There is much that one might admire in Gorky’s brave stand against the destruction of the revolution. His despairing voice was an isolated one — which made it all the more noble and tragic. As far as the Left was concerned his ‘untimely thoughts’ were heretical — they were ‘politically incorrect’ — because it was the received view that violence and destruction were both natural and even justified by the wider goals of the revolution; and yet Gorky’s contacts with the Bolsheviks made them just as unwelcome on the Right. His own circle around Novaia zhizn’ was not so much a political faction as a loose assortment of disaffected Marxists who had no party they felt they could join. ‘I should form my own party,’ Gorky wrote to Ekaterina on 19 March, ‘but I wouldn’t know what to call it. In this party there is only one member — and that is me.’75
And yet, as Gorky himself acknowledged, his own position was full of prejudices and contradictions which only an intellectual could afford. He made sweeping moral and cultural judgements about the violence of the revolutionary crowd without ever attempting to understand this violence in its historical or social context. In his many writings on the mob trials, for example, he never considered the simple social fact that, with the cities full of crime and violence, and with no police force to uphold the law, these acts of street justice had become the only way for ordinary citizens to protect their property and themselves. Gorky did not really understand the problem; he simply judged it from a moral viewpoint.
Gorky’s cultural prejudices were nowhere more apparent than in his efforts to explain the origins of this violence. Of course he saw the need to place it in the context of the legacies of tsarism:
The conditions in which the Russian people lived in the past could foster in them neither respect for the individual, nor awareness of the citizen’s rights, nor a feeling of justice — these were conditions of absolute lawlessness, of the oppression of the individual, of the most shameless lies and bestial cruelty. And one must be amazed that with all these conditions, the people nevertheless retained in themselves quite a few human feelings and some degree of common sense.
And he was the first to stress that the barbarism of the revolution was born in the barbarism of the First World War. The mass slaughter of the trenches and the hardships of the rear had brought out the cruelty and brutishness of people, Gorky explained to Romain Rolland, hardening them to the suffering of their fellow human beings. People had developed a taste for violence and few of them, he maintained, had been shocked by the killing of the February Days. The unwritten rules of civilized behaviour had all been forgotten, the thin veneer of civilization had been stripped away, in the revolutionary explosion.76
Yet Gorky was always rather more inclined to explain this violence in terms of the Russian national character than in terms of the context in which it took place. ‘The environment in which the tragedy of the Russian Revolution has been and is being played out’, he wrote in 1922, ‘is an environment of semi-savage people. I explain the cruel manifestations of the revolution in terms of the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people.’ He never stopped to think that all social revolutions are, by their very nature, violent. Here Gorky’s view was prejudiced by his ardent Westernizing sympathies. It was his belief that all human progress and civilization derived from the West, and that all barbarism derived from the East. Socially, historically and geographically, Russia was caught between Europe and Asia. The Petrine state tradition and the Russian intelligentsia were both Westernizing influences; the peasantry were Asiatic; while the working class was in between, derived as it was from the peasantry yet capable of being civilized under the intelligentsia’s guidance. The Russian Revolution, which, Gorky realized in 1917, came essentially from the peasant depths, was an Easternizing and barbaric force. He had no illusions, as Lvov did, about the goodness or the wisdom of the simple Russian people. ‘I am turning into a pessimist, and, it seems, a misanthrope,’ he wrote to Ekaterina in mid-March. ‘In my view the overwhelming majority of the population in Russia is both evil and as stupid as pigs.’77
