Popularly seen as a war against all privilege, the practical ideology of the Russian Revolution owed less to Marx - whose works were hardly known by the semi-literate masses - than to the egalitarian customs and Utopian yearnings of the peasantry. Long before it was written down by Marx, the Russian people had lived by the idea that surplus wealth was immoral, all property was theft, and that manual labour was the only true source of value. In the Russian peasant mind there was Christian virtue in being poor - a fact the Bolsheviks exploited brilliantly when they called their newspaper
By giving institutional form to this crusade, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements among the poor who derived satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether such destruction brought about any improvement in their own lot. They licensed the Red Guards and other self-appointed groups of armed workers to raid the houses of 'the rich' and confiscate their property. They rounded up the leisured classes and forced them to do jobs such as clearing snow or rubbish from the streets. Akhmatova was ordered to clean the streets around the Fountain House.5 House Committees (usually made up of former porters and domestic servants) were instructed to move the urban poor into the apartments of the old privileged elites. Palaces like the Fountain House were sub-divided and made into apartment blocks. Soon after their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks unleashed a campaign of mass terror, encouraging the workers and the peasants to denounce their neighbours to Revolutionary Tribunals and the local Cheka, or political police. Almost anything could be construed as 'counterrevolutionary' - hiding property, being late for work, drunkenness or hooligan behaviour - and the prisons were soon filled. Most of those
arrested by the Cheka in the early years of the Bolshevik regime had been denounced by their neighbours - often as a result of some vendetta. In this climate of mass terror no private space was left untouched. People lived under constant scrutiny, watched all the time by the House Committees, and always fearful of arrest. This was not a time for lyric poetry.
Akhmatova was dismissed as a figure from the past. Left-wing critics said her private poetry was incompatible with the new collectivist order. Other poets of her generation, such as Pasternak, were able to adapt to the new conditions of the Revolution. Or, like Mayakovsky, they were made for it. But Akhmatova was rooted in a classical tradition that had been thrown out in 1917, and she found it hard to come to terms - as did Mandelstam - with her new Soviet environment. She wrote very little in the early Soviet years. Her energy was consumed by the struggle to survive the harsh conditions of the civil war in Petrograd, where chronic shortages of food and fuel reduced the population by more than half, as people died or fled the hungry city for the countryside. Trees and wooden houses were chopped down for firewood; horses lay dead in the middle of the road; the waters of the Moika and Fontanka were filled with rubbish; vermin and diseases spread; and the daily life of the Tsars' capital appeared to return to the prehistoric age, as desperate people scavenged for a piece of bread to eat or a stick of wood to burn.6
And confined to this savage capital,
We have forgotten forever
The lakes, the steppes, the towns,
And the dawns of our great native land.
Day and night in the bloody circle
A brutal languor overcomes us…
No one wants to help us
Because we stayed home,
Because, loving our city
And not winged freedom,
We preserved for ourselves
Its palaces, its fire and water.
A different time is drawing near,
The wind of death already chills the heart,
But the holy city of Peter
Will be our unintended monument.7
