From Soviet Russia (New York), Vol. 4 Nos. 15–16, April 19–26, 1921.
Copied with thanks from the Revolution’s Newsstand Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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(Victor Serge was one of the most brilliant stylists among the younger generation of those Paris Anarchists who, averse to any labor movement, believed only in “individual action.” After serving a five-year sentence in France, he went to Russia, where the November Revolution made him a complete convert to Communism. His real name Kibalchich his family, although of Belgian nationality, being of Russian decent.) |
Moscow, June 6, 1918. TWO great revolutionary parties have for more than twenty years been hearing the burden of the struggle against the autocracy. These hostile brothers- immutably hostile, resemble each other in no respect. In the rival organizations of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and the Social Revolutionist Party, and the anarchist groups, all the energies, all the varieties of temperament that existed in Russia were believed to find place. This multiplicity of forms of the revolutionary activity was the cause of its richness and its invincibility.
The Social Democratic Party, which was Marxist, which had fed on the science and on the method of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Kautsky, and was directed by a theorist who was simultaneously a brilliant publicist, perhaps the most dogmatic spirit of the Russian intellectuals of his epoch [Plekhanov], basing all its hopes on the proletariat of the cities, occupied itself in a tireless work of propaganda, devoting its forces simultaneously to political (parliamentary, in the three Dumas) and economic struggles.
This party seemed far from the fiery and active revolutionary aggressiveness of the Social Revolutionists, the heirs of the liberal Socialism of Lavrov and of Mikhailovsky, for whom the role of the individual was of greater importance than that of the masses. The Social Revolutionists, a party of intellectuals basing themselves on the other hand on the peasantry, to whom they refused to apply the Marxist formulas, conspirators of an imposing daring, continued the traditions of the great terrorists of the Narodnaya Volya. From their fighting organizations there issued forth men like Gregory Gershuni, Ivan Platonvich Kalayev, the executor of the Grand Duke Sergius, Yegor Sazonov, who gave his life twice, [The first time on the occasion of the execution of Minister von Plehve; the second time in the Akatoni Prison when he poisoned himself a short time before the date fixed for his liberation in a protest against the suffering inflicted upon his fellow prisoners.] Maria Spiridonova – and some of the others! The fighting organization has hundreds of terrorist acts to its credit, and each time a man, a woman, or a boy or girl, chosen among the most trusty and most firmly grounded militants went voluntarily to the sacrifice. For months the act would be prepared by the militants, who lived only to accomplish their terrible work. Boris Savinkov one of these heroes-and who alas has since fallen to become the accomplice of the Kornilovs and the Kolchaks, has set down the experiences of terrorists who were disguised as coachmen or traveling peddlers, with the task of executing a minister who had been condemned to die. Psychologists will discuss at a later date the mentality of these idealists, these intellectuals, who in their self-denial and bravery may he compared with the great mystics- but who, fed on science and on modem literature, and scorning the old beliefs were matured by a profound sense of social duty, and by ideas of which it is impossible to deny a vision of a new faith.
History has been merciless to the Russian Revolutionary Socialist Party. Corrupted by too easy an accession to power with Minister Kerensky, swelled by the numbers of all the political and military adventurers of the crumbling period which followed the autocracy, intoxicated by its rule, beset by the chancelleries of the Entente and hounded by the revolutionary masses which were demanding peace and the social revolution, it proved itself powerless to bring about its own ideal even after it had been attenuated and impoverished to the proportions of a democracy,- that called itself officially a Socialist Republic. Its most energetic leader, Savinkov, compromised himself with reaction, in the pitiable adventure with General Kornilov, an improvised dictator who was defeated three days afterwards. The party was cast out from power by the storm of November, 1917, and replaced by the Bolshevik People’s Commissars. Its most visible champion, the man who lasted for an hour, Kerensky, was only a violent and grandiloquent but mediocre orator [Compare the picture by Sukhanov on this in his “Notes on the Revolution”]; the well-known, the great leader Chernov, who for a moment spoke in the name of the majority of the Constituent Assembly, was able neither to have the party’s social reform program carried out, nor to defend it against an early parliamentary gangrene; Avksentiev, an elegant and distinguished orator, compromised himself stupidly with the directorate which permitted Kolchak to elevate himself to power, and which Kolchak in turn caused to be arrested; the heroic grandmother of the revolution, Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who has fallen into a sort of an anti-Bolshevist hysteria, was destined to be hooted in America by angry and disappointed Russian workers. How sad all this is! The Social Revolution in November was destined to be carried out against ”these revolutionists” of the day before, to sweep them aside, to throw them into the worst reaction, to cause even their names to be shamed, even the name of the very party for which the Kalayevs and Sazonovs had died.
It was on June 6, 1918, that the Russian Social Revolutionist Party tragically put an end to its career. It had long before divided into two opposing groups, the party of the right, clearly reactionary, advocate of parliamentary democracy, which was gladly supported by the armies of the Allies themselves; and a party of the left which is ardently pro-Soviet, and which after November shared with the Bolshevik Communists the responsibility of power.
It was a terrible moment: one of the hours of history in which the destiny of nations seems to hang by a single hair. The Revolution was being strangled in a noose. The peace of Brest Litovsk, signed a few days before, left it demoralized, ruined, dejected; and only its most farseeing and most stoical sons were still free from doubt. The victorious Germans were advancing, nevertheless, toward Voronezh, Kursk. Briansk. without a possibility of opposing any force to them. The Allies were disembarking at Murmansk and executing people at Kem. M. Noulens, Ambassador of France, and Savinkov who had become his accomplice, caused the insurrections of Yaroslav and Kazan to blaze forth, and produced the revolt of the Czecho-Slovaks. In the press of two worlds there was no question except that of Allied, Japanese and American intervention. The future was black. Lenin had said: “We must have a moment of respite.” And such a moment really was necessary. There was among the few men who desired this moment and who paid for it stoically with a historical humiliation, a sort of cold, lucid, resolute heroism. The Fifth Congress of Soviets approved of them, hut it was impossible to bring about this approval without a great internal struggle. Under other circumstances, in view of the complete disaster of the country, the revolutionary proletariat rebelled against the “capitulation” and caused the Red flag of the Commune to wave over Paris. An action in a contrary, purely national direction, was apparently the result in Russia. And the Social Revolutionist Party of the Left, until then allied, suddenly became a mortal enemy. And as a matter of fact, in times where compromise is dead and fanaticism supreme, in other words, in times of revolution two parties, the Girondist and the Mountain, The Commune and the Convention, cannot exist side by side. The mentality of men is such that the dissenter, the one who opposes our ideas, first a suspect, in a short time becomes a traitor, a treacherous enemy, the foreigner’s stool pigeon, the possible murderer. The best of the Social Revolutionaries (Spiridonova) went so far as to repeat the base calumny that had been trotted out by the Allied newspapers: Lenin and Trotsky are agents of Germany. The Bolshevik press could not afford to delay reproaching the Social Revolutionists for playing the game of the Entente.
On June 6, about three o’clock in the afternoon, two terrorists, acting in the name of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionist Party, Andreyev and Blumkin (Jakov Gregorievich), executed Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador. Moscow was in great excitement, for it might mean war. Yet all that came of it was street fighting, executions on the street comers, and cannon thundering in the squares. And it was in this street fighting that the Social Revolutionist Party of the Left perished.
... When they left the small mansion of the German Embassy, on Denezhny Pereulok, the two terrorists got away in an automobile and reported to the Central Committee of the Party, where they placed themselves under the protection of Popov’s army contingents. Dzerzhinsky, President of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating the Counter-revolution, appeared without companions and demanded the surrender of the guilty ones whose act was an open breach of the clearly expressed will of the Congress of Soviets. He was answered that the Committee would assume the entire responsibility for the act, and the Committee was arrested. A few hours later the battle opened. On June 8 at four o’clock it was over. For a moment the Social Revolutionists had been in control of the post office and the telegraph office. Their artillery had fired on the Kremlin where the Council of People’s Commissars was in session. A few cannon balls had been enough to demolish the General Staff of the rebellious party, and 400 men in all were arrested. A contingent arriving in great haste from Petrograd was disarmed. And this adventure cost the life of the workingman Alexandrovich, one of the fine characters of the early days of the Revolution, one of the leaders of the first Soviet of the pre-November days – who, now an assistant to Dzerzhinsky in the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) had there prepared the uprising, the papers, the forged documents, which it would need in its course. He was executed.
Could this adventure have been avoided? It seems on the contrary that it was predestined by fate, in so far as we are the instruments of fate. Ambitions to govern, revolutionary fire, revolt against the odious peace of Brest Litovsk, the terrorist traditions and the organization of the party, all these are psychological factors that sufficiently explain their actions. The gravest of their consequences was the end of Russian political life. From now on only one party governed; a single party existed. There was no longer any rivalry, opposition, or discussion. The last rival of the Communist Party had committed suicide in the uprising of June 6, 7, and 8. And the eagerness of the Bolsheviki to remain exclusive was justified by their bitter experience: their only ally had at the most critical moment turned against them.
At present this is ancient history and almost forgotten. Many people no longer know how one of the great parties in the revolution met its end. Many heroes are consigned to oblivion, many are victims. But a number of them still survive and the future still may appreciate them at their proper value. Of the leaders of the June 6 movement, Maria Spiridonova, sick and poor, is now somewhere in hiding in Moscow; Kamkov, lean, irritable, is imprisoned. Of the two men who killed Count Mirbach, one lives at Moscow with his wife at the Hotel Metropole, the Second Soviet House, and is therefore the neighbor of Bukharin and Chicherin.
A room in the Metropole opening on a gray court, so gray that in the scant daylight that comes in through the window it would be impossible to work without turning on the electric light. The moisture creeps along the walls of which the paper bulges and hangs loose in places, for the entire hotel is in a condition of advanced dilapidation. The water pipes have burst in several places, flooding certain apartments. This room is one of the poorest in appearance in spite of its regular furniture, its divan and chairs burdened with boob, two desks on which manuscripts and documents are accumulating and the large curtains cutting off the alcove. On the walls are several portraits.
Jakov Gregorievich Blumkin is rather tall, his face of a yellowish pallor, surrounded by a fringe of black heard, which is rather abundant, but short. His aquiline nose, his somewhat large mouth and thin lips are expressive and mobile. His black eyes are somewhat elongated, and look you straight in the face with energy. The head is handsome and regular. It may be that it is his hair or his beard; but you would say that he was a Romanticist of 1820 or 1848, one of those insurgents who were simultaneously poets, cavaliers, and gallants. He is at the prime of life: hardly more than thirty. His wife, a simple young woman of regular features, with black hair, listens to our conversation without apparent interest.
Jakov Gregorievich, now recovering from several wounds he received in the Ukraine – his former companions in arms had made up their minds to kill him because he was working with the Bolsheviki- is at present studying Oriental languages, and preparing a work on terrorism.
For terrorism is the great interest, the master idea of this man. He speaks of it deliberately, with learning, with conviction, with the persuasive tone of one who is not touched by any double. He is of the race of those who think that acts of revolution maturely reflected, conceived in cool blood, executed with daring self-denial may have a decisive effect on the course of revolutionary periods, or at any rate in social struggles.
We spoke of the act of June 6. I mentioned what joy had broken out among us, who were exiled and imprisoned in a foreign land, on the occasion of the execution of Count Mirbach, which proved after the execution of Marshal Eichorn, that the Revolution had lost nothing of its inner forces; but I also mentioned that we had understood this act as playing the game of the Entente, which desired a new war between Russia and Germany.
Jakov Gregorievich answered me as follows:
”This is one of the tragic sides of our situation. We never were in the pay of anyone. Do you think that people do things like that for anyone for anything?”
And, his head thrown back, he looked at me questioningly, with a tranquil pride in his eyes.
“One does such things because one must, because one’s conscience, one’s revolutionary conviction, dictate that imperatively. This act was necessary. The events in the sequel have proved that we were right. And immediately after, whatever might have been the anger against us, the atmosphere seemed purified. The Fifth Congress of Soviets had ended in a sort of collapse – and it was well understood later that we had washed a blot from the Revolution.”
Why not take a position above considerations of party and tactics? History makes a game of all the forces and the greatest results in revolutions are sometimes attained by such unforeseen reactions. I remember at this moment that at the time when the drama was being accomplished, I marvelled at the fact that even in their most tragic contradictions the two great Russian parties were serving the revolution to which both had devoted themselves. While the Bolsheviki in signing the peace at Brest Litovsk were sidetracking all the plans of allied imperialism, the irreducible Social Revolutionists were turning against German imperialism the redoubtable army of terrorism.
“We wanted at first”, says Jakov Gregorievich, “to clear the air after the shame of the treaty, to show to the world that our revolutionary vigor remains intact. And besides, we know perfectly what was the internal situation of Germany.”
Blumkin picked up from the table a small miniature photograph framed in brown wood, the portrait of a young man with the open countenance of a worker, a clear-cut, somewhat odd chin, doubtless a blond type –
“Andreyev”, he said to me. “My companion on June 6. He has since been killed in the Ukraine, where he was working in the General Staff, I think of the army of the anarchist partizans of Makhno.
Jakov Gregorievich is anxious to tell me in a few words about the tragic 6th of June. I can call up in my mind the little mansion on Denezhny Pereulok which was then the German Embassy. The street bordered with gardens, quiet and gay, the summer atmosphere, the rich houses, little palaces for the moat part of one story only, where formerly the very rich lived, the Embassy with the wrought iron fence of its garden, topped with a border of green foliage, its elegant little building of cut stone, its austere balcony, its marble vestibule, than the splendid antechamber in a style half Gothic, half ancient Russian, recalling certain old apartments of the Kremlin: somber carvings of wood, a high gallery, tapestry and near the gate of the hall of honor, the tambour whose duty it was to announce visitors.
I also have passed through the little parlors in the French Louis XV style, filled with graceful objects, tapestried with embroidered silks, furnished with little round tables and rare marbles, with pretty furniture covered with trinkets, with divans, and sculptures. I entered the Cabinet of Count Mirbach, in which the portieres of light coffee color, the comfortable leather armchairs, the secretaries, produce an insinuating atmosphere of comfort, of well-being, of dignity and elegance.
And in that apartment I saw working, together with Bukharin, the most adroit and able theoretician of Bolshevism, two other ambassadors, those rather modest militants: Berzin, pale, delicate, sickly, who represented the Russian Soviets in Switzerland, and Rudniansky, smooth shaven, with hard blue eyes, the representative of the Hungarian Soviets in Russia. Times have changed: the mansion of the German Embassy is now the House of the Third International. There also the water pipes froze through lack of heating facilities, and then burst, so that even through these luxurious boudoirs the water trickles from the ceiling, destroys the splendid paintings, the silken tapestries, and gnaws at the carpets. This is the place to which Andreyev and Blumkin came in an automobile on June 6, 1918, about 3 p.m.
“We had papers with us (of course they were forged) of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating the Counter-revolution), which ordered us to interview Count Mirbach- but he was obstinate, for a quarter of an hour, and we were obliged to insist. We had ourselves increased the difficulties of the undertaking by having a telephone message sent him asking him not to receive anyone without having first consulted the President of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky. For we feared there might he an awkward attempt to carry out the act, which would have spoiled everything. I was obliged to press my demand. Our errand was of the greatest importance, it concerned the family of the Ambassador-it was a good pretext for a certain Lieutenant Mirbach, a nephew or cousin of our Mirbach, had just been arrested for espionage. This discussion took place in the reception room, whose windows opened on the street.”
The beautiful apartment of light marble, with its things of pink, of brown-grenade, orange, walnut, it has changed but little since then. The flowers and the allegorical figures, the bluish notes of the ceiling, introduce somewhat striking elements into the design. Along the walls the armchairs with their high hacks, a light yellow, in old Russian style, have been left in their position. Not far from the window there is a divan of similar style, decorated with two wooden sculptures, representing voluptuous nude female figures covered with light veils. The apartment is very rich, very bright. The damage done by the explosion of the bomb has not been repaired. The moldings of the ceiling are broken; chips of marble have been detached by the explosion, and the walls in one corner are cracked. On the floor there is a reddish-brown stain – blood perhaps, Andreyev and Blumkin were in this room when the Ambassador, disturbed by their persistence, came out to meet them and took them into an adjoining study.
They took seats near the table – Count Mirbach, one of his secretaries, a German officer, and the two terrorists. This, says Blumkin, was the most terrible moment for him. Andreyev had his hand grenade in his pocket; had he moved his hand toward the pocket be would have attracted the attention of those present, who were following his movements closely. The moment had to be carefully chosen. The Ambassador was becoming bored with the extended interview, was showing some indifference with regard to the Mirbach who had been put behind the bars as a spy.
“This went on for about twenty minutes,” says Yakov Gregoryevich, “twenty infernal minutes, during which I was looking into the eyes of this man, talking to him in clear sentences, courteously, seeking one pretext after another, drawing upon my entire imagination for material with which to embroider the story, and all the time obstinately clinging to the thought: I must kill him, – kill him, – kill him.”
Blumkin finally found a pretext to take out his portfolio, opened it brusquely and said: “I have here a document which –“, took out his Browning from the portfolio and shot at the Ambassador.
At once there was panic all over the house. The secretary, the officers, thought only of finding shelter behind the furniture or outside the room. While they were making themselves scarce, “flattening themselves out” along the carpet, getting off into neighboring rooms, Count Mirbach rose and ran across the reception room toward an exit. He was wounded and fell before he reached the door. Then Andreyev threw the hand grenade, which did not explode. Blumkin had to dash forward, seize the bomb, and throw it again, this time with force, against the hard wood floor, and at that moment he saw the supplicating glance of the wounded man, stretched at his feet, turning towards him, the man who was half dead, and who was about to be torn to pieces.
The explosion smashed all the windows and threw Blumkin out through one of them. Andreyev was already outside. In falling, Yakov Gregoryevich broke a leg. The two terrorists had agreed that if one of them should be wounded the other was to dispatch him and think only of making his own escape. But Andreyev insisted on helping his comrade, who had been hit in the thigh by a bullet discharged by the sentinel, and got him safely to the car. In the vehicle they passed through the streets, to the accompaniment of rapid cracks of rifles, but there was no real pursuit of them, the panic and confusion being too great.
How many eventful happenings since! The German Revolution, the Versailles Peace, intervention, the civil war in Russia, the terror, Denikin, Yudenich, Kolchak, the def eat of all these, the victory of the Soviets, the approach of peace! Yakov Gregoryevich, after his personal safety was assured, on the fall of the German imperialism, did not resign himself to inaction. His party has no political significance at this moment, but the groups of valorous militants are still at work, not at Moscow, but where there is danger, in Ukraine, in Siberia. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, which a short time previously had declared Yakov Gregoryevich Blumkin to be an outlaw, now confided to him “missions” in Ukraine and Siberia. There was to be, in the latter region, an attempt on the person of the Supreme Ruler, Admiral Kolchak, who has since been executed (Feb. 7, 1920.) The Extraordinary Commission which once was looking for the terrorist all over Russia, is now holding its archives open for his use, so that he may avail himself of these documents in order to write his book on terrorism. And he amuses himself sometimes with the fantastic versions that have accumulated in this pile of official papers and deposition.
Because he consented to work with the Bolsheviks, Yakov Gregoryevich became an object, in Ukraine, of three successive attempts on his life on the part of certain Socialist Revolutionists of the Left. Such is their party fanaticism. All three attempts were committed at Kiev, within a period of two weeks, from June 6 to June 20, 1919.
At the first attempt, pistol shots were fired at him without hitting him. The second time he came near being killed: a bullet passed through his head. The third time, a bomb was thrown at him through a window of the hospital where he was lying wounded on his couch of suffering. Fortunately for him, the explosion took place outside. It is almost by a miracle that this terrorist remains alive. For the hatred of the Germans also pursued him, with equal bitterness. His wife, for instance, tells us with a smile that man of the same name received three revolver shots from a German non-commissioned officer in a little town of Ukraine, merely because the officer had noticed the name.
“And now?” I asked. “And now” he answered “I am studying the Oriental languages. The future of the revolution is in the East.”
He is standing, tall, with his high brow, his black hair, and beard, imparting to his face a somewhat sickly pallor, in which his eyes shine with a sombre light. His voice is warm, his movements supple, and I reflect that this man who has attempted such terrible sacrifices, who has been ignored, is nevertheless one of the most beautiful figures of the Revolution and of present day Russia- one of the few survivors of the race of the great terrorists, a handful who long before the great revolts of the masses were strong enough in their daring and their abnegation to cause thrones to tremble. He has conscience, will, energy, conviction, devotion. A peculiar favor of Nature has caused her to confer upon him also great physical vigor and a kind of beauty. He is a man.
Moscow, March 7, 1920
Soviet Russia began in the summer of 1919, published by the Bureau of Information of Soviet Russia and replaced The Weekly Bulletin of the Bureau of Information of Soviet Russia. In lieu of an Embassy the Russian Soviet Government Bureau was the official voice of the Soviets in the US. Soviet Russia was published as the official organ of the RSGB until February 1922 when Soviet Russia became to the official organ of The Friends of Soviet Russia, becoming Soviet Russia Pictorial in 1923. There is no better US-published source for information on the Soviet state at this time, and includes official statements, articles by prominent Bolsheviks, data on the Soviet economy, weekly reports on the wars for survival the Soviets were engaged in, as well as efforts to in the US to lift the blockade and begin trade with the emerging Soviet Union.
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