What struck Fedotoff-White in talking with the men was the large gap between the lofty ideals espoused by the leaders of the revolution and the goals that motivated its foot soldiers. These men had no understanding or even interest in Marxist theory, nor were they concerned with what the new Russian society would look like. Rather, they were motivated by one thing: the desire to destroy the old order. “To all of them, the Bolshevik revolution meant the destruction of monarchy, aristocracy, bureaucracy, and the officer class,” he wrote.
the will to destroy was stronger than the will to create and that it was the major force directing the course of events.
The Bolsheviks soon realized, however, that they could not survive without the knowledge, skills, and education of the old elite. The workers and peasants, in whose name the Bolsheviks claimed to rule, were simply not qualified to run a vast state. And so began an uneasy collaboration between the old and new masters of Russia that was to last for more than two decades.
The pointless slaughter of World War I had inured the peasant-soldier to the most horrific violence, and he returned to his village from the front brutalized and shorn of restraint.
Attacking the old elite became an easy way to gain popularity and prove one’s commitment to the cause and to the people.
The revolution and everything it wrought almost destroyed Count Sergei, a man committed to tsarism and all it represented. In letters to friends he wrote of the tragedy that had descended upon their homeland; they were living through “a modern-day Mongol yoke” and under “the sword of Damocles.” “I have the feeling,” he wrote, “that I’m riding on a train that has just left the tracks.” Still, he tried to keep faith in Russia and its future. He busied himself reading histories of the French Revolution and Napoleon and sought comfort in the thought that Russia too would emerge from the dark night of anarchy into the light of a better future with order and peace restored. He continued to profess his faith in God and quoted the words of Alexander Pushkin: “I gaze forward without fear.”
“Russia did not need a constitution to limit the monarchy since she already had a limited monarch.”
This legacy of serfdom, in Davydoff’s estimation, pervaded all such relations. The peasants excelled at “trickery,” what he called “the usual weapon of the weak against the strong.”
Recalling the early years of his life in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov wrote: “The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.”
Alexander Pushkin immortalized the Pugachyovshchina in his novel The Captain’s Daughter, famous for its oft-quoted line “God save us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”
If by the time of Radishchev at least one nobleman dared call for radical change, thirty-five years later some even dared act. On December 14, 1825, a group of officers and members of the guards regiments, many of them from high aristocratic families, rebelled on St. Petersburg’s Senate Square. The Decembrists, as the rebels came to be called, advocated the end of serfdom, a constitution, and basic liberties.