The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Over the decades of the struggle against czarism, Russian Socialist-Populists had used also the weapon of individual terror. Like their historic predecessors of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) in the 1870’s, the Social-Revolutionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century made terrorist attempts on those who wielded czarist power. The victims during these attempts were not only the representatives of czarist autocracy but, in most cases, the terrorists themselves.
In the course of this self-sacrificing struggle, scores of magnificent men and women appeared in the arena, personalities ‘ fascinating not only to the peoples of Russia, but to the entire world. Men everywhere experienced admiration and wonder at the sight of these terrorists, each of whom presented a complicated moral problem. Insofar as the Russian terrorists were men of political action, their deeds could be explained on political grounds. But it was well known that they were morally sensitive .personalities and hence the question was asked: How could they justify morally their political-terrorist deeds?
Whenever a terrorist was captured by the czarist regime, the sympathy of the progressive world outside Russia was on his side. When Maria Spiridonova, for instance, the heroic young girl from Tambov, faced the military tribunal and stood in the shadow of the gallows, public opinion in France, Britain and America stormily demanded her release.
“Most remarkable of all,” wrote Henry W. Nevinson, famous British journalist, “was the outburst of pity aroused in London by reports of her beauty, her brutal treatment, her constancy, and her silent endurance. A great meeting promoted by ‘The Friends of Russian Freedom’ was held in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, July 14, 1907. Among many indignant speeches I best remember one by Cunninghame Graham who, in describing the fate of Spiridonova, poured out invective against the Russian tyranny with something more than his usual chivalrous denunciation of wrong. Some of us, afterward, collected a considerable fund in the hope of securing her release from Siberia by the bribery of her warders or others in authority.” [6]
And still people wondered how it had been possible for a woman who served a great ideal to kill a man, even if he was the cruel and brutal General Lushenovsky, whose hobby was the burning of villages and the murder of peasant men, women and children.
The stature of these fighters for freedom consisted in the very fact that they never linked political and strategic expediency with a moral defense of their deeds. They knew that by shedding blood, even the blood of mankind’s worst enemies, they had committed a crime and a sin. What was important to them, however, was not the crime against the laws of the state, but the sin against their own souls. Therefore they never glorified “heroic” terrorist acts or their own sacrifice. They accepted it as a bitter necessity of their personal destiny and of that of their people.
Only thus can we explain the amazing fact that almost every one of them sought his own death at the consummation of his deed.
Gregory Gershuni had been one of the leading personalities in the terrorist struggle of the Social-Revolutionary Party. He had organized the successful attempt upon Plehve, Minister of the Interior, whose iron fist had suppressed the entire Russian liberation movement, and “at whose death no one in Europe shed a tear.” But when Gershuni was arrested later, and in 1904 tried by the military tribunal, he explained that “the soft-hearted and the kindly had been forced to raise the bloody sword.” And when, in 1905, freedom was proclaimed in Russia for a short moment, Gershuni wrote happily from Siberia, where he was serving his sentence of Katorga: “Will we really be able to live in Russia now? Will we no longer need to kill? Has the thrice-happy day come at last? Is this the end of the accursed struggle which the regime has forced on us? Can we leave behind, on the threshold to a new life, the guns and the bombs, as gloomy memories of a life of outlawry?”
And he added: “But may the regime be eternally cursed, eternally shamed, for depriving our hands of peaceful work and our minds of peaceful thoughts. Eternal curses on those who turned sheep into tigers, and forced those who wished only for creative effort, on the road to violence and murder. May our children’s children remember,” the terrorist concluded, “may the pages of history carry this Cain’s sign, and may these words not be forgotten: ‘This is the beast that turned the best sons of the land into murderers.’ “
The same spirit of humanism and respect for the life of man permeated the thoughts and actions of Yegor Sozonov. His had been the task of removing Minister of the Interior Plehve from the road to liberation. On July 15, 1904, on one of the streets of Petrograd, he threw the bomb which blew up the minister’s carriage and Plehve himself. Sozonov himself was wounded in the attempt; his only wonder was that he was still alive. Later, as he awaited trial in prison, he described to his parents his state of mind.
“I have committed the greatest sin man can commit. I have shed human blood. Was I born to do that? In the dreams of my youth I had hoped to do peaceful work for the welfare of man and then, suddenly, I was confronted with a frightening task, and I could not escape the responsibility. It was not fame we were seeking. Only in pain and inner struggle, under the pressure of horrid reality, did we take into our hands the sword which we were not the first to lift. . . . Yes, I am guilty before God. But I await his judgment calmly, because I know He will not try me unjustly, as they surely will here.”
Sozonov was sentenced to lifelong Katorga in Siberia. In January, 1911, he was to leave the prison confine and live under police surveillance. His mother, whom he had promised tenderness and care to make up for her sufferings, was waiting for him. His faithful and loving bride waited for him, too. And so did the party of the Social-Revolutionaries, the party to which he was tied with every fiber of his being. And yet, on the eve of his new life, Sozonov chose death.
The Czar’s Government had sent a brutal new warden to the prison where Sozonov was incarcerated. His first action had been to humiliate the political prisoners in his charge by flogging them. The entire prison population was in turmoil and Sozonov decided to try and stay the hands of the henchman by his own death. On November 28, 1910, he took poison. He left a short farewell letter to his comrades.
“Tonight I shall try to end my life. If there is one life here whose end could stop further violence, it is probably mine. I feel it with all my heart. If I did not have the hope that my death might reduce the price the Moloch exacts, I would have remained, comrades, to live and fight with you. But to wait another day, might mean to see more men victimized. Greetings to the comrades and good night. Yegor.”
He was a classic example of the Russian revolutionary terrorist. With the full passion of his soul Sozonov had wished to expiate the guilt of his deed of July 15, 1904, by sacrificing his own life. What he did not succeed in doing that day on the Petrograd street, he carried out years later in prison on a November night in 1910. All through their lives, these men and women continued to feel responsible for the blood they had shed. It was not hatred toward despotism alone, but a deep love for their fellow men that had moved them to action. For his fellow men in prison Sozonov offered his life a second time.
No wonder that, when the news reached them, the martyr’s death of Yegor Sozonov deeply impressed the entire Russian people. It so happened that at that moment Leo Tolstoy had died also, at the railway station in the lonely village where he had fled to save his soul. Russian students in all universities across the country marched in powerful protest demonstrations against the regime. The names of Sozonov and Tolstoy were linked in the moral consciousness of the oppressed. For the revolutionary “murderer,” Sozonov, and the vehement opponent of the use of force, Tolstoy-both were symbolic of the faith in the sacredness of human life.
Another exceptional person was the Social-Revolutionary Ivan Kalayev, who, in February, 1905, in Moscow, threw the bomb that killed Grand Duke Sergei. This terrorist act attracted the attention of the country if only because the victim was a member of the Czar’s family itself. But more than that, all Russians were captivated by the noble personality of the terrorist. Kalayev was a man who served an ideal and was ready to sacrifice his life. But Kalayev also loved life, he cherished a love for man, for children, for nature. In his memoirs, Sozonov wrote these words about him:
“The first tiling you felt the moment you saw Kalayev was the sense of an inner glow. He was a rare combination of strength and tenderness, of beauty and sanctity.
“His friends used to call Kalayev ‘the poet.’
“ ‘Why are we revolutionaries?’ he used to ask. ‘Surely not simply because we fight against the oppressor. No. First of all we fight for a new world which we have already perceived and conquered in our thoughts. We can see its fine contours. We know that there everything will be magnificent and beautiful’ “
And Sozonov concluded:
“It was then that I began to understand the beauty inherent in our struggle, and how closely allied are the Good and the Beautiful.”
Yet the moral issue tortured Kalayev’s conscience. Might he kill a man, even for mankind’s happiness? He was ready to take the life of Prince Sergei because the existence of this man spelled humiliation and oppression for the people, for nature, for history. But in the body of prince and despot, Kalayev still saw the deep and the eternal: the man himself. And he asked himself a thousand times whether he dare lift his hand against the sacredness of life.
As a result, a strange thing happened to Kalayev. On February 2, 1905, he stood at the determined spot in the Kremlin, bomb in hand. The prince’s carriage approached rapidly and he raised his arm. But suddenly he saw that the prince’s wife and two children were with him in the carriage. Kalayev dropped his arm and walked away. We must visualize with what difficulties an act like this was prepared, how tensely his comrades were waiting to hear from him, to understand the true meaning of his voluntary withdrawal. Later he wrote to the princess:
“I did not want your death, just as I had done everything in my power to ensure the success of my attempt on the prince.”
Two days later, on February 4, 1905, Kalayev stood once more at his post and his bomb shattered the carriage and its occupant. And here the basic character of this religious man manifested itself once more. He made no attempt to escape; he wished to be taken prisoner because he wished to pay with his own life for the sin he had committed. This action has led a modern French poet to say that Kalayev had carried the bomb as one might carry a cross. [7]
Long before that day Kalayev had written that “only he has the right to take his own and another’s life who knows the full value of life; who knows what he sacrifices when he goes to his death, and what he takes when he condemns another to death.” Now, in full readiness, he waited for his trial, the death sentence and death itself.
“Often I think of the last minute. I would have liked to die right on the spot of my deed, to give up everything, to the last drop of blood. That, indeed, would have been happiness. But there is a higher happiness-to die on the scaffold. . . . Between the act and he scaffold lies eternity, the greatest period a man can experience. Only then can he recognize the full beauty and the power of the ideal. To go to the deed, and then to die on the scaffold is as if one had given one’s life twice.”
Fate, however, decreed that Kalayev was not to have this spiritual peace, that loneliness in prison in which he could search his soul. The widow of the Grand Duke considered it necessary to visit him in his cell. She wanted to explain to him that, as a Christian, she forgave him and that her only request was for him to express his regrets in public. It is not difficult to imagine how this meeting with a woman whom he had made unhappy must have affected a sensitive person like Kalayev. Despite his pity for her as a human being he refused, of course, to condemn the deed which he had committed out of pity and love for the Russian people. He had already settled his accounts with earthly justice; he was preparing himself for the tribunal of the highest judge.
Kalayev did not ask for mercy; he was hanged. And in death he became one of the most beautiful legends among the martyrs of the Russian liberation movement, for his moral luster transcended the boundaries of a political party, a fighting organization and even of his own people.
We have already mentioned Maria Spiridonova who, as a young girl, assassinated a czarist general for his brutal torture of the peasants in Tambov Province. That was in January, 1906. It is characteristic that she who, unlike most other terrorists, lived to see the revolution, came to stand in violent opposition to the Government terror of the Bolsheviks.
She had been one of the most important personalities in the victorious revolution (John Reed, in his Ten Days That Shook the World, called her “the most powerful and most beloved woman in all Russia”). But by September, 1918, she was once more a prisoner in the Moscow Kremlin. From there she published a shattering document in the form of an “Open Letter” to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. This letter will have a special place in this book, but let us quote here the statement of Maria Spiridonova concerning revolutionary terror as she understood it. Protesting vehemently against the terroristic regime which the Bolsheviks had initiated, she wrote: “You call this terror. But in the history of the Russian Revolution this word has never meant to signify revenge or intimidation (that was its least important purpose). It did not even mean only the liquidation of one of the people’s hangmen. No. The most important element in the terror was protest against the oppression of despotism, an attempt to arouse indignation in the souls of humiliated men and women, to fire the conscience of those who stood silent in face of this humiliation. That is how the terrorist advanced on the enemy. And almost always did the terrorist combine his deed with the voluntary sacrifice of his own life and freedom. I believe that only thus was it possible to justify the terrorist act of the revolutionary.”
This was the spirit of all those who-beginning with the Narodnaya Volya and extending to the young generation of the Social- Revolutionaries-had held in their hands the revolutionary sword. The sword they wielded never became a “sacred sword.” Of course they used the weapon for political purposes and their individual acts were part of the mass struggle for the liberation of the Russian people. But they never considered terror a constituent element, a permanent method of political action, for a liberated Russia after the revolution. To them terror had been a bitter necessity; for the Bolsheviks it became a principle of government. . . . Terror not against czarism, but against the people. Wide indeed is the gulf between the terror of a Kalayev or a Spiridonova, and the rule of terror of the Bolsheviks.