Efremov: The fissure is a fundamental one. The Declaration is too weak and mild. Treason, if proven, is a capital crime. We must insist on the establishment of a commission of inquiry. Only a trial, and retribution, can pacify the people’s conscience and prevent the people from exacting vengeance! (After an interruption:) The Progressist group is leaving the Bloc.
Thus, the Progressive Bloc had failed to take a single positive step since its creation, and at its first attempt to do so fell apart at the seams.
* * *
Instead of the Stürmers—the Milyukovs? Replace one set of murderers with another? Down with the black-and-yellow flag of the Progressive Bloc! Down with the stinking monstrosity of a misbegotten constitution! Let us forge a genuine hammer of revolution!
—RSDRP
* * *
[63]
You have to be born with eyes in the back of your head. And ears on your cap. You don’t have to smell him, or see his shadow, you just know without knowing how. Your back feels his presence. You’re being shadowed! You walk along, apparently without looking back, but you always know, you are always quite sure whether you’re being followed or not. That shabby bundle of rags on the bridge yonder, idly spitting into the water or eyeing the passersby … At the tram stop you know who is simply waiting for a tram and who has been standing there too long.
And, of course, you need good legs. If your legs are weak it’s no life for you, you’ll fold up in no time at all. Don’t go in for work underground if your legs are weak—especially in a city like Petersburg. Like my old mother, Khionia Nikolaevna, says: “It’s his legs that feed the wolf.” Same with the underground worker: it’s his legs he relies on.
Then things work out as awkwardly as they can, just to spite you, to wear you to a frazzle. You arrange meeting places well in advance, but choose a place to sleep at the last minute, according to circumstances, according to whether you’re being watched or not. You knew last night, of course, that you would be meeting Lutovinov this morning, that there was a place nearby where you could spend the night in an emergency, and headquarters in the Pavlovs’ house on Serdobolskaya Street was not far away—but not only must you not give away the hiding place by showing up there, you must take care not to compromise a single individual by letting your guard down. So last night, with two of them on his heels, and unable to shake them off, he had to zigzag all over the city, and rather than spend the night out in gardens (as he had last winter at temperatures below zero, wandering around and freezing till daybreak) he had to make a beeline for the Grazhdanka, through a dense copse where the sleuths would give up for fear of a knife in the ribs, or else make for the Galley Port.
It was there, in the Galley Port, that he shook them off, on a dark patch of wasteland.
But today he had had to drag himself right across Vasilevsky Island, right across the Petersburg side, across Aptekarsky and Kamenny islands and the suburbs of Novaya Derevnya and Lanskaya. Gorky’s apartment was more or less on his way, but he could not be visited until the day after tomorrow, and Serdobolskaya Street was close by, but that must wait till the evening, and in the meantime he must not even squint in that direction. All this for his morning meetings and then he would have to go from Serdobolskaya, where he was already expected, traverse the whole city again, past the Nevsky Gate, to the Glassmakers’ Quarter. And only then, if he was still in the clear, would he come back here to Serdobolskaya. And all this would have been a piece of cake, but for the lockout, blast it.
The lockout was something he hadn’t expected.
He hadn’t expected those people to make such a bold move. You got used to them shilly-shallying and then giving way.
Could he possibly have made a mistake?
It preyed on his mind—the thought that he had blundered. Overstepped the mark.
Lenin had been so insistent. Mass action must be avoided! Concentration on small underground conspiratorial cells!
He had slept badly. His head was heavy. Muzzy. And he had a long, hard day before him.
Some people like Petersburg, some don’t. It’s a matter of taste, but when you’re plodding along like this, with stone to the left of you, stone to the right of you, stone underfoot, sometimes the pavement comes up to hit you and you feel like howling: Mama, why did I ever leave green Murom, why did I ever set out to see the wide world?
Just a joke, of course.
It was a lot quicker by tram, but trams day after day would rattle the soul out of you, shake your head to bits. Anyway, you didn’t always have the five- and ten-kopeck pieces for your fare. And just imagine if one of the sleuths hopped on, you’d have to get off right away and your money would be down the drain. On foot you had more of a chance, you could maneuver.
The old laws of conspiracy no longer held. Many had ceased to observe strict rules: they did not take precautions with hideouts or even with underground printing presses. They said you only get caught because of “inside information” anyway, not because you’ve been shadowed, it’s always because of traitors, and you never knew who they were. The police won’t pick you up on the street very often, and if they do they’ll only send you out of town for a while. You’ll just wear yourself out with this conspiratorial nonsense.
No, as a rule they won’t pick you up on the street. But you carry a Finnish passport just in case (to show you’re exempt from military service). Your Russian passport is kept in reserve. You’d need one if you applied for a residence permit. So you don’t. No such person. No fixed abode. Free as a bird.
Many of them did in fact get away with it. And of course we don’t want idiots like you to get hit—if you do we’ll be stuck there with you. But we would still like to see hopeless idiots like you taught a lesson. Say you’re expelled for a short time. It doesn’t seem long to you, but afterward the whole setup needs rebuilding.
It may not seem long to you, but to me any interruption is too long. I won’t sacrifice a single day of freedom without good reason. I’m ready to die. I’m ready to go to Siberia, but only if I know there’s no other way. But to go into the Kresty if only for a month—for no good reason? Find yourself another fathead, I’m not your man. Never skimp on conspiratorial precautions. Overdoing the precautions always pays off.
Self-discipline means freedom, freedom means you can carry on working for the Party.
You’d know if you’d run around as much as I have. I stuck it out in Petersburg all last winter, with never a scratch. Traveled all around the provinces unscathed myself, and never got anybody else caught. Left for Scandinavia—got there safe and sound. Smuggled “literature,” bales of it, sometimes around the North Cape even, and it got through. And back I came—safe and sound. And here I am walking the streets of Petersburg again. What d’you think of that? No doubt there’s still the odd speck of dust from the sidewalks of New York and Copenhagen on the soles of my shoes. Maybe a granite chip or two from the Finnish north. And if I get through safely until February I’ll be back there.
But this time around, who wouldn’t have been found out? The way I arrived! Storm clouds over the Vyborg district, everybody expecting a blinding flash of lightning. On the trams, in the street, in the shops, at every turn people openly vilify the powers that be, with Little Mother Empress and Rasputin getting their share. And the police spies didn’t turn a hair. They’d heard it all so often. The uniformed police were laughed at and abused to their faces. Then a reserve regiment mutinied. When the army gets restless it means the end isn’t far off. After the sickening inactivity, the frivolity and pettiness, the contemptible squabbling of émigré life, and after a week in Arctic darkness, deafened by the roar of a waterfall, you’re suddenly faced with all this and have to make your mind up. All by yourself.
You could easily get it wrong.
Maybe you already have.
Have you? Haven’t you? It’s as if somebody had your soul on a lathe, planing it down.
The rules you made for yourself are clear and immutable. You have to know all the working-clas
s districts down to the last cul-de-sac. Have to know every little path through the backyards of the Vyborg, Neva, and Narva districts. And, of course, all the yards with two entrances. You must never follow the same route more than once. Never sleep in the same apartment two nights running. Nor, if the sleuths are closing in, must you hole up in the same apartment for two or three days on end. When the hunt thins out you must leave very early in the morning, while it’s still dark. Or another thing you can do is go into one place late in the afternoon as if you mean to stay the night, then move to a different apartment late in the evening. (The Glassworkers’ Quarter, where two sisters live next door to each other, is a good place for that.) And you must never tell even your most reliable comrades where you may be spending the night. The less they know, the better.
Another good dodge is to keep changing your hat and overcoat. You can always shake the sleuths off that way. Remember last winter, when they were right on your heels, in broad daylight? Where to hide? The baths, of course! Took a private cubicle. Sent for a messenger: listen, go to such an address, there’s a girl there, Tonya, she’s called, tell her on the quiet, not while her mother’s listening, “Uncle Sasha’s taken a room, he wants you to go to him.” She came. “Uncle Sasha, you’ve disgraced me, people will say a man sent for me from the bathhouse. Suppose the street finds out—who will marry me after that?” “Never mind, Tonya dear, never mind, it’s for the Revolution. I’ll find you a suitor like you never saw! … Here, take my hat and coat, wrap them in the sheet. And bring me your daddy’s, we’ll swap them back in a day or two …” And I got clean away.
Your Petersburg worker will always get you out of a hole.
These same nieces, and young girls in general, are good at counter-surveillance, you can send them out into the open to keep an eye on the sleuths.
Now, if you stayed with your sister two days in a row that would be a real rest. You could catch up on your sleep. And on your food. The most aggravating thing about these conspiratorial hideouts is always having to make fresh arrangements for one night at a time—and having to put up with the politeness of your hosts. They’re never expecting you till the last minute, they’re put out by your arrival, but don’t like to show it. There may be three small rooms for six people, and not enough beds—thank you, I’m grateful to you for whatever it is, give me any old thing to lie on, I can go under the table there, I’ll soon drop off, you just carry on as usual! But no, they give up their best bed, they feel obliged to entertain you, the man of the house insists on showing how educated he is politically and keeps you up half the night discussing Party programs. By then you’re incapable of taking any more hospitality, or conversation, or even talk about Party programs, you just want them to take pity on you and leave you in peace, your head is buzzing, you’d give anything just for a spell of silence … Just to be silent, stretch out without sheets, without even undressing, over there by the slop pail, anywhere, as long as your head gets a rest and your tongue can stop working.
Besides, an underground revolutionary’s head is cluttered with three times as many worries as any ordinary person’s. Apart from the usual, everyday concerns—moving around, jobs to be done, what to say to people—other cares weigh heavily on his brain: the safest way to dress, what to carry and what not to carry in his pockets, in what order to visit particular houses and meet particular people, so as not to lay a trail from one to another, what to leave where, who can be asked to hide something for him, pass something on, keep a secret.
Then, when your head is in this state, and after a poor night’s rest, you find that nuisance of a lawyer, Sokolov, pops up: the sailor revolutionaries are facing trial, they’re threatened with execution! It was all happening at once! The ferment, the smell of powder in the air, a regiment mutinies, soldiers fraternize with workers! A number of soldiers have been arrested and are awaiting trial—and suddenly these sailors are threatened with the death sentence! What should the party of the proletariat do? Why, hit back fast with a general strike! The decision was made in three minutes, without hesitation. When is the trial? On 8 November. So on 8 November—it’s everyone out!
A big thank-you to the workers and their families. The more poverty-stricken and joyless their lives, the more ready they are to share their shelter, to move over and make room, as long as you’re not fussy. During the war apartments belonging to the gentry and the intelligentsia ceased to be available for conspiratorial purposes. The change had set in before the war, in fact as soon as the tide of revolution turned.
These people liked calling themselves Bolsheviks, of course, Mitya Pavlov had visited one of them quite recently. On general Party matters they had the friendliest of conversations, but as soon as Pavlov got to the point—"A representative of the Central Committee has arrived from abroad, he needs somewhere to stay the night”—the other man beat a hasty retreat: “Simply impossible, I’m being watched!” Pretending that he was concerned for the CC’s representative, not for himself. As if anybody would think it worthwhile watching a worm like him. Luckily, Pavlov was up to the occasion. “You’re all good at talking. But we can’t get our literature released.” “What? You mean, you’ve got no money either?” He was amazed! He would never have imagined it! “How much do you need, then?” Pavlov: “A lot.” (He should have said “three hundred.”) The other thought quickly and paid his ransom. “I can manage a hundred.”
All in all, it’s been a useful lesson. They started bolting as early as 1908, all those bigmouths. Soon showed what sort of revolutionaries they were. Even before the war the only professional revolutionaries left were workers. There were barely enough intellectuals to form a Bolshevik group in the Duma and run the newspaper. Now even they have disappeared. As things are now, the Petersburg committee has not a single journalist left, and there’s no one to write leaflets. Militant students, novices, have come along to help out.
Never mind the liquidators, nobody expects anything from them. But where are the former Pravda group? They used to be so much more reliable—but they’ve swerved from the Pravda line. They’ve “had their eyes opened to their fatherland.” They’ve lapsed into patriotism or rather—to avoid that odious word—they’ve squeezed into any old bolt-hole, just to escape the call-up, to avoid being sent to the front. They’ve flocked into statistical departments, the Unions of Zemstvos and Towns, the War Industry Committees, serving side by side with the Guchkovites and the Gvozdevites, showing the underground opposition away with both hands, giving any sort of underground activity a wide berth. Krasikov? Shary? What sort of Bolsheviks are they now? True, Podvoisky still keeps in touch, cautiously. They’re all in “important positions.” We and they are no longer marching in step. Crafty Bonch has kept his ugly head down: “I’m just a student of religious sects, an ethnographer.” Steklov-Nakhamkes is a secretary in the Union of Towns. Kozlovsky has his own law office on Sergiev Street and is making his pile.
Most annoying of all is Krasin. He used to be the very soul of the Pravda group, now he’s taken off, vanished into the blue! Become a businessman, a chief executive more or less, earning a hundred thousand rubles, rolling in it, and not a single kopeck for his old comrades. Well, to be frank, it’s no use expecting him to. Gorky is right: those people would sooner give you money to get tanked up at Cubat’s than for underground work.
They’ve thought up a group label for themselves—"unattached” Social Democrats. So that they need not accept conspiratorial Party discipline or account for their behavior. Their attitude is: “We know what we’re doing, no need for you to stick your nose in.”
There was some thought of sending old Pravda supporters an ultimatum: come over to us immediately or we’ll never accept you later.
Which meant that Sokolov, the little lawyer, isn’t one of the worst. He’s obliging. He even helps with money now and then. He passes on all the information he picks up in journalistic and legal circles. And on occasion he has made his apartment available for meetings with those jittery parliamenta
rians—the Chkheidzes and Kerenskys—you needed a place in which you could put the screws to them as Lenin demanded: the Russian Kautskyites must be brought to account by the workers’ underground! And sure enough they tied themselves in knots trying to excuse themselves.
The workers’ underground. But is there such a thing? The trouble is that the reflux has gone much deeper. That sort of life, with spells of imprisonment and banishment on top of it, wears people out. Last year when you went around to the old places, you saw more than enough. There was a smell of wormwood in the fields. Don’t look, Sanya! Take Ryabinin, the geologist, a native of Murom, like yourself. One of your own, of course, he smiles and smiles, but it’s no use trying to recruit him for the Revolution anymore, he’s a dropout. Or Gromov, from Sormovo. A Social Democrat since 1900. Jailed and banished over and over again, till finally he got tired of it. He’d aged and gone gray, and withdrawn into his own little house, into his family circle … At best, a mere sympathizer. Or Grishka from Novgorod. We were fellow prisoners in 1904, and again in Vladimir Central in 1905. Poverty, unemployment, family cares had crushed him. What a propagandist, what an organizer he used to be! Now all that is lost. He agonizes over it, it gives him no peace—but he still says leave me out of it, boys, find somebody younger.
But what if the men all give up, one after another? Who’s going to train the new recruits? Who will bond them with the Party?
You can forgive the workers. But not the intellectuals.
But at bottom that’s how it’s bound to be. Where can you find a genuine proletarian politician—not proletarians in name only—and can such a person exist? The main problem for him is how to become a politician without ceasing to be a worker. Otherwise, how can you call yourself “proletarian”? You’ll just be an intellectual, a semibourgeois. That’s why this new species of “educated proletarian” has recently appeared on the scene—our best hope for the future. There are very few of them, very few of us, but only our kind can carry on the workers’ cause. We must inevitably take responsibility for every form of revolutionary activity—journalism, writing and distribution of leaflets, clandestine correspondence, that in particular we must not entrust to other hands.
November 1916 Page 121