One might well ask why the Bolshevik moderates, who were openly opposed to the use of political terror and enjoyed widespread support among the party rank and file, failed to act as a more effective brake on the Leninist zealots. The answer surely lies in the psychological weakness of the moderates and the autocratic status of Lenin among the party leaders after the ‘victory’ of October.fn9 None of the Bolshevik moderates had either the courage or the capacity for leadership to stand up against Lenin and run the risk of splitting the party. The five who had been brave enough to resign from the Central Committee on 4 November all sooner or later made their peace with Lenin: Zinoviev, who had always been a coward and an opportunist, was the first to recant on 8 November, and was readmitted to the Central Committee; Kamenev, Miliutin, Nogin and Rykov held out three weeks longer. To a greater or lesser extent, the fundamental weakness of all the moderates was their own intellectualism. While it made them uncomfortable with the idea of the Terror, it also deprived them of the means to take their fight against it beyond the realm of words. Lunacharsky was a perfect example. On 2 November he had burst into tears at a Sovnarkom meeting, and subsequently resigned as Commissar of Enlightenment, after hearing reports that the Bolshevik bombardment of the Kremlin had destroyed St Basil’s Cathedral during the fighting in Moscow. ‘I cannot bear it any longer,’ he had written in Novaia zhizn’. ‘My cup is full. I am powerless to stop this barbarism.’ When these reports turned out to be false he had withdrawn his resignation; yet he remained just as frustrated by his impotence against the Bolshevik Terror. Gorky, one of his oldest political friends, who later plagued him with requests to save the country’s writers and artists from persecution, summed up the situation of the moderates in a New Year’s letter to Ekaterina:
It is clear that Russia is heading for a new and even more savage autocracy. Yesterday I called on the ‘Commissar of Justice’, a decent enough man but, like all the representatives of ‘the authorities’, utterly impotent. I pleaded with him to release Vernadsky, it seems without success … Lunacharsky’s behaviour is astonishingly absurd and ludicrous — he is both a comical and a tragic figure. All the Bolsheviks of his ilk have become repulsively pitiable and wretched.52
