Two days later he was arrested, along with the other members of the deputation to Witte and Mirsky on 8 January (they had foolishly left their visiting cards). All of them were charged (quite ridiculously, though it showed the extent of the regime’s fears) with belonging to a ‘revolutionary convention’ which had planned to seize power and establish a ‘provisional government’. They were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress.36
*
The events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, as 9 January became known, brought Gorky closer to the Bolsheviks. Gorky had first met Lenin in 1902 and had quickly fallen into a love-hate relationship with him. He had since been active in attracting funds for the Social Democrats from rich industrialists, such as Savva Morozov, who clearly saw the writing on the wall (‘These days it is necessary to be friends with one’s enemies,’ Morozov had once said to the Bolshevik Krasin). Gorky’s relationship with the Bolsheviks was never easy or straightforward. As with many intellectuals, his commitment to the revolution was romantic and idealist. He saw it as a vast struggle of the human spirit for freedom, brotherhood and spiritual improvement. His was essentially a humanist view, one which placed the individual at its heart, and he could never quite bring himself to accept the iron discipline or the narrow dogmatism of the Bolsheviks. ‘I belong to none of our parties’, he once wrote to the painter Repin, ‘and I am glad of it. For this is freedom, and man is greatly in need of that.’ The gipsies, gamblers, beggars and swindlers who filled the pages of his stories were all struggling in their own small way for individual freedom and dignity: they were not the representatives of an organized ‘proletariat’. People struggled, classes did not struggle, that was Gorky’s view. Gorky, in his own words, ‘could admire but not like’ wooden dogmatists like Lenin who tried to compress life’s diversity into their abstract theory. Being fully human meant, in his view, ‘loving passionately and painfully the living, sinning, and — forgive me — pitiful Russian’.37 It was almost a Christian view of human redemption through revolution (and Gorky flirted with Christianity). Such ideas were common among the radical intelligentsia. Witness the writings of Merezhkovsky (on ‘Christianity without Christ’), Solovyov (on ‘Godmanhood’) and Bogdanov (on ‘God-Building’), with whom Gorky was closely linked. During and after 1917 this contradiction between the party and the human goals of the revolution would bring Gorky into conflict with the Bolsheviks. But for the moment, in 1905, they were brought together by their common view that the workers’ movement had to be radicalized. This was why Gorky, in his letter to Ekaterina, had seen some good in Bloody Sunday; the effect of the massacre would be to radicalize the mood on the streets. The workers needed something like this to shake them out of their naive belief in the existence of a benevolent Tsar. Only blood could change the colour of history. Now it was time to organize the workers and to move them away from their attachment to the liberals towards socialist goals.
There was a huge wave of strikes during the weeks after Bloody Sunday. In January alone, more than 400,000 workers downed tools across the country. It was the largest ever labour protest in Russian history. But the strikes were not really organized; they were more like a spontaneous outburst of anger; and the workers’ demands were often not even formulated until after the strike had begun. The socialist parties were still much too weak to play a leading role. Their main leaders — Lenin, Martov, Trotsky, Plekhanov and Chernov — were all in exile, and although they were undoubtedly excited by what they agreed was the long-awaited start of the revolution, very few of them were in a hurry to leave the comfortable environment of their coffee houses in Geneva or Paris for the dangerous and harsh existence awaiting them back in Russia. It was only later during 1905 that they began to return and the workers rallied to the leftwing parties as they became more politicized.fn6
In the meantime the running continued to be made by the liberal and democratic opposition. Educated society was outraged by the massacre of Bloody Sunday. The student Kerensky, who had witnessed the shooting on Nevsky Prospekt, went home that evening and wrote a furious protest letter to his schoolfriends in the Guards. Two weeks later he wrote to his parents in Tashkent:
