Yabloko Party leader Grigory Yavlinsky

Says Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the Unity in the Name of Russia Foundation (and, as all the world knows, the grandson of Stalin's sidekick Vyacheslav Molotov): "February 1917 is not the kind of date that is worth celebrating. In the space of several days Russian statehood was destroyed, and with it, a great country." [2] This can also be taken as the gist of the Solzhenitsyn pamphlet, though Mr. Nikonov insists on disagreeing with some of his points.

Contrariwise, Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party (no longer represented in the State Duma), states this of his own party: "We are the heirs of February 1917." And he goes on to say: "There was a monarchy in Russia, and it collapsed without any violence at all because it failed to adapt to the new realities. It had wavered for 17 years, set up the Duma, then dispersed it, and it all ended in the czar abdicating. Then, at a time of extreme hardship and disintegration, our country began building a modern, European state, making preparations for a Constituent Assembly, a Constitution, and conducting elections. And when one of the parties, the RSDRP(b) [the Bolsheviks. -- S.R.], lost at the polls, receiving a mere 20 percent [actually 25 percent. -- S.R.], it upped and grabbed power by force." [3] Conclusion: celebrate February 1917 and take over where the "Februarists" left off.

As ever, there is a third party there to yell, "A plague o' both your houses!" Sergei Shelin accuses both Solzhenitsyn and Yavlinsky of exaggerating the historical role of political parties and of educated classes in general: "Strangely or not, the writer and the politician are in accord with each other in many respects. Both of them believe that the main historical players in this country have been, and still are, the 'educated class' and the powers-that-be, while the lower classes are mere objects manipulated by both. Solzhenitsyn states this outright, while Yavlinsky implies it... There is nothing surprising about this. Our 'educated class' has always exaggerated its own role. Only -- the greater part of it has been accustomed, just like Yavlinsky, to paint the educated class's contribution to any event in the most radiant hues, while the smaller part prefers, along with Solzhenitsyn, a gloomier palette." [4]

I'd say there is a lot in this last view. There is always, not just in Russia but in Russia especially, a vast majority of the -- pardon me -- hoi polloi sarcastically observing the goings-on of the educated classes while completely engrossed, as right now and much more so a few years ago, in the serious business of physical survival, only rarely raising their heads to mutter gloomily Nam by vashi problemy "We wish we had your problems."

That does not relieve one, as a member of the "educated classes" and a confirmed (I nearly said certified) moderate liberal, of the demanding chore of finding one's own place in this line-up of the current political forces. Should one side with one of these parties to the conflict -- or perhaps strive to achieve intellectual and spiritual equilibrium in some other, preferably clearly defined and sincerely embraced position? Is one a Februarist, an heir to the 1917 Februarists, like Mr. Yavlinsky, Academician Sakharov et al., or an anti-Februarist -- and in that case, what kind? Like Mr. Solzhenitsyn? Or like -- who?

Let me deal with the hub of the affair, the Solzhenitsyn article, first. Who does not know Mr. Solzhenitsyn -- the Nobel Prize winner for literature; the author of The Gulag Archipelago that denounced Stalin's labor camp system; the man who opened the eyes of the Western world, of its left-leaning intellectuals in particular, to the iniquities of the Stalin regime of terror; who was banished from the country in 1974 to become the "hermit of Vermont" for 20 years; returned to Russia in 1994 to become the "hermit of Troitse-Lykovo" near Moscow; regarded by the majority (if they think of him at all, which is very rare, to tell the truth) as a classic of Russian literature, the conscience of the nation, and the figurehead of the Slavophile pochvenniki (soil-niks) wing of the Russian intelligentsia.

As a member of the opposite, Westernizing [5] liberal wing of that same intelligentsia, I must avow my long-standing, hearty dislike of the man both as a writer and as a public figure.

The writer Solzhenitsyn makes my skin crawl with his slaughtering of the Russian language in an attempt to create an "inimitable" style of his own, with its pseudo-folksy neologisms instantly reminiscent of the language of tenth-rate peasant-stock writers of the 1920s so beautifully parodied by Ilf and Petrov. The poet Lev Losev referred to Solzhenitsyn as an "average prose writer." I would insert the word "below" there.

As for Solzhenitsyn as a public figure, I cordially resent his overt claim to be the nation's spiritual leader, something in the manner of an Orthodox Church ayatollah periodically descending from Olympian heights to deliver a final, irrevocable verdict on the way this universe is run (sorry about that -- no ayatollahs on Mount Olympus). This kind of supreme judgment interferes with my innate right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness according to my own lights as long as it does not interfere with another man's freedom to pursue the same. And I definitely prefer my own, hopefully level-headed, kind of analysis to Solzhenitsyn's Old Testament-like castigations. [6]

Having got this off my chest, I must admit that there is little I find quarrel with in Solzhenitsyn's assessment of the February 1917 revolution -- except his style, which is still deeply antipathetic to me. It is in fact not an "assessment" in any acceptable sense, not an historian's analysis of past events sine ira et studio, but a fierce harangue against the various evil forces that brought about the February revolution -- an event that opened the way to the Bolshevik coup a few months later. The best word for this harangue is perhaps "denunciation."

He denounces just about everybody and everything. The revolution as a whole was "spiritually sickening; from the very first hours it introduced both enmity in the morals and manners and collective dictatorship over independent opinion... its ideas were trite, its leaders were complete nonentities."

Emperor Nicholas II, Solzhenitsyn's pet aversion, was a traitor to his dynasty, to the principle of monarchy itself, to the army, the people, the Orthodox Church, you just name it. He was tied to his wife's apron strings and cared more about his own family, especially his sick son, than about the country's fate. He made an unpardonable error in appointing himself Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and handing over the running of the empire's civil affairs to his hysterical German wife and her "friend," the pseudo-holy man, drunk and charlatan Grigory Rasputin. Solzhenitsyn works out detailed instructions on what should have been done to prevent the revolution or nip it in the bud, and accuses the czar of not carrying out those instructions, a few decades post factum. His list of the czar's transgressions appears, indeed, open-ended. [7]

A step below the czar, the State Duma is found guilty because "its speeches overexcited society and prepared it for the revolution." Milyukov, leader of a Duma party, "slanderously accused, from the Duma lectern, the empress and the premier of high treason -- and he was not even suspended from a single Duma session, let alone persecuted." It was the Duma's top-ranking deputies, along with top army commanders, who forced Nicholas' abdication and then usurped executive powers by setting up a quasi-government in the shape of a Duma Committee. It later legitimized, without having any right to do so, the Provisional Government that kept sliding more and more to the left until it was kicked out by the Bolsheviks.

Members of the governments, both the czarist and the revolutionary provisional one, come under just as scathing censure; by way of an example of Solzhenitsyn's style of criticism, just one typical characteristic -- of the czar's Interior Minister Protopopov: a "psychopathic chatterer, liar, hysterical coward gone mad with power." Reading this sort of narrative, one unwittingly remembers a remark from a character in a play by Bernard Shaw: "Lady Brittomart, your moral duty is done when you have called everybody names."

Recounting all this is tiring and tiresome. No one escapes Solzhenitsyn's accusing finger, everyone is to blame -- the officers, the generals, the aristocracy, the czar's brothers, the Church, the treacherous Cossacks, the foreign ambassadors (especially French and British ones), the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, Milyukov, Guchkov, Kerensky, the German spies and agents provocateurs, ditto British ones, etc. etc.

One could of course object to some details of this onslaught. For instance, one could say (as some do) that Nicholas II was an honest, cultured and decent man who was simply not up to the world-historical tasks facing him, not fit to handle the earthquake that he found himself on top of; a man who hated the idea of shedding his subjects' blood, who let things slide rather than give orders to fire at the people, as his namesake Nicholas I did in 1825 and he himself, in 1905 -- an event the memory of which had singed his soul and made him abhor that kind of violence ever after.

One could say that the Empress Aleksandra Feodorovna, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, was English rather than German (the imperial couple corresponded almost entirely in English), and that in the decades since those times no trace was found of her treacherous activities in support of the Germanophile party at court or elsewhere.

One could say that the Provisional Government bunch were, like Nicholas II, disinclined to use violence even where use of force was clearly indicated to prevent worse disasters -- like the Bolshevik coup. Freemasons to a man, they abolished capital punishment, the chain-of-command principle in the army, the governorships, the police, the local administration, and committed a lot of other stupidities -- all with the best of intentions simply because they were what they were, sons of their own times and cultural background.

If we take this attitude, we cannot but be shocked or just taken aback by the fierce tone of Solzhenitsyn's invectives -- the more so that their news value is zero. All the facts that he treats of have been before the public for decades in the émigré literature, of which there are mountains. Even in the Soviet times one could, with a little effort, gain access to the spetskhran, the special departments at major libraries where banned literature was kept, and I have known people (like my rector at Kalinin University) who wrote whole dissertations about the period in question. Of course these dissertations expressed officially approved views, but the researchers who wrote them read the pertinent books and documents, and made copies of them, and they circulated among the people in the know in samizdat form -- as typewritten or even handwritten copies.

Needless to say all these materials have been perfectly accessible for nearly two decades here. As I write this, I have a pile of such books on my desk, mostly memoirs -- by Prince Sergei Trubetzkoy, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivan Bunin, Zinaida Gippius, General Anton Denikin, S.P. Melgunov, Princess Zinaida Shakhovskaya, and even John Reed the misguided American Communist. There is also a history textbook by S.G. Pushkarev [8], where all the pertinent facts are neatly laid out, minus Solzhenitsyn's prophetic heat and fervor, only prophets do not usually prophesy about the past, do they...

I must say that the main conclusion I have drawn from reading these volumes is the opposite of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's if-only attitude. If only the czar had picked his generals more astutely or just intelligently, if only he had not been such a milksop, if only he had given orders to blockade Petrograd by destroying the railways leading to it, if only the reservists had been pulled out of the capital, if only certain telegrams had not unaccountably gone astray or been destroyed -- the list of these if-onlies is practically endless and just as hopeless. In a country like Russia, with its age-old antagonism between the ruling classes and the downtrodden ones, none of these if-onlies would have worked, especially not in a time of war and hardship. Aloof from and below the stage where all kinds of political agents were acting out their jeus de scène, there was the roiling, hundred-million-plus-strong peasant masses whose sole idea of freedom was, in the words of the poet, "Russian mutiny, senseless and ruthless."

Incidentally, even some of the leading actors realized that. Here is an excerpt from a telephone conversation between Alexander Kerensky, the future head of the liberal Provisional Government, and Zinaida Gippius, hostess of a literary-philosophical-political salon in St.Petersburg, several months before the February revolution: "What will there be, then?" asks M-me Gippius. Kerensky's reply: "There will be something... that begins with an A..." Zinaida Gippius' comment: "Kerensky is right, and I understand him: there will be anarchy."

And realizing that, Mr. Kerensky jumped both feet first in the most radically liberal revolution the world had known. So what was more natural than the outcome of that adventure: Russia looped the loop from autocracy to Bolshevik tyranny. Radical liberalism did away not just with autocracy but with Russia's entire state apparatus, it triggered off anarchy, anarchy was harnessed by all kind of Socialists and eventually by the Bolsheviks -- et voilà, you have Military Communism complete with such exquisite touches as "Chinese meat." [10]

So, if Mr. Solzhenitsyn's denunciation is aimed at this kind of radical-liberal adventurism and irresponsibility, I am ready to embrace his conclusions. Unfortunately, there is reason to suspect that the spirit of such radicalism is still here with us now.

Let me therefore proceed to deal with Mr. Yavlinsky's stance. It is assumed, and sometimes stated outright in the circles which Mr. Yavlisnky stands for, that we here in Russia are in the pre-February 1917 situation. In the paper I've just quoted, Sergei Shelin says: "...certain... nuances in today's behavior of the upper and lower classes give rise to 'February,' or, more accurately, 'pre-February' associations in many people." [11] Specifically, the "Putin regime" is said to be authoritarian and even autocratic and thus slated for an overthrow, just like the Nicholas II regime in 1917. So, Up the Revolution -- Orange, Red, or color-blind!

It is enough to formulate this position clearly to make any true Russian liberal shudder -- if he really holds the future of liberalism in Russia dear to his heart. It is my firm belief -- an article of faith, you might say -- that no revolution in Russia, liberal, democratic, or any other, is either possible or desirable, either now or in the foreseeable future.

Anyone who has taken a course in Marxism-Leninism -- or in ordinary commonsense -- knows that there cannot be a genuine revolution without something called a "revolutionary situation" (unless of course you care to apply the term to comic-opera Latin-American-type coups). This revolutionary situation concept is encapsulated in the simple formula: "The ruling classes can no longer rule, while the lower classes can no longer go on living as they do."

Is there anything like that now in Russia? Only in the fevered imagination of various electorally negligible, radical-minded outsiders in politics. Sure, the ruling classes, the "oligarchs" multiplying so exceedingly (see Forbes Magazine) and the monstrously inept and corrupt bureaucracies are not exactly popular (and when were they, in Russia?). But are they impotent and ready to drop the reins of power from their hands, like the czarist bureaucracy did all too readily in 1917? Not on your life! Just try and do something revolutionary to the upper classes -- and see what it will get you.

General of the Army Andrei Nikolayev, a Duma deputy whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for the Moscow News a few years ago, provided me with some memorable statistics. Apparently in Moscow alone "close security protection services" (bodyguards, in plain English) were 100,000 strong. That is ten divisions, if you get my drift. Fully armed, well-paid, and ready to defend their style of living and that of their masters. This is entirely apart from the state "repressive apparatus" -- which has also done pretty well for itself in recent years and is not likely to welcome any revolutionists in the streets of Moscow or anywhere else.

Now for the second part of the revolutionary situation formula: are the underprivileged classes so desperate that they can no longer live as they do now and are ready to rise up in arms or resort to civil disobedience? Sure, there is plenty of discontent among what Marxists call "the masses" -- but then again, when wasn't there? Clearly there is less of it now than in the Yeltsin reign, when pensions and wages were not paid for months and sometimes years on end, when crime and unemployment were at their peak, and women staged "empty pan marches" through downtown Moscow.

It was then that popular discontent erupted in violence in October 1993, but, speaking as an eyewitness and a foot soldier on the democratic side, it was a very mixed affair. It is mostly portrayed as a Communist-led putsch against Yeltsin's democratic government, but it was not as clean-cut as that, not by a long chalk. Even as I nursed a stinking Molotov cocktail all that cold, horror-filled night of October 3/4 behind a "democratic" barricade near Central Telegraph, I realized, rather dimly and shame-facedly, that we, the people on both sides, were but pawns in a game played by two power-mad clans that went for each other's throats over the divvying-up of the nation's assets, soon to be privatized in what I later referred to, rather charitably, as the "scam of the century." [12]

Anyone who has his ear to the ground in today's Russia will realize that a spontaneous popular uprising, like the late February 1917 mutiny of the reservist regiments in Petrograd in support of mobs of women marching through the streets yelling "Bread! Bread!" is definitely not on the cards now. This is mere fantasy and wishful thinking of folks on the fringes of politics, lunatic and otherwise.

Other differences between the February 1917 and the current situation in Russia are even more glaring. There was a two-and-a-half-year-old World War going on at that time, with a seven-million-strong Russian army fighting losing battles and bleeding copiously. Its men -- peasants in army fatigues -- were combustible material in the hands of the revolutionists who were promising them the two things they desired most: peace and a speedy return to their villages where they fully expected to take part in dividing landowners' property among themselves. Nothing even remotely similar is to be found in the current situation.

Lastly -- and you will have to forgive my turning even more Marxian at this point -- the class structure of Russian society has changed drastically not only compared to 1917 Russia (whose population was 90 percent peasant), but even to that of this country as it was in 1991. There is a struggling but ever more numerous middle class now, comprising some 30 percent of the populace, according to some sociologists -- and middle class values do not include bloody revolutions. Sure, these people thoroughly dislike the oligarchs, but they would not mind turning oligarchs or mini-oligarchs themselves -- which some of them are, in their own tight circles.

No, neither a genuine, mass revolution nor a political coup is in the realm of the possible in today's Russia; nor is it desirable, not to anyone of true liberal convictions. I would hate to agree on the time of day with Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, but he really hit the nail on the head when he said, "Russia has exhausted its quota of revolutions in the 20th century." Coming as it does from the leader of a party responsible for at least three of those revolutions in the past, this is worth saying "Hear, hear!" to.

Russia had two radical-liberal revolutions in the early 1990s: a political one (which led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union -- that was, after all, simply historical Russia); and a socioeconomic one in the shape of shock therapy and wholesale privatization carried out ruthlessly, with Bolshevik zeal, by Yeltsin's minions -- Gaidar, Chubais and the like -- which left Russia in a worse plight than after World War II and led to the national default of August 1998.

To me, "radical liberalism" is an oxymoron; one is either a radical or a liberal. Russia's history, both remote and recent, provides enough proof of this truth to any reasonable observer -- quite apart from Mr. Solzhenitsyn's rancorous denunciations and in contravention of Mr. Yavlinsky's wishful thinking.

Notes:

[1] And frenzy it is. If you Google-search "solzhenitsyn february revolution," in Russian, you will have to plough through about 42,000 entries to get to the bottom of the affair; in English, Google will get you more than double that number. Even if you discount a few tens of thousands of irrelevancies, the residue is still stupefying.

[2] Vyacheslav Nikonov, "Krushenie imperii" (Collapse of an Empire). Rossiyskaya gazeta, 16 March 2007. See also V. Nikonov's article "Fevralskoe krushenie" (The February Collapse) in Izvestia, 7 March 2007. [Here and elsewhere, translation mine. -- SR]

[3] Grigory Yavlinsky's interview in Izvestia, 23 January 2007. This view was supported by Andrei Sakharov, historian, director of the Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences: The February Revolution "really made the country a free, democratic bourgeois republic while preserving the main levers of the world's civilized development -- a market economy, private property, and respect for the rights and freedoms of the individual." (See stenographic report of a discussion of Solzhenitsyn's article "Reflections on the February Revolution" at http://www/rg/ru/stenogramma/html published on 27 February, 2007).

[4] Sergei Shelin. "Fevralskiy opyt" (The February Experiment). GlobalRus.ru, http://www.globalrus.ru/column/783694

[5] A note on my kind of Westernism. I am a Westernist in the sense that the culture of liberalism, historically speaking, is not endemic in Russia, that it was transposed onto Russian soil -- precisely from the West. Unfortunately, the term zapadnik "Westernist" is now often applied -- with sufficient reason -- to individuals who advocate the subordination of Russia's national interests to those of the West. I have absolutely nothing to do with this kind of Westernism; I am a Russian Westernist -- and there are plenty of us over here. So far as I can judge, Mr. Putin is one; a European to the core -- however hard the Western reader may find to accept this.

[6] For an expanded version of my views on Solzhenitsyn, see Sergei Roy. "Solzhenitsyn's Remedy Cannot Cure Russia's Ills." The Moscow Times, August 10, 1994.

[7] One wonders how Mr. Solzhenitsyn, an Orthodox Christian, squares his philippics with the fact that the Church has sanctified the emperor who died a martyr's death, along with his whole family, at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

[8] Rossiya 1801-1917: Vlast i obshchestvo (Russia 1801-1917: Power and Society). Moscow, Posev Publishers, 2001. Originally published in English as The Emergence of Modern Russia 1801-1917 in the USA in 1963 and in Canada in 1985.

[9] Zinaida Gippius. Dnevniki. Vospominaniya. Memuary (Diaries. Remembrances. Memoirs). Minsk, Harvest Publishers, 2004, p.55.

[10] Caution: people with delicate constitutions should not read this footnote. "Chinese meat" was the flesh of those "enemies of the proletarian revolution" who were executed in the Saints Peter and Paul Fortress by the Bolsheviks (they used Chinese to do the actual shootings) and sold to the famished city populace as veal, in 1918-1920.

[11] Sergei Shelin, op.cit.

[12] See Sergei Roy. "Troika with Seat-belts." The Moscow Times, Sept.2000. Also on Johnson's Russia List, 6 April 2005.