November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  How can we work together in the same factory without mutual trust?

  But, then, what answer had the workers ever been given, except by the police and the Cossacks? How often had anyone addressed them as “fellow countrymen”?

  Dmitriev too was disconcerted by this damnable trait in the educated Russian character. But it was impossible to wipe the educated look from your face. You had to act. Do something about the trench gun, to start with. If the infantry battalions were to have it for the spring campaign there was not a day to lose. But the job called for willing collaborators, not hired mercenaries.

  “Ye-e-es, well …” Dmitriev hadn’t moved, he was still sitting sideways, one arm crooked over the chair back. “Suppose we told the soldiers in the trenches that the gun exists but they won’t get it because men are striking for some reason or other … would it make the slightest sense to any man there?”

  To the rescue! Into the fray! Action now! Overturn all obstacles! That was what Obodovsky understood best and usually did, and he was ready to drop everything there and then and set off for the factory. But, mellowed by the years, he was more aware of one unfortunate failing in himself—his impetuosity, his reluctance to believe that others could act in time and no less effectively, that Russia did in fact have good people and plenty of them.

  From this bare cupboard of a room, without a single machine tool, or so much as a rough file, littered with nothing but blueprints and newspapers, the Obukhov foundry and engineering shop on the Neva side were not a mere eight versts away but over a mountain. So what could they possibly do to speed up the trench gun?

  But just seeing each other had given them all the help they needed. Dmitriev’s resolve, made before his arrival, showed in his intent look: “Right, I’ll go. And speak to them. I’ll get the two key shops together and simply tell them what’s what. Tell them what the trench mortar means and why we mustn’t go slow with it. I’ve arranged with the management to address a meeting when the shift ends today. There’s just one thing, Akimovich, it’s got to be done in agreement with the Workers’ Group. They have to help. That’s why I’m here.”

  “The Workers’ Group?” Obodovsky thought about it. “You’re right, of course. But you don’t know how contrary they’ve become. They’re nailed down so tightly by all those party slogans that they can’t make a move of their own. The Mensheviks reign supreme, and I can’t talk to them. I start swearing at them. Still, having workers’ representatives at the center was the right idea. Kozma is sure to be there now, let’s go and try our luck.”

  He shot out of his chair.

  They had to hurry along Nevsky, cross the road, and go down Liteiny Prospect.

  [31]

  Since then the first war had ended, the smoke of revolution had cleared, the country had been flattened by Soviet steamrollers (and the Cheka had shot Obodovsky), there had been another war, no happier for us than the first, and the Soviet steamrollers had rolled again, but all those who saw Gvozdev in the Spassk division of Steplag in the third decade of the captivity from which he would never escape say that even at seventy, with four numbers slapped on him, Kozma Antonovich preserved, in his eyes and on his brow, that peculiar childlike radiance, that look of startled vulnerability.

  His early life had been simple and untroubled: want had cut short his childhood games, but as a youngster he had a marvelous time laboring for his father, workdays were good and holidays were good, and it left him with a firm back, strong muscles, and sober ways. He was as much at home in the dance as behind the plow, and loved to lead the singing (when he got to Petersburg he never missed Chaliapin at the House of the People). He married at twenty, and took his wife to Rtishchevo, where he was a skillful and diligent mechanic at the railway junction. Being an engine driver’s helper was even better. How they flew along! Then—the revolution, and there was no hiding from it. Everybody became a revolutionary. After that they spent three quiet years in Saratov. Nor did Petersburg disturb their peace to begin with: when war broke out Kozma was already one of the senior turners on the third floor at Ericsson’s, where all the finest metalworkers in Petersburg were concentrated. His work always went with a swing: lathe, cutting tools, and metal all did what he asked, and because of that other workers began calling him by his name and patronymic—Kozma Antonovich—before his years required them to do so.

  This happy state of equilibrium might have lasted in different times, but not in that strange time of political parties, slogans, and war. A year had now passed since all Petersburg factories were called upon to nominate electors, who in turn would choose a Workers’ Group to represent the opinion and the will of the Russian working class employed in war industries. The times were such that there was no avoiding involvement. And since Petersburg had grown used to passing itself off as all Russia (and Russia was used to its doing so), and since Ericsson’s was one of the newest and liveliest factories in Petersburg, and the liveliest and most active shop in Ericsson’s six-story building was that on the third floor, Kozma was suddenly pushed further and further to the fore, out of the crowd, until no other shoulders and elbows touched his own. First on the list of candidates from the factory, from the Vyborg side, from the city, from Russia as a whole, Gvozdev finally stepped to the front of the stage as Russian worker No. 1.

  A step far beyond the stride of any ordinary man. Kozma might have got off lightly, might have sat hidden among hundreds of other delegates, might never have been elected top man, might have remained at ease and obscure, if that first meeting of electors in September 1915 had not been twisted out of shape, denatured and wrecked by the Bolsheviks. The distinctive characteristic of the Bolsheviks is well known: the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were all factions and frictions, there were always thirteen different opinions in each party, whereas the Bolsheviks marched in step, and whether they were voting or just yelling it was with a single voice. Uninvited, un-elected, with no mandate at all, they gate-crashed the electoral meeting in force—it was simply impossible to hold the doors against them. They burst in yelling that this meeting should not be happening, that nobody should be delegated—down with the war! down with the imperialist bourgeoisie! One of their people, a certain Kudryashov from the Putilov factory, had wormed his way into the Presidium expecting to become chairman if his side prevailed. But he was recognized, and the workers saw through the trick: he was not Kudryashov and he wasn’t from the Putilov factory. The Bolsheviks had sidelined Kudryashov, the delegate elected by the Putilov factory, stolen his instructions and altered them to suit themselves. Their howling and shouting disrupted the meeting, so that no elections took place.

  Kozma had always attached more importance to fairness than to anything else. From his early years he liked to see things work out justly, fairly. What most vexed him at the meeting was the unfairness of it. Why did it have to be a shouting match? He described what had happened in a newspaper (helped by literate Mensheviks). He refused to back down, and managed to get another meeting called for November in the Engineers’ Club. This time the doors were strictly controlled and only delegates were admitted, no one could just walk in. So Kozma willy-nilly became chairman of the Workers’ Group. The Workers’ Group was to act in association with the War Industry Committee, to assist it while at the same time protecting workers’ interests.

  At this second meeting speakers said calmly and sensibly what they thought the Workers’ Group was and what it should be doing. Emelyanov, from the Tube Factory, said: We oppose this war, of course, but what must we do to get peace? Russia’s salvation, of course, lies not in military defense, but in the triumph of democracy. The government’s present to the working class has a sting in its tail, and we must unite all the living forces of the country for the struggle for democracy. Marx tells us that the farther east you go, the dirtier the bourgeoisie is, and it’s especially dirty in Russia, but we shall be there criticizing it and egging it on against a regime on its last legs. And through the War Industry Committee we shall
also be helping to organize workers’ democracy.

  Breido, from the Lessner factory, also made a literate speech. Guchkov and Konovalov, he said, are our class enemies, but at certain moments in political life we go hand in hand with the bourgeoisie and give it a bit of a push to the left. It’s no good just shouting, “We’re against everything,” when our nation’s existence is in the balance. The Progressive Bloc’s demands can do us as much good as they can for them: if all Russian citizens are given their freedom it must apply to the workers as much as to anybody. The bourgeoisie is our ally against the government, and together with it we can revolutionize society at large.

  Delegates from Westinghouse said that by joining the War Industry Committee they would be able to prevent increases in productivity at the workers’ expense.

  A speaker from the Putilov factory: We can’t take the view that Germany must be smashed. But we can’t let Russia be smashed either. Defending ourselves against the Germans doesn’t mean that we support the Tsarist government. Russia belongs to Russian working people. By defending Russia the workers are defending their own road to freedom.

  A speaker from the aircraft factory: If we stand aside from the war the cry will go up that we have played into the hands of the Germans and of reaction. Of course, we are joining the War Industry Committee not to manufacture shells but to organize the people’s forces!

  Another speaker from the Tube Factory: We’re joining the committees not to increase shell production but to jolt the country out of its sleeping sickness, to make it end its silence.

  They all seemed to be in agreement. Nobody contradicted anybody, yet there was a mounting unease: rack their brains as they might, they weren’t really sure why they were joining the War Industry Committee. The guard at the door was as strict as ever, and no Bolsheviks got through into the hall except those elected in the factories, a small minority. Yet everyone who spoke seemed to have a wall of enraged Bolsheviks before him, and tried to speak cautiously and unprovocatively, so as not to anger them. What was said seemed clear enough, yet the fog thickened. They spoke in favor of elections, but the loose ends were not tied up. By then it was Kozma’s turn and there was no avoiding it. Speaking not at his workbench, but from a platform, he felt somehow shaky, his ears seemed to be stopped up and only half heard what he was saying, the hall swam, and faced with the Bolsheviks yet again, he felt that this second meeting was all his fault. His mind could not grapple with it all. And what came out was not what Kozma really thought: that we must help our brothers at the front. To say that seemed for some reason impermissible. What came out was somehow apologetic: joining the War Industry Committee is the only way out for the workers, our only hope of emerging from the underground into which we have been driven and in which we are being stifled. The central question in life, he said, was the replacement of landowner power by that of the bourgeoisie, which was now the strongest class economically. (The Mensheviks had given him a few words on a scrap of paper, but he had mislaid it. The few sentences he had memorized he reproduced in a form all his own.) So then, a change of the existing political order was dictated by the infallible logic of life itself. But that did not mean that anyone who defended his country was by doing so refusing to participate in the class struggle. True, the Tsarist government had proved incapable of defending the country, but if Russia lost the war, inasmuch as the German proletariat had betrayed its oath of solidarity, the German Junkers would put a halter around our necks and turn back the wheels of industry in our country. The conditions for successful class warfare would no longer exist, and the workers would be the first to feel the effects. So the choice they must make in spite of everything was to put the weight of worker power into the scales, for the time being, on the side of the bourgeoisie. “We can win freedom only by defending the nation.”

  The Bolsheviks remained an inconsiderable minority, and in defiance of them a Workers’ Group made up of Mensheviks, with a sprinkling of Socialist Revolutionaries, was elected, but they all felt so sheepish, they were all so conscious of the wall of angry faces out there on the street, that having chosen by vote those who would go and assist in defending Russia they went on to vote, under no compulsion, in favor of the directive drafted by the Bolsheviks: in joining the War Industry Committee the workers took no responsibility for its work: the war was being waged not by Russia but by the governing class, for the seizure of markets, the government was irresponsible, the Duma cowardly, hence the aim of the Workers’ Group must be not to help factories in defense work but to convene an All-Russian Workers’ Congress and prepare themselves to take power as a provisional Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. War or no war, the eight-hour workday must be introduced—immediately; complete freedom to exercise trade unions’ rights previously won, and also the inviolability of the person, must be guaranteed—immediately; all land must be—immediately—transferred to the peasants; and there must be an immediate amnesty for all political enemies of the government, and for all terrorists still in jail or at hard labor in places of exile.

  Shackled by these instructions, and mystified by its own existence—had it been created to help industry defend the country or to fight Tsarist autocracy?—the Workers’ Group reported to Guchkov’s Central War Industry Committee and was given two rooms with a telephone, and a salaried secretary with an assistant and two clerks, also paid by the committee, in its second building, on the Liteiny Prospect, beyond the junction with Zhukovskaya Street. There it operated openly as the only legal workers’ organization in Russia. (Trade unions and workers’ clubs had been suspended at the beginning of the war, and there were few factories in which shop stewards had survived, even where the Bolsheviks did not prevent their election.) The Workers’ Group was given the right to circularize its branches in other towns, to disseminate its proceedings and resolutions—not in the form of grubby little underground leaflets, but exquisitely printed on the best white paper—to make the rounds of towns and factories, to assemble large bodies of workers for consultation without a police presence. It even, without authorization, proclaimed its own political immunity, equating itself with the party groups in the State Duma! (Left to himself, Kozma would never have thought of that, but he was persuaded to do it by the two advisers who had been imposed upon him.) In wartime conditions these were remarkable achievements.

  But Kozma went into his new accommodation with the same blockage in his ears and blur before his eyes. It was like standing at your lathe worrying that the cutting tool might dig too deep and the part jump from the bar. It wasn’t at all clear which was the main enemy—Germany or the autocracy? The other fifteen members of the group remained at their places of work, and came in for meetings or to sit around for a while, but Kozma became a fixture—no point knocking around among Ericsson’s machines. What he really should be doing, what lead he should give, he had no idea, but the Mensheviks gave him two brisk and businesslike advisers to lean on, Gutovsky and Pumpyansky: they occupied the secretarial posts, and relegated actual secretarial work to the clerks.

  Gutovsky was known to Social Democrats as “the Gas” because of the speed with which he expanded in all directions. (His nickname was originally “Acetylene”—a play on his patronymic, Anitsetovich.) There was nothing Gutovsky didn’t know about the working class and social democracy! He was simply omniscient, and could answer any question before you’d finished asking. He had brought out a newspaper of his own at one time, and composed leaflets by the dozen. Pumpyansky, though no Gas, was also swift to take off and to take over. Paired, they were better still at explaining and expounding—not always in perfect harmony, but discords were soon resolved. Without those two Kozma would have been lost.

  So some sort of order and stability was achieved. Guchkov’s committee was satisfied with the group (though it was as helpful to the revolutionary cause as to the cause of defense). In the front room they discussed the organization of the workforce for production, while in the back room they also engaged in conspiratorial activity, draf
ting and disseminating illegal leaflets, and to everybody who traveled around Russia visiting provincial workers’ groups they gave overt instructions to assist defense industry and clandestine instructions to sabotage it. Kozma couldn’t keep up with everything that was done and written and circulated in the name of the Workers’ Group!

  He had bitten off more than he could chew, and wondered why on earth his name was Gvozdev (perhaps from gvozd, “nail”). If there ever had been any “nails” in his family he didn’t think he was one of them. (More likely than not the Gvozdevs were originally just “smiths.”)

  For all the wise words he heard, he knew in his heart, if he was honest with himself, that Russia must be defended against Germany. It made no sense to be stirring up revolution in time of war. When his head was in too much of a whirl there was one guiding light: those soldiers—aren’t they our brothers? Shouldn’t we be thinking of them?

  So when, shortly after the election of the Workers’ Group, some sort of infectious itch went around Petrograd, with some madman trying to talk workers into a strike on 22 January 1916, a general strike, and not just for one day, intended to overthrow the Tsar, Kozma exercised firm leadership. The men must be restrained from striking, the time was not right. And he himself went around the factories telling them so.

  He succeeded in restraining them.

  The upshot was that when 22 January came a fight flared up at Ericson’s. Auxiliary workers from the lower floors and the yard, egged on by agitators, rushed the third floor and assaulted the skilled men, because they, the “Gvozdevites,” had demanded that the strike question should be decided not by a shouting match but fairly, by a clear vote. Hammers, wrenches, steel punches, and iron bars were used as weapons, heavy bolts were hurled around, Gvozdev himself was hit with a stool, a lot of the equipment manufactured on the third floor was smashed, and some of Gvozdev’s supporters were shoved down the stairs. But although the whole management had taken flight earlier, the Gvozdevites stood their ground, and prevented the strike.