The Other Russia

Lecture 8

The KPRF, the RKRP, the pretty much thinned-out Anpilov supporters and the smaller orthodox “communist” organizations and even the “terrorist” Gubkin and the RKSM (Bilevsky’s) still consider the “proletariat”, “the working people”, as they say, as a revolutionary class. They are looking on “Marxism-Leninism” as Jews on the Covenant tables brought to them by Moses. The “communists” are wrong. For some reason they suppose that the poor are necessarily violent. In Marx’s times the proletariat was in fact in terrible conditions, they were indeed working 12 hours a day. Yes, they were living in moist and frozen lodgings. So emotionally they were on the most extreme, at any moment ready to hysterical protest and burst, society brink. Their life was so bad that even a torture chamber was not too terrible for them compared to a factory. In a sense, they really had nothing to lose besides shackles. They were the most inveterate, after the convicts maybe. It is in this sense that they were revolutionary. That is, in case of disorders organized by others it was possible to hope on the participation of these inveterate factory workers. Because of their hard life they could be easily excited and easily fell for panic and rebellion emotions.

However, even already a half century after the publication of the “Communist Manifesto” by 1900, workers, even in Russia were not living so desperately. They simply lived steadily bad. As for the revolution’s organization, or its preparation, then the proletariat added to Lenin’s strong cohort of narodovoltzi [People’s Will members] and SRs [Socialist-Revolutionists] not more but even less than other classes. Perovskaia, Kibalchich, Grinevitsky, Alexandre Ulianov, as it is known, were not workers. Totally accidentally in Lefortovo’s castle library happened to be a very instructive research of R. A. Gorodnitsky “The Fighting Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1901-1911”. And there I discovered rare and amazing data about the origin of SRs fighters.

“The Combat Organization in 1903-1906 comprised 13 women and 51 men.

The estate origin of CO members looks as follows: 13 nobles, 3 honorary citizens, 5 priests children, 10 merchants children, 27 middle class people and 6 peasants. The CO administration comprised 2 individuals of noble origin, 3 merchants sons and 2 middle class persons”.

The educational level of the CO for the studied period: 6 members had a higher education, 28 an incomplete higher, 24 – a middle, 6 – a primary one… The numbers – concludes Gorodnitsky – reveal the principal environment from which CO members were recruited – the student community of higher educational institutions”.

Interesting is also the national CO composition: 43 Russians, 19 Jews and 2 Poles.

By age: “It is precisely young people 20-30 years old who composed the skeleton of the CO” ascertains Gorodnitsky.

One cannot dismiss this depressing for the proletariat statistics with the remark that well, the socialist-revolutionaries – it’s a party that put the allotment of land to the peasants as its main task and so then there was no workers. Gorodnitsky specially specifies that the Combat Organization of the SRs strikingly differed from the SRs party and in essence was a different organization – the Combat Organization of the entire Russian revolution. “For many CO members of 1903-1906 the strict ideological canons of the PSR were too narrow and their presence and work in the CO they regarded as the service to the entire Russian revolution, which after the victory, as the fighters hoped, ought to produce a radical reconstruction of society on socialistic grounds”.

That’s that. The avant-garde of the entire Russian revolution: 13 nobles, 27 petty bourgeoisie commoners, a horde of half-taught students and not a single worker. But maybe in the following years in this very Russia’s efficient revolutionary organization (the Bolsheviks in comparison were still meddling in their swaddling clothes) workers have entered and peasants dominated?

Here are the data about the CO in 1907-1909. 7 men and 3 women (the epoch of Azef’s exposure, the organization was going through hard times).

The estate origin: 6 commoners, 2 merchants children, 1 priest son, 1 peasant.

The educational level: 3 CO members had a higher education, 3 – an incomplete higher, 4 – a middle one.

In 1909-1911 the CO comprised 13 men and 4 women.

The estate origin of CO members: 6 nobles, 1 honorary citizen, 3 merchants children, 1 priest son, 5 commoners and 1 peasant.

The national composition: 11 Russians, 3 Jews, 1 Ukrainian, 1 Latvian and 1 Pole.

The educational level: 2 persons had a higher education, 8 – an incomplete higher, 5 – a middle, 2 – a primary one.

Again – not a single worker!

Undoubtedly workers marched with Gapon to the czar the 9th January, during the revolutionary uprising of 1905 even the entire workers district “The Red Presnya” distinguished itself but these are cases of “stirrings that were organized by others”.

Let’s leave the proletariats. Let’s take a closer look on a identikit of who was shaking the Russian Empire in the very beginning of this century and prepared a revolution. It is a half-taught student of a higher educational institution, Russian (One in four is Jew), from 20 to 30 years old, originally from the middle class, that is petty bourgeoisie. Lets have a look on CO leaders. The founder of the Combat Organization Gershuni Gregory Andreevich (Gersh) was born in 1870 in Kovensk province. The family was registered to the middle estate. In 1885 he was sent to study as an apothecary. In 1887-1888 he works in a pharmacy in Kronschtadt. He moves to Petersburg. He works as an apothecary until 1895. In Petersburg he befriends literary men, artists, students. He writes the short story “How to be” in which is described the murder of one of the members of a revolutionary circle suspected in provocation. In 1895 Gershuni went to Kiev and entered as a free listener the courses of the medicine faculty of the university of St Vladimir. In Mars 1896 he is arrested, he is incriminated with participation in an anti-government association “The Allied Council of Kiev’s student organizations and land affiliations”. He got off with nothing more than a light fright. Having passed the exams to become pharmacist he moved again to Petersburg. Later he came to Moscow, worked in bacteriology courses, then in the institute of experimental medicine. In Spring 1898 he goes to Minsk, begins to offer services to revolutionary groups, sets up a workshop of machines for illegal typographies, creates a passports bureau, sends illegal persons over the border etc. Finally he joins the circle “Workers party of political liberation of Russia” in 1899. In 1990 he is arrested. Accidentally freed. Shifts to an illegal position. In Summer 1901 he travels around Nijni Novgorod, Ufa, Voronej, Saratov, Samara setting up contacts everywhere. In September 1901 he began to recruit people for the Combat Organization. The first terrorist act happened the 2nd of April 1902. The assassination of the minister of intern affairs Sipyagin in Petersburg.

Boris Victorivich Savinkov (It is precisely his “Memories of a Terrorist” who brought the CO its historical fame) was born in 1879 in Kharkov in the family of the comrade of the public prosecutor of the military district court. Savinkov completed gymnasium in Warsaw in 1897. In December of the same year, 18 years old, Warsaw’s gendarmerie administration called him to account for participation in student unrests connected to the opening in Warsow of a monument to the suppresser of the Polish uprising of 1863-1864 the count M. N. Muraviev. Savinkov is handed under the open surveillance of the police. In 1897 Savinkov entered the juridical faculty of the Petersburg University. But already in 1899 he was fired from the University because of student unrests and called for preliminary investigation on the case of a group of students who had assembled in an “Organizational Committee”. In the end of 1899 Savinkov passed the border and during two years he studied at the juridical faculties of the Berlin and Heidelberg universities. In Fall 1900 Savinkov came to Varshava for the execution of his military duty but was “declared completely incapable for military service”. Savinkov draws closer with social-democrats, enters the group “Workers’ banner” and together with P. M. Rutenberg founds the group “Socialist”. In 1901, in Spring Savinkov is arrested on the case of these social-democratic organizations. In December 1901 the investigation is completed. In the beginning of 1902 Savinkov is exiled to Vologda. In Spring 1903 Savinkov joins the SR party. In June of the same year he escapes from Vologda to Archangelsk, and from there to Norway, after in Geneva where he meets a member of the Central Committee of the SRs party – Gotz. He is 24 years old, he is already a professional revolutionary.

From the attacks that had made the CO famous three are prominent: the murder by Stephan Balmashev of the minister Sipyagin, the murder by Egor Sozonov the 15 July 1904 of V. K. Pleve and the assassination by Ivan Kalyaev the 4 February 1905 of the Great prince Sergei Alexandrovich. Kalyaev was executed the 10 May of the same year. There is a lot of material about him in the “Memories” of Savenko, just as about Egor Sozonov. From all of the CO heroes Kalyaev, – a poet and an inspired revolutionary – was a finished type of the most fanatical adherent to uncompromising means of struggle. His entire life threw a challenge not only to the existing political regime in Russia but was also a revolt against the unjust bases of world creation.

Stephan Balmashev was born in 1881 in the family of hereditary nobles of the Archangelsk province. At the same time his father is an old revolutionary-populist. In 1899 he enters the Kazan university from where he is transferred to the Kiev one on the juridical faculty. For participation in a student meeting Balmashev was excluded from the university and given to military service for a year. The 23 January 1901 having came (he was not yet sent to the army) in the building of the Kiev university, Stephan brought with him a few glass pipes filled with a foul-smelling liquid which he trampled with his feet in the closet room of the university with the goal of stopping the lectures. He was arrested and unauthorized manuscripts were found, and also notes and messages related to his acquaintances. The 10 April 1901 Balmashev was liberated form guard under the surveillance of the military authorities in the city of Roslavl of the Smolensk province. Soon after he resigned for a six months leave and came to Simferopol and then the 30 July 1901 in Kharkov but even there he did not stay, went to Kiev where he stayed until December 1901 and then left in Saratov. In this city Balmashev had tight contacts with the SRs. (The acquaintance of Balmashev with Gershuni happened in 1901 in Kiev.) The Saratov SRs provided Balmashev with the means for the commitment of a terrorist act.

The 2 April 1902 in the building of the Committee of Ministers came Balmashev, disguised in an adjutant uniform and having awaited the arrival of Sipyagin, made too shots at him. (Sipyagin diseased after an hour and a half). After the shots Balmashev said loudly: “That’s what should be done with these people”. The next day it was Balmashev’s birthday – he was now 21 years old. The 3 May at four o’clock in the morning Balmashev was hanged in the yard of the Shlisserburg fortress. Stephan declined the confession and the Eucharist, on seeing the priest he said: I don’t want to deal with hypocrites.”

That’s the kind of people, frenzied, restless, today they would be called misfits, who were the material for the most revolutionary organization of the beginning of the century Russia. And for all revolutionary organizations in essence. Not only of Russia. Precisely frenzied, restless, changing places of study, service, work, place of residence and even life style. These are all the first characteristics of misfits. Misfits were also the Great Leaders of future powerful political movements that had blown up Europe. Before becoming a corporal and then chancellor of Germany Adolph Hitler bummed in Vienna seven years, lived in shelters, made drawings of Vienna’s sightseeings, walked around in a long coat to the heels like Lautreamont (Hitler, by the way, looks like Edgar Poe, did anybody beside me remark it?), shared his den with a bum, who sold his drawings. All of this is usually omitted in biographies but it is precisely the youth, the years that form a person that are important. There, in Vienna, in the shadow of magnificent cathedrals, among splendid museums, near the luxurious burgers mansions, how he must have suffered, the unknown to everyone vagrant Adolph! And how he started to hate Vienna and how after as a reichchancellor in 1938 he must have rejoiced driving into the hostile at a time city accompanied by the welcoming shouts of the million-size population. The young Stalin was also a misfit, it suffices to look at his early picture – young, with a small beard, in a flimsy scarf drawn into the little jacket. Benito Mussolini, a loud-voiced socialist from the little village of Predappio bummed in the wealthy Switzerland, spent the nights under bridges, was arrested by the police, worked as a construction worker, worked on a can plant, walked, stared, envied, hated. Later he affirmed that he met with Lenin in Zurich and Geneva. Mussolini is a big mouthed Italian… They all avidly read, wrote, studied bit by bit, vagabonded, wrote poetry and searched a long time what to do. Vladimir Lenin did not bum but he too was not the quietest jury attorney, brother of the executed for an unsuccessful regicide older brother, a professional revolutionary almost from 17, at 27 already an exiled, at 30 an immigrant, a cruel and strange weirdo. When in Russia the February revolution happened he wanted to fly over the military fields of Europe in a balloon! Or to ride a train with the documents of a deaf-mute Swede! Say, what a type! In humiliations, in poverty, in sufferings the leaders of the Great parties had experienced enlightenments: illuminations about their mission.

And the brothers-in-arms of the Leaders of the Great Parties of Europe! Around them joined poets, provincial journalists, writers (at random: Goebbels, Trotsky, Marinetti, Lunacharsky), strange women (the first to come: Inessa Armand, Anjelica Balabanoff, Kollontai, Leni Rifenschtal, Larisa Reisner), strange military (Ludendorff, Ernst Rem, the count Ciano, Tukhachevsky, Fruntze), psychopaths, countless extravagant types of half-thugs half-revolutionaries (at random: Kotovsky, Dzerjinsky, Camo, Horst Wessel).

Lenin possibly clearly saw this paradox: the first proletarian revolution was organized and performed not by the proletarians but by misfits, hysterical people, tramps, demagogues, orators, half-educated people, bums and all kind of rolling stones. Later the sailors and the peasants and the workers dared to arrive at what already happened, yes. However, they were not the first in the revolution business, they are not its fathers, – they joined later.

And here a mistake was committed. Lenin himself is guilty here because nobody except him could have done that. As a founding father, he should have left tables where he should have stated clearly, according to which criterias should diamonds be chosen in the dung. Like Buddhists have special criterias of selection of the dalai-Lama and the Panchen-Lama. He should have said in his tables: “In the future for purposes of public service look for the talents among misfits, among weird, hysterical, poetic people, among lunatics, but not among the workers or some peasants, unless you’ll fall on a really unusual exemplar. God forbid you, comrades successors, to look among the stable classes of the population”. However, Lenin did not keep any such instruction. The insolence and honesty to declare that only a party consisted of talented misfits, poets, prophets and psychopaths is capable of carrying out a revolution lacked to Lenin. The magic of the absolute justice of the revolution in the name of the majority forced him to preserve and support the ideological lie: a proletarian, fourth estate revolution for the sake of the majority (of the workers). (Accordingly the fascists in Germany affirmed that they made their 1933 revolution for the volk – the people, the Italian fascists did theirs for the Italian nation.) But they just had to admit that the majority (proletariat, volk, nation) is untalented and is not capable to win or to defend its interests. Later this ideological lie had disastrous consequences, it catastrophically reflected on the quality of the party staff who came to replace the first heroic staff of misfits. The official lie about the special revolutionary character of the proletarians (after them the most revolutionary were considered the peasants and the third were the soldiers, who know why) became branded with glowing red letters in the legacy of the Bolsheviks’ communist party.

The leaders were selected and promoted among them, the workers and peasants by origin were encouraged.

They were not interested or forgot the data about the estate origin of the SRs Combat Organization personnel or the personnel of the Central Committee. The party believed that the proletariat is the crown of creation when it was just a pretext for the seizure of power by the best – the misfits, psychos, outcasts. To what this has lead is common knowledge: a total nobody came from the country – the little son of a kolkhoz director, the dumbhead Misha Gorbatchev and then the Sverldlov dumbhead – Boris Yeltsin, and the State created by the genius of madmen, sadists, poets, butchers, the extraordinary State collapsed. That’s what a wrong personnel policy means.

One should have tracked in workshops of bohemia, in prisons, in asylums – strange individuals – that’s what should have been done. Possessed, composing poetry, talking in sleep on unknown languages. One should have taken in the 70s in the Central Committee Vladimir Bukovski, Natan Sharansky, Eduard Kuznetsov and Volodia Gershuni! (I knew the grandson of the terrorist in 1968-70. We even lived for some time under the same roof. Half of Volodka’s life was spent in prisons and asylums. Regardless of the ideological divergences I respected him. With Savinkov we are tied through Kharkov, place of his birth and I spent there my childhood and early youth.) But to take such delinquent, but vigorous people those who would have taken them in the CK should have been geniuses themselves! It is a paradox but to save a rapidly aging elite and State could only those who attacked it the most furiously…

Looking at our NBP regional organizations we can see with great satisfaction that they are headed by provincial journalists, poets, rockers, punks, half-educated students. There are also a few workers, they are great guys, but they are temporary, accidental workers (and have already become professional revolutionaries) but they are the black sheep of their class and as an exception just confirm the general rule. That is why NBP is not involved with the masses, does not try to make zombies out of the working people (we cannot equal the TV-empires’ ability to propagandize and besot the people). However, NBP conducts a selective propaganda, recognizing and organizing the active minority – the misfits. In the 60s-70s the European leftists also turned to the proletariat – they stayed near the factories entrances flooding the workers with propaganda leaflets but after looking on themselves in the mirror, after comparing themselves with the proletarians and after reflecting on who they were they put forward the theory that the most revolutionary class are students. We, the NBP, though among the members of the party a part are students, we don’t think that the students is a special revolutionary class. To this day the pupils of senior classes of schools beat them and leave them far behind by revolutionism. But even this is not a truth in last instance. The revolutionary classes do not exist at all. A revolutionary character is either is or is not. So the most revolutionary type of individual is the misfit: a strange, unorganized person living on society’s margin, a talented pervert, fanatic, psychopath, unlucky fellow. One should not think that there are too few of those for a revolutionary party. There are hundreds of thousands of marginal persons if not millions. This is a whole social group. A part of misfits fills the ranks of the criminal word. The best have to be with us.