsheviks. In 1926

Kanatchikov sided with the 'left opposition' of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who criticized the policies of Stalin and Bukharin on the grounds (and this was significant for Kanatchikov) that they were too soft on the peasantry. For this 'deviation' Kanatchikov was punished with a posting in Prague as a TASS correspondent. Two years later he was allowed to return to Russia after he had written a grovelling letter to the Central Committee in which he confessed his 'political mistakes'. His ardent support for collectivization — the logical conclusion of his rejection of the old peasant Russia — earned him a temporary 'rehabilitation'. In 1929 he was made the editor of the newly founded Literary Newspaper, the weekly publication of the Soviet Writers' Union. During the next few years he wrote a string of party pamphlets in support of Stalin, for which he was rewarded with a larger flat, all the usual party perks and a steady increase in his salary. But in Stalin's Russia every party member was haunted by his past and when, from the end of 1935, Stalin moved to wipe out the 'Zinovievites', Kanatchikovs star fell once again. He was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to eight years' hard labour in the Gulag. Like so many Bolshevik victims of the Great Terror, he pleaded with Stalin to intervene and grant him mercy without realizing that it was Stalin himself who had ordered his arrest. Kanatchikov had served out half his sentence by the time he died in 1940.⁷

Exile for Gorky was a form of torture. While he could not bear to live in Soviet Russia, nor could he bear to live abroad. For several years he wavered in this schizophrenic state, homesick for Russia yet too sick of it to return home. From Berlin, Gorky wandered restlessly through the spa towns of Germany and Czechoslovakia before settling in the Italian resort of Sorrento. 'No, I cannot go to Russia,' he wrote to Rolland in 1924. 'I feel like a person without a homeland. In Russia I would be the enemy of everything and everyone, it would be like banging my head against a brick wall.'

It was not so much the nature of the Soviet regime as its hostile policy towards the arts and its friendly policies towards the peasantry which kept him in exile during the NEP years. Although he had always opposed the rise of the Bolshevik dictatorship, he had also found a means of justifying it as a necessary antidote to the instinctive anarchism of the peasantry. Gorky was nothing if not contradictory. His rationalization of the Soviet regime became even more marked after Lenin's death, which filled him with remorse. Gorky had both loved and hated Lenin, and their relationship could not now be resolved. 'Yes, my dear friend,' Gorky wrote to Rolland, 'Lenin's death has been a very heavy blow for me. I loved him. I loved him with wrath.' Nina Berberova, who knew Gorky well during his years in Berlin and Marienbad, later wrote that Lenin's death had made him 'very tearful' and that he did not stop crying throughout the next weeks as he wrote his eulogistic Memories of him. 'Gorky was overwhelmed with repentance,' Berberova recalled. He 'reassessed his attitude to the October

Revolution and the early years of Bolshevism, to the role of Lenin, to his being right and Gorky being wrong... Quite sincerely he believed that Lenin's death had left him orphaned with the whole of Russia.' Gorky's Memories of Lenin were the first step towards his reconciliation with Lenin's successors in the Kremlin. In 1926, on Dzerzhinsky's death, he even wrote in praise of the Cheka leader ('a gifted man with a sensitive heart and a strong sense of justice'). And yet he was still not ready to return to Russia. No doubt he was frightened about what he might find there. For the Russia in his mind was always much rosier than the Russia of reality, and even Gorky, despite his ability to deceive himself, must have been aware of this. Certainly, his life-long attachment to the principles of individual liberty and human dignity was still strong enough to hold him back, especially as a creative artist whose own ability to continue to write had become increasingly dependent on the freedoms and the comforts he could enjoy only in the West. His work was flourishing in Europe, with The Artamonov Business, followed by the first two volumes of The Life of Klim Samgin, his two great didactic novels, written between 1925 and 1928. Meanwhile, in Russia the Soviet regime had drawn up an index of 'counter-revolutionary' books — which included Plato, Kant, Ruskin, Nietzsche and Tolstoy — to be withdrawn from all public libraries. Gorky was outraged by this censorship and began to write a letter to the government renouncing his Soviet citizenship. But then in anger he tore the letter up: however much he might despise the Soviet regime's 'spiritual vampirism', he could not bring himself to cut his links with it.⁸

In the end, as with Brusilov, it was good old-fashioned Russian nationalism that persuaded Gorky to return home. For one thing, he could not abide the Russian emigres — and they could not abide him. 'To us Russians,' wrote one Paris exile in 1922, 'Gorky is one of those who are morally and politically responsible for the great calamities that the Bolshevik regime has brought to our country. Years will pass, but he will never be forgotten.'⁹ The more anti-Soviet the emigres became, the more Gorky reacted by aligning himself with the Soviet regime. Moreover, the rise of Fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy made Gorky reject all his earlier ideals — ideals that had formed the basis of his opposition to the Bolsheviks — about Europe as a historic force of moral progress and civilization. The more disillusioned he became with Fascist Europe the more he was inclined to extol Soviet Russia as a morally superior system. No doubt this was wishful thinking but in the context of the times it is understandable.

Gorky went back to Russia in 1928. After five summer trips he settled there for good in 1932. His return was hailed by the Soviet regime as a great victory in its propaganda war against the West. The prodigal son was showered with honours: the Order of Lenin was conferred on him; he was given Riabushinsky's house in Moscow, a masterpiece of the style moderne which he filled with

treasures at the states expense; a trilogy of films was made about his life; Tverskaia Street in Moscow became Gorky Street; and his native city of Nizhnyi Novgorod was renamed Gorkii. All these honours were designed to buy Gorky's political support. The Soviet regime to which he had returned was deeply split between Stalin's supporters and the Rightists, such as Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who opposed Stalin's extreme policies on collectivization and industrialization. To begin with, Gorky occupied a place between the two, and this made him a valuable target for both sides. On the one hand Gorky saw Stalin's policies as the only way for Russia to escape its backward peasant past. Yet on the other he did not like Stalin as a human being (whereas he was close friends with Bukharin and Rykov) and opposed his policies on literature. Between 1928 and 1932, as far as one can tell from the sketchy sources, Gorky lent his support to Stalin while attempting to restrain his extreme policies. It was the same role that he had played with Lenin between 1917 and 1921. Gorky secured the release of many people from the labour camps, and, it seems likely, persuaded Stalin to write his famous article 'Dizzy with Success' in March 1930, in which the leader condemned the excesses of his local officials for the first murderous campaign of collectivization.¹⁰

To his former comrades, to those socialists who had made a stand against the Bolsheviks or had made a complete break with Soviet Russia, Gorky's return to Moscow seemed like a betrayal. Viktor Serge, who saw Gorky in 1930, later recalled him as a tragic figure, a once outspoken critic of the Soviet regime who had somehow allowed himself to become silenced:

What was going on inside him? We knew that he still grumbled, that he was uneasy, that his harshness had an obverse of grief and protest. We told each other: 'One of these days he'll explode!' And indeed he did, a short while before his death, finally breaking with Stalin. But all his collaborators on the Novaia zhizn' of 1917 were disappearing into jail and he said nothing. Literature was dying and he said nothing ... I happened to catch a glimpse of him in the street. Leaning back alone, in the rear seat of a big Lincoln car, he seemed remote from the street, remote from the life of Moscow, reduced to an algebraic cipher of himself. He had not aged but rather thinned and dried, his head bony and cropped inside a Turkish skull-cap, his nose and cheekbones jutting, his eye-sockets hollow like a skeleton's.

But the truth was more complex — and in this was Gorky's final tragedy. Shortly after his return in 1932 he began to think that perhaps he was mistaken to remain in Russia. He found himself increasingly opposed to the Stalinist regime — but at the same time he could not escape it. He had become a Soviet institution,