As students moved into higher grades, the circles became ranked and specialized. The “lower circles” studied basic socialist literature; the “middle” ones organized presentations on particular topics or authors; and the “higher” ones sponsored papers on freely chosen subjects and formal debates with invited participants. Different circles, including those from different schools, formed interlocking networks of common reading, conversation, and belief. In Arosev’s Realschule, all the reading groups were united into a single “Non-Party Revolutionary Organization” with its own statutes (“a kind of teaching plan for a short-term course designed to produce revolutionaries of both kinds: SRs and Marxists.”)16
For most people, the choice between the SRs and Marxists happened some time after their separation from the Zulus. Unlike the original election, it is usually remembered as a rational act subject to testing, reconsideration, and public scrutiny. At the age of sixteen, the veterans of Osinsky’s (Obolensky’s) circle in Moscow Gymnasium No. 7 decided it was time to make up their minds and “self-identify politically.” To that end, they invited a Moscow University student, Platon Lebedev (the future “Kerzhentsev”), and launched a series of presentations on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Osinsky spent three months in the Rumiantsev Library reading about the Decembrists.
I have always done my best to resist everything “fashionable,” everything accepted by the intelligentsia in the manner of a psychological contagion. At that time [1904], I considered Marxism, which was spreading rapidly among the intelligentsia, just another fashionable trend (for the intelligentsia, including some of my friends, it did turn out to be only a fashion). So, I tried very hard to give the Decembrist movement a non-Marxist explanation. This explanation contradicted my own evidence and the paper kept sliding into a meaningless liberal rut. It was not difficult for Lebedev-Kerzhentsev, with the obvious support of my own comrades, to rout me utterly. Having given my “defeat” a great deal of serious thought, I arrived at the conclusion that I had chosen the wrong path and that old Marx was right, after all. The revolution of 1905 provided plenty of further—much more tangible—proof.17
In Kazan, Arosev (Z) and Skriabin (Molotov) chose their political affiliations without a great deal of serious thought. In the spring of 1907, at the age of seventeen, they decided to test their convictions by reading the relevant texts and holding a public debate at the Non-Party Revolutionary Organization’s fall meeting. Arosev’s topic was “The Philosophical Foundations of the Socialist Revolutionary Party”; Skriabin’s, “The Philosophical Foundations of the Social-Democratic Party.” According to Arosev, “Skriabin and I stocked up on the literature, left behind the noise of the city—he, for Viatka Province, I, for the village of Malye Derbyshki—and immersed ourselves in Marx, Mikhailovsky, Engels, Lavrov, Plekhanov, Delevsky [sic]…. We had agreed to read the same books, so that, during the debate, he would be familiar with my sources and I, with his.”
For three months, they read, took notes, and wrote long letters to each other. “Those were not letters, but theoretical position papers and counter-papers, a sort of written exam on material covered.” At the end of the summer, they reassembled in Skriabin’s room. “The soft August twilight came in through the large windows. Out in the courtyard we could see chickens walking around and a cat stretching itself by the water pipe. The room slowly grew dark. A copy of Aivazovsky’s ‘The Waves of the Surf,’ painted by Nikolai Skriabin [Viacheslav’s brother], looked down at us from the wall. On the table, the samovar was wheezing softly. Next to it were cups of unfinished tea and a large tome, open and unread.” Suddenly Arosev announced that his summer reading had convinced him of the superiority of Marxism over populism, and that he could not, in good conscience, defend the SR position (which favored Russian peasants over rootless workers as agents of revolutionary change). After a brief pause, Skriabin said that, in that case, he was not going to speak, either. At the general meeting, the two friends’ declarations “were met with loud applause from one side and a buzz of disapproval, from the other…. But no one called Z a traitor. They knew that Z had taken a sharp ideological turn, that he had stepped over the threshold separating a spontaneous study of the world from its conscious understanding.”18
Not all debates between the SRs and Marxists were this one-sided, even in later retellings by eventual victors. The “decisive battle” Bukharin describes in his memoir involved two teams of earnest boys and girls (reinforced, in the case of the SRs, by one university student) and covered all the usual points of disagreement: the “working class” versus “the people”; “sober calculation” versus “great deeds and self-sacrifice”; “objectivism” versus “subjectivism”; and “universal laws of development” versus “Russia’s uniqueness.” The Marxist charge that the SRs put heroes above the crowd met with the countercharge that Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? amounted to the same thing; to which the Bolsheviks said that their leaders objectively represented the interests of the workers; to which the SRs responded that the Bolsheviks had “turned their party into a barracks, enforced total unanimity, killed all freedom of criticism in their own midst, and were now trying to spread the same thing everywhere”; to which the Bolsheviks responded by quoting from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?:
We are a tight group walking along a precipitous and difficult path, holding each other firmly by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have come together, as a result of a decision freely taken, precisely for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of stumbling into the nearby swamp, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us are beginning to shout: Let’s go into the swamp! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the freedom to urge you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to urge us, but to go yourselves wherever you please, even into the swamp. In fact, we believe that the swamp is just where you belong, and we are prepared to do whatever we can to help you take up residence there. But then let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us, and don’t soil the noble word “freedom,” for we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the swamp, but also against those who are turning toward the swamp!19
At this point the Bolsheviks proclaimed themselves the winners and ended the debate. Everyone got up and, one at a time (“young ladies excepted!”), walked out of the smoke-filled room with “heavy dark-red curtains” into a back alley off the Arbat, a few blocks north of Bukharin’s gymnasium and the Big Stone Bridge. “It was quiet in the street…. The sound of footsteps echoed through the alley…. Large flakes of snow were falling silently, floating out of the darkness, whirling around streetlamps, and covering, like a soft, fluffy eiderdown, the sidewalks, hitching posts, sleds, and the back of a coachman on the corner, half asleep and not fully sober.”20
As student circles and various “non-party revolutionary organizations” established links with each other and joined formal revolutionary parties, they progressed from just reading to reading and writing essays (Osinsky’s first was about the utilitarian theory of ethics); to reading and writing leaflets (Voronsky’s first ran: “All we can hear are the rattling of chains and the screeching of cell locks, but the new day is dawning, and the sun of social independence and equality, the sun of labor and liberty will rise”); to reading and transporting illegal literature, printing proclamations, holding rallies, making bombs, and, in the case of the SR Maximalists, killing state officials. All over the empire, schoolchildren, seminarians, college students, and eternal students were in the grips of a “living, vibrant faith,” eager to fight “not only against the swamp, but also against those who are turning toward the swamp.”21
Valerian Kuibyshev
In 1909, the twenty-one-
year-old Valerian Kuibyshev—graduate of the Siberian Cadet Corps, student of Tomsk University, and member of the Bolshevik Party since the age of sixteen—was arrested for receiving a parcel with illegal books. His father, the military commander of Kainsk, in the Siberian steppe, was promptly summoned to appear before his commanding officer, General Maslennikov. Valerian describes his father as a simple man, honest soldier, and loving parent, in the manner of Pushkin’s fort commander from The Captain’s Daughter. He was a “servitor who never had any property, so we were raised very modestly; patched and threadbare suits were handed down from older brothers and sisters to the younger ones.” He was also, like Sverdlov’s father, understanding and perhaps proud of his son’s rebellion. There were eight children in the Kuibyshev family, and every one of them was listed by the police as politically unreliable. According to a story Valerian told several friends in August 1931,
Father arrived in Omsk in low spirits and presented himself to General Maslennikov.
As soon as he entered, the general started yelling at him:
“You can’t even raise your own children properly, so how are you going to train your soldiers? Your home address is being used for receiving subversive literature. You should be shot.”
General Maslennikov did not stop yelling for half an hour. Father stood at attention, his arms at his sides, not allowed to respond while his commander was speaking.
Having exhausted himself, General Maslennikov fell silent for a while and then said: “I am having you transferred to Tiumen.”
Tiumen was, of course, a much bigger town than Kainsk. This was a promotion….
Father was taken aback: “Excuse me, Your Excellency?”
“You are being transferred to Tiumen.” Then, after a short pause: “I have two sons in prison in Kiev myself.”22
■ ■ ■
The young revolutionaries’ main job was “propaganda and agitation.” “Propaganda” consisted in extending school reading circles to “the masses.” Aleksandr Voronsky’s circle used to meet underground.
The basement was dimly lit with a lamp. It smelled of kerosene and cheap tobacco. The curtains were closely drawn. Casting somber, monstrous shadows, the workers would silently sit down at the table covered with dark oilcloth that was torn and stained with ink. It was always cold in the room. Someone would move the iron stove closer, and the smoke would make your throat itch and eyes burn. They felt like meetings of mysterious conspirators, but the faces of those present were always perfectly ordinary. Sternly and possessively, Nikita would examine the members of the circle, as if testing them, tap on the table with his knuckle or a pencil, and say solemnly: “Listen to the Comrade Speaker.”23
Nikita was an older worker who “loved ‘learning,’ put on ancient glasses to read books and newspapers, did not tolerate teasing, and never joked himself, or indeed knew how.” The Comrade Speaker’s learning was partly offset by his awkwardness in front of those whose social and intellectual inferiority was offset by their maturity and redemptive mission.24
“Agitation” (as opposed to “propaganda”) referred to making speeches at factories or outdoor rallies. The speeches were to be short and more or less to the point. The point, according to the the agitators’ instructions, was to make sure that “the flame of hatred … burned in the listeners’ hearts.” Voronsky delivered his “in one violent burst, without catching his breath, gesticulating volubly.”25
Once, I was rhapsodizing at an improvised open-air meeting from the caboose of a freight train. Below me was a crowd of railway workers. I ardently prophesied “the hour of vengeance and retribution” and was passionately urging them “not to give way to provocation” and “to fight to the end,” while piling on the appeals and not sparing the slogans. Transported by my revolutionary fervor, I did not notice the clanking and the jerking of the train as, before the eyes of the amazed workers, I began to float away, first slowly, then faster and faster, farther and farther away, still waving my arms and shouting out fiery words.26
Words—written or spoken—are at the center of all missionary work. Voronsky and his fellow agitators spent most of their time talking, whether the train was moving or not. Reading (often out loud) was incorporated into discussion; writing (Lenin’s, in particular) was like shouting out fiery words; and some of the most important silences in socialist autobiographies are memories of being spellbound by someone else’s eloquence: Lenin’s, Trotsky’s, Chernov’s. Everyone seemed quick-tempered, talkative, and contemplative at the same time.
Socialist proselytizing was different from the Christian kind in two fundamental ways. First, it was not universalist. The Christian message was, in theory, for everyone; the socialist one was aimed exclusively at the elect (Russian peasants for the SRs, industrial workers for the Marxists). Even the Calvinists, who preached members-only salvation for the chosen, did not claim to know who the chosen were. Socialists, by contrast, assumed that a particular, objectively defined part of humanity was the exclusive means of universal redemption and the indigenous population of the kingdom of freedom. The original preachers could come from anywhere—indeed, they were all intellectuals (unapologetically so, in the case of the Bolsheviks)—but the real meaning of their “agitation and propaganda” and the only chance for the coming of the real day was to convert the convertible. The prince was to wake up the sleeping beauty, not the ugly step-sisters.
The Bolsheviks were particularly forceful on this score. By being the most skeptical of “spontaneity” (“class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,” according to Lenin), they were the most intent on proselytizing. And proselytizing demanded organizational rigor. As the agitator’s instructions put it, “explicating the role of our party as the most advanced detachment of the working class, you must not forget that our party is a fighting army, and not a debating society.” And as a member of Bukharin’s debating society put it, having followed his instructions, “my opponent tried to frighten us with talk about the barracks. I am not afraid of words. There are barracks and barracks, just as there are soldiers and soldiers. We are building our party not as a, I am sorry, motley collection of swans, crawfish, and pikes, but as a party of the truly like-minded, and a military party at that. Yes, military.” And the reason they could do that was that they were the only party led by an uncontested charismatic leader. Lenin was both the creature and the guarantee of the unity of the like-minded.27
The second way in which socialist evangelism differed from its Christian counterpart was its intellectualism—the degree to which it was, indeed, a debating society. Most Russian Orthodox converts to Protestant Christianity seemed to be after personal salvation and independent work on the self, much of it through reading and conversation. Socialists were after the same thing, but they went much further. A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning. It was an immediate step up socially and intellectually, as well as spiritually. The student preachers of Bolshevism were asking the workers to become students while remaining workers. The would-be converts had a special role because of who they were, but they could not perform that role without an altered “consciousness.”
This combination of proletarian chosenness with committed intellectualism—self-affirmation through change and upward mobility without betrayal—seemed to appeal to some workers. As one of Voronsky’s pupils put it, “‘It’s really strange, all these people wearing glasses coming to serve us, for God’s sake! And why are they serving us? They are serving us because they’re beginning to understand our untold strength, because,’ he would start beating himself on the chest, ‘because proletarians of all countries unite! Simple as that.’” In Kon’s version of a popular fairy-tale metaphor (also used in the title of Voronsky’s memoirs), “the work was going well. Having been sprinkled with the magic water of life, the sleeping kingdom was waking up and coming to life.”28
Karl Lander (Kārlis Landers), the so
n of Latvian day laborers, was fifteen years old when he saw a May Day demonstration and suddenly felt “drawn by a new powerful force.” As he writes in his autobiography, “I knew the everyday life of workers well because of my relatives and close friends, but, suddenly, it appeared in a completely new light, as a carrier and keeper of some great mystery.” His first mentor was a “Christian socialist in the best sense of the word,” a man “who would have been at home during the peasant wars of the Reformation.” Impressed by the message, Lander “dropped everything” and set out in search of sectarians “who did not recognize secular or religious authority and owned all things in common.” What he found he did not like—because the “Dukhobor” sectarians who welcomed him did not allow secular books, whereas he was convinced that “in order to understand all these things, it was necessary to study, and study long and hard.” The police did him the favor of sending him to prison, where he “spent whole nights in animated conversations.” Having “cleared up many unresolved questions,” he joined a Social-Democrat reading circle “united by common intellectual interests and bonds of close friendship.”29
The House of Government Page 5