November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  How the Bolsheviks reviled them, unsparingly and without exception, spat on them and flung mud at them in all the unpaved back streets on the Vyborg side, calling them traitors to the working class, lackeys of the imperialist bourgeoisie, a bunch of political rogues and renegades who had traded their proletarian intransigence for the honor of sitting in easy chairs at the same table as Stolypin’s comrade-inarms (meaning Guchkov). Then they fomented a rowdy campaign among Petrograd workers to recall the Workers’ Group: the proletariat must not join bourgeois organizations!

  Kozma was in it up to his neck! Nobody had ever abused him like that before. But he understood very well that this was no time to accept “recall,” that only by sitting where he was could he champion the workers’ rights and privileges. To keep his seat he had to make concessions to the Bolsheviks, whatever their game was, and say one thing while thinking another: say that the aim of the Workers’ Group was the complete demolition of the regime, or that the government was planning a Jewish pogrom, when there was no hint of anything of the kind. Or demand things from the factory owners that they could not possibly provide. Or howl that the militarization of the factories meant the reintroduction of serfdom, although it was obvious to everybody that this was the least disruptive way of regulating jobs, the food supply for the workers, and exemption from the draft. You had to join without question in barking at and attacking the regime. The large gatherings of workers, ostensibly “commissions” of the Workers’ Group, in the Guchkov committee’s main assembly hall discussed not the defense of the country, indeed no, but the government of the future, which must be not just “responsible to parliament,” as the Duma demanded, but a “Provisional Revolutionary Government,” with democratic socialists among its members. (Though Kolya couldn’t for the life of him see why the need for such a government had suddenly become so pressing.) Or else they would be declaring that the people must bypass governments and take peace negotiations into their own hands.

  Yes! Yes! said the whisperers in Gvozdev’s ear. While outside on the street there were cries of “traitor,” and men even broke into the offices on Liteiny to shout it! Whereas Plekhanov wrote from Paris to say that revolutionary activity in wartime was treason!

  Yes, Kozma was in it up to his neck.

  Nor was it just the Bolsheviks. He was harassed by the quick-footed Interdistrict group and the sharp-tongued Internationalist-Initiativists: “We have certainly not authorized the Gvozdevites to speak for the whole Russian proletariat! They are sacrilegiously usurping the name of the working masses!”

  Even Chkheidze and Kerensky shamefacedly shrank from the Workers’ Group so as not to soil their hands.

  And the workers who had elected the group grew restive and had to be pacified somehow.

  The whole Samara section even instructed the central body “not to forge cannon and kill German comrades, but to obtain the separation of the church from the state, the confiscation of gentry land, and a democratic republic.” Kozma was by then so befogged that he read this three times without seeing how nonsensical it was. Separation of the church? If they say so—must be right. Confiscation? Those are their orders—must be done. Aha! Fatheads! You’ve pulled a boner there! You don’t forge cannon, you cast them! Probably written by some seminarian.

  And where did Guchkov come in? All Social Democratic resolutions and leaflets assured Kozma (who had in fact been provided with a Social Democratic Party card himself) that the Russian bourgeoisie, led by the bloodthirsty Guchkov, was using this war not for the defense of Russia but to line their own pockets and take power by easy stages.

  Maybe it was true? How could you look into somebody else’s heart? And mugs like us draw in our horns and give way to them.

  But when he went to the Workers’ Group, there was Aleksandr Ivanovich in person, a shortish man with a slight limp, a rather unhealthy look about him, and a ponderous manner, shaking his hand and saying: “My dear Kozma Antonovich! You’re a Russian, and I’m a Russian. We speak the same language, one look and we understand each other. The whole future of Russia depends on what is happening now and how this war ends. If we lose we shall be enslaved by Germany, perhaps for many decades. I know that the workers have long been oppressed and denied their rights. There’s a big backlog of accounts to be settled, a lot of sores to be healed. But you and your friends do feel for Russia—of course you do. And you have the political sense to know that this is not the time to settle those accounts, not the time to open those sores. It isn’t only you—we too, the whole of Russian society, have a grim reckoning to present to the government. But let us wait, let us finish the war first, we must not let Russia’s very backbone be broken. The workers will listen to you. You mustn’t tire of explaining to them that every day on strike is a stab in the back for our army, that it means death for our fellow Russians. For your, and our, brothers.”

  Kozma listened to such speeches, looking closely into Guchkov’s eyes, which were not diamonds after all, but like everybody else’s, eyes full of entreaty and trust and swollen from illness. (In the first few weeks of the Workers’ Group’s existence Guchkov was in fact supposed to be dying, and bulletins were published which seemed to anticipate his death.) And Kozma melted, felt that they were soul mates, and agreed with every word.

  “No, Aleksandr Ivanovich, we won’t nurse our grievances. We were oppressed all right. The owners never gave us a hearing. I’m not talking about Ericsson’s, but more out-of-the-way places. It would have been better for them if they’d woken up before the war, of course. But if they’ve begun to realize, it still isn’t too late. Don’t think we don’t know that if the Germans break through into Russia they’ll put a yoke on our necks and gobble up all our bread.”

  Keep it simple, leave political parties out of it, speak your natural language, and what was there, really, to understand?

  As they sat there, on two uncompromisingly hard chairs, facing each other across a simple desk, Kozma could not get it into his head that the man before him was the leader of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and the comrade-in-arms of that man of blood—Stolypin.

  “I do understand, Aleksan’ Ivanych. You’ll have our support. That’s why we’ve come here.”

  But he was hardly ever allowed such tête-à-têtes, not even for a minute at a time, because he was not just Kozma Gvozdev, an individual and a free agent, he was one of a team, tied by party loyalty to the brainiest, busiest, writing-est, talking-est, indefatigably sharp-eyed secretaries, set to watch over him, and if they missed him for a moment they came loudly flapping in pursuit.

  “Oh dear, Kozma Antonych, what have you done now? We’ll have the Bolsheviks talking about the Gvozdev-Guchkov Bloc! Have you thought about that?”

  Kozma was not his own man. Unlike that other Kozma—Minin—he could not go forth and cry, “Rise, people of Russia, save your motherland!” It was “… just whom were you trying to save, Kozma Antonych? The Romanov dynasty? Together with the Black Hundreds and the liberals? Then who’s to do our job and stir up class contradictions?”

  “Why, the Initiativists will disown us!”

  “The Internationalists will back away from us!”

  “Especially the Siberian Zimmerwaldists!”

  So they didn’t allow Kozma to do much talking on his own account. It had to be with a secretary on either side, his shoulders, as it were, pinned between them, his head not free, feeling as if he were in harness.

  “Defeating Germany, Aleksandr Ivanych, is of no importance at all to the working class. If they don’t want strikes let the factory owners tighten their belts a bit. You say the sores can wait, but our patience is exhausted.”

  And if Guchkov was leaving for the Crimea to continue his treatment, Acetylene would compose a letter for Kozma, allowing him to sign it, but not to alter a single word. “Our opinion, my own and that of all my comrades, is that ‘social peace’ is a screen for exploitation, and that as long as there is a class of industrialists the working class will never accept s
ocial peace, or even an armistice! Victory over Germany is the path to future conquests for the ruling classes.”

  Not so very long ago Kozma stood at his bench, picked up his wages on Saturday, and went off home with not a care in the world. He turned out metal parts as he knew best how to, and nobody jogged his elbow. Now he was tied hand and foot by this glib pair. Before a thought could take shape in his head and descend to his throat, Gutovsky and Pumpyansky would feed him an answer, or several answers at once, giving him no time to think. That was what particularly baffled him—that they supplied several answers simultaneously. All of them swift, all different, and all correct.

  Take the hardest question of all: Since we’re all brothers, shouldn’t we—really and truly, between ourselves—be strengthening Russia’s defenses?

  Well, the first thing to remember is that this war hinders the liberation struggle of the working class. On the other hand, all peoples have the right to defend themselves. And self-defense can lead to revolution. So defense of the country is the same thing as relentless struggle with autocracy—something the Bolsheviks refuse to understand.

  A bipartite national policy!

  So we are what they call defensists?

  Tut-tut! Not another word, comrade! “Defensist” is an opprobrious name used to brand accomplices of the reactionary clique. We are revolutionary defensists, and that term embodies a radically different meaning.

  Which must mean that … We should work? With all our might?

  Sh-sh-sh! You must understand the mobilization of industry, Kozma Antonych, not in a narrowly technical sense, but as social and political mobilization; in other words, we can’t allow the franchised strata alone to mobilize. However, the militarization of the factories on the pretense of “mobilization” is a very great danger to the interests of the working class, a new form of factory feudalism.

  Wire frames rested on Gutovsky’s prominent ears, but even through his glasses his eyes were sharp, quick, challenging.

  As he wagged his head over his lessons, Kozma’s youthful straw mop flopped over his face and he swept it back with his hand. His teachers were both around thirty, five years younger than himself, but they had found time to get all this great wisdom from books, latched on to it, adapted it for use. Lucky they were there to help, or a man could come to grief in that little room.

  If that’s how it is, how do we defend ourselves against—what d’you call it? Fideolism? Just by striking?

  Well, there are times when the worker is left with no means of fighting for his basic needs except by disorganizing production. But on the other hand, the Bolshevik policy of strikes for the sake of striking and their antiquated, pigheaded boycott campaigns are the least promising method of class warfare. The Bolsheviks ruthlessly exploit the political inexperience of the broad popular masses.

  They were both so sharp, those secretaries, that any bit of paper you sent out, any instruction you gave by telephone, they were there first, turning it this way and that, sniffing it all over, sizing it up. How would the Western socialists take it? Would the O.K. bunch approve? What would be the reaction of the Reunionists? the Menshevik Internationalists? the Petersburg Initiative group? And of course the Interdistrict group? Toughest of all—like having a saw blade across your throat and a gag in your mouth—you wondered what deadly response the Bolsheviks would come up with. They, the Bolsheviks, had to be watched more closely than the autocracy.

  If some newspaper took it into its head to praise the Workers’ Group for its contribution to defense, for its loyalty to the motherland, it was in a way flattering, but the secretaries would be in agonies: if you denied it you’d be damaging your own work, if you didn’t the Bolsheviks would have their claws in you.

  So every sentence, spoken or written, however well-rounded, must have written into it, tagged onto it, such phrases as “fully conscious of our obligations to the international proletariat” … “in the words of the Copenhagen Workers’ Congress” …

  If Kozma could not make a move without his secretaries interfering, they too, and even the senior Mensheviks in the O.K., never took a step independently, never made self-confident decisions, but always looked timidly leftward, worrying about the harsh words the Bolsheviks might have for them.

  The Bolsheviks loudly threatened to “run Gvozdev and those other bastards out on a wheelbarrow.” Meaning to the rubbish heap—workers used to do that with unpopular foremen, and once dumped they could never reassert themselves. What hurt Kozma, though, was not the Bolshevik pack as a whole, but Sashka Shlyapnikov, their head man. They could say what they liked, but Sashka himself had signed the “Gvozdevite Traitors” proclamation on the very day when Kozma was cracked on the head with a stool. He and Sashka had worked in the same shop, side by side, they were almost the same age, competing to see who could shave metal closest and cleanest. And now …

  The spilt peas had gone fourteen different ways.

  There was no end to the secondhand abuse that Sashka heaped on Kozma: Guchkov had him on a leash, he was a middleman dividing up orders between capitalists …

  Why, oh why, Sashka, do you daub me with pitch just because I’ve acted as conciliator and prevented a strike? What’s bad about that? Surely it’s work, not strikes, that keeps factories going? Suppose we go on striking till German helmets enter Petrograd—is that really what you want? Your trouble is when you get one thing fixed in your head you think you know it all. But what do we know, my friend? Right—our grandfathers lived in the woods and knew every little path. But here there are huge chimneys sticking up, giving off smoke so you can’t see through it, and broken stones under your feet that nothing leaves a live trail on. We see only what we see: the policeman at the crossroads, and the Parviainens, the Aivazes, the Nobels, and the Rozenkranzes, driving up in their carriages and driving off again. They wouldn’t even give us a hearing before, now they show respect, say, “We know your needs, but let’s finish the war first.” True, they might have come to their senses earlier, but people are all the same, they do nothing till lightning strikes … Maybe we should believe them, Sasha? Trying to settle old scores with the German armies watching—what does that make us look like? You and I ought to get together and talk it all over: why are we behaving like enemies? A nail’s no good without a cap,* nor a cap without a nail. Haven’t you ever stopped and asked yourself, Sasha: What if I’ve been wrong all along? Can I get inside somebody else’s head and think for him? You’ve said all those hard things about me. “The foul ulcer of Gvozdevism!” What’s the point of that, boys? It makes my flesh creep. I’ve got smart alecks sniffing around me all the time, and you’ve got some of your own: they’re mighty quick with the pen and with the tongue, they know it all. Do you trust your group? Watch out you don’t burn your fingers.”

  Gvozdev’s counselors were never at a loss. However things went, whatever awkward turn they took, these people could always twist them around so that what had happened was exactly what the representatives of workers’ democracy had foreseen and pointed to long ago! Kozma could only listen, eyes popping.

  They had a pat answer for everything. A rumor went around that the strikes weren’t spontaneous, that strike funds received contributions from unknown sources—could it be German money?

  “No!” said Acetylene heatedly. “German subversive activities have nothing to do with it, only a stupid know-nothing could think it does. The reason is the domination of the gentry-bureaucratic clique, whose whole system of government consists of cynical disregard of the people’s interests, and continual provocation. These strikes are a warning that we cannot go on as we are.”

  That much was true.

  And here they were again, sitting in the back room—Kozma at his desk, wearing a Russian cross-buttoning blouse under his overall jacket, Gutovsky and Pumpyansky, each at one end of his desk, in identical black coats and stand-up collars complete with ties, reasoning with their president, explaining yet again what he ought to think about a variety of currently
important matters.

  The latest hot potato was the Guchkov committee’s cavalier treatment of its own Workers’ Group. As part of the committee, the group could not print and circulate any document, resolution, or appeal without the agreement of the other members. (People were afraid that the group might call openly for revolution, in the name of the committee as a whole.) “In effect,” Gutovsky said, seething, “the committee is making the need for coordination an excuse for censoring our activities!”

  “Censoring our opinions and our views!” Pumpyansky added, wiggling his fingers to make it clearer. He had no revolutionary Siberian past, like Gutovsky’s, and had to assert his own importance at every turn.

  “But that does violence to the freedom of opinion of the workers’ representatives!”

  “And at once isolates the Workers’ Group from the working masses!”

  This was how they always explained things, many times over, as if Kozma might forget the moment he crossed the threshold. They were particularly insistent that every question was complicated, very complicated, very, very complicated. So that Kozma, for his part, began to fear that he might not understand, might forget, might get muddled over quite simple matters … except that there didn’t seem to be any simple matters left.

  “A definite line has to be drawn,” Gutovsky said, drawing it, unwaveringly and precisely, with the edge of his hand on the desk. “A line beyond which we cannot go!”

  “Otherwise we will have to ask ourselves whether our presence on the committee is not futile!” Pumpyansky said, wagging his finger for emphasis.