This black notebook is just a hundredth of the ‘Petersburg Diaries’ that I have written daily, without break, since the first declaration of war. I’ll explain later what fate befell the other two, thicker volumes of these diaries but I want to first make it known that I no longer have them. Before I give you these last remains, containing just the second half of 1919, I need to say a few things about the diaries. This last notebook has been kept a little differently all things considered: The entries are shorter, fragmented and often without date. It is still still a continuation though and will therefore not be understandeable without the help of the first two volumes.
Our life, our milieu and our location were generally very convenient for the writing of such diaries. We, Merezhkovsky and I, were native Petersburgers and belonged to the wide circle of the Russian ‘intelligentsia’, that was nicknamed, rightly or wrongly, ‘Conscience and Reason’. This ‘intelligentsia’ was however – and this is without any doubt – the only ‘word’, the only ‘voice’ in the silenced, tacit, autocratic Russia of the time. After the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution – it was unsuccessful because autocracy still remained – this circle of ‘intellectuals’ became if not stronger, then at least broader. Although torn apart by internal disagreement, the circle was united in a general, and very important, political standpoint. The opposition of the autocratic regime. The Russian intelligentsia is a class, or a circle, or a layer (all of these words are inexact) that was unknown to the democratic-bourgeois of Europe just as it was unknown to The Autocracy. It was, in comparison to the cross-section of the whole of Russia, very tiny; and yet it was the only place where cultural work was being carried out, and it has played an extremely crucial historical role. I won’t define this role, I’m not turning to the intelligentsia as my subject, only briefly describing it.
There was almost no division in the professional circles of Petersburg after this revolution. The representatives of different professions – teachers, lawyers, doctors, writers, poets – were all in some way or another politically involved. Politics – the conditions under the autocratic regime – was our most pressing interest so that every cultured Russian, from whatever background, encountered political questions whether they liked it or not.
When a ‘ghost-state’ surfaced in 1905 – the creation of the Duma – and a leader was ‘politically elected’, nothing really changed. Only greater divisions between parties became evident. At the same time most major ‘politicians’ remained part of the same ‘intelligentsia’, the same circles, while the wheels of their pure, stately occupancy continued to rotate uselessly in the void. It was a very certain form of self-deception, and it was injurious.
Not every intellectual belonged to one party or another; but every one knew their way around party politics and sympathised with one specific party more than another. The struggles between the parties were interminable. But since, under the prevailing conditions, people’s differences took on rather abstract forms, and since they were united in their hatred of the autocracy, all circles of the Russian intelligentsia, not only the main ones, remained in touching distance.
We, Merezhkovsky, Filosofov and I, and even some of our friends, felt that as writers we were on the more idealistic sides of the conflicts. Not belonging to a single party, we were close to all. The party we sympathised with the most contained many old friends; amongst them were some emigrants we had known for many years (including Savinkov) with whom we were in constant contact. This party was the party of the Social Revolutionaries. Despite its poorly worked out ideology, it seemed to us the most well organised and most accordant party with Russia’s condition and its followers already included the Narodniks, who had a historic socialist past behind them. As for the Social Democratic Party, formed relatively newly in 1905 according to Western models, and split from the start into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, it’s foundations of economic materialism seemed particularly alien to us and as it seemed, to the Russian people. For ten years we lead a consequential, and internally very ideal struggle against them.
The farce that was the Duma led to the formation of the ‘Moderate-Liberals’ who wished to operate only within its boundaries. As already mentioned, their work turned out to be a spectre too. The Constitutional-Democratic (Cadets) Party, the only meaningful liberal party, had no real grounding at all. It adhered to European methods under conditions that had nothing in the slightest in common with Europe. Although the work of the liberals remained fruitless in the political sphere, they had of course created, or attempted to create, much in the cultural sphere. This explains the increasing sympathy of the intelligentsia for them in the years leading up to the war. We had a lot of points of contact with the liberals because Filosofov, without belonging to the Cadets Party, worked on the newspaper ‘Retsch’ and thus represented a standpoint that had a lot in common with the liberals.
And so the entire feeble political life of Russia, concentrated in the intelligentsia and in the illegal parties surrounding the degenerating shadow government – The Duma – lay before us. One did not need to be a political scientist to grasp what was happening. They only needed to open their eyes, and open eyes were all we had. Thus my diary was born, and became quite naturally a socio-political chronicle.
At this point I must recognise the importance of our geographical location for this chronicle. The whole of Petersburg was significant as a centre of the events that followed. But Petersburg had a centre within this centre: The Revolution was concentrated, even at the beginning, around the Duma, that’s to say, around the The Tauride Palace. The straight, level streets that led up to it were, in February and March of 1917, like arteries through which flowed a vivifying blood to the heart of the Revolution. The dome of the Duma, from the days of Katherine, loomed melancholically and proudly over the leafless branches of the birches in the park below.
Living right at the fence of the park, on the first floor of the last house in the row that lead up to the Palace, we followed the events minute by minute. The whole six years – six hundred years it felt – I stared out of the window, or from the balcony, to the left at the sun setting in the misty horizon of the street, or to the right at the trees of The Tauride Park, dressed in youthful foliage, or else losing their last leaves. I watched as the old palace, so briefly awakened for a new life, died. I saw the dying of St Petersburg, that beloved, austere and terrible city, created by Peter I and sung about by Pushkin, in its final moments. My last diary entry is a record of agony.
But I’m rushing ahead, let me just say that these expressed circumstances – our chance apartment right in the centre of it all – were favourable for my recordings. It seems to me that even if I were not a writer, and had never even picked up a pen, I would have been compelled to write these entries, and indeed, after having seen all this I would have been able to do nothing else.
But anyway, the war came and roused the Petersburg intelligentsia; the political interests and therefore also the party divides were intensified. The liberals came forward decisively in favour of the war and also in support of the autocratic government. The well known ‘Progressive Bloc’ was a product of the agreement of the left liberals (the Cadets) with the right leaning parties in favour of the war.
The other side of the Intelligentsia was more or less against the war. There were a multitude of different shades to this opinion. To us, no true politicians and without a care for the system’s complex internal mechanisms, and having not yet lost our common sense, one thing was clear: The war coud not possibly end well for Russia in its current state. Before its end the Revolution would have to come. This premonition, or rather this knowledge I should say, was shared with us by many others.
‘It’ll come, that’s for sure’ I wrote in January 1916. But what is it that’ll come? It, the true, necessary Revolution, or it, the faceless, elemental collapse? If we had all clearly recognised that these threatening events were nearer, just outside our door, if we had all grasped them immediately and readied ourselves to meet them….perhaps they would not have lead to our destruction but rather, to our salvation…. But the ‘real politicians’, those who were active in the Duma during the war, and who in some way determined the course of events (i.e. the Liberals), did not see this darkening storm that was approaching. In fact they were the first supporters of the government. It seemed to us that the entire edifice was collapsing.
Was it not their duty to mitigate with their own hands the destruction of what must collapse in order to preserve what was valuable, lest it should all crash down and bury us under the rubble?
But the liberals backed away further and further to the right, embittering the left leaning parties (which had some, albeit tenuous, connections with the lowest starts of society) to their cause. I remember now how in a conversation over the telephone after a very serious mistake by the party leaders in the Duma, Kerenski responded to my worried question, ‘What will happen now?’: ‘Something is coming, something that begins with an A…’. Anarchy. The Collapse. It.
For Cici
Translated by Leon Friedman
Keeping up with Yesterday 
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