Studies in scarlet
RONALD HINGLEY
Red Prelude: a Biography of Zhelyabov David Footman (Barrie and Rockliff 25s) Tolstoy Henri Troyat (W. H. Allen 84s)
The Bridge and the Abyss: the Troubled Friendship of Maxim Gorky and V. I. Lenin Bertram D. Wolfe (Pall Mall 50s)
On 1 March 1881, twenty years after signing the statute emancipating the serfs of his empire, Alexander II of Russia was killed by a crudely constructed hand-grenade while driving along a quay in St Petersburg, his assassins being members of the revolutionary terrorist group known as People's Will. Though the act has since been praised by those who unthinkingly approve of any revolutionary deed irrespective of its consequences (none being more prone to this aberration than those who are sometimes known as bourgeois intellectuals), the motives for this squalid murder were obscure and un- impressive. Its main effect was to intensify that harsh extremism both of right and left which was to become an increasingly regrettable feature of Russian political life in the follow- ing decades. And with all his many faults Alex- ander II was surely the best—or at any rate the least deplorable—ruler that Russia has ever had, and not merely the best emperor, as Professor Schapiro says in his admirable preface to Mr David Footman's Red Prelude.
This masterpiece of revolutionary history first appeared in 1944 in an edition unavoidably austere owing to wartime conditions. It now reemerges at an astonishingly low price—a re- incarnation especially gratifying to a reviewer who only a few months ago was lamenting in the pages of the SPECTATOR that inferior sur- veys of the same subject should continue to be published while this classic work remained un- obtainable. It is a biography of Andrei Zhely- abov, who was the chief architect of the Tsar's assassination, though prevented from participat- ing in the actual event since he chanced to be arrested two days earlier. Brave, single-minded and utterly determined, he was that exception among Russian revolutionaries—a member of the lower classes, since his father had been a serf.
Without by any means ignoring the idea-basis which is indispensable to the understanding of Russian nihilism, Mr Footman has achieved a proper balance between ideas and deeds, being principally concerned to show his hero at work and evidently sharing his belief in the primacy of action in a revolutionary context. Once again one must agree with the preface, where the portrait of Zhelyabov is termed the most truthful image of a revolutionary in the English language, not excluding Conrad's Secret Agent. Mr Footman also shows enviable skill in evoking the characters of the supporting cast—as where he points out that Zhelyabov's mistress, the alarming Sophia Perovsky (who commanded
the terrorist killer-squad in the field), would have made an excellent governess.
The events of Alexander Il's reign show re- volutionary terrorism on a small scale, the assassinations and executions being numbered at little more than a score: a meagre achieve- ment compared with the age of Stolypin in the 1900s, not to mention the wholesale repressions of the Soviet period. But the catastrophe of 1 March 1881 caused considerable stir at the time, and was responsible for a resolute attempt by the novelist Leo Tolstoy to intervene with the new Tsar, Alexander Ill, on behalf of the terrorists sentenced to be publicly hanged. Tol- stoy unsuccessfully appealed to the son to show Christian forbearance by forgiving his father's murderers; otherwise he foresaw an intensification of revolutionary violence such as did eventually take place.
The new biography of Tolstoy, by Henri Troyat, is conceived almost on the scale of War and Peace —though not at all in its manner, as is claimed in an unduly bombastic blurb. This study appears to have suffered somewhat in translation from French to English and has been grossly overpraised. But it will probably acquaint the more industrious general reader with the main facts of Tolstoy's life as effec- tively as any existing biography.
Himself a kind of revolutionary, though a non-violent one, Tolstoy became in old age the friend of Maxim Gorky, that literary pheno- menon, who 'shot up on the horizon like a rocket from a submarine' in the 1890s, as Mr Wolfe states in an oddly chosen phrase. His book is a most useful contribution to the understand- ing of an author who later suffered canonisa- tion as the patron-saint of Soviet literature, and who has been held up to admiration by count- less Bolshevik hagiographers as a proletarian writing for proletarians about proletarians. Serious scholars have never been taken in by this piece of mumbo-jumbo, but many will be unaware just how wide were the differences between Lenin and Gorky, the only literary figure with whom the great revolutionary main- tained a prolonged friendship. Though Gorky himself was certainly a revolutionary, his views were poles apart from Lenin's—a politician through and through, whereas Gorky was every inch the artist, albeit on a mediocre level.
Libertarian to an extent which would have been severely avenged in anyone with a less impeccably revolutionary past, Gorky set him- self to denounce the Bolshevik coup d'etat in his newspaper New Life until Lenin banned it. This did not deter Gorky from the philan- thropic task of saving his fellow-intellectuals from death by starvation, freezing, or the revolvers of the Cheka. He found employment for writers as translators, and his benefactions were not restricted to literary figures, for he also gallantly tried to rescue members of the im- perial family threatened with execution. Un- fortunately this Red Pimpernel succeeded in saving only one of the four Grand Dukes for whom he interceded with Lenin.
It is welcome to find these matters systematic- ally described in Mr Wolfe's book, and one must now hope for a sequel in which the yet muddier waters of Gorky's weird relationship with Stalin may be similarly charted.
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