by I. J. Singer
“Comrades,” he began, “all the power to the soldiers and workers. I urge you to desert. Don’t shed your blood for the imperialist powers. Point your rifles against your true enemy—the bourgeoisie. Seize the factories from the manufacturers, seize the land from the gentry, and distribute it among yourselves. Do this, and all the workers and peasants of the world will follow your lead. An end to the war!”
At first, his tough words were received with mockery and contempt by the other party leaders. The newspapers jumped in to defame him. What could you expect from a man who had returned to Russia by sufferance of the enemy? After all, he had come in a sealed German railroad car. He had been encouraged in this by the German high command in return for his promise to turn his countrymen against the war. If he, a Russian, could do such a thing, he was a pawn and a traitor who deserved whatever the liberated masses did to him.
At meetings, the leaders of other parties castigated him mercilessly. Only a fanatic, a doctrinaire without a grasp of reality, could propose that Russia abrogate her responsibility to her allies in such craven fashion and subject her to German reactionaries who would enslave her once again. The Russian people weren’t such cowards. They had given their lives to defend their country, and they would go on doing so. Only after victory was theirs would they build a socialist system.
There was no place in revolutionary Russia for the policy he and his lackeys advocated. The best thing would be to let them dig their own graves with their words rather than punish them and make martyrs of them.
The humorists had a field day with the squat bald man whose physical appearance lent itself so well to burlesque and caricature.
The smear campaigns left him unmoved. He smiled at his distorted image in the cartoons. He didn’t care what they said about him. He didn’t bother to justify his arrival in a sealed German railroad car. He ignored the accusations that he had been paid off by the enemy. He didn’t even bother to defend himself against charges of being a German spy.
“Comrade, you must counter these accusations,” his associates advised. “Your name and honor are being besmirched.”
He smiled at them mockingly. “What for? Soldiers and workers don’t read newspapers, and peasants don’t read at all. As for the intellectuals, I couldn’t care less what they think of me. Russia needs two things only—peace and land. That’s the only thing the soldiers and peasants understand.…”
“But it’s a matter of morality,” his colleagues argued.
“We’re not middle-class brides who need to guard their good name. We have one concern—the revolution.…”
He knew what he was about, the squat man. He gauged the mood of the Russian people perfectly. The soldiers, who were tired of war and who longed for their homes and wives, didn’t care how he had arrived from abroad. They cared even less about Russia’s allies, or about the spring offensive their generals had promised to launch in order to draw Ludendorff’s armies away from the western front. Their only concern—as the bald man kept reiterating—was peace and land.
With the speed of fire leaping from roof to roof, these two words carried through the streets, barracks, harbors, trenches, factories, squares, and plazas.
When the powers that be saw that matters were growing serious—even alarming—they stopped the smear campaigns against the squat man. To counter his influence, they sent out their most eloquent speakers accompanied by bands and singers to rekindle the patriotic spirit of the troops. They mobilized new units, furnished them with the finest equipment, and shipped them off to the front to the strains of the “Marseillaise” to launch the spring offensive. But the huge military body had already been infected with the tiny bacillus of “peace and land,” which promptly proceeded to consume the body from within. The soldiers threw down their rifles and hurried home on trains and on foot to their wives and their land.
Following the first uprising instigated by the squat man in July, the government ceased the war of words it had launched against him and resorted to force. The uprising was put down, and the squat man along with his lieutenants was formally charged with treason and with conspiring with the German general staff. Some of his comrades surrendered voluntarily in order to stand trial and to prove their innocence, but he went underground among the sailors of Kronstadt. The notion of subjecting himself to a trial struck him as preposterous.
His colleagues tried to reason with thim. They pointed out the need to absolve himself of all charges as a matter of honor, but he waved their suggestions aside. “Honor is for dancing teachers,” he sneered. “Our job is to get on with the revolution.”
He pointed to his devoted disciple who had elected to join him in hiding. “He’s the only one with any sense.”
One of his associates tried to warn him about his disciple. “You can’t trust him … he swings with the breeze. He isn’t motivated by revolutionary principles, only by his own ambitions.”
The squat man smiled caustically. “You know the old Russian proverb: ‘On a well-run farm, every pile of dung comes in handy.’ He does good work for the revolution.”
At first, he was sure that his enemies would flush him out and execute him along with his confederates. That was what he would have done in their place. But to his relief, he realized that they were dedicated democrats who were afraid to act boldly and decisively, and he resumed his seditious activities, inundating the soldiers and sailors with propaganda to desert the front and strive for peace and land.
The government leaders sent out their spokesmen to cities, towns, and villages, to factories and clubs. Across the length and breath of Russia, skilled orators urged the citizens to choose delegates so that a parliament of deputies elected by the people could begin to govern the land according to its wishes.
The squat man knew that his party was too small to win control of the people of Russia, and he, therefore, concentrated all his efforts on the soldiers and sailors in order to recruit armed men to his side.
He conceded to his opponents the body; all he wanted was the head.
And by autumn he had got his way. One wintry night in October, his sailors took over the capital. Railway depots, telegraph stations, telephone exchanges, water works, garrisons—everything was seized simultaneously. The Winter Palace, where the government was conducting its endless conferences, was menaced by gaping cannon and fieldpieces.
In the first days, when the squat man hadn’t felt secure enough to seize power, he had sent emissaries to his opponents, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats to join him in forming a coalition government composed of the socialist parties. His comrades had been upset. “How can we work with them?” they lamented.
“Once we’re strong enough, we’ll send them to hell,” he had explained to them, as if to naïve children.
The opposition parties had consoled themselves with their triumph. Of the 703 deputies gathered at the Tauride Palace for the opening session of the Constituent Assembly, a mere 160 had been Bolsheviks. But the squat man knew what he was about. His opponents had the votes, but he had the guns. All the streets, squares, telegraph stations, depots, fortresses, prisons, and trains were controlled by his soldiers and sailors, and he laughed at his skittish comrades. On the first day of the session he ordered his troops to cow and humiliate the deputies of the other parties. They were made to walk a gauntlet into the Tauride Palace while the soldiers and sailors cursed and spat upon them.
“Counterrevolutionaries! Sellouts! Capitalist lackeys! Warmongers!” they cried as the terrified deputies shuffled between them. “We’ll string you up to every lamppost!”
Among the deputies were two old revolutionaries from Lodz—Nissan Eibeshutz and Pavel Szczinski, who had shared exile in Siberia, who had studied together, escaped together, worked in Lodz for the revolution, and later met in Kresty Prison again.
The revolution had freed them both, and now they were on their way to the Tauride Palace as delegates of the people, but there the similarity ended. Szczinski wore a uni
form and a pistol strapped to his side. He was now a trusted follower of the squat bald man.
Nissan, on the other hand, wore a ragged, unbuttoned coat with the pockets stuffed with newspapers, brochures, theses, and resolutions. He still believed in the power of the word, not the gun, in justice and in the voice of the people, which was like the voice of God.
“Hang the traitors! Shoot them! Blast them to hell!” the sailors growled in their rage.
Nissan tugged at Szczinski’s sleeve. “See what you have sowed?”
Szczinski started to mumble something, but Nissan cut him off. “Is it I who is being called the counterrevolutionary, the capitalist lackey, the sellout? … Tell me!”
His friend bowed his head. He didn’t dare look Nissan in the eye.
The Tauride Palace resembled a huge barrack, rather than a house of parliament. Soldiers with rifles and hand grenades were everywhere. Steel bayonets glittered their icy rage. The gallery was filled with tattooed sailors. “We ought to clean out the whole counterrevolutionary nest with machine guns!” they cried, their fingers closing on the triggers of their Mausers and Nagants.
Foreign correspondents looked on in disbelief. Never had they witnessed such an opening of parliament.
The first to take the floor were the adherents of the squat man. They proposed that the Constituent Assembly acknowledge their party’s authority to the world and ratify all its laws.
The deputies of the other parties took umbrage. “Down with dictators!” they cried. “The Constituent Assembly does not bow to you—you must bow to it, the will of the people!”
One of the Bolsheviks took out a resolution the squat man had prepared in advance and proceeded to read it: “Inasmuch as the Constituent Assembly is an obsolete form of representation by the people, a form unsuitable for a time when the proletariat is threatened by its enemy, the bourgeoisie, and the revolution is in danger—this assembly is hereby dissolved.”
The deputies launched a storm of protest. They pounded on tables and waved their arms, but at that moment Pavel Szczinski gave a prearranged signal to the soldiers and sailors. With Mausers and Nagants held shoulder high, they cleared the hall of the people’s deputies.
Their heads bowed, deeply humiliated, the deputies slunk out into the dark streets of Petrograd. No streetcars were running; no streetlights were lit; no buildings were open. Only uniformed men milled through the streets. Armed with rifles and grenades and behung with bandoliers, they swaggered along the Nevsky Prospekt, smoking, laughing, cursing.
At all squares and monuments stood artillery pieces, muzzles pointing high. Field kitchens sent sparks shooting all around. A sailor played a gay tune on a concertina.
Nissan stumbled along in a daze of despair and disappointment. How many years had he waited for the first meeting of the freely elected deputies of a liberated Russia? How much torture, starvation, confinement, and deprivation had he endured to attain this day? And now, to be kicked out like a leprous dog.… And by whom? Not by the tsar’s bullyboys, not by bourgeois lackeys, but by his own kind! He felt as betrayed and degraded as he had that May Day long ago, when the gentiles had transformed the celebration of the workers’ freedom into an assault upon the Jews.
He crawled into the narrow cot in his dingy room and heaved into the pillow, lamenting the glorious day of redemption from which he had been so unjustly excluded.
The sound of gunfire kept echoing into the night.
Fifty-Eight
BETWEEN THE TROOPS of the Polish Legion that Commander Marcin Kuczinski had sent to Lodz to recruit youth and the German soldiers occupying the city, a state of deep animosity prevailed.
Ever since they had been forced to go to war as allies, the Germans had had nothing but contempt for the Austrians and for all the nationalities under their command, which included the Polish legionnaires. A major problem was one of communication. The Austrian Army encompassed Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Jews, Ruthenians, Bosnians, Rumanians, even gypsies, most of whom knew no German outside of the few military commands.
Besides, after a drop too much, soldiers of these nationalities were inclined to express their hatred of Germans, who, accustomed to a single land, a single language, and a single set of customs, didn’t take kindly to such criticism and looked askance at the Austrians for failing to discipline their subject nations and turn them into proper Teutons.
“Hey, you kitche, pitche, mitche!” the Germans mocked their allies’ jargons.
Besides, the Austrians were such poor fighting men that they invariably retreated before the Russians, forcing them, the Germans, to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. And they, the kaiser’s troops, were, therefore, repelled by the sight of their ineffectual allies in their puttees, their silly little caps, and profusion of chauvinistic insignia.
The German officers regarded their Austrian counterparts as scum often consisting of sons of shopkeepers, peasants, or even Jews from Tarnopol and other parts of Galicia. You never could tell what kind of lowlife you might encounter at the Officers’ Club or at a ball. And the Germans made sure to commandeer the best living quarters for themselves, leaving the dregs to the Austrians, and to take over all the important commands.
German enlisted men pretended they didn’t see Austrian officers and failed to salute them. Or if they saluted, they did it so sloppily that it seemed more contemptuous than not saluting at all. If the Austrian officers reported the oversight, the German officers made a show of dressing down their men, but they did it with such tongue in cheek, that the German soldiers knew it was all right to keep ignoring their allies.
Following the Austrians’ most recent routs during the Russian spring offensive and their inevitable rescue by the Germans, the enmity between the two allies had grown even more intense. The Germans even made obscene allusions to the initials K and K which stood for Kaiserlich and Königlich—royal and imperial, the title by which the Hapsburg House was known—and this evoked added rage and humiliation among the Austrians.
But the Germans were even more scornful of the Polish Legion, which had been founded in Austria and which functioned as an autonomous force with its own officer corps and uniforms, and they made fun of the legionnaires’ Polish speech, their drooping caps and stirring, patriotic hymns. The moment the Poles started singing about dear old Poland, the Germans retaliated with a ditty of their own:
All their bombs and all their Cossacks,
All their lice and all their Polacks,
We don’t begrudge the Russky sons of bitches
’Cause all they do is give you the itches!
Those Galician legionnaires who understood German seethed, but the German soldiers wouldn’t let up. They completely ignored the legion’s officers despite orders to treat officers of all allied nations with the same respect as their own. Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau’s nape flushed a deep burgundy when the legionnaires entered the city in peasant carts drawn by skinny little Polish horses to recruit the youth of Lodz into their ranks. “Just look at that scurvy crew, would you?” he growled to his adjutant.
He had loathed Poles and considered them on a par with cattle from the time he had employed them on his estates in East Prussia. They worked like slaves for the lowest wages and were content to bed down in barns or even on the bare ground. Like all East Prussian landowners, he had always cast a covetous eye eastward, where land was plentiful and labor cheap. Now that he had the chance to show the Polish and Jewish scum what Germans were made of, the legion had suddenly been thrust upon him to raise his hackles with their blue uniforms straight out of an operetta and their repulsive jargon.
He had no option but to tolerate them. Orders were orders. But he was furious at his superiors in the general staff for visiting this ragtag crew upon him. The Austrians were bad enough, but never in Germany’s glorious history had a foreign legion been permitted to be formed in an occupied land, with its own language, command, and all the other accoutrements of an army within an army.
It
was all the fault of the accursed Austrians with their babel of nations, races, and jargons. They weren’t soldiers, but a pack of swineherds and politicians. Now they had duped the German general staff into allowing a Polish Legion to recruit in the cities.
Baron Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau gritted his aristocratic false teeth. He had orders to provide the Polacks with living quarters, but he saw to it that these were little better than pigsties. He made sure they wouldn’t enjoy themselves in Lodz. He had enough trouble contending with patriotic organizations in the city that nursed silly dreams of an independent Poland. Now the legion would encourage these seditious elements to emerge into the light of day.
Among the officers of the legion arriving in the city was Felix Feldblum, an old friend and fellow conspirator of Marcin Kuczinski’s. After breaking with the Proletariat party, Feldblum had joined Kuczinski in the Polish Socialist party, which combined its struggle for socialism with a quest for an independent Poland.
Just as he had before, Felix Feldblum again toiled selflessly for his new party. He printed proclamations on secret printing presses; he wrote and set the party newspaper; he organized study groups among Polish workers; he translated socialist books; he attended secret party conferences; he went to prison, escaped, was jailed again.
During the 1905 troubles, Feldblum had operated in Lodz, where his implacable enemy had been Pavel Szczinski, who regarded the Polish Socialist party as a vehicle of chauvinism and reaction. Himself a former seminarian, Szczinski detested Polish socialists, who ignored the plight of the working classes to dream of an independent Poland. He sneered at the Jew Feldblum in his role as an alleged Polish patriot.
When the World War broke out, Feldblum was in Galicia, hiding from the gendarmes in Poland. He was arrested in Galicia as a Russian alien, but shortly after, his friend Kuczinski founded the Polish Legion, and Feldblum volunteered for it. Like most Polish socialists, he believed that the greatest obstacle to freedom was tsarist Russia. Along with his comrades he believed that a Poland freed from the Russian yoke would establish itself as a land of brotherhood and equality, and he had placed himself at the side of his friend Kuczinski, just as he always had in the past.