The House of Government

2

THE PREACHERS

Most prophets of the Real Day were either Christians or socialists. The majority of Christians continued to think of “the Second Coming” as a metaphor for endless postponement, but a growing minority, including a few decadent intellectuals and the rapidly multiplying Evangelical Protestants, expected the Last Judgment in their lifetimes. This belief was shared by those who associated Babylon with capitalism and looked forward to a violent revolution followed by a reign of social justice.

The two groups had a great deal in common. Some people believed that revolutionary socialism was a form of Christianity; others believed that Christianity was a form of revolutionary socialism. Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev proposed to incorporate political apocalypticism into Christianity; Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky considered Marxism a religion of earthly salvation; Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich referred to Baptists and Flagellants as natural “transmission points” of Bolshevik propaganda; and the Bolshevik propagandist (and priest’s son) Aleksandr Voronsky claimed to have met a revolutionary terrorist who was using the Gospels as a guide to “the violent overthrow of the tsarist regime.”¹

But normally they saw each other as opposites. Christians tended to think of socialists as atheists or Antichrists, and socialists tended to agree (while considering Christians backward or hypocritical). In standard socialist autobiographies, the loss of “religious” faith was a prerequisite for spiritual awakening. One crucial difference was that most preachers of a Christian apocalypse were workers and peasants, while most theorists of workers’ and peasants’ revolutions were students and “eternal students.” The students were usually the children of clerks, clergymen, teachers, doctors, Jews, and other “proletarians of mental labor”: professional intellectuals as metaphorical Jews (chosen, learned, and alienated) and Jews as honorary intellectuals irrespective of what they did for a living. They all grew up as perennial prodigies, as heirs to a lost sacred mission, as strangers among people they called “the people.” They were, for the most part, hereditary members of the intelligentsia.

The Vilno Bolshevik Aron Solts believed that the source of his “opposition to the powers that be” was his Jewishness, which he associated with legal inequality, “relative intellectualism,” and sympathy for revolutionary terrorists. Nikolai Bukharin claimed that his father, a teacher and sometime tax inspector, did not believe in God, “enjoyed saying something radical every once in a while,” and often asked Nikolai, who had learned to read at the age of four, to recite poetry for family friends. Bukharin’s friend and Swamp “agitator” Valerian Obolensky (whose job in the winter of 1907–8 was to write leaflets for the Gustav List workers) grew up in the family of a veterinarian of “radical convictions and high culture” who taught his children French and German and encouraged them to read Belinsky and Dobroliubov (“not to mention the great fiction writers”). Another early convert to Bolshevism, Aleksei Stankevich, attributed his awakening to the feeling “that Mother and Father were much better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than their milieu.” (His father, a teacher in Kostroma and Kologriv, was “driven to drink” by the idiocy of provincial life.) “All this led our youthful minds deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion.”²

Aron Solts

Nikolai Bukharin

Valerian Obolensky (Osinsky)

(Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

To be a true intelligent meant being religious about being secular; asking “the accursed questions” over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle; and feeling both chosen and damned for being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than one’s milieu. Whether a member of the intelligentsia could find the answers to the accursed questions and still be a member of the intelligentsia was open to question. Lenin thought not (and did not consider himself one). The authors of the antiradical manifesto Signposts believed there were no nondoctrinaire intelligentsia members left (and considered themselves an exception). Most people used the term to refer to both the confused and the confident—as long as they remained self-conscious about being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than their milieu. The proportion of those who had overcome doubt kept growing. Most believed in the coming revolution; more and more knew that it would be followed by socialism.

There were two kinds of socialists: Marxists and nationalists. Or rather, there was a wide range of possible definitions of collective martyrdom—from the Mensheviks’ reliance on the timely self-realization of the sociologically correct proletarians; to the Bolsheviks’ expectation that Russian workers and peasants might start a revolution out of turn, by way of exception; to the Populists’ faith in the Russian peasant as a universal redeemer by virtue of his uniquely Russian communalism; to the Bundists’ insistence on the need for a Jewish specificity within Marxist cosmopolitanism; to the uncompromising tribal millenarianism of the Armenian Dashnaks, socialist Zionists, and Polish nationalists. Even at the extremes, the distinction was not always clear: the Marxists talked of “hereditary proletarians” as a caste with its own culture and genealogy; the most radical Russian nationalists were known as Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), not Russian nationalists; and the most radical non-Russian nationalists represented their nations as the world’s original proletarians. Everyone spoke the biblical language of tribal chosenness and suffering for humanity.

Feliks Kon

One of the oldest Bolsheviks, Feliks Kon, grew up in Warsaw, in a Jewish family of Polish nationalists. “Patriotism was a substitute for religion,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Of the latter, only the formal, ritualistic side remained.” Once, on Passover, as his grandfather “was presiding over the table and leading the prayers,” an uncle returned from foreign exile, where he had been hiding from “the Muscovites”: “The prayers were forgotten. Everyone, from the little ones to my old grandfather, sat listening to his stories with rapt attention. ‘Rather than talking about the flight of the Jews from Egypt,’ said Uncle to Grandfather, ‘let’s talk about the martyrdom of Poland.’ Grandfather readily agreed.”

At seventeen, Kon learned of the heroism of the Muscovite revolutionary terrorists and stopped talking about the martyrdom of Poland. The exodus came to represent universal liberation.

It was a change of faith, of cult…. A dead, ossified faith had been replaced by a living, vibrant one…. I was ready to do battle with the whole world of lies, hypocrisy, humiliation, and falsehood, the world of grief and servitude…. It was clear as day to me that I must go to other seventeen- and eighteen-year-old ardent young men and share with them my faith and my truth, for us to unite, come together, “do more studying”—I vaguely understood the necessity of that—and then, all of us together, leave behind “the gloaters, idle blabberers, and blood-stained executioners” for “the camp of the dying,” to reveal to them the reasons for their grinding slavery, open their eyes to the force living within them, awaken that force, and then … then … then … the great deed would be done: the world of slavery and untruth would sink into the abyss, and the bright sun of liberty would shine over the earth.³

Karl Radek

Serial conversions involving a variety of national and cosmopolitan options were common on the Russian Empire’s western periphery. Another ardent young man, Karl Sobelson, moved from the cult of Heinrich Heine and Nathan the Wise (which he described as typical of Galician Jews), to Polish patriotism “complete with its Catholic shell” (at which point he became “Radek”), to socialism “understood as a quest for Polish independence,” to radical Marxism in a variety of national guises. Closer to the imperial center, spiritual awakening tended to be represented as a generic revelation of the misery of the surrounding world, with the finer distinctions regarding the nature of the last days becoming apparent later, as a result of sober reflection.⁴

Some well-off socialists remembered having been impressionable or rebellious children sensitive to injustice and subject to “feelings of discomfort and shame” on account of their unearned privilege. Elena Stasova—the granddaughter of a prominent architect, daughter of an even more prominent lawyer, and niece of a famous art critic—suffered from a growing “feeling of indebtedness” to the people “who made it possible for us, the intelligentsia, to live the way we did.”⁵

But most, like Feliks Kon, were changed forever by reading, and even Stasova’s feelings of guilt “were partly derived from books.” The officer’s son and cadet corps student, Sergei Mitskevich, lived in the dark until the age of fourteen: “I read Turgenev’s The Virgin Soil, and my eyes were opened: I understood that revolutionaries were not the evil men our officials said they were, but people struggling for freedom, for the people. This realization led to a complete revolution in my thinking. I began to read a lot.” New reading led to new insights and the eventual “discovery of the key to the understanding of reality,” but it was the first youthful epiphany that separated life without “sense or meaning” from a purposeful quest for true knowledge.⁶

Kon (born 1864), Stasova (1873), and Mitskevich (1869) were among the oldest Bolsheviks. The vast majority—those born in the 1880s and 1890s—had their eyes opened in school, alongside their classmates. In Nikolai Bukharin’s Moscow Gymnasium No. 1 (on Volkhonka across from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior), some boys “went on living aimlessly—reading whatever was assigned and horsing around in the hallways,” but “the class elite” consisted of two groups of self-conscious apocalyptics: the decadents and the revolutionaries. According to Bukharin’s partisan account,

the aristocratic group—the loners, the sons of the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie (rich merchants, bankers, stock exchange speculators, and Jewish moneybags, who were trying desperately to make their way into the most refined spheres)—aped their older brothers, playing earnestly at beings snobs and dandies. They wore jodhpurs, pointy English dress shoes, expensive narrow-waisted, light-colored jackets made by well-known Moscow tailors, and wide, fancy leather sashes. Their collars were starched and their hair neatly combed, with impeccably straight parts and not a hair out of place. They acted as if they were doing the gymnasium a great favor by attending classes. They kept to themselves and often brought French books, from Baudelaire to Maeterlinck and Rodenbach, which they read with melancholy miens, to make clear that they lived in a world of altogether different dimensions. They were loose-limbed, pointedly polite, fond of exchanging remarks in French or English and conversing about art, and seemed to regard normal life as something to be held squeamishly between two fingers, pinkie extended. They dropped the names of Nietzsche and Solovyov but did not read them; carried around reproductions of the exquisitely depraved, elegant graphic masterpieces by Aubrey Beardsley and Félicien Rops; and talked in church whispers of Oscar Wilde. Of the new Russian poets, they only recognized the Symbolists, showing off by sharing the latest news of their literary and personal lives, which bordered on refined gossip.

The rival group consisted mainly of children from intelligentsia families. They wore Tolstoy shirts under their jackets and kept their hair deliberately shaggy and often uncombed; some older boys were beginning to grow beards. In class they secretly read Pisarev, Dobroliubov, and Shchedrin…. They worshiped Gorky, despised everything official, scorned all kinds of “pomp and circumstance,” and ridiculed “the white satin lining crowd,” their ideals, and the way they walked, giving them cutting and rather accurate nicknames, such as “the heavenly wagtail,” and occasionally entering into lively arguments with them, often on literary subjects. They sensed vaguely that the unstoppable stream of life would soon answer the question “When will the real day finally come?” They were impressed by every manifestation of open protest, every word of condemnation, every act of heroic resistance to established order. Even routine pranks had a certain value in their eyes: they were instinctively attracted to “undermining the foundations,” even in little things. They were impertinent, sharp-tongued, and prone to mocking their sheeplike neighbors.⁷

According to his classmate Ilya Ehrenburg, Bukharin was less morbidly earnest than most of his fellow underminers (especially his best friend, the unsmiling Grigory Brilliant), but he was just as cutting. He laughed a lot and “constantly interrupted the conversation with jokes and made-up or absurd words,” but “it was dangerous to argue with him: he tenderly ridiculed his opponents.”⁸

Yakov Sverdlov

Yakov Sverdlov’s (Y’s) biographers describe him as boisterously argumentative. One of six children in the family of a Jewish engraver in Nizhnii Novgorod, he excelled in elementary school and was sent to a gymnasium, where he fought with the children of noblemen and “baffled” his teachers with unexpected questions. “Bored in his classes, he figured out a way to read regular books instead of textbooks while sitting at his desk. Once, when he had been caught in the act and heard the teacher’s threatening ‘What are you doing?’, he answered calmly: ‘Reading an interesting book.’ ‘What kind of book?’ roared the teacher even more threateningly. ‘An ordinary, paper one,’ answered the student even more calmly.” True or not, this story is an accurate representation of a young rebel’s ideal (“quick-tempered,” “talkative,” and “contemplative”) disposition. After four years, Sverdlov left the gymnasium to become a pharmacist’s apprentice and a “professional revolutionary.” Sverdlov’s father cheered him on: all of Yakov’s five siblings were, in one way or another, waiting for the coming of the real day.⁹

The road to belief began with friendship. Sverdlov had Vladimir Lubotsky (later “Zagorsky,” the man after whom the town of Sergiev-Posad would be renamed); Kon had Ludowik Sawicki (who committed suicide in Paris in 1893); and Bukharin had Grigory Brilliant (the future people’s commissar of finance, Grigory Sokolnikov). The son of a Kazan merchant, Aleksandr Arosev, remembered finding a friend early on in his Realschule career: “At one point I was told there was a strong boy named Skriabin in Grade 3, Section B. I sought him out. One day he was in the hall washing the blackboard sponge under a faucet. He looked rather gloomy (the way he always did, as I found out later). I came up to him and proposed fighting. Skriabin agreed. Having exchanged several preliminary punches, we got into a stranglehold, to the delight of the whole hall. I don’t remember who won, but we became acquainted.”¹⁰

Acquaintance led to conversations, conversations to confessions, and confessions to intimacy. As Arosev wrote in one of his many memoirs, “Friendship begins when one reveals to the other a mystery that has never been revealed before. And when you are young, anything can become a mystery: the way you notice a passing cloud, delight in a thunderstorm, admire a girl, or dream of a faraway land.” For Skriabin, the mystery was music (he was a violinist and played quartets with his three brothers); for Arosev, it was novels. For both of them, it was the search for the true path to revolution. Arosev continues:

One night,… we were walking through the deserted streets, sprinkled with snow. The silence of the streets gave us a sense of intimacy, and the cold forced us to move closer to one another. We were walking arm in arm. It was well past midnight. From street corners, roadside posts, and porch awnings, shapeless shadows slid over the darkly glistening snow that looked like so many fish scales. Sometimes it seemed to us that those were the shadows of spies following us wherever we went, but there were no spies anywhere. Those shadows—the uncertain silvery flickerings in the night—were listening to our halting speeches, our words that sparkled with one thing only: a desperate eagerness to find a truth that we could give all of ourselves to in the name of struggle.¹¹

The truth, they knew, was to be found in larger groups of like-minded believers. After more conversations and confessions, several clusters of friends would come together as a secret reading circle:

Seven or eight fifth-grade Realschule students were sitting on the chairs, bed, and couch of the low attic room lit up by a kerosene lamp with a white glass lampshade. The portraits of Kautsky, Engels, Marx, Mikhailovsky, Uspensky, Korolenko, and Tolstoy looked down sternly and protectively. On the bookshelf in the corner, one could see the names of the same heroes of the age….

The air was filled with an energy that could only be sensed by the nerves, which, like little cobwebs, connected everyone and made them feel related and bound together forever, for many centuries to come. The young men barely knew each other, but each looked at the others with an almost ecstatic affection, proud to be there, next to all those others, who were so mysterious and, just like him, full of fire. Every face seemed to be saying: “Starting today, this very minute, I, so-and-so, have joined the ranks of fighters.”¹²

They would then elect a chairman (on this occasion, Skriabin) and decide on book lists, passwords, and nicknames. Skriabin became “Uncle,” and later “Molotov”; Arosev became “Z”; and, in other rooms in other towns, Sverdlov became “Comrade Andrei”; Brilliant became “Sokolnikov”; Obolensky became “Osinsky”; and Voronsky—“a pale, thin, curly-haired, blue-eyed young man with full, bright red lips” —became “Valentin.”

Voronsky’s circle of Tambov seminarians was born “within the damp, musty walls steeped in the balm and incense of Orthodox Christianity,” but its members—“adolescent runts with prominent collarbones and awkwardly flailing arms”—read the same books as their Kazan and Moscow contemporaries—and held similar meetings:

Imagine a tiny room somewhere on First Dolevaia Street, in the house of a clerk’s widow: faded wallpaper, calico curtains on the windows, three or four chairs with holes in the seats, a table, an iron bed, a bookshelf, a tin lamp with a paper lampshade (with a burnt trace left by the light bulb), fresh faces with downy upper lips, and open double-breasted gray jackets with faded white buttons. Two gymnasium girls in brown dresses are hiding in a dark corner; their hair is pulled back tightly in braids; one of them is so shy she almost never lifts her eyes. We are arguing about the commune, the land strips, and the relationship between the hero and the crowd. We are overconfident and full of peremptory fervor. Someone is plucking the strings of an old guitar or mandolin.¹³

What bound them together were the books they read and the omnipresent lampshades—white, brown, or green—which stood for both common reading and shared spaces. Sometimes Arosev’s friends would just sit quietly reading by lamplight, with “cups of hot tea steaming on a little round table.”

The open pages of [Plekhanov, Pisarev, and Belinsky] filled us up so completely and blinded our eyes to such an extent that sometimes, lifting our tired heads, we would be surprised to find ourselves in a room cast into shadows by a green lampshade. The lampshade would veil the sinful, messy world outside, while shedding its bright light on white sheets and black lines—those streams of intricate thought. I don’t know about the others, but I was in awe of the tenacity, durability, and terrible fearlessness of human thought, especially that thought within which—or rather, beneath which—there loomed something larger than thought, something primeval and incomprehensible, something that made it impossible for men not to act in a certain way, not to experience the urge for action so powerful that even death, were it to stand in the way of this urge, would appear powerless.¹⁴

Aleksandr Arosev

Viacheslav Skriabin (Molotov) (Courtesy of V. A. Nikonov)

Joining “the camp of the dying” was a vital ingredient of the urge for action nurtured by collective reading. As Kon put it, from a position of nostalgic immortality, “we were all going to die, of course, this much was clear. In fact, as I saw it at the time, it was even necessary,” especially since death was “a wonderful, beautiful detail,” remote and perhaps fleeting. “My state of mind at the time resembled the mood of a young knight who is determined to wake up a sleeping princess even if he has to undergo severe personal trials…. Awakened by the miraculous touch of socialism, the working people would wake up, rise, shed the terrible shackles of slavery, and liberate themselves and everyone else. The capacity for friendship and willingness to die is what separated “the sensitive and young at heart” from those Feliks Kon and his friends called the “Zulus”—or, “in the terminology of the time, the savages who only cared about their future careers and present comforts and had no interest whatsoever in the rest of humanity.” The Zulus were divided into the “naked ones” and the “hypocrites.” The sensitive and young at heart were divided into reading circles.¹⁵

As students moved into higher grades, the circles became ranked and specialized. The “lower circles” studied basic socialist literature; the “middle” ones organized presentations on particular topics or authors; and the “higher” ones sponsored papers on freely chosen subjects and formal debates with invited participants. Different circles, including those from different schools, formed interlocking networks of common reading, conversation, and belief. In Arosev’s Realschule, all the reading groups were united into a single “Non-Party Revolutionary Organization” with its own statutes (“a kind of teaching plan for a short-term course designed to produce revolutionaries of both kinds: SRs and Marxists.”)¹⁶

For most people, the choice between the SRs and Marxists happened some time after their separation from the Zulus. Unlike the original election, it is usually remembered as a rational act subject to testing, reconsideration, and public scrutiny. At the age of sixteen, the veterans of Osinsky’s (Obolensky’s) circle in Moscow Gymnasium No. 7 decided it was time to make up their minds and “self-identify politically.” To that end, they invited a Moscow University student, Platon Lebedev (the future “Kerzhentsev”), and launched a series of presentations on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Osinsky spent three months in the Rumiantsev Library reading about the Decembrists.

I have always done my best to resist everything “fashionable,” everything accepted by the intelligentsia in the manner of a psychological contagion. At that time [1904], I considered Marxism, which was spreading rapidly among the intelligentsia, just another fashionable trend (for the intelligentsia, including some of my friends, it did turn out to be only a fashion). So, I tried very hard to give the Decembrist movement a non-Marxist explanation. This explanation contradicted my own evidence and the paper kept sliding into a meaningless liberal rut. It was not difficult for Lebedev-Kerzhentsev, with the obvious support of my own comrades, to rout me utterly. Having given my “defeat” a great deal of serious thought, I arrived at the conclusion that I had chosen the wrong path and that old Marx was right, after all. The revolution of 1905 provided plenty of further—much more tangible—proof.¹⁷

In Kazan, Arosev (Z) and Skriabin (Molotov) chose their political affiliations without a great deal of serious thought. In the spring of 1907, at the age of seventeen, they decided to test their convictions by reading the relevant texts and holding a public debate at the Non-Party Revolutionary Organization’s fall meeting. Arosev’s topic was “The Philosophical Foundations of the Socialist Revolutionary Party”; Skriabin’s, “The Philosophical Foundations of the Social-Democratic Party.” According to Arosev, “Skriabin and I stocked up on the literature, left behind the noise of the city—he, for Viatka Province, I, for the village of Malye Derbyshki—and immersed ourselves in Marx, Mikhailovsky, Engels, Lavrov, Plekhanov, Delevsky [sic]…. We had agreed to read the same books, so that, during the debate, he would be familiar with my sources and I, with his.”

For three months, they read, took notes, and wrote long letters to each other. “Those were not letters, but theoretical position papers and counter-papers, a sort of written exam on material covered.” At the end of the summer, they reassembled in Skriabin’s room. “The soft August twilight came in through the large windows. Out in the courtyard we could see chickens walking around and a cat stretching itself by the water pipe. The room slowly grew dark. A copy of Aivazovsky’s ‘The Waves of the Surf,’ painted by Nikolai Skriabin [Viacheslav’s brother], looked down at us from the wall. On the table, the samovar was wheezing softly. Next to it were cups of unfinished tea and a large tome, open and unread.” Suddenly Arosev announced that his summer reading had convinced him of the superiority of Marxism over populism, and that he could not, in good conscience, defend the SR position (which favored Russian peasants over rootless workers as agents of revolutionary change). After a brief pause, Skriabin said that, in that case, he was not going to speak, either. At the general meeting, the two friends’ declarations “were met with loud applause from one side and a buzz of disapproval, from the other…. But no one called Z a traitor. They knew that Z had taken a sharp ideological turn, that he had stepped over the threshold separating a spontaneous study of the world from its conscious understanding.”¹⁸

Not all debates between the SRs and Marxists were this one-sided, even in later retellings by eventual victors. The “decisive battle” Bukharin describes in his memoir involved two teams of earnest boys and girls (reinforced, in the case of the SRs, by one university student) and covered all the usual points of disagreement: the “working class” versus “the people”; “sober calculation” versus “great deeds and self-sacrifice”; “objectivism” versus “subjectivism”; and “universal laws of development” versus “Russia’s uniqueness.” The Marxist charge that the SRs put heroes above the crowd met with the countercharge that Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? amounted to the same thing; to which the Bolsheviks said that their leaders objectively represented the interests of the workers; to which the SRs responded that the Bolsheviks had “turned their party into a barracks, enforced total unanimity, killed all freedom of criticism in their own midst, and were now trying to spread the same thing everywhere”; to which the Bolsheviks responded by quoting from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?:

We are a tight group walking along a precipitous and difficult path, holding each other firmly by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have come together, as a result of a decision freely taken, precisely for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of stumbling into the nearby swamp, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us are beginning to shout: Let’s go into the swamp! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the freedom to urge you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to urge us, but to go yourselves wherever you please, even into the swamp. In fact, we believe that the swamp is just where you belong, and we are prepared to do whatever we can to help you take up residence there. But then let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us, and don’t soil the noble word “freedom,” for we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the swamp, but also against those who are turning toward the swamp!¹⁹

At this point the Bolsheviks proclaimed themselves the winners and ended the debate. Everyone got up and, one at a time (“young ladies excepted!”), walked out of the smoke-filled room with “heavy dark-red curtains” into a back alley off the Arbat, a few blocks north of Bukharin’s gymnasium and the Big Stone Bridge. “It was quiet in the street…. The sound of footsteps echoed through the alley…. Large flakes of snow were falling silently, floating out of the darkness, whirling around streetlamps, and covering, like a soft, fluffy eiderdown, the sidewalks, hitching posts, sleds, and the back of a coachman on the corner, half asleep and not fully sober.”²⁰

As student circles and various “non-party revolutionary organizations” established links with each other and joined formal revolutionary parties, they progressed from just reading to reading and writing essays (Osinsky’s first was about the utilitarian theory of ethics); to reading and writing leaflets (Voronsky’s first ran: “All we can hear are the rattling of chains and the screeching of cell locks, but the new day is dawning, and the sun of social independence and equality, the sun of labor and liberty will rise”); to reading and transporting illegal literature, printing proclamations, holding rallies, making bombs, and, in the case of the SR Maximalists, killing state officials. All over the empire, schoolchildren, seminarians, college students, and eternal students were in the grips of a “living, vibrant faith,” eager to fight “not only against the swamp, but also against those who are turning toward the swamp.”²¹

Valerian Kuibyshev

In 1909, the twenty-one-year-old Valerian Kuibyshev—graduate of the Siberian Cadet Corps, student of Tomsk University, and member of the Bolshevik Party since the age of sixteen—was arrested for receiving a parcel with illegal books. His father, the military commander of Kainsk, in the Siberian steppe, was promptly summoned to appear before his commanding officer, General Maslennikov. Valerian describes his father as a simple man, honest soldier, and loving parent, in the manner of Pushkin’s fort commander from The Captain’s Daughter. He was a “servitor who never had any property, so we were raised very modestly; patched and threadbare suits were handed down from older brothers and sisters to the younger ones.” He was also, like Sverdlov’s father, understanding and perhaps proud of his son’s rebellion. There were eight children in the Kuibyshev family, and every one of them was listed by the police as politically unreliable. According to a story Valerian told several friends in August 1931,

Father arrived in Omsk in low spirits and presented himself to General Maslennikov.

As soon as he entered, the general started yelling at him:

“You can’t even raise your own children properly, so how are you going to train your soldiers? Your home address is being used for receiving subversive literature. You should be shot.”

General Maslennikov did not stop yelling for half an hour. Father stood at attention, his arms at his sides, not allowed to respond while his commander was speaking.

Having exhausted himself, General Maslennikov fell silent for a while and then said: “I am having you transferred to Tiumen.”

Tiumen was, of course, a much bigger town than Kainsk. This was a promotion….

Father was taken aback: “Excuse me, Your Excellency?”

“You are being transferred to Tiumen.” Then, after a short pause: “I have two sons in prison in Kiev myself.”²²

■ ■ ■

The young revolutionaries’ main job was “propaganda and agitation.” “Propaganda” consisted in extending school reading circles to “the masses.” Aleksandr Voronsky’s circle used to meet underground.

The basement was dimly lit with a lamp. It smelled of kerosene and cheap tobacco. The curtains were closely drawn. Casting somber, monstrous shadows, the workers would silently sit down at the table covered with dark oilcloth that was torn and stained with ink. It was always cold in the room. Someone would move the iron stove closer, and the smoke would make your throat itch and eyes burn. They felt like meetings of mysterious conspirators, but the faces of those present were always perfectly ordinary. Sternly and possessively, Nikita would examine the members of the circle, as if testing them, tap on the table with his knuckle or a pencil, and say solemnly: “Listen to the Comrade Speaker.”²³

Nikita was an older worker who “loved ‘learning,’ put on ancient glasses to read books and newspapers, did not tolerate teasing, and never joked himself, or indeed knew how.” The Comrade Speaker’s learning was partly offset by his awkwardness in front of those whose social and intellectual inferiority was offset by their maturity and redemptive mission.²⁴

“Agitation” (as opposed to “propaganda”) referred to making speeches at factories or outdoor rallies. The speeches were to be short and more or less to the point. The point, according to the the agitators’ instructions, was to make sure that “the flame of hatred … burned in the listeners’ hearts.” Voronsky delivered his “in one violent burst, without catching his breath, gesticulating volubly.”²⁵

Once, I was rhapsodizing at an improvised open-air meeting from the caboose of a freight train. Below me was a crowd of railway workers. I ardently prophesied “the hour of vengeance and retribution” and was passionately urging them “not to give way to provocation” and “to fight to the end,” while piling on the appeals and not sparing the slogans. Transported by my revolutionary fervor, I did not notice the clanking and the jerking of the train as, before the eyes of the amazed workers, I began to float away, first slowly, then faster and faster, farther and farther away, still waving my arms and shouting out fiery words.²⁶

Words—written or spoken—are at the center of all missionary work. Voronsky and his fellow agitators spent most of their time talking, whether the train was moving or not. Reading (often out loud) was incorporated into discussion; writing (Lenin’s, in particular) was like shouting out fiery words; and some of the most important silences in socialist autobiographies are memories of being spellbound by someone else’s eloquence: Lenin’s, Trotsky’s, Chernov’s. Everyone seemed quick-tempered, talkative, and contemplative at the same time.

Socialist proselytizing was different from the Christian kind in two fundamental ways. First, it was not universalist. The Christian message was, in theory, for everyone; the socialist one was aimed exclusively at the elect (Russian peasants for the SRs, industrial workers for the Marxists). Even the Calvinists, who preached members-only salvation for the chosen, did not claim to know who the chosen were. Socialists, by contrast, assumed that a particular, objectively defined part of humanity was the exclusive means of universal redemption and the indigenous population of the kingdom of freedom. The original preachers could come from anywhere—indeed, they were all intellectuals (unapologetically so, in the case of the Bolsheviks)—but the real meaning of their “agitation and propaganda” and the only chance for the coming of the real day was to convert the convertible. The prince was to wake up the sleeping beauty, not the ugly step-sisters.

The Bolsheviks were particularly forceful on this score. By being the most skeptical of “spontaneity” (“class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,” according to Lenin), they were the most intent on proselytizing. And proselytizing demanded organizational rigor. As the agitator’s instructions put it, “explicating the role of our party as the most advanced detachment of the working class, you must not forget that our party is a fighting army, and not a debating society.” And as a member of Bukharin’s debating society put it, having followed his instructions, “my opponent tried to frighten us with talk about the barracks. I am not afraid of words. There are barracks and barracks, just as there are soldiers and soldiers. We are building our party not as a, I am sorry, motley collection of swans, crawfish, and pikes, but as a party of the truly like-minded, and a military party at that. Yes, military.” And the reason they could do that was that they were the only party led by an uncontested charismatic leader. Lenin was both the creature and the guarantee of the unity of the like-minded.²⁷

The second way in which socialist evangelism differed from its Christian counterpart was its intellectualism—the degree to which it was, indeed, a debating society. Most Russian Orthodox converts to Protestant Christianity seemed to be after personal salvation and independent work on the self, much of it through reading and conversation. Socialists were after the same thing, but they went much further. A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning. It was an immediate step up socially and intellectually, as well as spiritually. The student preachers of Bolshevism were asking the workers to become students while remaining workers. The would-be converts had a special role because of who they were, but they could not perform that role without an altered “consciousness.”

This combination of proletarian chosenness with committed intellectualism—self-affirmation through change and upward mobility without betrayal—seemed to appeal to some workers. As one of Voronsky’s pupils put it, “‘It’s really strange, all these people wearing glasses coming to serve us, for God’s sake! And why are they serving us? They are serving us because they’re beginning to understand our untold strength, because,’ he would start beating himself on the chest, ‘because proletarians of all countries unite! Simple as that.’” In Kon’s version of a popular fairy-tale metaphor (also used in the title of Voronsky’s memoirs), “the work was going well. Having been sprinkled with the magic water of life, the sleeping kingdom was waking up and coming to life.”²⁸

Karl Lander (Kārlis Landers), the son of Latvian day laborers, was fifteen years old when he saw a May Day demonstration and suddenly felt “drawn by a new powerful force.” As he writes in his autobiography, “I knew the everyday life of workers well because of my relatives and close friends, but, suddenly, it appeared in a completely new light, as a carrier and keeper of some great mystery.” His first mentor was a “Christian socialist in the best sense of the word,” a man “who would have been at home during the peasant wars of the Reformation.” Impressed by the message, Lander “dropped everything” and set out in search of sectarians “who did not recognize secular or religious authority and owned all things in common.” What he found he did not like—because the “Dukhobor” sectarians who welcomed him did not allow secular books, whereas he was convinced that “in order to understand all these things, it was necessary to study, and study long and hard.” The police did him the favor of sending him to prison, where he “spent whole nights in animated conversations.” Having “cleared up many unresolved questions,” he joined a Social-Democrat reading circle “united by common intellectual interests and bonds of close friendship.”²⁹

Pavel Postyshev

Pavel Postyshev, a “calico printer” from Ivanovo-Voznesensk, was sent to the Vladimir Central Prison in 1908, when he was twenty-one. His savior was a local doctor’s wife, Lubov Matveevna Belokonskaia, who procured food, books, money, clothing, and fictitious brides for the prisoners. Four years later, he wrote to Belokonskaia from his place of “eternal exile” on Lake Baikal: “Dear L.M., I am a working man and am proud to belong to that class because it is destined to perform a great deed. Treasuring my title or rank of proletarian, and determined to keep that title pure and unsullied, especially as a conscious proletarian, I must not lie to you. You have dedicated your life to the great cause of the workers, and how can we not love you as children love a kind mother.”³⁰

The Donbass miner, Roman Terekhov, claims to have started wondering, at the age of fifteen,

why some people did nothing and lived in luxury, while others worked day and night and lived in misery. This provoked in me a feeling of great hatred for those who did not work but lived well, especially the bosses. My goal was to do everything I could to find a person who would untie the tightly fastened knot of life for me. I found such a person in Danil Oguliaev, a tool maker in our mechanical shop. He explained to me the reasons for our life. After this I began to love him and always did all of his errands and assignments, such as distributing proclamations, posting them where they could be seen clearly, etc., and also stood guard at secret meetings.

Once, he was allowed to participate in one of those meetings. “The night was dark and the steppe prickly as we walked toward the woods, where a comrade, who had been waiting for us, showed us the spot. There were about fifty people at the meeting. One young man made a presentation, and then another young man spoke against him. I didn’t like their argument and felt very bad they hadn’t been able to make up. I got back home with a bad taste in my mouth. The only valuable thing I took from that meeting were the words of one of the comrades about needing to arm ourselves.” Terekhov began his armed struggle by trying to kill a mechanic in his shop, but the attempt failed because he could not find an appropriate weapon. Some time later, a student propagandist showed him an issue of Pravda, and he organized a newspaper-reading circle.³¹

Orphaned at four, Vasily Orekhov worked as a shepherd in his native village before running away to Moscow. At ten, he got a job at the Renommée candy factory (one of Einem’s more serious competitors) but was soon fired “for the non-allowance of an administration of a beating upon his person.” At seventeen, while working as a cook at a homeopathic hospital, he had some of his questions answered by a nurse named Aleksandrova. As he wrote in the mid-1920s in his typed, but unedited autobiography, “[She] prepared me for political literacy and the trade union movement having prepared my consciousness and her knowledge of my understanding and took into account my social status and everything I had lived through my spirit and my inclinations and my thirst for knowledge and work. Simply put, between July 1901 and March 1902 I was her probationer. In March I was accepted into a circle of democrats.”

Semen Kanatchikov

After several more jobs and a few beatings, and having joined a new Bolshevik circle and made a speech at a rally on the significance of May 1, Orekhov was hired at Kudelkin’s box-making shop. He did not stay long. “In 1908 I was exiled from Moscow for overturning a bowl of cabbage soup onto Kudelkin’s head and boiling his whole head, ’cause in those days the bosses used to provide their own boss food for us workers, and during Lent Kudelkin used to make this disgusting watery soup from cabbage with worms in it, and once he made this soup and I suggested that he keep his maggoty cabbage soup and give me something better, but Kudelkin said, ‘you’ll eat what you’re given,’ and so I turned the bowl of soup over his head, for which reason I spent two weeks in jail and was then exiled from Moscow.” Having left for Podolsk, Orekhov joined a local Bolshevik circle and became a propagandist.³²

Semen Kanatchikov’s “beliefs, views of the surrounding world, [and] the moral foundations with which [he] had lived and grown up” began to crumble after he became an apprentice at the Gustav List plant in the Swamp. A fellow worker told him that there was no hell other than the one they were living in; that the relics of saints were no different from the Egyptian mummies in the nearby Historical Museum; that the Dukhobors were “wonderful human beings” because they considered all people brothers; and that the nonexistence of God could be proven by watching worms and maggots appear out of nothing (“and then other creatures will begin to develop from the insects, and so on…. And, in the course of four, five, or maybe even ten thousand years, man himself will emerge”). But it was a book (What Should Every Worker Know and Remember?) that brought about the epiphany. “For an entire week I was in a state of virtual ecstasy, as if I were standing up high on some tall stilts, from where all other people appeared to me like some kind of bugs, like beetles rummaging in dung, while I alone had grasped the mechanics and the meaning of existence…. I now withdrew from my [cooperative] and settled in a separate room with one of my comrades. I stopped going to the priest for “confession,” no longer attended church, and began to eat “forbidden” food during Lenten fast days.”³³

The workers’ conversions were similar to those of the students in that they seemed to result from a combinaton of an innate moral sense with eye-opening readings and conversations. But whereas the students “stepped over the threshold” in the company of other students, the workers, according to their own recollections, needed a guide “from without.” As one of them put it, using a reading-circle commonplace, “it’s sad to say, but it’s obvious that the working people will not awaken from their slumber very soon”—unless a “comrade student” has sprinkled them with the magic water of life.³⁴

One such student, according to his comrades, was Yakov Sverdlov. “With his medium height, unruly brown hair, glasses continuously perched on his nose, and Tolstoy shirt worn under his student jacket, Sverdlov looked like a student, and for us, the young people as well as the workers, a ‘student’ meant a ‘revolutionary.’” In theory, anyone could become a revolutionary by acquiring consciousness and engaging in propaganda and agitation, and anybody could look like a student by wearing glasses and a jacket over a Tolstoy shirt. Sverdlov, for one, left the gymnasium after four years, never went to college, and only adopted the “student” uniform (which also included high boots and a cap and amounted to a combination of gymnasium and proletarian styles) when he was no longer a student.³⁵

In fact, however, Orekhov, Terekhov, Postyshev, Kanatchikov, and most other workers would become revolutionaries without ever becoming students, no matter how hard they studied, what positions they attained, or whether they wore glasses and jackets over Tolstoy shirts (Kanatchikov did). One reason for the difference was their speech, style, taste, gestures, and other birthmarks that might or might not be compatible with an altered consciousness. Another was the worker’s need for “the never-ending pursuit of a miserable piece of bread.” As Postyshev wrote to his adopted mother, Liubov Belokonskaia, “while my soul is yearning for light, screaming and struggling to break out of the embrace of unrelieved darkness, my body is drowning out my soul’s cry with its groaning for bread. Oh, how hard it all is!”³⁶

The third reason had to do with the consciousness of those left behind. The “students” were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries. As Kanatchikov put it, “Rare indeed were the occasions when a member of the intelligentsia completely broke his ties with his bourgeois or petty-bourgeois family…. What usually happened was that even after expelling the recalcitrant child from the family hearth, the kind-hearted relatives would soften, be filled with pity for the imprisoned martyr, and manifest more and more concern for him. They would visit him in prison, provide him with necessities, petition the authorities, request that his situation be mollified, and so on.”³⁷

According to Sverdlov’s sisters Sarra and Sofia and his brother Veniamin, their father, the owner of an engraving shop, was a short-tempered but docile man who, after an initial struggle, grew to accept and eventually support the transformation of his house into “a meeting place for Nizhny Novgorod’s Social Democrats,” and his shop, into a place for manufacturing revolutionary proclamations and stamps for false passports. Voronsky’s father, the priest, died when Voronsky was very young, but one of his fictional doubles visits his son’s commune and, along with everyone else, drinks to Marxism, terror, Russian literature, new engines, and, at his son’s request, “to the unequal struggle, brave souls, and those who sacrifice themselves without asking anything in return.” (The toast “To the Clergy!” is roundly rejected by the seminarians, so Father Khristofor has to drink it alone.) In 1906, Kuibyshev’s father, a lieutenant colonel and, at the time, military commander of Kuznetsk, received a telegram from his daughter that Valerian was about to be court-martialed (“everyone knows what a court-martial is: today they arrest you and within forty-eight hours you get your sentence: acquittal or death”). According to Valerian’s account recorded in the early 1930s, “Father almost lost his mind: without wasting a single moment, he jumped into a carriage and rushed to the train station (in those days, there was no line connecting Kuznetsk to the Trans-Siberian). He told me later that he had spent an enormous sum on that trip because he demanded such speed that several horses died along the way.”

Having arrived at the prison, Kuibyshev senior discovered that his son would be tried by a military district court, not a field court-martial. Valerian knew nothing about the telegram.

When they told me that my father had come to see me, I felt very bad. I was expecting all kinds of reproaches, tears, and remonstrations (it was my first arrest). I would have no choice but to break with my father, and break for good….

Having prepared myself to rebuff any attempt to talk me into straying from my chosen path in life, I entered the visitors’ cell. But instead of finding my father angry, I found him crying like a child, with tears in his eyes, rushing toward me to embrace me. He kept kissing and hugging me, laughing happily, patting me all over, assuring himself I was alive. I was taken aback.

“Father, what’s the matter, why are you so happy?”

He told me about the telegram.

This is how my father found out about my first arrest. My sister’s mistake helped reconcile my father to my chosen path.³⁸

“The worker’s story is very different,” writes Kanatchikov. “He has no bonds, he has no ‘hearth,’ and he has no connections in the camp of his oppressors.” Not only was his family less likely to be reconciled with his chosen path—he was less likely to be reconciled with his family (which he sometimes called “the swamp”).³⁹

It usually happened that no sooner did a worker become conscious than he ceased being satisfied with his social environment; he would begin to feel burdened by it and would then try to socialize only with persons like himself and to spend his free time in more rational and cultured ways. At that moment his personal tragedy would begin. If the worker was an older family man, conflicts would immediately arise within his family, primarily with his wife, who was usually backward and uncultured. She could not understand his spiritual needs, did not share his ideals, feared and hated his friends, and grumbled and railed at him for spending money uselessly on books and for other cultural and revolutionary goals; most of all, she feared losing her bread-winner. If the worker was a young man, he inevitably came into conflict with his parents or other relatives, who had various powers over him. It was on this basis that conscious workers developed a negative attitude toward the family, toward marriage, and even toward women.⁴⁰

In student circles, women were less numerous and less prominent than men, but their roles as writers’ muses, debate audiences, prison liaisons, model martyrs, and “technical workers” were crucially important in the life of revolutionary communities. (Only among Jewish revolutionaries was the number of women comparable to that of men, making Jewish women even more “overrepresented” among revolutionaries than Jewish men.) Among worker revolutionaries, there were almost no women. Workers joining socialist circles and waiting to be fully “awakened” were the only proletarians with nothing but their chains to lose. They had the advantage of belonging to the chosen class, but they had no proper consciousness, no “culture,” no families, and no female companionship other than the awkward and often humiliating contact with Jewish and intelligentsia women. They had to remake themselves through study in order to become eligible for romance even as they were remaking themselves through study in order to redeem humanity. In the meantime, they had only their faith, each other, and the kind of existential freedom that seemed a mirror image of what they were promised in the kingdom of freedom. When Kanatchikov received a letter from his brother “enforming” him that the soul of their father, Ivan Egorych, had been delivered to God, he threw himself on his cot, buried his face in his pillow, and gave vent to a flood of tears. “But in the depth of my soul,” he writes in his autobiography, “another feeling was simmering and growing—a feeling of freedom and proud independence.”⁴¹

■ ■ ■

One place where students and workers came together—to coalesce into a “party” and be free from “the swamp”—was prison. Students tempered their steel, workers acquired consciousness, and both learned to live side by side in close intimacy and relative equality. Arosev was arrested for the first time in 1909, when he was still in school in Kazan. “I liked the prison right away: everything was efficient and serious, as if we were in the capital. As I was being taken to my cell and saw my slightly stooped shadow on the wall of the prison corridor, I was filled with great respect for myself…. We were put in a cell with eight other students. Two of them were SRs we knew. It all looked more like a jolly student party than a prison. There were books, more books, notebooks filled with notes, slices of sausage on the long wooden table, tin teapots, mugs, loud laughter, joking, discussions, and chess games.”⁴²

The prisoners walked along prison corridors “as if in university halls,” played leapfrog in the courtyard, and observed strict silence before bedtime “in order to allow those who wished to read and write to do so.” Life in the Ekaterinburg prison in 1907 was similar. According to one of Yakov Sverdlov’s cellmates,

All day long the cells on our block were open, and the inmates could walk freely from one cell to another, play games [“Sverdlov was one of the ringleaders when it came to leapfrog”], sing songs, listen to presentations, and conduct debates. All this was regulated by a “constitution,” which established a strict order enforced by cell elders who had been elected by the political prisoners. There were certain hours reserved for silence and collective walks…. Our cell was always crowded. In those days most of the prisoners were Social-Democrats, but there were also some SRs and anarchists. People from other cells often came over to listen to Y. M. Sverdlov.⁴³

Sverdlov knew, and Arosev soon found out, that “such freedom in prison was a direct reflection of the relative positions of the combatants outside.” A great deal depended on the time, place, sentence, chief warden, and prisoner’s social class. Orekhov, the worker who poured boiling cabbage soup over his employer’s head, describes “having his arms twisted, being tied up in a sack, and being force-fed finely ground glass,” as well as “lying unconscious for eight hours as a result of a single blow delivered to the head.” The Don Cossack Valentin Trifonov remembers wearing a winter coat in prison in order to soften the blows of the guards. According to his son, Yuri, “the inmates were constantly protesting against something: from the authorities’ use of the informal form of address, to the wardens’ demands that they greet them by shouting ‘Good day, Sir!’ and taking off their hats, to corporal punishment, forced haircuts, and petitioners who asked for pardons and shorter sentences.”⁴⁴

There were riots, escapes, suicides, and executions. Even Arosev, in his comfortable prison, might be playing leapfrog in the courtyard when, “suddenly, they would bring in a comrade who had been sentenced to death, and we knew that tomorrow or the day after he would be led out into this courtyard, not far from where we were playing, and hanged, and this comrade would be no more.”⁴⁵

Valentin Trifonov

(Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

But most Bolshevik prison memoirs are about the education of a true Bolshevik, and most of them refer to prison as a “university.” “Strange as it may sound,” writes Kon, “the years I spent in prison were the best years of my life. I did a lot of studying, tested my strength in a long and bitter struggle, and, in constant interaction with other prisoners, learned the difference between words and deeds, firm convictions and fleeting fancies. It was in prison that I learned how to judge my own life and the lives of others from the point of view of the good of the cause.” Osinsky and Bukharin cemented their friendship when they lived “in perfect harmony” in the same prison cell, and Platon Kerzhentsev, who had defeated Osinsky in the high school debate on the Decembrists, “studied thoroughly … the literature of both Marxism and populism and left prison—the best university of [his] life—as a Bolshevik.” Iosif Tarshis’s (Osip Piatnitsky’s) time in prison was “a university” because he “studied systematically under the guidance of a comrade who knew Marxist revolutionary literature,” and Grigory Petrovsky’s time in prison was a university because he “not only read the best Marxist literature, but also studied arithmetic, geometry, and German.”⁴⁶

The education of a true Bolshevik consisted in learning how to judge his own life and the lives of others from the point of view of the good of the cause, but it also consisted in learning as much as possible about everything else. Once the faith in the coming of the real day was in place and “the key to the understanding of reality,” in hand, the study of arithmetic, geometry, and German helped enlist all things for the good of the cause. The more one knew, the easier it was to perceive the “moving forces” behind people and things and “the fantastic, enchanting, and transparent light over everything and everyone.”

During his first stay in prison, and with nothing but the prison library at his disposal, Kanatchikov read “Turgenev, Uspensky, Dostoevsky, Spielhagen (Between the Hammer and the Anvil), Shchedrin, and others.” Shchedrin was his particular favorite. “I laughed so hard that the guard repeatedly opened the transom and stared at my face, evidently wondering if I’d lost my mind.” By the time he was arrested again, he had more experience, a higher consciousness, and much better comrades. Faina Rykova (the sister of the student revolutionary, Aleksei Rykov), brought him a year’s worth of books. “The selection had not been made very systematically, but that really didn’t matter; I wanted to know everything there was that could aid the cause of the revolution, whether directly or indirectly…. I recall that my collection included Lippert’s History of Primitive Culture, Kliuchevsky’s lectures on Russian history, Timiriazev’s Popular Exposition of Darwin’s Theory, Zheleznov’s Political Economy, and V. Ilyin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia. At that time, I still didn’t know that Ilyin was the pseudonym of Lenin.”⁴⁷

Voronsky began by reading Marx, Kropotkin, Balzac, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky, but when he was put in a “semi-dungeon” with “damp corners crawling with woodlice,” he relaxed his schedule. “Morning and evening—calisthenics and a brisk towel rubdown; three hours of German; and the remaining hours I reserved for Homer, Dickens, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Leskov, indolent and sluggish daydreaming, and unhurried reflections and recollections.”⁴⁸

Yakov Sverdlov seems to have been incapable of anything indolent or unhurried. He walked fast, talked loudly, followed the “Mueller system” of calisthenics, slept no more than five hours a night, and kept his personal “consumption statistics” (ten cigarettes, one prison lunch, one bottle of milk, one pound of white bread, and three cups of tea a day, four to six pounds of sugar a month …). In the Ekaterinburg prison, when he was not doing some combination of the above or playing leapfrog, he was reading Lenin, Marx, Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Mehring, as well as Werner Sombart on capitalism, Paul Louis on socialism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb on trade unionism, Charles Gide on cooperation, and Victor S. Clark on the Australian labor movement. He read German books in the original, worked hard on his French and mathematics, and picked up a teach-yourself-English textbook. His constant rereading of Das Kapital, What Is to Be Done?, and the Marx–Engels correspondence allowed him to profit from reading journal articles about women’s history (the author “is correct to relate the rise of individualism to the capitalist mode of production, which has led to the economic independence of women”), sports (“in different historical periods, sports have always served the interests of the ruling classes”), and a great variety of poetry, from proletarian autodidacts to Shelley, Verhaeren, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, Kipling, and his particular favorite, Heinrich Heine. “Literature and the arts interest me very much,” he wrote in a letter. “They help me understand the development of mankind, which has already been explained theoretically.” According to Sverdlov’s common-law wife and Bolshevik party comrade, Klavdia Novgorodtseva, his motto was: “I put books to the test of life, and life to the test of books.”⁴⁹

In March 1911, when Sverdlov was in the St. Petersburg House of Pretrial Detention and Novgorodtseva was about to have their first child, his reading turned to “various approaches to the sexual question and, in particular, the question of reproduction.” She was thirty-four; he was twenty-five and had a seven-year-old daughter by another comrade (although he does not seem to have stayed in close touch with them). Among the “questions” he was considering were:

The special selection of partners for the production of offspring in Plato’s ideal state; More’s Utopia, where, before marriage, the two sides appeared before each other with nothing on; the most recent theories, principally by the so-called men of science, at the head of which one would have to put Auguste Forel [the author of the recently published The Sexual Question], who recommends a preliminary medical examination of the whole organism in order to determine whether reproduction is desirable. I am also reminded of various descriptions of the act of birth in different cultural epochs, contained in both histories of culture and works of literature. Everything leads me to believe that the “pangs of birth” are directly related to the condition of the mother’s organism: the more normal the organism, the less acute the pain, less frequent the accidents, etc. I am also thinking of various political programs that rely on scientific data to demand the termination of work for a certain period of time before birth, etc. Thinking of all these things and weighing them relative to each other, I am inclined to reach a favorable conclusion, although of course I am not a specialist and there is so much I still don’t know.

Yakov Sverdlov

Klavdia Novgorodtseva

He kept putting his reproductive life to the test of books until, on April 4, their son was born. Novgorodtseva named him Andrei, after Sverdlov’s party nickname. When she wrote to Yakov that her body was much changed, he reassured her that it would not last and said that when he had written to her about literary depictions of childbirth, he had—“of course”—been thinking of Natasha Rostova from War and Peace.⁵⁰

■ ■ ■

If prison was a university, then exile was the ultimate test—a test of one’s character and convictions by life when reduced to its essentials. There were two kinds of exile. One was voluntary flight to the west, known as “emigration” and mostly remembered as a time of homelessness, secret conferences, frequent moves, fractious votes, work in libraries, meetings with leaders, and loneliness in a variety of strange and mostly uninteresting cities and countries—or not remembered at all as a time spent away from both the beauty and the beast. The other kind was exile proper—an “administrative” banishment to Siberia or Russia’s European north that combined martyrdom and fulfillment, confinement and freedom to a much more concentrated degree than prison—because it was both banishment to an inferno and a full-fledged, self-administered community of true believers complete with courtship, marriage, and childbirth. In most retrospective accounts and some contemporary ones, exile was an epic, mythic experience—the most important one in the lives of revolutionaries short of the revolution itself.⁵¹

Osip Piatnitsky

After months of travel in a convoy, accompanied by more or less drunk and more or less indulgent soldiers, the exile would be delivered to the end of the world (usually a village in the tundra) and met by a local “political,” who would ask him whether he was a “Bek” (a Bolshevik), a “Mek” (Menshevik), or something else entirely. Depending on the answer, the new arrival would be taken to a particular cabin, given tea, asked about life outside, and inducted into the local community, which, depending on its size, might or might not be divided along sectarian lines. The most important line was the one separating the “politicals” from everyone else. As Kanatchikov put it, “We jealously guarded the high calling of the revolutionary and strictly punished anyone who sullied and abased it…. We had to expend a great deal of energy in order to draw a sharp and distinct line between ourselves—political people who were struggling for an idea and suffering for our convictions—and the ordinary criminal offenders.”⁵²

Most of the larger communities were run as communes—with mutual aid accounts, communal dining rooms, conflict resolution committees, libraries, choirs, and regularly scheduled meetings and debates. Government stipends (higher for “students” than for workers) were supplemented with money sent by comrades and relatives, as well as with earnings from teaching, publishing, and occasional work in the area. (Sverdlov wrote about local life for a Tomsk newspaper; Novgorodtseva worked as a meteorologist; Voronsky bound books; and Piatnitsky felled trees.) Many of the exiles taught, treated, or studied the locals, but they could find no place for them in the coming revolution. Piatnitsky, a ladies’ tailor from a Lithuanian shtetl (described in one police report as “below average height, thin, with a narrow chest),” marveled at how “dreadfully inept” the Siberian peasants were at being peasants. He wondered why, after they had listened to Marxist explanations with apparent interest, they would go straight to the local policeman “to ask if what the political exiles were saying was true.” There were exceptions, however. Sergei Mitskevich married a local sixteen-year-old girl named Olympiada, who decided to “be useful to the people” by becoming a nurse; Boris Ivanov, a baker from St. Petersburg, came close to developing a “genuinely deep attachment” to his landlord’s daughter Matrena; and Aleksandr Voronsky’s literary double, “Valentin,” preached so eloquently to his landlady, an Old Believer widow of about thirty-two, “broad-shouldered and stout,” that once, after sitting and listening to one of his monologues she “got up, walked over to the double bed with a mountain of down pillows and a gloriously puffy eiderdown, slowly turned back the quilt, then turned to Valentin and said, calmly and meekly: ‘I understand now. Come here and let me comfort you.’ Having said this, she began, just as slowly and meekly, and with deep sighs, to unbutton her bodice.”⁵³

But mostly, they courted each other, married each other (unofficially), and lectured each other. Some exiles also exchanged lessons, but usually the students were the teachers and the workers their students. Valentin Trifonov, the orphaned Don Cossack who had worked in a railroad depot before becoming a Bolshevik, claimed to have learned everything, including “simply culture,” from his fellow exile, Aron Solts. Boris Ivanov, the “barely literate and politically underdeveloped” baker (as he described himself), had Sverdlov tutor him in Russian, algebra, geometry, and political economy, as well as “basic literacy and political development.” The exiles hiked, talked, celebrated revolutionary holidays, waited for new arrivals, and read (many publishers provided exiles with free copies). “Despite the administrative constraints, we lived fairly freely,” wrote Voronsky about his time on the White Sea coast. “We were surrounded on all sides by snow, ice, the sea, the river, cliffs, and the rather primitive, but solid and healthy life of the native Pomors. We received free newspapers, journals, and books. Our days were uneventful but not dreary, at least during the first year of exile. We often got together, argued, and regularly received illegal literature. The police bothered us, but not very persistently…. The superintendent and the guards were a little scared of us.”⁵⁴

The exiles’ worst enemy was melancholy and depression. “How could you not be melancholy and depressed,” wrote Piatnitsky, “if all around you there was snow for eight months of the year, and it hurt your eyes to look at it, and you could only walk on a road because otherwise you were in danger of falling through the snow, which was almost five feet deep?” And how could you not be melancholy and depressed, wrote Boris Ivanov, “when, for several months in a row, the sun hides behind the horizon, and the pale, sullen, overcast day appears for half an hour to an hour, and then it’s night again, for months on end”?⁵⁵

Some would refuse to get out of bed; others would start drinking; yet others would suffer from doubt or stop reading and writing altogether. Local peasants would come uninvited, and, according to Sverdlov, “sit silently for half an hour before getting up to say, ‘Well, I’ve got to get going, good bye.’” Visiting nomads would stop by “to marvel at how quickly the pen moved across the page and how much got written, and stand there looking over your shoulder until you couldn’t write anymore.” Postyshev could not always keep his promise to write to Belokonskaia. “How many times I have sat down at a moment of overwhelming sadness in order to share my loneliness with you, but was never able to finish a single letter. My dear, much respected Lubov Matveevna, if only you knew how much I suffered, you would forgive my silence.”⁵⁶

Even the company of fellow exiles could become unbearable. In the spring of 1914, Sverdlov was transferred to a tiny village beyond the Arctic Circle, along with one other political, “a Georgian named Dzhugashvili.” “He’s a good fellow,” wrote Sverdlov to a friend, “but too much of an individualist in everyday life. I, on the other hand, require some minimal degree of order, so it bothers me sometimes.” “The saddest thing of all,” he wrote a month later, “is that, in the conditions of exile or prison, a person is fully exposed and reveals himself in the smallest details. The worst part is that all you see are the ‘small details of life.’ There is no room for bigger traits to manifest themselves. My comrade and I are in different houses now, and we don’t see much of each other.” Having been allowed to move to a different village, he wrote to Novgorodtseva: “You know, my dear, how horrible the conditions in Kureika were. The comrade I was with turned out to be such a person, socially, that we didn’t talk or see each other. It was terrible. And it was all the more terrible because, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t—couldn’t, really—study. I reached the point of total intellectual torpor, a kind of anabiosis of the brain.” (Three days later, Dzhugashvili wrote to Tatiana Slovatinskaia, in whose apartment in Petrograd he had lived before his arrest: “Dearest, my misery grows by the hour. I am in desperate straits. On top of everything, I have come down with something and have a suspicious cough. I need milk, but … I don’t have any money. My dear, if you can scrape some money together, send it immediately, by telegraph. I can’t bear it any longer.”)⁵⁷

Moving in with a close friend helped Sverdlov, but did not bring full relief. The friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, born “Shaia Itskov” but known as “Georges,” “contributed quite a bit” to Sverdlov’s reawakening. “He is a lively person. He raises countless questions, which he tries to resolve through dialog…. But don’t start thinking that it’s so great for the two of us, that we have a vibrant comradely atmosphere here. After all, we are only two.” And still worse: “Georges has become a certified neurotic and is on his way to becoming a misanthrope. He has a good opinion of people in general, of abstract people, but he is terribly quarrelsome with particular human beings he comes into contact with. The result is that he is on the outs with everyone—except for me, of course, because I know what a good fellow he is, what a kind soul he has.” Finally, they parted—“not because of a quarrel, nothing of the kind,” but because “a separate apartment is better, after all.” They had been going to bed at different times and studying at different times, “and, moreover, I can’t write intimate letters when there’s someone else around who is awake.”⁵⁸

Sverdlov wrote many intimate letters, especially when there was no one else around. “You know, my little one,” he wrote to Novgorodtseva from Kureika, after he and Dzhugashvili had stopped talking to each other, “I really do love you so—so very, very much. Are you asleep and cannot hear? Sleep then, sleep, my darling, I won’t disturb you. Oh my, oh my!” A year after the birth of Andrei, he still had not seen his son and wife (he called her his “wife” in his letters, although some Bolsheviks were wary of the term).

I feel so strongly that my existence is inseparable from yours, and talk to you in my soul so often that it seems strange somehow that we haven’t seen each other for so long. Oh how I want to be near you, to see you and our little one. But I’ll confess that my greatest desire is to be with you; you are in my thoughts much more, you and you and you again, and then our little one. Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, I do want your caress, sometimes I want it so much it hurts, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I want to lay my head in your lap and gaze endlessly at your dear, beloved, beautiful face, peer into your eyes, turn into a tiny babe and feel the touch of your hand on my hair. Yes, there is inexpressible joy in this, but even stronger, much much greater is my desire to share with you all my feelings, my thoughts, and in sharing them to gain new strength, to ensure that you are carried along by my mood, that we become one person within that mood…. I want to caress you, take care of you, fill your life with new energy and joy…. I want to give you so, so much. But what can I do?⁵⁹

Meanwhile, Sverdlov’s pupil, Boris Ivanov, was writing to a “dear, distant friend” Bliuma Faktorovich. “I am writing to you in the dusk. You are standing before me in my cabin the way you did back then at the New Year’s Eve party in our workers’ club. Your thick brown hair is like a crown, and your dark, fiery eyes are sparkling in the glow of the lights.” The letter ends with a poem that transforms his loneliness and longing into their common—and tragic—devotion to the cause.

We’ll welcome the New Year with a kiss

This night of joy is not for you and me.

We’ll kiss like brothers, as we struggle for the people

Who suffer from oppression and from want.

Please don’t be jealous of the feasting all around,

Let’s drink our cup of tears to the bottom.⁶⁰

Thousands of miles away, Voronsky was drinking from the same cup.

During those long, dull nights, I used to read until my head spun, then stoke the stove, and turn down the lamp. The birch logs would hiss, crackle drily, and pop, like roasting nuts, while ugly, furry shadows wandered around the room. The coals covered in gray ashes reminded me of things lost and extinguished. Life in the capitals and big cities seemed far away and gone forever…. Enchanting female images would come alive and disappear, those past passions turned into ghostly, elusive shadows. In a rush I would finish stoking up the stove, close the stove doors and shutters with a bang, get dressed, cast a last worried, melancholy look around the dark room, and set off to see Vadim, Jan, or Valentin. The dark heavenly depths used to crush me with their frightening immensity.⁶¹

Boris Ivanov

Even Sverdlov, whose “cheerfulness and optimism” were, according to Ivanov, the colony’s main “support for the weak,” would occasionally give way to despair. Once, when he had not received any letters for several weeks, his lip was swollen, and he was “shivering from the cold (or a cold, he wasn’t sure),” he wrote to Novgorodtseva, “Yesterday it got so bad that I felt like crying and moaning, and could not sleep. I had to use all my strength not to let myself go. I managed to pull myself together somewhat, but then got to the point of regretting that I didn’t have any potassium bromide pills with me—and I’m not sure I would’ve been able to keep from taking them, either.”⁶²

Those were rare moments, however, and they were always followed by expressions of hope based on some combination of comradeship, love, and faith in the truth of the prophecy. “The days of light will come; believe in it firmly, be full of this faith,” was the main theme of Sverdlov’s letters to his wife, sisters, and friends. Most of them, including Sverdlov himself, followed this injunction. Voronsky’s visions and doubts are dispelled by “conversations with comrades”; Piatnitsky’s passage about melancholy and depression is followed by an account of mutual support among the exiles; and Ivanov’s description of the long Arctic nights ends with an image of the “heavenly depths” that is sublime, not crushing. “The sky is covered with countless stars, which shine much more brightly here than they do at home or in the south. The fantastic bands of the northern lights dance around like searchlights, and, every once in a while, a white fiery pillar rises from the earth all the way to the sky or a spray of blue, red, and violet lights might shoot up.”⁶³

Postyshev, too, found solace in nature (and in belles lettres):

It is not easy for me to describe these mountains in all their glory—when they are painted golden by the rising sun and, high above them, the turquoise sky is glistening, and the fiery dawn clings so closely to the earth that it seems that the earth might catch fire. At sunset, I prefer to walk between the mountains, in the “gashes,” as they are called here. Then the mountains are shrouded in a blue haze; their tops seem to touch the clouds; and the rays of the setting sun radiate through the pine trees. At such moments, your eyes can perceive magic; your soul becomes transcendent; and you wish to live and to hug everyone in sight and to forgive and be forgiven.⁶⁴

A true Bolshevik could not indulge in such sentiments for too long, and neither could the wilderness. In 1913, Postyshev and two of his friends were celebrating “the great proletarian holiday, May First” in the taiga. “The noise of the giant trees was like the triumphant hymn of a million-strong army of the proletariat. That wild but majestic music penetrated to the very bottom of our hearts. We stood and listened to that powerful victory song. The chords kept changing: first a piercing scream full of hatred and thirst for vengeance, then the heavy moan of a huge, huge army.”⁶⁵

For Sverdlov, the “victory” referred to two things: his reunion with Novgorodtseva and the coming of the real day. The former came first. They met briefly in 1912 on the Ob River in West Siberia, and then, in May 1915, two years after the birth of their daughter Vera, Novgorodtseva came to join Sverdlov permanently in the village of Monastyrskoe, on the Enisei River. Boris Ivanov remembers first seeing their house:

The forest came right up to the house, in the form of numerous low fir trees and bushes. The house had three rooms and four windows. The furniture was of the simplest kind: wooden benches, a table with a white tablecloth, a pile of books on a little stool. Among them, I could see the first volume of Das Kapital, a book in German, and an open issue of The Russian Wealth. On the windowsill, there was a huge heap of newspapers.

A black-eyed boy of about six, dressed in a white linen suit, was looking at me with curiosity.

“Adia, come on, stop staring! This comrade has just arrived from Petersburg. Say hello to him!,” said Sverdlov, lightly pushing the boy toward me.

“This is my little critter,” he said with a smile.⁶⁶

Andrei (Adia) Sverdlov was four, not six, but he had already traveled a great deal: visiting his father in the Tomsk prison, spending time in his mother’s cell in St. Petersburg, and living in two different places of exile. Thanks to their extra earnings, the Sverdlovs had been able to buy a cow for fresh milk for the children.

Sverdlov usually got up around 6:00 a.m. and skied to the river bank to record meteorological data (Novgorodtseva’s official job).

Having come back from the Enisei [writes Novgorodtseva], Yakov Mikhailovich would chop wood, feed the cow, clean out the manure, start a fire in the stove, boil water, and make breakfast. Around eight the children would wake up. Yakov Mikhailovich always washed and dressed them. The children were his responsibility: despite my protests, he never let me interfere.

We usually had breakfast at about half past eight, and after that I would set off on my round of lessons. Yakov Mikhailovich received his pupils … at home. Around noon he would finish tutoring and start making lunch.

The main staples in Monastyrskoe were fish and Siberian dumplings with reindeer meat. Both Novgorodtseva and Ivanov claim that Sverdlov was unsurpassed as a filling maker; Ivanov, a baker by trade, was the dough-molding “artist.” “We usually had lunch around 2:00 p.m. After that I would do the dishes (having won this right after many a battle), and then we would both do some sewing, mending, and, if need be, washing. By five or six, Yakov Mikhailovich would be free from household chores, and by seven, people would start coming over.” About ten of Monastyrskoe’s twenty or so exiles came regularly. Sverdlov would “officiate” at the stove, while the others tried to follow Ivanov’s lead in molding the dumplings. “There was no end to the jokes and laughter, but there was never any alcohol. Yakov Mikhailovich never drank either vodka or wine.” This was true of most Bolshevik circle members, both the “students” and the workers.⁶⁷

Sometimes they held formal lectures, debates, or party meetings. Such gatherings were illegal, but in the winter, according to Ivanov,

The windows [of Sverdlov’s house] would be covered with a thick layer of ice, so you could not see anything from the outside…. Only the light of the kerosene lamp would show through the frozen glass and cast a pale reflection on the snow drifts near the house…. The Bolshevik exiles usually gathered in a small room that did not look like a setting for a lecture or a presentation. A pot of hot tea would be standing on the table. Valentina Sergushova would pour it out into mugs. Guests would be sitting in comfortable positions around the table, although some might be lying on reindeer skins spread out on the floor next to the iron stove with its burning cedar log. Their faces would be just barely visible in the semidarkness of the room.⁶⁸

After the lectures they would often go for walks. Their favorite activity was singing, and their favorite songs were “the roaring battle hymns of the revolutionary proletariat of that time.” Sometimes, during those hikes, they would start playfully pushing each other around. “Occasionally such rough-housing would turn into real battles, with people throwing snowballs at each other and shoving each other into snow drifts. Sad was the fate of those who could not react fast enough to an opponent’s sudden move!” Sverdlov, who was “the initiator and ringleader” of most such battles, made up in aggression what he lacked in size. According to Novgorodtseva, he particularly enjoyed “sitting astride his vanquished playmates and stuffing handfuls of snow down their collars.”

Finally, Yakov Mikhailovich would announce loudly, “Let’s go have some tea!” and we would troop back to our place, exhausted, red-cheeked, loud, and happy. Once inside, everyone would get right to work: someone would start the samovar, others would get the dishes, set the table, etc. Then the tea drinking would begin, and the merry, free-flowing conversation would start up again. Andrei and Verushka, long used to all kinds of noise, would be fast asleep in the next room.

Around nine or ten, everyone would head for home, and Yakov Mikhailovich would sit down to work. Night was the time for serious concentration. For at least four or five hours, he would sit over his books and manuscripts, reading, taking notes, copying out passages, and writing. He would not go to bed until one or two in the morning, and then at six or seven he would be up again.⁶⁹

Exiles in Monastyrskoe. Sverdlov is seated, in the white shirt.

Klavdia Novgorodtseva and Andrei Sverdlov are seated in front.

Between them, wearing a hat, is Grigory Petrovsky.

Stalin (Dzhugashvili) is in the back, in a black hat; on his left is Lev Kamenev. Far right in a leather jacket is Filipp Goloshchekin.

Exile stood for suffering, intimacy, and the sublime immensity of the heavenly depths. It offered a perfect metaphor for both what was wrong with the “world of lies” and what was central to the promise of socialism. “The gap between reason and what is beyond reason is created by deformations in social life,” thought Voronsky as he “roamed through glades and climbed up slopes.” “Only under socialism will the fundamental contradiction between the conscious and the unconscious be eliminated. The leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom will be accomplished: there will be no tragic chasm between the conscious and the unconscious; reason will tame the elements while remaining connected to their immense power.” In the meantime, the memory of banishment would serve as a promise of liberation and a sacred bond among “comrades-in-arms, fellows in freedom, and friends.” “They are my family, my country, my cherished past and glorious future. They blossom in my soul like rare flowers on a mountain slope, right next to the edge of the snow. Here’s to our free, loyal fellowship, firm handshakes, sincere conversations on stormy nights, our laughter, jokes, bravery, daring, restless wanderings, our willingness to help each other at the cost of our lives, our certainty and faith in the bitterest of years, our marvelous, unique, valiant band!”⁷⁰

■ ■ ■

The free fellowships preparing for the leap to the kingdom of freedom (by means of agitation and propaganda and through the trials of prison and exile) were organized into “parties,” each one with its own program and statutes, but all of them sharing a fundamental rejection of the existing order of things and a withdrawal into a secret community of the self-chosen. The most important part of being a revolutionary was, in Voronsky’s words, the “habit of dividing people into two camps: us and them.”

“Us” was the underground: a secret, exclusive circle of people fastened together by a voluntary, iron bond of mutual responsibility, with our own understanding of honor, right, and justice. This circle was invisible but always present, militant and unbending. It was like a volcanic island rising up in the middle of the ocean. Everything else—huge, ever multiplying, earthbound—was the world of the enemy. Everything else needed to be remade and reshaped; it was loathsome and deserved to die; it kept resisting, persecuting, expelling, pursuing, and living its own life. And so I learned how to despise everything that was outside our secret free fellowship.⁷¹

Aleksandr Voronsky

The first part of Voronsky’s autobiography came out in Novyi mir in 1927; the full version appeared as a book in 1929. Some critics did not like its excessive “reflexivity,” but, as Voronsky’s wife wrote at the time, its “content could not possibly raise any objections.” Gorky called it “the voice of a true revolutionary, who knows how to talk about himself as a real, live human being.” The book’s publication was approved by the censorship office and formally endorsed by Viacheslav Molotov (formerly Skriabin), on the recommendation of Platon Kerzhentsev (formerly Lebedev), under the “editorial responsibility” of Semen Kanatchikov (formerly a Gustav List worker). Voronsky’s underground self seemed no different from that of any other revolutionary.⁷²

I used to walk down Nevsky. The sight of the glittering shop windows, the carriages and trotting horses, the top hats and bowlers filled me with a sense of superiority. I would think to myself: here is a gentlemen with a bushy moustache wearing a shiny English suit, and here is a stout lady with a pink face rustling her silks…. They can walk into a store, casually pick out something expensive, have it delivered to their home by a delivery boy, walk into this or that restaurant, go to the opera in the evening and then sit down to dinner, unfolding a crisp, well-starched napkin. And here am I, with a fifty-kopeck coin in my pocket, wearing a ragged fall coat and rust-colored, worn-out shoes, but I don’t mind: I am carrying out the will of the anonymous people who are marching unwaveringly toward their goal of destruction. I, too, am a member of their secret fraternity. In the shop window, precious stones sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow: they are for you, the full-bellied, the well-groomed, the satisfied. Inside my coat, piles of leaflets are stuffed under my tight belt. They are for you, too. They are just as good as dynamite or a Browning pistol. You walk by, shoving me aside, but you don’t know what I know; you don’t suspect anything; you don’t realize the danger you’re in. I am stronger and more powerful than you, and I enjoy walking among you, unnoticed.⁷³

The underground men had a variety of names for the loathsome “everything else” that “kept living its own life” outside their secret free fellowship. The most common was “philistines” (obyvateli), or people without higher principles or interests, people absorbed in the pleasures and failures of everyday existence, people whose “opinions, thoughts, gossip, and desires were petty and pitiful,” people who were not fully human because they had no spark of “consciousness.” In Russia, according to Voronsky, they were doubly damned, and possibly not human at all, because they combined protocapitalist acquisitiveness with the “primeval and utter swinishness” of provincial backwardness: “the driveling, hiccuping, and lip-smacking gluttony, the unctuousness mixed with beastliness.”⁷⁴

Have you ever been to the meat row at the market? Pig and cow carcasses hang from the ceiling, and counters and carts are all covered with chunks of fat, yellow grease, and coagulated blood. Pieces of bone and brain fly everywhere, attracting packs of dogs. Aprons are stiff with blood, and the sickly-sweet, nauseating stench of rotting flesh is stifling. I always imagine these to be the embodied feelings, hopes, and thoughts of the average inhabitant of our Okurovs, Rasteriaevs, and Mirgorods. They are his life, his world. Observe his excitement as he turns over and digs through the lumps of fat and lard! His eyes are oily; his lower lip droops; his filthy, foul-smelling mouth fills with saliva; afraid that someone might snap up the coveted piece before him, he snarls hungrily and sticks out his elbows. Shove against him at this moment, touch him by accident, and he is ready to kill you on the spot. I’ve seen people standing by the meat counters with their eyes glassed over and their fingers trembling, looking at the hunks of meat the way some men stare at naked women. You think I’m exaggerating? Go see for yourself, but make sure you look closely.⁷⁵

The “philistine” had long been the stock antipode of the “intelligent,” and provincial Russia was his natural habitat. “The town of Okurov” was Gorky’s version; “Rasteriaeva Street” was Gleb Uspensky’s; and Mirgorod was Gogol’s pastoral prototype. What the socialists did was to turn the philistine into a “bourgeois” and sentence him to death as a matter of Marxist inevitability and personal gratification. What the socialists feared was his ability to grow new heads and tempt new victims. The most common metaphor for “philistinism” was a “swamp” that posed as solid ground while seeping into homes, souls, and Bolshevik reading circles. Voronsky’s native town of Tambov reminded him of the swamp he used to go to when he was a little boy. “Under its murky, dead film, the swamp bubbled, rumbled, rotted, and gurgled, exhaling foul odors and swarming with myriads of midges, soft, plump tadpoles, water spiders, red beetles, and frogs; it slurped and rustled with reeds and bulrushes. Farther in, if you made it across the shaky hillocks of grass to its depths, the quagmire yawned. Any calf, cow, or horse that lost its way would perish there.”⁷⁶

Whereas the SRs believed that the revolution would prevent the swamp from submerging the whole of the Russian countryside, the Marxists assumed that the flood was a fait accompli, welcomed it as a necessary interlude, and endorsed Engels’s warning to the driveling gluttons: “You shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife—but do not forget that ‘The hangman stands at the door!’” The Bolshevik-Menshevik disagreement concerned the question of who the hangman should be: the Mensheviks favored the proletariat; the Bolsheviks (some of whom recognized the original Heine in the prophet’s words) demanded the leading role for themselves.⁷⁷

Voronsky’s alter ego Valentin was a true Bolshevik.

Some day soon the third angel will sound his trumpet. And then we will show all those who wish to enjoy life with some fat, a little manure, a bit of dirt, and a few legalized rapes what the end of the world is about. We will show them the price of categorical imperatives and civic cloaks. We will remind them of their little albums of those who have been hanged and the little amateur libraries they have collected about them. We won’t forget anything: the innocent tears of the children, the wasted youth in the back alleys and basements, the destroyed talents, the mothers’ grief, Sonechka Marmeladova and little Ilya, and all those hanged on the gallows as the sun was sending out its first, sinless rays.⁷⁸

Valentin was deliberately, defiantly Dostoevskian. Few Russian socialists would have understood every one of his allusions or endorsed his combination of prophetic fire with self-doubting introspection, but most of them shared his vision. The revolutionaries were going to prevail because of the sheer power of their hatred. It cleansed the soul and swelled like the flood of the real day. “It rushes along to the gates of a new kingdom, drenching its path in human blood and leaving behind death, moaning, and cursing. It rushes past the cowardly and the petty, sweeping along the brave, the daring, and the strong.” It was the main weapon of the weak and the guarantee of future salvation. “Man must return to his lost paradise, and he will return there—no longer as nature’s slave or contemplator, but as its free master, ruler, and creator.”⁷⁹

Most of those who shared Valentin’s vision were organized into groups located along the free will–predestination continuum. None was fully “objectivist” (the Mensheviks prepared for the inevitable by organizing trade unions), and none was free from “historical inevitability.” They knew themselves to be closely related (as former members of the same reading circles and fellow “politicals” in prison and exile) and routinely accused each other of deliberate misrepresentation. They referred to themselves as “parties” but rejected meaningful comparisons to other political organizations. Lenin called the Bolsheviks “a party of a new type.” Valentin abandoned the term altogether. “What sort of party are we?” he asked. “Parties are what they have in the West and in America. None of them, including the socialists, go beyond the legal struggle for reforms. We, on the other hand, are an army, men of fire and sword, warriors and destroyers.”⁸⁰

Parties are usually described as associations that seek power within a given society (or, in Max Weber’s definition, “secure power within an organization for its leaders in order to attain ideal or material advantages for its active members”). None of the three main socialist groups in early-twentieth-century Russia were interested in securing power within the Russian state or society, however construed. Their purpose was to await and, to a greater or lesser degree, bring about, that society’s replacement by a “kingdom of freedom” understood as life without politics. They were faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world, dedicated to “the abandoned and the persecuted,” and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism. They were, by most definitions, sects.⁸¹

“Sects” are usually defined in opposition to “churches” (described as bureaucratic, specialized, world-accepting, all-inclusive, elite-friendly organizations into which most members are born) or to societies that they attempt to flee or undermine. Lists of attributes (voluntary, exclusive, egalitarian) are sometimes replaced by a continuum representing degrees of tension with the surrounding world, from a few hunted fugitives at one end to well-integrated institutions at the other. All scholarly definitions characterize sects as “religious” groups, but since the determination of whether a group is religious concerns the nature of the faith, not the degree of tension with the world, it is irrelevant to the sect/party distinction. The main three socialist groups in early-twentieth-century Russia can safely be called sects because no usable definition relies on doctrinal criteria (unless one counts group members who classify heretics in relation to a particular orthodoxy) and because all three decisively rejected the world and possessed the main structural features associated with world-rejection (and conventionally assumed to be sectarian).⁸²

Membership in such a group gave one a great sense of purpose, power, and belonging (especially for the Bolsheviks, who stood out among the socialists as the only sect rigidly organized around a charismatic leader). But the radical abandonment of most conventional attachments, the continual sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future, and the violent casting out of money changers came—as all heroic commitments do—at the cost of recurring doubt. What if the discarded attachments were the true ones? What if the future came too late for there ever to have been a present? What if the “philistines” were only human? What if all the years in prison and exile were in vain? “What is my strength, that I should wait, and what is my end, that I should endure?” Job’s plight is inherent in all forms of submission to a force presumed to be both all-powerful and benevolent. (“If it is a matter of strength, he is mighty! And if it is a matter of justice, who will summon him? Even if I were innocent, my mouth would condemn me; if I were blameless, it would pronounce me guilty.”) It is particularly acute, however, among those who emphasize self-study and self-improvement as much as selflessness. A self that has been painstakingly worked on is not easy to sacrifice—especially if the work relies on as eclectic a reading list as Bukharin’s or Voronsky’s.⁸³

Bukharin’s autobiographical alter ego, Kolia, has his first “profound spiritual crisis” when his little brother dies. “Is there anything that is worth one of Andriusha’s little tears? What is the point of all the actions, virtues, exploits, and expiations, if the past cannot be brought back?” The answer comes from the same source as the question:

One day, Kolia was sitting quietly by himself reading Dostoevsky when, suddenly, he hit upon a passage that shook him to the depths of his being. It was the passage in The Adolescent that described how the people of the future … would live without the consolation of their thousand-year faith. The great idea of immortality would disappear, and would have to be replaced with something else, and all of the great excess of love for Him who had embodied immortality would be transferred to nature, the world, the people in it, to every little blade of grass. They would love life and the earth irrepressibly, insofar as they would gradually become aware of their own temporality and finitude, and it would be a special, different kind of love.⁸⁴

Voronsky’s autobiographical narrator has his first spiritual crisis when his sister dies:

How could this happen, I kept thinking, how could this happen? I yearn for universal happiness, I worry about the welfare and prosperity of others, and here I was, not noticing, not knowing anything about the life and hopes of my own sister…. In this way, won’t I end up establishing universal fraternity by squashing and trampling over everything ruthlessly and coldly, not noticing not only clear enemies, but human life in general: children, brothers, sisters? Or is this a necessary stage, because you can’t win unless your teeth are clenched, your heart steeled, and your head, clear and cold? Could it be so?⁸⁵

This monologue leads up to the book’s central episode. The narrator goes to see his uncle, Father Nikolai.

In the dusty courtyard, cluttered with a cart, traveling carriage, and droshky, the guard dog Milka and a dirty pink piglet lay head-to-head in front of the kennel. Both were sleeping. The piglet was dreamily wagging the taut end of its little tail.

“Trough happiness,” I said.

Father Nikolai, a stout, calm, deliberate priest and a good farmer, glanced at the piglet and Milka, smiled, adjusted the silver cross on his chest, and continued on his way.

The narrator catches up with him, and they walk up a hill behind the village.

The lukewarm, watery sun slid toward the amber edge of the sky. To the right of the hill was a lush green meadow. Herds of cows and sheep plodded slowly and distractedly toward the village, casting long shadows behind them. We could hear the foolish bleating of the sheep and the dry cracking of the shepherds’ whips. Two colts galloped by, bucking and shaking their flowing manes. The light-colored river lay tranquil, its gentle curves gleaming with copper flashes. Beyond the river, the fields stretched into the distance. Little hamlets dotted the hills. Behind them lay the silent, solemn pine forest. The cadenced tones of distant church bells floated lazily through the air.

“What a blessing,” said Father Nikolai, stopping and leaning on his long staff. “Back in the courtyard, you said something about trough happiness. It may be the trough kind, but it’s real…. Vegetation is at the root of all creation: the grass, the trees, the beasts of all kinds, the huts, the peasants, the birds, you and I…. Everything you see around you,” he gestured broadly and unhurriedly with his hand, “has been created by vegetation, by trough happiness, as you call it.”

“But vegetation is mindless and elemental,” I objected.

Father Nikolai took off his wide-brimmed hat, ran his hand across his hair, and said:

“Indeed it is…. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.’”⁸⁶

They go on to argue about whether life is a miracle or a play of “blind and malicious forces,” and whether “the real miracle” is life as we know it or the human desire and ability to subdue and transform it.

Father Nikolai gave it some thought, rolled up the sleeve of his cassock, and said:

… “Man needs to plow, sow, breed cattle, tend gardens, and raise children. That’s the most important thing. Everything else is secondary. You, who are ‘looking for the city that is to come,’ do not know and cannot understand the joy of a farmer when he sees a brood of chickens, or the care with which he prunes and grafts an apple tree. You believe he only thinks of profit, but he doesn’t always think of profit, and sometimes he doesn’t think of profit at all: instead, he feels the joy of ‘vegetation,’ sees the fruit of his labor and takes pleasure in life…. Life is huge. It’s like a mountain that can’t be moved.”

“We’ll dig tunnels through it, Uncle.”

“You think life is different on the other side? It’s the same, the same.”⁸⁷

This dialogue—internal, external, or both—runs through Voronsky’s book and, in one way or another, through most Bolshevik memoirs, from Kon’s story of his grandfather presiding over a transformed Passover prayer to Kuibyshev’s story of his father crying like a child in his son’s prison cell. Could it be that it was inherent in human life?

“Have you ever read Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Brand?” I asked Valentin.

“I have. Why?”

“They represent two types, two psychological models. Peer Gynt lacks integrity; he is scattered and disorganized. All he can be is raw material for something else, but nothing human is alien to him. He lulls, comforts, and deceives his dying mother…. He has no principles, but his heart is open. Brand, on the other hand, is a fighter, he is all of a piece. He desires with his whole being. His motto is “all or nothing,” but his heart is closed to human joys and woes; he is ruthless. He takes from his wife Agnes the little cap, her last memory of her dead child, and refuses to go to his mother’s deathbed to offer a few words of consolation.”⁸⁸

Every true Bolshevik has a purer, more consistently sectarian doppelgänger—an all-or-nothing Brand to his self-doubting underground man. Ulianov has Lenin, Dzhugashvili has Stalin, Skriabin has Molotov, Arosev has Z, and Voronsky has his Valentin.⁸⁹

“There are millions of Peer Gynts. They are needed as manure, as fertilizer. But don’t you think, Valentin, that the Brand principle is becoming too dominant among us? We are becoming harder, tougher; we are turning into the revolution’s promoters and apprentices; we are separating ourselves from everything ‘human all too human.’”

Fidgeting under his blanket, Valentin lit a match, drew on his cigarette, and declared:

“That’s the way it should be in our era. We must become more efficient and more resolute, we must give all of ourselves to our ideal. We cannot show weakness and float in the wake of divergent and contradictory emotions. We are warriors.”⁹⁰

In Voronsky’s world, the real-life one as well as the fictional, there is never an escape from dualism—even in his favorite refuge, a cottage in a pine forest outside Tambov that belongs to Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova, his older friend and socialist mentor. (She—also the child of a priest—is the “mysterious revolutionary” who gave him his very first stack of illegal leaflets when he was a seminarian.) Miagkova has three little daughters. “This girls’ world attracted me. Their pure, innocent eyes, the braids tied with bright ribbons, the ink-stained notebooks, the stickers, dolls, flowers, short colorful dresses, the carefree, inimitable, contagious laughter, loud chatter, games, and all the running around helped me forget my troubles and misfortunes.” Two of the sisters love to listen to the silly stories he makes up, but the third one, “the olive-skinned Tania,” has a “critical frame of mind” and refuses to play along. “You didn’t really buy a parrot, and you didn’t really see a scary man, and he didn’t really run after you—you just made it all up.” Voronsky may, in fact, have been chased by a plainclothes policeman, but Tania isn’t having any of it—she needs proof. “Valentin” is Voronsky’s fictional Brand-like alter ego. Tania was a real all-or-nothing twelve-year-old. She would go on to join the Bolsheviks at the age of twenty.⁹¹

■ ■ ■

Voronsky and Arosev may have been more self-consciously literary and programmatically self-reflexive than most Bolsheviks, and their memoirs may have absorbed some of the doubts and discoveries of the 1920s and early 1930s, but it seems clear—and was, for a while, universally accepted—that they were faithful chroniclers, not odd exceptions. Yakov Sverdlov, who never published anything other than articles on party politics and reports on Siberian social conditions, faced the same dilemmas and discussed them endlessly in his letters. What is the relationship between the coming general happiness and the present-day lives of individual believers? Which part of Father Nikolai’s “vegetation” should be renounced as irredeemably philistine? What is to be done about the fact that—as Sverdlov writes apropos of the great mystery of his son’s future life—“we mortals are not granted the ability to lift the veil of individual fate; all we can do is foresee the future of mankind as a whole”?⁹²

The more terrible the trials, the greater the uncertainty and the temptations. “You cannot imagine [wrote Sverdlov to Novgorodtseva in January 1914], how badly I want to see the children. Such a sharp, piercing pain. Adka’s photograph is on the table in front of me. So is yours. I stare and stare, for hours on end, and then I close my eyes and try to imagine little Vera, but I can’t, really. I think until my head hurts. My eyes grow wet, and I am ready to burst out sobbing. My dear, dear, sweet little children…. Oh Kadia, Kadia! My darling, my love…. What will our future bring?”⁹³

Sometimes it seems that their future life will bring nothing but trials: “There’s much, much suffering ahead,” he wrote in August 1914. Voronsky, the former seminarian, quotes the original passage from the confession of the Old Belief martyr, Archpriest Avvakum, who jouneyed to Calvary accompanied by his wife: “I came up, and the poor dear started in on me, saying, ‘Will these sufferings go on for a long time, Archpriest?’ And I said: ‘Markovna, right up to our very death.’ And so she sighed and answered, ‘Good enough, Petrovich, then let’s be getting on.’” (According to Voronsky’s daughter, “let’s be getting on” was his favorite saying.) But of course neither Sverdlov nor Voronsky is an Archpriest Avvakum. Or rather, they are, in the sense of being prepared to endure suffering for the sake of their faith, but they do not relish martyrdom or asceticism as virtues in their own right. As Sverdlov puts it in a letter to a young friend, “I also like Ibsen, but Brand’s ‘all or nothing’ motto is not to my taste, for I consider it rootless and anarchist.”⁹⁴

Sverdlov’s and Voronsky’s faith, unlike Avvakum’s, is to be strengthened by reading as broadly as possible. In Sverdlov’s view, once a Marxist “consciousness” has been acquired, everything, without exception, becomes proof of its truth. “The greater the knowledge and the more wideranging it is, the vaster the space, the broader the horizons for creativity and, most important, the more conscious that creativity is.” In 1916, with “the light of the kerosene lamp shining through the frozen glass and casting a pale reflection on the snow drifts” outside his house in Monastyrskoe, Sverdlov wrote to a young friend:

For a better understanding of Ibsen, I would recommend reading everything by him, in a particular order. The best edition is the Skirmunt, reprinted by Znanie in eight volumes, in Hansen’s translation. That is the best edition. It should be read in the order in which it was published, although you don’t have to read the last volume: it’s his correspondence, which, as I recall, is of little interest. But before you get started, it would be a good idea to read something appropriate about the history of Sweden and Norway over the last thirty or forty years, in order to become familiarized with the development of social relations there during this period. Such familiarity will help you understand Ibsen. For the same purpose, it would be good to read Lunacharsky’s article [“Ibsen and Philistinism”] in the 1907 issue of Obrazovanie, the brochure about him by Roland-Holst, and Plekhanov’s article in, I think, Sovremennyi mir, also from 1907.⁹⁵

“Putting books to the test of life and putting life to the test of books” is hard work and requires constant vigilance and self-examination. In this sense, Sverdlov’s faith is similar to Archpriest Avvakum’s. “I watch myself very closely sometimes. You know my habit of self-analysis. I see clearly every fleeting movement of my soul. And right now I cannot detect any dangerous symptoms. There is none of the intellectual laziness and mental torpor that haunted me for a while. There is only a desire to study, to learn.”⁹⁶

But what if self-analysis revealed some dangerous signs of moral torpor? What happens when endless suffering breeds doubt, and doubt is deepened by reading and self-analysis? Are the Bolsheviks in danger of falling, one by one, into the chasm separating their ability to “foresee the future of mankind as a whole” and their all-too-human inability to “lift the veil of individual fate”? Sverdlov’s answer is a thoughtful but resolute no. In 1913, he started writing to Kira Egon-Besser, the fourteen-year-old daughter of his close friends from Ekaterinburg, Aleksandr and Lydia Besser. Like many intelligentsia adolescents at the time, Kira suffered from chronic “pessimism” and occasional thoughts of suicide. Sverdlov’s advice to her is remarkably consistent. “We were born at a good time,” he wrote in January 1914, “in the period of human history when the final act of the human tragedy is at hand…. Today only the blind and those who do not want to see fail to notice the growing force that is fated to play the main part in this final act. And there is so much beauty in the rise of this force, and it fills one with so much energy, that, truly, it is good to be alive.” Universal redemption is the key to personal fulfillment. “Allow me to kiss you on both cheeks when we meet,” he wrote in May 1914, “for I have no doubt that I will see you and L. I. again. I’ll kiss you in any case, whether you like it or not.”⁹⁷

They continued to correspond, and Sverdlov continued to urge hope and faith (hope as a function of faith). The first of his surviving letters was the one sent to the Dormitory for Female Students on Sophia Embankment in May 1904, when he was nineteen (“The real day is coming, after all…. The dawn, which sheds its fantastic, enchanting, and transparent light over everything and everyone, is near”). The last one, to Kira Egon-Besser in Petrograd, was written in Monastyrskoe on January 20, 1917, when he was thirty-two and she was eighteen:

My worldview ensures that my certainty in the triumph of a life of harmony, free from all manner of filth, cannot disappear. Just as unshakeable is my certainty that future life will produce pure human beings, beautiful in every respect. Yes, there is much evil in the world today. But to understand and discover its causes is to understand its transient nature. That is why isolated, but sometimes difficult, feelings of dejection are drowned out by the overall optimism of my approach to life. That’s the whole secret. It has nothing to do with a rejection of private life. On the contrary, it is precisely this approach to life that makes a full private life possible, a life in which people are fused into a single whole not only physically, but also spiritually.⁹⁸

Around the time this letter would have arrived in Petrograd, the workers of the Putilov Plant began the strike that would become the first phase of the February Revolution—and possibly the last act of the human tragedy. Sverdlov heard the news in early March, and, accompanied by Filipp (“Georges”) Goloshchekin, jumped into a sled and set out up the Enisei in a mad rush to reach Krasnoiarsk before the ice began to break up. After more than two weeks of ceaseless travel, they arrived, and by March 29 had made it all the way to Petrograd.

According to Novgorodtseva, they went straight to the apartment of Sverdlov’s sister Sarra.

Later she talked about how Yakov Mikhailovich had appeared out of nowhere and started peppering her with questions about what was happening in Petrograd, with their comrades, and in the Central Committee (at the time, Sarra was helping Elena Stasova in the Central Committee secretariat).

Having answered barely a tenth of the questions, Sarra suddenly remembered that her brother must be hungry after his long journey and started to fan the samovar when Yakov Mikhailovich suddenly grabbed his head and moaned:

“Oh no! Georges!”

“Georges? Georges who?”

“Goloshchekin! I left him downstairs by the entrance, told him I’d go see if you were in and be right back. It’s been half an hour. Would you mind going to get him? He’ll kill me for sure if I go. He’s easy to spot: tall, skinny, with a goatee, and wearing a black hat. In other words, a regular Don Quixote.”

Sarra ran out and immediately spotted Goloshchekin, who was shifting from one foot to the other, looking despondent. She brought him in, served them both tea, and then took them to the Tauride Palace, where, in a corridor, at the entrance to one of the rooms, Elena Dmitrievna Stasova had placed a desk under a large, handwritten sign that said: “RSDRP(b), Central Committee Secretariat.”⁹⁹

Kira Egon-Besser had to wait a day or two longer. “One evening in late March [she writes in her memoir], the doorbell rang. When I heard the sound of his familiar booming bass coming from the entryway, I came running and saw Yakov Mikhailovich. He kissed me on both cheeks.”¹⁰⁰

■ ■ ■

Revolution was inseparable from love. It demanded sacrifices for the sake of a future harmony, and it required harmony—in love, comradeship, and book learning—as a condition for fulfillment. Most revolutionary leaders were young men who identified the Revolution with womanhood; many of them were men in love who identified particular women with the Revolution. Becoming a Bolshevik meant joining a band of brothers (and, possibly, sisters); living as a Bolshevik meant favoring some brothers over others and loving some sisters as much as the Revolution. “Who do I confess my weakness to, if not to you, my dear, my sweetheart?” wrote Sverdlov to Novgorodtseva. “The more thorough the analysis to which we subject our relationship, the more profound, I would even say, thrillingly profound, it becomes.” Revolutionary introspection relied on “a union of two kindred spirits filled with the same emotion and faith.” After 1914, Sverdlov’s hope for the real day seemed fused with his wish to kiss Kira Egon-Besser.¹⁰¹

Valerian Osinsky

(Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Sverdlov’s last letter about the real day took about a month to come true. Valerian Osinsky wrote his in late February 1917, at the time of its fulfillment. Born “Valerian Obolensky” in the family of a veterinarian of noble birth, he had debated Kerzhentsev in his Moscow gymnasium, shared a prison cell with Bukharin, and served as an “agitator” in the Swamp after the 1905 Revolution. He was famously tall, studious, radical, and aloof. In February 1917, he was thirty years old and married to a fellow revolutionary, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova. They had a five-year-old son, Vadim, whom they called “Dima.” His correspondent, Anna Mikhailovna Shaternikova, was in her mid-twenties, a devoted Marxist, and a volunteer nurse. They had met a few months earlier in a hospital in Yalta, where he was being treated for tuberculosis. They were in love, but could not, for the time being, be together. They knew that their individual fates depended on the future of mankind as a whole. They were certain that that future was near, but did not know that it had already reached Petrograd.¹⁰² Osinsky’s letter contains his prose translation of the last three stanzas of Émile Verhaeren’s “Blacksmith” (“Le Forgeron”), with detailed line-by-line commentary:

The mob, whose sacred fury always rises above itself, is an immensely inspired force, projected by the will of those to come, that will erect, with its merciless hands, a new world of insatiable utopia….

The blacksmith, whose hope does not ever stray toward doubt or fear, sees before him, as if they were already here, the days when the simplest ethical commandments will become the foundation of human existence, serene and harmonious….

Lit up by that luminous faith, the flames of which he has been stoking for many a year in his forge, by the side of the road, next to the tilled fields,

The blacksmith, huge and massive, is hammering with mighty, full blows—as if he were tempering the steel of human souls—the immense blades of patience and silence.

This poem, according to Osinsky, is a prophetic depiction of “the psychology of revolution.” The passage on the power of the mob confirms that “one of life’s greatest pleasures” is to join collective humanity in its sacred fury. The “insatiability” of utopia refers both to the boundlessness of human aspiration and the “pitiless arms of the crowd.” And what is liberation if not the embrace of “the simplest ethical commandments”? “For thousands of years, different moral teachers (Socrates, Christ, Buddha, etc.) have been preaching so-called good,” but their prescriptions have been mutually contradictory and incomplete because they have been based on life in “antagonistic” societies. It has been “savage morality, slave morality, or beggars’ morality—not the morality of a rational, free, and developed society, and thus not fully simple, not primary.” True virtue is contingent on revolution. “Only in the world of insatiable utopia will the simplest ethical rules become real and free from exceptions and contradictions.”

The same is true of love, the “moving force” of ethics in a society liberated from social contradictions. At present, it is circumscribed by personal interests, limited in forms of expression, and “mixed with hatred (albeit the ‘sacred’ kind).” “Over there,” it will “reveal without shame all of its profound tenderness and its charity without embellishment, without the tinkling bells of magnanimity and philanthropy.” This idea seems utopian because it sounds “ethereal, ‘illuminated,’ and a bit banal,” but of course it is not a utopia because all it means is that people will be able to “live and work joyfully and intensely.” It will be “the kind of ‘good time when any grief is easy to bear,’… a time of real social health, as opposed to having one’s head up in the clouds.” (The “easy to bear” quotation comes from Knut Hamsun’s Victoria, a universal “student” favorite about the life-sustaining power of ethereal love.)

This “luminous faith” (lucide croyance) is not only faith “but also certitude and clairvoyance.” “It is with this luminous, radiant, burning certitude in his eyes that the huge, massive (gourd), heavy, and lumbering blacksmith … swings his hammer.” At the end of his letter, Osinsky claims that his “sometimes spare, inaccurate, and not always rhythmical” translation is much truer to the original than Valery Briusov’s smooth, rhymed version. “You cannot parrot the blacksmith, you have to be him—him … dont l’éspoir ne dévie vers les doutes ni les affres—jamais [him, whose hope does not ever stray toward doubt or fear].” To stress the point, Osinsky suddenly changes his tone and adds: “Tell me, A.M., does this blacksmith—énorme et gourd—remind you of anyone by any chance?”¹⁰³

■ ■ ■

But the tallest, biggest, bluntest, and loudest of Russia’s blacksmiths was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In January 1914, “handsome and twenty-two,” he arrived in Odessa as part of a Futurist traveling show also featuring David Burliuk and Vasily Kamensky. “All three,” according to a newspaper report, “were wearing top hats, yellow blouses, and overcoats with radishes in their lapels.” As they were walking along the embankment on the first evening of their visit, Kamensky noticed “an absolutely extraordinary girl: tall, shapely, with magnificent, shining eyes—in short, a real beauty.” He pointed her out to Mayakovsky, who “turned around, looked her slowly up and down, and then suddenly seemed to become extremely agitated. ‘Listen, you two stay here, or do whatever you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel in … well, in a while.’”¹⁰⁴

The girl’s name was Maria Denisova, but Mayakovsky called her “La Gioconda.” She was twenty years old. Originally from Kharkov, she had moved to Odessa to attend a gymnasium but had later dropped out and enrolled in sculpture classes at an art studio.¹⁰⁵ The next day, the three Futurists were invited to dinner at her older sister’s house. According to Kamensky,

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Maria Denisova

The dinner at La Gioconda’s turned into a triumph of poetry. We spent most of the time reciting poems and saying very special, festive things. Volodia was inspired…. He talked a great deal and was very smart and witty…. I will never forget the way he read his poetry that evening.

When we got back to our hotel, it took us a long time to get over the tremendous impression Maria had made on us.

Burliuk was silent, but looked meaningfully at Volodia, who kept pacing nervously back and forth, unsure about what to do or how to deal with this sudden eruption of love…. He kept asking quietly over and over again:

“What should I do? What can I do? Should I write a letter? But wouldn’t that look stupid? I love you. What more can I say?”¹⁰⁶

He did write a letter—not at all like the one from Tatiana to Onegin (“I am writing to you, what more can I say”), but a love letter nonetheless. He called it “The Thirteenth Apostle,” but then, when the censors objected, renamed it A Cloud in Pants. Its addressee was God, among many others, and its subject was the end of love—and everything else.

On the Futurists’ last day in Odessa, Maria told Mayakovsky to wait for her in his hotel room at 4:00 p.m. Two days later, on the train between Nikolaev and Kishinev, Mayakovsky began to recite:¹⁰⁷

You think it’s delirium? Malaria?

It happened.

Happened in Odessa,

“I’ll see you at four,” said Maria.

Eight,

Nine,

Ten.

Past midnight, and many anguished stanzas later, she finally came.

You entered,

brusque, matter-of-fact,

torturing the suede of your gloves,

and said:

“Guess what,

I’m getting married.”

Fine.

Go ahead.

I’ll be all right.

Can’t you see I’m perfectly calm?

Like the pulse of a corpse.

Remember?

You used to say:

“Jack London,

money,

love,

passion,”

but all I could see

was you—La Gioconda

whom someone was bound to steal.

And did.

His revenge would be terrible. “Remember! Pompeii perished when they mocked Vesuvius.” But of course Pompeii was doomed in any case. Like Sverdlov and Osinsky, Mayakovsky had known all along that there would be earthquakes and famines, and that brother would betray brother to death, and children would rebel against their parents and have them put to death, and the sun would be darkened, and the moon would not give its light, and the stars would fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies would be shaken. Like Sverdlov and Osinsky, Mayakovsky connected a doomed love to a doomed world. Impossible loves were but reminders of impossible lives. The days of distress were but signs of the prophet’s election and the world’s violent end.

I,

mocked and cast aside,

like an endless

dirty joke,

can see through the mountains of time

him

whom no one else can see.

There,

beyond the scope of feeble vision,

at the head of the hungry hordes,

in its thorny crown of revolutions,

strides the year

1916.

I am his John the Baptist;

I am where the pain is—

everywhere;

in each drop of the tear stream

I nailed myself to the cross.

It’s too late for forgiveness,

I’ve burned the souls that nurtured compassion.

And that is much harder than taking

a hundred million Bastilles!

And when,

with rebellion

his advent heralding,

you step forth to greet your savior,

I’ll rip out

my soul,

stomp on it,

make it big,

and hand it to you—

all bloodied, for a banner.

But no, it is he, the “spat-upon Calvarian,” who is the Savior. His Maria is Mary, the Mother of God, and he is, “maybe, the most beautiful of her sons.”

In Heaven, he asks God his Father to build a merry-go-round on the tree of knowledge of good and evil and offers to bring in the best-looking Eves from the city’s back alleys.¹⁰⁸

Not interested?

Shaking your shaggy head?

Giving me the big frown?

You don’t really think

that creep with the wings

standing behind you

knows the meaning of love?

. . . . . . . . . . .

You, the almighty,

came up with a pair of hands,

made sure everyone got a head,

so why couldn’t you come up with a way

for us to kiss and kiss and kiss

without this torture?

I thought you were really powerful, a god almighty

but you’re just a drop-out, a puny little godlet.

Look, I’m bending down

to pull out a cobbler’s knife

from inside my boot.

Winged scoundrels!

Cringe in your paradise

Ruffle your feathers as you tremble in fright!

And you, the one with the incense breath,

I’ll split you open from here to Alaska!

Heaven would be exposed for the joke it is, but—as in the original Revelation—the last and decisive slaughter would take place on earth. The hungry would crawl out of the swamp, and the well-fed—Voronsky’s “driveling, hiccuping, lip-smacking” meat-market butchers—would hang in place of the bloody carcasses. The theft of La Gioconda would be avenged.

Come on, you

meek, sweaty little starvelings

festering in your flea-ridden muck!

Let’s turn Mondays and Tuesdays

into holidays

by dipping them in blood!

Let the Earth, at knifepoint, think again

about whom it has chosen to pick on!

The Earth,

grown fat,

like Rothschild’s lover,

used up and left to rot.

Let the flags flap in the heat of the gunfire

The way they do on any decent holiday—

And you, lampposts, hoist up

the shopkeepers’

bloody carcasses.

I outswore,

outbegged,

outstabbed myself,

sank my teeth into someone’s flesh.

The sunset, red as the Marseillaise,

Shuddered as it breathed its last.¹⁰⁹