Here is how this novel describes the creation of the Red Army in the autumn of 1918. Read it once for what it says, and then read it again for what is missing.
...mobilized the staunchest Communists of Moscow, Petrograd and Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and dispatched them to the army. They travelled by train towards the fronts, breaking down any sabotage, both deliberate and unintentional, which they came across on the line. The stern regime of terror was established in the army, too. Disorganized and wilting detachments were transformed into regiments subordinated to the will of the Revolutionary Military Council. Valour and prowess became the order of the day. Cowardice was regarded as tantamount to treason. The Red front took the offensive. One sharp blow accounted for Kazan, and soon after, Samara fell. The White detachments fled in panic before the Red Terror. At Tsaritsyn, where Stalin was on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Tenth Army, a vast and bloody battle was going on against the White Cossack army of Ataman Krasnov, who had the aid and connivance of German headquarters....
Everything in that paragraph is true. Communists were mobilised from the cities and sent to the fronts. They did travel by train. A regime of terror was established in the army, and cowardice was treated as treason. Kazan did fall to a sharp blow in September 1918, and it was the turning point of the civil war. The Revolutionary Military Council did impose its will on detachments that had no discipline and no officers.
The Revolutionary Military Council had a chairman. He was the man who assembled the Communists, who lived on the train, who restored the death penalty in the army, who stood at Sviyazhsk through August and September and took Kazan back. His name was Leon Trotsky and it does not occur in this book.
We counted. In a novel of a hundred and twenty-eight thousand words about the year 1918, Lenin is named fifteen times, Stalin once — in the sentence above — and Trotsky not once. The figures are identical in the 1965 printing.
That sentence about Tsaritsyn is doing a precise job. The paragraph describes Trotsky's work at length and attributes it to an institution: things are done by "the Revolutionary Military Council", in the passive, by a will without a person. Then, immediately, a name is supplied — and it is the name of the man who was a member of a different Council, of the Tenth Army, at a subsidiary front. Kazan happens to no one. Tsaritsyn happens to Stalin.
Alexei Tolstoy wrote this book in 1927 and 1928.
Those are not neutral years. In November 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party. In January 1928 he was deported to Alma-Ata. In 1929 he was expelled from the Soviet Union altogether. The erasure in this novel is not a later retouching by a Soviet editor: it is contemporaneous with the event, performed by the novelist himself, in the months when it was being decided what the civil war had consisted of.
Tolstoy had returned from emigration in 1923. The Sisters, the first book of this trilogy, was finished in Paris in August 1921 and is an émigré's novel. This second book is the first written inside, and the change is not only political but formal: where Book One observes a society and declines to explain it, Book Two supplies the explanations, and this paragraph is one of them.
The volume in your hands is the Progress printing of 1965, translated — like the rest of the trilogy — by Ivy and Tatiana Litvinov, with book design by Y. Kogan and illuminations and tailpieces by V. Sveshnikov. It belongs to a matched three-volume set: The Sisters, Nineteen Eighteen and Bleak Morning were issued together in this design, and all three are reissued here.
Progress printed the same translation again in 1975, in the Soviet Authors Library, and that printing is also in this series. On the question above the two are identical — we have checked both. The removal of Trotsky from the account of the civil war survived the Twentieth Congress, survived the removal of Stalin's body from the Mausoleum, and was still being set in type in 1975.
Nineteen Eighteen takes the four people of The Sisters and throws them across a continent coming apart.
Dasha is in Petrograd, then adrift; Katya is in the Ukraine under German occupation; Telegin is with the Reds; Roshchin, the officer who told Katya on the last page of Book One that revolutions calm down, is with the Whites. Husbands and sisters spend the book missing one another by a hundred miles. Dasha is named two hundred and eighty-two times, Katya a hundred and seventy-two, Roshchin a hundred and fifty-eight, Telegin a hundred and fourteen — the balance has shifted from Book One, and Roshchin's rise in the count is the measure of what interests Tolstoy now, which is a decent man on the wrong side.
The best writing is in the Ukraine. Makhno is named forty-nine times and Denikin eighty-two; the Germans occupy, the atamans raid, the villages arm, and nobody's authority extends past the next set of railway sidings. Tolstoy is very good on this — on the speed with which a countryside reverts, on peasants who have heard of Makhno as a rumour ("They say Nestor Ivanovich Makhno has a gang of twenty-five daredevils who raid the estates"), on the German command establishing order by requiring the village street to be swept on Saturday nights.
That detail is the whole occupation in one line. An empire arrives, and what it produces is a regulation about sweeping.
The reason Lenin is named fifteen times is not that he appears. It is that he is a target.
The spine of this novel is Dasha's recruitment, in Moscow, by a counter-revolutionary conspiracy that intends to kill him. It is handled with great coolness. A young man in pince-nez edges up to her bench in a public garden, glances round, and opens:
"Did you spend the night in the Metropole?" ... "Good! I've got you a room. You can move in, this evening. Not a syllable to Zhirov! Now to business! Do you know Lenin by sight?"
She does not. He takes a bundle of photographs out of his pocket and stuffs them into her handbag. Then he takes her hands, which are lying lifelessly in her lap, gives them a shake, and delivers the argument:
"This is how matters stand.... Bolshevism is Lenin. Get that? We may crush the Red Army, but so long as Lenin is in the Kremlin there can never be victory for us. Is that clear? He's a theoretician, he's will incarnate — the greatest danger for the whole world, not just for us.... Think it over and tell me definitely: are you, or are you not, ready and willing?"
And Tolstoy gives Dasha the best line in the trilogy, which is only two words and a stage direction:
"To kill him?" asked Dasha, watching a half-naked infant which was staggering about bow-legged.
A woman is asked to commit a political murder and her eyes are on a baby learning to walk. No novelist who was merely executing a commission writes that sentence.
What follows is a portrait of White ideology going to pieces, and it is the most valuable passage in the book after the one we began with. Dasha's host works through the standard indictment — the sealed carriages, Bolsheviks "hired at enormous sums", the deliberate organisation of famine, "thousands of imbeciles hanging on Lenin's lips" — and then, unable to stop, crosses over:
"He is the Antichrist! Remember the prophecies? Everything coincides. The north will go to war with the south. The iron horsemen of death will appear — that's the tanks.... An evil star will drop into the source of waters — that's the five-pointed star of the Bolsheviks.... And he addresses the multitude as Christ did, only in reverse..."
Tolstoy had listened to this in Paris. He lets the man talk, does not interrupt him, and allows the political argument to slide into apocalypse under its own weight. It is a far more damaging account of the counter-revolution than any denunciation, because it is delivered in the speaker's own voice and he thinks he is winning.
This matters for the charge we have made, so it needs stating in his favour.
Nineteen Eighteen is not a timid book about the Bolsheviks. It says outright that "the stern regime of terror was established in the army" and that cowardice was treated as treason. It describes the Red Terror by name. And in one of its strongest episodes it puts on the page a Bolshevik military commissar, Broinitsky, who has come to the top after the taking of Rostov and rules by invoking Moscow:
"At the slightest word he shouts: 'Comrade Lenin knows my worth, I'll send a personal telegram to Comrade Lenin....' He's surrounded himself with the criminal element, who are continually carrying out requisitions and taking people out to be shot."
He is unmasked in front of a hall: "Nobody gave you power in Rostov, your mandate is forged, your references to Moscow, not to speak of Comrade Lenin, are insolent lies."
A forged mandate, a criminal retinue, people taken out and shot, and Lenin's name used as the warrant — published in 1928. Whatever else Tolstoy was, he was not a man who could not bear to show the revolution's underside.
Which is exactly why the silence we began with cannot be explained as caution. A writer prepared to show terror, famine, a fraudulent commissar and an execution squad was not squeamish. The omission of one name from the account of the Red Army is not timidity in general. It is an operation on a particular man, performed in the particular year that man was expelled.
This 1965 printing carries almost nothing. No critical foreword, no afterword, no note on the author, no editorial matter of any kind: a half-title, the Russian title page, the translators' credit, and the novel. The reader is handed the book and left to it.
That is worth a paragraph, because it is unusual in this series and because it cuts two ways.
Against it: a foreign reader in 1965 received a novel about the founding of the Soviet state with no indication of when it was written, no mention that the trilogy's first volume had been finished in Paris by an émigré, and no hint that the years of this book's composition — 1927 and 1928 — were the years in which the losing side of a political struggle was being removed from the record. Silence is not neutrality when the text itself has a hole in it.
For it: the alternative, on the evidence of this series, would have been worse. The 1975 reissue of this same translation added a jacket panel headed "Writers about Alexei Tolstoi". Gorky praises a talent that is "simply a big, truly Russian talent, wise with Russian wisdom". Romain Rolland admires how the characters "form an inseparable part of the air, earth and light that surround and nurture them". Theodore Dreiser certifies, in one line, that "Alexei Tolstoi bore the name of his great predecessor with honor" — which settles the awkward question of the surname by making it a matter of honour rather than of relation.
A Frenchman and an American vouching for a Soviet novelist to an English-language reader, and a Russian vouching for his Russianness. Nothing in any of it is false, and none of it is about 1918.
A reader of this 1965 printing at least knows they have been told nothing. That is a lower form of honesty than the real thing, but it is a form of it.
We are not going to pretend this is a bad novel, because it is not. The Ukrainian chapters are the best account in English fiction of what the civil war looked like from a cart, and Roshchin — a monarchist officer whom Tolstoy refuses to make contemptible, and whose journey is the moral spine of the book — could not have been written by a man who had never sat in a room with such people. Tolstoy had. He had been in Paris with them.
Nor do we say that Tolstoy was a liar who knew better. He may have. We have no way of knowing what a man thought in 1928 about a name he had decided not to write, and this series does not deal in imagined interior lives.
What we say is narrower and harder to answer. A novel published as history, by a house that presented it to foreign readers as the authoritative fictional record of the revolution, describes the founding of the Red Army in a paragraph from which the founder has been removed, and names instead the man whose reputation required building. That paragraph was written in the year of Trotsky's expulsion. It was still being printed in English, unaltered, forty-seven years later.
An introduction from this tradition cannot walk past that, and there is no need to be shrill about it. The paragraph is on the page. We have quoted it whole. A reader who knows who chaired the Revolutionary Military Council can see the shape of the hole, and a reader who does not has now been told.
Book One ended with Vadim Roshchin holding Katya's hand on a Moscow street and telling her that "the years will pass, wars will die out, revolutions will calm down, and only one thing will be left — your kind, tender, loving heart." A man with a paste pail was putting up notices saying the revolution was in danger, and he looked at them both with hatred.
Nineteen Eighteen is the answer to that sentence, and the answer is no.
Roshchin joins the Whites. Tolstoy neither excuses him nor makes him a monster: he gives him his reasons, his disgust, his decency, and then puts him on a burial mound beside an officer called von Mecke, watching a railway trolley come out of a cutting with six men on it.
"Reds!" said von Mecke. "I thought so!" He turned his head to the left: "Squad!" Turning to the right he cried: "Make ready! Rapid fire at a moving object. Fire!" The air around the mound was rent with a crackling sound, as of starched calico being torn.
Rapid fire at a moving object. The men on the trolley are an object. Roshchin, who believed that a loving heart would outlast the revolution, is lying next to the man giving that order, and Tolstoy leaves him there without comment.
And the novel ends by taking everything away. Telegin rides into Samara at the head of his regiment, past the monument to Alexander II "once more being hastily concealed with boards" — the city has changed hands so often that the statue's covering has become routine. He turns to the second house from the corner, and is on horseback, so he can see into the first-floor windows:
there was the walnut door, on the threshold of which Dasha had appeared, as in a dream, that time, and there the doctor's study, the bookshelves overturned and Mendeleyev's portrait on the wall, crooked, its glass smashed.... But where was Dasha? What had happened to her? There was no one to answer these questions.
1928
A smashed portrait of Mendeleyev, hanging crooked: the liberal, scientific, improving Russia of the Bulavin household, which produced both sisters, left broken on a wall and visible only from the saddle. The book closes on a question nobody can answer and a date.
It is a real ending, by a real novelist. Hold it in mind alongside the paragraph about Kazan, because both are the work of the same hand in the same year, and the distance between them is the subject of this introduction.
The Ukraine, the carts, the atamans and the sweeping of the street on Saturdays.
And the erasure itself, which is the most valuable thing in the book for our purposes, because it is an artefact rather than an argument. Histories can be refuted. This is a novel, and novels work by what they find worth mentioning. Tolstoy wrote a hundred and twenty-eight thousand words about 1918 and mentioned Kazan, the Revolutionary Military Council, the terror in the army, the mobilisation of Communists and the trains — every component of one man's work — and left out the man.
Read the paragraph on the fall of Kazan again when you reach it. It is the most eloquent silence in this series.