The Winter of 1920

The first months of 1920 was a dark time in Russia. The Civil War was grinding to a grim conclusion. The two main White forces – Denikin’s army in the South and Kolchak’s in the East – were being driven back by the Reds. Kolchak, sensing that he was losing control of the situation, yielded the title of Supreme Ruler of Russia to Denikin. This titular change was of little consequence. Denikin’s forces were losing ground by the day.

Kolchak did not have long to live. By mid-January, the Czechoslovak units that had been fighting alongside the Whites realized they had no desire to die in a foreign land for a foreign cause and decided to get out, at any price. The price turned out to be Kolchak’s freedom. On January 15, they handed Kolchak over to his former enemies: the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in Irkutsk. A week later, his situation became even more dire when the city was overtaken by the Bolsheviks. On February 7 Kolchak was executed. (In April, Denikin handed over command to Pyotr Wrangel and, not wishing to suffer Kolchak’s fate, caught a ride out of the country on an English ship.)

By spring, the Bolsheviks had already established control over most of central Russia. A few corners of the former Empire were still out of reach for them – the Caucasus, the Far East, and Poland – but it was only a matter of time before they too would turn red.

Since victory was now in sight, the Bolsheviks began to contemplate what postwar life would look like – not that they had any doubts about the matter: everyone would be free and happy, and soon a communist utopia would be realized, all “non-working elements” would be reeducated, and revolution would sweep across the rest of the world. Such was the rosy road that lay ahead, at least in theory. Reality played out somewhat differently.

The most troublesome matter was finding the path to communism. Nobody knew exactly how communism was supposed to take shape, but clearly it was coming soon. What needed to happen? Private property and money had to be eliminated, and the dividing line between the rich and the poor had to be erased. Everyone had to be forced to work.

By the beginning of 1920, great strides had been made in that direction. Land had been nationalized immediately after the Bolshevik takeover, followed by a simple little sleight of hand. The Land Decree, issued October 26, 1917, supposedly handed land over to the peasants, prompting their unbridled enthusiasm and greatly increasing rural support for the Bolsheviks. In fact, the land was being handed over “for use,” but little attention was paid to this nuance in the confiscatory fever that accompanied its divvying up.

Meanwhile, a half year later, the Bolsheviks, who had loudly trumpeted “power to the soviets,” noticed that, in the countryside, the soviets were for some reason being dominated by the richest – meaning the most successful and respected – peasants. What about the poor peasants? The Bolsheviks immediately mandated the creation of committees of poor peasants that were given full power over villages and backed by the force of arms.

Then, in 1919, a program of compulsory food requisitioning was launched, a sort of food tax that is best described with one word: plunder. The poor-peasant committees, with the help of the army, took everything from peasants that was considered “surplus” – a category that covered pretty much their entire harvest.

Communism had to be built in the city as well as the countryside, and by early 1920 almost all of private enterprise had been nationalized. But, for some reason, rather than the triumph of emancipated labor there followed a time of horrific famine. Store shelves were empty, and, to make matters worse, the Bolsheviks tightened the screws on many forms of commerce. That did not stop the black market from flourishing.

A campaign to catch and kill anyone engaged in the black market only pushed prices higher. To buy goods on the “white” market you needed to have ration cards, but these cards were only given to workers, since anyone who wasn’t working didn’t deserve to eat. The lishentsy – the disenfranchised and generally scorned former landowners, businessmen, priests, and other “former people” who were now enemies of the people (along with their families) – had long since lost their political rights and were not eligible to receive ration cards. How were they supposed to survive? Nobody worried about that – let them work! Labor was now an obligation, and a decree issued in January 1920 made it a requirement for every able-bodied person to work. Now, any former university professor or young noblewoman could be pressed into a “labor army” and sent to cut down trees or clean streets.

Many intellectuals were saved from hunger and the labor army by the World Literature publishing house set up by Maxim Gorky, who had overcome poverty and illiteracy to become an erudite and renowned writer. Despite his leftist views, he harbored no illusions about the enlightenment of the Russian people and their readiness for revolution.

He remembered how much books had meant to him during his difficult and dreary childhood. Now he longed to expose the proletariat and peasantry to world culture, devising an ambitious plan to translate both the classics and contemporary literature. Thousands of volumes would be published, making great reading easily accessible to the barely literate masses.

A large proportion of the cultural elite of that period eked out a living through World Literature, and the meager fees it paid helped many survive the horrific Petrograd winter of 1919–1920.

The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, who also translated for World Literature, later wrote a tongue and cheek history of the enterprise. He describes its origins as follows:

Augustus Maximus laid the cornerstone of his kingdom at 64 Nevsky, and the first year of his rule was clearly blessed by the gods. A daily torrent of myriad caravans of translators from the hinterland arrived to set up their colorful tents and trade in the fruits of their lands, receiving 250 paper shekels per octavo, which in those ancient and abundant times was more than enough to acquire one pound of grain. Drawn by rumors of plenty, a multitude of learned men from Gothic, Frankish, Chaldean, Babylonian, Indian, Egyptian, and other lands streamed in.

The money earned was enough to buy at least something from the speculators. For that, these “learned men” did not have to travel far. An old Jewish woman named Roza Vasilyevna Rura installed herself on the building’s marble staircase to sell wares that were otherwise in short supply: various comestibles, soap, cigarettes. The literati were perpetually short of cash, but Roza was ready to offer a piece of soap on credit, or even to lend money. Nobody knows who this woman was and whether she had any idea what sorts of geniuses she was dealing with. In any event, she kept an album, which may be a sign she was from an educated family, since such was the prerevolutionary custom in those circles.

And so, in cold and hungry Petrograd, on the marble staircase of a building where perpetually starving writers and poets were busy translating and publishing the world’s masterpieces, sat a plump, sixty-year-old woman wrapped in layers of shawls collecting album entries from the poetic geniuses of her day, just like an erstwhile high-society belle.

An entry by Osip Mandelstam in classical hexameter goes:

If you are sad that my debt’s run up now to a whole ‘leven thousand,
Could have been worse, could have been twenty-one, bear in mind.

Если грустишь, что тебе задолжал я одиннадцать тысяч,
Помни, что двадцать одну мог я тебе задолжать.

In another album, this one belonging to Kornei Chukovsky, Alexander Blok made the following reference to Roza:

No, I swear, our Roza sure can
Drain my wallet till it’s dry!
It’s not filled by prose, you madman,
But by rations from on high!

Нет, клянусь, довольно Роза
Истощала кошелек!
Верь, безумный, он – не проза,
Свыше данный нам паек!..

Alas, the literary earnings soon came to an end, along with the very idea of exposing the toiling masses to works by the likes of Byron and Stendhal, Romain Rolland and Flaubert, not to mention the second-century Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, by Achilles Tatius of Alexandria.

In 1921, Gorky left for abroad to escape the joys of revolutionary life, and his epic publishing endeavor was abandoned. Yet he is still owed a debt of gratitude for the wonderful books that were published by World Literature, and for keeping dozens of Russia’s best minds alive, at least for a while.