The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
The Brest “peace” did not bring peace to the country. Each day the implications of the treaty became more clearly apparent. Under cover of the treaty, Germany concluded a separate peace with the nationalist Ukrainian Rada Government; and German and Austrian forces occupied the most fertile and the most industrialized sections of the Ukraine. A little later German troops penetrated to the provinces of the Don and the Caucasus. They cut Central Russia off from those regions which had always supplied it with vital raw materials. For the Ukraine had produced bread, the Donetz basin coal and ores, the Caucasus oil. Russia was being systematically strangled.
Now that the Soviet Government had become a one-party regime, it felt free to pursue strictly Marxist and Bolshevik (or Communist) policies. More or less openly it declared a class war on the villages where “bread was being hidden.” It ignored the tremendous achievement of land distribution and social transformation in the villages. In its narrow-mindedness, isolation and fear of hunger, it organized “proletarian” formations and sent them into the villages to requisition bread “for the city” by force of arms, and a bitter, senseless struggle was thus fomented between city and village. And German pressure was being felt in Moscow itself where the German Ambassador, Count von Mirbach, was stationed. The Embassy automatically became a rallying point for all reactionary forces. The specter of restoration appeared on the horizon.
The party of the Left Social-Revolutionaries decided to end this intolerable situation-first by lifting the heavy German yoke from the country. On July 6, 1918, two Left Social-Revolutionaries shot Count von Mirbach. His death caused consternation and a desperate resoluteness in the Kremlin, now seat of the Bolshevik Government. To the Bolsheviks the assassination spelled rebellion, an attempt by the Left Social-Revolutionaries to wrest political power from them. And they expected immediate repercussions from the German Government. They did everything possible to assure Germany that the Bolshevik Government had nothing to do with the terrorist act, and that they remained unflinchingly loyal to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And at the same time they struck out against the Left Social- Revolutionaries with mass arrests, persecutions and vilification. They drove the party underground and thus remained alone in the political arena.
In actuality the Left Social-Revolutionaries at that time had had no intentions of staging a revolt. They wanted only to force a change in those circumstances which were leading the country on the road to ruin, and in this manner re-establish the former equilibrium in the revolution. They contended that Germany was incapable of renewing her war on Russia, and the truth of this contention was demonstrated at once by the fact that Berlin did not react to the assassination with the violence it would have exhibited in the days of her great military might. (Germany at that time was already very close to defeat.)
But Lenin and Trotsky could not forgive another party for acting independently and thus challenging their dictatorship. They had already forgotten what had happened a year earlier, in the July, 1917 riots, when they themselves faced persecution and vilification for their actions. They frankly announced their plan to break up and annihilate the Left Social-Revolutionary Party. On the morning after the assassination they shot thirteen Left Social-Revolutionaries, arrested at random, with Alexandrovitch, our representative on the Cheka, at their head. They arrested Maria Spiridonova, who claimed full responsibility for the act, and jailed her in the Kremlin.
It was a deep shock for Spiridonova and thousands of her friends in the country. Only sixteen months had passed since her triumphant liberation from czarist Katorga. She had been one of the leading-and one of the beloved-personalities of the revolution and now once more she was a prisoner in the Kremlin; but this time in the hands of those with whom she had only recently fought a common fight. “I am surprised,” she wrote at that time to a friend, “how fully I am prepared for death. I cannot say that I would die now with the same sense of exultation as in 1906. Now it will be more in a matter-of-fact fashion. But when I think of the Internationale and its pure, heroic purposes, my soul catches fire just as in former days.”
The Bolshevik leaders wanted to stage an open trial of Spiridonova to break her moral prestige and that of the movement she represented. But she did not oblige them, having no confidence in their “party courts.” Instead, she issued an indictment of the Bolshevik regime in the form of her “Open Letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.” It stated in part:
“. . . The destruction of our Party signals the destruction of the Soviet revolution. The events of the past few months are ample proof, yet you have not understood it. Your senses have become so dulled that you view every restiveness among the people only as a product of propaganda or incitement.
“In your appraisal of facts you have ceased to be socialists. You are just like the Czarist government which also looked for “agitators” and explained all unrest in the country by their activities. And you are just as wrong as they were. . . .
“Everybody knows that the resistance of peasants acting in self-defense is not counter-revolution, that counter-revolution is rather in the acts that are responsible for these uprisings and in their brutal suppression. A thousand propagandists working against the Bolsheviks could not have achieved what they themselves have brought on their heads. Hundreds of peasant letters from all parts of the country tell the story of their brutalities. [24] And the peasants are not alone.
“Take the story of the sailors of Petrograd-a horrible nightmare of retribution against the perfectly legitimate expression of the people’s dissatisfaction. How could anyone be so blind? How could you get so panicky for the safety of your own skin? How could you punish so cruelly a spontaneous revolutionary action? How dared you raise your hands against those same sailors without whose support the October Revolution could not have triumphed? You denounced Kerensky and his death penalty at the front! How dared you kill here, in the hinterland, some of the best sons of the revolution? How dared you murder Haskelis only because, on instructions from the legal Left Social-Revolutionary faction of the Petrograd Soviet, he read its declaration at its session? No need even to disprove your lie, accusing him of having written a resolution passed at a meeting of sailors. For Haskelis, when you murdered him, had neither hands nor arms. Both had been amputated to the shoulders. . . .
“Your party had proclaimed great goals once and it started out well enough. The October Revolution, in which we marched together with you, was victorious because its foundations and its slogans were objectively right in the historic reality of our time, and they were genuinely supported by the working masses.
“It was truly a revolution of the working people, and Soviet power was drawn from their depths. It was then indestructible; conspiracies, uprisings could not break it. Provincial and district Soviets were elected spontaneously. There were neither dispersals nor arrests of political opponents, but free battles of party opinions. The election results everywhere showed the people’s disillusionment with the parties of compromise: the Right Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Those parties simply crumbled away. Terror against them was utterly needless and that is how it would be to this day if you had remained true to October, if you had not betrayed the principles of socialism.
“But your policy has turned out to be utter deceit of the working people. Instead of socialized industry-you have instituted state capitalism or capitalist Statism. The compulsory exploitative structure remains, with only a trivial difference in the distribution of profits. The difference is trivial because your many-headed bureaucracy will cat up more than the small heap of the bourgeoisie ever did.
“Instead of socializing the land, a move approved amid general rejoicing by the third Soviet Congress, you have manipulated its sabotage. And now that you have freed your hands by breaking with us, the Left Social-Revolutionaries, you are putting nationalization of land over on the peasants, sometimes openlo and more often furtively, sometimes by deceit and sometimes by force. And the result is: State ownership just as in industry.
“And look at your army, its structure, the system of Trotsky’s regime, who not only reintroduced, as did Kerensky, capital punishment at the front, but who is using it on a terrifying scale (Kerensky did not have time even to try it). You brought back the old mechanical discipline and punishment, including flogging, into your “socialist army.” What do you call all this if not return to the days of Nicholas, but a reforging of the old army which promises an easy road to dictatorship for all manner of home-grown Bonapartes.
“With your cynical attitude toward the Soviets; with your high-handed disbanding of Congresses and Soviets and the unpunished arrogance of Bolshevik agents, you are the true mutineers against the Soviet power.
“And when peasants drive off or kill your brazen agents, they act in self-defence against the destruction of their rights, against violence and oppression. When the people of a village or a factory elect a right-wing socialist, let them do so. It is their right, and our misfortune that we did not succeed in gaining their confidence. For the Soviets must be like a barometer, sensitive to, and allied with, the people; hence there must be unconditional freedom of elections, free play for the people’s spontaneous will; only then will there be creativity, a new life, a vibrant organism. Only then will the people feel that everything in the country is indeed their concern, not somebody else’s. That is why we fought you when you ejected the right-wing socialists from the Soviets and the Central Executive Committee. . . .
“You talk in the name of the class struggle, but in reality you have substituted for it a fiendish battle between men. To escape starvation workers march against peasants, snatching from them their last piece of bread. Thus you have sown great hatred between brothers, between land and factory workers. And it will not soon disappear.
“And what of your Cheka! In the name of the proletariat, in the name of the peasantry, you have wiped out all the moral achievements of our revolution. What have you done to our revolution which was sanctified by the immeasurable sufferings of the working people?
“For the tiny morsel of truth which you dangled before the people and which you helped achieve, you have inflated your own importance, you have arrogated monstrous powers and, like the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ [of Dostoyevsky], claim absolute authority over body and soul of the people. And when they began to reject you, you laid them in chains, pretending to combat an alleged counter-revolution.
“You are out to destroy our Party with all the means you command and you count on success in this undertaking. Because we oppose you, because we reject the forced recruitment of masses into the Communist Party and insist on their right to think independently-because of all that you deny us the opportunity to work for the revolution; you arrest our speakers as they address the working people; you beat us and you torture us.
“And now your agenda includes a trial over the Central Committee of the Left Social-Revolutionaries and over me. But I reject your trial, even to its use as a propaganda platform. . . . I reject the jurisdiction of your party over mine or over myself. If there is a tribunal to judge us, we shall appeal to the Internationale and the verdict of history. And in such a trial there is no doubt as to who will be the accused, who will be convicted and who acquitted.”
“Your tribunal consists of Party members. In the name of Party discipline it will confirm what your Party decided as far back as July.
“Whatever excuses you may find to put me on trial, you cannot force me to participate in it. Even your Cheka will prove powerless. For too long have I lain at the very bottom of life; too dearly-with every fiber of my being-do I love the revolution to fear your tortures or death. . .
“Our movement cannot be destroyed, by you or any other temporary reaction, for it lives in the hearts of our people; it is hidden in the deep recesses of their minds. The revolutionary rebirth will surely occur under the banner of this ideal: the ideal of the liberation of the human personality.”
M. Spiridonova
Kremlin, Moscow.
Five months later, in December, 1918, Spiridonova was released only to be jailed again in February, 1919. And then the incredible occurred: less than two months later she escaped from the Kremlin, where she had been watched by a thousand eyes. Nicolai Malakhov, one of the Cheka’s dependable soldiers who guarded her cell, endangered his life as he led her from behind the Kremlin walls to freedom. Immediately she “dropped down” into the underground of the Left Social-Revolutionary movement to continue the fight for her ideals. She was then thirty-four years old. [25]