We had known Kerenski a long time. Before the war he had visited us often, and during it we encountered him frequently in the countless left-leaning circles of the intelligentsia. We loved Kerenski. There was something vivacious, stormy, and child-like about him. Despite his hysterical nervousness he seemed to us more sober, and more sharp-sighted than many other of our peers.
However, it would be difficult, pointless and also boring if I were to try now to reconstruct every last page of those diaries that I no longer have with me. The historical events of any time are generally known; it’s the details themselves that we cannot really remember. The purpose of my diaries, their overwhelming thread, is such that If I were to try to explain things briefly, I would be able to explain nothing at all. The point I’m trying to make here is that as a predominantly fiction-writer, I am not solely interested in the events to which I bore witness. What interests me more is people. I am interested in every person, their form, their personality, their strength, their errors, their way, their life and their role in this great tragedy. This story is of course not only made by people, but to a certain extent also of people. If one didn’t focus on just a few islands in the wild flow of the revolution, one could easily lose all understanding of the events. And the fewer one follows such points, the more one overlooks the individual personalities, the madder, the more terrible, and the more boring, the history becomes. For this reason my diary takes on the form of a continuous flow, grounded in these individual’s stories, until towards the end of 1919 when it becomes a series of fragmented, external, purely factual notes. With the beginning of Bolshevik control, unity disappeared among the people, I could no longer see them. It had not only disappeared on my horizon, before my eyes, it had been completely, and fatally destroyed. Gradually, the Revolution itself disappeared too, every last struggle drawn to a close. Where there is no remaining struggle, there is no revolution left to speak of!
I hid my diaries in the cellar. A deep, dark cellar from which no sound reached the outside world. On the Petersburg streets, in the Petersburg houses, reigned at last a terrifying silence, the silence of slaves whose enslavement was perfected in their isolation.
Autocracy, war, the first days of freedom, the first days of the February Revolution, as joyful as love. And then the first days of fear and dread… Kerenski’s political ascension… Lenin, sent from Germany and greeted with wonder… The July Revolution… It’s put down, as terrible as a defeat…..again by Kerenski and his cabinet. Then the famous ‘Kornilov Affair’, that shocking drama that – knowing Savinkov and Kerensky – we followed from the inside. Hasty historians unanimously noted this ‘Kornilov Uprising’ down, really seeming to believe that such an ‘uprising’ had actually happened….. And then the final act, that blitz of bullets in the black October sky… We saw it from our balcony… We heard every last shot… It was the bombardment of the Winter Palace… And we knew that it was people that were being shot, people who had helplessly and courageously locked themselves inside, and who were now lost to the world, even to their dear ‘Captain’, Kerenski.
The Provisional Government fell – ‘Us’, the same intellectuals, the same people, each of whom’s face was known to us… (I am not even talking about the fact that among them were people we were close to). That is the spectacle, that is the conflict, that is the story.
And then came the end. The final chapter- the Constituent Assembly. Dark winter days. Our friends the Social Revolutionaries, masters of yesterday, visited us secretly now, disguised and with upturned collars… And then the final evening, the last night, the only night of the Assembly’s existence. When I pulled back the curtains and stared into the white snowiness of the park, the little dome was hardly visible… ‘They are there….They are still sitting in there… What could they be deciding now?’.
The Bolsheviks decided only in the morning to put an end to the farce. The sailor Shelesnjakov (famous for his unconditional demand in the Assembly for ‘one million bourgeois heads’) declared that he was tired, and immediately dissolved the meeting.
However many more gunshots, murders and deaths came after is unimportant. It was the sometimes slow, sometimes fast collapse. The agony of the Revolution and its death.
Life was narrower and narrower, it congealed. Even time itself seemed to turn to stone. My entries became shorter. What could I write? There was nobody and nothing. The new, appalling, unprecedented, inhumane ‘Living Reforms’ were beginning to emerge.
And so I sporadically tried to continue with my diary until in the year 1919 when it became practically impossible. People were spreading rumours about it. Gorky knew about it. I wasn’t just putting myself at risk but our whole household. My diaries contained too much information about too many people. A few of them were not yet dead and not all of them were safe… Under the Bolshevik regime there was no corner, no matter how intimate, no private apartment, which the ‘authorities’ couldn’t penetrate at any time (this lay in the principles of their authority), and so I had only one option: To bury my diaries. And so I did. I gave them to some good friends and they buried them somewhere outside the city. I don’t know exactly where.
This is the story of my 1914-1919 Petersburg diaries.
The months slowly continued to creep by…..Our lives were no lives at all, ascetic lives.
This small, old black notebook lay mostly empty on my writing desk. Half at random, half automatically I began writing entries. Cautious, harmless notes without names and sometimes even without dates. Sitting there, you always had the feeling that someone was standing behind you, staring over your shoulder, keenly watching the words you were writing.
And yet I had to write, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, but I always had the feeling that I had to immediately get down at least two or three words, two or three details. And indeed there’s a lot that I simply can’t reconstruct from memory anymore, it seems too fantastic now. If I didn’t have these sheets of paper on which everything is down in black and white, If I hadn’t decided at the very last moment to commit the insane act of packing them in the suitcase we took on our escape, it would seem to me now that I was exaggerating, that I was lying.
For Cici
Translated by Leon Friedman
Keeping up with Yesterday 
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