The evolution of the West was fertilized by the growth of freedom; Russia’s evolution was fertilized by the growth of slavery. This is the abyss that divides Russia and the West.
The history of humanity is the history of human freedom. The growth of human potentiality is expressed, above all, in the growth of freedom. Freedom is not, as Engels claimed, “the recognition of necessity.” Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome. Progress, in essence, is the progress of human freedom. What is life itself, if not freedom? The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom.
Russia has always evolved in a peculiar way; what has evolved has been the degree of non-freedom. Year by year serfdom grew harsher and the peasants’ right to their land more tenuous. Meanwhile, Russian science, technology, and learning continued to advance, merging with the growth of slavery.
The birth of Russian statehood was marked by the final enslavement of the peasantry; in 1497, Autumn Yuri’s Day, November 26, the peasant’s last day of freedom, was abolished. No longer could a peasant choose to move from one landlord to another.[1]
After this, the number of free “wanderers” kept dwindling, the number of serfs continued to grow, and Russia began to make herself felt as a part of Europe. After being tied to the land, the peasant was then tied first to the owner of the land and then to the officials representing the State and the army. The landowner, meanwhile, was granted first the right to pass judgment on his serfs and then the right to subject them to “the Moscow torture” (as it was christened four centuries ago); this meant tying a man’s hands behind his back, lifting him off the ground by his wrists, and beating him with a knout. And Russian metallurgy continued to progress; grain warehouses grew larger; the State and its army grew stronger; the world saw the dawn of Russian military glory; and literacy increased.
The remarkable work of Peter the Great, who laid the foundations of Russian scientific and industrial progress, involved an equally remarkable progress in the severity of serfdom. The serfs who worked the land were still further reduced in status—until they enjoyed no more rights than a landlord’s household serfs; the few remaining “wanderers” were enserfed. Peter also enserfed the peasant farmers of the far north and of the southern and eastern frontiers. There was a similar increase in the burdens placed on the peasants owned by the State; this too was in the interests of Petrine enlightenment and progress. Peter believed that he was bringing Russia closer to the West—and that was indeed the case. But the abyss between freedom and non-freedom continued to grow.
Then came the dazzling age of Catherine the Great, the age of a wonderful flowering of Russian arts and Russian enlightenment—and the age when serfdom reached its highest development.
And so, Russian progress and Russian slavery were shackled together by a thousand-year-long chain. Every move forward toward the light only deepened the black pit of serfdom.
The nineteenth century, however, was a very special century for Russia.
This century shook the fundamental principle of Russian life: the link between progress and serfdom.
Russian revolutionary thinkers failed to appreciate the importance of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The emancipation of the serfs—as we can see from the history of the following century—was more truly revolutionary than the October Revolution. The emancipation of the serfs shook Russia’s thousand-year-old foundation, a foundation that neither Peter the Great nor Lenin had so much as touched: the dependence of the country’s evolution on the growth of slavery.
After the emancipation of the serfs, the revolutionary leaders, the students, and the intelligentsia fought violently, passionately, and with self-abnegation for a human dignity that Russia had never known, for progress without slavery. This new law was something entirely alien to Russian tradition, and no one knew what would become of Russia if she were to renounce the thousand-year link between her evolution and slavery. No one knew what would become of the Russian character.
In February 1917, the path of freedom lay open for Russia. Russia chose Lenin.
The destruction of Russian life carried out by Lenin was on a vast scale. Lenin destroyed the way of life of the landowners. Lenin destroyed merchants and factory owners.
Nevertheless, Lenin was fated by history. However bizarre this may sound, he was fated by Russian history to preserve Russia’s old curse: this link between progress and non-freedom.
The only true revolutionaries are those who seek to destroy the very foundation of the old Russia: her slave soul.
And so it was that Lenin’s obsession with revolution, his fanatical faith in the truth of Marxism and absolute intolerance of anyone who disagreed with him, all led him to further hugely the development of the Russia he hated with all his fanatical soul.
It is, indeed, tragic that a man who so sincerely loved Tolstoy and Beethoven should have furthered a new enslavement of the peasants and workers, that he should have played a central role in reducing to the status of lackeys—State lackeys—such outstanding figures of Russian culture as the writer Aleksey Tolstoy, the physical chemist Nikolay Semyonov, and the composer Dmitry Shostakovich.
The debate begun by the supporters of Russian freedom was finally resolved. Once again, Russian slavery proved invincible.
Lenin’s victory became his defeat.
But Lenin’s tragedy was not only a Russian tragedy. It became a tragedy for the whole world.
Did Lenin ever imagine the true consequences of his revolution? Did he ever imagine that it would not simply be a matter of Russia now leading the way—rather than, as had been predicted, following in the path of a socialist Europe? Did he ever imagine that what his revolution would liberate was Russian slavery itself —that his revolution would enable Russian slavery to spread beyond the confines of Russia, to become a torch lighting a new path for humanity?
Russia was no longer drinking in the spirit of freedom from the West. Instead the West was gazing in fascination at this Russian spectacle—of modernization through non-freedom.
The world saw the bewitching simplicity of this path. The world saw the strength of this People’s State built upon non-freedom.
The words of Russia’s prophets seemed to have been fulfilled.
But they were fulfilled in the strangest and most terrible of ways.
Lenin’s synthesis of non-freedom and socialism stupefied the world more than the discovery of nuclear energy.
The European apostles of national revolutions saw the flame coming from the East. First the Italians and then the Germans began to develop the concept of national socialism in their own ways.
And the flame kept spreading. It was taken up by Asia and Africa.
Nations and States could develop in the name of power! They could develop in contempt of freedom!
This was not nourishment for the healthy. It was a narcotic for failures, for the sick and the weak, for the backward and beaten.
Through the will, passion, and genius of Lenin, Russia’s thousand-year-old law of development became a worldwide law.
So history decreed.
Lenin’s intolerance, his forcefulness, his intransigence in the face of disagreement, his contempt for freedom, the fanaticism of his faith, the cruelty he showed toward his enemies—all the qualities that brought victory to his cause were born and forged in the thousand-year-old depths of Russian slavery. That is why his victory served the cause of non-freedom. And in the meantime other aspects of Lenin did not cease to exist; the traits that have charmed millions, the traits of a kind, modest Russian working intellectual continued to exist—but they existed immaterially, without significance.
So. Is the Russian soul still as enigmatic as ever? No, there is no enigma.
Was there ever an enigma? What enigma can there be in slavery?
But is this really a specifically and uniquely Russian law of development? Can it truly be the lot of the Russian soul, and of the Russian soul alone, to evolve not with the growth of freedom but with the growth of slavery? Can this truly be the fate of the Russian soul?
No, no, of course not.
This law is determined by the parameters—and there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of such parameters—within which Russian history has unfolded.
“Soul” is neither here nor there; it simply does not come into it. If the French or the Germans, the Italians or the English, had been placed a thousand years ago within the same parameters of forest, steppe, bog, and plain, in the force field between Europe and Asia, amid Russia’s tragic vastness, then the pattern of their history would have been no different from that of Russian history. Anyway, it is not only the Russians who have known this path. There are many people on every continent of this Earth who have come to know the bitterness of the Russian path—some of them only vaguely and from a distance, some of them closely and clearly, suffering bitterness of their own.
It is time for the students and diviners of Russia to understand that the mystique of the Russian soul is simply the result of a thousand years of slavery.
And in admiration of the Byzantine purity and Christian meekness of the Russian soul there lies an involuntary recognition of the inviolability of Russian slavery. The sources of this Christian meekness and Byzantine ascetic purity are the same as the sources of Lenin’s passion, intolerance, and fanatical faith—they lie in the thousand years of Russian serfdom, Russian nonfreedom.
And this is why the Russian prophets were so tragically mistaken. Where, where can we find this “Russian soul, all-human and all-unifying”—that Dostoevsky told us would “speak the final word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly concord of all tribes according to the law of the Gospel of Christ”?
Where indeed, O Lord, is this all-human and all-unifying soul to be found? Did the prophets of Russia ever imagine that their prophecies about the coming universal triumph of the Russian soul would find their fulfillment in the unified grating and grinding of the barbed wire stretched around Auschwitz and the labor camps of Siberia?
Lenin was in many ways opposed to the great prophets of Russia. He is infinitely far from their ideals of meekness, of Christian, Byzantine purity and the laws of the Gospel. But he is also strangely and surprisingly close to these prophets. While going his own very different way, he made no effort to save Russia from her thousand-year-old quagmire of non-freedom. Like them, he recognized Russian slavery as something unshakable. Like them, he was born of our non-freedom.
The Russian slave soul lives both in Russian faith and in Russian lack of faith, both in Russian meek love of humanity and in the Russian propensity to reckless violence. It lives in Russian miserliness and philistinism, in Russian obedient industriousness, in Russian ascetic purity, in the Russian capacity for fraud on a supreme scale, in the redoubtable braveness of Russian warriors, in the Russian lack of any sense of human dignity, in the frenzy of Russian sectarians, and in the desperate ferocity with which Russian rebels rebel. The Russian slave soul is manifest in Lenin’s revolution, in Lenin’s passionate embrace of Western revolutionary teachings, in Lenin’s fanaticism, in Lenin’s violence, and in the victories of the Leninist State.
Wherever slavery exists in the world, it gives birth to souls of the same kind.
What hope is there for Russia if even her great prophets were unable to distinguish freedom from slavery?
What hope is there for Russia if her geniuses see submissive slavery as the expression of the meek, bright beauty of her soul?
What hope is there for Russia if Lenin, the man who did most to transform her, did not destroy but only strengthened the tie between Russian progress and Russian non-freedom?
When will we see the day of a free, human, Russian soul? When will this day dawn?
Or will it never dawn?
Excerpted from Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Anna Aslanyan. Reprinted from pages 179-185 of the NYRB Classics Original published in 2009.
Note
1 There are two festivals of St. Yury (St. George) in the Orthodox calendar, in the spring, and in the summer. Autumn Yury’s Day, celebrated on November 26, when the harvest has been completed, had a special importance. A Code of Law introduced in 1497 by Ivan III established the two-week period around Autumn Yury’s Day (one week before the feast and one week after it), as the only time of year when a peasant was free to move from one landowner to another. A century later, Boris Godunov annulled this freedom, thus finalizing the evolution of serfdom.