“It’s particularly dangerous in view of the recall campaign the Bolsheviks are mounting against the Workers’ Group!”
“It undermines the significance which the Workers’ Group should have as a class weapon!”
Kozma well remembered how lightly he had moved around the factory, how lightly he had run up the stairs, two steps at a time, only last autumn. Now, sitting day in and day out at this desk, he seemed to have grown heavy, to have taken root, so that he and his chair were like one stubbornly rooted stump growing out of the floor. Growing and unable to rise. He wanted to straighten up, but could only brace his shoulders and stretch backward.
He was under a spell. Bewitched.
“Don’t be taken in by sweet talk, Antonych. When you’re dealing with Guchkov and his bunch don’t forget that they are the tried and tested leaders of capitalism’s militant organizations.”
“They’re out to trap us with their talk of ‘national unity,’ Antonych—and ‘national unity’ is transformed into the union of large-scale industrial capitalism with the existing regime.”
Yes, things were looking bad for the Workers’ Group. They did somehow seem to have fallen into a trap again. Yet Aleksandr Ivanovich seemed to be a decent guy.
“We ought to be checking up on them, not they on us!” Anitsetovich said. “We can’t even be sure they’re trying to solve problems of military technology in the country’s best interests!”
“Against its interests, you can be sure!” Moiseevich, not to be outdone, fully concurred.
Dear, oh dear. Kozma was in a quandary.
His upper lip was raised like that of a puzzled child; his hair, newly washed and silky, tumbled over his eyes, which were fixed in entreaty on his teachers.
“Do you really think the danger from outside is what matters?” Gutovsky flapped his black elbows as if attempting to take off.
“Is the danger of a military defeat what matters most?” Pumpyansky’s finger emerged from a black sleeve to draw menacing lines in the air.
“What of their predatory scheme to annex Galicia?”
“Their oppression of Poland?”
“Their greedy designs on Constantinople?”
“Their anti-Semitic pogroms policy?”
“D’you call that defending the country?”
“And their criminal scheme to use yellow labor?”
Yellow labor! There was this one melting point at which all working-class parties and groups, and the working class as a whole, fused instead of fragmenting. Beginning last year, it had become fashionable to indenture Chinese labor—originally for the Murmansk railroad, but now, it seemed, for Petrograd as well. What next?
“Will unruly workers be sent into the trenches, and the Chinese into the factories?”
“Which would be the end of the revolutionary movement!”
But the crafty bourgeois had Kozma fooled. Why shouldn’t the Chinese be allowed to work? Wouldn’t that be … you know … what they call “internationalism”?
“Oh dear, no! Allowing greedy industrialists to exploit the Chinese even more inhumanely?”
“Not to leave the Chinese defenseless is in fact our prime international duty!”
“Indentured yellow labor is blatant slave-trading!”
“Which is why the Petrograd proletariat cannot allow them into the capital!”
At that point the door was flung open and in burst not the bloodstained Konovalov in person, not Ryabushinsky, but Engineer Obodovsky from the subcommittee for Military-Technical Aid.
A worthy accomplice of the capitalists in question.
Or an unworthy underling.
He came in at a run, in his overcoat, but hatless. He was always in a hurry, with an absentminded look about him except for his sharp eyes.
The absentmindedness was for the Menshevik secretaries, the sharp eyes for Kozma.
Behind him—someone else from the technical team, a big dark hulk in a leather jacket.
Obodovsky hastily introduced him—"Engineer Dmitriev!”—as he covered the space between himself and the desk in one stride to shake hands with Kozma.
Kozma was so firmly grafted onto chair and floor that there was no tearing himself away. He shook hands with Obodovsky but couldn’t take a step toward Dmitriev, who in turn greeted him from a distance.
While Gutovsky and Pumpyansky, elbows defensively at the ready, refrained from greetings.
Obodovsky was in too much of a hurry to sit down.
“Kozma Antonych!” he burst out, looking very worried. “I must ask you …” Then he turned his eyes upon the startled, battle-ready Mensheviks and his tone became more tentative.
“Perhaps you and I should have a talk.”
But why all the secrecy?
What was his imperialist ulterior motive?
“By all means.”
“By all means!” Their suspicions aroused, the nimble pair pointed to a seat.
While Kozma, clean-shaven upper lip and sparse eyebrows raised, showed in his light brown eyes his willingness to step outside for a talk—if only he were not vegetating. He couldn’t just tear up all his roots.
“What can I do for you, Pyotr Akimych?” Then, more cautiously, more austerely. “Has something happened?”
Obodovsky, still standing, was eager to get on with it.
“The Obukhov factory is holding up the trench mortar, and our infantry is shedding blood unnecessarily for want of it, blood it could save. Help us to persuade the shops working on that order to do overtime and go in on Sundays. And to prevent the strike which could happen shortly. Could you possibly get the factory commission together to handle it?”
Factory commissions, formed by the Workers’ Group, were legal organizations. Formally intended to help with defense contracts. But …
“But the working class cannot ignore its class interests and turn factory commissions into a weapon against itself.”
“That would be a move in the wrong direction, Mr. Obodovsky. But by all means let’s look at all sides of the question.”
They made themselves even more comfortable in their chairs, spread themselves, and prepared for action.
Obodovsky had known the Gas, then a stripling, back in 1905 in Siberia. He had been one of the loudest mouths in the Siberian Social Democratic Union, determined come what may on armed uprising. But once he was running smoothly he had squandered a great deal of paper on behalf of the Mensheviks, advised the Social Democratic group in the Duma, and now … here he was again. Obodovsky hadn’t wasted time on such troublemakers in Irkutsk in 1905 and he certainly wasn’t going to now.
“Gentlemen,” he said, flinching as if attacked by gadflies, “I’m no journalist, alas. And you don’t know anything about casting tolerances or turning procedures. So what is there for us to talk about?”
He looked fiercely at Gvozdev.
Gvozdev’s tawny eyes answered that he would be glad to help, he even squared his shoulders—but no, nothing budged, all was stuck fast.
The Menshevik advisers were quick off the mark.
“Please, Mr. Obodovsky, don’t regard us as supporters of conservative strike-ism flying false radical colors.”
“In case you are capable of understanding our point of view, here it is: in present-day circumstances strikes do not benefit the working class.”
“A spontaneous flare-up can even damage the working class,” was Gutovsky’s amendment.
“Spontaneous flare-ups,” said Pumpyansky, refusing to be bettered, “only damp down and fragment the growing conflict between Russian society as a whole and the regime.”
Except for the twitching of his eyebrows Obodovsky was stock-still. Did this mean that, against all expectations, all present were agreed? That help was at hand?
Dmitriev too, looking gloomily pleased, shifted from one foot to the other.
“But,” said Gutovsky with a flash of his glasses and a toss of his curls, “but strikes are the only way out for a working class summarily and cynically dispatched to
the front as cannon fodder.”
“How indeed,” said Pumpyansky, with a toss of his smooth head, “how except by striking can the working class liberate itself from the noose of the police state?”
“Defend the country, yes, but not if it means abstinence from strikes!”
“And no amount of overtime will help in a country where the people’s resources are so insanely squandered.”
“As so often spelled out in warnings from the revolutionary democrats …”
“With whom you at one time had a certain connection, Mr. Obodovsky.”
It was against such renegades that the Gas’s zeal burned most fiercely. It was self-seeking prodigals like Obodovsky who threw the ranks of the democratic movement into disarray.
Obodovsky was no longer looking at them, but—still standing, perplexed and questioning—at Kozma. No serpentine thoughts darted and wriggled over Kozma’s broad candid brow, there was no flapping of the arms or fluttering of the fingers. His hands struggled in vain to tug the chair free of the floor, his thickset shoulders strained …
On either side of him they nattered on.
“The answer is not to work overtime but to smash the whole political regime from top to bottom and immediately.”
“To wrest power from the irresponsible, reactionary, venal Russian government!”
Obodovsky could restrain himself no longer.
“But not to the detriment of the war effort? Not if it means greater losses for our infantry?”
But they soared out of reach, and with amazing mental nimbleness swooped from the left, then changed direction to swoop from the right. There were kaleidoscopic glimpses of the grotesque Duma’s indifferentism, of a workers’ democracy issuing appeals to the democracies of allied countries …
But what of Kozma?
And the trench mortar?
Could he or couldn’t he help?
He struggled in vain to tear himself from the fatal spot to which he was grafted. But … but … The infantry! Russian infantry needlessly shedding their blood! His two paws pressing down on the desktop, his neck and his whole torso bulging with the strain—as if he were free and could rise unaided with a toss of the straw-colored foliage draped over his temples—the man turned by magic into a tree trunk suddenly spoke out boldly, in a human voice, like a tree in a fairy tale.
“All right, there’s a member of our group at the Obukhov factory, Grisha Komarov. I’ll phone him right away. He’ll do what he can to back you up.”
Gutovsky and Pumpyansky blinked, taken aback—but it was over in a quarter of a minute—they changed without changing, their features were as mobile as ever, their speech as rapid and articulate as they hurried to catch up.
“To mobilize industry? That is, of course, a possibility.”
“What after all is the point of our activities? To give the working class a legal footing.”
“But the working class must be extremely cautious in its choice of methods.”
“And effective mobilization is impossible without complete freedom of coalition.”
“And the immediate full democratization of …”
The engineers did not hear how it ended. They had left.
* * *
… The traitorous Gvozdevites, yes-men of the Kadets, vampires sucking the blood of the working class … Government stooges … certain engineers who pick up a good 4,000 a year … It is our duty, comrades, to take up the sacred struggle, and cry out to the vampires, “Take your bloodstained hands off us!” The workers of Petersburg make known their valiant demands to all the world!
—Central Committee of the RSDRP
* * *
*“A nail’s no good without a cap”: a play on the names Gvozdev and Shlyapnikov. Gvozdev is perhaps from gvozd, nail; Shlyapnikov suggests shlyapa, hat. [Trans.]
[32]
Board one of the Neva steam trams—three short cars with upper decks—and it will go around the Aleksandr Nevsky monastery and the monastery settlement, then cross the Arkhangelogorodsky Bridge and come out on the Schlüsselburg Prospect. (The bridge’s name no doubt means that this was the beginning of the ancient sledge route to Archangel.) Verst by verst it passes the Glassmakers’ Quarter, the Empire-style granaries on the banks of the Neva, quaysides, timber barges, hay stores. It passes the Semyanin factory (not your destination), the bobbin factory (an exquisite building not a bit like a factory). Crossing the Horn it skirts the villages of Smolenskoye and Michael the Archangel, each with its own church, and the adjacent Alexander engineering plant (also not your present destination). Now, closer to the shoreline, it rolls on along the Neva where even in the war years villages from opposite banks had met at carnival time on the broad frozen expanses for a fistfight or cockfights or pigeon racing, as if these peasants were totally unaware that Peter’s world-famed capital was on their doorstep. The little tram rolls on past the porcelain factory, the third oldest in Europe, set up shortly after the secret of manufacturing porcelain was discovered. Past the few remaining riverside villas built for the magnates of Anna’s, Elizabeth’s, and Catherine’s reigns, now more and more frequently displaced by brick factory buildings and tall chimney stacks, from which black clouds crawl and billow to sully the sky and foul the Neva, drifting toward Little Okhta if the wind is in one quarter, absorbing the smoke from Okhta and from the powder factory if it is on the other. Then, passing Kurakin’s villa, it finally reaches what was once Princess Vyazemsky’s manor house and grounds, of which few traces have survived half a century of the steelworks founded by Engineer Obukhov, after the wretched Crimean campaign, in which much of our artillery proved useless. This works, which makes armor plating and big guns, and has its own workers’ settlement of well-equipped modern two-story houses, is your destination, and you alight. (The tram will trundle on past several cemeteries, several German settlements, the Cenobitic Monastery, a few more factories—and finish up at Murzinki.)
And although you live in Petersburg—not, it is true, in one of the more pleasant quarters, but in Stremyannaya or some such place—now that you have trundled so many versts, with constant changes of scene, of people and of ideas, traveling not as an idle sightseer but with carefully planned business to transact, understanding what is done in this place and indeed eager to lend a hand—suddenly, from the far end of the Schlüsselburg Prospect, you see and feel about the famous city quite differently. Hefting this long, long Neva end of the lever, wriggling it in your hand you discover that the fulcrum of the whole system is not there but here: that the center of gravity of this much lauded Palmyra or Venice of the North is not the glittering Nevsky Prospect, nor the splendid stone-built Morskaya, nor the gilded spires, nor Rossi’s colonnades, nor Felten’s grilles, past which our legendary poets absently strolled, but the wrought-iron railings themselves, the multitude of lions, the chariot of Victory on its great arch, the very bridges with their cast-iron (or are they living?) horses, the Anichkov Bridge, the Nikolai Bridge, the Blue Bridge, the Chain Bridge, all cast and forged here, far beyond the Neva Gate, here at the Alexander engineering plant. From here you know for sure that the real weight of Petersburg does not lie in what the world at large sees as, and means by, Petersburg. No, that huge agglomeration, gaudy by day, ablaze with light by night, that great, greedy huddle of palaces, theaters, restaurants, shops, seen from here is a wanton, reckless, cynical overload at the far end of the lever, dangerous just because it is at the far end of the arm and threatens to tip the balance.
This was where the important, the sensible work was done, producing not only those so entertaining wrought-iron railings and chariots but many sensible, necessary things; the first Russian locomotive, the ships on the Neva, iron and steel castings of all sizes, from the most enormous to the minute, had first acquired their definitive size and shape, first become mobile and usable here.
Dmitriev always entered the Obukhov or any other factory yard conscious that every minute something on the drawing board was taking shape and becoming a reality.
He loved all that was eternal and beautiful in the faraway cluttered center of Petersburg, but was never bored or repelled by these unbeautiful surroundings, the dreary blankness of the walls, the bareness, the litter, the scorched earth with never a blade of grass, the soot, the heat, the foul smells and harsh noises, for these were not manifestations of ugliness, but a necessary accompaniment to the birth of things. To the inexperienced, an engineering plant is a rackety accumulation of workbenches, materials, and finished goods, but those working there know that this apparent disorder is in reality the best sort of order, that everything fits in beautifully, and that every man is in his proper place, working to plan, a necessary part of the whole.
You enjoy going into a factory yard because it all means something. To you, an insider, the cutoffs heaped against a wall are not just so much scrap iron—you know just what job a metalworker was doing to produce each bit of waste. You can read the shavings around the turners’ shop just as readily. Brass? Copper? Steel? How wide? How thick? The finished pieces at the forge tell you what its last job was or what its next order is. In fact, the noises from the forge, the look of the smoke over the iron or steel smelteries, the fiery reflections in the windows, their color or lack of it, the fresh heap of slag at the door of the cupola furnace, what the wheelbarrow men are carrying from one shop to another, even the sort of boards piled up outside the drying room, tell the experienced eye everything before it leaves the yard. Before you set foot in the first building you are geared into and magnetized by the work in hand, it is decided for you where you’re most needed, and your feet automatically turn in that direction.
The day was dying without ever really dawning. An hour earlier there had been snow or rather a fine, frozen drizzle, and where no one had walked, and the heat from the buildings and the underground steam pipe had not melted it, a thin white coating remained to give the evening a wintry look. And it was getting chilly.
Dmitriev was ill at ease. He wasn’t used to making speeches. True, they would be men he worked with, men he knew well, but they would have been assembled in this unnatural way, two hundred at a time, specifically to listen to him. Still, there was no other way of getting them to rally round and join in what needed to be done. He had already figured out what he would say, but hoped to pick up hints from their faces and from the way things went and improve on it as he went along.
November 1916 Page 66