The Russian Revolution unfolded in such an astonishing and immensely complex series of events that it is difficult to grasp what really happened. This is why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his work of dramatized history, The Red Wheel, tried to capture the truth and meaning of the Revolution by exploring certain nodal points, or short periods of time, that give us access to the event itself. As the Publishers Note explains, the fourth and final book of the series,March 1917, is the centerpiece of The Red Wheel. Here its most important lessons are brought home.

　　March 1917, Book 4, has just been published by the University of Notre Dame Press, in a quite readable and capable translation by Marian Schwartz. This volume begins with a vivid account of a disturbing dream in which Pavel Ivanovich Varsonofiev, the wise seer or “stargazer” of previous volumes, is handed an “astral” telegram, no doubt highlighting the terrible fate of Russia if she continues down her chaotic revolutionary path. When Varsonofiev goes to read the main text of the “telegram,” however, it turns out it has been “dropped, erased.” Some malevolent force is impeding communication, and Varsonofiev fears great evil ahead. He loves his country but cannot share the misplaced confidence of Russia’s liberals that the “hurricane” of revolutionary upheaval will somehow result in peace, freedom, and democratic bliss. In Solzhenitsyn’s account, this premonition is amply confirmed.

　　At an open meeting of the Kadet party in Moscow, the Kadet spokesman Nikolai Kishkin reassures Varsonofiev that there is no need to be “afraid of democracy” or of the parallel government that had taken shape in the form of a “Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.” Varsonofiev is skeptical, and walking to the meeting, he sees police and gendarme, the protectors ofcivilized order, being led into preliminary detention. Here is a deed that speaks volumes. The thoughtless liberals had forgotten the essential connection between freedom and measure, and the reality of “enemies to the Left” (and not merely “counterrevolutionaries” on the Right) who could destroy Russia and civilized order with it.

　　In the first three books of March 1917, covering the period from March 8, 1917, to the 22nd of the same month, Solzhenitsyn chronicles a perfect storm: the passivity and pusillanimity of Tsar Nikolai and the “nullities” associated with the half-autocratic old regime; the refusal of Russia’s liberals (and “educated society” more broadly) to give the Russian state any benefit of the doubt, even during wartime; the malevolent machinations of the revolutionary Left who are clearly biding their time for an even more ”revolutionary” revolution; and the violence and mayhem on the streets that are foolishly applauded by a blindly progressive-minded bourgeoisie. The old Duma or parliament was now irrelevant, and the new Provisional Government, despite its flamboyant revolutionary pronouncements, was incapable of governing from the get-go.

　　Revolution Seen Though a Literary Kaleidoscope

　　The street scenes in March 1917, Book 4, are far fewer and generally less dramatic than in the early books of the node. The worst of the bloodshed—and the demented behavior of mobs turned truly mad—has abated for now. This opens the way to revealing accounts of what was said by both the free or “bourgeois” press and the socialist one. Left-liberals are overcome by “intoxicated joy” while the socialist press obsesses about non-existent “counterrevolutionary” machinations and the need to keep a suspicious eye on the “bourgeois” provisional government. Even the ”free newspapers” celebrate the fraud that is Aleksandr Kerensky, the Socialist Revolutionary Minister of Justice (and soon-to-be War Minister and then Prime Minister) who delights in celebratory speeches and the “whirling activity” that sustains his illusion that he is exercising real authority. One deluded liberal newspaper calls him “the minister of truth and love. The symbol of our noble revolution.”

　　Kerensky fears above all a moribund old regime, precisely when the real threat comes from the revolutionary Left. These ideological blinders would lead him to stymie the efforts of General Lavr Kornilov, answering a call from Kerensky himself, to forestall a Bolshevik coup in September 1917. Kerensky, by then Prime Minister of a semi-radicalized Provisional Government, would massively rearm the Bolsheviks and ultimately spend the rest of his life (he died in the United States in 1970) attempting to justify his actions in that disastrous year. To his death, he still believed that he embodied and displayed what Solzhenitsyn, reflecting Kerensky’s self-understanding, called “a genius for revolutionary action.” He thus remains a sad, if instructive, case of a progressive who was unable to acknowledge enemies on the Left and who never woke up to fundamental realities.

　　Solzhenitsyn artfully describes the temporary divisions on the revolutionary side, divisions that will be overcome when a returned Lenin reasserts the titanic revolutionary will of a Bolshevik party committed to “revolution” in its most radical and destructive form.

　　Chapter 555 consists of revealing “fragments” about the second week of the revolution in the capital Petrograd (soon to be renamed St. Petersburg, and then, lamentably, Leningrad). In one such fragment, Olga Stolypina, the widow of the great liberal-conservative statesman Pyotr Stolypin, runs “into her old footman Ilya from the Winter Palace,” the seat of Russia’s government. They had been close, and Ilya had told the Stolypins “many stories about Aleksandr II and Aleksandr III and shown them objects from their daily life.” Stolypin’s widow is surprised to see this loyal servant of the Tsars wearing a red bow, a sign of the revolutionary cause. She “reproached him” and did not hesitate to call this display of “red” sentiments “filth.” This old and decent man, his face “drowning in his white side-whiskers,” sadly responds, “Out of caution, Olga Borisovna, out of caution alone!” The revolution thus exerted its control over those who knew better and in no way wished to be in its spiritual grip. This is ever the revolutionary and totalitarian way.

　　A Government that Doesn’t Govern

　　What quickly becomes apparent in this volume is that the Provisional Government, as ofMarch 1917, had not even begun to govern. It was constantly beset by lawlessness in the armed forces and by agitation and sustained subversion on the part of the Soviet of Workers’s Deputies and its unelected Executive Committee. At one point in the book, the Executive Committee even demands that the Provisional Government fund the Soviets’s “organizational and political work” of subversion to the tune of 10 million rubles! At this stage (shortly before Lenin’s return to Russia), the Bolsheviks are divided between revolutionary leaders and propagandists who see the Provisional Government as “class enemies” and wish to actively subvert the war effort, and rank-and-file members who are less ruthless and who do not want to unduly weaken the government—at least not yet. Solzhenitsyn artfully describes the temporary divisions on the revolutionary side, divisions that will be overcome when a returned Lenin reasserts the titanic revolutionary will of a Bolshevik party committed to “revolution” in its most radical and destructive form.

　　In a crucial chapter (567), General Alekseev, who would soon become the Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, is stunned to read a letter to him from Minister of War Aleksandr Guchkov admitting that “a week after its creation” the government “possesses no real authority.” As we shall see in the two volumes of April 1917, Guchkov quickly becomes fully committed to the restoration of genuine authority in the Russian state and the armed forces. He was a vociferous critic of the weakness and decadence of Nikolai’s regime but remained a patriot, monarchist, and constitutionalist at heart. He was forced to resign on April 29, 1917, but in September 1917, Guchkov would support General Kornilov’s perfectly reasonable, if failed, efforts to prevent the seizure of power by totalitarian-minded revolutionaries.Nor were they alone in resisting the red wheel.

　　Although he plays a somewhat diminished role in this last part of the March “node,” Solzhenitsyn’s fictional protagonist Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev, a talented soldier who has always supported the fusion of sound tradition with sensible and necessary modernization, fully discerns the nature of the crisis. When he is given a choice of a promotion, or a move to GHQ, general military headquarters, he reflects that “only weeks remained to save the army itself.” There must be someone “to defend the country” against the forces of subversion and dissolution. A public-spirited as well as ambitious man, Vorotynstev “had always thirsted for a high-appointment!” But he clearly appreciates that this offer is coming “from the wrong people” “at the wrong time.” In chapter 186 of April 1917 (the very last chapter of The Red Wheel as a whole), we will see Vorotynstev organizing military officers for what would become the core of the White Army. Solzhenitsyn clearly admires his measured and thoughtful patriotism and his indomitable opposition to the forces of civic and moral subversion.

　　In the closing half of the volume, Lenin, still in exile in Zurich, Switzerland, becomes more and more of a looming presence. Other revolutionaries have already returned home to Russia and Lenin is eager to join them. Lenin is shrewd, daring, single-minded, fanatical, and devoid of moral scruples in the ordinary sense of the term. As with all Solzhenitsyn’s main characters, we hear Lenin’s thoughts from the inside, so to speak, even if the author has no sympathy for his machinations or the ideological fanaticism that drives them. This diversity of inner voices heightens the interest and intelligibility of the drama. The Red Wheel is in no way “monologic” even if its author is anything but neutral in the great contest between civilized order and revolutionary subversion.

　　Just a few months before, the Bolshevik leader, still plotting away in his Swiss exile, had lamented to his fellow revolutionaries in Zurich that they would not live to see a revolutionary conflagration break out in their native land. Now, we see a wily revolutionary at work who is “on fire” yet again and determined to join (and exploit) the revolutionary carnival in Petrograd. He is now rid of all equivocations and is committed to doing anything necessary to bring down the hapless Provisional Government. He and his agents successfully negotiated with German authorities (Russia’s deadly enemy in the war) to return up to forty Bolshevik revolutionaries and agitators to the Russian capital in a “sealed train.” In the penultimate chapter of Book 4 of March 1917 (chapter 654), we see a triumphant Lenin preparing to return to Russia, his birthplace, though he has no real patriotic attachment to this land. In the most subversive way imaginable, his only purpose is to “intervene in the Russian revolution!” Every reader of the book already knows that he will succeed.

　　Lessons Learned

　　We began by pointing out that the four books of March 1917 are “the centerpiece” of The Red Wheel. The events of February/March depicted in it (the ambiguity in dating results from Russia’s imminent change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar) are the real revolution, with the Bolshevik “revolution” of November 7, 1917 (October 23, 1917, according to the old Julian calendar), possessing the character of a coup d’état or putsch rather than a true revolution. (To be sure, a cruel, truly totalitarian transformation would follow in the years and decades after Red October.) What larger conclusions are we then to draw from the collapse of the Russian old regime, the chaos and revolution unleashed by the February/March revolution, and the brutal assault of the Bolsheviks? How do these events still speak to us, as contemporary readers? Some vitally important lessons have been intimated along the way.

　　In his Reflections on the February Revolution, written between 1980 and 1983 and not yet published in English, Solzhenitsyn sketches the lessons he believed should be drawn from Russia’s descent into revolutionary upheavals and the mindless enthusiasm, even inebriation, on the part of “educated society.” The four sections of that work were originally intended to be published as introductions to the four books of March 1917. But Solzhenitsyn ultimately concluded that publishing the Reflections as part of The Red Wheel itself risked being too didactic and might undermine the all-important literary character of the work. Instead, he published it separately on three occasions, in 1983 in Paris during his Western exile, and again after his return to his homeland in 1997 and 2007, respectively (and in French, too). These striking reflections give us access to Solzhenitsyn’s “authorial intention” in The Red Wheel, outlining his most profound thoughts about the accelerating locomotive (“the red wheel”) that was Russia’s march into revolutionary nihilism. The descent into madness was not preordained, as Solzhenitsyn repeatedly makes clear. But each abdication of moral and political responsibility on the part of those who should have known better contributed to making that descent more likely—and more deadly. Here is the first lesson.

　　Russia’s liberals, who were not genuinely “liberal” after all, were on the whole incapable of recognizing “enemies to the Left.”

　　In the fourth section of the Reflections, Solzhenitsyn delineates the various causes and influences that contributed to the deadly acceleration of “the red wheel.” The war was a significant contributing factor, although Solzhenitsyn believed that the February revolution was not initially inspired by discontent with the war. He strikingly places a great deal of blame on a decent, if pathetically weak-willed, emperor (and the “nullities” who surrounded him after the assassination of Stolypin) for having neither the determination to pursue meaningful reforms nor the courage to put down revolutionary unrest. Tsar Nikolai was a good Christian and a loving father but a feckless ruler. For its part, “educated society” was immature, petulant, and addicted to abstract, utopian political and ideological schemes that boded very poorly for Russia’s future. As we have had reason to state, Russia’s liberals, who were not genuinely “liberal” after all, were on the whole incapable of recognizing “enemies to the Left.” Here is another enduring lesson to be drawn from the text.

　　Solzhenitsyn also argues that Russia needed “a strong and authoritative Church,” but one that was not under the thumb of a centralized and semi-autocratic state, as the Russian Church had largely been since the reign of Peter the Great. But despite the renewal of Orthodox philosophy and theology during Russia’s “Silver Age” at the beginning of the twentieth century, the official church was largely “anemic” and only just beginning to wake up. Its leaders did not even publicly pray or speak out for the Tsar and his family when they came under assault during the February Revolution. Seminaries were infiltrated by revolutionary activists and full of anti-religious literature and revolutionary propaganda. A weakened Church failed in its mission to “care for souls” and more broadly to care for the spiritual health of the Russian people.

　　In the decades leading up to the Revolution, a liberated peasantry (Solzhenitsyn lamented both the serfdom of old and the lethargy of the village mir or commune) was losing its Christian countenance and mores. With “the fear of God” abating, lawless peasants resorted to pillage and violence in 1917, only to be cruelly ground down later by collectivization and a murderous revolutionary state. “Men have forgotten God,” some wise peasants told the young Solzhenitsyn in the 1920s. He repeats that conclusion here as well as in his 1983 Templeton Lecture. Nothing good came out of 1917, just violence, mayhem, and self-defeating revolutionary inebriation. Its initial leaders were far better than the left-wing totalitarians who followed them in power, but their thinking and action turned out to be “spiritually repugnant,” and devoid of moral seriousness.

　　Chapter 578 of March 1917, Book 4 provides a thoughtful way forward for a Church that remains true to its wisdom and that refuses to succumb to new ideological illusions. The military chaplain Father Severyan (readers will remember him for his riveting dialogue with Sanya Lazhenitsyn about Tolstoy’s pacifist and humanitarian distortion of Christianity at the beginning of November 1916) has little to do, since few soldiers—or even officers—still make use of his priestly services in this new revolutionary dispensation. Severyan rejects the “fashionable, universal atheism” that has “flowed into Russia through the minds of Catherine’s magnates—and down, down, down, to the sons of village priests.” It then “had filled all the vessels of educated society and washed it of faith.”

　　This deeply reflective priest wanted new freedoms for Russia and the Church, but not the conformism that comes with obligatory liberal and revolutionary modes of thinking. No reactionary, he nonetheless refused to succumb to the compulsory progressive “winds.” Christianity—not democracy, revolution, or illusory “progress”—would show the path to national renewal. Like Solzhenitsyn, Father Severyan believed that “neither science, nor bureaucracy, nor democracy, nor much trumpeted socialism, could provide the answer for man’s soul.” Against clerics who associated socialism with true Christianity, Father Severyan insisted that socialism was “founded on struggle,” on hate, and not on the healing power of Christ’s “love.” He is among Solzhenitsyn’s most admirable literary creations, and in many ways a reflection of his deepest insights and positive affirmations.

　　A Book that Speaks to East and West

　　Near the end of Reflections on the February Revolution, Solzhenitsyn suggestively adds that Russia’s “immature and aborted democracy” inaugurated by the February Revolution “prophetically outlined all the neighboring weaknesses of the flourishing (Western) democracies, their mad and blind retreat faced with the most extreme forms of socialism, their perplexed weakness faced with terrorism.” Solzhenitsyn’s work thus aims to speak to the crisis of modernity in both its Eastern and Western forms.

　　Earlier in March 1917, the liberal ex-Marxist Pyotr Struve, a man of personal integrity and growing political acumen, laments revolutionary illusions that ignore the dependence of freedom both on moderation, and on the state or authoritative institutions. Freedom must be balanced, measured, and self-governing, and not a substitute for authority within its legitimate spheres. Such is Solzhenitsyn’s liberal conservatism.

　　In the West today, an ethos of autonomy, liberation, and self-expression has crowded out ordered liberty, the self-limitation at the heart of authentic self-government. In addition, we have no shortage of “soft” or “hard” progressives that seem to be lifted right out of the pages of The Red Wheel. In contemporary Russia, after the chaos and criminality of the Russian 1990s, the ruling authorities have forgotten that a strong, legitimate state must also protect the civic freedoms that are so vital for human flourishing. This is what the patriotic Solzhenitsyn, a considered partisan of both freedom and civilized order, can teach his compatriots still coming out “from under the rubble” of Communist totalitarianism and the societal and spiritual confusion that followed in its wake. A work that combines deep civic and spiritual wisdom, literary art of high quality, and dramatic history that informs and instructs, The Red Wheel deserves a readership that is receptive to its enduring lessons. With the publication of the whole of March 1917, those lessons are much easier to discern.