Morson review of March 1917, Book 2

Gary Saul Morson reviews the newly-appeared March 1917, Book 2 at the American Scholar.

“To capture such confusion as it was experienced, Solzhenitsyn divides nearly 700 pages into 182 brief chapters jolting among countless narrative threads. We witness decisions taken on the basis of rumors later revealed to be false. We see that Petrograd (as St. Petersburg became known after 1914) was not overrun by an organized group of class-conscious revolutionary workers, as Soviet historians later claimed, but by a rabble of drunkards, released criminals, and soldiers who murdered their officers. “That’s what’s freedom’s for,” one rioter explains. “I shoot wherever I want.” The result is a world reminiscent of Hobbes’s struggle of all against all: “In all the city, each person could protect only himself and expect an attack from anyone and everyone. … It was as if the capital itself were drunk.”

Only intellectuals who have read too many romanticized accounts of the French Revolution could celebrate this violence and expect anything good to come from it. With his trademark irony, reminiscent of Edward Gibbon, Solzhenitsyn describes the puzzlement of one government official unable to recognize in this mob “the noble Face of the People” idealized by thinkers across the political spectrum.”