Socialism for Gorky had always been essentially a cultural ideal. It meant for him the building of a humanist civilization based on the principles of democracy and on the development of the people’s moral, spiritual and intellectual forces. ‘The new political life’, he wrote in April, ‘demands from us a new structure of the soul.’ And yet the revolution, as he saw it, had unleashed an ‘anarchic wave of plebeian violence and revenge’ which threatened to destroy Russian civilization. There had been no ‘social revolution’, as Gorky understood the term, but only a ‘zoological’ outburst of violence and destruction. Instead of heralding a new civilization, the Russian Revolution had brought the country to the brink of a ‘new dark age of barbaric chaos’, in which the instincts of revenge and hatred would overcome all that was good in the people. The task of the democratic intelligentsia, as he saw it in 1917, was the defence of civilization against the destructive violence of the crowd. It was, in his own Arnoldian terms, a struggle of ‘culture against anarchy’.69
The violent rejection of everything associated with the old civilization was an integral element of the February Revolution. Symbols of the imperial regime were destroyed, statues of tsarist heroes were smashed, street names were changed. Peasants vandalized manor houses, churches and schools. They burned down libraries and smashed up priceless works of art.
Many romantic socialists saw this iconoclastic violence as a ‘natural’ (i.e. positive) revolutionary impulse from an oppressed people with much to avenge. Trotsky, for example, spoke in idealistic terms of the revolution, even through the incitement of aggression, arousing the human personality.
It is natural that persons unaccustomed to revolution and its psychology, or persons who have previously only experienced in the realm of ideas that which has unfolded before them physically, materially, may view with some sorrow, if not disgust, the anarchic wildness and violence which appeared on the surface of the revolutionary events. Yet in that riotous anarchy, even in its most negative manifestations, when the soldier, yesterday’s slave, all of a sudden found himself in a first-class railway carriage and tore out the velvet facings to make himself foot-cloths, even in such an act of vandalism the awakening of the personality was expressed. That downtrodden, persecuted Russian peasant, who had been struck in the face and subjected to the vilest curses, found himself, for perhaps the first time in his life, in a first-class carriage and saw the velvet cushions, while on his feet he had stinking rags, and he tore up the velvet, saying that he too had the right to a piece of good silk or velvet.
And there were many leftwing intellectuals who saw the violence in similar terms. Some, like Blok, idealized the burning down of the old Russia as an exorcism of its sinful past, and believed that out of this destruction of the old world a new and more fraternal world, perhaps even a more Christian world, would be created. Hence Blok, in his famous poem ‘The Twelve’ (written in January 1918), portrayed Christ at the head of the Red Guards. Others, like Voloshin, Mandelstam and Belyi, were rather more ambivalent towards the revolutionary violence, welcoming it, on the one hand, as a just and elemental force, while, on the other, expressing horror at its savage cruelty.70
But Gorky saw only darkness in the violence. He was appalled by what, he had no doubts, were its inevitable consequences, the moral corruption of the revolution and the people’s descent into barbarism. He was, as always, quite uncompromising and outspoken in his condemnations of the violence in his well-known column, ‘Untimely Thoughts’, which he published in his newspaper Novaia zhizn’ during 1917 and 1918. He condemned the boom in royal pornography as ‘poisonous filth’, whose only real effect was to arouse the ‘dark instincts of the mob’. Later, during the Red Terror, he would take up the defence of several Romanovs, including even a Grand Duke, seeing them as the ‘poor scapegoats of the Revolution, martyrs to the fanaticism of the times’. He was even more appalled by the ‘rise of anti-Semitism, the pogrom mentality of the working class’, a class upon which, like all the Marxists, he had placed great faith as a liberating and moral force. Gorky also condemned the vandalism of the peasant revolution. He saw the destruction of the gentry’s manors, with their libraries and fine art, as nothing less than an attack on civilization. In March 1917, after hearing rumours that the crowds were about to smash the equestrian statue of Alexander III in Znamenskaya Square, Gorky held a meeting of fifty leading cultural figures in his flat, and out of this was formed a twelve-man commission to campaign for the preservation of all artistic monuments and historic buildings. The ‘Gorky Commission’ it was often called.71
