The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

Chapter Eighteen

  What had seemed a simple solution of all problems had exploded into a million new problems, some of them ridiculously petty, like finding food and clothes.

  The seams of accustomed life came apart. Schools, factories, public institutions lost their old meanings. The people of our city crowded into the snow-covered streets. It was as if homes and offices and workshops had been turned inside out, dumping their human contents into the squares and parks. Demonstrations, banners, cheering, flaring angers, occasional shooting—and above it all, enveloping it, almost smothering it all, there was talk, talk, talk. Words pent up for centuries broke through in passionate oratory; foolish and inspired, high-pitched and vengeful oratory.

  Slogans filled the air and seemed to have a proliferating life of their own. Down with the war! War to a victorious end! Land and freedom! The factories to the workers! On to the Constituent Assembly! All power to the Soviets! New words and new names burst and sputtered in our minds like fireworks. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Kadets, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists. . . . Kerensky, Miliukov, Lenin, Trotsky. . . . Red Guards, Whites, Partisans. . . .

  Platforms grew on the main squares. Speakers followed one another in a loud procession. Men and women who had never spoken above a timid whisper now felt the urge to scream, preach, scold and declaim. Educated men with well-tended beards made way for soldiers and workmen. “Right! Right!” the crowds thundered or “Doloi! Von!—Down with him! Out with him!”

  Once, on a day of demonstrations under a forest of homemade banners, my father spoke from a platform. Everyone seemed to know his name.

  “Friends and brothers! Workers, peasants, intellectuals and soldiers!” he began.

  It was the first time I had heard him speak in public and I could scarcely contain my excitement. His voice was resonant and he seemed transfigured, so that I had to reassure myself that it was, indeed, my own father. Words and ideas that had been intimately our own, almost a family secret, were miraculously public, so that everyone became part of the family. He told about prison and exile, about the heroic life of Comrade Paramonov, about the beautiful future. He pleaded for order and self-control and warned against those who would drown the revolution in blood. He spoke with marvelous simplicity and sincerity, as if these were his three sons multiplied to hundreds.

  When he stepped from the platform and a band played the Marseillaise, I rushed toward him, elbowed a way through his admiring friends, and shouted “Hurrah, papa!” Father laughed with a full voice.

  “You see, Vitenka,” he said, “now people will be free. It was worth fighting for this!”

  Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red

  175

  I knew then, or perhaps I only understood later, that he was justifying himself, explaining the years of penury and worry he had visited on his family.

  The honeymoon of the revolution, however, soon trailed off into dissensions, accusations, suffering. Enthusiasm gave way to anger and bitterness. Stones, fists, revolver shots were increasingly mixed with the words and arguments. At the same time food became scarcer; wood, coal and kerosene seemed to disappear; some factories worked only intermittently, others closed down altogether. “There’s your revolution! You asked for it!” people, especially the well-dressed people, now muttered.

  My father grew more depressed, more silent, with every passing day. He became more irritable than I had ever seen him in the years of danger and sacrifice. When I pressed him for an explanation of the many parties and programs he seemed embarrassed.

  “It’s too complex,” he would say. “You’re not old enough to understand. This is a struggle for power. No matter what any party stands for, it will be bad if one party wins. That will only mean new masters for the old—rule by force, not by the free will of the people. It is not for this that the revolutionists gave their lives.”

  Another time, after we had listened to Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Kadets [Constitutional Democrats, K D’s in Russian] and others in the Mining Institute, now the headquarters of the Ekaterinoslav Soviet, he shook his head sadly and said:

  “I have been fighting to overthrow Tsarism. For freedom, for plenty, not for violence and vengeance. We should have free elections and many parties. If one party dominates, it’s the end.”

  “But what are you, papa? A Menshevik, Bolshevik, a Social Revolutionary or what?”

  “None of these, Vitia. Always remember this: that no slogan, no matter how attractive, is any indication of the real policy of any political party once it comes to power.”

  The newspapers were shrill with the call to a better life for the country. Poor and backward Russia was at last on the highroad to progress—it only remained for everyone to dig more coal, raise more grain, acquire more culture. I read the invocations as if they were addressed personally to me. Occasionally one of the great new leaders—Petrovsky, Rakovsky or even Lunacharsky —passed through our district. Listening to them, I felt myself part of something new, big, exciting. In the Moscow Kremlin sat men whom we called simply Comrade—Lenin, Trotsky, Dzherzhinsky—but I knew them to be of the stature of gods.

  176

  Chapter Eighteen

  Looking back to my private history as a Communist, I am inclined to date my conversion to the arrival of Comrade Lazarev, who gave a series of lectures on the problems of socialism. He was a man of about thirty, on the staff of the University of Sverdlovsk, tall, slim, neatly dressed. He talked simply in his own words, not in quotations from Marx or Lenin. What impressed me especially was that he wore a necktie, thereby bringing powerful reinforcement to those of us who argued that one could be a good Soviet citizen yet indulge in such bourgeois accessories.

  One day I was in the library, engrossed in a book, when someone behind me said:

  “What are you reading? I’m curious.”

  I turned around. It was Comrade Lazarev.

  “The Disquisitions of Father Jerome Cougniard by Anatole France,” I replied, smiling in embarrassment.

  “So? Anatole France,” he said. “Why not the Russian classics, or some contemporary Soviet writer?”

  “I find a lot in Anatole France that I don’t find in the Soviet writers,” I said. “He’s subtle and very honest. I do read Russian classics, but the new au-thors—they write only politically and seem to avoid the real life around us.”

  “Very interesting, let’s discuss it some night. Come to my room and we’ll get acquainted.”

  I met him again a few days later at a subbotnik: a work session, when hundreds of volunteers pitched in to do some urgent job without pay. On this occasion it was the removal of a mountainous heap of coal to clear a road. Comrade Lazarev was in work clothes, covered with soot and plying a shovel with great diligence. He greeted me like an old friend and I was pleased.

  That evening he saw me again in the library. And what was I reading now, he wanted to know. What to Do? [aka What’s to Be Done?] by Cherni-shevsky, I told him.

  “An important work,” he nodded approvingly.

  “Yes, and his question, what to do, is one that bothers me now,” I said.

  “It’s a question that has already been answered for millions by Lenin, and before him by Marx. Have you read Lenin and Marx?”

  “A little of Lenin, here and there,” I replied, “but not Marx. I’ve read the Party literature, of course, but I’m not sure that it quite answers the question what to do.”

  “Come over to my room, we’ll have a glass of tea and some refreshments and we’ll talk without disturbing anyone,” Comrade Lazarev smiled.

  It was a spotlessly clean, bright room. The divan was covered with a gay rug; books neatly ranged on the desk between book-ends; a few flowers in a colored pitcher. On one wall hung several family pictures, one of them of

  Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red

  177

  Lazarev himself as a boy, in gimnazium uniform, a dog at his feet; another of a pretty sister, also in student garb. On another wall were framed photographs of Lenin
and Marx and between them—this was the touch that warmed me and won me over, though I did not know exactly why—the familiar picture of Leo Tolstoy in old age, in the long peasant tunic, his thumbs stuck into the woven belt.

  This isn’t an obscene sailor attacking a nurse at night, I thought to myself. [Here Kravchenko is referring to an earlier incident.] I could follow this kind of Communist.

  “Since I have to live here for several months,” Lazarev explained, “I’ve tried to make the place homelike.”

  We talked for hours that night, about books, the Party, the future of Russia. My place was with the Communist minority who must show the way, Lazarev said, and I ought to join the Komsomol and later the Party. Of course, he conceded, the Party wasn’t perfect and perhaps its program wasn’t perfect, but men are more important than programs.

  “If bright, idealistic young people like you stand aloof, what chance will there be?” he said. “Why not come closer to us and work for the common cause? You can help others by serving as an example of devotion to the country. Just look around you in the barracks—gambling, dirt, drunkenness, greed where there ought to be cleanliness, books, spiritual light. You must understand that there’s a terrific task ahead of us, Augean stables to be cleaned. We must outroot the stale, filthy, unsocial past that’s still everywhere, and for that we need good men. The heart of the question Vitia, is not only formal socialism but decency, education and a brighter life for the masses.”

  I had been “pressured” by Communists before this. But now, for the first time, I was hearing echoes of the spirit that had suffused my childhood. I argued with Comrade Lazarev; I said I would think it over, but in fact I agreed with him and had already made up my mind.

  When Comrade Lazarev departed for Moscow some weeks later, I was in the large group—ordinary miners and office workers as well as the top officials of the administration—gathered at the station to see him off.

  “There you are, Vitia,” he singled me out. “I head by accident that you’ve joined the Komsomol. Good for you! Congratulations! But why didn’t you tell me? I would have recommended you.”

  “I know, and I’m grateful, but I wanted to do it on my own . . . without patronage.”

  Now life had for me an urgency, a purpose, a new and thrilling dimension of dedication to a cause. I was one of the élite, chosen by History to lead my country and the whole world out of darkness into the socialist light. This

  178

  Chapter Eighteen

  sounds pretentious, I know, yet that is how we talked and felt. There might be cynicism and self-seeking among some of the grown-up Communists, but not in our circle of ardent novitiates.

  My privileges, as one of the elect, were to work harder, to disdain money and foreswear personal ambitions. I must never forget that I am a Komsomol member first, a person second. The fact that I had joined up in a mining region, in an area of “industrial upsurge,” seemed to me to add a sort of mystic significance to the event. I suppose that a young nobleman admitted to court life under the Tsar had that same feeling of “belonging.”

  There was no longer much margin of time for petty amusements. Life was filled with duties—lectures, theatricals for the miners, Party “theses” to be studied and discussed. We were aware always that from our midst must come the Lenins and Bukharins of tomorrow. We were perfecting ourselves for the vocation of leadership; we were the acolytes of a sort of materialist religion.

  Having discovered that I could write and speak on my feet with some natural eloquence, I was soon an “activist.” I served on all kinds of committees, did missionary work among the non-Party infidels, played a role in the frequent celebrations. There were endless occasions to celebrate, over and above the regular revolutionary holidays. The installation of new machinery, the opening of new pits, the completion of production schedules were marked by demonstrations, music, speeches. Elsewhere in the world coal may be just coal—with us it was “fuel for the locomotives of revolution.”

  Through the intercession of Comrade Lazarev I had been transferred to work in the pits. I no longer needed to envy Senia [diminutive of Arsenii] on that score. The two of us and several other young miners formed an artel, a cooperative group doing jobs and being paid as a unit. The artel system was at this time encouraged as a means of raising output. Members of efficient artels usually earned more than individual miners. This, however, was the least of our concerns. We bid for the most difficult and dangerous assignments, eager to prove our zeal by deeds. We even had a slogan which we solemnly communicated to the officials: “If it’s necessary, it can be done.”

  The members of our artel lived together in a clean and comfortable house stocked with good books. We took turns at scrubbing the floor and other household chores. The Soviet leaders and classic Russian writers deployed on our walls looked down approvingly, I was sure, on this example of “culture” in the midst of backwardness. Among them was Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of the men close to Lenin and later to become Commissar of Heavy Industry. I liked his rough-hewn Georgian face, with its huge eagle beak and a shaggy drooping mustache. Perhaps I had a vague premonition that this man would one day be the patron, and in a sense the inspiration, of my busiest years as a Communist.

  Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red

  179

  On occasion, of course, we allowed ourselves an evening of light-hearted sociability. Friends and comrades liked to gather in our house—it was so “civilized” and the talk so “elevated.” One of our crowd played the guitar superbly; we would sing and dance and dispute far into the night. A number of the more attractive girls in the community would join us on these occasions. If we had too good a time we all felt a bit guilty and did Komsomol penance by more intensive work, study and political discussion in the days that followed.

  In the late fall the boastful slogan of our artel was put to a critical test. One of the mines had been flooded. It was propped with wooden beams for fear of collapse, but work went on without interruption. It was this mine that we offered to operate, in order to set an example to the regular miners there, mostly Tatars and Chinese.

  I was in the pit, working intently though I was almost knee-deep in icy water. Suddenly the whole world seemed to shudder, creak and groan. I heard someone shriek in terror—probably it was my own voice in my ears. Part of our shaft had caved in. When I opened my eyes again I was in a large whitewashed room, in one of a row of hospital beds. A doctor in a white gown was feeling my pulse and a handsome middle-aged nurse stood by with pad and pencil in hand. She smiled in greeting when she saw I had regained consciousness.

  “You’ll be all right, Comrade Kravchenko, don’t worry,” she said, and the doctor nodded in confirmation.

  They told me I had been in the water inside the caved-in mine for two or three hours. The Chinese worker next to me had been killed. Little hope had been held out for me—if I had not been finished off by the collapsing walls, I must have drowned in the ice water. But here I was, with bruised legs and a high fever, but otherwise in good shape. The fever later developed into pneumonia.

  The two months in the hospital of Algoverovka, curiously, remain with me as one of the pleasantest interludes of my youth. The story of my artel and its climax in the cave-in was embroidered, in the telling, into a saga of socialist heroism in which I was one of the heroes. Important trade-union and Party officials came to my bedside; the boys and girls of my Komsomol unit visited me regularly and never failed to bring little gifts. I was still in the hospital on my eighteenth birthday. Members of the artel and its friends arrived in a body in a heart-warming show of fellowship.

  The handsome nurse treated me as if I were her own son. Indeed, in the cozy languor of convalescence I had the sense of having been adopted by all of Russia—its workers, its Komsomols, its officialdom—as the favorite son of a vast and wonderful family.

  180

  Chapter Eighteen

  The doctors forbade me to return to the mines, at least for a year, and no
pleading on my part could upset their injunction, conveyed to the administration. I had no wish to go back to an office job and therefore prepared to return to the Tocsin commune and Ekaterinoslav.

  In the midst of these preparations came the news that Lenin had died, on January 24, 1924. The shock and the sorrow were real and deep in this corner of the Donets valley. The reaction had little to do with politics. To the plain people in the collieries—even to the gamblers and brawlers in the barracks, the swaggerers with shoes that creaked, let alone to the Communist Youths— he had become a symbol of hope. We needed to believe that the sufferings of these bloody years were an investment in a bright future. Each of us had a feeling of personal loss.

  I marched three miles, with thousands of others, to the memorial meeting outside the mine office, called “Paris Commune.” It was a bitterly cold, snowy afternoon; the winds cut like sharp knives. The rostrum in the open air was draped in red and black bunting, though a pall of snow soon covered everything. One after another the orators shouted above the howling wind, declaiming formulas of official sorrow.

  “Comrade miners!” a pompous delegate from Kharkov shrieked, “Lenin is dead, but the work of Lenin goes forward. The leader of proletarian revolution . . . leader of the working class of the world… best disciple of Marx and Engels. . . .”

  The formal words left me depressed. Why don’t they talk simply, from the heart rather than from Pravda and Izvestia editorials? Trudging home through the snowstorm I was pleased to discover that Senia and others had the same let-down feeling. The orators had failed to express how we felt about Lenin, because what we felt had less relation to the dead leader than to our own living hopes.