The ‘savage instincts’ of the Russian peasants, whom Gorky hated with a vengeance, were, in his view, especially to blame for the violence of the revolution. The sole desire of the peasants, Gorky often argued, was to exact a cruel revenge on their former masters, and on all the wealthy and privileged élite, among whom they counted their self-appointed leaders among the intelligentsia. Much of the revolutionary violence in the cities — the mob trials, the anarchic looting and the ‘carting out’ of the factory bosses — he put down, like many of the Mensheviks, to the sudden influx of unskilled peasant workers into cities during the war. It was as if he refused to believe that the working class, which, like all Marxists, he saw as a force of cultural progress, might behave like peasants or hooligans. And yet he often expressed his own deep fear that the urban culture of the working class was being ‘dissolved in the peasant mass’, that the world of school and industry was being lost to the barbaric customs of the village.78
Gorky blamed the Bolsheviks for much of this. Lenin’s April Theses had, as he saw it, called prematurely for a new revolution, and in Russia’s state of backwardness this was bound to make it hostage to the peasantry. As he wrote in 1924:
I thought that the Theses sacrificed the small and heroic band of politically educated workers, as well as the truly revolutionary intelligentsia, to the Russian peasantry. The only active force in Russia would be thrown, like a pinch of salt, into the flat bog of the village, and it would dissolve without a trace, without changing the spirit, the life, the history of the nation.79
It seemed to Gorky that the cultural ideals of the socialist intelligentsia were being sacrificed by the Bolsheviks in the interests of their own political ends. The Bolsheviks were guilty of stirring up class hatred and of encouraging the ‘nihilistic masses’ to destroy the old order root and branch.
The violent clashes on the Nevsky Prospekt during the demonstrations of 20–1 April, which many people blamed on the Bolsheviks, filled Gorky with a sense of deep revulsion. His ‘untimely thoughts’ for the 23rd:
The bright wings of our young freedom are bespattered with innocent blood. Murder and violence are the arguments of despotism … We must understand that the most terrible enemy of freedom and justice is within us; it is our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings … Are we capable of understanding this? If we are incapable, if we cannot refrain from the most flagrant use of force on man, then we have no freedom … Is it possible that the memory of our vile past, the memory of how hundreds and thousands of us were shot in the streets, has implanted in us, too, the calm attitude of the executioner toward the violent death of a man? I cannot find harsh enough words to reproach those who try to prove something with bullets, bayonets, or a fist in the face. Were not these the … means by which we were kept in shameful slavery? And now, having freed ourselves from slavery externally, we continue to live dominated by the feelings of slaves.80
The role of the Bolsheviks in the abortive demonstrations of 10 June also angered him. He wrote to Ekaterina on 14 June:
I have come to the end of my tether. Physically I am still holding out. But every day my anxiety grows and I think that the crazy politics of Lenin will soon lead us to a civil war. He is completely isolated but his slogans are very popular among the mass of the uneducated workers and some of the soldiers.81
It seemed to Gorky that the ‘plebeian anger’ aroused by the Bolsheviks’ militant slogans might all too easily degenerate into a force of destruction and chaos in a peasant country such as Russia, where the mass of the people were ‘ignorant and base’. Hatred of the burzhoois would soon give way to a senseless pogrom, a class war of retribution, a ‘looting of the looters’, to adopt the Bolsheviks’ own slogan. Distrust of the democratic parties, equally fostered by the Bolsheviks, would soon become a general negation of the intelligentsia and its humanist values.
