“It’s as good as done!”
Kayurov sounded confident. This was right up his alley. When strong-arm stuff was needed he was first off the mark. Some things he might make a hash of, but not this …!
“I’ve heard they’re giving strikers a handout in some places.”
“Oh? Who is? Where do the funds come from?”
“Lord knows. The Interdistrict group maybe, or the Initiative group.”
Internationalists? Socialists outside the rival parties? Well, well! A mystery. Still, it’s all grist for our mill.
Vaska Kayurov likes a chat. But there are things you can’t tell him … That your heart is heavy, that you wonder whether we’ve made a mistake. Just tell him what you’ve decided. That’s enough for him.
It’s a general rule anyway. Everything you say is meant for one particular listener. Five minutes later you may be talking to someone else. The words will be different, and so in some respect will you.
Kayurov’s a good man to talk to if you want to relieve your feelings by abusing someone. Everything about Kayurov is sharp. From his restless, piercing eyes to the biting language he uses. He lashes out at Chkheidze again: he’s a liar when he says he sympathizes with the Zimmerwald declaration, he just wants to hitch us to a bourgeois government. Suppose Milyukov does replace Stürmer—where does that get us? He had harsher words still for Gvozdev; know him myself, from Ericsson’s, I’d like to get my teeth in his throat! Strikebreakers! Want to force arbitration hearings on us, Gvozdev’s boys do! They’ve decided saving the country means saving the monarchy. A harmless little mistake! Our Minins and Pozharskys nowadays don’t lay their purses on the altar, nowadays they’re out to pinch what’s there already.
If we want to go on talking without attracting attention we ought to drag the meal out. But the spoon’s in such a hurry to empty the plate. Braised meat, cabbage, potatoes … Food problem’s bound to come up with those people staring you in the face. Doesn’t take much to set Kayurov off anyway. Action’s what he’s good at, but he likes airing his views. Which are sometimes quite sensible.
“There ought to be fixed prices for all food, of course. But the government mustn’t be given a monopoly on the grain trade! That can’t be allowed! The government must not control the grain supply, or they’ll have us at their mercy. We aren’t making enough of the food problem in our agitation. We must stir up housewives to wreck the shops. If the women take to the streets they won’t let the Cossacks loose on them!”
Kayurov has a separate group of his own, men originally from Sormovo, among whom he passes for a wise head. They wanted to do it all themselves—make the plans and carry them out, maybe launch the whole second Russian Revolution. They refused even to recognize the Petersburg Committee for quite some time: you do your thing, they said, and we’ll do ours. Partly because they’re distrustful: the committee might include informers who could land them all in jail. But you have to draw the line somewhere: the secret police, bless them, also try to infect us with suspicion so as to disunite us. When Chernomaz, of the Petersburg Committee, smeared the “expats,” said they’re just sitting it out comfortably, all they do is send orders, and expect us to treat them like holy writ—Kayurov’s group lent a ready ear. And when Shlyapnikov had arrived in person last autumn—here you are, a real live member of the Central Committee, right here, not “sitting it out”!—there had been an outcry from Kayurov’s group: That’s impossible! We never elected him! He’s a provocateur!
Impossible! Nobody else can manage it, so you can’t have managed it either. Obviously, the Okhrana must have escorted you over the frontier. True, you didn’t elect me. Present circumstances being so difficult. But which of you could be named in my place?
They talked it over and sorted it all out, with Gorky as intermediary: he was from their part of the world, from Nizhny Novgorod, and so the only one whom the Sormovo group looked up to and trusted. His apartment was the one place where they all met—to wag their tongues and sob on his breast, remembering the collapse of the first revolution, the glorious “red years” up to 1907, and the subsequent decline of the working class. (Gorky liked shedding a tear or two himself.)
Now that my feet are warmer they feel wetter than ever. I can feel the water gathering inside my boots. How nice it would be to take them off and dry out! A homeless man can never find a place to do it.
Gorky keeps open house in his apartment on the Kronverksky Prospect, and all sorts of people flock there—ordinary workers, Social Democrats, revolutionary democrats in general, and he’s always hospitable, you always get something to eat there, and the atmosphere could not be more cheerful if beyond those walls Tsarism had ceased to exist, or was already on its way out. The apartment is kept under observation, there are often plainclothesmen on duty outside, but since its occupant is not engaged in clandestine or illegal activities, and since people flock there in such numbers—as many as forty at a time—visiting Gorky need not breach the rules of underground activity, and Shlyapnikov permits himself to go there.
“When will you be at Aleksei Maksimych’s? Tell him I’ll stop by the day after tomorrow.”
To pick up the news from the Duma. The Duma opens tomorrow and the next day Gorky will have all the news from the lobbies. And where else would you get all the news from bourgeois circles, and even from the ruling clique, and all the printed matter that was making the rounds? That secret meeting of factory owners with the city governor? Here’s the typed report. Protopopov’s secret meeting with the Duma deputies? Here’s the record, send it abroad if you feel like it.
“Aleksei Maksimych has gone off to Moscow.”
“Oh? When?”
All those messages Lenin gave me for Gorky. Getting him to cough up money—I can handle that all right. But some of the other jobs are a bit trickier. Like cutting out the “Okists” by joining up with the “Makhists.” Can’t make any sense of that at all. Sweep them all out with the same broom—that would be easier to understand and to do. Lenin’s always trying to play one group against the another. But Gorky’s best of friends with both groups. And with all the others. Though at bottom his position is the same as ours.
Kayurov echoed his thoughts. “Aleksei Maksimych and I had an argument about what line we should take if things started happening quickly. The Revolution will begin at the front, that’s obvious. But that means that the front will be weakened immediately and Russia will lose this blasted ‘second fatherland war.’ Which is a good thing. Lenin writes that the defeat of their own country is to the advantage of the proletariat. So one or the other of the two imperialist groups will win a temporary hegemony over Russia. Well, then—which of the two is preferable? Aleksei Maksimych always claims that the Franco-British combination is better. And I tell him that capitalists of all nations have factories in Piter, even the Swedes, even the Finns, and they rule us. So we have plenty of chances to compare. Your Englishman is always the most savage and most spiteful of the lot. At the Nevsky cotton mill they let in a yardful of women looking for work, and he comes out on the porch with a pipe between his teeth and stares at them contemptuously as if they were cattle. The Germans aren’t so barefaced. A bit more human, you might say, more like our own. All those German foremen we’ve got in the factories—you can have words with them and make it up afterward. What do you think?”
What Shlyapnikov thought was that this kind of talk made him sick. He’d had his fill of it there, he hadn’t expected to have to listen to it here. But should he answer back, should he try to explain? Start an argument here and now? He had filled his belly, and a sluggish warmth was spreading over his whole body. He would have liked to go on sitting there languidly and could easily have gone to sleep in his chair. But an underground agent cannot permit himself to lie down or even sit still for long, except at times of extreme danger. His tea drunk, he was pressed for time. It’s his legs that feed the wolf.
“Besides,” Kayurov said, warming to his theme, “they’re neighbors. How can y
ou jump over them?”
“Know what, Vaska?” Shlyapnikov beckoned to the waiter for his bill. “Don’t go spreading that stupid talk around, even at Gorky’s. Our line is to slip by under the Germans’ jaws without them vomiting all over us.”
Shared words, separate bills. If you work for your kopecks you count them carefully. Each of them paid his own tab.
Shlyapnikov left feeling worried.
But he had his wits about him. He walked down the lane in the other direction toward Mezhevaya Street. With nobody in tow, apparently.
Once there he jumped onto a moving tram, which quickly picked up speed. Now he was sure that he was clean. Couldn’t afford to make mistakes today.
He thought it best to take a connecting ticket. Didn’t want to walk for a single block along the Nevsky, where he was likely to be noticed. Besides, it would save him five kopecks.
If the Petersburg militants all think like Kayurov, how can we avoid getting our hands dirty? From day one of the war the German General Staff has seen the Russian socialist-internationalists as more or less its allies. More or less is right! And pigs may (more or less) fly!
But Lenin keeps his weather eye open! He won’t let it go too far!
Sashenka—smart girl—had smelled a rat when some socialists interned in Berlin in 1914 were offered the chance to return to Russia. Who was rolling out the red carpet, and why, and where the money was coming from no one knew. All those Chkhenkelis and Nakhamkeses and Luries and Gordons jumped at the chance, and authorized her to speak for them—so off she went and refused on behalf of herself and all the others! How they’d scolded her!
Then that snake Kesküla turned up, the self-styled Estonian revolutionary. He arrived in Scandinavia from Switzerland with loads of money to dish out. What about you—need some money? To publish your brochures? To transport your literature? For Party purposes generally? “Pliss, ve ken alvays find some!” Printing presses? Weapons? We can get you anything provided you’re fighting against Tsarism. He was warmly recommended by Lenin—they know me, I see so-and-so and such-and-such regularly. Kollontai was almost taken in, but this time Shlyapnikov was more suspicious and saw right through him. Of course, they’d cooperated with the scoundrel to some extent, because of his credentials, and Shlyapnikov had told him more than he should—but then a sobering thought had occurred to him. Homeless émigrés do not have checkbooks or friends in Russian banks. On your way, brother! While the going’s good!
He’d told Lenin all about Kesküla, in a letter, told him not to trust the man. Brainy people, with their heads buried in books and newspapers, don’t notice such trickery. You have to look where you’re putting your feet, or you’ll step in something …
At the end of Nizhegorodskaya Street he got off and waited for the city-circle tram, the No. 6, with the green and blue markings. He was standing a step or two away from a policeman, but in a close-packed, faceless crowd. They were at the bottleneck on the Vyborg side, where the road suddenly rears up to cross the Liteiny Bridge. Massed workers had so often stormed that bridge to irrupt into the city—only to be brought up short by policemen of one kind or another.
And would of course storm it again?
Must storm it again.
Strolling around Stockholm is one thing. This is something different. Our own Petersburg paving stones under our feet, our own Liteiny Bridge, fated one of these days to open up to our marching columns.
Never mind the policeman standing there.
Europe has split apart at the scarlet seams that were its frontiers! And such very clever people are so mixed up about it! Perfectly decent German socialists are puzzled by ours. Look—you’re against Tsarism! And there’s no more dreadful danger in Europe than Tsarism! So why don’t you want help from Germany? Do you really want to see Tsarism defeated or not?
Well, we don’t want help from you via Wilhelm, and that’s all there is to it. Don’t help us by shelling our brothers with six-inchers! We can do without that sort of proletarian solidarity!
That should be clear enough. But it still wasn’t. Not to anybody. Take the Finnish “activists” getting arms from Germany. Why had they let Shlyapnikov pass instead of killing him back there in the polar darkness? Why, because he was an ally of sorts. And Shlyapnikov wasn’t going to argue, wasn’t going to say in sign language, “Go ahead, shoot me, I don’t want your help.”
Incidentally, running guns to the Finns was one of Kesküla’s games.
The tram shuddered and rattled its way over the Liteiny Bridge, over the cold, dark gray Neva. Now it was stopping outside the District Court. How those inside would love to lay hands on whoever was stirring up all the strikes.
Now that his belly was full he found himself nodding off to make up for all those sleepless nights. There was a confused buzz in his head. He could have dozed a while in spite of the jolting tram.
Chased away from one door, Kesküla had tried another. Shlyapnikov wouldn’t take his money, but Bogrovsky, secretary of the RSDRP group in Stockholm, did. Signing blank receipts sent by Lenin, and putting Shlyapnikov’s seal on them! Neat, eh?
Then Bukharin and Pyatakov had charged in to investigate.
Kesküla had been repulsed abroad, but—not to worry—Russia was within his reach. When Shlyapnikov arrived in Petersburg a dubious Dane of some sort named Kruze, a Social Democrat needless to say, but representing a commercial firm, had approached him, saying that what puzzled him most was why the Russian Social Democrats were not preparing for armed insurrection. Did they want arms sent in from abroad? There was no difficulty about that. Or type fonts for their printshop, in whatever quantity.
Well, it was tempting. And difficult to know what to make of it. (They might have taken the bait, but Kruze was in a hurry and dashed off to see Bukharin’s wife in Moscow. What—no one preparing for insurrection in Moscow either? He also wanted to know whether they could locate various Estonians for him—he had a note for them from their comrade Kesküla.)
Meanwhile, Bukharin and Pyatakov were hot on Kesküla’s trail. They succeeded in unraveling the whole story. Kesküla was an agent of the German General Staff, and a whole web of intrigue had already been woven around the Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland.
You might have expected neutral Sweden to ignore the émigrés’ tidying-up efforts. But no. They had been patient in the past, but now they arrested the self-appointed sleuths and deported them. And the Bosch female with them. And Aleksandra Kollontai. So much for Swedish neutrality! Don’t dare touch German spies! (Shlyapnikov had rescued them all when he returned from Petersburg: in the West he was regarded as the only real representative of Russian Social Democracy, and Branting had helped him.)
The tram clanked on along Kirochnaya Street and onto Znamenskaya, not very far from the Tauride Palace, where tomorrow the Duma windbags would be holding their festive and fatuous gathering. Some of them taking the workers’ name in vain, since they were really and truly afraid of the workers’ movement.
Afraid of this latest escalation from strike to lockout to counter-strike—with who knew what consequences? Would Petersburg hold out? While they were deliberating, cooped up in the Tauride Palace, would Petersburg still stand firm?
The plank had broken as he made his leap forward! (He couldn’t have said at what particular moment, but jump he did.) Would he land on his feet on the other bank? Or headfirst in the stream? The next twelve hours would decide, and he must collect his wits, make certain adjustments … But his head was buzzing and incapable of thinking straight.
He couldn’t think straight, but all sorts of nonsensical thoughts crowded into his mind … The “Japanese,” so-called (Pyatakov with his Bosch woman, and Bukharin) … their investigation of the German agents was their one and only success. Otherwise, they had always been tadpoles—ludicrous creatures with big heads, incapable of achieving anything. Amidst his books and his papers, in debate, Bukharin had a voice of thunder, his eyes blazed, he never conceded a single point. But in any re
al-life situation, and especially when traveling—at the station in London, or on the quayside in Denmark, with a forged passport in the name of Moishe Dolgolevsky, though he looked as Russian as could be, unable to speak a single foreign language, incapable of answering officials boldly and confidently—Bukharin was laughably helpless, he became a shapeless item of baggage, and as such Shlyapnikov had toted him around, onto ships from England to Norway, or from Denmark to Norway, had sprung him from a Swedish jail, and, taking pity on his discomfiture, sent him on tour around America “on Party business.” Any attempt to retool the “Japanese” resident in Sweden, on Russia’s borders, for the really important tasks of transmitting literature and maintaining communications, had proved quite hopeless, they were so awkward, and everybody, they themselves included, recognized it. They had in fact set off in the direction of “Russia,” but by what route? They had been on the road for nearly two years—via Switzerland, France, England, Norway, and Sweden—until in the end their strength had failed them. Any farther and they would have been hoofing it over the ice. Their expertise was in rushing out articles: Here, print this! Send that off! They were just as skillful at whipping up disagreements on theory.
He got off the tram. His route ran along Rozhdestvenskaya and Khersonskaya streets, but he kept to the backyards, making for the Arkhangelogorodsky Bridge.
Life in emigration was such that a single match could set off an explosion. Disagreement on theory instantly became personal enmity. The “Japanese” had disagreed with Lenin as to whether self-determination should or should not be promised to all nations unconditionally. (Lenin used to say it should be promised to nobody! Now he said, “Promise away!” While the “Japanese” went on saying “no” as before.) Between them they had wrecked the editorial board of Kommunist. If they quarreled on one little point everything could go to the devil, workers’ cause included!
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