Living My Life - Emma Goldman [232]
Such was the epic of dazzling beauty and overwhelming power, infused with palpitating life by the ardour and eloquence of our friend. Presently Bill himself broke the spell. He had shown us the transformation in the soul of Russia, he continued; he would have to let us see her ills of the body as well. “Not to prejudice you,” he emphasized, “as has been feared by people whose criterion of revolutionary integrity is a membership card.” Before long we would ourselves meet the appalling afflictions that were sapping the country’s strength, he said. His object was merely to prepare us—to help us diagnose the source of the disease, to point out the danger of its spreading and enable us to see that only the most drastic measures could effect a cure. The Russian experience had taught him that we anarchists had been the romanticists of revolution, forgetful of the cost it would entail, the frightful price the enemies of the Revolution would exact, the fiendish methods they would resort to in order to destroy its gains. One cannot fight fire and sword with only the logic and justice of one’s ideal. The counter-revolutionists had combined to isolate and starve Russia, and the blockade was taking frightful toll of human life. The intervention and the destruction in its wake, the numerous White attacks, costing oceans of blood, the hordes of Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich; their pogroms, bestial revenge, and the general havoc wrought had imposed on the Revolution a warfare that its most far-sighted exponents had never dreamed about. A warfare not always in keeping [with our] romantic ideas of revolutionary ethics, indispensable none the less to drive off the hungry wolves ready to tear the Revolution limb from limb. He had not ceased to be an anarchist, Bill assured us; he had not become indifferent to the menace of a Marxian State machine. That danger was no longer a subject for theoretic discussion, but an actual reality because of the existing bureaucracy, inefficiency, and corruption. He loathed the dictatorship and its handmaiden, the Cheka,5 with their ruthless suppression of thought, speech, and initiative. But it was an unavoidable evil. The anarchists had been the first to respond to Lenin’s essentially anarchistic call to revolution. They had the right to demand an accounting. “And we will! Never doubt that,” Bill fairly shouted, “we will! But not now, not now! Not while every nerve must be strained to save Russia from the reactionary elements which are desperately fighting to come back to power.” [ ... ]
Our comrade was the enthusiastic bard of old, his song the saga of the Revolution, the most stupendous event of our time. Its miracles were many, its horrors and woe the martyrdom of a people nailed to the cross.
Bill was entirely right, we thought. Nothing was of moment compared with the supreme need of giving one’s all to safeguard the Revolution and its gains. The faith and fervour of our comrade swept me along to ecstatic heights. Yet I could not entirely free myself from an undercurrent of uneasiness one often feels when left alone in the dark. Resolutely I strove to drive it back, moving like a sleep-walker through enchanted space. Sometimes I would stumble back to earth only half-aroused by a harsh voice or an ugly sight. The gagging of free speech at the session of the Petro-Soviet that we had attended, the discovery that better and more plentiful food was served Party members at the Smolny dining-room and many similar injustices and evils had attracted my attention. Model schools where the children were stuffed with sweets and candies, and side by side with them schools dismal, poorly equipped, unheated, and filthy, where the little ones, hungry all the time, were herded together like cattle. A special hospital for Communists, with every modern comfort, while