November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  “Better take a peek, Yura, see whether anything’s happening out there.”

  Yura looked out. The mist was thinning, and you could see farther. All was well. Even if it hadn’t been, you could give the police spies a taste of your fists in a place like this.

  Not much of a meal, those tomatoes. Not enough to line the bottom of a hungry belly. But sliced up and salted, a piece for you and a piece for me, you’ve got something that draws you closer together than the cause itself.

  That last crossing, his third, was the hardest of all. A test not so much of patience this time as of how much your feet and your heart could stand. Not everybody could have managed it, and that was a fact. Yet again, he finds himself far to the north of anywhere. A sledge and a driver, but it isn’t free this time: one mark per kilometer. The polar night. But you can see a long way—maybe there’s a moon behind the clouds? Along a river valley tumbling into ditches. Then over the river on foot, you and your guides clinging to opposite ends of a long rope. The frontier guards who pass that way several times a day have worn a track through the snow along the riverbank. Another sledge. You sleep a while. Change sledges at farmhouses. All around—the wilderness. Not a single stranger passing on foot, not a single cart. At Rovaniemi—another river, this time a dark, noisy, ice-free river. Loud voices calling for a boat.

  (You tell your story, but all the time your heart is not in it. You should be thinking of other things. What’s going to happen? What should you do about it? Though your mind is almost made up. Jump! And—then what?)

  Among the Finns you’re like a dumb man: don’t know a single word of Finnish. They take you where you want to go, and that’s good enough. They won’t betray you. In fact, you’re glad you don’t have to converse when you stop for the night. It’s good to be able to rest and plan ahead. Suddenly—you’re stopped. Searched. The Finns gabble away in their own language, their Russian is very poor. It turns out that your captors are a sort of army unit in the heart of the forest, consisting of old soldiers and raw young men. These are the so-called activists—Finns who have taken up arms against Russia. (In effect, they’re fighting for Germany, but that needn’t worry you right now.) They aren’t too fond of their own Social Democrats—regard them as aliens. But when they’re told that you’re a revolutionary they let you pass. After which it’s southward again. There’s less and less snow. A thaw has set in. Time to take extra care. Must be on your guard now. But the bolder and more casual you are, the less you are suspected. Sometimes it’s a matter of seconds—you dodge a patrol by nipping up a fire escape onto the station roof. Another time a gendarme manages to grab you and asks to see your passport. You search your pockets with alacrity and suddenly realize: “I haven’t got it! Anyway, I live locally and we don’t bother with them.” (Though everything you’re wearing is of foreign manufacture. But then the Finns dress better than we do.) The gendarme arrests you anyway. Takes you into the station waiting room, turns around to look for backup—and in one second, no, half a second you’re gone with the wind! Through the door! Bowling someone over and away into the forest! Keep to the forest. You’ve gotten away with it. But don’t go in circles. Where’s the railroad track? And how can you decide whether a train is going your way or in the opposite direction? The sky is overcast. You guess correctly. Then it’s on foot again. It’s dark. Warm. Hurry it up! You must put maybe forty versts behind you by morning. Thirsty? There’s snow. Hungry? Do without. You search the trackmen’s sheds, but find nothing. Suddenly—look out! A railway bridge! There’ll be sentries, obviously. Must go the long way around. Make a detour—an extra ten versts. Next—talk a boatman into ferrying you across. By morning you’re asleep in a barn, in straw, with mice squeaking in your ear. Next night—all the way to Uleaborg by forest road. But avoiding passersby. You’ve covered seventy versts in two nights! When you arrive at the editorial office of the Social Democratic newspaper and sit down, you can’t get up again. Your legs are like lead, your toes are galled and bleeding. Later, the comrades will concoct a false document and a photograph and take you through to Helsingfors, but right now it’s doubtful whether you can even stand up and go to the farm to rest. (The blisters still haven’t healed, and they make walking difficult.)

  “Yes, they’re good tomatoes, these.”

  All this explained why the members of the Central Committee abroad, Vladimir Ilyich and Zinoviev, were, putting it bluntly, not keen on such excursions. Shlyapnikov, though, had never been a stay-at-home anyway. Besides, here in Russia he knew a lot of workers personally, which was a big help with communications. So off he went on his rounds, with his yoke over his shoulders, sympathizing with the émigrés when he was abroad, and with the natives when he was in Russia.

  Comrade Belenin, dear friend, tell them in Piter we must have money, they’ll have to get up a collection! Get it from Letopis, from Gorky, from Bonch, from Volna if need be—from anywhere as long as it’s money! Then when I get here I find Volna is quite the wrong sort of publication—they’re against us and I won’t get a kopeck out of them. And Bonch begrudges every ruble, as do all the once-upon-a-time Social Democrats. True, Gorky always gives—we’d starve without him. As for those coppers from members in the Petersburg factories, it pains me to take them. Then there’s the extra 10 percent we take from local organizations for the All-Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. But send that money abroad with my own hands? Oh no.

  Money, money, that’s always where you have to start. He produced a wad and counted out fifteen red notes into Lutovinov’s clumsy paw.

  “Here you are, Yura. That’s all for the time being. You’ll have to manage somehow.”

  The hundred and fifty looked even less in Lutovinov’s fist.

  “It isn’t much, Gavrilovich. What can I do with this?”

  What could he do with it? Was that all he needed to move around, to organize things, to buy “material”? Plus something to live on?

  He sighed, thought a bit. Should I make it another twenty? But what about Nizhny? What about Ivanovo–Voznesensk? And Tula? And what if somebody had to go to the Urals?

  Can’t be done.

  The previous year his budget had been bigger. He and his photographer brother-in-law had the idea of printing postcards with pictures of the imprisoned Duma deputies in convicts’ smocks. They had done a brisk trade in the factories. In addition to which Shlyapnikov had brought in several numbers of Sotsial-Demokrat and two of Kommunist, which were loaned to readers for a fee. Whereas now …

  (Now … his heart sank: he had to decide.)

  “You may not believe it, Yura, I went off to America to try to earn some money and I could hardly pay for my passage.”

  Lutovinov stared wide-eyed. “What, you? You really went to work for money?”

  It’s no great secret, I can tell him about it.

  “When I was leaving, a certain person here …”

  (Gorky. But no need to tell him that …)

  “… gave me some documentation on the persecution of the Jews. What’s been happening since the war broke out. I was supposed to get the stuff published in the West. Not to give it away, though, to sell it. The Jews were supposed to pay good prices for it! Nothing’s done except for hard cash in the West. In Copenhagen, for instance, half the town are black marketeers and profiteers nowadays. And the Social Democrats are as bad as the rest.”

  “What, our comrades?”

  “Everybody gets corrupted there. There’s a black market in canned food meant for the army, in German pencils, in medicines … If they get expelled from Denmark they set up in business in their next place. There’s somebody called Parvus—he’s amassed several million already. And now he’s a benefactor, the scoundrel.”

  At the very mention of that ambiguous figure, Parvus, the Social Democratic moneybags, a dark cloud descended on his heart. He put the man out of his mind. Not his business. Lenin would see to him—with his iron nit comb.

  “Or take America nowadays. I needed a passport f
or the voyage back. They’re issued by the Russian Consulate. But I couldn’t let them know who I was. I had to pretend I lived in America. They advised me to get confirmation from my parish that I belonged there. I went to see the priest, and for two dollars he gave me a certificate. That’s how it is with them.”

  (With my people, the Old Believers, you’d never, never get that.)

  “That’s America for you. Everybody’s on the make. If they aren’t making it today they’re dreaming about it tomorrow. But living is cheap there, and easy. Our comrades there tried hard to persuade me to stay, said it’s the same working class here, you know, you can be just as much a help to the International here as there. But I wasn’t having any of it. So all right, they’ve got two Russian newspapers. And a few in Yiddish. There’s one called New World, with a Menshevik running it. I submitted a report on the situation in Russia, thought I could topple that Menshevik, wanted to put a Bolshevik in his place, but there was nobody suitable, not a single one, can you believe it?”

  He laughed.

  “So what papers did you use to get in there?”

  Good thinking, Yurka. He had a good conspiratorial head on his shoulders.

  “Getting in was still more difficult. They’ve got immigration control in New York Harbor. They don’t let sick people in—don’t need them. They check your money, your income, your prospects, whether you’ve at least got well-off acquaintances. Paupers are turned back.”

  “So what could you show them?” Lutovinov’s blue eyes were popping, but he was enjoying Shlyapnikov’s success in advance.

  “What I showed them was”—with a catch in his voice, he always spoke of it with pride—"was my turner’s papers. Turner, first class, in English. I qualified in England.”

  He put an arm around Lutovinov, a shabby figure in his skimpy gray-brown-ginger overcoat (it had lost its original single color) with frayed buttonholes which would soon look like—just holes. Shlyapnikov had exchanged his own European coat in Piter for one so threadbare that it was almost white. He had kept only his good boots.

  “Last summer I asked the Central Committee for permission to leave Norway and go to England. They wouldn’t let me at first. But once I was standing behind a machine I was earning money for the Party as well as for myself, and sent some to them in Switzerland. The working class is what everything else is based on, brother. A workingman will survive anywhere. And let me tell you something—you shouldn’t let Party business take you away from your machine too much, mustn’t get out of practice. You’re a real craftsman. You must try to become an educated proletarian. Without such people we will never build the Party. Or else it won’t be the right sort of party.”

  Yurka, with Shlyapnikov’s arm around him, listened trustfully. Like a younger brother, though so much bigger. There were only three years between them, but Yurka had seen so much less of the world.

  “Or what can easily happen to people is they get too big for their boots and turn into God knows what—useless windbags. Now take Gvozdev—we’re fighting him, but I’m fond of him just the same. Standing at the next bench to his is a real treat! A good pair of hands—no two ways about it!”

  The shed door was wide open, so they could see anyone coming. It was a gray day. The air was hazy, and there were patches of fog close to the ground. Potatoes had been lifted and lay along the furrows. The red-brownish haulm was drenched.

  Somewhere over there all those foreign countries …

  “So did they?”

  “Did they what?”

  “Let you into America?”

  “Oh yes! A turner, remember! Not a squeak out of them.”

  “But when they were interrogating you and all that, where was the Jewish printed matter?” Lutovinov’s mind was still on track.

  “In the engine room, with a comrade,” Shlyapnikov said reassuringly.

  “So did you sell it?”

  “At a ridiculous price. I really disgraced myself. The Jews back in Stockholm were eager to buy and offered a good price. But I was afraid it would all go straight to the German General Staff and be used by them … There are German spies at every turn, you know, in Sweden and Denmark. A revolutionary activist risks dirtying himself on the German intelligence service from time to time. Things don’t look very strict in Europe, but you have to be on your guard. If they manage to plant money on you, you’ll never shake them off. So what I suggested to the Swedish Jews was give us the money for a press and we’ll publish your stuff first, then our own. But no, they wanted to be sole proprietors of the material. I got suspicious, that’s why I lit out for America. The Jews there won’t begrudge the money, I thought, they’re all millionaires. What to use for travel money, though? I had to use Party money for the voyage, traveling in the cheapest class. And what was the result? I arrived in July, the worst time possible: all the rich Jews had left town for the summer, and the others haggled. So I sold the stuff for five hundred dollars, I’m ashamed to say. And two hundred and fifty went on the return fare and living expenses. You see what happens when a workingman goes into business.”

  At moments like that a juicy swear word often helps. But Shlyapnikov was not in the habit. Never had been, on account of his religion.

  “New York is just stone, iron, and smoke, I don’t know how people live there. In Piter at least we’ve got copses and vegetable gardens, but there’s nowhere you can just sit like this in New York.”

  Mustn’t sit here for long either. This drizzly day was deceptively quiet. Right behind their backs along the Sampsonyevsky Prospect, along the Vyborg and Pollyustrovskaya embankments, the factories had been silent for three, four, or five days now. The strike had closed some, the retaliatory lockout had slammed the gates of others. Ericsson’s, the Old and the New Lessner works, the Old and New Parviainen works, Aivaz, Renault, Phoenix, Nobel, Ekwall, Prometheus, Baranovsky’s, and yet others all over Petersburg, 120,000 workers, maybe a few less … and who would be deciding their fate? He would, Shlyapnikov would. It should really be the Bureau of the Central Committee and the Petersburg Committee, but it was impossible to get them all together, and he wasn’t going to consult that pain in the neck Molotov, somebody from the Petersburg Committee would come along to Pavlov’s apartment that evening and the two of them would decide. (We’ll decide—but the leaflets have most likely been printed already. We’ll decide—but it’s already decided.)

  “Listen, Yura”—Shlyapnikov’s arm was resting still more heavily on his shoulder—"you know what we want to do, don’t you? To disrupt the lockout we want to call a total general strike, starting tomorrow, all over Petersburg, right down to the last small workshop, the very last worker—everybody!”

  His arm pressed harder still. A somber face, dark as if blackened by smoke, with sick eyes and drooping mustache, looked out from under the workman’s cap.

  “What do you think? Will the proletariat support us? Will it catch on?”

  Lutovinov was silent.

  “Or won’t it?”

  Yura thought it over.

  “What can I say, Gavrilovich? In the little places, those where there’s no firm hand to organize things, it’s always anybody’s guess. It may catch on, and it may not … People are chickening out.”

  Shlyapnikov shrank into himself, looking darker and sicker than ever.

  He knew all that. That was where he had begun: as a fitter’s mate with other young workers, in the Obukhov strike in 1901, stuffing their pockets with nuts and bolts, metal cutoffs, stones, rushing from the Semyannikov to the Obukhov plant, to drive the know-nothings who didn’t want to strike away from their machines.

  “Yes, but it isn’t all rabbit punches, there’s got to be solidarity. If one group are in a fix the others must help them out. If there’s no solidarity, what kind of proletariat are we? We’ll never, never …”

  “They’re chickening out,” Lutovinov said. “They need pepping up. It all depends … I don’t really know … Now if somebody could slip the strikers a bit of mone
y …”

  “All right, then. It’ll be decided this evening, we’ll send a runner sometime in the night …”

  A sensible fellow, Lutovinov. And one of us.

  “Listen, maybe you ought to take the whole south over, what do you say? Add Voronezh, Kharkov, and the North Caucasus to what you’ve got now? Let’s think about it—how many are on our side in those towns, what connections we have, how many people do we need? What d’you say, shall we meet in a week’s time and discuss it? D’you want to bring somebody else with you?”

  They agreed on the details: where, when to meet, how they would recognize each other, how they would get through the door, the password.

  All right. Time to leave. Separately.

  Palm smacked palm. Shlyapnikov strode away between the rows of potatoes, muddying his boots.

  The mist had settled, and the air was damper than in the morning.

  If he could have communicated with the CC by telegraph, he could have tapped out his message, they would have answered, they could have discussed the situation. But they weren’t in communication even by letter—you could do what you liked, use invisible ink, write code, conceal the message in the covers of a book, there was no one to take a message of any sort. At one time all clandestine correspondence had been carried on via the Duma group, but that arrangement had collapsed when they were arrested. A certain amount had trickled through via Lenin’s sister, but she had been detained for three months. Now, if she wasn’t banished to Astrakhan (her husband was pulling strings to keep her at home on health grounds and he was a company director, so she would be allowed to stay) she would still be under surveillance and a spent force.

  No contact at all! Until you go yourself. Right, you can feel the yoke on your shoulders. Show that you’re up to it!

  If only the Central Committee Bureau really meant something. As things are, what does it amount to? Three of us strolling down the Lesnoy Boulevard when it gets dark, and making our decisions as we go. It’s called the BCC, but liaison with abroad and with the provinces and all the real work fall on me, on Shlyapnikov. Zalutsky is supposed to be our link with the Petersburg Committee. To all intents and purposes he is the PC. That drip Molotov is responsible for literature. Nominally. Try reading one of his leaflets, you’ll doze off before you’re halfway through. He might as well be writing for sheep or cows. If you want something with fire in it you commission the youngsters, the students, to write it. Molotov was only taken on because there was nobody else. And because he fitted Lenin’s specifications: the leadership must consist solely of people who understand that our prime tactical objective is to distance ourselves from Chkheidze. In no circumstances must we join forces with Chkheidze. If we did cooperate with Mensheviks we would find ourselves chained to them, helpless lackeys. Molotov had taken the point.