Shlyapnikov could neither understand nor accept that a difference of opinion must inevitably make people enemies. Well, that’s our intelligentsia for you. There’s no mistaking them. They’d sooner see the whole movement collapse than give way on a matter of principle. But why should the workers’ cause suffer? If it was to get anywhere in Russia, surely they ought to make peace?
As though he hadn’t enough to do, on his last visit to Russia he had to set about making peace between the “Japanese” and the “Swiss.” He had wasted two months acting as a buffer between them. He had tried to explain to both sides what Kommunist meant to the Russian worker. They stood in line for it! Snapped it up! Waste of breath. Bukharin left for America unreconciled.
Ah, the Schlüsselburg Prospect. Workingmen like me walking around here. I won’t stand out. Needn’t take the steam tram. It isn’t far, and I’ve got time.
But Shlyapnikov’s role as peacemaker had not ended there. As he set off back to a Petersburg seething with industrial unrest in that third autumn of the war, Lenin had ordered him, as his first priority, to convene the Bureau of the Central Committee to discuss disagreements among the editors of Kommunist (Comrade Belenin’s report), express their solidarity with the basic (i.e., Leninist) line of the Central Committee, and send their resolution in writing to Switzerland immediately.
Lenin didn’t say with whom. Petersburg would look after that. It had nothing else on its mind.
All the same, Shlyapnikov tried to strike a balance. Differences of opinion on particular questions among members of the Central Organ should not be used to prevent them from contributing to the Central Committee’s publications. Their cooperation on uncontentious matters should be welcomed. (They would jump at the chance.)
So he carried out his mission and got the “Japanese” condemned, but, in his heart of hearts, when he turned his gaze from Petersburg to the world out there, to all those Russian Social Democratic colonies teeming with theoretical and literary talents, the Americans, the English (in England alone Litvinov, Chicherin, Peters, Kerzhentsev, and heaven knows how many others were taking their ease), the French, the Swiss, the Swedish, the Danish, all those Chudnovskys, Uritskys, Trotskys, Volodarskys, Suritsys, Zurabovs, Luries (or “Larins”), Levins (or “Dalins”), Gordons, Dermans, all of them waiting there for the end of the war or for world revolution—and you’re the one “co-opted” to rush back and forth and shoulder the yoke. Carry this in and bring that out, to shake Tsarism to its foundations. Carry this in, bring that out, and deliver your report for us to discuss.
On arrival abroad you have to ask Lenin which country you can live in. Can I go and work as a turner in England? Am I allowed to meet Branting, or would that be treading on Litvinov’s toes?
You arrive abroad and all the dithering soon gets you down. What you really want to do is bask on that pebbly beach, or plunge headfirst into the water. What difference would it make?
Shlyapnikov didn’t resent the yoke: his broad shoulders, his indomitable spirit, his tireless legs were made for it. He did not mind the whole burden being placed on him alone. It rather amused him. But on a worrisome day like this he really ought to be able to consult other Central Committee members: there were decisions to be made, action to be taken. And sure enough there was no one on the spot.
By now he was making his way through the Glassmakers’ Quarter. He crossed Porcelain Street, and found himself on the little square in front of the Church of All the Afflicted. There were crowds around the church and the shops as always, and it was easy to keep out of sight. He would not arouse suspicion entering Kovalenko’s studio, which was open to all.
Kovalenko, Manya Shlyapnikova’s husband, was not a court photographer or a famous one. He had won no medals at exhibitions to emboss on his business cards, but he was just the photographer the workers’ cause needed to help fill the Party’s coffers (though spicier cards—"Rasputin and the Tsaritsa,” “Rasputin and Vyrubova,” also sold well in Petersburg).
If you needed to enlist others for clandestine activity, who better than close relatives? There were no more willing helpers. And you never felt safer than when you were resting in the dark, windowless back room of a relative’s house, lying low like a hunted beast in its lair.
Iosif Ivanych was photographing a client under the studio lamps. A lower-middle-class woman with two children, and two young ladies, sat in the waiting room. Stepping quietly, Shlyapnikov slipped discreetly behind the curtain. His sister Manya was in the inner room.
“Want something to eat?”
“Not just now.”
“Will you be staying the night?”
“No, no. I’ll just sit around until it gets dark. What time is it now? I’m not late, then. A student should be coming here shortly. Fellow with big features and sticking-out ears, won’t be wearing a uniform. Ask him what kind of photograph he wants. He’ll say, ‘I would like one in Caucasian dress.’ Then bring him in here.”
He took his overcoat off, and passed behind a chintz curtain with lilac-flower pattern into a back room. It had no light of its own, and that which reached it from the dining room was stolen from the Petersburg grayness outside. He sat down on the bed. His head slumped heavily into his hands.
What he would really like to do was lie down and stay put till morning. For some reason he often found himself short of sleep when the day ahead was particularly difficult.
The bed sagged under him, his knees rose and his head sank toward them … Had he been asleep? Manya touched his shoulder.
“He’s come.”
He rubbed and rubbed his unshaven face with dry hands. It seemed to refresh him. He left the room.
Matvei Ryss was sitting at the dining table. He had placed his student cap on the bright blue embroidered tablecloth, but was still wearing a stylish overcoat and a reddish-brown scarf. He had a luxuriant thatch of ash-blond hair, and everything about him—ears, cheeks, and lips—was fresh, pink, and bright.
Youth to the rescue. This student group—Anya Kogan, Zhenya Gut, Roshal—this new intake of young people marked a break with the old intelligentsia. These were the cadre of the future. We can manage better without their sleepy elders.
“Well? How are things?” he asked, doing his best to sound brisk and cheerful as he shook hands with the student.
“Fine, Comrade Belenin!”
“Fine, you say? So why didn’t the Obukhov factory support the strike?”
“They’ve adopted our resolution on the food shortage. And I can guarantee their support for a general strike against the lockouts.”
“You sure?”
“We’ll see to it.”
“It’s very important, young man. The Obukhov factory carries a lot of weight.”
“They can’t get out of it. Can’t go against workers’ solidarity.”
“Fine, you make me happy. Anything else?”
“There’s unrest in the university.”
“You don’t say! That’s marvelous!”
It was catching on! It was happening after all!
“They all got together on the main staircase the day before yesterday to discuss food prices and the troops refusing to fire on workers at the pipe factory. Did that really happen?”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Well, at the meeting they said it did. Then they sang revolutionary songs in the corridors and stormed the lecture rooms.”
“Great! Good for them!”
“The university, the Bestuzhev Institute, and our place, the Psychoneurological Institute, are ready to strike. If there’s a general strike we’ll support it.”
Shlyapnikov, facing him across the small dining table, showed his pleasure. “Good work, boys, well done!”
Support comes from where you least expect it. While the workers were following those “defensists” like a flock of sheep.
He gazed at Ryss approvingly. “Right now the main battle is the strike against the lockout.”
“I realize that.”
“And we�
��re getting your leaflet ready. Not like in the old days underground, when it would be handwritten, or rolled off on a duplicating machine, but in a proper printshop.”
Ryss shook his head incredulously.
“You’ll see! I’m not going to mention names but a handpicked bunch of trustworthy men get together on the night shift and instead of their newspaper they print our leaflet. All we have to do is carry the bundles out.”
“It’s simpler still for the Interdistrict group.”
“How’s that?” Shlyapnikov asked jealously. This was a group, somewhere between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which thought that it alone could …
“They just pay to get their printing done in a legal printshop. The owner takes fifty rubles for a thousand copies, paper supplied.”
“Well, well …” Shlyapnikov sounded a little put out.
“And where d’you think the printshop is? On Gorokhovaya, right next to the city governor’s offices.”
“That’s pretty good.” Shlyapnikov looked glum. “I’ve noticed that their paper and typeface are good. Anyway … We’ll distribute the leaflets this evening. I’ll try to send some here by night for the Nevsky district. Pick them up as early as you can in the morning and distribute them. This is a battle we must win. We’ve never fought one like it before.”
“Understood,” said Ryss with a twitch of his ginger eyebrows. “We’ll put our backs into it.”
Stout fellow. Without his sort you wouldn’t know where to turn next. If you had to do all the writing and everything else yourself and …
“So what about the other one?”
“That’s ready as well,” Ryss said, shaking his head without further disturbing his hair, tousled as it was. He took a piece of paper with a new text from his pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the table.
New jobs to be done and old anniversaries trod on each other’s heels, gave him no peace. Before they knew about the lockout this leaflet had been ordered for 17 November, the second anniversary of the arrest of the Bolshevik Duma deputies. Although they hadn’t behaved as they should in court—Kamenev particularly—this anniversary had become a recognized occasion for fomenting working-class resentment.
Matvei’s writing was bold and irregular, with long tails to the letters. Legible enough. But Shlyapnikov wanted to hear how it sounded.
“Don’t say it too loud, though, or they’ll hear it in the studio.”
Ryss began reading happily, keeping his voice down, but with as much feeling as he could muster.
“… in the persons of those five deputies the whole Russian proletariat was on trial … At that time the war was only just beginning to sink its talons into the bodies of the peoples of Europe. Many listened with their eyes shut to the deafening drumrolls of the servile bourgeois press …”
A ringing voice, demanding to be heard from political platforms. He would make a fine orator. The man who writes his own speeches knows where to put the emphases.
“Marvelous style you’ve got!”
Lenin was correct when he wrote that the leaflet was the most important and the most difficult form of political literature. Not many of the émigrés had such a good style. Bukharin was drier. And Shlyapnikov himself, for all Kollontai’s coaching, was not up to much, his writing lacked punch.
“… Let us mark the day on which we were robbed of our workers’ representatives by intensifying agitation for our demands … With the hiss of the conveyor belts in our ears we reach out our muscular hands to you! In serried ranks reborn in the Third International, we will step up the struggle to end the war by means of civil war …”
“Great stuff. Great. There’s just one thing, don’t go writing for the Interdistrict crowd.”
“I’ve never written anything for them!” Ryss protested.
“You can’t fool me! I recognize your style!”
“That’s not me, Comrade Belenin. They’re all handy with the pen.”
“Let’s leave it at that. But if you did it wouldn’t be honest.”
He picked up the paper. There were damp finger marks where Matvei had held it.
“Tell me, was Solomon Ryss, the Maximalist, your brother?”
“Cousin.”
“Quite a family. Fighters all.”
When Shlyapnikov had said goodbye to the student, his brother-in-law came in. He had finished work but was still wearing his smock. He looked at Shlyapnikov with a peculiar smile on his face.
“Aleksei Gavrilovich, in all the times you’ve been here you’ve never let me take your photograph. Neither this autumn nor last. One of these days you’ll wonder where the years have gone to. Let’s do it now. I’ve got some room left on a plate.”
Shlyapnikov stared, momentarily at a loss. He was used to the crowd outside, which meant that anyone could enter the studio without arousing suspicion, and whenever he arrived someone was having his photograph taken, yet it had never occurred to him that he could do the same. Indeed, that he needed a photograph of himself.
Or that maybe Sashenka would want one.
A slight shrug. Lips pursed. His hand rose to rub his cheeks in a masculine gesture of apology.
“But I haven’t had a shave, Iosif Ivanych.”
“So shave now. Manya will get you some hot water in a jiffy.”
But being unshaven was just an excuse. He wasn’t in the mood. He felt depressed and anxious to be elsewhere, not wasting time sitting for a photograph.
All the same he went over to the mirror suspended at an angle over the table between the windows. It was in an awkward place, and you had to bend double to see yourself in it. Besides, it was tarnished, chipped and flaking around the edges.
He looked every day of his thirty-two years, and could have been taken for forty. His face was Russian, but not strikingly Russian: looking at the group photograph taken in a French factory, when he had trimmed his mustache differently and parted his hair, you would have been hard put to single out the one Russian from his French fellow workers. In a decent suit he could pass, say, for a French traveling salesman.
He himself would have liked to look a bit more heroic, to have more of the revolutionary about him. But maybe he was better without it—that way the police would be quicker to pounce on him. As it was, he looked like your average factory hand—one whose mind was on payday, and if he drank at all, knew his limit. Modest mustache, modestly close-cropped hair. But what made the man in the mirror a stranger, a mystery to himself, was something different: he looked like someone who knew, rather than someone who did things. (Whereas he had always honestly put into practice all that he knew.) The eyes were wrong, not those of a fighter, and so was the smile—a sad one. Why, whatever pose he struck for the photographer, did he always end up looking so strange? Not a bit like a real revolutionary. Even that mere boy Ryss looked much more like the real thing.
It was worse today. His eyes showed that he was short of sleep, unrested, his mustache drooped, and he looked so downcast—not a bit like the “lover boy” whom Sasha was always so eager to go walking with along the slopes at Holmenkollen, where they could watch the trains go by from the edge of the cliff. What had become of his youth, his strength, his nimble legs? Was all that really less than two years ago?
“No, thank you, Iosif Ivanych. Some other time. I don’t feel like it.”
“Just as you please. Let’s eat, then.”
Kovalenko went off to wash his hands.
How different the young Aleksandr had looked at seventeen, before his first spell in solitary, before he had come under surveillance, before he had done time in Vladimir Central. In fact, before he was a revolutionary at all, in one of those cheap Russian shirts worn in the provinces, with arms restlessly eager to work, however tightly he folded them on his chest they were like living things struggling to escape. And eyes full of the will to believe and to do great deeds.
His faith had been that of the Orthodox Old Believers. They were still persecuted in those days, but these genuine Orthodox Chr
istians staunchly defended their beliefs, and Aleksandr, like all the others, was ready to die for them. But persecution was abandoned, it was no longer possible to suffer for the faith, the more adaptable members began truckling to authority and the energies of the young flowed into other channels. Aleksandr was converted to Social Democracy. A completely different cause, on the face of it, but the enemy, the persecutors, were the same as before—except that they were now on the other flank.
He was still not much older, although he had been arrested several times, still the same awkward provincial, still uncertain what to do with his hands or with the rest of himself, the same sober, shy, taciturn youngster when he went abroad for the first time and something wonderful, something he could never have dreamt of happened: a woman, a lady, as he would have called her a little while ago at home in Russia, a beauty (although she was rather short and twelve years his senior), experienced and seductive, had taken him under her iridescent wing—and sometimes he felt as if his legs had lost all feeling and he was no longer standing on firm ground, his emotions were in turmoil with the strangeness of it all. As the saying goes: a fine lady’s favors are like honey on the knife.
Honey, yes. On a knife. But gradually things took a different turn. Gradually he drew himself up to her level. So that, in spite of her advantage in age, her German, French, and English, her exquisite manners, her facility with the pen, when she had shaped him in her own mold, transformed him, she finally admitted that in comparison with him she was “a Finnish bumpkin.” “Your bumpkin, my darling dear! Hurry back to me!”
Lenin too was always hurrying him up—hurry home, hurry back to report. If he hurried back now he would find himself snowbound yet again in a lonely guesthouse, with northern pines standing like tall, pointed candles in the drifts. But Scandinavia was just a fiction, “a mirage.” Reality was this dying Petersburg day, the loud ticking of the wall clock and the clatter of spoons scooping up the last drop of soup.
He had forgotten that he had sat down to eat with them.
His sister and brother-in-law had a question for him, but he hadn’t been following their discussion and was lost for an answer.
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