Everyday life during the Revolution

[AGRBear]

What a great way of describing how some of my family must have felt as the Bolsheviks took their homes and forced them into the last cave, their bedroom, before they were taken by the CHEKA.... No one has heard from them since that day.

AGRBear

[Elisabeth]

That's very sad about your relatives, AGRBear. I can't say that Martin Martinych and Masha fare any better in this story.

[HerrKaiser]

I went to high school with a girl whose father was a teenager during the revolution and 2-3 years afterward. He spoke to our history and civics classes; very amazing. His stories did not at all reflect "live as usual". On the contrary, he witnessed innocent people being shot in the streets by the revolutionaries (both Menshoviks and Bolsheviks) just for wearing a clean shirt, the assumption being anyone with a clean or new shirt was bourgeois. Fear gripped the entire set of common people, especially in the cities. No one really knew who was a "spy" that might report them for speaking or acting inappropriately. This girl's father painted a picture of horror and fear that is indelibly inked on my brain. Interestingly, I have Cuban friends who went through the 1958 revolution....and their stories are much the same.
Yes, of course, people try to work and earn money to get food and provide shelter for their families in as much as possible, but the society was totally disrupted and murder and terror prevailed. The word "revolution" IS a violent overthrow. Not nice at all and not business as usual.

[Elisabeth]

That's very interesting, HerrKaiser, and jibes with most of what I've read about the aftermath of the October Revolution, including Zamiatin's short story, "The Cave," which is a brilliant (and in its own way every bit as terrifying) depiction of life in Petrograd in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

On the books thread we have been discussing Marie Avinov's memoir (as recorded by David Chavchavadze), "Pilgrimage through Hell." I want to repeat here what I wrote elsewhere, because this book will be of great interest to anyone researching "everyday life" after the Revolution. I read it over a decade ago, and it made a deep and lasting impression on me.

Marie Avinov's story is incredibly dramatic. Married into an old aristocratic family, she stayed in Russia after the revolution because her husband, Nikolai, was a prominent engineer (if I recall correctly).  He was one of those deeply patriotic souls who couldn't bear to leave Russia and who also held fast to the idea that it was his duty to serve his country for as long as he was needed by the new regime. They used his expertise until the late 1920s, when Stalin started liquidating the "specialists" left over from tsarist times. I think he was shot as late as 1928. Marie was also arrested. One of the best parts of the book is when she is in the Gulag and entertains the other women with stories taken from world literature. As others have noted in this forum, she became known in the Gulag as the "Russian Scheherazade."
 
Perhaps the book sounds depressing from my description but it really is not.  Marie Avinov showed incredible stamina and courage, and I found her life story inspiring. She was a great lady!

[Dashkova]

Evgenia Ginzburg was similarly honored with such a moniker.

[BobAtchison]

One of the things to remember is that Petersburg was, for most people who lived there, a temporary place of residence.  Prior to 1914 most workers came and went into the city based on the seasons of the countryside.   The people who considered Petersburg home were generally government workers, shop keepers, professionals and members of the intelligensia.  A signifigant percentage of residents of the city were foreign born.

People saw the Revolution differently.  If you lived there year-round and called the city home you really noticed the stores closing, the disapearance of restaurants, the closing of newspapers and banks.  Imagine every store you know closing up in less than a year and no where to buy food.  Imagine all banks and bank accounts are gone... all the familiar things have vanished.  All that is left are the buildings and desperate people.

[AGRBear]

In Richard Luckett's book THE WHITE GENERALS  are some interesting details about the period of time between the Nicholas II's abdication, the rise of the Prov. Govt. and Lenin's Revolution.

One of the earliest acts the Prov. Govt. did was to abolish the death penalty p. 50.

This meant many things but at that time,  it created a terrible impact on the war against Germany.  Why?  Once the soldiers discovered that they could dessert and not be shot.... many fled....  Being caught was unlikely and if someone was part of the unlucky few,  they were imprisoned which ended with a general amnesty...

This isn't incerted here to debate if the war was good, could have been avoided or bad.   The abolishment of the death penalty was an event which affected the  "everday life" of a soldier, their families and Russia....

AGRBear

[AGRBear]

A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY, THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes p.  646  CHEKA:

"The ingenuity of the Cheka's torture metods were matched only by the Spanish Inquistion.  Each local Cheka had its own speciality."

For the gruesome detials read Figes.

p. 647:

"Executions were the final product of this machinery of terror.  Tens of thousands of summary executions were carried out in courtyards and cellars, or in deserted fields on the edge of towns..."  Whole prisions would be 'empties' by the Cheka before a town was abandoned to the Whites. At night the tities tried to sleelp to the sound of pople being shot."

One  night Lenin asked Dzerzhinsky, who was the head of the CHEKA, how many prisioners were in the jails in Moscow.  Dzerzhinsky reported back that there were 1,500.  That night, 1,500 prisioners were executed.  Later, Lenin would say his order had been misread.  Only he knows the truth of this.

p. 649:
"Under Lenin's regime--not Stalin's--the Cheka was to become a vast poltice state."  "Nobody will ever know the exact number of people represssed and killed by the Cheka in thse years.  But it was certainly several hundred thousand..."

AGRBear

[olga]

AGRBear, you are beginning to sound like CJ_Griffin.

[Elisabeth]

AGRBear, you are beginning to sound like CJ_Griffin.

No, AGR Bear is beginning to sound like Orlando Figes, whom she is quoting. (Kudos to AGR Bear for actually reading Figes, unlike so many people here!)

Darth, I think it's interesting that Orlando Figes (everyone's fave leftist historian - but not left enough on this subject, I guess?) gets turned into a right-winger like C.J. the minute you disagree with him.

[AGRBear]

It was Darth's buddy rsykkiya who told me to buy Figes.  

I don't always agree with Figes' conclusion, I do find his information informative, interesting and filled with sources.

So, here is another slice of everyday life during the revolution:

Figes p. 481:

"The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insrrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began."

Trotsky wrote:  "...an armed conflict today or tomorrow on the even of the Soviet Congress is no in our plans."

But the Red Guards were pushing...  People in the city were being irratated and stirred up....

So who wanted this "insurrection"?

One has to following Lenin and I think we can truthfully say this was "Lenin's  insurrection",  "Lenin's coup" and then it was "Lenin's Revoltuion".

AGRBear

[AGRBear]

Here is a look into Gen. Denikin's view of what was happening around him as he rode in a 3rd class railway car,  in disguise.  Page 520 of Figes:

"Now I was a simply  a borrzhui, who was shoved and cursed sometimes with malice, sometimes just in passing, but fortunately no one paid any attention to me.  Now I saw real life more clearly and was terrified."

One of the major  mistakes the noblemen education was it lack of understanding the "commoner" and "real life".  However, Denikin was a nobleman, he was from humble background and apparently had forgotten what it was like to be the the "real" world.

Anyway Denikin goes on to tell us:

"I saw boundless hatred of ideas and of people, of everything that was socially or intelleclltually higher than the crowd,  of everything which bore the slightest trace of abundance, even of inanimate objects, which were the signs of some culture stange or inaccesible to the crowd.  This felling expressed hatred acculated over the centuries, the bitterness of three years of war, and the hysteria generated by the revolutionary leaders."

Read more about Denikin and other Gen. in the Whites and Reds thread.

AGRBear

[AGRBear]

According to various books I've read, the communists system of "mass terror" was quite sucessfull.

Joseph Height: HOMESTEADERS ON THE STEPPE, THE ODYSSEY OF A PIONEERING PEOPLE p. 376:
"...Stalin and his all-powerful secret police were able to expand the system to colosal proportions as a results of the enforced collectivization of some 20 million works and peasants who were converted into 250,000 large ecomonic units known as kolkozes."

AGRBear

[olga]

AGRBear, this thread is about the Revolution, not the Purges.

[rskkiya]

Yes!
Thank you dear Darth Olga!
By the way, how much longer until the final film? "Sith"?)


spasibah!
paka
rskkiya