The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Pavel Postyshev

  Pavel Postyshev, a “calico printer” from Ivanovo-Voznesensk, was sent to the Vladimir Central Prison in 1908, when he was twenty-one. His savior was a local doctor’s wife, Lubov Matveevna Belokonskaia, who procured food, books, money, clothing, and fictitious brides for the prisoners. Four years later, he wrote to Belokonskaia from his place of “eternal exile” on Lake Baikal: “Dear L.M., I am a working man and am proud to belong to that class because it is destined to perform a great deed. Treasuring my title or rank of proletarian, and determined to keep that title pure and unsullied, especially as a conscious proletarian, I must not lie to you. You have dedicated your life to the great cause of the workers, and how can we not love you as children love a kind mother.”30

  The Donbass miner, Roman Terekhov, claims to have started wondering, at the age of fifteen,

  why some people did nothing and lived in luxury, while others worked day and night and lived in misery. This provoked in me a feeling of great hatred for those who did not work but lived well, especially the bosses. My goal was to do everything I could to find a person who would untie the tightly fastened knot of life for me. I found such a person in Danil Oguliaev, a tool maker in our mechanical shop. He explained to me the reasons for our life. After this I began to love him and always did all of his errands and assignments, such as distributing proclamations, posting them where they could be seen clearly, etc., and also stood guard at secret meetings.

  Once, he was allowed to participate in one of those meetings. “The night was dark and the steppe prickly as we walked toward the woods, where a comrade, who had been waiting for us, showed us the spot. There were about fifty people at the meeting. One young man made a presentation, and then another young man spoke against him. I didn’t like their argument and felt very bad they hadn’t been able to make up. I got back home with a bad taste in my mouth. The only valuable thing I took from that meeting were the words of one of the comrades about needing to arm ourselves.” Terekhov began his armed struggle by trying to kill a mechanic in his shop, but the attempt failed because he could not find an appropriate weapon. Some time later, a student propagandist showed him an issue of Pravda, and he organized a newspaper-reading circle.31

  Orphaned at four, Vasily Orekhov worked as a shepherd in his native village before running away to Moscow. At ten, he got a job at the Renommée candy factory (one of Einem’s more serious competitors) but was soon fired “for the non-allowance of an administration of a beating upon his person.” At seventeen, while working as a cook at a homeopathic hospital, he had some of his questions answered by a nurse named Aleksandrova. As he wrote in the mid-1920s in his typed, but unedited autobiography, “[She] prepared me for political literacy and the trade union movement having prepared my consciousness and her knowledge of my understanding and took into account my social status and everything I had lived through my spirit and my inclinations and my thirst for knowledge and work. Simply put, between July 1901 and March 1902 I was her probationer. In March I was accepted into a circle of democrats.”

  Semen Kanatchikov

  After several more jobs and a few beatings, and having joined a new Bolshevik circle and made a speech at a rally on the significance of May 1, Orekhov was hired at Kudelkin’s box-making shop. He did not stay long. “In 1908 I was exiled from Moscow for overturning a bowl of cabbage soup onto Kudelkin’s head and boiling his whole head, ’cause in those days the bosses used to provide their own boss food for us workers, and during Lent Kudelkin used to make this disgusting watery soup from cabbage with worms in it, and once he made this soup and I suggested that he keep his maggoty cabbage soup and give me something better, but Kudelkin said, ‘you’ll eat what you’re given,’ and so I turned the bowl of soup over his head, for which reason I spent two weeks in jail and was then exiled from Moscow.” Having left for Podolsk, Orekhov joined a local Bolshevik circle and became a propagandist.32

  Semen Kanatchikov’s “beliefs, views of the surrounding world, [and] the moral foundations with which [he] had lived and grown up” began to crumble after he became an apprentice at the Gustav List plant in the Swamp. A fellow worker told him that there was no hell other than the one they were living in; that the relics of saints were no different from the Egyptian mummies in the nearby Historical Museum; that the Dukhobors were “wonderful human beings” because they considered all people brothers; and that the nonexistence of God could be proven by watching worms and maggots appear out of nothing (“and then other creatures will begin to develop from the insects, and so on…. And, in the course of four, five, or maybe even ten thousand years, man himself will emerge”). But it was a book (What Should Every Worker Know and Remember?) that brought about the epiphany. “For an entire week I was in a state of virtual ecstasy, as if I were standing up high on some tall stilts, from where all other people appeared to me like some kind of bugs, like beetles rummaging in dung, while I alone had grasped the mechanics and the meaning of existence…. I now withdrew from my [cooperative] and settled in a separate room with one of my comrades. I stopped going to the priest for “confession,” no longer attended church, and began to eat “forbidden” food during Lenten fast days.”33

  The workers’ conversions were similar to those of the students in that they seemed to result from a combinaton of an innate moral sense with eye-opening readings and conversations. But whereas the students “stepped over the threshold” in the company of other students, the workers, according to their own recollections, needed a guide “from without.” As one of them put it, using a reading-circle commonplace, “it’s sad to say, but it’s obvious that the working people will not awaken from their slumber very soon”—unless a “comrade student” has sprinkled them with the magic water of life.34

  One such student, according to his comrades, was Yakov Sverdlov. “With his medium height, unruly brown hair, glasses continuously perched on his nose, and Tolstoy shirt worn under his student jacket, Sverdlov looked like a student, and for us, the young people as well as the workers, a ‘student’ meant a ‘revolutionary.’” In theory, anyone could become a revolutionary by acquiring consciousness and engaging in propaganda and agitation, and anybody could look like a student by wearing glasses and a jacket over a Tolstoy shirt. Sverdlov, for one, left the gymnasium after four years, never went to college, and only adopted the “student” uniform (which also included high boots and a cap and amounted to a combination of gymnasium and proletarian styles) when he was no longer a student.35

  In fact, however, Orekhov, Terekhov, Postyshev, Kanatchikov, and most other workers would become revolutionaries without ever becoming students, no matter how hard they studied, what positions they attained, or whether they wore glasses and jackets over Tolstoy shirts (Kanatchikov did). One reason for the difference was their speech, style, taste, gestures, and other birthmarks that might or might not be compatible with an altered consciousness. Another was the worker’s need for “the never-ending pursuit of a miserable piece of bread.” As Postyshev wrote to his adopted mother, Liubov Belokonskaia, “while my soul is yearning for light, screaming and struggling to break out of the embrace of unrelieved darkness, my body is drowning out my soul’s cry with its groaning for bread. Oh, how hard it all is!”36

  The third reason had to do with the consciousness of those left behind. The “students” were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries. As Kanatchikov put it, “Rare indeed were the occasions when a member of the intelligentsia completely broke his ties with his bourgeois or petty-bourgeois family…. What usually happened was that even after expelling the recalcitrant child from the family hearth, the kind-hearted relatives would soften, be filled with pity for the imprisoned martyr, and manifest more and more concern for him. They would visit him in prison, provide him with necessities, petition the authorities, request that his situation be mollified, and so on.”37

  According to Sverdlov’s sisters Sarra and Sofia and
his brother Veniamin, their father, the owner of an engraving shop, was a short-tempered but docile man who, after an initial struggle, grew to accept and eventually support the transformation of his house into “a meeting place for Nizhny Novgorod’s Social Democrats,” and his shop, into a place for manufacturing revolutionary proclamations and stamps for false passports. Voronsky’s father, the priest, died when Voronsky was very young, but one of his fictional doubles visits his son’s commune and, along with everyone else, drinks to Marxism, terror, Russian literature, new engines, and, at his son’s request, “to the unequal struggle, brave souls, and those who sacrifice themselves without asking anything in return.” (The toast “To the Clergy!” is roundly rejected by the seminarians, so Father Khristofor has to drink it alone.) In 1906, Kuibyshev’s father, a lieutenant colonel and, at the time, military commander of Kuznetsk, received a telegram from his daughter that Valerian was about to be court-martialed (“everyone knows what a court-martial is: today they arrest you and within forty-eight hours you get your sentence: acquittal or death”). According to Valerian’s account recorded in the early 1930s, “Father almost lost his mind: without wasting a single moment, he jumped into a carriage and rushed to the train station (in those days, there was no line connecting Kuznetsk to the Trans-Siberian). He told me later that he had spent an enormous sum on that trip because he demanded such speed that several horses died along the way.”

  Having arrived at the prison, Kuibyshev senior discovered that his son would be tried by a military district court, not a field court-martial. Valerian knew nothing about the telegram.

  When they told me that my father had come to see me, I felt very bad. I was expecting all kinds of reproaches, tears, and remonstrations (it was my first arrest). I would have no choice but to break with my father, and break for good….

  Having prepared myself to rebuff any attempt to talk me into straying from my chosen path in life, I entered the visitors’ cell. But instead of finding my father angry, I found him crying like a child, with tears in his eyes, rushing toward me to embrace me. He kept kissing and hugging me, laughing happily, patting me all over, assuring himself I was alive. I was taken aback.

  “Father, what’s the matter, why are you so happy?”

  He told me about the telegram.

  This is how my father found out about my first arrest. My sister’s mistake helped reconcile my father to my chosen path.38

  “The worker’s story is very different,” writes Kanatchikov. “He has no bonds, he has no ‘hearth,’ and he has no connections in the camp of his oppressors.” Not only was his family less likely to be reconciled with his chosen path—he was less likely to be reconciled with his family (which he sometimes called “the swamp”).39

  It usually happened that no sooner did a worker become conscious than he ceased being satisfied with his social environment; he would begin to feel burdened by it and would then try to socialize only with persons like himself and to spend his free time in more rational and cultured ways. At that moment his personal tragedy would begin. If the worker was an older family man, conflicts would immediately arise within his family, primarily with his wife, who was usually backward and uncultured. She could not understand his spiritual needs, did not share his ideals, feared and hated his friends, and grumbled and railed at him for spending money uselessly on books and for other cultural and revolutionary goals; most of all, she feared losing her bread-winner. If the worker was a young man, he inevitably came into conflict with his parents or other relatives, who had various powers over him. It was on this basis that conscious workers developed a negative attitude toward the family, toward marriage, and even toward women.40

  In student circles, women were less numerous and less prominent than men, but their roles as writers’ muses, debate audiences, prison liaisons, model martyrs, and “technical workers” were crucially important in the life of revolutionary communities. (Only among Jewish revolutionaries was the number of women comparable to that of men, making Jewish women even more “overrepresented” among revolutionaries than Jewish men.) Among worker revolutionaries, there were almost no women. Workers joining socialist circles and waiting to be fully “awakened” were the only proletarians with nothing but their chains to lose. They had the advantage of belonging to the chosen class, but they had no proper consciousness, no “culture,” no families, and no female companionship other than the awkward and often humiliating contact with Jewish and intelligentsia women. They had to remake themselves through study in order to become eligible for romance even as they were remaking themselves through study in order to redeem humanity. In the meantime, they had only their faith, each other, and the kind of existential freedom that seemed a mirror image of what they were promised in the kingdom of freedom. When Kanatchikov received a letter from his brother “enforming” him that the soul of their father, Ivan Egorych, had been delivered to God, he threw himself on his cot, buried his face in his pillow, and gave vent to a flood of tears. “But in the depth of my soul,” he writes in his autobiography, “another feeling was simmering and growing—a feeling of freedom and proud independence.”41

  ■ ■ ■

  One place where students and workers came together—to coalesce into a “party” and be free from “the swamp”—was prison. Students tempered their steel, workers acquired consciousness, and both learned to live side by side in close intimacy and relative equality. Arosev was arrested for the first time in 1909, when he was still in school in Kazan. “I liked the prison right away: everything was efficient and serious, as if we were in the capital. As I was being taken to my cell and saw my slightly stooped shadow on the wall of the prison corridor, I was filled with great respect for myself…. We were put in a cell with eight other students. Two of them were SRs we knew. It all looked more like a jolly student party than a prison. There were books, more books, notebooks filled with notes, slices of sausage on the long wooden table, tin teapots, mugs, loud laughter, joking, discussions, and chess games.”42

  The prisoners walked along prison corridors “as if in university halls,” played leapfrog in the courtyard, and observed strict silence before bedtime “in order to allow those who wished to read and write to do so.” Life in the Ekaterinburg prison in 1907 was similar. According to one of Yakov Sverdlov’s cellmates,

  All day long the cells on our block were open, and the inmates could walk freely from one cell to another, play games [“Sverdlov was one of the ringleaders when it came to leapfrog”], sing songs, listen to presentations, and conduct debates. All this was regulated by a “constitution,” which established a strict order enforced by cell elders who had been elected by the political prisoners. There were certain hours reserved for silence and collective walks…. Our cell was always crowded. In those days most of the prisoners were Social-Democrats, but there were also some SRs and anarchists. People from other cells often came over to listen to Y. M. Sverdlov.43

  Sverdlov knew, and Arosev soon found out, that “such freedom in prison was a direct reflection of the relative positions of the combatants outside.” A great deal depended on the time, place, sentence, chief warden, and prisoner’s social class. Orekhov, the worker who poured boiling cabbage soup over his employer’s head, describes “having his arms twisted, being tied up in a sack, and being force-fed finely ground glass,” as well as “lying unconscious for eight hours as a result of a single blow delivered to the head.” The Don Cossack Valentin Trifonov remembers wearing a winter coat in prison in order to soften the blows of the guards. According to his son, Yuri, “the inmates were constantly protesting against something: from the authorities’ use of the informal form of address, to the wardens’ demands that they greet them by shouting ‘Good day, Sir!’ and taking off their hats, to corporal punishment, forced haircuts, and petitioners who asked for pardons and shorter sentences.”44

  There were riots, escapes, suicides, and executions. Even Arosev, in his comfortable prison, might be playing leapfrog in the courtyard when, “
suddenly, they would bring in a comrade who had been sentenced to death, and we knew that tomorrow or the day after he would be led out into this courtyard, not far from where we were playing, and hanged, and this comrade would be no more.”45

  Valentin Trifonov

  (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  But most Bolshevik prison memoirs are about the education of a true Bolshevik, and most of them refer to prison as a “university.” “Strange as it may sound,” writes Kon, “the years I spent in prison were the best years of my life. I did a lot of studying, tested my strength in a long and bitter struggle, and, in constant interaction with other prisoners, learned the difference between words and deeds, firm convictions and fleeting fancies. It was in prison that I learned how to judge my own life and the lives of others from the point of view of the good of the cause.” Osinsky and Bukharin cemented their friendship when they lived “in perfect harmony” in the same prison cell, and Platon Kerzhentsev, who had defeated Osinsky in the high school debate on the Decembrists, “studied thoroughly … the literature of both Marxism and populism and left prison—the best university of [his] life—as a Bolshevik.” Iosif Tarshis’s (Osip Piatnitsky’s) time in prison was “a university” because he “studied systematically under the guidance of a comrade who knew Marxist revolutionary literature,” and Grigory Petrovsky’s time in prison was a university because he “not only read the best Marxist literature, but also studied arithmetic, geometry, and German.”46

  The education of a true Bolshevik consisted in learning how to judge his own life and the lives of others from the point of view of the good of the cause, but it also consisted in learning as much as possible about everything else. Once the faith in the coming of the real day was in place and “the key to the understanding of reality,” in hand, the study of arithmetic, geometry, and German helped enlist all things for the good of the cause. The more one knew, the easier it was to perceive the “moving forces” behind people and things and “the fantastic, enchanting, and transparent light over everything and everyone.”