36 The New York Reviewthe radical difference between reality
and newspaper accounts:Every Petersburger had seen the
revolution with his own eyes. But
with the first newspaper page
they were told about something
quite different. There were vague
mentions of “excesses” and “an-
archy.”... Everyone knew that sol-
diers were going from apartment
to apartment and stealing, but the
newspapers wrote: “thieves and
hooligans dressed as soldiers”—as
if hooligans were some known so-
cial class, or it was so easy for lots
of people to dress as soldiers.Having proclaimed “the Revolution”
bloodless, newspaper accounts even
referred to the thousands of executed
people “as ‘deceased’ rather than
killed.”
“The lie became the principle of
newspapers starting from the very
first day of this unchecked freedom,”
Andozerskaya reflects. When they re-
ported that arrested officers—recently
regarded as war heroes—had been
magnanimously allowed to receive a
bed in prison and food from home, it
really meant that they weren’t being
fed or given a place to sleep. Jour-
nalists and intellectuals had long de-
manded freedom of the press but now
suppressed any publication deemed in-
sufficiently radical.
In each Red Wheel novel, Solzheni-
tsyn explores the mentality leading ed-
ucated people to conform to prevailing
opinion even when it contradicts their
most cherished principles. Before the
revolution, Andozerskaya shocked her
students by saying that a historian writes
the truth even when it does not support
progressive opinion. Now she reflects:The newspapers were disgusting,
yes, but that was because they
spewed society’s vile epidemic: the
fear of standing out from every-
one else.... Now that the “police
inspector was gone” and “we can
breathe,” people’s greatest fear
was standing out from everyone
else.... The dictatorship of the
current.Lenin supposedly remarked that
“when we are ready to hang the capi-
talists, they will sell us the rope,” but
in Solzhenitsyn’s (generally accurate)
account, capitalists were even more
self-destructive. Wealthy businessmen
and other well-placed people destined
to be shot implored bloodthirsty revolu-
tionaries to accept sizable cash contri-
butions. Liberal generals and admirals,
who immediately proclaimed their al-
legiance to the revolution and the new
Provisional Government, were lynched
anyway. Solzhenitsyn describes their
pathetic confusion. Meanwhile Nicho-
las II, whom Solzhenitsyn portrays as
a softhearted idiot, reasons that “in
[good] weather like this, no evil deed
could take place. God would not allow
it.” Only Bolsheviks grasp “the unusual
nature of revolutionary situations” and
the dynamics of power.
Almost without exception, the mem-
bers of the Provisional Government
could do no more than assume revo-
lutionary poses and make speeches
inspiring to intellectuals but beyond
the comprehension of workers and sol-
diers. The “paramount principle” to
which Prince Lvov, the first head of theProvisional Government, adheres “was
belief and trust. Belief in people, all
people, our holy people.” To the sug-
gestion that police should put a limit to
anarchy and murder, he replies, “Why
does a free state need police at all?”
Lvov recoils at the very idea of resolute
action. “Ah, ‘decisive measures,’ that’s
not our language,” he thinks, “it is un-
worthy of a free alliance of free people.
My dear fellows, why so ominous?”
The radical Aleksandr Kerensky,
intoxicated by his own voice, supposes
he can defeat anarchy and Bolshevism
by sheer charisma. Only Vladimir
Nabokov, the progressive politician
(and father of the novelist) who was
murdered by monarchists in 1922 in
Berlin, acts competently. He wonders
that his colleagues “had no idea how to
operate, how to translate thoughts and
votes into legislation.... A decision
was approved before it had any text,
unaccompanied by any figures or bud-
get,” and orders were given that made
no sense or could not be implemented.
Politicians neglected “the most funda-
mental act,” establishing their author-
ity in the provinces.Solzhenitsyn writes so harshly about
the liberal Kadets (Constitutional
Democrats) and non-Bolshevik so-
cialists of the Provisional Government
because he himself had adhered to the
common assumption—still predomi-
nant in the West—that the February
revolution represented Russia’s great
hope instead of a stage leading directly
to Bolshevism. He began writing The
Red Wheel, he explains in Between
Two Millstones, under the spell of
such ideas, “and they were scattered
throughout [his novel] First Circle, for
example, and the first edition of Archi-
pelago.” It was only in the mid-1970s,
when he consulted archives preserved
in the West, that he recognized his
mistake. The slide from February toOctober was a continuous process and
Bolshevism its natural outcome. The
Red Wheel, he decided, would narrate
“the inglorious, six-month-long story of
how the ‘victorious’ democracy (fabri-
cated, in Russia, by the educated types)
foundered, helpless, of its own accord.”
Solzhenitsyn wanted to leave read-
ers with little alternative to accepting
his conclusions. He wanted “to pro-
vide proof, rather than impressionistic
daubs, which convince no one. A his-
torical epic is not some diversion for the
pen—it only has substance if it is truth-
ful all the way through.” He therefore
included important documents in the
text. Several chapters consist entirely
of actual newspaper extracts. The result
was a work of immense length and for-
mal idiosyncrasy unprecedented even
in the Russian tradition of formally
idiosyncratic works. Solzhenitsyn em-
ployed structural anomaly not as an
end in itself, as the Russian Formalists
had advocated, but to convey the direct
sense of what was really happening.
Most historians trace a coherent nar-
rative of past events, but Solzhenitsyn
renders the confusing impressions of
participants who had no idea where
events were leading and pieced to-
gether scraps of shifting evidence and
unreliable information. To portray the
historical process, Solzhenitsyn ex-
plains in Between Two Millstones, one
must render “the color of the succes-
sive, changeable, momentary opinions”
and perceptions. Hundreds of short
chapters, shifting between historical
and fictional figures, convey the throb
of events almost hour by hour.
The section in the third volume of
March 1917 devoted to Friday, March
16, for instance, includes chapters 354
to 407. Scenes shift quickly between
the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich
and other generals and telegraph and
railway employees, fictional charac-
ters representing types of people com-
mon at the time, and the novel’s mainfictional heroes, all interspersed with
newspaper extracts, a chapter of “Frag-
ments from the day,” and the attempt
of Tolstoy’s former secretary to inter-
vene on behalf of imprisoned sectari-
ans. One brief chapter depicts what the
table of contents describes as “a new
daily life for the Executive Committee
[of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies].—The Romanov dynasty’s
fate.—Start the Streetcars.” If this is
difficult for the reader to follow, it was
even harder for actual participants in
the events.
One newspaper instructed:Naïve people fear that with the
elimination of the monarchy,
Russia’s state unity might falter.
But it is free political institutions
that will strengthen Russian state
unity. The new government arose
not through self-appointment: on it
rests the will of the people.Every one of these statements proved
false. Another newspaper reported:More than 800 prisoners were re-
leased from the local prison (two
of them politicals, the rest crimi-
nals). Immediately upon release...
the courthouse was burned to the
ground.... Pogroms, robberies,
and murders rained down on the
entire city.A newspaper in the city of Tver de-
scribed how the governor, seeing a
mob heading for his house, phoned the
bishop to make confession. One so-
cialist newspaper published a curious
“appeal”:Comrade thieves, wheeler- dealers,
robbers, picklocks, swindlers, black-
mailers, double-dealers, sots, ma-
rauders, pickpockets, cat burglars,
vagrants, and other brethren... we
have to meet in order to choose rep-
resentatives to the Soviet of Work-
ers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies... Unite,
comrades, for in unity is strength!...
[Signed] Group of conscientious
businessmen.Solzhenitsyn also includes what he
calls “screens”: directions for how
a scene might be filmed. Frame by
frame, chapter 418 depicts how a mob
murders the surprised liberal admiral
Adrian Nepenin (“He hadn’t expected
this treatment!”). The equal sign, Sol-
zhenitsyn explains, means “cut to”:The whole time we see up ahead—
we see large and up close the ad-
miral’s face,
not yet disenchanted even now,
how he trusted and hoped.
But there, behind, sailor hands
are pushing officers aside,
dragging them off....
= Trampled snow on the street
down which they are leading
= the admiral with the lively,
open face, who so believed in
these heroes in black.Yet another perspective appears in the
brief proverbs and sayings Solzhenitsyn
places in large print between chapters
to evoke folk wisdom that’s beyond the
reach of the participants: “FOR THE
TSAR’S SIN GOD WILL PUNISH THE
ENTIRE LAND”; “SOMEONE ELSE’S
FOOL IS A JOKE, YOUR OWN FOOLIN NATURE
I can think, but rarely of nature.
I look with my back to the landscape,
As if in a Claude glass.A cheat code. Ninety-nine lives,
Which might as well be infinite
Unless this isn’t the first one?Nietzsche said There’s a rollicking kindness
That looks like malice.
I ascribe that “kindness” to fate.A breeze carries unknown pathogens,
Information that can’t want to die
Because it’s not alive.What it wants is desire.
A barrier to crossing
The chasm of the day.—Elisa GabbertMorson 35 37 .indd 36 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 33 PM