This is the third and last volume of a trilogy written across twenty years, and the three books together record something no history of the period records as plainly: the manufacture of a reputation, in real time, by a novelist who was revising his sense of what had happened as the official version changed around him.
Here is the whole of it, in two rows of figures. We counted the names in all three books.
| The Sisters (1921) | Nineteen Eighteen (1927–28) | Bleak Morning (1940–41) | |
| Trotsky | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Stalin | 0 | 1 | 6 |
Leon Trotsky founded the Red Army, chaired the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic throughout the civil war, and lived on an armoured train between its fronts. In four hundred thousand words about that war his name does not occur once.
In Nineteen Eighteen, written in the year of his expulsion from the Party, Stalin is named a single time, in passing, at Tsaritsyn. In Bleak Morning, written twelve years later at the height of the cult, he is named six times — and this is what he does in them.
He issues timely warnings: "Stalin told us only the day before yesterday to be on the lookout for this."
He saves Perm. The Whites have taken it, the foreign press has proclaimed "the mailed fist raised over Bolshevik Russia", and then:
But Commissar Stalin — he who had twice routed Krasnov at Tsaritsyn that autumn — was sent to the banks of the Kama from Moscow (this the Whites learned through their Intelligence Service), and immediately took radical measures.
He drafts the strategy that wins the war: "the vast strategic plan drawn up by the new command of the Southern Front. Copies of this plan, typed on bluish paper and signed by Stalin, were sent to all army commanders, commanders of corps, divisional commanders, brigade commanders and regimental commanders."
He signs the decisive order, with a title:
"The order is signed by Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, Stalin, General Headquarters, Serpukhov."
And in the last pages, at a lecture in Moscow, he is pointed out across a hall: "the thin one at the end, with a black moustache is Stalin, the one who crushed Denikin."
Read those five together. A man warns, is despatched, takes radical measures, drafts the plan, signs the orders as chairman of a Revolutionary Military Council, and crushes the enemy. Every function in that list belonged, in fact, to the man who is not in the book. Nineteen Eighteen performed the removal. Bleak Morning completes the substitution.
We are not asking you to take this on our authority. The five passages are quoted above and you will meet them in the text.
The trilogy's composition dates are printed at the end of each volume, and they are the most useful thing about this edition.
The Sisters is dated August 1921 and was finished in Paris, where Alexei Tolstoy was living as an émigré. It contains neither name, which in 1921 was merely accurate: it is a novel about 1914 to 1917.
Nineteen Eighteen is dated 1928. Trotsky was expelled from the Party in November 1927 and deported to Alma-Ata in January 1928.
Bleak Morning is dated 22nd June, 1941 — the day the German army crossed the Soviet frontier. Tolstoy finished his civil-war trilogy on the morning the next war began.
So the three books are not merely a narrative sequence; they are three soundings taken at three moments in the Soviet state's relationship with its own history, by a writer who was inside that state for two of them and outside it for the first. Whatever else this trilogy is, it is an instrument that registered the change.
It would be a poor introduction that left you thinking Bleak Morning is only an exhibit, so: it is the best of the three as a novel, and by some distance.
The four people of The Sisters are dragged across the last years of the civil war and, improbably, brought back together. Katya is named two hundred and seventy-three times now and Roshchin two hundred and thirty-seven; the balance has shifted decisively from Dasha's book to theirs, and the reason is that Roshchin's story is what Tolstoy actually wanted to write.
Vadim Roshchin, the monarchist officer who told Katya at the end of Book One that revolutions calm down and a loving heart outlasts them, spends this novel crossing over. Tolstoy takes it slowly and does not make it easy or flattering. It is the most sustained piece of character work in the trilogy, and its interest for readers of this series is that it is an honest account of something that really happened to thousands of officers, told without triumph.
And there is Makhno, who is named a hundred and twenty-nine times — more often in this volume than Denikin. The Ukrainian anarchist movement is a continuous presence here rather than a rumour, as it was in Book Two, and the chapters set in its orbit are the liveliest writing Tolstoy ever did. He is not sympathetic to Makhno. But he gives the movement room, energy and a logic of its own, and a reader who knows only the official Soviet account of the makhnovshchina will find rather more on these pages than that account allows.
The Ukrainian chapters deserve their own paragraph, because they are the part of this trilogy most likely to surprise a reader who expects a Soviet novel of 1941 to be uniform.
Tolstoy is hostile to Makhno and makes no secret of it. But hostility here takes the form of portraiture rather than denunciation, and the portrait is unforgettable:
Makhno was on a spree. Attiring himself in a school uniform which he had acquired after a raid on Berdyansk, he showed off by riding all over the town on a bicycle, or, together with his aide, Karetnik, he roved the streets singing to the accordion; another time he would put in an appearance at the market, pale and irritable, trying to pick quarrels; but everyone kept out of his way, knowing the alacrity with which his revolver was prone to fly out of his trouser pocket.
A man in a stolen schoolboy's uniform, on a bicycle, with a revolver loose in his trouser pocket. It is a caricature and it is also, unmistakably, seen.
The movement gets the same treatment. Its capital at Gulyai-Polye is rendered through a fairground roundabout: two ragged men turning it by main force, two accordion players "stretching out their instruments as far as they would go, as if to fill them with all the breadth and audacity of the soul of the Makhno freemen", riders bellowing "Faster!" in peremptory bass voices until one man's cap flies off and another draws his sword and brandishes it "as if cutting off the head" of an imaginary foe — and then the onlookers drag the riders off their wooden horses and it becomes a brawl.
The anarchist utopia as a roundabout that somebody else has to push. The judgement is severe, but it is delivered as an image rather than an argument, and it leaves the reader free.
Best of all is a peasant on a stalled train, staring at the sparks, working through the succession of authorities:
"We changed the tsar for the Rada, the Rada for the hetman, and who are we going to change the hetman for? For Makhno? There was once a fool who set out to make himself a ploughshare. He kept the iron on the fire till half of it melted away, so he decided to make an axe. But half of the iron that was left melted, too, and now only enough remained to make an awl. And he banged it with his hammer until there was nothing left but a splinter."
Tsar, Rada, hetman, Makhno: ploughshare, axe, awl, splinter. That is the Ukrainian revolution of 1917 to 1920 in a folk parable, and no analysis in this series improves on it.
The other reason to read this volume is Vadim Roshchin, and Tolstoy does not let him off.
The turn does not come as a revelation. It comes as disgust, in a hotel room in White-held Ekaterinoslav, where Roshchin lies with his hands clasped behind his head and listens to himself:
"I can't go on like this," he said softly, hating the unnatural sound of his voice. The way he said it made him feel sick.... "Why 'can't' I? What does 'can't' mean? There's nothing one can't do! For that matter, one can fasten one end of one's leather belt to the door handle, and the other round one's neck.... Come on, now, Roshchin, be honest! Why all these airs and graces? You're just a beast like all the rest."
And then, "with vengeful fury", he goes over what he has been living among: women "bearing the traces of continual evacuation on their countenances, still clinging to the pitiful remnants of their dignity, wandering from one hotel to another, offering for sale all sorts of trifles 'hallowed by their associations'"; generals without commands; a whole society liquidating itself in hotel lobbies.
You're just a beast like all the rest. The conversion of the trilogy's most sympathetic reactionary begins with him refusing himself the consolation of being better than his surroundings — the same consolation he had offered Katya on the last page of Book One, when he told her that a loving heart would outlast the revolution. Tolstoy is settling an account with his own earlier ending, and he knew it.
The trilogy ends in a lecture hall in Moscow, at a meeting on the electrification of Russia — a map, a lecturer with a cue, an audience in overcoats.
Dasha is imagining a house: "we'll live in a log house, as clean as clean, with drops of resin, and big windows.... There'll be a big fire in the grate on winter mornings."
And Roshchin — the officer who once promised Katya that all this would pass — leans over and whispers to her:
"Do you realize the significance this gives to all our efforts, to the blood that has been shed, the unknown, silent sufferings....? The world will be rearranged for the common welfare.... Everyone in this hall is ready to give his life for this.... It's not just an idea of mine. They could show you scars and the bluish spots left by bullets.... And this — in my native land, and this is Russia..."
Then the man at the map, leaning on his cue "as on a spear", speaks the last words of four hundred thousand:
"The die has been cast," said the man at the map, leaning on his cue, as on a spear. "We are fighting at the barricades for our own rights and the rights of the rest of the world — to put an end once and for all to the exploitation of man by man."
22nd June, 1941
It is a fine ending and it is also, precisely, the problem. Roshchin's conversion is completed in the vocabulary of the nation — "in my native land, and this is Russia" — and the internationalist sentence that closes the book is given not to a Bolshevik but to a lecturer at a map. The trilogy that began with a stranger wanting to smash Petersburg ends with the promise to end the exploitation of man by man, written on the day the exploitation of man by man arrived from the west with tanks.
This is the last volume, so a word on the whole.
Read in order, Ordeal is not one book in three parts. It is three books by three men who happen to share a name and a set of characters.
The first was written in Paris by a count who had left Russia, for readers who had left with him. It describes a society without explaining it, gives the impulse to smash Petersburg to any disaffected visitor, and ends with a bill-sticker looking at two members of the gentry with hatred. Nothing in it is resolved and nothing is certain.
The second was written five years after its author went home, in the year the opposition was crushed. It still has the first book's eye — the German occupation administering a village by ordering the street swept, a White conspirator sliding from politics into the Antichrist, a fraudulent commissar shooting people in Lenin's name — and it has, for the first time, a paragraph in which history is explained, and the explanation has a name cut out of it.
The third was written thirteen years later, finished on the morning the Germans invaded, and it completes the operation: the missing man's functions are distributed to another man, six times, by name and title.
The trilogy is therefore worth more than the sum of its parts, and worth more than its author intended. It is a record of a gifted, adaptable and not especially brave writer being carried from one account of the revolution to another over twenty years, with the carriage visible in the text. Very few documents of the period let you watch that happen inside a single mind and a single set of characters.
And a warning against the easy reading. It would be comfortable to conclude that Tolstoy simply got worse — that the émigré was honest and the laureate was bought. The books do not support it. Bleak Morning contains the best writing of the three: the roundabout at Gulyai-Polye, Makhno on his bicycle, the ploughshare-to-splinter parable, Roshchin refusing to let himself off in a hotel room. A man does not write those passages with his eyes shut. He wrote them in the same years, in the same book, as the sentences about Perm and the bluish paper.
That combination is the actual subject of these three introductions. Not a writer who went blind, but one who could see extremely well and had learned exactly where not to look.
The Makhno chapters, Roshchin's crossing, and the last page.
And the three-book arithmetic at the head of this introduction, which is the most useful thing this series has found. Histories can be argued with. A novelist's choices about whom to mention cannot be argued with; they can only be counted. Tolstoy wrote four hundred thousand words about the Russian civil war across twenty years. The name of the man who organised its winning side appears in them zero times, and the name of the man who needed to have organised it appears once in 1928 and six times in 1941.
That is not a polemic. It is a tally, and the reader can check it.