1917 Diary

the politicians

Like any other year, 1917 officially ended on December 31. In a more profound way, however, the year came to an end during the nighttime hours of October 25-26 (November 7-8 New Style). That is when the Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee raised a rebellion, grabbed power by arresting the Provisional Government, and cynically used the Second Congress of Soviets to give this brazen takeover a veneer of democracy: formally, they placed power in the hands of the congress, which they by then essentially controlled, along with their temporary comrades, the SRs or Socialist Revolutionaries, with whom they would break a few months later. The Mensheviks and other leftist members of the Congress could do little but voice their objections.

And that was that.

Some rejoiced, others were indignant, while still others hastily packed their bags to flee the country, or made their way to the Don region to join the anti-Bolshevik military effort. Few truly appreciated the impact the events of that night would have on the rest of their lives.

Nicholas II and his family were still in Tobolsk. Under guard but relatively well treated, they, for the time being, lived a fairly comfortable life. By now understanding that they would not be allowed to leave Russia, they corresponded with friends and family and hoped they might at least make it to Crimea. In truth, their lives were rather dull, but then again they had always lived in isolation from society. As prisoners, they did their best to recreate their old way of life. Nicholas took walks (for now, he was still allowed this pleasure), sawed firewood, and read out loud, choosing, interestingly, books like Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three (about a brutal revolution), Ivan Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches (a powerful literary denunciation of serfdom), and Smoke (a book about revolutionaries, also by Turgenev).

Nicholas’s sweet and open-hearted daughters quickly developed something akin to friendship with their guards. The royal family even decorated Christmas trees for them and gave them presents. As Nicholas wrote in his diary:

December 24. Sunday. Before taking a walk, we prepared presents for everyone and organized the holiday celebration. During teatime, until 5 o’clock, Alex and I went to the guardhouse and decorated a Christmas tree for the 4th regiment’s 1st platoon. We visited with the guards from all the different shifts until 5:30. After supper we had a Christmas celebration with the retinue and all the servants, receiving our people until 8:00.

Meanwhile, in Yekaterinburg, the Ural Soviet already had its eye on a house belonging to Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev, an engineer and member of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party. Ipatiev had bought this fine home in the center of town in 1908, keeping the ground floor as his place of business while he and his family lived upstairs. In April 1918 Ipatiev was evicted: his home was needed to house the royal family, which the Ural Soviet was eager to have under its control. A few months later the family met its violent end there.

For now, the Romanovs, of course, had no idea that they would be shot in the basement of what is now known as Ipatiev House. They wrote letters, staged plays, and the children kept up their studies with the teachers who had followed them into exile.

Alexander Kerensky, who had left Petrograd the morning of October 25, had by now given up his desperate attempt to save Russia and was hoping to at least save himself. His efforts to work with the Cossack Ataman Pyotr Krasnov to keep Petrograd out of Bolshevik hands had failed. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks were sending envoys to the Cossacks offering safe passage to their “motherland” (most Cossacks thought of the Don region as their true home) in exchange for Kerensky. As Kerensky later recalled:

General Krasnov came to see me around 11 a.m. If I had cause to be suspicious of him in the past, after our conversation these suspicions only grew. He tried to convince me to go to Petrograd to negotiate with Lenin, assuring me that I would be perfectly safe under Cossack protection and that there was no alternative. I will not go into the details of our conversation. Looking back, I now understand what a difficult position he was in, since he was not a traitor by nature.

Kerensky escaped disguised as a sailor – not a woman, as the Bolsheviks for some reason claimed.

“Quick! Take off your jacket!” A few seconds later I had been transformed into a rather ridiculous looking sailor: the sleeves of my uniform were short, my reddish boots and leggings were obviously outdated. My navy cap was so small that it barely covered the top of my head. The disguise was topped off with some over-sized driving goggles. I said farewell to my assistant, and he left through the next room.

Kerensky lived through an adrenalin-fueled time of escape to the North, where loyal friends hid him for 40 days before he finally made it out of the country. Once he reached safety, he must have experienced a terrible let-down. Suddenly, he was irrelevant. He spent the rest of his long life, which ended in 1970, rehashing the events of 1917, trying to prove that he had said and done all the right things in the lead-up to revolution. Clearly, the end result was not right.

the military

Lavr Kornilov also had a tense November. He was still imprisoned in Bykhov, not far from Mogilev, along with other officers involved in the “Kornilov Affair,” the fumbled attempt at a military coup during the summer. After the Bolshevik takeover, investigators released almost all of the arrestees, and on November 19 the commander-in-chief, General Nikolai Dukhonin, who was already at odds with the new government he now served, ordered that the final five prisoners, including Kornilov, be released. Here is how General Denikin, also among the captives, later described the circumstances surrounding their ultimate release:

Profound disappointment, utter dejection. We were discussing the situation. A sleepless night. Our supporters from the officers’ committee and Cossack Union were racing back and forth between Mogilev and Bykhov. In the dead of night we found out about the circumstances behind Headquarters’ new decision. Members of the Cossack Union had spent a long time persuading Dukhonin to let us go to the Don, arguing that at any moment he himself, the Supreme Commander, could wind up a prisoner unless he left town. Dukhonin finally agreed to entrust the Cossack representative with supreme orders addressed to the commandant of the Bykhov prison and the head of railroads instructing that we be transferred, but with the stipulation that these documents be used only when absolutely necessary. On the 18th, the Cossacks decided that such a time had come. When Dukhonin learned that plans were being made to put us on a train, he rescinded his order and told the Cossack representative who came to see him: “It’s too soon. By issuing that order I have signed my own death sentence.”

But on the morning of the 19th Colonel Kusonsky from the General Staff appeared and informed General Kornilov: “In four hours Krylenko will arrive in Mogilev, which Headquarters will surrender without a fight. General Dukhonin has ordered me to tell you that all the prisoners must immediately leave Bykhov.”

Kornilov and Denikin were among those who headed for the Don region and began organizing the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army. The charismatic Kornilov would surely have been an asset to the Whites during the Civil War had he not died in the spring of 1918 during the storming of Yekaterinodar [modern Krasnodar]. As Denikin wrote: “There was just one enemy shell that hit the house, and it hit only one room, Kornilov’s, and he was in it, and he was the only one it killed. The ways and doings of an unfathomable will are shrouded in eternal mystery.”

Whether or not Dukhonin had doomed himself by releasing Kornilov and the other prisoners, he indeed did not last long. On November 20 (December 3 New Style) he was bayoneted to death by soldiers right in front of the Bolshevik Krylenko, who had now been officially named as Dukhonin’s replacement. Denikin describes his death:

On the 19th, commanders of shock troops that had arrived in Mogilev on their own initiative requested Dukhonin’s permission to defend Headquarters. Before disbanding, the General Army Committee said “no.” That same day, Dukhonin ordered the shock troops to leave town.

“I don’t want a fratricidal war,” he told commanders. “The Motherland will need your thousands of lives. The Bolsheviks will not give Russia true peace. You have been called to defend the Motherland from the enemy and the Constituent Assembly from being disbanded.”

Having given his blessing to others to continue the fight, he himself stayed behind. He had obviously lost confidence in everyone.

“I have had and still have a thousand chances to go into hiding. But I will not. I know that Krylenko will arrest me, and perhaps they will even shoot me. But that is a soldier’s death.”

And he died.

The following day a mob of sailors – wild, embittered, right in front of the “top chief” Krylenko – tore General Dukhonin to pieces and brutally defiled his corpse.

Krylenko went on to have an illustrious career in Soviet Russia. He became People’s Commissar for Justice and worked assiduously to implement the Stalinist terror. In his leisure time, he liked to climb mountains. This hobby ultimately served as the justification for his arrest: he was accused of spending too much time hiking around at the expense of his work. All the necessary confessions were beaten out of him and in 1938 he was convicted of membership in a “counterrevolutionary fascist-terrorist organization of mountain-climbers and tourists.”

And he was executed.

But that was far in the future. As 1917 drew to a close, amid the Christmas and New Year holidays, everyone hoped (or at least tried to hope) for a brighter future.

the intelligentsia

In the early twentieth century, Russians were in the habit of keeping diaries and wrote in them almost every day. Soldiers kept diaries in the trenches of World War I, revolutionaries and protesters kept records of their time at the barricades, inmates in prison made regular entries, and even the bed-ridden, weakened by disease, managed to keep up this habit.

But – curious thing – during the final months of 1917, people largely stopped writing in their diaries. It was almost as if, overpowered by a sense of horror and of a momentous turning point, they simply did not know how to describe what was going on around them.

On November 4, future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin wrote: “I couldn’t write yesterday. One of the more frightening days of my entire life. I fell asleep around seven. I was sobbing. Eight months of fear, slavery, indignity, and outrages! This day tops them all!”

On November 21 he made his final entry for 1917:

November 21, midnight. I’m sitting by myself, slightly drunk. The wine is restoring my courage, the sweet blur of the dream of life, perception – the sense of smell, etc. – is not so simple, there is some sort of essence of earthly existence in it. Before me stands a bottle of Appanage Wine No. 24. Sealed with the state emblem. Russia is no more! Where has it gone?... Dukhonin has been killed, headquarters has been taken, and so forth. A new patriarch of “all Rus” has been elevated to the throne now – what for?[3]

The diary entries Bunin made in 1918 were ultimately turned into the disturbing memoir, Cursed Days.

The poet Alexander Blok stopped making diary entries back in October. Toward the end of 1917 the lengthy poem The Twelve, which he wrote in January 1918, was already taking shape in his brain: clearly, the poem depicts events that took place in December: “Black night. White snow. Wind, wind! Hard to stand. Wind, wind! Across God’s entire land!” Such is the poem’s beginning, with a horrific blizzard that sweeps the old world into oblivion and presides over the birth of a new one.

It is easy to figure out the poem’s time frame. Obviously, it is winter, and in the third stanza we find a sign calling for “All Power to the Constituent Assembly,” a slogan that would have ceased making sense by January 5th, when the assembly – the repository of so much hope – finally met, had a one-day session that extended late into the night, and was then dispersed by the Bolsheviks. As legend has it, the anarchist Zheleznyakov, who was in charge of guarding the Tauride Palace, where the assembly was meeting, walked out and announced, “The guards are tired!” after which the members of the assembly left, taking with them any hope for democracy.

So Blok’s Twelve must have been marching forward with their “sovereign stride” right before Christmas, right when a new world was being born (the Russian word for Christmas being Рождество – the Birth). This is why it makes perfect sense that they are being led by Christ, carrying a bloody flag: “With gentle step, above the blizzard / Through the flakes of pearly snow, / With a crown of roses white, / At their head is Jesus Christ.”

“Arrest is possible, but to flee would be unpleasant,” Vladimir Vernadsky, a prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic Party and renowned geologist, mineralogist, and philosopher, wrote in his diary on November 5. An entry made ten days later reads:

You can’t help but think of the future. You want to find a solution that does not depend on chance circumstances. These chance circumstances can be awful for those living through them, but what is preserved as a result of them is huge in and of itself. Now, on the topic of chance, everything depends on the Constituent Assembly. Even if it is not majority Bolshevik, it’s still clear that unified Russia is over. Russia will be a federation. There has been too much of a decline of will and of respect for Great Russians. The South will gain hegemony. Siberia will play a very great role. I even dream that Austrian lands will become a part of the federation. A capital other than Moscow?

In November 1917, like so many others, Vernadsky stopped making entries in his diary, resuming only several months later. Any hope that the Constituent Assembly might survive collapsed, and Vernadsky made his way first to Ukraine, then to Crimea, but he ultimately returned to Petrograd and gradually became a top Soviet scientist. Geology is not literature or history after all. The new Soviet rulers were willing to forgive the past political sins of someone with expertise in precious metals exploration.

Not everyone in the intelligentsia felt the same way about the revolution. By autumn, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had begun 1917 with his exquisite staging of Lermontov’s Masquerade, had decided that the revolution suited his revolutionary approach to theater. After the actors of the Mariinsky Theater went on strike to protest the Bolshevik coup, Meyerhold appealed to them to support the new government. He soon joined the Bolshevik party and began to work with the People’s Commissariat for Education. A year later, in the fall of 1918, he staged Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, a strange and pioneering play about the revolution that depicts the events of 1917 as the creation of a new world.

Many members of the avant-garde – poets, artists, musicians – succumbed to the same illusion that captivated Meyerhold and Mayakovsky and decided to serve the revolution, believing that it reflected impulses akin to their own revolutionary innovations in the arts. Just a few years later it became clear that the new powers that be had little use for Futurism, Suprematism, or any of the other avant-garde isms. Soon Socialist Realism – supposedly a realistic depiction of Soviet life that in fact idealized it – was the only artistic game in town. Nobody needed Malevich’s paintings, Meyerhold’s plays, or Mayakovsky’s poetry. The gloomy gray totalitarian state began to swallow them up. Were they not aware of the common knowledge that revolutions “devour their young”?

For now, Blok was still listening to the blizzard, trying to catch the sounds of a new life and hear the steady march of the Twelve. Mayakovsky was still rapturous in his welcoming of the new world, generating such catchy lines as:

Form your lines and forward march!
It’s no time for verbal intrigues.
Quiet, orators!
The floor
Is yours,
Comrade Mauser.

Разворачивайтесь в марше!
Словесной не место кляузе.
Тише, ораторы!
Ваше
слово,
товарищ маузер

Presumably he had no idea that just thirteen years later he himself would pick up a Mauser and shoot himself in the head.

Meyerhold, for now, kept thinking up new approaches to theater and hurrying to meetings at the Education Commissariat. Bunin, meanwhile, was trying to find a way to Odessa.

“Does the eye of the eagle ever fade?” Mayakovsky asked in his famous “Left March,” quoted above, which resounded at poetry readings across the country:

Tighten
your grip on the world’s throat
proletarian fingers!
Gallant chest thrust forward!
Glue over the sky with your banners!
Who there is marching rightward?
Left!
Left!
Left!

Крепи
у мира на горле
пролетариата пальцы!
Грудью вперед бравой!
Флагами небо оклеивай!
Кто там шагает правой?
Левой!
Левой!
Левой!