The first thing to say about this book is that it is not by Anatoly Lunacharsky. Library catalogues list it under his name, and the publisher's blurb leads with him — "A. Lunacharsky, the first People's Commissar for Education" heads the roll of contributors — but October Storm and After: Stories and Reminiscences is an anthology of twenty pieces, and Lunacharsky's share of it is a single reminiscence of about eight hundred words. In a volume of some eighty-eight thousand, he supplies roughly one per cent. He is the marquee name on a book he did not write.
That matters, because Lunacharsky in 1974 was one of the few genuinely first-rank Bolsheviks whose name Progress Publishers could still print in gold on a cover. He had been a real intellectual — a critic who read four languages and quoted poetry in all of them, the author of plays, the man who ran Soviet education and the arts from 1917 to 1929. He had also had the good fortune, if that is the word, to die in 1933, in Menton, on his way to take up an ambassadorship. He was never arrested, never tried, never confessed to anything. He was, in the Progress catalogue's terms, safe.
And so a reader might reasonably open this book expecting Lunacharsky's testimony — expecting, above all, some part of Revolutionary Silhouettes, the sequence of pen portraits of his contemporaries that he collected in 1923 and that remains the best first-hand sketch anyone made of the Bolshevik leadership at its height. It is not here. Not the Trotsky portrait, not the Zinoviev, not the Kamenev, not the Bukharin, not the Sverdlov. Nothing from the Silhouettes appears in this volume at all. What appears instead is "Smolny on the Night of the Storm" — vivid, brief, and, by the time you have read it twice, conspicuously empty.
Nobody signs it. There is no editor's name, no compiler's name, no introduction and no index; the only editorial voice in the volume is the abbreviation "Ed." at the foot of four notes. What survives of the copyright page carries the collection's Russian title — Rasskazy o revolyutsii, or Stories of the Revolution — above the standard line stating that this is the English-language edition. The compilation, in other words, was made in Russian and then translated; October Storm and After is the export imprint's own title, and the promotion of Lunacharsky to the head of the bill is the export imprint's own decision.
The volume's treatment of dates is the finding, and it is exact. Every one of the nineteen translated pieces carries a translator's credit — George H. Hanna does twelve of them, Robert Daglish five, Margaret Wettlin and Helen Altschuler one each; only Reed's, written in English, has none. Not one of the twenty pieces carries a date of composition, a date of first publication, or a periodical or book from which it is taken, beyond an occasional gesture in a head-note ("The Tales of the Don, of which this story is one, were written in the twenties"). Two of the twenty do not even carry an author's name. The single dating statement in the entire object is on the back cover: "Many of the stories were written between 1920 and 1940, but there is also a large selection of modern writings."
That is the whole apparatus. Eighty-eight thousand words spanning perhaps five decades, and the reader is told which decade by a blurb. It is worth being concrete about what this costs. Sholokhov's story and Lunacharsky's memoir are separated from Vera Panova's by something like forty years, a world war, the Terror and Zhdanov; in this book they sit in one undifferentiated present tense in which everything was written by people who "took part in the Great October Socialist Revolution". A collection that dated its contents would be a historical source. A collection that does not is a mood.
The internal evidence puts the compilation at the end of the 1960s or a little after: the latest date the book contains is 1967, the year of Yuri German's death, given in his head-note; a photograph caption is dated 1967 as well. Nothing in the extracted text records a printing history or an earlier edition, so 1974 may be the first English appearance or may not; the book does not say.
Run the names through the text. In roughly eighty-eight thousand words about the October Revolution and the Civil War, the word Trotsky does not occur once. Neither does Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, Bogdanov, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Podvoisky or Uritsky. Stalin, for that matter, does not occur either — this is a Brezhnev-period export title, the 1956 line still nominally held, and the late dictator has been erased along with his victims. Kamenev occurs exactly once, spelt "Kameniev", performing a procedural function, inside a passage written by an American. Lenin is named seventy-nine times.
These are counted absences in a badly scanned book, so they were tested rather than assumed: the scan renders Fadeyev as "F.acleyev", Lavrenyov as "LAVBENYOV", Panova as "VEBA PANOVA" and Izvestia as an unreadable smear, and a name the scanner has chewed returns zero exactly like a name nobody wrote. Each of the names above was searched for again as a fragment and in its common variants, and run through the project's edit-distance checker. Nothing came back. The one near-miss the checker offered was "Bukhara", which is the city, in a story set in Central Asia.
The most eloquent absence is not a name at all. Lunacharsky's own piece pauses to admire "the activities of the Military Revolutionary Committee at the time of the October Revolution", and Reed's excerpt turns on a vote by armoured-car crews to withdraw their representative from the Military Revolutionary Committee. The body is named twice, in the two pieces that open the book. Its chairman is named nowhere. This is not the crude old method of writing Stalin into rooms he was not in; it is the later, tidier method of leaving the room empty and describing the furniture.
Trotsky himself had described the older technique from exile, in an essay written on 18 June 1938, three months after the last of the great Moscow trials, and a text the Fourth International thought important enough to reprint twelve years later. Of the "Practical Centre" that Soviet painting had by then made a favourite subject, he observed that Stalin "did not appear at Smolny", the staff headquarters of the insurrection, and that "in memoirs of participants in the insurrection — and there is no shortage of these — the name of Stalin is not once mentioned." Set that beside this volume, whose first item is a memoir of Smolny by a participant. In 1938 the falsification worked by insertion, and Trotsky could refute it by pointing at the memoirs. By 1974 it works by subtraction, and the memoir has been brought into line: it now mentions nobody.
The single Kamenev sighting is worth pausing on, because of where it sits. The book's second item is headed "TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (Excerpts)", and its editorial head-note quotes Lenin's preface to John Reed at generous length: "Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages." The head-note then concludes, without any apparent embarrassment: "Here we give two short excerpts from John Reed's book."
Millions of copies in all languages; two short excerpts. It is difficult to construct a more compact self-indictment. And the two excerpts have been chosen with care. One is Lenin reading the Decree on Peace to the Second Congress of Soviets; the other is a night meeting of armoured-car crews in the Mikhailovsky Riding-School, at which Krylenko argues them out of neutrality. Reed's book is a book in which Trotsky is on nearly every page — chairing the Petrograd Soviet, running the Military Revolutionary Committee, speaking at the Congress. Progress has located two stretches of it in which he happens not to be, and printed those.
Note also who else survives the excerpting. Nikolai Krylenko — "the People's Commissar for Military Affairs", in Reed's phrase — gets several hundred words of direct quotation here, ending on a genuine piece of reporting: "he tottered, almost falling; a hundred hands reached up to help him down". Krylenko was shot in 1938. He is present in this volume only because an American wrote him down in 1919 and the American's paragraph could not be filleted further without collapsing. No Soviet-authored text in the book names him.
The pattern is exact and it is not an accident. Where a revolutionary is named, he or she died in time: Sverdlov in 1919, Dzerzhinsky in 1926, Gorky in 1936, Lenin himself. Kollontai, who survived to 1952 in diplomatic exile and was never charged, is a contributor and is introduced as "a close friend of Lenin's". Krupskaya appears, safely, in someone else's recollection. The dead-in-time and the never-accused make up the entire cast.
The book has no argument in it, and that is the technique: a book with no argument in it cannot be caught making a false one. Its entire scholarly apparatus, across twenty pieces, consists of twelve footnotes. Four are the editor's, and of those, two explain what the Smolny Institute was and which presidium is meant, one glosses the Old Style calendar, and one glosses "Menshevik defencists" as "supporters of the imperialist policy of the Provisional Government". Four more are the translators', rendering Russian and Central Asian words. The remaining four belong to the authors of the pieces themselves. On the entire history of the revolution, then, Moscow's editors offered their readers one political sentence.
What the book has instead is a short biographical head-note before each piece, and these repay reading closely. Lunacharsky's runs to four sentences. He "joined a Social-Democratic organisation in 1892, when he was 17 years old; he later contributed to the Bolshevik newspapers Vperyod and Proletary under Lenin's guidance." Then: "For many years after the October Revolution he was People's Commissar for Education of the R.S.F.S.R." Then a line about his talents, and then: "Lenin had a very high opinion of Lunacharsky."
Every clause here is doing work. The years between 1908 and 1913 — when Lunacharsky was the leading exponent of "God-building", the attempt to give socialism the emotional apparatus of a religion, and when Lenin devoted much of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and a good deal of private invective to demolishing him and Bogdanov — have been folded into the phrase "under Lenin's guidance". The word Vperyod is doing something particularly neat: it was the name of Lenin's paper in 1904–05, and it was also the name of the dissident Bogdanov–Lunacharsky group and its journal after 1909. The head-note attaches it to Lenin, and the reader who does not already know is given no reason to look further.
"For many years after the October Revolution he was People's Commissar for Education" supplies no terminal date and no reason for one. Lunacharsky ran Narkompros until 1929 and was then removed, in the year the cultural revolution turned against precisely his kind of tolerance. The head-note does not say when he stopped, or why, or what he did in the four years before he died. It does not mention that he resigned from the government within a fortnight of the revolution, in distress at reports that the Kremlin's cathedrals had been shelled, and had to be talked back. Nor, of course, does it mention the Silhouettes, whose existence would immediately raise the question of what became of their subjects.
Compare what our own tradition managed to say about the same man in the same period. Trotsky, writing The Revolution Betrayed in 1936 — three years after Lunacharsky's death, and with no motive to flatter him — records that "the patronizing of all kinds of modernism by Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar of Art and Education, was often embarrassing to Lenin", and that Lenin nonetheless "confined himself to ironical remarks in private conversations, and remained remote from the idea of converting his literary tastes into law", because the state could restrict but must "in no case pretend to the role of commander in the sphere of science, literature and art". That is a portrait: the irritation and the tolerance together, and the political principle that made both possible. The head-note can manage only "Lenin had a very high opinion of Lunacharsky." It is not that the Soviet sentence is false. It is that it has had everything removed from it that would let a reader think.
Turn now to Lunacharsky's own eight hundred words, and the shape of the problem becomes plain. The second half of "Smolny on the Night of the Storm" is a memoir of the formation of the first Soviet government. "Let me add to these few scanty lines my reminiscences of the way the first Council of People's Commissars was formed. It took place in a little room in Smolny, where the chairs were hidden under the hats and coats thrown on to them." He was there; he was one of the people being chosen; and he recalls having doubts: "It seemed to me that the selection was often too casual and I was afraid that the people chosen, whom I knew well and who did not seem to me to have the training for the various specialities, were not up to the gigantic tasks ahead." Lenin "waved me aside with a gesture of annoyance but at the same time smiled" — "That's for the time being," he said, "then we'll see."
It is a wonderful small scene, and Lunacharsky was a wonderful writer of small scenes. It is also a memoir of the composition of a body in which not one member is named except Lenin. Lunacharsky, writing about the men he "knew well", names none of the men. The reader is told that "some, of course, were replaced, others retained their posts", and that "some people, of course (even some of those who had taken part in the insurrection and had not been mere onlookers), grew dizzy in face of tremendous prospects" — an insinuation floated over an empty space where thirteen names should be. Whether Lunacharsky wrote it that way, or whether the cuts were made later, the extracted text cannot tell us, and the volume's refusal to date or source a single item makes it impossible to find out. What can be said is that Progress printed it in 1974 in a form that names nobody, and that the missing list was not hard to find.
It had, in fact, been published in English by this book's opponents more than a decade earlier. Writing under the name Ernest Germain, Ernest Mandel devoted a two-part article, "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union", to the Khrushchev-era official History, in Fourth International nos. 10 and 11. (That journal's issues are numbered rather than dated, and no date can now be recovered for them; neighbouring numbers report the Twenty-First Congress of January–February 1959, which places the run in the years just after.) Noting that the History "forgets" to give the composition of the first Sovnarkom — as it also "forgets", he adds, "that Trotsky was the first Bolshevik president of the Petrograd soviet and that as such he also presided over that soviet's Revolutionary Military Committee, entrusted with preparing the insurrection" — Germain supplied the list from the source: "This can, however, be found in John Reed's book, currently on sale in the USSR: Lenin, Miliutin, Shliapnikov, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Krylenko, Dybenko, Nogin, Lunacharsky, Stepanov, Trotsky, Lomov, Teodorovich, Avilov, Stalin."
Read that list slowly, because it is the whole argument of this introduction in fourteen names. Four of the men on it died before the Terror: Lenin in 1924, Nogin the same year, Skvortsov-Stepanov in 1928, and Lunacharsky in 1933. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940. Most of the rest — Krylenko, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Shliapnikov, Dybenko and others — were shot in 1937 and 1938. Lunacharsky's presence on the cover of a 1974 Progress volume and his colleagues' absence from its pages are the same fact, seen from two ends.
The tactic of Germain's whole article is to hold Reed against the official text — "John Reed's book really does not leave a single word of the Stalinist falsification standing" — and its force comes from the fact that Reed was then legally on sale in Moscow. The same journal had already identified the exact boundary Progress would still be observing in 1974. Reviewing the new official History, a notice signed only "PF" put the method in a sentence: "this book is best characterized by what it leaves out: the Moscow trials!" — an application, the reviewer wrote, of "the lie by omission". And an earlier issue, surveying the Soviet publishing thaw, named "the preface and notes to John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World" as one of "two of the most sensational publications in the USSR in recent years", and drew the conclusion that "destalinization stops at the level just preceding the big 'purge.'" That was written before this book was compiled. This book is its confirmation: Reed is still the loophole, and by 1974 the loophole has been narrowed to two excerpts.
One head-note comes very close to giving the game away. "A. Zorich is the pseudonym of Vasily Lokot (1899–1937). He belonged to the generation of writers who entered the world of literature in the early years of the revolution. In the twenties and thirties his short stories and satirical articles were published in the columns of the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia." A satirist for the two principal Soviet newspapers, still in his thirties, stops in 1937. Lokot was shot. The book offers the dates and no explanation, and trusts that most readers will not do the subtraction.
It is worth recording what this volume does not do, because the reflex of the catalogue is missing here. The deviation vocabulary that runs through the Progress list — opportunism, revisionism, dogmatism, sectarianism — is essentially absent: zero occurrences of three of the four, and the single appearance of "opportunist" in eighty-eight thousand words is in a story by Vera Inber, where a daughter says to her father, "And don't you think it's the opportunist in you that's talking?" and he replies, "It probably is." Turned on oneself and immediately conceded — which is precisely what the label never does in the volumes that use it in earnest. This book does not denounce anybody. Its method is not the accusation; it is the empty chair.
None of which is the fault of the writers collected here, and a reader who throws the book away on the strength of the above will lose something.
Kornei Chukovsky's "People's Commissar for Education", taken from his Contemporaries, is the best thing in the volume and one of the best short accounts of Lunacharsky in English. It is affectionate and unillusioned at once. Chukovsky records the queue on the filthy staircase in Manezhny Street — teachers, inventors, librarians, circus people, futurists, Cubists, ballet dancers, Proletcult poets — and the Commissar receiving all of them. He records arguing with Lunacharsky about Walt Whitman, losing, refusing to concede, and then being asked to contribute the opposing view to his own book: "he did not object to an entirely different interpretation of the American poet's work rubbing shoulders with his own." He records the 1920 debate at the Moscow House of the Press where Mayakovsky and others attacked Lunacharsky's plays for four hours, Lunacharsky answered for two and a half, and the hall gave him an ovation at three in the morning — after which the only thing Lunacharsky said in the street was that Mayakovsky had looked sad, and he would have to go and cheer him up. Mayakovsky's verdict, quoted here, is "Lunacharsky spoke like a god."
That portrait is not propaganda, and the record it describes was real. Lunacharsky's Narkompros protected people it had no ideological sympathy with. He argued with the avant-garde rather than banning it; he thought poets, in the phrase he took from Marx and repeated after Mayakovsky's suicide, "need many caresses". Chukovsky's closing observation — that "this connoisseur of Botticelli, this fine judge of Richard Wagner, this interpreter of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Marcel Proust and Pirandello was perfectly at home among rank-and-file proletarians" — describes a combination that the Soviet cultural apparatus would not permit again for sixty years.
How completely it would not permit it was described, at the time, by people who had no stake in flattering anyone. In October 1938, reviewing a study of Soviet art in the Trotskyist New International, Edna Margolin noticed that the new doctrine of socialist realism had been proclaimed without ever being defined, and drew the obvious inference: "unformulated, it makes a better weapon against those who fall from grace." Trotsky, in the essay quoted above, was blunter still: "the art of the Stalinist period will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution." By that standard Chukovsky's Lunacharsky is another civilisation — which is exactly why Lunacharsky could still be honoured in 1974 and his testimony could not be printed.
The fiction, too, is largely real fiction. Boris Lavrenyov's The Forty First, which takes up the largest single block of the book, is a Civil War story that ends with a Red sniper shooting the White officer she has fallen in love with and collapsing on his body: "Oh, what have I done? Look at me, sweet! Open your dear blue eyes!" Nothing is resolved and nobody is vindicated. Zorich's "The Insult" is told largely from inside the head of an elderly bourgeois scientist convinced that the revolution is destroying science, and takes his grievance seriously for most of its length. Sholokhov's "The Bastard", Vsevolod Ivanov's "Letter T", Vera Inber's Central Asian stories: these were written in the 1920s and 1930s by writers who could still write, and the translations, several of them by George H. Hanna, are competent and readable. If you want to know what the revolution felt like at ground level to people who were there, the volume delivers.
That is not an accident of taste, and it is worth naming the mechanism. Five years before this book appeared, in the International Socialist Review of January–February 1969, George Saunders surveyed half a century of Soviet writing and observed that after the purges and Zhdanov, "those pioneer years came to look like a golden age of vigor, freedom, and experimentation", while "many of the finest literary talents perished in the great purges of the nineteen-thirties." An anthology assembled in Moscow at the end of the 1960s could reach back past both catastrophes and come up with genuinely good stories, precisely because the 1920s were the last stretch of Soviet literature that had not been written to order. The quality of this book is a measurement of what came after it.
The tragedy, then, is not what these writers wrote, and it is emphatically not what Lunacharsky wrote. He died in 1933. He did not live to see the Writers' Union, or the trials, or the shooting of Krylenko and Lokot, or the use that would be made of his own name forty years on. He spent his political life insisting that the revolution could afford disagreement — that an opposing reading of Whitman could sit beside his own in the same book. The charge here lies entirely against the editors who, four decades after his death, put his name on the cover of a volume assembled on the opposite principle, from which the names of his closest colleagues had been removed, and in which his own memoir of choosing a government mentions nobody he chose. He is the pretext for a book that could not have contained him.
Read it for Chukovsky, for Lavrenyov, for what Reed still manages to say through two short excerpts. Then read the Silhouettes, which are available elsewhere in English, and see who is missing.