“The years passed, and the fog lifted, and what had been accomplished could be seen clearly. What had looked like chaos, insanity, self-destruction, the concatenation of unfortunate circumstances, the events whose mysterious, tragic meaninglessness had driven people mad, became recognizable step by step as the clear, precise, obvious attributes of the new life.
The fate of the generation of the Revolution was revealed in a new light, logically, without mysticism. Only now did Ivan Grigoryevich begin to grasp that new national destiny which had risen from the bones of the annihilated generation.
That Bolshevik generation of the Civil War period had been formed in the days of the Revolution; where the concept of the "World Commune" held absolute sway; in the midst of the hungry and inspired subbotniki. It took unto itself the heritage of World War and Civil War—destruction, famine, typhus, anarchy, rampant crime. Through Lenin's lips it proclaimed the existence of a Party that could set Russia on a new path. Without hesitation it accepted as its inheritance centuries of Russian tyranny, throughout which generations had been born and had died knowing one right only—"serf right," the right of the master over the serf.
Under Lenin's leadership that Bolshevik generation had taken part in the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the destruction of those democratic revolutionary parties which had struggled against Russian absolutism.
That Bolshevik generation of the Civil War did not believe in freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of the press - not in the context of bourgeois Russia. Like Lenin, it regarded as nonsense, as nothing, those freedoms of which many revolutionary workers and intellectuals had dreamed.
The young state crushed the democratic parties, clearing the path for Soviet construction. And by the end of the twenties, those parties were completely liquidated, and the people imprisoned under the Czar had been returned to prison and sent off to hard labor. And then, in 1930, the ax of the total collectivization of agriculture fell. And soon the ax fell again, this time on the Bolshevik generation of the Civil War. Only a small fraction of it survived—and its soul, at any rate its faith in the "World Commune," its revolutionary, romantic strength, departed with those who perished in 1937. The ones who survived made their adjustment to the new times, to the new people.
And the new people did not believe in the Revolution. They were not children of the Revolution. They were the children of the state the Revolution had created.
The new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks. One of the state's concerns, in fact, was that its clerks so often turned out to be very petty indeed, and cheating, thieving types to boot.
Terror and dictatorship swallowed up those who had created them. And the state, intended as the means to an end, itself turned out to be the end. The people who created it had conceived of it as a means to the realization of their ideals. But it turned out that their dreams, their ideals, were merely a means, a tool, of the great and dread state. Instead of being a servant, as it was meant to be, the state had become a grim tyrant.
The people weren't the ones who needed the terror of 1919, who destroyed freedom of speech and of the press, who required the death of millions of peasants—for the peasants made up the largest segment of the people. It was not the people who in 1937 needed prisons and camps crammed to overflowing, who needed the ruinous resettlement in the taiga of the Crimean Tatars, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Russified Bulgarians and Greeks, the Chechens, and the Volga Germans. Nor were the people the ones who destroyed the freedom to plant and sow as one pleased and the workers' right to strike. Nor was it the people who heaped up all those monstrous taxes and surtaxes and levies on the production cost of consumer goods.
The state had become the master. What had been envisioned as national in form had become national in content; it had become the essence. And the socialist element, which had been envisaged as the content, had been forced out, reduced to mere phraseology, mere external form, a shell. And it was with tragic clarity that the sacred law of all life defined itself: freedom of the individual human being is higher than anything else, and there is no goal, no purpose in the world, for which it may be sacrificed.” - Vasily Grossman, ‘Forever Flowing’ (1972) [p. 191 - 194]
