The novel opens with something nobody can identify.
Dust smothers a Cossack village, leaving visible only the dark tops of the poplars. Out of it comes a din: dogs, horses, children crying, men swearing, women calling, a drunken accordion — "as though a huge beehive had lost its queen and was humming in frenzied distraction, many-voiced and discordant." Above it, in the blinding sky, kites turn their hooked beaks to right and to left, "but making nothing of it, for never before had there been such a sight." Then Serafimovich asks the reader the questions the kites cannot answer:
Was it a country fair? Where, then, were the tents and traders with their heaped merchandise? Was it a settlers' camp? But why the guns and limber-chests, the army carts and the stacked rifles? Was it an army? But why were there babies crying all over the place, napkins hung upon rifles to dry and cradles swung suspended from the muzzles of guns; why did young mothers suckle their babies, cows munch hay beside the artillery horses...
That is how you open a novel whose protagonist is a mass. The reader is put in the position of the bird: looking down at a hundred thousand people who do not yet constitute anything, and unable to say what they are. Everything the book goes on to do is contained in the fact that the question has no answer on page one and does have one on the last page.
We begin there deliberately, because this introduction has an unusual job. The Iron Flood is the one book in this series that our own tradition has dismissed by name, and we have to deal with that before we can do anything else.
Three dates, and the middle one is missing.
Serafimovich wrote The Iron Flood in 1924, when he was sixty-one and already a writer of thirty-five years' standing. The volume in your hands is described on its copyright leaf as the Fourth Revised Edition, 1974, published by Progress in the Soviet Authors Library, with illustrations by M. Grekov and A. Kokorin. The English is credited only as "Translated from the Russian": no translator is named, and we have not supplied one.
"Fourth Revised Edition" is doing a great deal of quiet work. It tells you that the text has been through at least four states and does not tell you what changed, when, or who decided. Serafimovich lived until 1949 and revised his own book; what happened to it after that is not disclosed here. A reader should hold the 1974 text lightly on points of detail. What follows is an account of the novel as this printing gives it, which is the only version an English reader has.
The events are real. In the summer of 1918 the Red forces in the Kuban were cut off, and a mass of poor peasants and Cossacks — with their families, their carts, their cattle and their children — fled south and west from the Cossack rising, then marched along the Black Sea coast and over the mountains of the North Caucasus to rejoin the main Red Army. That was the Taman Army. Its commander was Yepifan Iovich Kovtyukh, who appears in the novel as Kozhukh and is named on this volume's own jacket. Remember that name; we return to it at the end, and it is the reason this introduction exists.
Two things, and both are harder than the novel's reputation suggests.
The first is that the mass is the subject and is never flattered. This is not a people's army marching to victory with banners. It is a rabble that has to be terrorised into becoming an army, and Serafimovich says so. By the last chapter the men are boasting about discipline in these terms: "It can't be stricter than what we have here: when batko said he'd give us hell we all learned to behave. Just look, we march in ranks as straight as a tight string." Batko — father — is what they call Kozhukh, and what they are praising is the credible threat of a man who will have them shot. The transformation the novel exists to depict is achieved by suffering and by fear, and the book does not pretend it was achieved by persuasion.
The second is that the political argument is genuinely staged rather than settled. The best scene in the book is a stand-off round a cooking fire between the peasant soldiers and a detachment of Black Sea sailors, and Serafimovich gives the sailors — anarchists, hung with revolvers, bombs and cartridge belts, travelling with women the soldiers resent — the floor.
"Where's your Kozhukh taking you? Have you thought of that? We started the Revolution. We sank the fleet, regardless of Moscow's instructions. The Bolsheviks are messing about with the German Kaiser, making secret ... But we shan't allow the people to be betrayed. If a man betrays the people, he'll be shot on the spot. Who's your Kozhukh? An officer!"
And when the soldiers jeer at them for the women, the reply is a complete political self-account:
"Who was it that started the Revolution? The sailors. Who did the tsar shoot? Who did he drown? Who did he chain? The sailors. Who brought literature from abroad? The sailors. Who beat the bourgeois and the priests? The sailors. You're only beginning to see daylight, whereas we sailors have shed our blood in the struggle. And while we were shedding our blood for the Revolution who but you fell upon us with your tsarist bayonets?"
Rifles come up; revolvers come out; bombs are unfastened. A grey-moustached Ukrainian sergeant who had fought the whole imperialist war on the Western front, and who "when the Revolution broke out, had killed the officers of his company", takes a mouthful of hot porridge and defuses it.
Look at what is in that exchange. Brest-Litovsk denounced as a betrayal — "messing about with the German Kaiser". The Bolsheviks' use of former tsarist officers denounced as class treachery, aimed at the novel's own hero: Who's your Kozhukh? An officer! The sailors' claim to be the revolution's real vanguard, with a list of credentials that is substantially true. This is the anarcho-maximalist left of 1918 speaking in its own voice, at length, in a novel published in 1924 and still being reprinted by the Soviet state's own foreign-language house in 1974. Serafimovich does not refute them. He lets them make their case, notes that they are armed to the teeth and not sober, and moves on.
And the ending earns itself. The men sit round fires listening to speakers, and understand that they are part of something:
They did not understand, they did not know how to express it, but they felt it. ... As the veil of smoke vanished towards the star-bestrewn sky, so their jubilation waned into intangible weariness around the fires, and the great sea of people fell gently to sleep smiling. The fires went out. It was quiet. The night was blue.
A writer who can end a novel about a hundred thousand people with four words about the colour of the sky is not a writer who needs anyone's indulgence.
This printing carries, in front of the novel, an essay by Serafimovich called "How The Iron Flood Was Conceived and Written". It is the most interesting piece of front matter in this series so far, because for once the apparatus around a novel is the novelist.
It opens with him climbing the Caucasian watershed before the First World War with his son, and reaching a place where the range narrows "almost to a razor-blade thinness", with bottomless precipices on both sides, the sea to the right "reared up into a wall, an immovable wall of molten blue", and the Kuban steppe to the left. "We stood in reverent silence on the narrow isthmus, not more than two metres wide, and stared at the map of the world that lay open before us." Then the revolution, Moscow "gaping with the black holes of windows", and a question: "What about me, where was my place?"
What follows is a serious argument about the peasantry, and we quote it because a good deal of what is said about Serafimovich assumes he was incapable of one.
He rejects his own earlier subject: "Too much had already been written about the poor peasant, poverty-ridden, ignorant, long-suffering. I had written about such peasants myself and portrayed them exactly like that. But now we had the Revolution." He sets out why peasant revolt alone cannot make a revolution — "Razin's, Pugachev's and later peasant uprisings" shook the social order "but did not replace it with a new one" — and why the proletariat had to lead it, and why it could not win alone: "If the working class had been alone in the revolutionary struggle, it would have been vanquished, as it happened in previous revolutions."
Then the part that shows he knew exactly what his subject was. The peasant, he writes, "was a property-owner: he had a cow, a horse, a plot of land and a house", and that made "the fundamental difference between his psychology and the worker's". He puts the reasoning in the peasant's own mouth — do away with the landowner, take his land, and then: "I may also take his implements, a couple of cows, a couple of horses and a plough, and that is all I want. With these things I shall grow rich and enlarge my farm." And: "The majority of them did not give a thought to what would happen afterwards and had no idea how they would go on."
The march, he says, "was such a nightmarish university" that by the end "the people changed out of all recognition". And then the distinction that a doctrinaire would not have drawn: what they arrived at "might not have been conscious knowledge, as with the proletariat, but it was instinctive conviction."
Finally he explains his own last page. The real Taman force went on to Astrakhan; the novel stops before that.
Why did I put the fullstop earlier? Because my task had been fulfilled. I took anarchist mass which refused to obey and was prepared to bayonet its leaders if they displeased them and led them through terrible torments to the point when they realised they were a part of an organised force of the October Revolution. That was enough for me.
That is an artist explaining a formal decision in formal terms. Whatever else is true about this book, it was built, and the man who built it knew why every part of it was where it was.
Now the thing this introduction has to face.
In the seventh chapter of The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, Trotsky described what the bureaucracy's command over literature produces, and named names: "Mediocre but 'right-thinking' storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics." He predicted that the Thermidorian epoch would be remembered "pre-eminently as an epoch of mediocrities, laureates and toadies".
The charge has two parts and they have to be separated.
On the second part — the manufacture of classics by political criterion — Trotsky was exactly right, and the jacket of this very volume is the proof. It says that The Iron Flood "became a classic work of socialist realism". Became. Socialist realism was not proclaimed until 1934, ten years after the novel was written; the doctrine was applied backwards to a book that predates it, in order to give the doctrine ancestors. That is the identical operation this series has traced in the Russian Classics Series, where Gogol and Turgenev are annexed as forerunners of a method they could not have heard of. The jacket also quotes a personal letter from Lenin in 1920 about "how necessary your work is to the workers and all of us" — four years before The Iron Flood existed. Lenin is endorsing something else, and the endorsement is placed where a reader will take it to cover this novel. Trotsky's word for that process was "inaugurated", and it is the right word.
On the first part — mediocrity — the book in your hands does not support it. The opening with the kites is not the work of a mediocrity. Nor is the essay on the peasant as small proprietor; nor the sailors' speech; nor "the night was blue". Serafimovich was sixty-one, had been publishing since 1889, and wrote here a formally ambitious novel with a collective protagonist, at a time when that was an open technical problem and not a convention.
There is an irony in this worth naming, because it implicates both sides. The Soviet apparatus said Serafimovich's politics made him a classic. Trotsky said Serafimovich's politics were all he had. The two verdicts are opposite in intention and identical in method: each decides the value of the book from the position of its author, and neither requires anyone to read it. Our business is the second thing.
This is now the second time in this series that the judgement of 1936 has failed to fit a particular book. Fadeyev, whose later career the verdict describes exactly, wrote The Rout at twenty-five and it is not a mediocrity's novel either. The pattern is instructive rather than embarrassing. Trotsky was writing in 1936 about a machine that was then at full power, and about writers he encountered as its ornaments — laureates, officials, names on lists. He was right about the machine. He was describing men by what the machine had made of them, at a moment when their best work was already ten or fifteen years behind them and had been produced before the machine existed. A tradition that can say this about its own founder's judgement is in better health than one that cannot.
The rear flap of this 1974 printing states that the novel "is based on real events, the heroic march of the Taman Army commanded by E. I. Kovtyukh across the North Caucasus to join the main Red Army forces (summer 1918)".
Yepifan Iovich Kovtyukh was born in 1890. He was a staff captain in the tsar's army, went over to the Bolsheviks, commanded the Taman Army on the march this novel celebrates, rose to komkor in the Red Army, and commanded the 11th Rifle Corps until June 1936. He was arrested by the NKVD on 10 August 1937. His name was placed on an execution list signed by Stalin on 26 July 1938, and he was shot three days later, on 29 July. He was rehabilitated on 23 February 1956.
Read that beside the scene at the cooking fire. The sailors' jeer at the novel's hero — Who's your Kozhukh? An officer! — names precisely the category that the state would liquidate twenty years later: the former tsarist officers who had carried the Red Army through the civil war. In 1918 Serafimovich put the accusation in the mouths of anarchists and let his commander stand. In 1938 the accusation, in a new grammar, was made by the state and the commander did not stand.
And the novel went on being a classic the whole time. It was a classic while Kovtyukh was a corps commander; it was a classic while he was in the Lubyanka; it was a classic in the years when his name could not be printed; it was a classic after 1956, when it could be printed again; and in 1974 the house put it on the jacket in capital letters as the guarantee of the book's authenticity, with no indication that the man had been shot by the government that was selling you the book.
That is what the apparatus around a Soviet novel consists of. Not footnotes. A sentence of praise with a hole in the middle of it, where a name is doing the work of a certificate and the reader is not told what became of the man who earned it.
The march, and the honesty about it.
Serafimovich set out to show a mass of small proprietors turning into something that could win, and he refused every shortcut available to him: the mass begins as a rabble, its discipline is imposed by a commander it fears, its enemies on the left are allowed to state their case, and what it arrives at is not understanding but conviction it cannot articulate. There is no positive hero in the doctrinal sense, no Party organisation directing the action, and no promise at the end beyond a hundred thousand people asleep and a blue night.
Read it for that, and read the author's essay first. Then read the jacket again, and notice that of the two men named on it — the writer and the commander — the state killed one and canonised the other, and told the foreign reader about neither.