TIME OF TROUBLES:
The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922
Translated, edited, and introduced by Terence Emmons
Princeton University Press
548 pp., including illustrations and maps, $39.50
During seven turbulent days in late February and early March 1917, a half-million angry Petrograd workers drove the Romanovs from Russia's throne and established a democratic government to mark the beginning of the Revolution of 1917. Almost in an instant, a 300-year-old dynasty fell in ruins. Yet if the events of February and March changed Russia's political structure, her social and economic order remained much the same. The generals who had commanded the czar's armies continued to command. Many of the statesmen who had served the czar still governed, and such prominent revolutionaries as Trotsky and Lenin returned from exile, only to be put into prison or driven again into hiding. Russia's peasants still hungered for land; her workers still labored in factories to produce weapons to fight a war they had come to despise, while her lords and ladies still lived comfortable, elegant lives. Six months after the Romanovs had been driven from her throne, Russia remained much as she had been before.
Then, at the end of October, two tumultuous days in Petrograd changed Russia's course in ways that the first Revolution of 1917 had not. In power at last, Lenin and the Bolsheviks launched a social and economic revolution that opened wide the floodgates of civil war. Quickly, they nationalized Russia's land, factories, and natural resources; moved her capital to Moscow; and declared war upon all nobles, industrialists, merchants, intellectuals, and "rich" peasants. Russia's real revolution thus began not with the events that toppled the Romanovs at the beginning of 1917 but with the Bolsheviks' seizure of power at the year's end, when the guideposts by which men and women had taken their bearings suddenly slipped from sight. As Russians came to realize that the rules that had shaped their lives no longer had any meaning, they began to live from day to day, uncertain of the present and fearful of the future. "Our lovingly built nest has been destroyed, and God knows where and when we will be able to build it again," Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e, a Moscow history professor and head librarian at the vast Rumiantsev Museum (the present-day Lenin Library), wrote as the winter of 1919 ended. "We are living in a bivouac, as one should now. All efforts are directed toward avoiding dying from hunger."
The Civil War period
For most Russians, the years between 1917 and 1922 were nothing like the era of gloriously heroic revolutionary struggle that Bolshevik accounts have painted so vividly. Instead, they were times of fear, hunger, and desperate uncertainty. During Russia's real revolution, even the most carefully made plans had no value. The rules of life changed daily as men and women struggled to reshape their lives around a new system of values whose limits and meaning even its Bolshevik creators did not fully comprehend. "Ahead there is nothing--neither in private life, nor in general prospects," Got'e wrote at the end of 1919. "The revolution has devoured everything that was most dear to me," he said as the last minutes of the year ticked away. "Cold, hunger, moral and physical death--that is
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