... the interests of the people Korolenko understood as a realist, because as a result of his life experience, he was one of the best connoisseurs of the people - the people not imagined, not a mystical, not saint, not imaginary, and one who really lives, works, thinks and dreams of Russian Earth.

... What is the power and meaning of Korolenko?

In the fact that, through all the works, Korolenko - large and small, through his essays, notebooks, letters and through his huge, brilliant social activities are faith in a person, faith in immortality, invincible and conquering the nobility of his nature and mind. And although this nobility is historically temporarily depressed in it - it, however, the stronger bones of a person, the stronger even his life.

The most important and constantly valuable in the work of Korolenko is that he has not opened his conviction in the beautiful essence of man, did not invent his inner idea, - he has long and carefully studied people of the people in reality and only then opened They are true of their essence. Artistic truth entered the works of Korolenko from the real big world ...

Vladimir Korolenko

Letters to Lunacharsky

Letters V. G. Korolenko K A. V. Lunacharsky, many decades in the USSR were not published. The correspondence initiative belonged to V. I. Lenin, who had a sharply negative attitude of Korolenko to the politics of the Bolsheviks. "We must ask for A. V. Lunacharsky to enter into correspondence with him: it is most convenient for him as the Commissioner of Folk Enlightenment, and to the same Writer." It was an attempt to incline on his side of the writer, whose name became a symbol of humanity and civilian courage.

After a meeting with Lunacharsky Korolenko wrote six letters, but not a single answer received.

Lunacharsky himself, responding in 1930 on the proposal of Professor N. K. Piksanov to repose his correspondence with Korolenko, wrote: "As for my correspondence with Korolenko, it cannot be published. For the correspondence was not there. "

Letters extended to the lists, and in 1922 were published in Paris.

The letter first

Anatoly Vasilyevich.

Of course, I did not forget my promise to write a detailed letter, especially since it was my sincere desire. To express frank opinions about the most important motives of public life has long been for me, as well as for many sincere writers, who urgently need. Thanks to the established "freedom of the speech" of this need, there is no satisfaction. We, dissent, have to write not articles, but reports notes. It seemed to me that it would be easier for me to me. The impression of your visiting strengthened this intention in me, and I waited for time when I sit at the table to exchange views with a comrade writer about sore issues of modernity.

But here is a nightmare episode with shootings during your arrival, as if I left us such an obstacle that I can't talk about anything until I was shared with him. I involuntarily have to start with this episode.

Already starting a conversation with you (or rather, to the petition) before the rally, I was nervous, vaguely feeling that I would have to speak in vain words over the grave just buried. But - so I wanted to believe that the words of the head of the head. Commissions have some reason and five lives can still be saved. True, on the total tone of your speech, it was felt that even you would consider this nightmare in the order of things ... But ... a person is peculiar to hope ...

And the next day, even before receiving your note, I learned that my vague premonition is a fact: five inconsidered executions, five corpses lay between my then impressions and by the time when I take a feather with a cramped heart. Only two or three days ago we learned from local "news" the names of the victims. Before a date with you I saw my native Aroness and Mirkin, and this is a defill of personal drama on these unreserved shadows for me.

I was brought to the rally, firstly, a copy of the official conclusion of the Food Education. It contained that in the Acts of Aronov, the food authorities did not see the violations of the decrees. Secondly, I brought the petition of mill workers, proving that the workers did not consider him a gross exploiter and speculator. Thus, on the issue of these two lives there were different, even official opinions demanding caution and inspection. And indeed, over a year and a half before that, the Emergency Commission received the proposal of the Gubspolkom, according to the conclusion of the legal adviser, to release Aronov or transfer it to the revolutionary tribunal.

Instead, he is shot administratively.

You know that during your literary life I "sowed not some roses." Under the royal power, I wrote a lot about the death penalty and even dismissed the right to talk about it printed much more than it was allowed by censorship. Sometimes I was able to even save already doomed victims of the military courts, and there were cases when after the suspension of execution, evidence of innocence was obtained and the victim was released (for example, in the Yusupov case), although it happened that these evidence came too late (in Glusker and others. ).

But execution without trial, execution in administrative order - this was the greatest rarity even then. I remember only one case when the scaled scales (Warsaw Governor's Governor) shot two young men without a court. But this opened this indignation even in the military-vessels, that only the "approval" after the fact of a stupid king saved the ramp from the citizen of the court. Even members of the Main Military Court assured me that the repetition of this is no longer possible.

Many and at the time, and after that, incredible disgraces were going on, but direct recognition, which is allowed to connect to one investigative power and the power, the sentences (to the death penalty), even then did not happen. The activities of Bolshevik Extreme. Investigation commissions presents an example, may be the only in the history of cultural peoples. One day one of the prominent members of the All-Ukrainian CC, having met me in Poltava. com. where I often came and then with different petitions, asked me about my impressions. I replied: If during the royal power, the district gendarmes received the right not only to refer to Siberia, but also to execute death, then it would be the most that we see now.

My interlocutor answered on this:

- But this is for the benefit of the people.

I think that not all sorts of funds can really apply for the benefit of the people, and for me it is undoubted that administrative executions erected into the system and ongoing for the second year have not belong to their number. Once, last year, I had to describe in writing to Christ. George. Oakovsky one episode, when the Street Chekists shot several so-called counter-revolutionaries. They were already led by a dark night in the cemetery, where they raised shot over the open grave and were shot in the back of the head without distant ceremonies. Maybe they really tried to run (no wonder), and they were shot right there on the street from hand guns. Be that as it may, the people spent in the morning at the Bazaar saw another puddles of the blood, which was lying on dogs, and listened to the crowd of the stories of the surrounding inhabitants about the night incident. I then asked X. G. Rakovsky: Does he consider that these several people, whether they are even the most active agitators, could you tell this crowd something more brighter and more exciting than this picture? I must say that then the local Gubspolk, and the Central Kiev authorities immediately stopped (twice) attempts to such collective executions and demanded the transfer of the case to the revolutionary tribunal. The court of one of the doomed surveys. Comm. I justified to the shooting, and this sentence was met by the assignments of the whole public. Applauded even clocks redarmeys, postponing the guns. After when Denikins came, they pulled out of the total pit of 16 decomposing corpses and put them at the bottom. The impression was terrible, but by the time they themselves were shot by a few people without trial, and I asked them from their supporters: did they think that the corpses were shot by them extracted from the holes would have a more attractive look? Yes, mutual screaming has already reached the extreme limits, and it is bitter to think that the historian will have to celebrate this page of "administrative activities" of the CC in the history of the first Russian republic, and moreover, not in the XVIII, but in the XX century.

We study journalism

N.L. Liderman convict:

V.G. Korolenko "Letters to A.V. Lunacharsky "

One of the main arguments, through which Lenin tried to disprove the sharp criticism of the Orthodi acts of Soviet power, was this: the writer is poorly aware of the real state of affairs; He lives in St. Petersburg and forced to "observe scraps of the life of the former capital," he is surrounded by "an embittered bourgeois intelligentsia, who has not understood anything, not learned." "You put yourself in a position in which you can directly observe a new in the life of workers and peasants, i.e. 9/10 of the population of Russia you are not, - Lenin Gorky on July 31, 1919. - "If you observe, you need to observe below, where you can converge the work of a new structure of life, in the working village, province or in the village .." \\

Vladimir Galaktiovich Korolenko (18531921) was still long before the revolution was forced by the state of health to move in Poltava, and all the peripetics of revolution and civil war he observed not from Peter and not because of the teeth of the Moscow Kremlin, namely "below." Right in front of the windows of his houses, Kaiserovsky soldiers and outer Gaidamaks of Hetman Scoropadsky, the Volunteer Army of General Denikin and "Zhovtoblischniki" Petlyura, "Rebels" of Batki Makhno and the detachments of the Red Army. Old and seriously ill writer

i had to starve, and to provide

help dying from hunger, to join a hand-to-hand with robbers, broke into his house, and regularly visit the CC, to save the next victims of the Red Terror, among them and their own son-in-law. In a word, it could not be supplied in a weak awareness of the situation "below below", "the work of a new structure of life" he was convicted, which is called "in pictures".

Naum Lazarevich Leiderman - Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor of the Department of Modern Russian Literature of the Ural State Pedagogical University.

1 quote. By: V.I. Lenin about literature and art. M., 1957. C.301-302. (Discharge and italic author.)

2 Korolenko was elected Honorary Chairman of the All-Russian Committee for Assistance to the starving (Pomhol), the Committee existed only two months (from July to August 1921), was dissolved at the personal order of Lenin with the directive newspapers - "They are struggling to make fun and stretch at least once a week for two months "(Lenin V.I. Full. Coll. Op. T.53. P. 142.)

Vladimir Korolenko had a huge authority in public circles of Russia. He was called the "singer of high humanity, the poet of the Russian Intelligent Conscience" 3. Tolerance, respect for dissent, Korolenko himself considered his credo: "I have forever a religious attitude towards freedom of someone else's belief and someone else's faith" 4. Back in young years, he had earned a reputation as a folk intercession, when the peasant-Udmurts arose, and confirmed this reputation in 1913, when he made a defender in the case of Bailisa - the Jewish Clauser accused of ritual murder. The magazine "Russian wealth", which has published Korolenko since 1904, was in Russia one of the most solid periodic publications of the liberal-democratic direction, they read the honor of large writers, scientists, politicians, publicists.

Already on the delete of life, "talked", as he himself put himself, Korolenko wrote: "I see that I could do a lot more if it were not scattered between clean fiction, journalism and practical enterprises, such as Multan's business or helping the starving. But

Do not regret it. First, otherwise could not. Any Baleis's case completely knocked me out of the gauge, and it was necessary that the literature in our time did not remain indifferent to life "5. During the years of revolution and civil war, the writer was painfully experienced everything that happened around, he considered him a duty to interfere with the course of events, to announce his position to try to influence public opinion and on the activities of the new government.

3 cyt. According to the book a notoe py. V.G. Korolenko: the chronicle of life and creativity. 1917-1921. - "Book", M., 1990. p.221. In the book PI Neared presented a variety of materials (diaries, letters, writer's appeals, documents and memories of contemporaries), testifying to the titanic activities of the old writer in defense of the democratic values \u200b\u200band life of people. Next, the links to the diary and other records of Korolenko will be brought to this source with the date.

Quotes from "Letters to Lunacharsky" are also given on this edition (in brackets: Roman - the sequence number of the letter, Arabic - page).

5 Korolenko V. letter S.D. Protopopov. 16/19 July 1920// SOBR. cit. In 10-t. T. 10. M., 1956. S.578.

The "letter project" to the Lunacharsky "began to develop" from Korolenko on May 12, 1920, when that first time drove through Poltava and sent him a note. On June 7, Lunacharsky again arrived in Poltava and visited the writer. There is evidence that the initiative of this meeting belonged to Lenin. The new government was needed by supporting people who have continued authority in the country. The conversation between the old writer and the Soviet Commissar, apparently, was an impartial, but as a result, an agreement was reached that Korolenko will send a letter to Lunacharsky with his considerations about what is happening, Lunacharsky is undertaken to publish them. Korolenko wrote 6 letters, they were shipped from June 19 to September 22, 1920. Lunacharsky received them. It is known that Lenin familiarized them with them, they went hand over her hands, they were published abroad (1922), but in Russia they were first printed only after 68 years (in the magazine "New World", 1988, No. 10).

The genre of the letter is the most adequate way of presenting the author's personal opinion, oriented on a living, informal dialogue between it and the addressee; This is a word carrying the potential of the dialogue: here is the reaction to the previously known position of the addressee, an attempt to influence it, cause a recipient response in a word or act. Moreover, the letter is a fairly free genre form that allows you to combine the message and thinking, particularly and generalizations, which easily makes the plug-in genres.

In his letters, Korolenko is not addressed to one by Lunacharsky, but to the highest leadership of Soviet Russia, to those who are now pending her fate. Apparently, Korolenko agreed with Lunacharsky that in his letters he will try to "express frankly his views on the most important motifs of public life" (232). And at the same time, addressing his letters precisely to Lunacharsky as "one of the current center", Korolenko believed that they would be "can be written as a writer" (record in the diary. 12.05.20). This is a very essential detail that gives the key to the artistic nature of Korolenko journalism.

The writer with journalistic directness declares its political position and fundamentally defends its right to criticize what is happening:

"You will probably - he writes Lunacharsky - that I love our people at least any Bolshevik. Allow the fact that I have proven this with your entire life coming to an end. But I love it not blindly, as an environment convenient for

these or other experiments, and so what it is in reality "(IV, 250).

Although Korolenko stipulates: "I am not a politician, not economist," but in fact, unlike Lunacharsky and Gorky, he thoroughly understood in jurisprudence and economy. And in the "letters to Lunachar", he explained to the Bolsheviks with the knowledge of the subject, which is their mistakes and crimes.

Korolenko believed that the tsarist Russia was doomed, because there was a noble dictatorship on it, because the work was badly rewarded, because social injustice existed. The writer supported the struggle for socialism as a system of social justice. However, unlike Lenin and his like-minded people, he believed that it was impossible to "jump" into socialism, bypassing capitalism.

But his controversy with the Bolsheviks and their politics, Korolenko leads in the language of art, means of art's art. True, the writer is constantly apologizing to the addressee for the fact that he is constantly distracted from "general issues":

"This is the second letter I will start with a specific example. So it is easier for me. I am not a politician, not economist. I am only a person who looked closely to a folk life and produced some flair for her "(II, 236). And the letter fourth begins like this: "This time it can seem to do without specific cases, and I will try to immediately go to the general issues until the events have mastered my mood" (IV, 247). But this time - it did not work out: "I wanted to do in this letter without specific cases," Korolenko writes. - "But I barely finished this letter. We continue the former. " (IV, 252). And reports the next shares of the authorities - arrests and shooters of the hostages.

But in fact, this "vice" of the artist becomes one of the main tools of his journalistic controversy. Korolenko tries to convince the paintings, scenes, episodes, vividly written, with embossed details and expressive details. He explains the presence of a large number of "concrete facts" so: "But I found it necessary to bring them here as a background, on which we are now discussing the discussion of general issues" (243). And this background convinces with its irrefutable reliability: this is what the writer himself was a witness, about what was forced to personally speak - to prevent the execution of innocent, someone to rescue from prison, some shares of the authorities challenge, convince.

Some of the stories in the following

lenko line up as completely completed stories. The plots of these "plug-in novels" are didactic - they are aimed at refuting those or other ideological concepts and political practices.

To clarify the "mechanism" of the journalistic thinking of the author "Letters", consider one example.

The second letter is a plug-in novel, which tells about the rally of the unemployed in Chicago in 1893 (236-239). "The picture was peculiar," the author writes. Before the eyes of the reader, the panorama of a grand rally is unfolded on a huge square in Chicago, but the narrator hears the "deep breath" of a person "in a worn suit of a worker", and the image concentrates - the exchange of views between the narrator and these workers should be concentrated. It turns out that this simple worker calling himself by Marxist, believes that "capitalism has not yet finished its business" and that for socialism "Neither we nor this crowd, no institution ... are not ready."

Next - writes the author: ". The point of view of the American Socialist (...) I will try to restore my words now. " "In his own words," Korolenko means to translate from the language of logic to the language of figurative associations. He compares the development of society with the development of a living organism: "New forms are brewing in it as much as coral reefs grow on the bottom." Next, the logic of thought is checked into the deployment of the found comparison:

"... gossy, they form the ridge that everything grows. What can be compared with the social revolution is the moment when the reef rose above the surface of the ocean. At this time, he is subjected to fierce blows of ocean waves, seeking to demolish an unexpected obstacle, on the one hand. On the other hand, the influence of the atmosphere seeks to go on life on this new basis. I needed a long organic work under water to give a sustainable base for this "(238).

And hence the didactic conclusion:

"Isn't the same in society? It takes a lot of effort, like political freedom, enlightenment, we need to develop new public plexuses on the same soil, we need growing changes in institutions and in human rights. "

That is, clearly, you can say, "visually", Korolenko explains the Bolsheviks, what is their main strategic mistake: they are trying to "jump" through the capital

lerism, it is advisable, directively "to introduce communism" without learning from the capitalist of the organization of production. And what happened as a result? "You won the capital," he states

You did not notice only (...), that by killing him, you also killed the production "^, 254). "And the main thing

You destroyed what was organic in the city relations and villages: the natural connection of the exchange "(255).

Such a political strategy is a consequence of a speculative approach to reality, which manifests itself in maximalism and schematism of Bolshevik projects and programs. ". You are used to calling always to the most extreme measures, to last conclusion from the scheme, to the end result (...). You have a scheme, "Korolenko writes," the imagination completely suppressed. You can not imagine the difficulty of reality (...). In the harassment of this its scheme you brought the country to a terrible position "^, 254)," the writer states.

The Korolenko Korolenko sees another roof of the Bolshevik strategy in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the proclaimed. But is Russia's people ready to lead a leadership in their state?

Korolenko again appeals to real reality. He tells the stories from the experience of the 1905 revolution (about the mass "Gra-Bižki", which made peasants in landlockers) (246); gives a "small but meaningful example" - about how in Poltava citizens were allowed to plant all the free plots of land and how all the planted painted (251); Draws the scene, seen from the window of his house: like redarmeys, "entering some kind of hurried fierce", trying anything, worst everything and all, knock nuts from a few nut trees growing in the yard; leads "the case, bright, as a deliberately invented anecdote, but nevertheless actual" - about how one Romanian boyar, excited by socialist

ideas, "started an exemplary Public Park" and which vandalism he was subjected to (248-249).

The instructive nature of all these stories, cases, scenes is obvious. On their basis, the author of the letters makes a generalizing conclusion, which sounds chashanno, as a stanza from the poem in prose (we will show it graphically):

". The people who have not yet learned to own a voting apparatus that does not know how to formulate opinion in it;

which proceeds with the dispute device

alnae justice through individual robbery (your: "Lost Grab");

who begins the kingdom of justice to the assumption of mass inconsistent executions, lasts of the years already;

such people are still far from becoming at the head of the best aspirations of humanity.

He needs to still learn from himself, and not to teach others "(266).

This is already a rhetorical potics, which in this case is aesthetically affecting the reader of the expression of the phrase, the rhythm of the Supphase period (paragraph).

Korolenko most often appeals to the arsenal of rhetorical poetics when he denies his opponents. For example, its indignation with a screaming fragrance of legality, which was the facility of the Chechkis, the author expresses in the form that can be called "painrial surprise":

"Many and at that time and after that, incredible disgraces were created, but direct recognition, which is allowed to connect to one investigative power and the power, the verdict (to the death penalty), even then did not happen. The activities of Bolshevik emergency investigative commissions represent an example - may be the only in the history of cultural peoples "(233-234).

His angry protest against massive arrests The author of the "letters" crystallizes in the form of a question poured by a murderous sarcasm: "Is it possible to think that the executives can better form prices than guillotine?" (I, 235) Finally, Korolenko uses such a reception of intellectual rhetoric, as the paradoxical exposure of a negative meaning in what its opponents see a purely positive meaning:

"The easiest of which you managed to negotiate our masses, indicates not our readiness for the socialist system, but, on the contrary, to the immaturity of our people" (IV, 248);

"Having rejoicing His victories over Denikinians, over Kolchak, above the yudench and Poles, you did not notice that they suffered a complete defeat on a much more extensive and important front" 6 (V, 254).

At the same time, Korolenko does not ignore the traditional expressive agents of artistic speech. Here and ulcer epithet: "What

6 Korolenko means "Economic Front", this expression was born during the years of Soviet power.

is your fantastic communism? " - Write the author of his opponents. Incorrecting by the Bolsheviks class hostility, it characterizes so - "systematized rage" (235). Here and expressive metaphor: "Selskaya Ukraine boils hatred and anger" (256). With eager irony, the author certifies the current rulers: "Well-arranged communists" (261). And speaking about the elusive Batka Makhno, who laughs at the helplessness of Soviet power, the author of "letters" is not alien to Grotesque: " This laughter resembles a true Mephistophel Grimas on the person of our revolution "(252).

But Paphos of Dawn is not limited to the style palette "Letters". They have several stylistic formations that form a certain expressive polyphony in a discourse, subjectively motivated discourse.

Disposal here is the source tonality that gives "sewing". The decisions are directly moving in caution. So, in connection with the closure of the Bolsheviks of opposition newspapers, Korolenko, who, as he himself certificates - in the royal time, "I knew how to break the censorship framework," - warns:

"How do you learn and how do you express it (the people - Avt.) Will? We have no free print, voting freedom - too. Free print, in your opinion, only bourgeois prejudice. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom of print makes you deaf and blind on the phenomena of life "(V, 256).

Potaking to the broken red Armyians can lead to this, "Writer warns," that instead of socialism, we only led a coarse soldier like the Jancharts "^!, 262).

Warnings are moving into prophecy:

"It is clear that there can be no further way, and the country is threatened by unheard of disasters ..." (VI, 261). "I would not want to be a prophet, but my heart is compressed by the foreboding that we are just a threshold of such disasters, before all that we are experiencing now" (VI, 265).

"I wish from the heart to be sprouted in your heart again the echo of the mood, which once threw us in the main issues,

when we both believed that the movement to socialism should rely on the best sides of the human nature "(I, 236).

In circulation to the Soviet leaders, the author's voice is poured by oratory, it sounds demanding, demanding. So, fearing the fact that the protest of the people against the bloody tyranny of the Bolsheviks will turn into an even more bloody riot, Korolenko draws a "call to., Leaders of early communism, refuse to experiment and take a healthy reaction to the ability to take the opportunity to experience it and curb the reaction Unhealthy, ferocious and unreasonable "(¥ \u200b\u200b^ 266-267).

The writer, who is very expensive ideas of social justice, which is horrified by horror, how these ideas are face and discredited, trying to find a way out of that deadlock, in which the democratic revolution "The leaders of the early socialism" were driving. He promotes: "Where is the outcome?" And trying to find it.

"And now a true noble miracle would be that you (...) refused to be a destructive way of violence, but it should be done honestly and fully, (...) You should directly recognize your mistakes that you have done with the people. " (VI, 269).

And this is important. A writer who so consistently reproached the Bolsheviks in economic illiteracy and economic voluntarism, which with horror states that all Russia is amazed, "still sees the main task of the revolution not in the economy and not even in the establishment of a normal economic life, but in" Education of moral Cultures. " The author's thought is taught in a chased aphoristic form: "Souls

must be reborn "(VI, 264).

It is clear that in the presentation of the highest goals of the social revolution, Korolenko is solidary with Gorky7. But "non-advocacy

7 Better and Korolenko since the 1890s established warm relations. Korolenko was the first writer to whom he came with his literary experiments of young Alexey Peshkov. Gorky always treated Korolenko with the greatest respect, called him

credit Thoughts "were expressed at the very beginning of the revolution, Koroleno wrote his" letters "in 1920, after the civil war, when a whole Mont Blanc error and the crimes of a new government had already accumulated. Therefore, he tries to browse the ways to the source ideal, in the name of which a democratic revolution was performed. For Korolenko there is no doubt that first of all "must be taken from a careful attitude towards human life, which has now become so cheaver" (I, 236). This is the cornerstone of his political doctrine. And hence it follows that it is necessary to "instead of inciting class struggle to seek agreement within the country between all public layers."

Measures to be taken into account in these tasks, Korolenko sets out as clear provisions characteristic of a political figure speech. The authorities are to abandon terror. Restore democratic institutions that have just begun to be formed immediately after February 17th, namely

Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. Return to the Normal Criminal Procedure Code. Restore statehood as an institution that provides a compromise and the consent of various social layers among themselves. But the writer gives an expressive color to dry political formulations. Here and the classic figurative opposition: "The ship's ship has to spend between scillary slavery and charibda of injustice" (¥ ^ 265). And warning that on the path of changes in the morals "we need to go through a long and harsh school", Korolenko gives a bright analogy:

"The wonderful diamond crystals and amorphous coal are also obtained from the same carbon substance. So, there is a difference in the inner structure of atoms themselves. The same can also be said about the human atoms, of which the Society consists: not every form can be immediately screamed from this substance "(IV, 251).

Korolenko completes his "letters" completes the appeal of the people "along the way of returning to freedom." However, he is very doubted that the Bolshevik leaders are capable of this:

with his teacher and mentor. In the years of the revolution of the Civil War, they exchanged letters in which they were shared about the events that took place, they tried to jointly organize assistance to starving.

"But. Is it possible for you? Not too late if you even wanted to do it? " So ends the last, sixth, letter.

Korolenko attached great importance to his letters to Lunacharsky, he hoped to reach the minds and hearts of new advantages of Russian fate. He even shone himself with the hope that the proclaiming of Lenin's transition to Nap's writing also had some influence. But in fact, the word Korolenko turned out to be a voice blatant in the desert. The authorities were raised to prevent the old writer, they

they even demonstrated their respect for him - widely celebrated its 68th anniversary, offered material assistance, persuaded to go abroad for treatment. Korolenko

rotate all sentences and categorically refused to leave Russia. In fact, Bolshevik ideologists tried to create an impression about him as a person who no longer sleeps for life, has a reporting idea of \u200b\u200bwhat is happening.

Officially, the authorities did not respond in any way to letters. K. They simply silent them. The authorities did everything possible to inside the country about the "letters" Korolenko did not know. As if they were not.

It is clear that in the spectrum of opinions on the revolution and paths, which Russia went after the 17th year, Korolenko occupies a special, position, full of tragedy and pain for the recreated, perverted, discredited ideals of social justice and freedom.

From letters Vl. Korolenko to Lunacharsky

Ed. "Zadlong". Paris.1922.

The letter first

You know that during your literary life I "sowed not some roses" (your expression in one of the articles about me). Under the royal power, I wrote a lot about the death penalty and even dismissed the right to talk about it printed much more than it was allowed by censorship. Sometimes I managed to even save the doomed victims of the military courts, and there were cases when after the suspension of the execution, there were evidence of innocence and the victim was released (for example in the case of Yusupov), although it happened that these evidence came too late (in Glucker, etc.) .

But execution without trial, execution in administrative order - this was the greatest rarity even then. I remember only one case when the scaled scales (Warsaw Governor's Governor) shot two young men without a court. But this opened such indignation even in the military-vessels, that only the "approval" after the fact of a stupid king saved the clone from the citizen of the Court. Even members of the Main Military Court assured me that the repetition of this is no longer possible.

Many and at the time, and after that, incredible disgraces were going on, but direct recognition, which is allowed to connect to one investigative power and the power, the sentences (to the death penalty), even then did not happen. The activities of Bolshevik Emergency Investigation Commissions presents an example to be the only in the history of cultural peoples. One day one of the prominent members of the All-Ukrainian CC, having met me in the Poltava CC, where I often came ... with different petitions, asked me about my impressions. I replied: if the district gendarm governments had received the right not only to refer to Siberia, but also to execute death, then it would be the most that we see now. My interlocutor answered this: - But it is for the benefit of the people.

I think that not all sorts of funds can really apply for the benefit of the people, and for me it is undoubted that administrative executions erected into the system and ongoing for the second year have not belong to their number. ...

Do not say that the revolution has its own laws. There were, of course, the explosions of the passions of the revolutionary crowd, the blood of the street with blood even in the XIX century, but these were outbreaks of a natural, rather than systematized rage. And they stayed for a long time (as the set of hostages of communites) in bloody beacons, which caused not only the hypocritical indignation of Versailles, who far surpassed in the cruelty of the communations, but also the workers themselves and their friends ... For a long time, it threw a darling and stunting shadow and the Socialist movement.

This is a gloomy incident (it's about the execution of some Aronov and Mirkin on charges of grain speculation. Food authorities did not see the violation of the law. - Ed.) Reminds the well-known episode of the Great French Revolution. Then it was also high cost. It was then explained then too, the most nareous way - the origin of aristocrats and speculators, and excited the blind rage of the crowd. Convention "went to meet the folk feeling", and the heads of the then arons and Mirkina flew dozens under the guillotine knife. Nothing, however helped, the high cost only grew. Finally, the Paris workers were the first to wake up from the fatal Ugon. They appealed to the Convention with the Petition, in which they said: "We ask bread, and you think you will feed us with executions." According to Misha, the historian-Socialist, from this fatigue, the first explosions of the counter-revolution shot out of this fatigue in S. Aantuansky suburb .... and ... I am biter to think that you are, A.V., instead of calling for a soup, justice reminders , careful attitude towards human life, which is now so cheaver, in his speech they expressed solidarity with these "administrative executions." In the transfer of local newspapers it sounds like this. I wish from the heart to be sprouted in your heart again the mood echo, which once threw us in the main issues when we both believed that the movement to socialism should rely on the best sides of the human nature, assuming courage in straight fighting and humanity even to opponents . Let the atrocity and blind injustice remain entirely to the proportion of the past, who has learned, is not penetrating into the future.

The second letter

(Vl. Korolenko describes a rally in Chicago, where representatives of various parties and flows simultaneously set out their programs and any of the participants in a two-thousandth rally could familiarize themselves with them, moving from one "platform" to another. At the rally Vl. Korolenko applied to the next question to the prominent Representative of the Socialist Party of Chicago Stone):

... - Would you wish, in order for all these heads, some kind of logical machine turned at once, and they, and, perhaps, and all the people appealed to you, socialists, and would say: we are in your power. Arrange our lives?

"Save God," the American Socialist replied decisively.

- Why?

- Neither we nor this crowd, nor agencies of America are still ready for this. I am Marxist. In our opinion, capitalism has not yet finish its business. Recently here was Engels. He said: "Your capital perfectly fulfills its role. All these monsters will greatly serve as a future society. But his role is not yet far over" and this is true ... As for the comprehensive organization of the national economy of a huge country in the socialist basis, this The task for our party is still not able to ... We, Marxists, perfectly understand that we will have to deal with people who immediately turned into angels, but with millions of individual, let's say even healthy egoism, for reconciliation of which difficult development and shower , and transitional institutions ... America gives excellent free soil for this, but for now and only.

There are many conditions as political freedom, education, we need to develop new public plexuses on the same soil, we need growing changes in institutions and in human gears. In a word, it is necessary that one mine (Vl. Korolenko - approx.) A close friend and friend, the founder of Romanian socialism, the true Marxist of the Hero-Dobryzhan called "objective and subjective conditions of social coup" ...

In my opinion, this is the basis of Marx's philosophy. And that's why. Engels at the very end of the last century said that even America is not yet ready for a social coup.

(From the fact that Germany is not advanced in the development of socialism, where socialist organizations are developed by more than all countries, and the backward Russia, which, until the February Revolution, did not know all legal socialist organizations, - threw out the banner of the social revolution, "Romanian objerals did good Conclusion): The smaller the "objective and subjective conditions" in the country, it is more ready for the social coup.

This argument can be called anything, just not by Marxism.

The arrival of the Delegation of the English workers ended with a bitter letter to Lenin, which sounds cooling and disappointment (about the fact that British Treads-Unions do not want to support the Russian revolution - approx.). But from the east, the Soviet Republic receives hot greetings. But - you should only think about what this coldness of the English working and socialist workers marks and bring the fanatic east to imagine their meaning.

When ... You want to clearly imagine a picture ... peculiar oriental rallies on the squares in front of mosques, where the wandering dervishi call on squatting listeners to the Holy War with Europeans and at the same time to the greeting of the Russian Soviet Republic, then you can hardly say What's here we are talking about the progress in the sense of Marx and Engels ... rather, on the contrary: Asia responds to what feels in our native, Asian.

Letter third.

Above Russia, the course of historical destinies committed almost a magical and very evil joke. In millions of Russian heads in some two or three years, some kind of logical screw, and from blind adolescence in front of the autocracy, from a complete indifference to politics our people immediately crossed ... to communism, at least the Communist Government.

Morals remained old, lifestyle, too. The level of enlightement during the war could not rise strongly, but the conclusions were radically opposite. From the dictatorship of the nobility ... We switched to the "proletariat dictatorship." You, the party "Bolsheviks", proclaimed her, and the people straight from the autocracy moved to you and said: "Arrange our lives."

The people believed that you can do it. You did not refuse. It seemed easy to you, and you immediately after the political coup began a social revolution.

Karlyl's English historian known to you that governments most often die from lies ... Your dictatorship was preceded by the dictatorship of the nobility. She rested on a huge lies, for a long time on Russia. Why do we have after the peasant reform, the wealth of the country is not growing, but is a waning, and the country falls into all the growing hunger strikes? The noble dictatorship responded: from the man's laziness and drunkenness. The hunger strikes are growing not from the fact that we have a dead stagnant that our main force, agriculture, complain of bad land orders, and exclusively from a lack of guardianship over the people of lazy people and drunks ... ... that we had a lot of drunkenness - it was True, but the truth is only partial. The main essence of the peasantry, as a class, was not in drunkenness, but in labor and more than work, poorly rewarded and did not give hope for a solid improvement in the situation. The entire policy of the past decades of tsarism was based on this lie ... The educated society was trying to fight with her ... But the people's masses believed only the kings and helped them to suppress any liberation movement. The autocratic building did not have smart people who would understand how this lie supported by the blind force, the most real way leads to death to death ... Instead of raising truth and stop, it (autocracy) only increased a lie, reached, finally, to the monstrous absurdity, the "autocratic constitution", i.e. Before the dream, deception to maintain the essence of absolutism in constitutional form.

And the system collapsed.

Now I put a question: Is everything true and in your strict? Is there any traces of the same lie that you have time to instill the people?

In my deep conviction, there is such a lie, and even strangely wears the same wide, "class" character. You inspired the rebel and excited people that the so-called "bourgeoisie" ("Bourges") represents only the class of tuneevans and robbers, ringing coupons - and nothing more.

Is it true? .. Can you say that you are Marxists?

When you, Marxists, the fierce controversy with populists, you proved that Russia needs and consistently go through the "Stage of Capitalism" ... The capitalist class was then presented to you by the class, how well, organicizing production. Despite all its shortcomings, you considered completely according to the teaching of Marx, that such an organization is benefactor for backward in industrial relations ...

Why now the foreign word "bourgeois" is a whole, a huge and complex concept, with your light hand turned into the eyes of our Dark People, until it did not know him, in a simplified idea of \u200b\u200bthe "bourgeois", exclusively Tunewader, a robber, not a busy except coupon haircut?

Absolutely as a lie of the noble dictatorship, which replaced the class value of the peasantry by the submission of Tuneev and Drunkets, your formula replaced the role of the organizer - the representation of an exclusively robber ... you donated to the tactical considerations. Tactically, it was advantageous to inflate the people's hatred for capitalism and raise the masses into Russian capitalism, as the combat detachment is racing the fortress. And you did not stop before the perversion of truth. Particular truth you were issued for all the truth (after all, drunkenness was also). And now it has brought its fruits. The fortress you are taken and is given to stream and looting. You just forgot that this fortress is a national wealth, mined by the "benefactor", which in this apparatus created by Russian capitalism, has a lot to be improved, further development, and not destruction. You inspired the people that all this is only the fruit of robbery to be looted in turn. Saying this, I mean not some material values \u200b\u200bin the form of a factory created by capitalism, plants, cars, railways, but also those new processes and skills, the new social structure that you, Marxists themselves meant, when proved benefactority "CAPITALISTIC STAGE" ...

With its slogan "Loaded" you did what the village robberry, which killed the huge amounts of agricultural property without any benefit for your communism, turned into a cities where the production apparatus created by the capitalist system quickly began to collapse.

Now you have been unfortunately, but, unfortunately, too late when the country stands in a terrible danger before one forgotten by the front. Front This is hostile forces drives.

Fourth letter

The European proletariat did not go after you, and his mood in the mass is the mood of that American Socialist Stone, whose opinion I brought in the second letter. They think that capitalism even in Europe has not completed his business and that his work can still be useful for the future, a kind of palladium, which mankind has minted through a long and unfair struggle and progress. Only we, who never knew completely of these freedoms and not learned to enjoy together with the people, we declare them by the "bourgeois prejudice", only inhibiting justice.

This is a huge mistake, also once again reminding the Slavophilic myth about our "people of the Godhead" and even more our national fairy tale about Ivanushka, who without science, all science surpassed and to which everything managed to easily at a prominent class. The ease itself, with which you managed to lead your masses, does not indicate our readiness for the socialist building, but on the contrary, to the immaturity of our people. Mechanics knows useful and harmful resistance. Harmful interferes with the work of the mechanism and is subject to elimination. But without useful resistance, the mechanism will rotate inust, without producing the necessary work. This happened to us. You pushed the most maximalist slogans, you fight in the name of socialism, you defeat him with the name on the battlefields, but all this bustle in the name of communism does not marvel his victory ....

Not any lack of skills of bourgeois society marks the readiness for socialism ... By nature, by natural deposits, our people are not inferior to the best peoples of the world, and it makes him love. But he far behind in the upbringing of moral culture. He has no self-esteem that makes it takes to refrain from the well-known actions (this is, first of all, on theft in a broad sense of the word - approx.), Even when no one knows. This must be admitted and necessary to bring out of this necessary consequences.

We need to go through a rather long and harsh school. You talk about communism. Not to mention the fact that communism is something unformed and indefinite, and you still have not found out that you mean, - for the social coup in this direction other morals are needed ...

And this (lag in moral culture - approx.) Since you proclaimed communism, it has not weakened, but intensified to a great extent ... and you cannot cope with this element. Here you need something else, and in any case, the communism is still far ...

Fifty letter

It is necessary to think about the reasons of the explicit disclosure between the Western European socialists and you, the leaders of the Russian proletariat. Your monopoly print explains this by the fact that the leaders of socialism in Western Europe sold bourgeoisie. But forgive, the same vulgarity, just as when you were accused of bribing from Germany.

There is no need to look for low reasons for explaining the fact of this disorder. It is rooted much deeper - in a huge difference of sentiment. Even in the fact that the leaders of European socialism have been led by the legally mass struggle of their proletariat for tens of years, penetrated these masses, created a wide and slender organization, achieved its legal recognition.

You have never been in such a position. You were only aspiracted, and at most, managed a conspiracy that was trying to penetrate the working environment. It creates a completely different mood, other psychology.

European leaders of socialism, taking this or other decision, recommending it to their followers, used to weigh all sides of this step. When, for example, a strike was declared, then the leaders had to think about everything, not only its agitation significance, but also the comprehensive consequences of it for the working environment, including this state of industry. Will the mass be able to withstand a strike, in a state of capital to give up without the disposal of the production itself, which will affect the same workers? In short, they took responsibility not only for the fight, but for how the measures recommended by them will affect the workers welfare. They are accustomed to feeling mutual relationship between capital and labor.

You have never been in this position, because thanks to meaningless pressure autocracy, never performed legally. You personally had to take risks, I had to sit in prisons for the fact that in the whole of Europe it was recognized as the right mass and the right of her leaders, and this risk of prison, links, cavities replaced for you in your own eyes and in the eyes of workers every other responsibility. If the workers and their families have had to be hungry from the error in one or another of your plan and to endure extreme need, then you received our share of suffering in a different form.

And that is why you are used to calling always to the most extreme measures, to last conclusion from the scheme, to the end result. That's why you could not work out an allege to life, to the complex possibilities of the fight itself, and where are you from one-sided view of the capital, as exclusively about the predator, without a complicating idea of \u200b\u200bits role in the organization of production.

And hence your frustration and bitterness in relation to Western European socialism.

The workers first went for you .... they rushed after you, i.e. Over the dream of the immediate implementation of socialism.

But reality remains reality. For the working mass, there is still not a simple scheme, not one end result, as for you, but the question of the immediate life of them and their families. And the working mass firstly felt the consequences of your schematic. You won the capital, and he is now at your feet, mutilated and broken. You did not only notice that it is connected with the production of such alive threads that, killing him, you also killed production ....

And now the working environment begins to feel your main mistake and in it are the sentiments that you so condemn in the vast majority of Western European socialists: Menshevism is clearly enhanced in it, i.e. Socialism, but not a maximalist type .... He recognizes that some achievements of the bourgeois system are representing a nationwide heritage. You are struggling with this mood. Once it was confirmed that Russia is autocably rules the will of the king. But barely somewhere showed the will of this poor fellowship, not quite consonant with the intention of the ruling bureaucracy, the latter had thousands of ways to bring autocrat to obedience. Isn't that the current "dictator" with the same poor thing? How do you learn and how do you express his will? We have no free print, vote freedom - as well. Free print, in your opinion, only bourgeois prejudice. Meanwhile, the lack of free print makes you deaf and blind on the phenomena of life. In your officials reigns inner well-being, while people blindly "wand apart" from hunger. The victory of communism in the Ukrainian village is proclaimed at a time when rural Ukraine boils hatred and anger, and the extremes are already thinking about the shot of the hostages. Hunger began in the cities, there is a formidable winter, and you care only about falsifying the opinions of the proletariat. A little somewhere begins to manifest independent thought in the work environment, not quite consonted with the direction of your policy, the Communists immediately take their measures. This Board of the Professional Union receives the name of white or yellow, his members are arrested, the reign itself is dismissed, and then a triumphant article in your official: "Road Red Protection" or another red workers group, which have been in the minority until then. Out of the amount of such phenomena and is found that you call the "proletariat dictature" ....

Once still with autocracy ... In one humorous body, the autocrat was depicted sitting on the bayonets. Signature - "uncomfortable position" Go something like that.

In the same inconvenient position is now your communist ruling party. Its position in the village is straight tragic .... Your party consults yourself by the fact that it is only curly (rustic robes), which does not prevent you from burning whole villages. And the rich and the poor are equally. But in the cities you hold only military force, otherwise your representation would quickly change. Nearest allies, Socialists, Mensheviki, are sitting in prisons ....

At one time it was the question of the shooting of the Navrotsky (the workover printer, apparently the Menshevik, the ex-reference, first at a tsarism, and then referred to the northern province of the CC) for his speech against the new oppression of freedom of opinions in the working environment. What good, it could easily happen, and then the difference between the extremes and former gendar administrations would be vividly emphasized. The latners did not have the right to shoot, - your extremes have this right and enjoy them with terrifying freedom and ease.

Sixth letter.

What did you diverge with the leaders of European socialism and start more and more to disperse with your own working environment? I gave the answer to this question above: he is in your maximalism.

Logically, this position is the easiest: Take it immediately, and everyone who stops immediately before the complexity and sometimes the accuracy of the task, call the inconsistent, stupid, and sometimes the traitorner of socialism, the agreement, Kolchkov, Denikinets, in general, ...

The inconvenience of this reception is that you yourself cannot fulfill everything immediately ...

Logic is one of the powerful means of thought, but far from the only one. There is still an imagination, which makes it possible to cover the complexity of specific phenomena. This property is necessary for such a case, as the management of a huge country. You have a scheme completely suppressed imagination. You can not imagine the complexity of reality ... You are only mathematics of socialism, its logic and schematics ...

The country is threatened by unheard of disasters. The first victim is the intelligentsia. Then - urban workers. The well-established communists and the boom army will stay longer. But in this environment among good-fass people, signs of impoverishment are noticeable. Best of all all kinds of robbers live. And it is natural: you build everything on egoism, and you yourself require selflessness ...

With a light heart, you started your schematic experiment in the hope that it will be only a signal for the worldwide maximum revolution. You must already see what you are mistaken ... You have to be content with a light victory for consistent conceptual optimism over the "consents", but it is already clear that in general the workers will not go to your way, and Russia, who is accustomed to obey all oppression, not I have developed forms to express your true opinion, forced to go this sad, gloomy ways in full solitude.

Where to? What is your fantastic communism?

It is known that in the past century there were attempts to translate a communist dream in reality. You know what they ended. ... they all ended with sad failure, discord, tragedies for initiators ... And all these noble dreamers (Vl. Korolenko mentions Owen, Fourierists, Saint-Simonists, etc. - approx.) Cumshots of consciousness that humanity should be reborn Before destroying (capitalism - approx.) (If the commune at all is feasible) ...

In general, the process ... the distribution for which you took with such a light heart presents the process of long and difficult training "objective and subjective conditions", for which all the voltage of general amateurs is necessary and, most importantly, freedom. Only such amateurness, only freedom of any experiments may indicate that it will endure criticism of practical life and what is doomed to death.

You have introduced your communism in the barracks (just remember the "labor militarization"). As we can satisfied, you will not have violated the inviolability and freedom of private life shortly ... Without creating almost nothing, you destroyed a lot, otherwise, Introducing immediate communism, you abolished the hunt for a long time, which is the introduction of the urgent The task of modernity.

The souls must be reborn. And for this you need to first reborn the institutions. And this, in turn, requires freedom of thought and undertakings for new forms of life. By force, delay this amateur in society and the people is a crime that has committed our recent fallen government. But there is also another, perhaps, not less - is the force to impose new forms of life, the convenience of which people were not yet aware and they could not even become familiar with the creative experience. And you are to blame. Instinct You were replaced by order and wait for your order to change the nature of a person. For this encroachment to freedom of self-determination of the people, the payback is waiting for you.

Social justice is very important, and you rightly indicate that there is no complete freedom without it. But without freedom it is impossible to achieve justice. The ship's ship has to spend between scilla slavery and haribda injustice, never lose sight of both together. No matter how much you claimed that bourgeois freedom is only a deception by a working class, in this you will not be able to convince European workers ... There were many political revolutions, there was not one social. You will be the first experience of introducing socialism by suppressing freedom.

What can I go out of this? I would not want to be a prophet, but my heart is compressed by the foreboding that we are still only at the threshold of such disasters, in front of which everything that is still experiencing ...

The people who have not learned to other voting devices, which does not know how to formulate the opinion in it, which proceeds to the Social Justice Device through Individual Robbery (Your: Lost Grab), which begins the kingdom of justice to the assumption of mass discrepancies, which are already years, such people still far from becoming at the head of the best aspirations of mankind. He needs to still learn, not to teach others.

You defeated Denikin volunteers, won the yudenich, Kolchak, Poles, defeat and Wrangel. It is possible that the Armed Intervention of the Entente would also end up with your victory: it would awaken the spirit of patriotism, who tried in vain to kill in the name of internationalism, forgetting that the idea of \u200b\u200bthe Fatherland is still the greatest achievement on the path of mankind to unity, which, probably, It will be achieved only by the merger of the Fatherland. In short, on all fronts you are the winners, without noticing the inner illness, making you powerless before the front of nature ...

Russia stands in thought between two utopias: the utopia of the past and the utopia of the future, choosing, in which utopia she rushes.

External intervention would only donounce the experience ...

It would take all the tension of honesty and good faith in order to recognize their huge mistake. Suppress your pride and minimize on the other way - on the road that you call the consentment ...

This path seems to me the only one, giving Russia a decent way out of the present impossible position (we note that the introduction of NEP in the next, in 1921, meant such a turn - approx.).

It has long been said that every people deserve that government that has. In this sense, it can be said that Russia deserved you ... You are only a real expression of her past, with slave submissions in front of autocracy even at a time when, exhausting all creative forces in peasant reform and a few more, for her followed, it has passed To the blind reaction and many years suppressed the organic growth of the country. At this time, the people were on his side, and Russia was doomed to rot and decomposition. It is normal that all shades of thought be presented in the country, even the most extreme, even sometimes unreasonable.

A live struggle prevents rotting and implements even unreasonable aspirations in a kind of vaccination: what is unreasonable and harmful for this time often saves power for the future.

But the influence of persistently retrograde government we had no effect. Public thought ceased and forcibly customized under the rank. In agriculture reigned hopeless stagnation, the growing layers of industrial workers remained outside the possibility of struggling for improving their position. A friendly working people intelligentsia was drunk in the underground, to Siberia, in emigration and led a dreamily embittered life outside of open ties with their own reality. And this, in turn, perverted an intelligent thought, directing it to the path of schematism and maximalism.

Then the chance of history suddenly destroyed this partition between the people who lived so long without political thought, and the intelligentsia living without people, i.e. No connection with reality. And so, when the partition suddenly collapsed, a mixture of alien for so long elements came out to a poisonous. An explosion occurred, but not the fruitful explosion, which destroys only what prevented the normal development of the country, and deeply bawed living fabrics of the public organism. And you were the only representatives of the Russian people with his usual to arbitrariness, with his naive expectations of "just immediately", with the lack of even the origin of the organization and creativity ...

And now the true beneficial miracle would be that you finally have been aware of our loneliness, not only among European socialism, but the emerging of you from you your own working environment, not to mention the positive hatred of the village to your communism - would confess and They would refuse the disadvantage of violence. But it is done honestly and full. Maybe you still have enough power to turn to a new way. You must directly recognize your mistakes that you have done with your people. And the main one of them is that much in the capitalist strictly you eliminated a prematurely and possible measure of socialism can only enter the free country.

Governments died from lying ... Maybe there is still time to return to the truth, and I am sure that the people, blindly following you on the path of violence, with the joy of waking up consciousness will go along the way to return to freedom. If not for you and your government, it will be benefactor for the country and for the growth of socialist consciousness in it. But ... Is it possible for you? Is it too late if you even wanted to do it?

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From the letters of A.V. Lunacharsky

In 1920, V.G. Korolenko wrote six letters to the then addict. It happened after meeting them in Poltava, where A.N. Lunacarsky visited Korolenko. There was no response to the letters.

The texts went handled "in the lists", were published in 1922 in Paris, and in the USSR only in 1988 in the magazine "New World" number 8, and later in the collection "Unknown Korolenko".

In the first letters, V.G. Korolenko wrote about the executions, which are manufactured by the staff of the Emergency Commission (CC) without a court, in "administrative order" with an explanation that this is done "for the benefit of the people." The first three letters were written about specific cases of inconsistent executions. Korolenko wrote: "I call them discussed because in any country in the world the role of investigative commissions in the world is not connected with the right to decide the sentences, and even to the death penalty. The everywhere of the investigative commission is verified by the court with the participation of protection. It was even with the kings. " without trial, which was not even under the royal power. We give a fragment of the third letter and the full text of letters 4-6.

From the third letter

Above Russia, the course of historical destinies committed almost a magical and very evil joke. In millions of Russian heads in some two or three years, a suddenly some kind of logical cog turned around, and from a blind worship before autocracy, from a complete indifference to politics our people immediately crossed ... to communism, at least the Communist Government.

Morals remained old, lifestyle, too. The level of enlightement during the war could not rise strongly, but the conclusions were radically opposite. From the dictatorship of the nobility ("The Council of the Unified Nobility") we moved to the "proletariat dictatorship." You, the Bolsheviks Party, proclaimed her, and the people right from the autocracy came to you and said: "Arrange our life."

The people believed that you can do it. You did not refuse. It seemed easy to you, and you immediately after the political coup began a social revolution.

Karlyl's English historian known to you that governments most often die from lies. I know now such categories as truth or lies, however, or not true, less in the go seems "distracts". Only "game of egoism" affects historical processes. Carlel was convinced and argued that the questions of the truth or lies are reflected in the end on the most real results of this "game of egoism", and I think he is right. Your dictatorship was preceded by a dictatorship of the nobility. She rested on a huge lies, for a long time on Russia. Why do we have after the peasant reform, the richness of the country is not growing, but is a decrease and the country falls into all growing hunger strikes? The noble dictatorship responded: from the man's laziness and drunkenness. The hunger strikes are growing not because we have reigned dead stagnation that our main force, agriculture, is evident landfinding, and exclusively from lacking for guardianship over the people of lazy people and drunks. I had to fight a lot with comrades in the hungry years in the literature and in meetings with this monstrous lie. That we had a lot of drunkenness, it was true, but the truth is only partial. The main essence of the peasantry as a class was not in drunkenness, but in labor, and more than work, poorly rewarded and did not give hope for a solid improvement in the situation. The entire policy of the last decades of tsarism was based on this lies. Hence the allocation of the Zemsky Chief and the predominance of the nobility in all civilians and in the land. This blatant lie penetrated the entire life ... The educated society was trying to fight with her, and even the best elements of the nobility itself participated in this "opposition." But the masses believed only the kings and helped them to suppress any freedom-loving movement. The autocratic building did not have smart people who would understand how this lie supported by the blind force, the most realistic way leads to death.

The Formula of Karleil, as you can see, suitable, perhaps, to determine the cause of the death of autocracy. Instead of occupying truth and stop, it only increased a lie, reaching finally to the monstrous absurdity, the "autocracy constitution", that is, to the dream of deception to preserve the essence of absolutism in constitutional form.

And the system collapsed.

Now I put a question: Is everything true and in your strict? Is there any traces of the same lie that you have time to instill the people?

In my deep conviction, such a lie is, and even strangely it wears the same wide, "class" character. You inspired the rebel and excited people, that the so-called bourgeoisie ("Bourges") represents only the class of Tuneev, robbers, ringing coupons, and nothing more.

Is it true? Can you sincerely talk it?

In particular, can you say - Marxists?

You, Anatoly Vasilyevich, of course, perfectly remember that recently when you are a Maxist - a fierce controversy with populists. You have proven that Russia needs and consistently go through the "Stage of Capitalism". What are you here then under this beneficial stage? Did there really only be a bourgeois tune and coupon haircut?

Obviously, then you intended the other. The capitalist class was then presented to you as a class, how well, is well organized by production. Despite all its shortcomings, you thought completely according to the teaching of Marx, that such an organization is benefactor for backward in the industrial relations of countries, for example, Romania, Hungary and ... Russia.

Why is the foreign word "bourgeois" - a whole huge complex concept - with your light hand turned into the eyes of our Dark People, until then, he did not know him, in a simplified idea of \u200b\u200bthe bourgeois, exclusively TUNYADER, robbuiters, nothing busy, except coupon having ?

In the same way as the lies of the noble dictatorship, which replaced the class value of the peasantry by the submission of Tuneev and Drunkets, your formula replaced the role of the production organization - let both the bad organizer - the submission of an exclusively robber. And look again how the Karlali is right with its formula.

The robbing instincts were bloated by our war and then with unrest, inevitable at any revolution. It was necessary to fight with them every revolutionary government. The feeling of truth, which obliges you, Marxists, to clarify the role of capitalism in backward countries to the same thing. You did not. According to tactical considerations, you donated a debt before the truth. Tactically, it was advantageous to inflate the people's hatred for capitalism and raise the masses into Russian capitalism, as the combat detachment is racing the fortress. And you did not stop before the perversion of truth. Particular truth you were issued for all the truth (after all, drunkenness was also). And now it brought the fruit. The fortress you are taken and is given to stream and looting. You just forgot that this fortress is a popular wealth, mined by the "benefactor process", which in this apparatus created by Russian capitalism, has a lot to be improved, further development, and not destruction. You inspired the people that all this is only the fruit of robbery to be looted in turn. Saying this, I mean not some material values \u200b\u200bin the form of a factory created by capitalism, plants, cars, railways, but also those new processes and skills, the new social structure that you, Marxists themselves meant, when proved benefactority "CAPITALISTIC STAGE".

In 1902, they were played out in some places of Poltava and the adjacent Kharkiv province wide agrarian riots. The peasants suddenly rushed to rob landfast savings and then, on the arrival of the authorities, he was put on his knees, and the same pounded under the rose. When they began to judge them, then I had one time to serve as an intermediary between them and with the organized defense. At this time, in my office in Poltava, the peasants were going sometimes in significant quantities, and I tried to look at their views on what happened. They themselves were about him not very high opinion. They called all the movement "robbing", and the most prudent of them explained the emergence of this "robbing" in their own way: "Yak Ditin is not crying, then Mati is not BCH." They understood that robbery was not a suitable attack for any improvements, but, brought to despair, they tried to at least pay attention to the attention of the "benefactor of the king" to their position. The rest did blind greed, and the movement took extensive sizes. But the royal government was blind and deaf. It only knew the need for further custody and "Eternity of the unshakable foundations" and from suddenly sadly sad "robbing" did not manage to make output. The attempt (rather reasonable) of the agrarian reform of the first Duma was strangled, and the motives moving the peasant masses during the "robbing" remained until the time of revolution. You, the Bolsheviks, cast them in the final form. With its slogan "Robbing," you did what the rustic "robbing", which destroyed the huge amounts of agricultural property without any benefit for your communism, shifted in the city where the production apparatus created by the capitalist system quickly began to collapse.

The struggle with this system took the character of some siege of the enemy fortress. Any destruction of the precipitated fortress, every fire in it, all the destruction of its reserves is beneficial for precipitating. And you, too, considered our success, any destruction applied by the capitalist system, forgetting that the true victory of the social revolution, if it were destined to be accomplished, would not be in the destruction of the capitalist manufacturing office, but in mastering them and in his work on new principles.

Now you have been unfortunately, but, unfortunately, too late when the country stands in a terrible danger before one forgotten by the front. This front is hostile forces of nature.

Until the next letter.

Fourth letter

This time, it can seem to do without specific cases, and I will try to immediately go to the general issues until the events searched for my mood.

I start this letter under the impression of the English delegation. In our local official printed or reprinted from somewhere the article "Our Grief", accompanying Lenin's letter to English workers. It refers to it that, along with pride, our revolutionary championship, the Russian Communists are experiencing a "tragedy of loneliness." In Lenin's letter, he sounds, in the opinion of the author, bewilderment of such "leaders" itself in our unparalleled era of such "leaders" of the workers' masses, what are the majority of English delegates who came to Russia "..." British TreadsNionists, no, in essence who have not learned, to Unfortunately, still represent the huge masses of the English workers. "

Since you, the Communist Party, are only representatives of the "dictatorship of the Russian proletariat", then it should be the conclusion that our proletariat stepped far forward in its mass in comparison with the English thread-unionists, whose movement is already a whole story. In other Soviet newspapers, it has repeated more than once that the leaders of the old German socialism, even such as Kautsky, are contemptuous agreements and even sold "bourgeoisie" ("Poltava Izvestia" ("VIsti"), No. 24, June 27, 1920. ).

Threading what can be explained by polemical incontinence and passion, still the fact remains: the European proletariat for you did not go and his mood in mass is the mood of that American Socialist, whose opinion I brought in the second letter. They think that capitalism even has not completed its business even in Europe and that his work can still be useful for the future. When moving to this future, not everything is subject to destroying and defeating. Things such as freedom of thought, assemblies, words and prints, for them are not simple "bourgeois prejudices", but the necessary instrument of a further future, a kind of palladium, which mankind mined through a long and unfoldable struggle and progress. Only we, who never knew all these freedoms and did not need to use them together with the people, we declare them by the "bourgeois prejudice", only inhibiting justice.

This is a huge mistake, also once again reminiscent of the Slavophile world about our "God-God" and even more - our national fairy tale about Ivanushka, who has surpassed all science without science and to which everything is possible without difficulty, by whining belane. The easiestness with which you managed to negotiate our masses, indicates not our readiness for the socialist system, but, on the contrary, on the immaturity of our people. Mechanics knows useful and harmful resistance. Harmful interferes with the work of the mechanism and is subject to elimination. But without useful resistance, the mechanism will rotate inust, without producing the necessary work. This happened to us. You have thrown out the most maximalist slogans, you fight in the name of socialism, you defeat him with the name on the fields of the battle, but all this vanity in the name of communism does not not march his victory.

In Romania, which is largely reminded of Russia, I was told to me, bright, as a deliberately invented anecdote, but nevertheless real. There are still large estates with all the signs of our old boyar. Even the owners of the boyars are undoubtedly from the Slavic Word.

Sometimes such a boyars, especially of the young, prone to the extreme parties, and many of them passed the Socialism School of Socialism. Somehow one of these boyars, traveling in Switzerland, became interested in anarchism and met a scientist anarchist. Brucershaft drank and so much liked each other that Boyarin began to call an anarchist in Romania. He has huge estates in his homeland, including a lot of land under the forest, and he decided part of this forest to turn into a public park. It corresponded to the views of an anarchist: all the estates of Boyarina would have turned out to be generally owned, and he honestly warned his friend. He foresees that Romanians who have such a "boyars" obviously represent the young people, not infected as the Swiss, bourgeois prejudices, and therefore there is easier to conduct anarchic ideas. He warns that at the first signs of the revolution, he will not only won't protect the private ownership of Boyarin, but, on the contrary, now will provide her to the people. Boyar agreed - maybe because the danger did not seem so close to him ...

And in one corner of Romania, a scientist gardener-anarchist for money and on the Earth Boyarin began an exemplary public park. Soon, however, the inconveniences that expire from the "youth of the people" were revealed: on the tables, on the benches, snapshots appeared on the walls, the flowers were unceremoniously, the branches on unprecedented trees were rushed, the retrames turned into a cloac. Anarchist turned with an eloquent appeal, in which he explained that the park was available at the disposal and to protect the population: it is not necessary to break the colors, do not form branches, do not need indecent inscriptions ... But the "young people" responded to Paphos Anarchist-theorient peculiar humor : The inscriptions appeared already carved knives, flowers and trees were destroyed with the fierce, the Returada was even more skidding. Then the gardener came to the boyar and said:
- I can't live in your country. The people who have not learned how to behave in public places is still too far from anarchism in my sense.
This case explains the essence of my thought. Not any lack of skills of bourgeois society marks readiness for socialism. Once, our anarchist Bakunin wrote: "... We need to enter the union with all the thieves and robberies of the Russian Earth." He was the theoretical advantage and anarchist who denied the property in theory. The thief denies it almost. Let the practice be soles with the theory. We now, such a reasoning seems great naivety: Between the denial of the property of an anarchist-philosopher, far looking into the future, and the same denial of a simple thief lies a whole abyss. Warma must first go back to work out an honest attitude to someone else's property, that is, what "capitalist stage" teaches, and then not individually, but together with all the people to think about public denial of ownership.

You say that our people do not look like those Romanians, what they were told about. I know: to the degree there is a difference even in Romania itself. But - let's honestly and with love for the truth we will talk about what our people now represents.

You allow, it is likely that I love our people at least any Bolshevik; Allow the fact that I have proven this with your entire life coming to an end ... But I love it not blindly, as an environment convenient for certain experiments, but what it is in reality. When I traveled in America, for example, I was happy to think about the fact that we are impossible such courts of Lynch, which time of that time was played in one of the southern states: the Negro raped a white girl and to hide the crime, killed her. The population of the town arranged the court and burned him alive on the fire. Correspondents described a step by step such details: the ropes overloaded, and the unfortunate slipper from the fire. The crowd provided his father killed a special honor: he took a negra on his hands on his hands and again threw in the fire.

I think that even now, during the greatest absence, we cannot have a similar phenomenon. Slavic nature of our people softer Anglo-Saxon. We even have a death penalty only to the Greeks together with Christianity. But it does not prevent me from recognizing that in America the moral culture is much higher. The case with the Negro - the phenomenon is so exceptional that this exclusiveness caused such a brutal court of the crowd. At the usual time, on average, a young girl can safely travel across the country guarded by the hardness of public morals. Is it possible to say about our ingrats? We have such a traveler can at all go to the network of our common promiscuity and depravity. By nature, according to natural deposits, our people are not inferior to the best peoples of the world, and it makes you love him. But he far behind in the upbringing of moral culture. He has no self-esteem, which forces it to refrain from famous actions, even when no one knows. This must be admitted, and it is necessary to bring the necessary consequences from this.

We need to go through a rather long and harsh school. You talk about communism. Not to mention the fact that communism is still something unformed and indefinite and you still have not found out that you understand it, - for the social coup in this direction other morals are needed. From the same carbon substance, both wonderful diamond crystals and amorphous coal are obtained. So, there is some difference in the inner structure of atoms themselves. The same should also be said about human atoms, of which society is compiled: not every form can be immediately screamed from this company. In many cities of Switzerland, you can now safely leave any thing on the boulevard and, returning it, will put it on the same place. And we - we will talk directly ... Accurate accounting in such a question, of course, it is difficult, but you know, we have a saying: do not put bad, do not put a thief in sin. And you probably agree that a thousand people who would have passed by any bad lying thing, in Europe the percentage of seduced will be much smaller than in Russia. But this difference is already of great importance for the crystal. I was in the Ukrainian village, last autumn and talked a lot with the peasants about everything that happened. When I told about how in Toulouse my daughter and my husband lived a year on the apartment, inhabited by the workers, never shutting up the doors at night, was the greatest surprise.

And with us, - said sadly on this good and reasonable peasant, especially at the present time, if the cotton bring someone else's mother, then his mother even praise: it's good that you are in the house, and not from the house.

And this since you proclaimed communism, did not weaken, and intensified to a great extent.

Little, but a meaningful example: To at least weaken the flaw in food, the urban office of Poltava (still "bourgeois") encouraged the development of all free land plots. Thus, areas in front of the houses on the streets were planted with potatoes, carrots, etc. The same and relatively free places in the city garden. This has been traditional for several years.

At this year, the potatoes were superb, but ... he had to dig up everywhere long before he slept, because at night it was just crawled. Who is the cradle - this time it does not matter. The case, however, is that some worked, others used. A third of the crop died because the potatoes are not Doros, the reserves for the winter did not have to do from the rest of the part because the incredible potatoes of Rotch. I saw a group of poor women who stood in the morning and cried over the ripped at night. They worked, sowed, scrap, pololi. And others came, the bushes broke out, a lot was flooded, the trifle was pulled out, which was still necessary to reach two months, and did it in some hour.

This is an example indicating that such a thing as the moral properties of the people can be expressed in numbers. With one level of morality, the crop would be such that, and the urban population would be ensured from the winter hunger. Our people "under communism" have a huge part of the crop right away from our morals. An even greater damage is to be achieved that for the next year many will think to handle empty places - anyone reluctance to work for thieves ... And you can not handle any shootings with this element. Here you need something else, and in any case, the communism is still far away.

I wanted to do in this letter without specific cases. But I barely finished this letter. We continue the former. At the time at night, shots are heard. If this in the southwestern side means, the rebels approach, if in the southeastern side of the cemetery means someone (maybe many) are shot. Both sides compete in cruelty. All our poltava is similar to the powder cellar, and now there is already talking about shot of hostages scored from places covered by the rise. Measure, if it were to apply, meaningless, cruel and only harmful to those who use it. During the war, especially when I was in France, I followed this barbaric institution, which was visited by the Middle Currents, and I must say that even during the war of the actual shooting shooters, it seems. The French were accused of the Germans, Germans French. But it seems that the constriction was only suitable for mutual accusations, and not for actual use. You need to say about us: youth, which is hiding now in the forests, and Makhno, acknowledged nearby, little burning, if several old people are shot. This will only give them a few new adherents and finally takes the neutral population. In view, maybe these considerations, there are still no settings yet. But it is enough that the prisons are full of (alas! After that, the hostage shooters were reported even in official Izvestia.). How many grief makes it in the family - this clearly can be seen for those who come to me in tears. And how many employees are taken away from these families in the midst of harvest.

And Makhno, calling himself, by the way, an anarchist, already released in areas, they are employed, their money. I was told that two two hundred people were written on them: "Oh, Johnko, have fun, in Makhna Groshi wound up." Both the other: "Hto qich a penny is not a brother, that mahno draout."

In general, this figure is colorful and a remarkable degree. Makhno is the average withdrawal of the Ukrainian people (and maybe more wider). None of the warring parties without him did. He helped you when taking a Donetsk pool. Then he helped volunteers, at least passively, clearing the front. With the last lesson, Poltava Makhnovtsy helped you again. And then the Soviet government declared it out of law. But he laughs over it, and this laughter is reminiscent of a true Mephistophel grimace on the person of our revolution.

Fifth letter

It is necessary to think about the reasons of the explicit disorder between the Western European leaders of socialism and you, the leaders of Russian communism. Your monopoly print explains him by the fact that the leaders of socialism in Western Europe sold bourgeoisie. But this, forgive, the same vulgarity, just as when you were accused of bribing from Germany.

There is no need to look for low reasons for explaining the fact of this disorder. It is rooting much deeper, in a huge difference of sentiment. The fact is that the leaders of European Socialism for the past ten years led the legally mass struggle of their proletariat, long penetrated these masses, created a wide and slender organization, achieved its legal recognition.

You have never been in such a position. You were only aspiracted and the biggest - managed a conspiracy that was trying to penetrate the working environment. It creates a completely different mood, other psychology.

European leaders of socialism, taking this or other decision, recommending it to their followers, used to weigh all sides of this step. When, for example, a strike was announced, then the leaders had to be considered not only its agitation significance, but also the comprehensive consequences of it for the working environment, including this state of industry. Will the mass be able to withstand a strike, in a state of capital to give up without the disposal of the production itself, which will affect the same workers? In short, they took responsibility not only for the struggle itself, but for how a measure recommended by them on the welfare of workers will affect. They are accustomed to feeling mutual relationship between capital and labor.

You have never been in this position, because, thanks to the meaningless pressure of autocracy, they never performed legally. You personally had to risk it too, I had to sit in prisons for the fact that in all of Europe it was already recognized as the right masses and the right of her leaders, and this risk of prison, links, cavities replaced for you in your own eyes and in the eyes of workers every other responsibility. If the workers and their families have had to be hungry from the error in one or another of your plan and to endure extreme need, then you received our share of suffering in a different form.

And that is why you are used to calling always to the most extreme measures, to last conclusion from the scheme, to the end result. That is why you could not work out an alike to life, to the complex possibilities of the fight itself and where you get a one-way view of the capital as exclusively about the predator, without a complicating idea of \u200b\u200bits role in the organization of production.

And from here your disappointment and bitterness in relation to Western European socialism.

Workers first went for you. Still would. After idiotic persecution of any attempts to combat capital, you immediately proclaimed the proletarian dictatorship. The workers stolen and promised a lot ... They rushed after you, that is, for the dream of the immediate implementation of socialism.

But reality remains reality. For the working mass, there is still not a simple scheme, not one end result, as for you, but the question of the immediate life of them and their families. And the working mass firstly felt the consequences of your schematic. You won the capital, and he now lies with your feet, mutilated and broken. You did not only notice that it was connected with the production of such alive threads, which, killing him, you also killed production. Having rejoicing his victories over Denikinians, over the quoll, above the yudench and the Poles, you did not notice that they suffered a full defeat on a much more extensive and important front. This is the front, during which hostile forces of nature come from all sides. Personalized by one-sided destruction of capitalist building, not paying for nothing in the persecution of this scheme, you brought the country to a terrible position. Once in his book "In the Hungry Year" 9, I tried to draw the dark fortune to which the autocracy led: huge areas of bread in the Russian Russia, and the hunger strikes were intensified. Now much worse, all Russia is amazed hunger, starting from the capitals, where there were cases of hungry death on the streets. Now, they say, you have managed to establish food in Moscow and St. Petersburg (for a long time and what price?). But the hunger covers spaces much greater than in 1891-1892 in the province. And most importantly - you destroyed what was organic in the relationship of the city and the village: the natural connection of exchange. You have to replace it with artificial measures, "forced alienation", requisitions through punitive detachments. When the village does not receive not only agricultural tools, but for a needle is forced to pay 200 rubles and more and more - at this time you install such solid bread prices that are clearly disadvantageous. You contact your newspapers to seliners with articles in which we prove that the village is beneficial to support you. But, eliminating the question of the essence, - you speak different languages; Our people are not used to summarize the phenomenon.

Each agriculture only sees that he takes what he made, for remuneration, clearly not equivalent to his work, and makes his conclusion: hides bread in the pit. You find it, requiring it, pass around the villages of Russia and Ukraine with Kalenny gland, burn whole villages and happy to successes of food policy. If you add to it that many areas in Russia are also hit by hunger, that from there to our Ukraine, for example, the crowds of hungry people run blindly, and the fathers of families, Kursk and Ryazan men, for the absence of livestock themselves, are imputed in the fellowship and drag the carts with children and Skarbla, - then the picture goes more striking than everything that I had to celebrate in the hungry year ... And all this is not limited to localities affected by the crown. Already two months ago, we had in Poltava, I saw a man who was already the sixth day "did not see a bread", making a picture of some kind of potatoes and vegetables ... And now in addition it is winter, and a cold joins hunger. For WHO firewood brought from non-evil forests require 12 thousand. This means that the vast majority of the inhabitants, even relatively better than secure, as your Soviet employees, will be (with the exception of the Communists) completely defenseless from the cold. The apartments will be almost the same thing that will be in the yard. On this front, you gave all the urban (and part of the rural) population for mercy and disfavor to the hostile forces of nature, and this will equally feel both ruined, suspected, "unreliable" man in Surtuk and a person in a working blouse. The people have already found the formula in which this situation briefly summarized. One peasant, long-living in the city and engaged in Lomotov, told me somehow with bitter and angry smile:

Yak Buv we have a micola fool
Then chlib boiled patch
And the yak priesed the Rumina Communist
Then the wrong thing became people,
HLIB NI for Yaki Groshi is not Distan ...

This will not invent on purpose, this is what is born itself from the air, from the immediate sensation, from obvious facts.

And now the working environment begins to feel your main mistake, and it is the sentiments that you so condemn in the vast majority of Western European socialists; It is clearly enhanced by Menshevism, i.e. socialism, but not a maximalist type. He does not recognize immediate and complete social coup, starting with the destruction of capitalism as a enemy fortress. He admits that some achievements of the bourgeois system represent a nationwide property. You are struggling with this mood. Once it was confirmed that Russia is autocably rules the will of the king. But barely somewhere showed the will of this poor fellowship, not quite consonted with the intention of the rules of the bureaucracy, the latter had thousands of ways to bring autocrat to obedience. Is it not the same with the same poor thing, the current "dictator"? How do you learn and how do you express his will? We have no free print, vote freedom - as well. Free print, in your opinion, only bourgeois prejudice. Meanwhile, the lack of free print makes you deaf and blind on the phenomena of life. In your officials reigns inner well-being at the time when people blindly "wand apart" (old Russian expression) from hunger. The victories of communism in the Ukrainian village are proclaimed at the time when rural Ukraine boils hatred and anger and extrietary people are already thinking about the execution of the village hostages. Hunger began in the cities, there is a formidable winter, and you care only about falsifying the opinions of the proletariat. A little somewhere begins to manifest independent thought in the work environment, not quite consonted with the direction of your policy, the Communists immediately take their measures. This Board of the Professional Union receives the name of white or yellow, his members are arrested, the reign itself is dismissed, and then a triumphant article in your official: "Road of the Red Protection" or another Red Workers Group, which have been in the minority until then. From the amount of such phenomena and is found that you call the "proletariat dictatory". Now and in Poltava, we see the same: the emergency commission, this time in complete agreement with other institutions, produces solid arrests of Mensheviks. More or less outstanding from the "unreliable" socialist opposition sits in prison, for which many had to tear off from the required current work (without the help of "unreliable" Mensheviks, you still can't handle it). And thus, the new "Celebration of Communism" (now many Mensheviks are administratively sent to Georgia. ).

Is it a celebration? Once, even with autocracy, in one of the periods of alternate strengthening, the censorship, which was exempted with their efforts in one humorous body, was depicted self-adjacent sitting on the bayonets. Signature: "Uncomfortable position" - or something like that. In the same inconvenient position is now your communist ruling party. The position of it in the village is straight tragic. The point and the case from there bring communists and commissars, mutilated and killed. The officials write magnificent necrologists, and your party consults yourself by the fact that it is only curly (rustic robes), which does not prevent you from burning whole villages. And the rich and poor are equally. But in the cities you hold only military force, otherwise your representation would quickly change. The nearest your allies, Socialists, Mensheviks, are sitting in prisons. I have to observe such phenomena that. In 1905, when I was healthy and more actors, I had one time to fight with the growing mood of Jewish pogroms, which undoubtedly meant not alone Jews, but also carrying workers. At this time, the local printing houses, disturbing the strike, printed the appeal of the Poltavshchyna newspaper and mine. It involuntarily brought me closer with the width of the kitchers. I remember one thing: he was undoubtedly the left in the direction and very hot on temperament. His performances brought attention to him the attention of the gendarm authorities, and with the beginning of the reaction he was expelled first in Vologda, then in Ust-Sysolsk. The surname of his Navrotsky. Now he is in Poltava and ... arrested by your extreme for one of the speeches at the meeting of the printers (in October, Navorotsky was expelled by the decision of the CC in the Northern province. I had to write about this in Kharkov. My "Reporting Notes" did not have success . Now Navrotsky is free, but his son is expelled in the northern province, already once, in childhood, the exorbitant with his father. Obviously, history is repeated.). When I now read about the "yellow" printers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, then I involuntarily comes to the idea: how many Navrotsky, who proven in the fight against the royal reaction, their dedication to the actual liberation of workers, are arrested by the communists of the Epiphany under the guise of "yellow", i.e. " Unreacked "socialists. At one time, there was a question even about the execution of Navrotsky for his speech against the new oppression of freedom of opinions in the working environment. That's good - it could easily happen, and then the difference and former gendarmes and former gendar administrations would be vividly emphasized. The latter did not have the right to shoot - your extremes have this right and enjoy them with terrifying freedom and ease.

Sixth letter

What did you diverge with the leaders of European socialism and start more and more to disperse with your own working environment? I gave the answer to this question above: he is in our maximalism.

Logically, this position is the easiest: Take everything at once and everyone who stops immediately before the complexity and sometimes the tasks, call inconsistent, stupid, and sometimes injectors of socialism, agreements, Kolchaktsov, Denikints, generally traitors ...

The inconvenience of this reception is that you yourself cannot implement everything at once. You, for example, made a monetary system. This, of course, only "for the first time," until "the new exchange apparatus will be set up," for example, public supply. But wait for this for a long time, and some more maximalist, drawing the consequences of a monetary system, which is indeed one of the most characteristic features of the capitalist system, can logically do and you reproach: you made this feature, it means that it is consequeled, and then several Logic steps, and you - Kolchakovets, Denikinets, a traitor for socialism. And do not say that this is only a temporary stage: the whole question is precisely to the consultation of the ideal with the reality, which "temporarily" accepts Western European socialists and you. You are a schematic and maximalists, and they are looking for a measure of revolutionary possibilities. It was not possible for you to abolish the monetary system at once, they see many other impossibility of "immediately".

Logic is one of the powerful means of thought, but far from the only one. There is still an imagination, which makes it possible to cover the complexity of specific phenomena. This property is necessary for such a case, as the management of a huge country. You have a scheme completely suppressed imagination. You can not imagine the difficulty of reality. The mathematician expects, for example, how much time the core, brushed at such a speed, will arrive on the moon, but the physicist clearly imagines all the impossibility of the task, at least at the current level of technology. You are only mathematics of socialism, its logic and schematics. You say: We have already achieved everything if we did not interfere with worldwide bourgeois and if the leaders of European socialism, and for them, the majority of workers did not change: they do not have what we do from us do not destroy capitalism.

But first of all you did the easier thing: destroyed the Russian bourgeois, inorganized, unreasonable and weak. You know that the European bourgeois is much stronger, and the European worker is not such a blind herd so that it can be thrown into maximalism in the first call. He understands that it is long to destroy any apparatus, but it is necessary to change it in this case, so as not to destroy the production that a person is only protected from the ever hostile nature. Western European workers are more consciousness of reality than we, the leaders of communism, and because they are not maximalists. After the correspondence of Segrew and Lenin10 - it is clear: the European working mass will generally support you in maximalism. It remains neutral within the compromise.

In Poltava, in Poltava immediately after the revolution changed urban self-government. It became democratic and intervened in the course of the previous supply. By the way, it founded the urban wood warehouse, and when the merchants swallowed too much, urban management strengthened their sale, and prices fell. Then they shouted as socialism. Orthodox capital adherents prefer quite "free trade", without any intervention. It would seek you too modest ... But Poltava was protected from winter jellows.

This, of course, is a trifle, but it clearly wants my thought. Only so you can intervene in the supply on the go, without breaking and without destroying it. Then, as you experience, this intervention can be enhanced by introducing it into more and more broad areas until finally society goes to socialism. This is the path is slow, but the only possible one. You immediately stopped bourgeois ways to deliver objects of the greatest need, and now Poltava, the center of the cholerior terrain, surrounded by close forests, is before hunger and in the face of close winter is quite defenseless. And so everywhere, in all areas of supply. Your newspapers are informed with the celebration that in the Crimea at Wrangel bread sold already at 150 p. per pound. But we (i.e. you have) in Poltava, among the resident of Russia, it costs 450 rubles. per pound, i.e., three times more. And just the rest.

I have already said that in Poltava tradition was created: the inhabitants appeal to me as a writer who knew how to break through the censorship frames. Previously, people oppressed by the royal authorities came to me. Now they are native people arrested. Among these latter there are many tumors. Life takes its own: Despite your ban, leather-shustari, the business is accepted to make skin, thus satisfying the most stronger need for shoes due to winter. Sometimes the volost executives give their sanction to it, and little skin begins to be released, while ... do not know your authorities about this crime and do not stop him. You need to "immediately" production has become a socialist, even communist, and you transform a compromise into an agreement with bourgeois forms of production. Of course, you can say that you already have someone "Soviet Kozhevni", but what they mean by these bureaucratic ventures in comparison with the huge, as the ocean, the need. And as a result, see what your redarmeys go and serving your intelligentsia: the Red Army team will often meet in the naps, and the employee intelligentsia in some of the wooden sandals made. It reminds classical antiquity, but it is very uncomfortable now by winter. On the question that will be in winter, the answer sometimes serve only tears.

It is clear that there is no reason to go further and the country is threatened with unheard of disasters. The first victim of their intelligentsia will appear. Then urban workers. The best arranged communists and the Red Army will hold the longest. But in this environment among good-fass people, signs of impoverishment are noticeable. It is best for all kinds of robbers. And this is natural: you build everything on egoism, and you yourself require selflessness. Prove the same that an armed person favorably die with hunger, refraining from the robbery of a man unarmed.

I talked above about one characteristic little things a purely household property, about the robbery of the gardens that took such dimensions that it deprives for the future time of prompting to work, not to mention the role of the redarmeys played. Sometimes the hosts of the gardens did an ambush on the thieves. When they tiped the people of the civilian title, those confused and ran away. Only the redarmeys answered simply: what do we sit hungry, or what? And continued to rob, passing from this site to the neighbor's section. Now another same little thing. Not more than two weeks ago, the Krasnoarmeysky regiment was leaving from Poltava. He headquartered him next to my apartment, and because from morning along our street ranked rows of soldiers. In the courtyard at home, where I live, there are several walnut trees. This attracted a soldier, and in anticipation of sending our yard overwhelmed by Red Army. It is difficult to describe what happened here. Close on the trees, broke the branches, and, gradually entering some kind of hurried fierce, in a hurry, like children, soldiers began to grab the lap of firewood, bricks, stones and twist all this on trees with danger to get into the trees sitting on the trees or in our houses . Several times the lamps hit the frames, fortunately, not in glass. You know what it means to smash the glass now. I had to turn to the authorities, but the bosses could stop it only for the same time. A minute later, the yard was full of soldiers again, and I was hardly able to persuade, so as not to throw the windows and stones with danger to the windows. All trees were torn off, and only then the Red Army women left, after the solemn speech of the commander, which said that the Red Army is going to build a new society ... And I thought about the close distress, when the need is not in nuts, but in bread, fuel , in clothes, shoes will force these people, with dangerous disadvantages of children who are now thrown into nuts, just throw on the essentials. Then it may be that instead of socialism we have introduced only a coarse soldier like the Janchart.

I had to talk with a personal date with you about what the difference was when we were classified by the Red Army and Volunteers. The last more than three days frankly robbed the city "with the permission of the authorities". The Red Armyians occupied Poltava, as a disciplined army, and robbery produced by different gangsters immediately stopped. Only subsequently when you started not to shoot, the props of apartments (fastening frequently and labor classes), this impression was replaced by another feeling. You know how to hold new areas better than volunteers, but you can't keep them, like they, - I finished then. Now visitors from Kiev say that the Red Army was proposed before the speech in the campaign "dressed at the expense of the bourgeoisie." If this is confirmed, and the news wears all signs of reliability, it will mean that a dangerous symptom already begins: you finish the fact that Denikintsy began. The visitors say that this time the robbery lasted more than a week, and it may be indicated to the beginning of the last action of our tragedy.

I feel that my letters must be finished. They dragged too much and prevent me from surrender to another work. In addition, it should be said about this much more and with great study, and for this I have neither time nor health. Therefore, I will finish briefly: you with a light heart started our schematic experiment in the hope that it will be only a signal for the worldwide maximalist revolution. You must already see what you are mistaken: after the arrival of a foreign workers' delegation, after the letter of the Segery and the answer of Lenin, this dream disappears even for your optimism. You have to be content with an easy victory for consistent schematic optimism over the "consents", but it is already clear that in general the worker Europe will not go to our way, and Russia, accustomed to obeying any oppression, who did not work out for the expression of his true opinion, is forced to go this sad, gloomy By all alone.

Where to? What is your fantastic communism? It is known that in the past century there were attempts to translate a communist dream in reality. You know what they ended. Robert Owen, Fourierists, Sensimonists, Cabethists - such a long series of communist experiences in Europe and in America. All of them ended with sad failure, discord, tragedies for initiators, like the tragedy of the Cabe. And all these noble dreeders ended in consciousness that humanity should be reborn before destroying property and move to utility forms of life (if at all the communes are feasible). The Socialist Historian Renar says that the Cabe and the Communists of his sewing resorted to an too simplified decision of the issue: "Among the subjects surrounding us, there are those that can and should remain in individual possession, and others who must go into collective ownership." In general, the process of this distribution for which you took with such a light heart presents the process of long and difficult training "objective and subjective conditions", for which all the voltage of general amateurs is necessary and, most importantly, freedom. Only such amateurness, only freedom of any experiments may indicate that it will endure criticism of practical life and what is doomed to death. "Cabe," says Renar (and other utopians, I add), "I could still find the principle that would establish this separate line. He paid too much the place of power and unity. The community state that he dreamed of is reminds of a guesthouse, where young people provide healthy moderate food, where their minds are put in the uniform, as a body, teach them to work, eat, get up. The monotony of this harsh discipline generates boredom and disgust. This monastery boarding is too crazy so that humanity can move in it without breaking it. " Instead of the monastic boarding school, you introduced our communism to the barracks (just remember the "labor militarization"). As we can satisfied, you have broken off the inviolability and freedom of privacy, broke in housing ("My home is my fortress," the British say), they began to produce immediate delegations of the necessary things as intimate manifestations of taste and intellect, left Hand on private collections of paintings and books ... Without creating almost nothing, you destroyed a lot, otherwise to say, introducing immediate communism, you abolished the hunt for a long time, even from simple socialism, the introduction of which is an urgent task of modernity.

An eyewitness told me the next household picture: authorized volost committees were returned from one of the congresses. At this congress, as usual, resolutions were adopted in the communist spirit itself. Among the peasants who signed these resolutions reigned a sullen mood. They drove into their villages, and there, as you know, the mood is far from the communist. In this company, he drove hot and, apparently, a convinced communist, proving the advantages of the communist system. The answer to his hot tirades was sullen silence. Then he decided to pierce this ice and directly turned to one of the interlocutors, a clever solid peasant, in the emphasis, offering the question: why are you silent and what do you think about what I told you?

The axis Bachita, "the man answered seriously," all this, maybe, really ... Yes, the trouble is that the hands of a person are so arranged that it is easier for him to burn to herself, and not to himself (to rush to himself, and not Push).

As you can see, this is exactly what dreamers of utopian communism come to the end of experience. The point, of course, is not in hand, but in souls. The souls must be reborn. And for this you need to first reborn the institutions. And this, in turn, requires freedom of thought and undertaking for creativity of new forms of life. By force, delay this amateur in society and the people is a crime that has committed our recent fallen government. But there is also another, perhaps, not less - is the force to impose new forms of life, the convenience of which people were not yet aware and they could not even become familiar with the creative experience. And you are to blame. Instinct You were replaced by order and wait for your order to change the nature of a person. For this encroachment to freedom of self-determination of the people, the payback is waiting for you.

Social justice is very important, and you rightly indicate that there is no complete freedom without it. But without freedom it is impossible to achieve justice. The ship's ship has to spend between scilla slavery and harybda injustice, never lose sight of both. No matter how much you claimed that bourgeois freedom is only a deception by a working class, you will not succeed in convincing European workers. English workers who hoping now to spend your experiences (if, of course, they were successful) through parliament, they cannot forget that Bourgeois Gladstone, acting under the banner of self-sufficiency, almost all his life fought for the expansion of their election rights. And every political transformation in this spirit led to the possibility of struggle for social justice, and any political response gave reverse results. There were many political revolutions, there was not one social yet. You will be the first experience of introducing socialism by suppressing freedom.

What can I go out of this? It would not want to be a prophet, but my heart is compressed by the foreboding that we are just a threshold of such disasters, which will die all that we are experiencing now. Russia is a colossus, which gradually weakens from a long inner fever, from hunger and deprivation. Antante does not have to, perhaps, to fight with us for a long time to pacify us. This will make our inner destruction for it. The time will come when the exhausted colossus will ask to help him without asking about conditions ... and conditions, of course, will be heavy.

* * *

I cum out. Where is the outcome? In the past 1919, the correspondent of your government telegraph agency came to me to offer me a few questions about what I think about what was happening. I do not like interviews. In addition to the fact that I am a writer and could formulate my thoughts yourself, - these interviews are almost always inaccurate. But again - I am a writer, that is, a person seeking his thoughts to become known. And you killed free print. And I agreed to answer the correspondent, expressing only doubt that my thoughts would find a place in the Bolshevik press. He replied that he was not swore for it, but the agency will divide this interview to the leaders of Soviet power.

Interview in print did not appear. I do not know if it was assigned to you and whether you were going to get acquainted with him. I then spoke, in general, the same that I repeat now: you know how to take new places, but you can't hold them, and I feel that you have already lost the soil in Ukraine. Events This is my premonition justified: months after a half you had to leave Ukraine under the pressure of Denikintsev. Now clouds over your domination in Ukraine are condensed again ...

That Romanian anarchist, about which I spoke earlier, came to the conclusion that the people who do not know how to behave in public places to such an extent is still very far from the ideal building. I will say otherwise: the people who have not yet learned to own a voting apparatus, which does not know how to formulate the opinion in it, which proceeds to a social justice device through individual robbery (your: "Lost Grab"), which begins the kingdom of justice to the commitment of massive shootings, For years already years, such people are still far from becoming at the head of the best aspirations of mankind. He still needs to learn from himself, and not to teach others.

You defeated Denikin volunteers, we won the yudenich, Kolchak, Poles, probably win and Wrangel. It is possible that the Armed Intervention of the Entente would also end up with your victory: it would awaken the spirit of patriotism, who tried in vain to kill in the name of internationalism, forgetting that the idea of \u200b\u200bthe Fatherland is still the greatest achievement on the path of mankind to unity, which, probably, It will be achieved only by the merger of the Fatherland. In short, on all fronts you are the winners, without noticing the inner illness, making you powerless before the front of nature ...

You see from this that I am not waiting for any antena intervention, nor the victory of the generals. Russia is in thought between two utopias: the utopia of the past and the utopia of the future, choosing, to which utopia she rushes. External intervention would only donounce the experience, and the generals probably chaired the elements that sighing about the past and ready in favor of the past also abuse power as you are in favor of the future. According to many, the position of Russia is now such that there is no hope for a miracle. In a conversation with a correspondent, I was talking about, I ended up with a call for you, the leaders of the early communism, to abandon the experiment and take a healthy reaction in the hands of themselves in order to be able to master it and curb the reaction unhealthy, ferocious and unreasonable. I tell me that it would mean to count on a miracle. Maybe it's true. Of course, for this it would take all the tension of honesty and conscientiousness in order to recognize their huge mistake. Suppress your pride and roll onto a different road - on the road that you call the convention.

I realize that in this assumption a lot of naivety. But I am an optimist and artist, and this path seems to me the only one, giving Russia a decent way out of the present impossible position. In addition, it was said that every people deserve that government that has. In this sense, it can be said that Russia deserved you ... You are only a real expression of her past, with slave submissions in front of autocracy even at a time when, exhausting all creative forces in peasant reform and a few more, for her followed, it has passed To the blind reaction and many years suppressed the organic growth of the country. At this time, the people were on his side, and Russia was doomed to rot and decomposition. It is normal that all shades of thought be presented in the country, even the most extreme, even sometimes unreasonable. A live struggle prevents rotting and implements even unreasonable aspirations in a kind of vaccination: what is unreasonable and harmful for this time often saves power for the future.

But under the influence of persistently retrograde government, we had not that. Public thought ceased and forcibly customized under the rank. In agriculture reigned hopeless stagnation, the growing layers of industrial workers remained outside the possibility of struggling for improving their position. The intelligentsia friendly people was drunk in the underground, to Siberia, in emigration and led a dreamily embittered life outside open ties with their own reality. And this, in turn, perverted an intelligent thought, directing it to the path of schematism and maximalism.

Then the chance of history suddenly destroyed this partition between the people who lived so long without political thought, and the intelligentsia who lived without the people, that is, without connection with reality. And so, when the partition suddenly collapsed, a mixture of alien for so long elements came out to a poisonous. An explosion occurred, but not the fruitful explosion, which destroys only what prevented the normal development of the country, and deeply bawed living fabrics of the public organism. And you were the natural representatives of the Russian people with his habit of arbitrariness, with its naive expectations of "just immediately" with the lack of even the beneficial organization and creativity. No wonder that the explosion was only destroyed without creating.

And now the true beneficial miracle would be that you are finally aware of your loneliness, not only among European socialism, but the emerging of your own working environment has already started, not to mention the positive hatred of the village to your communism, they would confess and refused From the destroying path of violence. But it must be done honestly and full. Maybe you still have enough power to turn to a new path. You must directly recognize your mistakes that you have done with your people. And the main one of them is that much in the capitalist strictly you eliminated prematurely and that the possible measure of socialism can only enter into a free country.

Governments die from lies ... maybe there is still time to return to the truth, and I am sure that the people, blindly following you on the path of violence, with the joy of waking up consciousness will go along the way to return to freedom. If not for you and not for your government, it will be benefactor for the country and for the growth of socialist consciousness.

But is it possible for you? Is it too late if you even wanted to do it?

The letter first

Anatoly Vasilyevich.

Of course, I did not forget my promise to write a detailed letter, especially since it was my sincere desire. To express frank opinions about the most important motives of public life has long been for me, as well as for many sincere writers, who urgently need. Thanks to the established "freedom of speech", this need is not satisfaction. We, dissent, have to write not articles, but reports notes. It seemed to me that it would be easier for me to me. The impression of your visiting strengthened this intention in me, and I waited for time when I sit at the table to exchange views with a comrade writer about sore issues of modernity.

But here is a nightmare episode with shootings during your arrival 1, as if I have left such an obstacle between us that I can't talk about anything until I was shared with him. I involuntarily have to start with this episode.

Already starting a conversation with you (or rather, to the petition) before the rally, I was nervous, vaguely feeling that I would have to speak in vain words over the grave just buried. But - so I wanted to believe that the words of the head of the head. Commissions have some reason and five lives can still be saved. True, on the total tone of your speech, it was felt that even you would consider this nightmare in the order of things ... But ... a person is peculiar to hope ...

And the next day, even before receiving your note, I learned that my vague premonition is a fact: five inconsidered executions, five corpses lay between my then impressions and by the time when I take a feather with a cramped heart. Only two or three days ago we learned from local "news" names of the victims. Before a date with you I saw my native Aroness and Mirkin, and this is a defill of personal drama on these unreserved shadows for me. I was brought to the rally, firstly, a copy of the official conclusion of the Food Education. It contained that in _yad_ _aronov_ _ each_ _ _ _ __н_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _tecretes. Secondly, I brought the petition of mill workers, proving that the workers did not consider him a gross exploiter and speculator. Thus, on the issue of these two lives, there were different, even official, opinions demanding in any case caution and verification. And indeed, over a year and a half before that, the Emergency Commission received the proposal of the Gubspolkom, according to the conclusion of the legal adviser, _osvobody_ Aronov or transfer it to the revolutionary tribunal.

Instead, he is shot administratively.

You know that during your literary life I "sowed not some roses" (* Your expression in one of the articles about me. (Here and then-- note. V. G. Korolenko.)). Under the royal power, I wrote a lot about the death penalty and even dismissed the right to talk about it printed much more than it was allowed by censorship. Sometimes I managed to even save the doomed victims of the military courts, and there were cases when after the suspension of execution, there was evidence of innocence and the victims were released (for example, in the case of Yusupov 2), although it happened that these evidence came too late (in Glucker 3 and Dr.).

But execution without trial, execution in administrative order - this was the greatest rarity even then. I remember only one case when the scaled scales (Warsaw Governor's Governor) shot two young men without a court. But this opened such indignation even in the military-vessels, that only the "approval" after the fact of a stupid king saved the clone from the citizen of the Court. Even members of the Main Military Court assured me that the repetition of this is no longer possible.

Many and at the time and after that, incredible disgrace was created, but direct recognition, which is allowed to combine into one investigative power and power, the sentences (to the death penalty), even then did not happen. The activities of Bolshevik Extreme. Investigation commissions presents an example - maybe the only in the history of cultural peoples. One day one of the prominent members of the All-Ukrainian CC, having met me in Poltava. com. where I often came and then with different petitions, asked me about my impressions. I replied: If during the royal power, the district gendarmes received the right not only to refer to Siberia, but also to execute death, then it would be the most that we see now.

My interlocutor answered on this:

But this is for the benefit of the people.

I think that not all sorts of funds can really apply for the benefit of the people, and for me it is undoubted that administrative executions erected into the system and ongoing for the second year have not belong to their number. Once, last year, I had to describe in writing to Christ. George. Rakovsky 4 One episode, when, in the street, Chekists were shot by several so-called counter-revolutionaries. They were already led by a dark night in the cemetery, where they raised shot over the open grave and were shot in the back of the head without distant ceremonies. Maybe they really tried to run (no wonder), and they were shot right there on the street from hand guns. Be that as it may, the people spent in the morning at the Bazaar saw also the puddles of the blood, which the dogs listed, and listened to the crowd of the stories of the surrounding inhabitants about the night incident. I then asked X. G. Rakovsky: Does he consider that these several people, whether they are even the most active agitators, could you tell this crowd something more brighter and more exciting than this picture? I must say that then the local Gubspolk, and the Central Kiev authorities immediately stopped (twice) attempts to such collective executions and demanded the transfer of the case to the revolutionary tribunal. The court of one of the doomed surveys. Comm. I justified to the shooting, and this sentence was met by the assignments of the whole public. Applauded even clocks redarmeys, postponing the guns. After when Denikinians came, they pulled out of the total pit of 16 decaying corpses and put them at the bottom of 5. The impression was terrible, but by the time they themselves were shot by a few people without trial, and I asked them from their supporters: did they think that the corpses were shot by them extracted from the holes would have a more attractive look? Yes, mutual screaming has already reached the extreme limits, and it is bitter to think that the historian will have to celebrate this page of "administrative activities" of the CC in the history of the First Russian Republic, and moreover, not in the XVIII, but in the XX century.

Do not say that the revolution has its own laws. There were, of course, the explosions of the passions of the revolutionary crowd, who had chosen the street with blood even in the XIX century. But these were outbreaks of natural, rather than systematized rage. And they remained for a long time (as the execution of hostages of communites) in bloody beacons, which caused not only the hypocritical indignation of Versailles, who far surpassed in the cruelty of communations, but also the workers themselves and their friends ... For a long time, it threw a darling and stunting shadow and on the most socialist movement.

In a message about the shooting of Aronov and Mirkin, who finally appeared on June 11 and 12 in Izvestia, it was said that they were executed for bread speculation. Let even so, although still involuntarily remembered that the food authorities did not see the violation of decrees, and this disagreement deserved although [if] judicial audit. In general, all this grim incident resembles a public episode of the Great French Revolution. Then it was also high cost. It was also explained by the smallest way - the origin of aristocrats and speculators and excited the blind rage of the crowd. Convention "went to meet the folk feeling", and the heads of the then arons and Mirkina flew dozens under the guillotine knife. Nothing, however helped, the high cost only grew. Finally, the Parisian workers woke up from the fatal Ugon. They appealed to the Convention with the Petition, in which they said: "We ask bread, and you think you will feed us with executions." According to Michael, the historian-Socialist, from this fatigue, the first explosions of counter-revolution took place in S. -Antuansky suburb.

Is it possible to think that executions in administrative can better normalize prices than guillotine?

In the report of the official newspaper, only four names shot on May 30 are given, whereas definitely said about five. From this, the alarmed population makes the conclusion that the list is incomplete. There are still other names ... Meanwhile, if there is anything, where the publicity is most important, then this is precisely in matters of human life. Here every step should be lit. Everyone has the right to know who is deprived of life, if it is recognized as necessary, for which it is, by whose sentence. This is the smaller that you can demand from power. Now the population lives under the pressure of the nightmare. They say that only part [executed] is listed. They reach monstrous rumors, as if even the previous procedure is still simplified to the impossible lack of all kinds of forms, they say that it is now possible to do even without interrogation of the defendant. I think that this is only a frightened nonsense ... But - how to knock out the idea from the heads of the population that it sometimes is sometimes reality? ..

I'm bitterly thinking that you, Anatoly Vasilyevich, instead of calling to sorting, reminders of justice, careful attitude towards human life, which is now so cheaver, - in his speech they expressed solidarity with these "administrative executions." In the transfer of local newspapers it sounds like this. I wish from the heart to be sprouted in your heart again the mood echo, which once threw us in the main issues when we both believed that the movement to socialism should rely on the best sides of the human nature, assuming courage in straight fighting and humanity even to opponents . Let the atrocity and blind injustice remain entirely to the fraction of the past, who said, not penetrating the future ...

So, I now expressed everything that the stone was lying on my mind, and now, I think my thought was freed from the gloomy curtain, which prevented me to fulfill my desire to express themselves about the general issues.

Until the next letter.