November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  He also had to look for that man Komarov to find out whether Gvozdev had telephoned him and what the workers’ leaders had decided.

  Dmitriev was told in the office that they hadn’t forgotten, and that half an hour before the siren went off everybody entitled to be called an engineer—molders, smelters, smiths, fitters, turners, and milling-machine operators—would be brought together in the machine shop.

  Unluckily, the duty police sergeant was sitting there in the room while they were talking and of course overheard. He must have known about it anyway. Dmitriev frowned at the thought that this fishface would certainly turn up to make his presence felt, exhibiting his fat rosy cheeks like a signboard, to worry the workers with an unspoken question: why aren’t these ugly customers in the trenches? Nothing could have been less welcome. If it upset Dmitriev, what effect would it have on the workers? But he couldn’t ask the policeman directly not to turn up. That would only put ideas into his head. Invite suspicion. Just have to see how it goes.

  Dmitriev changed his best jacket for a greasy overall tunic with elbow patches, matching trousers with knee pieces, and a different cap—the things he wore to poke around in every nook and corner of the workshops, in storerooms and foundry lofts, as and when necessary. He needed this outfit, so much more appropriate, so much more at home in the factory, as never before, to cross more easily the penitential line between workers and gentlemen. Wearing it, he set off with firmer tread in search of Komarov.

  He found him sitting in a draft in the unheated anteroom to the materials storeroom, and they got talking. The day was dark, but it was darker still in the anteroom. The lamp had not been lit, and Komarov himself with his black stubble seemed a darker person than he really was.

  “We’re calling a meeting then, Grigori Kiryanych?”

  “Looks like it.”

  He seemed to agree. But not very enthusiastically.

  “Did you sort things out with Kozma Antonych?”

  “We spoke.”

  Could he expect help from him? Or just neutrality? Or would the man get up and say that the working class did not need this war? The way to the worker’s heart was narrow, there was just room for Dmitriev alone: but on one side he would have the policeman elbowing him and on the other some party orator. If this man couldn’t help he’d do better to keep quiet. But asking him would be awkward.

  They strode across the yard. Komarov was wearing a dirty, cloth work jacket, the sleeves of which ended well above his wrists, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold, and his big hands carried metal pieces from the storeroom without freezing.

  He was a metal planer, a local man, trained at the Obukhov factory, and that was all to the good. He was, though, also a party man, a Socialist Revolutionary elevated to the Workers’ Group, the only Obukhov worker on it—for some reason or other. Probably had the gift of gab.

  But he was a sturdy, solid-looking old boy, so he probably wouldn’t make too much of a nuisance of himself, like those pushy little busybodies who would do anything to attract attention.

  But if, while Dmitriev talked about the trench mortar, Komarov came out with proletarian solidarity, and the policeman sat in the corner scowling, the workers’ minds would stray in three different directions—and Dmitriev’s speech would go down the drain.

  “Grigori Kiryanych,” Dmitriev asked point-blank, “we call the meeting—then what?”

  Komarov tilted his head and shrugged one shoulder. “Whatever is wanted.”

  They halted. A shunting engine was backing across their path, pulling two flatcars, each bearing a brand-new 48-line Obukhov gun, heavily greased but not yet under wraps, toward the factory gate for dispatch.

  Newly designed long-barreled, medium-caliber beauties, not yet seen at the front.

  Where the train had passed, the rails had a wet metallic gleam, ahead of it they were coated with white frost.

  The dull, heavy, rhythmical pounding of the steam hammer could be heard from the forge. Dmitriev loved that sound. The whole power of the factory seemed to be concentrated in it.

  Komarov looked at the flatcars, at the purplish porous slag strewn on the track to dry it—anywhere rather than at Dmitriev.

  While they were still held up Dmitriev turned to him, trying in vain to catch his averted eyes. “Grigori Kiryanych, when you’re at your bench you don’t try to make one side of a part stronger and the other weaker, do you now? But that’s what the Workers’ Groups do. They say we’ll join the committees, not to make shells, but to rouse the people’s forces from their lethargy.”

  The locomotive had come to a dead stop before them, perhaps to switch tracks.

  Komarov held the iron pieces on his open hand. But he was no more forthcoming than before.

  “Suppose I keep quiet. What will the workers say? They’ll say what do you mean, overtime, when two shops out there are on strike already? For time and a half.”

  The locomotive moved on again, and Komarov’s eyes watched the slow-moving flatcars go by.

  Nor could Dmitriev tear himself away. His gaze followed those guns (122 millimeters by European reckoning), those magnificent, perfectly shaped, new Obukhov guns, already ballistically tested, guns which at the beginning of the war were not even at the experimental stage. But plant them all along the front line now, equip every infantry division with them, and they’d shove the Germans back where they came from in no time.

  “What can they say? Remember when we produced the first of those guns? It was December last year. And how many have we made since? If it’s three dozen we can think ourselves lucky. Is that any way to work? We, the working class!!! Democracy—the regime, giving the bourgeoisie a bit of a shock, that’s all you worry about. You ought to start by showing that you can work. The working class …”

  “It doesn’t just depend on us.”

  “On you as much as anybody. Time and a half! Of course, if you’ve got proclamations all over the walls, on workbenches, wheels, tree trunks, if the watchmen sweep them out in heaps and there are fresh ones up the next morning—who cares about work? If the Germans heard that a factory like this turns out two of these guns a month they’d rupture themselves laughing.”

  “But why should we be the only ones tightening our belts? Why can’t other people make do with less? Those who’ve got money? What do they care about the war? They spend their whole time playing cards.”

  It was no good trying to answer that. From down below this was what they could most easily see. And in that other world Dmitriev wouldn’t get a hearing.

  The steam hammer was pounding away.

  The guns proceeded. The two men walked on.

  “Grigori Kiryanych, I’m grateful to you, and to all the reasonable people here, for making this meeting possible. But don’t spoil it. If you speak, don’t give them the official line, tell them honestly what you see with your own eyes.”

  Whether or not he had taken the point he made no reply. He went off into his workshop.

  Dmitriev felt himself getting more and more agitated. There were still forty minutes or so to go, but it was getting dark early, and he wouldn’t be at ease until he was with his own people, the handful of men who had been working with him for months past on an experimental model of a trench mortar. They had carried out tests together, rejected some features and adopted others in their place. Dmitriev had initiated them, taught them what was what, got them to think about it and make suggestions, and some of their advice had been useful.

  He went looking. He would spend the remaining half hour putting them in the right frame of mind. And trying to get an inkling of what awaited him at the meeting. He went into the metal workshop looking for Malozemov, dear old Evdokim Ivanych, a careful and conscientious worker, but he was not around. His fellow workers assumed, as Dmitriev had surmised anyway, that he was in the old foundry with his friend Sozont.

  He didn’t see Sozont in the foundry. Laborers were raking molding clay, enriching it. He ducked into the coremakers’ shop, a lean-to
built on to the foundry. Yes, there he was! They’d often gathered in this secluded spot to sketch movable parts so that their gun could be dismantled for transportation and reassembled as rapidly as possible. They were all there. Gray-haired Evdokim Ivanych, sitting on a log as usual, which made him look even shorter than he was, puffing at a cigarette clumsily rolled in newspaper. Sozont Bogolepov, a hefty, broad-shouldered, big-headed man, stood propped up against a cupboard full of molds, looking even bigger than he was, with his hands behind his back—he did not need them for smoking. He liked standing that way, swiveling his polished pumpkin of a head to look at whoever was speaking. There were two corers, one busy molding, the other slumped idly in his seat. Then there was a youngster carrying trays loaded with dry cores from the drying room and ranging them on shelves. At one of the benches a weedy carpenter was briskly completing some job, and rattling away just as busily in a light, thin voice. A hollow-chested, consumptive-looking molder sat dejected on a workbench, doing nothing. Another bench was unmanned. There was one unoccupied stool, but Dmitriev chose to sit on the vacant bench to show that he belonged. He was so tall that his dangling feet touched the floor.

  The old foundry was not heated from the factory boiler room, but here in the coremakers’ shop there was a cast-iron stove, devouring wood chips and shavings and glowing dull red as always. The air was dry, warm, cheering. It was a pleasure to go in there. Dmitriev wasn’t chilled to the bone, but he was glad of the warmth.

  They were used to him by now, and each of them carried on with what he was doing.

  “The thing is, he’s sold all our secrets for three million gold rubles. And collected the money from the director of the bank in person,” the lively, small-toothed carpenter was saying, working on his mortise. “So now Wilhelm can take a look at all our plants anytime he likes.”

  The carpenter, with his gauge sticking out of his overall pocket, deftly loosened the vise, turned the piece around, tightened the screw again, and didn’t stop talking for a moment.

  “Know how it started? The Germans sent the Tsaritsa some medicinal herbs through him—you know, for the Tsarevich. Some that grow in Germany and we don’t have in Russia.”

  “Nonsense!” Sozont said. “There aren’t any herbs that don’t grow in Russia.”

  “I’m telling you there are!” The carpenter gripped his plane, which was almost half his own height—from waist to brow—and started planing in a great hurry. “Otherwise why would she be selling us out?”

  “I wonder,” said the molder with a sigh. “Maybe they’ve got something for TB growing there!”

  “Anyway, they sent these herbs. Through that Rasputnik. And every time he presented them to the Tsaritsa she gave him a little envelope sealed with her own seal. And inside she’d written down everything the Tsar had told her, and shouldn’t have, since the last time. And she kept asking Wilhelm what ministers to fire. His Imperial Majesty isn’t like his father, he’s as soft as soft. Another time they arranged it so that whichever front her hospital train was going to would show where we’d be attacking. And Rasputnik had some Jew working for him, Ruvim Shtein or something, and this Jew had a horse that was as good as invisible, could gallop all the way to Wilhelm and back in one shot.”

  The others looked disbelieving.

  “Well, maybe he didn’t get as far as Wilhelm. I don’t know. But he ended up a millionaire as well. Now they say he’s been found out. And put in the clink.”

  Dmitriev was surprised to find that the Rubinstein story, or a rather odd version of it, had gotten so far. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard such talk from workers. It was like the rubbish and brushwood and logs swept along by a swollen, turbid river after a heavy rainstorm. No good trying to stem the flow, you could only wait for it to pass. He didn’t even try to intervene. He knew that he couldn’t possibly change anybody’s mind. But he was horrified by the depth of their ignorance. And their anxiety. How could they possibly know what was going on? It was horrifying, the wall after wall of incomprehension erected across Russia.

  “Anyway, the Germans have given our ministers a billion to kill off a million people—a thousand rubles per person, soldiers or otherwise. And Count Frederiks has picked up the money for all the rest, so here in Petersburg they’re starving us to death. There’s another rumor going around. A wounded officer in the clinic at Tsarskoye Selo is supposed to have taken a shot at the Tsaritsa. Because she sides with the Germans. Only he missed.”

  Dmitriev would have liked to go and sit by Evdokim Ivanych, but there was no room, nor could he get up and stand by the cupboard with Sozont, and asking them to come outside would be awkward. Anyway, he didn’t feel that he could ask a straight question. What he did feel was the inevitable embarrassment, familiar through the ages to those about to address an audience of workingmen; he felt guilty for no good reason, and somehow vulnerable. He belonged there, he was frank and honest with them, he knew his job, wore a worker’s tunic, was physically sound and articulate … yet he still envied that little ferret of a carpenter who would jump up and harangue a thousand without turning a hair.

  “So you see it’s all up with us!” the carpenter said, planing for a while, then suddenly loosening the vise again. “His Imperial Majesty’s advisers have all been got at. We’ve been sold out all the way to Petersburg. Orders have come from Wilhelm to take Russia apart.” But the thought seemed to inspire in him malicious glee rather than fear.

  “What’s this baloney you’re talking, snaggletooth?” Dmitriev said.

  Not that anybody completely believed the carpenter.

  But it would be hopeless trying to convince them that there was nothing in it all.

  Carefully inspecting his joint with the help of an oak T square, the carpenter said, “Besides, there’s another secret order—it’s St. Elisei’s night for all the officers.”

  “Whose night?” the molder asked.

  “St. Elisei’s night.”

  “That can’t be right,” the molder said doubtfully. Probably literate. From reading blueprints.

  “What kind of a night do you mean?” the corers wondered.

  “Well, all those who haven’t got a special piece of paper will all be done in at one time, whether they’re at the front or in the rear.”

  “Who’s given that order?”

  “I’m telling you somebody has,” the carpenter said knowingly.

  “Hold on.” Dmitriev had suddenly realized that this sort of thing must be going on all over the factory, and at all other factories, not just here in the molding shop. “Where on earth did you get all this from?”

  “Go anywhere you like, everybody says the same. We’ve got people going around telling us things. Socials of one sort or another. And Jew boys. Just you wait, they say, it’s all going up in flames.”

  These horror stories had spread like the plague. Nothing to be done. It was the same everywhere. Higher up too, only in different words.

  “They muddy the water like in a fishpond in the spring,” Malozemov, sitting on his log, barked angrily. You could tell from the way he talked that some of his teeth were missing, but his gray mustache concealed the deficiency.

  “The people are defenseless,” Sozont pronounced from his cupboard.

  Sozont and Evdokim were from the same place. Like many Petersburg workers not registered as “townsfolk” they were described in their residence permits—and loudly proclaimed it at each reregistration, or whenever the police came around—as peasants from the province of Novgorod, one from the Zalutsk, the other from the Gubin rural district. This in spite of the fact that they had worked uninterruptedly at the Obukhov factory for many years (Sozont twenty, Evdokim twenty-five). They socialized with their compatriots in the factory, there were family ties between them, and when they spoke of “our place” they didn’t mean the factory but their native place, where there were seven streams all called “the Robya,” and to which Evdokim intended to work his way back, in time to be buried there. He was determin
ed not to end up in a Petersburg cemetery.

  The conversation droned on, and moved to the other inevitable, eternal, inexhaustible theme—prices. People in Russia had for years been used to stable prices, prices that seemed to be embedded in the goods for sale, an intrinsic part of them, and they were flabbergasted by the unchecked rise in prices in wartime. Like a child just learning to talk, painstakingly trying over and over again to utter some extraordinary, unmanageable word, these simple people uttered the latest prices over and over again, looking hard at each other as if to make sure that it was all true, that it really could be that way. Bread up from four to six kopecks a pound—the great globe itself reeled. Tea! You won’t be drinking it like you used to. Herring, once four kopecks a pound, now thirty! Or take shoes and clothes! Galoshes used to be one ruble thirty, now—can you believe it?—they’re four rubles fifty. And how are you going to keep warm? That’s one thing that won’t wait till the war ends. Birch logs were seven and a half a sazhen, now it’s twenty or more. For someone watching this unstoppable, this diabolical escalation from day to day, what explanation could there be except that some wicked, greedy hand was raking in the money? What else could account for the fact that things had ceased to cost their proper, immemorial price? Some invisible, wicked plotter was getting rich at the expense of ordinary folk, and those up above were all in on the plot. Why is there nothing to buy? They’re hiding it, that’s why, making a fortune out of our tears, getting fat in their hideouts. And you can’t get your hands on them, you don’t know where they are. They ride by in carriages, you can’t catch up with them.

  If yesterday’s prices left you aghast, they were nothing in comparison with the latest sensations. What should have been frightening became almost funny: those crazy prices can’t affect sensible people like us, let’s watch them skyrocketing and gloat!