{"id":84878,"date":"2019-11-18T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/accelerating-to-oblivion\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:21:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:21:56","slug":"accelerating-to-oblivion","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/accelerating-to-oblivion\/","title":{"rendered":"Accelerating to oblivion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rea<\/span>ders in the Anglophone world are far behind the French, Germans, and Russians in being able to confront Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn\u2019s massive and magisterial The Red Wheel<\/span> on its own terms. The centerpiece of that work is March 1917<\/span> (made up of four volumes), if one uses the nomenclature of the Gregorian rather than Julian calendars (Russians typically refer to the February and October revolutions of 1917, rather than March and November which are the standard usages in the West). The augmented August 1914<\/span>\u00a0centered around the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg at the beginning of World War I,<\/span> and had a cycle of chapters looking back on the Russian statesman Pyotr Stolypin\u2019s noble and tough-minded efforts to save Russia from both stagnation and revolution. November 1916<\/span> followed with a panoramic account of Russia on the eve of revolution. These \u201cnodes\u201d (the author\u2019s distinctive term for investigations of \u201cdiscrete periods of time\u201d that paved the way for Red October) were published in English in 1989 and 1999, respectively. The translator of those two nodes was the incomparable Harry T. Willetts. Solzhenitsyn believed, quite rightly, that Willetts was able to convey his prose in E<\/a>nglish exactly the way the Russian writer might have conveyed things if he wrote in English.<\/p>\n

Willetts was a true master, but he worked very slowly and eventually had to turn his attention to completing the translation of the original ninety-six-chapter version of In the First Circle<\/span>, finally published in 2009 (the eighty-seven-chapter version that appeared in the West in 1968 was \u201clightened\u201d with the faint hope of publication in the Soviet Union). Now the University of Notre Dame Press has picked up where Willetts left off, publishing Books 1 and 2 of March 1917<\/span> in lucid and faithful translations by the award-winning translator Marian Schwartz. In the 1980s, some critics in the United States and Great Britain gleefully declared The Red Wheel<\/span> a failure without the benefit of having read much or any of it. This became something of a received opinion, one that was endlessly recycled by Solzhenitsyn\u2019s \u201ccultured despisers,\u201d to cite a famous formulation by Friedrich Schleiermacher referring to the doctrinaire critics of religion. The availability in English of the first two books of March 1917<\/span> makes that judgment much harder to sustain.1<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It is true that Solzhenitsyn\u2019s book is profuse and sometimes chaotic. \u201cPlots and subplots abound,\u201d as the \u201cPublisher\u2019s Note\u201d at the beginning of the book correctly points out. But the sheer variety and heterogeneity of things treated in this node, the richly conveyed sense of chaos and impending doom, expertly and artfully capture the breakdown of civilized order. Here we see how a millennium-old nation ruled by a monarchy that had lasted a good three centuries fell apart in three days<\/span>. Book 2 of March 1917<\/span> powerfully reveals how a decent if flawed political and social order collapsed \u201cwith incredible alacrity,\u201d as Solzhenitsyn writes elsewhere. Solzhenitsyn brilliantly conveys the chaos, but as an artist he is not swayed by it. By concentrating on incidents from March 13 to March 15, 1917, Solzhenitsyn shows how all the parties had lost control of events. Neither the revolutionaries nor the partisans of the Old Regime (whether reactionaries or reformers) had any inkling or anticipation of the fateful events that would very soon tear Russia asunder. When news reached Lenin in his Zurich exile that revolution had broken out in St. Petersburg, he dismissed this report as an absurd provocation. \u201cThe Red Wheel\u201d had begun to accelerate at an extraordinary speed, and next to no one could make sense of the winds of destruction howling around them.<\/p>\n

March 1917<\/span>, while always at the service of historical and philosophical truth, largely becomes dramatic history based on \u201cthe author\u2019s extensive research in archives, administrative records, newspapers, memoirs, \u00e9migr\u00e9 collections, unpublished correspondence, family records, and other contemporary sources\u201d (to cite the \u201cPublisher\u2019s Note\u201d once again). In March 1917<\/span>, Solzhenitsyn impressively melds literature and history with elements of moral and political philosophy. If The Gulag Archipelago<\/span> reveals the dreadful telos<\/span> of \u201cthe Red Wheel,\u201d March 1917<\/span> describes the mixture of ideological inebriation, mob violence, and utter passivity on the part of a dying regime that finally made Russia\u2019s descent into seven decades of totalitarianism more or less inevitable. This time around, there was no Pyotr Stolypin to stand up to the forces of nihilism and depraved progressive ideology. Earlier volumes had shown (August 1914<\/span>, chapter 65, in particular) that Stolypin was the true king, not the weak, passive, and ineffectual Tsar Nikolai II<\/span>. Stolypin was the one statesman who could save Russia from the purblind, reactionary Right and the nihilistic and totalitarian Left.\u00a0But he had been assassinated by a double agent of the secret police and the revolutionary Left in the Kiev opera house in September 1911.<\/p>\n

In <\/span>Book 1 of Between Two Millstones<\/span>, Solzhenitsyn\u2019s \u201csketches of exile\u201d covering the years 1974 to 1978 (and also published by University of Notre Dame Press), Solzhenitsyn relates that he, too, had once accepted the widely shared judgment that the \u201cFebruary revolution\u201d brought freedom and a fleeting moment of democracy to Russia, only to be ground down in a matter of months by Bolshevik despotism and the cruel Red Terror that followed. But when working in the remarkable archives of the Hoover Institution in 1975 and 1976, Solzhenitsyn began to appreciate that \u201cthis supposedly light-bringing Revolution\u201d was marked by \u201cbaseness, meanness, hypocrisy, plebeian uniformity, and suppression of people with other points of view\u201d from the very first days of March<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The Provisional Government, dominated by feckless liberals and socialists who saw no enemies to the Left, did not really govern for a single day. They were at the mercy of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, who themselves were at the mercy of militant ideologues, Red and Redder, and angry crowds. Solzhenitsyn realized that the events of March were marked by no heroism or great deeds. The non-Communist Left had opposed every measure of the authorities, however decent, moderate, or constructive. They falsely blamed them for bread shortages. But faced with an emerging totalitarian Left, they fell silent, and allowed Russia to fall into \u201cdecay and death.\u201d Solzhenitsyn could not be more damning in his appraisal of these \u201crevolutionary events\u201d: \u201cThere was not a single week in 1917 of which the nation could be proud.\u201d Solzhenitsyn is second to none in attacking historical determinism and in defending human free will (which, rightly understood, cooperates with God\u2019s Providence). But by March 1917, he sadly concluded, \u201cit was absolutely inevitable that the Bolsheviks would come to power, that it would tumble into the hands of such people,\u201d violent, fanatical, and contemptuous of God, man, and the moral law.<\/p>\n

The monarchists portrayed in March 1917 <\/span>Book 2 are incompetent and wrongly think they can save the monarchy even as they play-act at Revolution. Vasily Shulgin frees the Peter and Paul Fortress, determined to liberate political prisoners who in fact didn\u2019t exist. The officers at the fortress, it turns out, are even more afraid of their own soldiers than they are of the revolutionary mobs. Red flags, red bows, red ribbons pop up everywhere as the revolution moves ever more to the Left. The head of the old Duma, Mikhail Rodzyanko, sees his power erode with each passing hour. He is powerless to stop thugs from attacking the portrait of the Emperor or intimidating anyone they want to at the Tauride Palace. The government had dispersed and most of the ministers were in hiding (some would end up as prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress by the end of Book 2).<\/p>\n

In <\/span>a series of wonderfully crafted \u201cStreet Scenes\u201d or \u201cFragments\u201d throughout the book, Solzhenitsyn conveys a kind of demonic lawlessness that had possessed the revolutionary crowds. Ruffians shot at apartment buildings, responding to nonexistent police snipers. Police stations were burned with impunity. Good men\u2014Colonel Balakshin, the head of a \u201cwheeled Battalion,\u201d and Captain Fergen, a courageous officer on leave from the front\u2014were killed for no good reason. People with German-sounding names were targeted. Young, and not so young, nihilists, caught up in violence for its own sake, specialized in \u201cpicking off coppers\u201d in the most brutal and mindless manner imaginable. Civilized characters, such as the monarchist historian Olda Andozerskaya, have no idea how to respond to this madness. When a revolutionary mob comes to her apartment, insanely looking for nonexistent snipers once more, she expresses her indignation. \u201cYou have no right!\u201d she exclaims. An ensign who has gone over to the revolution revealingly replies \u201cThe revolution doesn\u2019t ask for the right!\u201d This is a portent of more terrible horrors to come down the line when Russia will succumb to full-fledged totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

The insane are \u201cliberated\u201d from asylums and mix with the crowds. Two thousand criminals, among them murderers, are released from Butriki prison in Moscow, where revolution has also taken hold. Amid this collective (literal!) madness, the revolutionary Soviet issues Order No. 1 and sends it to all army units by telegram. The army is democratized overnight, and soldiers are effectively told not to obey orders from officers. And all of this in the midst of war, as more than a few responsible souls opine in the course of the work. Even the saluting of officers is forbidden in this display of anarchistic reveries which will soon give way to the iron discipline of totalitarian \u201corder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, those working to save the revolution from a dramatic leap to the left are ineffectual at best. Alexander Guchkov, the old Octobrist and monarchist who is at odds with the Tsar and who tried for months to organize a coup to save the monarchy, attempts to restore order in military units without real effect. Miliukov, the Kadet leader who becomes Foreign Minister in the Provisional Government, is shouted down by a revolutionary mob which wants to know \u201cwho elected you?\u201d A rather good question, one might add. In a series of chapters Solzhenitsyn paints a devastating portrait of Alexander Kerensky, a revolutionary windbag overcome by limitless vanity\u2014a man of the Left with a Napoleon Complex, and one whose hatred of the Tsar and the Old Regime prevents him from really resisting the new totalitarianism emerging on the left. Prince Georgi Lvov, the head of the local zemstvo<\/span> council movement, will become the first Prime Minister of the powerless and unbelievably ineffective Provisional Government. He is a lightweight of the first order, and is utterly unable to rule or move souls from the first hours of his time at the Tauride Palace. A more ineffectual and pathetic leader could not be imagined.<\/p>\n

Admiral Adrian Nepenin, the commander of the Baltic Fleet, expresses his sympathies for the revolution to his sailors and junior officers, with a misplaced confidence that freedom and order will somehow win out. In a later volume (March 1917<\/span>, chapter 418), we will see him crudely and cruelly murdered by sailors who have lost any sense of duty, decency, or decorum. As Solzhenitsyn notes, \u201cHe did not expect to be treated like this.\u201d Nor did all the liberals or socialists, or even na\u00efve monarchists, who thought that revolution directed by revolutionary mobs who kill and destroy with abandon could somehow give rise to a new and more humane political order in Russia. On the streets of Petrograd the crowds were \u201cexultant\u201d: \u201cUnbridled joy.\u201d It had been ridiculously easy to destroy a Christian monarchy of great duration. In one \u201cstreet scene,\u201d we hear the thoughts of the progressive Zinaida Gippius echoing a famous Paschal hymn: \u201cThe angels are singing in the heavens.\u201d But Pyotr Wrangel, the last and best commander of the White armies during the Russian Civil War, clearly speaks for Solzhenitsyn when he describes \u201cThe wild merriment of slaves who have lost their fear.\u201d Such nihilism can only give rise to more nihilism, ever more violent and more shameful. And eventually a new order will arise, one that combines ideological fanaticism with unprecedented forms of violence and lies. Euphoria will eventually give rise to dread in the face of soul-crushing despotism that will last for decades and will spread to other countries and continents. The March Revolution, indeed, led to nothing noble, honorable, constructive, or conducive to human liberty and dignity. It is best understood as the beginning of the end, a mindless eruption of hate and violence that allowed the ideological \u201cdemons\u201d foreseen by Dostoevsky to come to the forefront.<\/p>\n

Boo<\/span>k 2 ends with art of a very high order. In chapter 349, Guchkov and Shulgin visit Tsar Nikolai II<\/span> in the royal train car which has been circling the capital for three days. The Emperor is without an adequate sense of the extent of the collapse that has taken part in St. Petersburg and its environs. All Nikolai can think of is returning to his beloved Alix, the Empress of Russia, and his sick children. He is incapable of thinking politically or acting like a statesman who is obliged to preserve civilized order against the revolutionary deluge. Unbeknown to Guchkov and Shulgin, Nikolai has already been persuaded by his aide-de-camp Ruzsky to sign an abdication. But Nikolai waffles. He refuses to abandon the heir, suffering as the boy is from hemophilia, and to leave him to elements the Emperor cannot trust. In a chapter that is quietly suspenseful, and riveting in its own way, we see the shock of all concerned when Nikolai modifies the abdication to include himself and his son, thus turning the throne over to his brother Mikhail. But he has not consulted with Mikhail and thus has no idea if he will indeed accept the throne (he does not). Once more, the last Russian Tsar puts family\u2014and personal concerns\u2014above his political responsibilities. And in chapter 353, we see \u201cThe Emperor Alone\u201d after his abdication, at peace (of sorts), but still hoping for a miracle or divine intervention to make everything right. Passive as always, he never understood that Providence works, at least in part, in cooperation with human virtue and free will. His passivity ended up dooming an empire and paved the way for seventy years of inhuman and absolutely unprecedented totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, in his Reflections on the February Revolution<\/span>, first published in 1983, and then again in 2007 in French and Russian (on the ninetieth anniversary of the February Revolution), Solzhenitsyn makes clear that Nikolai had betrayed<\/span> Russia through fear, passivity, and his constant desire to run \u201cin ignorance, silence, night, the desert\u2014toward his family, toward his family, toward his family!\u201d Solzhenitsyn remarks that it is perfectly fine to be a Christian on the throne. But this does not give a monarch an excuse for \u201cforgetting his duties, the country\u2019s affairs, not to see this catastrophe coming.\u201d By failing to put an end to nihilistic violence by force, Nikolai unintentionally paved the way for Bolshevik despotism. The cruel murder of the royal family by Bolshevik thugs in July 1918 was a crime of the first order, Solzhenitsyn told an Italian interviewer in 2000. But Tsar Nikolai did not deserve to be canonized since his virtues were exclusively private and familial and were inextricably linked to grave flaws. He had removed himself from his God-given burdens with no real thought to the consequences. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in a pithy formulation in\u00a0Reflections on the February Revolution<\/span>: \u201cWeak Tsar, he betrayed us, all of us\u2014with respect to everything to follow<\/span>\u201d (emphasis in original).<\/p>\n

The rest of The Red Wheel<\/span> will address \u201ceverything to follow\u201d with the literary acumen and the historical and moral insight we have come to expect from Solzhenitsyn.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

1<\/a> The Red Wheel: March 1917, Node <\/span>III<\/span>, Book 2<\/span>, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Marian Schwartz; University of Notre Dame Press, 666 pages, $39.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1372,"featured_media":132131,"template":"","tags":[1171,929,1982,1983],"department_id":[561],"issue":[2910],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":70,"value_formatted":70,"value":"70","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"A worker\u2019s meeting at the Putilov Plant in Petrograd. 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