“Few, indeed, are the foreign scholars who understand so penetratingly the terrible betrayal of the cause of liberty in the deepest sense of the word engendered on principle by the earliest Bolshevists.”
Glossing
Vladimir Nabokov’s italics: among a sizable minority of fellow travelers and
apologists, from liberals to Trotskyists, it was conventional wisdom to blame
Stalin for the betrayal of the Bolshevik Revolution and its purported ideals.
Lenin and his cronies – among them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, both later murdered
on orders from Stalin – were blameless. “On principle” is the devastating phrase.
The Bolsheviks from the start were mercilessly, intentionally, systematically murderous.
Nabokov is
writing to Richard Pipes on this date, May 11, in 1971. A leading scholar of
Russian and Soviet history at Harvard, Pipes (1923-2018) was a steadfast
anti-communist and, later, a close adviser to President Reagan. He wrote the
introduction to the new edition of The
Provisional Government (University of Queensland Press, 1970) by the
novelist’s father, V.D. Nabokov.
Vladimir
Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870-1922) served in Russia’s provisional
government following the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar
Nicholas II in 1917. A member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Kadets,
he led the delegation sent to ask the Tsar’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael,
to succeed him. The senior Nabokov and his family fled to Crimea from St. Petersburg in December
1917 after the Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. He was assassinated by monarchists in Berlin in 1922, a
scene refracted forty years later in his son’s Pale Fire. Nabokov writes in his letter to Pipes:
“Your splendid Introduction . . . touched me
greatly. I wish to tell you how infinitely gratifying it is to me to find in it
this particular approach to Russian history at the revolutionary period. . . .
I am really most happy to have your wise and sympathetic Introduction head the
English translation of my father’s memoir.”
[I have
written about Richard Pipes here and here, and about Nabokov’s father’s murder here.]
I remember reading, years ago, a comment from someone who had known both Lenin and Stalin personally and had, miraculously, survived his relationships with both men. Unfortunately, I don't remember his name (as I said, this was years ago), but I do remember him saying that, as vicious as Stalin was, he was a real sweetheart compared to Lenin. (Not an exact quote, obviously.)
ReplyDelete"The Bolsheviks from the start were mercilessly, intentionally, systematically murderous" - yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
ReplyDeleteHow nice to see that the University of Queensland Press produced the volume you refer to. I don't know about now, but it used to be an awfully good publisher of a wide variety of interesting books.