“Soup, potatoes,” Kesha remembered. “Fish.”
“Is there any meat in the soup?”
“Sometimes there is.”
“There you are, then. And rye bread, you can’t buy wheaten bread. Who has the strength to cast cannon on that sort of food? And what do the factory owners eat? Have you any idea?”
No, on that subject Akindin had no ideas at all. Nor had any of the others. Maybe grouse or something, swimming in sour cream, indescribably delicious, out of this world.
“Or take a shirt,” Akindin said, plucking up his courage. “Used to cost three quarters, and never wear out. Now you’re lucky if it’s less than three rubles.” He became still more animated. “I used to pay two rubles for a corner, now the landlady asks eight.”
“There you are, then. And on top of that they want to treat you like cattle, take away your rights, forbid you to move from one factory to another. And what’s more, send you to training units and to the front.”
Lanky, fair-haired, wooden Uksila had come in and was standing behind Akindin.
“Right then, Kesha,” the morose Dakhin said impatiently, “you can be off now.”
Kesha collected himself, jumped up, seized his cap, bowed and bowed again, beaming, to his fellow workers, to the strangers—nobody shook his hand this time—and left.
And Dakhin finally sat down. Heavily.
Comrade Vadim smiled.
“You mustn’t get impatient, Comrade Dakhin. Don’t ever begrudge time spent on agitation, it always pays. Anyway, you did the right thing. You didn’t prepare Kokushkin in easy stages, did you? Went straight at it, am I right?”
Vadim was referring to the various current methods of recruiting and educating a worker before admitting him to the party circle: observing him at his bench, studying his attitude in apparently casual conversations, giving him minor tasks to begin with, like collecting money, then getting him to carry leaflets from one shop to another.
“Yes, you boldly omitted the preliminaries, broke through the defensist cobwebs, and tried your man out at the same time. Then brought him here, which was also correct.”
Dakhin remained just as gloomy, no hope of widening those sunken eyes or relaxing those grimly set lips, but there were some slight signs that he was gratified by this praise.
Maria noticed how everybody hung on Vadim’s words. He was so much younger than the others, yet how readily they recognized his superiority in speech, in intelligence, and in experience.
Now that there were no outsiders present, only party members (Maria was obviously one, since Vadim had brought her), they became more businesslike.
“Comrades,” Vadim said crisply, no longer in the smooth expository voice he had used on Kesha, “I bring instructions directly from the Pe-Ka.”
The Pe-Ka! The Petersburg Committee! That had a thrilling ring!
“The Petersburg Committee has a serious grievance against the Obukhov workers. How could you fail to support the Vyborg Quarter on the thirtieth and thirty-first? You didn’t lift a finger.”
They could only sigh. Mashistov more heavily than the others. Mashistov was the factory organizer. He had to bear the brunt of the rebuke. The rectangular jaw dropped slightly.
“We do what we can. We refused overtime. Two shops are on strike at present. For time and a half.”
“So why not all of them?” Vadim asked sternly. “When the Pe-Ka looks at the Neva Quarter it sees us going over to the liquidators.”
“That’s too much!” Dakhin burst out angrily. His eyes were needle sharp in their deep sockets.
Vadim spread his big, soft white fingers. (He was not embarrassed that his hands were not those of a workingman—the work they did was more important.)
“Is it, though? What about 22 January? The whole of working-class Petersburg was on strike. Only the Neva Quarter was at work. What was our excuse? That nobody told us to put down our tools, nobody came along to lead us out? That’s what makes them say there’s no militancy beyond the Neva Gate.”
Lanky Uksila, bent double over a desk, grinned as much as to say, “They’re right.” It was shaming. That they weren’t militant had been obvious long ago.
She saw all those hands—honest, strong, sinewy, hardworking hands used to gripping tools—lying on a desk or gripping the back of a chair—and to think that she was admitted to this circle! Veronika (Maria) could hardly believe it, but there she was, sitting for the first time with these men of iron, these true hearts, quite at home with them, except that she was embarrassed by her fur coat (she should have changed it; it was the correct wear for a visit to the Alexandra Theater, but here it might draw attention to what should be a secret meeting) and also by her luxuriant hair, which looked as though it was meant to invite admiration, and her far too delicate hands. She was so proud and so happy to be accepted as an equal by these people, and to be of use to them, that she had sworn to renounce, was there and then renouncing, her previous frivolous life of idle chitchat.
Busy renouncing, she paid less attention to what was being said.
“It’s the influence of the Alexander plant,” Mashistov said thoughtfully. Thoughtfulness shone out from his staring, almost immobile eyes. “They’ve become petty bourgeois, they’ve built themselves little houses, they keep cows—and our men would like to keep up with them.”
“Right now they’re getting ready for the holidays,” Dakhin snapped. “They’ll be off to church in droves!”
“What holidays are those?” Vadim asked in surprise.
“Our Lady of Kazan. Then Our Lady Comforter of All the Afflicted,” Dakhin snapped. “She’s their patron saint.”
“The things these priests think of!” Vadim said, surprised and amused. “All the Afflicted! Crafty, eh? They’ve hit the nail on the head there! Only what we have to do is get all the afflicted to revolt, instead of bowing down to their silly old God.”
“Our men have become very passive,” Uksila said with a strong Finnish accent. “They’re afraid of the training company. They put their hopes on the co-ops.”
Uksila himself, being a Finn, didn’t have to worry about the draft whatever happened. The Finns were exempt.
“Co-ops!” Vadim’s big, soft pink lips parted in a grin. “You’ll soon see how they’ll feed you … Gvozdev’s Canteen Center … You at least must understand that all this hullabaloo about co-ops and canteens is just a way of stepping up exploitation, to squeeze more out of you.”
Yes, they could see it now. The workers’ leaders looked sheepish. So it was just another swindle.
“You plod along behind the Duma Mensheviks, behind Chkheidze, that Marxoid lackey of Guchkov and Puryshkevich, and even he is more revolutionary than you.”
They were silent. We don’t know any better.
“Anyway, comrades, the Petersburg Committee has met and given me instructions to pass on to the Obukhov factory. The main thrust of our propaganda now must be inequalities of consumption, the high cost of living, food shortages. We must persistently exploit the dissatisfaction and indignation of the masses along these lines. You, however, have missed out on the whole cost-of-living campaign.”
They were lost for an answer.
“But it is not too late, even now.”
He took a sheaf of papers, folded into four, from his inside pocket, and opened them out.
“First you must arrange a short meeting and adopt a resolution along these lines. What I have here is a specimen resolution drafted by the Pe-Ka for workers’ meetings on the food crisis: ‘We, the workers of such and such a plant … fill it in … having discussed the food crisis …’ “ He read briskly, without pauses, but the words did not fuse or collide. “ ‘First, that it is the inevitable result of the interminable imperialist bloodbath … second, that in Russia it is complicated by the supremacy of the Tsarist monarchy, which has put the country’s economy at the mercy of capitalist predators … third, that the prolongation of the war will bring hunger, poverty, and the physical degenera
tion of the masses … fourth, that cooperatives and specifically workers’ dining rooms, wage increases, and similar half measures only segregate the workers in separate supply systems, turn the rest of the population against the working class, and split the forces of revolution … and fifth, that the only recourse against hunger is all-out struggle against the war itself. Therefore the whole working class and all democrats must rise up in revolutionary struggle and civil war under the slogan ‘Down with the war!’ ”
And all this—his ability to read and understand written matter quickly, and to make it comprehensible to others—was only a small part of his talents. Veronika had already learned that her director in this new life could write just as rapidly! Comrade Vadim—Matvei Ryss—was a member of the Petersburg Committee’s literary board. He specialized in leaflets. He could sit down and produce in little more than an hour the final draft of a fervent and cogent appeal to the masses, urging them either to “take to the streets” (“Abandon the stifling dungeons of labor!”) or, conversely, to stay off them (“Do not let them spill your precious workers’ blood on the paving stones of Petersburg before the time is ripe!”), directing their wrath by turns against the “Romanov gang of hereditary bloodsuckers,” the “sharks of our national industry,” or the “hopeless petty bourgeois obtuseness of the socialist-liquidators.” Admittedly these stock expressions were not in the best literary taste, but their impact was breathtaking. Of course, Matvei hadn’t invented these expressions himself, they existed already, to suit a particular audience and a particular objective. Matvei’s cleverness consisted in memorizing hundreds of them, letting them circulate freely in his mind, surfacing and submerging, so that the exact words he needed attached themselves spontaneously to the nib of his pen—"chariots of militarism,” “traveling salesmen of chauvinism,” “crowned murderers,” “brothers worn out by their hard fate”—words to frame and reinforce the latest demands and exhortations of the Pe-Ka.
And not just the Pe-Ka!
“I also have instructions from the Be-Tse-Ka!” Vadim announced, looking sterner and more important than ever.
The Be-Tse-Ka? They all turned to look at him, and Mashistov spoke, more sharply than usual. “The Bureau of the Central Committee? It doesn’t exist.”
“It was reestablished just the other day,” Vadim said mysteriously. And added more mysteriously still, “Comrade Belenin returned from abroad the other day.”
Those words “returned from abroad” baffled the imagination. The battle zones were pitted with craters and crisscrossed with barbed wire, the frontiers were sealed—how could a member of a clandestine organization, a wanted man without a passport, transport himself? On the breeze, perhaps? Yesterday Switzerland, today Petersburg—what sort of supermen were these?
“Belenin? Who’s he?” the impetuous Dakhin couldn’t help asking.
Don’t know who Belenin is? Lanky Uksila grinned sardonically, Mashistov looked more wooden than ever, Vadim licked his lips pityingly, and even Veronika, who didn’t herself know the answer, was embarrassed by the impropriety of the question.
Dakhin drew his eyes still deeper into their dark sockets.
“Well then,” Vadim calmly continued, “these are the Be-Tse-Ka’s instructions. To fight the Gvozdevites with all our strength. To sabotage all war industry consistently and on a broad front. Understood?”
Perfectly. Anyway, we’re doing a bit of that already.
“But be warned. Remember that our strongest weapon is the strike. There’s a shortage of fully qualified workers, so you won’t be sent to the front, and you can make big demands. You can strike, organize meetings, adopt strongly worded resolutions, but under no circumstances must you let yourselves be provoked into premature bloody clashes. If you have to take to the street you must avoid any sort of collision. The time has not come. The final attack will take place when we establish a firm alliance with the army. Also understood?”
Veronika remembered that distant time—how far away it now seemed!—at the beginning of August 1914, when students had sung patriotic songs on the Nevsky, and knelt before the Winter Palace, and she and her friends in the Bestuzhev Institute had rejoiced in the war as a refreshing storm! When even people sitting in tramcars took off their hats if they heard demonstrators in the street singing “God Save the Tsar.” Things had changed so drastically since then—when exactly?—that people couldn’t be driven out into the street even to celebrate the taking of Erzerum or the Brusilov offensive. And here they now were, talking seriously about the final assault, as though it was imminent. And saying quite openly: we want nothing to do with your cannons, we declare war on your war!
It was this feeling of certain strength, steadily growing and sure of itself, that had won her over, brought her to this place, flooded her with the happiness of belonging. She marveled at her old self, blindly unable for so long to find the true path.
“And one final thing. By order of the Be-Tse-Ka, we must call a general strike for 8 November, when the trial of the revolutionary sailors begins. A strike in protest against the trial.”
“What sailors are those?” Dakhin asked, undeterred. He had burned his fingers once, but still meant to know everything.
“You’ve been told—revolutionary sailors,” Uksila snapped.
Mashistov had never heard of them either, but the look of dogged devotion on his face seemed to say that he had spent his life grieving for these sailors and could bear their suffering no longer.
Vadim nonetheless explained. “I’ll tell you what sort of sailors they are. Last autumn they spread propaganda among ships’ companies. About … about the food, about officers with German names … never mind what. Anyway, they caused unrest on the Gangut and the Rurik, and we regard them as revolutionaries. They were kept in various jails for some time. Now they’re about to get rough justice. You’ll be given some leaflets tomorrow. Comrade Maria here will deliver them, that’s why I brought her along.”
Maria (Veronika) blushed, with everyone looking at her.
“If you want to know what it says in the leaflet …” Vadim promptly unfolded one and read excerpts. He read as a hare or a kangaroo hops, barely touching the ground, carrying off crumbs of soil on its paws. “Because in their stifling barracks they have preserved their revolutionary consciousness undimmed … refused to be an unprotesting instrument in the hands of … The government is powerless to put the cadres of the working class, millions strong, in the dock, but its despicable courts are always at the service of … To mark the alliance of the revolutionary people with the revolutionary army we are bringing our factories to a standstill! Let the hangman’s hand falter at the people’s protest! Down with the death penalty!”
Down with the death penalty! Tolstoy’s dream! The dream of all the noblest hearts! To think that she had wasted so many years, as a Bestuzhev student, astray in the “world of the arts,” before catching up with these people, whose breadth of vision left her gasping!
Matvei’s fair skin had turned pink. But he wasn’t going to read it all the way through. He folded the papers and looked hard at each of his comrades.
“But this will simultaneously be a strike in protest against the arrest of soldiers of the 181st Regiment. And against the high cost of living. By taking part in this strike you will wash away the disgrace of your previous inaction. Prepare yourselves. Are you up to it?”
They had to be up to it. Uksila rose to his full height. Mashistov also stood up, raising his boxlike head.
They settled the details and put on their street clothes.
Matvei wound a dark red scarf around his throat, and finally put on his cap. While Veronika pulled up her Orenburg head scarf, hiding her neatly dressed hair, and becoming slightly less pretty. Handshakes all around—and the three workers all shook hers. She touched those honest, toilworn hands with respect and reverence, and they pressed hers in an iron grip, painfully—but pleasurably.
They were showing their trust in her. Initiating her.
> How desperately she wanted to do well by these people, to be useful if only in a small way to them and to their noble cause: the movement to end the war! To end all wars on this earth, once and for all! And all forms of capital punishment! No one must be oppressed! All must be freed from servitude!
They left the mutual aid society’s shack in full view of the sentry, and with a patrol somewhere around, so Matvei took the young woman’s arm, to make it all look innocent, and they set off like that slowly along the Schlüsselburg Prospect.
And although Veronika knew that Matvei had taken her arm only for the sake of appearances, and that he was not particularly concerned for her, she walked along as if he really meant it.
“I’m so grateful to you for taking me with you. And entrusting me with this task. You’ll see that I’m just the right person for it.”
Matvei’s thoughts were elsewhere and he said nothing.
It was a pleasant, not too wintry evening. A fine moisture, not quite snowflakes and not quite raindrops, settled on the forehead and the cheeks. An endless vista of streetlamps drew them along the Prospect, that long carriageway without sidewalks. Scraps of newspaper littered the road. It looked neglected. It couldn’t always have been like that. There weren’t many people around. The shops were all shut, the side streets dark. They moved aside for a newish American truck heading for the city. Veronika retreated instinctively to save her fur coat from splashes, but Matvei also gave way.
Twenty long blocks ahead of them lay the city that was dark for half the year, built all of stone, but so well adapted to illumination at night, to entertainments of all kinds, balls, theaters, horse racing, trips to the islands, a city equipped to ensure the felicity of the few, and at this evening hour just beginning to live its real life, youthful guardsmen erect in swift cabs to show off their manly forms, slapping the cabby’s shoulder with their gloves to speed him up, rushing toward their appointed pleasures, with not the slightest desire to know anything whatsoever about the workers’ world on their periphery or the strikes which had already hit the city and were to hit it again.
November 1916 Page 70