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At the Opera House it stopped and a group of young people alighted. —
The car continued the climb.
“We’d better get a move on,” Pankratov urged the others, “or we’ll be late for sure.”
Okunev caught up with him at the theatre entrance.
“We came here under similar circumstances three years ago, you remember, Genka? —
That was when Dubava came back to us with the ‘Workers’ Opposition’. A grand meeting!
And tonight
we’ve got to grapple with him again!”
They had presented their passes and been admitted into the hall before Pankratov replied:
“Yes, history is repeating itself on the very same spot.”
They were hissed to silence. The evening session of the conference had already begun and they had to take the first seats they could find. —
A young woman was addressing the gathering from the rostrum. It was Talya.
“We’re just in time. Now sit quiet and listen to what wifie has to say,” Pankratov whispered,giving Okunev a dig in the ribs.
”…It’s true that we have spent much time and energy on this discussion, but I think that we have all learned a great deal from it. —
Today we are very glad to note that in our organisation Trotsky’s followers have been defeated. —
They cannot complain that they were not given a hearing. On the contrary: —
they have had every opportunity to express their point of view. —
As a matter of fact they have abused the freedom we gave them and committed a number of gross violations of Party discipline.”
Talya was nervous; you could tell by the way she kept tossing back a lock of hair that fell forward over her eyes as she spoke.
“Many comrades from the districts have spoken here, and they have all had something to say about the methods the Trotskyites have been using. —
There are quite a number of Trotskyites at this conference. —
The districts deliberately sent them here to give us another opportunity to hear them out at this city Party conference. —
It is not our fault if they are not making full use of this opportunity. —
Evidently their complete defeat in the districts and cells has taught them something.
They could hardly get up at this conference and repeat what they were saying only yesterday.”
A harsh voice from the right-hand corner of the hall interrupted Talya at this point:
“We haven’t had our say yet!”
Talya turned in the direction of the voice:
“All right, Dubava, come up here now and speak, we’ll listen to you.”
Dubava stared gloomily back at her and his lips twisted in anger.
“We’ll talk when the time comes!” he shouted back. —
He thought of the crushing defeat he had sustained the day before in his own district. —
The memory still rankled.
A low murmur passed over the hall. Pankratov, unable to restrain himself, cried out:
“Going to try shaking up the Party again, eh?”
Dubava recognised the voice, but did not turn round. —
He merely dug his teeth into his lower lip and bent his head.
“Dubava himself offers a striking example of how the Trotskyites are violating Party discipline,”
Talya went on. “He has worked in the Komsomol for a long time, many of us know him, the arsenal workers in particular. —
He is a student of the Kharkov Communist University, yet we all know that he has been here with Shumsky for the past three weeks. —
What has brought them here in the middle of the university term? —
There isn’t a single district in town where they haven’t addressed meetings. —
True, during the past few days Shumsky has shown signs of coming to his senses. —
Who sent them here?
Besides them, there are a good number of other Trotskyites from various organisations. —
They all worked here before at one time or another and now they have come back to stir up trouble within the Party. Do their Party organisations know where they are? Of course not.”
The conference was expecting the Trotskyites to come forward and admit their mistakes. —
Talya, hoping to persuade them to take this step, appealed to them earnestly. —
She addressed herself directly to them as if in comradely, informal debate:
“Three years ago in this very theatre Dubava came back to us with the former ‘Workers’ Opposition’. —
Remember? And do you remember what he said then: —
‘Never shall we let the Party banner fall from our hands.’ —
But hardly three years have passed and Dubava has done just that.
Yes, I repeat, he has let the Party banner fall. ‘We haven’t had our say yet!’ he just said. —
That shows that he and his fellow Trotskyites intend to go still further.”
“Let Tufta tell us about the barometer,” came a voice from the back rows. —
“He’s their weather expert.”
To which indignant voices responded:
“This is no time for silly jokes!”
“Are they going to stop fighting the Party or not? Let them answer that!”
“Let them tell us who wrote that anti-Party declaration!”
Indignation rose higher and higher and the chairman rang his bell long and insistently for silence.
Talya’s voice was drowned out by the din, and it was some time before she was able to continue.
“The letters we receive from our comrades in the outlying localities show that they are with us in this and that is very encouraging. —
Permit me to read part of one letter we have received. It is from Olga Yureneva. —
Many of you here know her. She is in charge of the Organisational Department of an Area Committee of the Komsomol.”
Talya drew a sheet of paper out of a pile before her, ran her eye over it and began:
“All practical work has been neglected. For the past four days all bureau members have been out in the districts where the Trotskyites have launched a more vicious campaign than ever. —
An incident occurred yesterday which aroused the indignation of the entire organisation. —
Failing to get a majority in a single cell in town, the opposition decided to rally their forces and put up a fight in the cell of the Regional Military Commissariat, which also includes the Communists working in the Regional Planning Commission and Educational Department. —
The cell has forty-two members, but all the Trotskyites banded together there. —
Never had we heard such anti-Party speeches as were made at that meeting. —
One of the Military Commissariat members got up and said outright: —
‘If the Party apparatus doesn’t give in, we will smash it by force.’ —
The oppositionists applauded that statement. Then Korchagin took the floor. —
‘How can you applaud that fascist and call yourselves Party members?’ —
he said, but they raised such a commotion, shouting and banging their chairs, that he could not go on. —
The members who were disgusted by this outrageous behaviour demanded that Korchagin be given a hearing, but the uproar was repeated as soon as he tried to make himself heard. —
‘So this is what you call democracy!’ he shouted above the din. ‘I’m going to speak just the same!’ —
At that point several of them fell on him and tried to drag him off the platform. —
There was wild confusion. Pavel fought back and went on speaking, but they dragged him off the stage, opened. —
a side door and threw him onto the stairway, his face was bleeding. —
After that, nearly all the members left the meeting. —
That incident was an eye-opener for many. …”
Talya left the platform.
Segal, who had been in charge of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Gubernia Party Committee for two months now, sat in the presidium next to Tokarev and listened attentively to the speeches of the delegates. —
So far the conference had been addressed exclusively by young people who were still in the Komsomol.
“How they have matured these past few years!” Segal was thinking.
“The opposition is already getting it hot,” he remarked to Tokarev, “and the heavy artillery has not yet been brought into action. —
It’s the youth who are routing the Trotskyites.” Just then Tufta leapt onto the platform. —
He was met by a loud buzz of disapproval and a brief outburst of laughter. —
Tufta turned to the presidium to protest against his reception, but the hall had already quieted down.
“Someone here called me a weather expert. —
So that is how you mock at my political views,Comrades of the majority!” —
he burst out in one breath.
A roar of laughter greeted his words. Tufta appealed indignantly to the chairman:
“You can laugh, but I tell you once again, the youth is a barometer. —
Lenin has said so time and again.”
In an instant silence reigned in the hall.
“What did Lenin say?” came voices from the audience.
Tufta livened up.
“When preparations were being made for the October uprising Lenin issued instructions to muster the resolute working-class youth, arm them and send them together with the sailors to the most important sectors. —
Do you want me to read you that passage? —
I have all the quotations down on cards.” —
Tufta dug into his portfolio.
“Never mind, we know it!”
“But what did Lenin say about unity?”
“And about Party discipline?”
“When did Lenin ever set up the youth in opposition to the old guard?”
Tufta lost the thread of his thoughts and switched over to another theme:
“Lagutina here read a letter from Yureneva. —
We cannot be expected to answer for certain excesses that might occur in the course of debate.”
Tsvetayev, sitting next to Shumsky, hissed in fury: “Fools barge in… .”
“Yes,” Shumsky whispered back. “That idiot will ruin us completely.”
Tufta’s shrill, high-pitched voice continued to grate on the ears of his hearers:
“If you have organised a majority faction, we have the right to organise a minority faction.”
A commotion arose in the hall.
Angry cries rained down on Tufta from all sides:
“What’s that? Again Bolsheviks and Mensheviks!”
“The Russian Communist Party isn’t a parliament!”
“They’re working for all sorts of factionists, from Myasnikov to Martov!”
Tufta threw up his arms as if about to plunge into a river, and returned an excited rapid-fire:
“Yes, we must have freedom to form groups. —
Otherwise how can we who hold different views fight for our opinions against such an organised, well-disciplined majority?”
The uproar increased. Pankratov got up and shouted:
“Let him speak. We might as well hear what he has to say. —
Tufta may blurt out what the others prefer to keep to themselves.”
The hall quieted down. Tufta realised that he had gone too far. —
Perhaps he ought not to have said that now. —
His thoughts went off at a tangent and he wound up his speech in a rush of words:
“Of course you can expel us and shove us overboard. That sort of thing is beginning already.
You’ve already got me out of the Gubernia Committee of the Komsomol. —
But never mind, we’ll soon see who was right.” —
And with that he jumped off the stage into the hall.
Tsvetayev passed a note down to Dubava. “Mityai, you take the floor next. —
Of course it won’t alter the situation, we are obviously getting the worst of it here. —
We must put Tufta right. He’s a blockhead and a gas-bag.”
Dubava asked for the floor and his request was granted immediately.
An expectant hush fell over the hall as he mounted the platform. —
It was the usual silence that precedes a speech, but to Dubava it was pregnant with hostility. —
The ardour with which he had addressed the cell meetings had cooled off by now. —
From day to day his passion had waned, and after the crushing defeat and the stern rebuff from his former comrades, it was like a fire doused with water, and now he was enveloped by the bitter smoke of wounded vanity made bitterer still by his stubborn refusal to admit himself in the wrong. —
He resolved to plunge straight in although he knew that he would only be alienating himself still further from the majority. —
His voice when he spoke was toneless, yet distinct.
“Please do not interrupt me or annoy me by heckling. —
I want to set forth our position in full,although I know in advance that it is no use. —
You have the majority.”
When at last he finished speaking it was as if a bombshell had burst in the hall. —
A hurricane of angry shouts descended upon him, stinging him like whiplashes.
“Shame!”
“Down with the splitters!”
“Enough mud-slinging!”
To the accompaniment of mocking laughter Dubava went back to his seat, and that laughter cut like a knife-thrust. —
Had they stormed and railed at him he would have been gratified, but to be jeered at like a third-rate actor whose voice had cracked on a false note was too much.
“Shumsky has the floor,” announced the chairman.
Shumsky got up. “I decline to speak.”
Then Pankratov’s bass boomed from the back rows.
“Let me speak!”
Dubava could tell by his voice that Pankratov was seething inwardly. —
His deep voice always boomed thus when he was mortally insulted, and a deep uneasiness seized Dubava as he gloomily watched the tall, slightly bent figure stride swiftly over to the platform. —
He knew what Pankratov was going to say. —
He thought of the meeting he had had the day before with his old friends at Solomenka and how they had pleaded with him to break with the opposition. —
Tsvetayev and Shumsky had been with him. They had met at Tokarev’s place. —
Pankratov, Okunev, Talya,Volyntsev, Zelenova, Staroverov and Artyukhin had been present. —
Dubava had remained deaf to this attempt to restore unity. —
In the middle of the discussion he had walked out with Tsvetayev,thus emphasising his unwillingness to admit his mistakes. —
Shumsky had remained. And now he had refused to take the floor. “Spineless intellectual! —
Of course they’ve won him over,” Dubava thought with bitter resentment. —
He was losing all his friends in this frenzied struggle. —
At the university there had been a rupture in his friendship with Zharky, who had sharply censured the declaration of the “forty-six” at a meeting of the Party bureau. —
And later, when the clash grew sharper, he had ceased to be on speaking terms. —
Several times after that Zharky had come to his place to visit Anna. It was a year since Dubava and Anna had been married. —
They occupied separate rooms, and Dubava believed that his strained relations with Anna, who did not share his views, had been aggravated by Zharky’s frequent visits. —
It was not jealousy on his part, he assured himself, but under the circumstances her friendship with Zharky irritated him. —
He had spoken to Anna about it and the result had been a scene which had by no means improved their relations. —
He had left for the conference without telling her where he was going.
The swift flight of his thoughts was cut short by Pankratov.
“Comrades!” the word rang out as the speaker took up a position at the very edge of the platform. —
“Comrades! For nine days we have listened to the speeches of the opposition, and I must say quite frankly that they spoke here not as fellow fighters, revolutionaries, our comrades in the class struggle. —
Their speeches were hostile, implacable, malicious and slanderous. Yes, Comrades, slanderous! —
They have tried to represent us Bolsheviks as supporters of a mailed-fist regime in the Party, as people who are betraying the interests of their class and the Revolution. —
They have attempted to brand as Party bureaucrats the best, the most tried and trusty section of our Party, the glorious old guard of Bolsheviks, men who built up the Russian Communist Party, men who suffered in tsarist prisons, men who with Comrade Lenin at their head have waged a relentless struggle against world Menshevism and Trotsky. —
Could anyone but an enemy make such statements? —
Is the Party and its functionaries not one single whole? —
Then what is this all about, I want to know? —
What would we say of men who would try to incite young Red Army men against their commanders and commissars, against army headquarters — and at a time when the unit was surrounded by the enemy? —
According to the Trotskyites, so long as I am a mechanic I’m ‘all right’, but if tomorrow I should become the secretary of a Party Committee I would be a ‘bureaucrat’ and a ‘chairwarmer’! —
Isn’t it a bit strange, Comrades, that among the oppositionists who are fighting against bureaucracy and for democracy there should be men like Tufta, for example, who was recently removed from his job for being a bureaucrat? —
Or Tsvetayev, who is well known to the Solomenka folks for his ‘democracy’; —
or Afanasyev, who was taken off the job three times by the Gubernia Committee for his highhanded way of running things in Podolsk District? —
It turns out that all those whom the Party has punished have united to fight the Party. Let the old Bolsheviks tell us about Trotsky’s ‘Bolshevism’. —
It is very important for the youth to know the history of Trotsky’s struggle against the Bolsheviks, about his constant shifting from one camp to another.
The struggle against the opposition has welded our ranks and it has strengthened the youth ideologically. —
The Bolshevik Party and the Komsomol have become steeled in the fight against petty-bourgeois trends. —
The hysterical panic-mongers of the opposition are predicting complete economic and political collapse. —
Our tomorrow will show how much these prophecies are worth.
They are demanding that we send old Bolsheviks like Tokarev, for instance, back to the bench and replace him by some weather-vane like Dubava who imagines his struggle against the Party to be a sort of heroic feat. —
No, Comrades, we won’t agree to that. The old Bolsheviks will get replacement, but not from among those who violently attack the Party line whenever we are up against some difficulty. —
We shall not permit the unity of our great Party to be disrupted. —
Never will the old and young guard be split. —
Under the banner of Lenin, in unrelenting struggle against petty-bourgeois trends, we shall march to victory!”
Pankratov descended the platform amid thunderous applause.
The following day a group of ten met at Tufta’s place.
“Shumsky and I are leaving today for Kharkov,” Dubava said. —
“There is nothing more for us to do here. You must try to keep together. —
All we can do now is to wait and see what happens. —
It is obvious that the All-Russia Conference will condemn us, but it seems to me that it is too soon to expect any repressive measures to be taken against us. —
The majority has decided to give us another chance. —
To carry on the struggle openly now, especially after the conference, means getting kicked out of the Party, and that does not enter into our plans. —
It is hard to say what the future holds for us. —
I think that’s all there is to be said.” —
Dubava got up to go.
The gaunt, thin-lipped Staroverov also rose.
“I don’t understand you, Mityai,” he said, rolling his r’s and slightly stammering. —
“Does that mean that the conference decision is not binding on us?”
“Formally, it is,” Tsvetayev cut him short. “Otherwise you’ll lose your Party card. —
But we’ll wait and see which way the wind blows and in the meantime we’ll disperse.”
Tufta stirred uneasily in his chair. Shumsky, pale and downcast, with dark circles under his eyes,sat by the window biting his nails. —
At Tsvetayev’s words he abandoned his depressing occupation and turned to the meeting.
“I’m opposed to such manoeuvres,” he said in sudden anger. —
“I personally consider that the decision of the conference is binding on us. —
We have fought for our convictions, but now we must submit to the decision that has been taken.”
Staroverov looked at him with approval.
“That is what I wanted to say,” he lisped.
Dubava fixed Shumsky with his eyes and said with a sneer:
“Nobody’s suggesting that you do anything. —
You still have a chance to ‘repent’ at the Gubernia Conference.”
Shumsky leapt to his feet.
“I resent your tone, Dmitri! And to be quite frank, what you say disgusts me and forces me to reconsider my position.”
Dubava waved him away.
“That’s exactly what I thought you’d do. Run along and repent before it is too late.” —
With that Dubava shook hands with Tufta and the others and left. —
Shumsky and Staroverov followed soon after.
Cruel cold marked the advent in history of the year one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four.
January fastened its icy grip on the snowbound land, and from the second half of the month howling storms and blizzards raged.
The Southwestern Railway was snowed up. Men fought the maddened elements. —
The steel screws of snowploughs cut into the drifts, clearing a path for the trains. —
Telegraph wires weighted down with ice snapped under the impact of frost and blizzard, and of the twelve lines only three functioned — the Indo-European and two government lines.
In the telegraph office at Shepetovka station three apparatuses continued their unceasing chatter understandable only to the trained ear.
The girl operators were new at the job; the length of the tape they had tapped out would not have exceeded twenty kilometres, but the old telegrapher who worked beside them had already passed the two-hundred-kilometre mark. —
Unlike his younger colleagues he did not need to read the tape in order to make out the message, nor did he puzzle with wrinkled brow over difficult words or phrases. —
Instead he wrote down the words one after the other as the apparatus ticked them out.
Now his ear caught the words “To all, to all, to all!”
“Must be another of those circulars about clearing away the snow,” the old telegrapher thought to himself as he wrote down the words. —
Outside, the blizzard raged, hurling the snow against the window. —
The telegrapher thought someone was knocking at the window, his eyes strayed in the direction of the sound and for a moment were arrested by the intricate pattern the frost had traced on the panes. —
No engraver could ever match that exquisite leaf-and-stalk design!
His thoughts wandered and for a while he stopped listening to the telegraph. —
But presently he looked down and reached for the tape to read the words he had missed.
The telegraph had tapped out these words:
“At 6.50 in the afternoon of January 21… —
.” Quickly writing down the words, the telegrapher dropped the tape and resting his head on his hand returned to listening.
“Yesterday in Gorki the death occurred….” Slowly he put the letters down on paper. —
How many messages had he taken down in his long life, joyous messages as well as tragic ones, how often had he been the first to hear of the sorrows or happiness of others! —
He had long since ceased to ponder over the meaning of the terse, clipped phrases, he merely caught the sounds and mechanically set them down on paper.
Now too someone had died, and someone was being notified of the fact. —
The telegrapher had forgotten the initial words: “To all, to all, to all.” —
The apparatus clicked out the letters “V-1-a-d-im-i-r I-1-y-i-c-h ‘, and the old telegrapher translated the hammer taps into words. —
He sat there unperturbed, a trifle weary. —
Someone named Vladimir Ilyich had died somewhere, someone would receive the message with the tragic tidings, a cry of grief and anguish would be wrung from someone, but it was no concern of his, for he was only a chance witness. —
The apparatus tapped out a dot, a dash, more dots, another dash, and out of the familiar sounds he caught the first letter and set it down on the telegraph form. —
It was the letter “L”. Then came the second letter, “E”; —
next to it he inscribed a neat “N”, drawing a heavy slanting line between the two uprights, hastily added an “I” and absently picked up the last letter — “N”.
The apparatus tapped out a pause, and for the fraction of a second the telegrapher’s eye rested on the word he had written: “LENIN”.
The apparatus went on tapping, but the familiar name now pierced the telegrapher’s consciousness.
He glanced once more at the last words of the message — “LENIN”. What? Lenin? —
The entire text of the telegram flashed before his mind’s eye. —
He stared at the telegraph form, and for the first time in all his thirty-two years of work he could not believe what he had written.
He ran his eye swiftly thrice over the lines, but the words obstinately refused to change: —
“the death occurred of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” The old man leapt to his feet, snatched up the spiral of tape and bored it with his eyes. —
The two-metre strip confirmed that which he refused to believe! —
He turned a deathlike face to his fellow workers, and his frightened cry fell on their ears: “Lenin is dead!”
The terrible news slipped through the wide open door of the telegraph office and with the speed of a hurricane swept over the station and into the blizzard, whipped over the tracks and switches and along with the icy blast tore through the ironbound gates of the railway shops.
A current repair crew was busy overhauling an engine standing over the first pit. —
Old Polentovsky himself had crawled down under the belly of his engine and was pointing out the ailing spots to the mechanics. —
Zakhar Bruzzhak and Artem were straightening out the bent bars of the fire grate.
Zakhar held the grating on the anvil and Artem wielded the hammer.
Zakhar had aged. The past few years had left a deep furrow on his forehead and touched his temples with silver. —
His back was bent and there were shadows in his sunken eyes.
The figure of a man was silhouetted for a moment in the doorway, and then the evening shadows swallowed him up. —
The blows of the hammer on iron drowned out his first cry, but when he reached the men working at the engine Artem paused with his hammer poised to strike.
“Comrades! Lenin is dead!”
The hammer slid slowly from Artem’s shoulder and his hands lowered it noiselessly onto the concrete floor.
“What’s that? What did you say?” Artem’s hand clutched convulsively at the sheepskin of the man who had brought the fearful tidings.
And he, gasping for breath, covered with snow, repeated in a low, broken voice:
“Yes, Comrades, Lenin is dead.”
And because the man did not shout, Artem realised that the terrible news was true. —
Only now did he recognise the man — it was the secretary of the local Party organisation.
Men climbed out of the pit and heard in silence of the death of the man with whose name the whole world had rung.
Somewhere outside the gates an engine shrieked, sending a shudder through the group of men.
The anguished sound was echoed by another engine at the far side of the station, then by a third.
Their mighty chorus was joined by the siren of the power station, high-pitched and piercing like the flight of shrapnel. —
Then all was drowned out by the deep sonorous voice of the handsome engine of the passenger train about to leave for Kiev.
A GPU agent started in surprise when the driver of the Polish engine of the Shepetovka-Warsaw express, on learning the reason for the alarming whistles, listened for a moment, then slowly raised his hand and pulled at the whistle cord. —
He knew that this was the last time he would do so, that he would never be allowed to drive this train again, but his hand did not let go of the cord, and the shriek of his engine roused the startled Polish couriers and diplomats from their soft couches.
People crowded into the railway shops. They poured through all the gates and when the vast building was filled to overflowing the funeral meeting opened amid heavy silence. —
The old Bolshevik Sharabrin, Secretary of the Shepetovka Regional Committee of the Party, addressed the gathering.
“Comrades! Lenin, the leader of the world proletariat, is dead. —
The Party has suffered an irreparable loss, for the man who created the Bolshevik Party and taught it to be implacable to its enemies is no more. —
… The death of the leader of our Party and our class is a summons to the best sons of the proletariat to join our ranks….”
The strains of the funeral march rang out, the men bared their heads, and Artem, who had not wept for fifteen years, felt a lump rising in his throat and his powerful shoulders shook. —
The very walls of the railwaymen’s club seemed to groan under the pressure of the human mass.
Outside it was bitterly cold, the two tall fir-trees at the entrance to the hall were garbed in snow and icicles, but inside it was suffocating from the heated stoves and the breath of six hundred people who had gathered to the memorial meeting arranged by the Party organisation.
The usual hum of conversation was stilled. —
Overpowering grief muffled men’s voices and they spoke in whispers, and there was sorrow and anxiety in the eyes of many.
They were like the crew of a ship that had lost her helmsman in a storm.
Silently the members of the bureau took their seats on the platform. —
The stocky Sirotenko carefully lifted the bell, rang it gently and replaced it on the table. —
This was enough for an oppressive hush to settle over the hall.
When the main speech had been delivered, Sirotenko, the Secretary of the Party organisation, rose to speak. —
And although the announcement he made was unusual for a memorial meeting, it surprised no one.
“A number of workers,” he said, “have asked this meeting to consider an application for membership in the Party. The application is signed by thirty-seven comrades.”
And he read out the application:
“To the railway organisation of the Bolshevik Party at Shepetovka Station, Southwestern Railway.
“The death of our leader is a summons to us to join the ranks of the Bolsheviks, and we ask that this meeting judge of our worthiness to join the Party of Lenin.”
Two columns of signatures were affixed to this brief statement.
Sirotenko read them aloud, pausing a few seconds after each name to allow the meeting to memorise them.
“Stanislav Zigmundovich Polentovsky, engine driver, thirty-six years of service.”
A murmur of approval rippled over the hall.
“Artem Andreyevich Korchagin, mechanic, seventeen years of service.”
“Zakhar Filippovich Bruzzhak, engine driver, twenty-one years of service.”
The murmur increased in volume as the man on the platform continued to call out the names of veteran members of the horny-palmed fraternity of railwaymen.
Silence again reigned when Polentovsky, whose name headed the list, stood before the meeting.
The old engine driver could not but betray his agitation as he told the story of his life.
”… What can I tell you, Comrades? You all know what the life of a workingman was like in the old days. —
Worked like a slave all my life and remained a beggar in my old age. —
When the Revolution came, I confess I considered myself an old man burdened down by family cares, and I did not see my way into the Party. And although I never sided with the enemy I rarely took part in the struggle myself. —
In nineteen hundred and five I was a member of the strike committee in the Warsaw railway shops and I was on the side of the Bolsheviks. —
I was young then and full of fight.
But what’s the use of recalling the past! Ilyich’s death has struck right at my heart; —
we’ve lost our friend and champion, and it’s the last time I’ll ever speak about being old. —
I don’t know how to put it, for I never was much good at speech making. —
But let me say this: my road is the Bolsheviks’ road and no other.”
The engine driver tossed his grey head and his eyes under his white brows looked out steadily and resolutely at the audience as if awaiting its decisive words.
Not a single voice was raised in opposition to the little grey-haired man’s application, and no one abstained during the voting in which the non-Party people too were invited to take part.
Polentovsky walked away from the presidium table a member of the Communist Party.
Everyone was conscious that something momentous was taking place. —
Now Artem’s great bulk loomed where the engine driver had just stood. —
The mechanic did not know what to do with his hands, and he nervously gripped his shaggy fur cap. —
His sheepskin jacket, threadbare at the edges, was open, but the high-necked collar of his grey army tunic was fastened on two brass buttons lending his whole figure a holiday neatness. —
Artem turned to face the hall and caught a fleeting glimpse of a familiar woman’s face. —
It was Galina, the stonemason’s daughter, sitting with her workmates from the tailor shop. —
She was gazing at him with a forgiving smile, and in that smile he read approval and something he could not have put into words.
“Tell them about yourself, Artem!” he heard Sirotenko say.
But it was not easy for Artem to begin his tale. —
He was not accustomed to addressing such a large audience, and he suddenly felt that to express all that life had stored within him was beyond his powers. —
He fumbled painfully for words, and his nervousness made it all the harder for him. —
Never had he experienced the like. He felt that this was a vital turning point for him, that he was about to take a step that would bring warmth and meaning into his harsh, warped life.
“There were four of us,” Artem began.
The hall was hushed. Six hundred people listened eagerly to this tall worker with the beaked nose and the eyes hidden under the dark fringe of eyebrows.
“My mother worked as cook for the rich folk. I hardly remember my father; —
he and mother didn’t get along. He drank too much. So mother had to take care of us kids. —
It was hard for her with so many mouths to feed. —
She slaved from morning till night and got four rubles a month and her grub. —
I was lucky enough to get two winters of school. —
They taught me to read and write, but when I turned nine my mother had to send me to work as an apprentice in a machine shop. —
I worked for three years for nothing but my grub…. The shop owner was a German named Foerster. —
He didn’t want to take me at first, said I was too young. —
But I was a sturdy lad, and my mother added on a couple of years. —
I worked three years for that German, but instead of learning a trade I had to do odd jobs around the house, and run for vodka. —
The boss drank like a fish… . He’d send me to fetch coal and iron too.… —
The mistress made a regular slave out of me: I had to peel potatoes and scour pots. —
I was always getting kicked and cuffed, most times for no reason, just out of habit. —
If I didn’t please the mistress — and she was always on the rampage on account of her husband’s drinking — she would beat me. —
I’d run away from her out into the street, but where could I go, who was there to complain to? —
My mother was forty miles away, and she couldn’t keep me anyway. —
… And in the shop it wasn’t any better. —
The master’s brother was in charge, a swine of a man who used to enjoy playing tricks on me. —
‘Here boy,’ he’d say, ‘fetch me that washer from over there,’ and he’d point to the corner by the forge. —
I’d run over and grab the washer and let out a yell.
It had just come out of the forge; and though it looked black lying there on the ground, when you touched it, it burned right through the flesh. —
I’d stand there screaming with the pain and he’d burst his sides laughing. —
I couldn’t stand any more of this and I ran away home to mother. —
But she didn’t know what to do with me, so she brought me back. —
She cried all the way there, I remember. —
In my third year they began to teach me something about the trade, but the beatings continued. —
I ran away again, this time to Starokonstantinov. —
I found work in a sausage factory and wasted more than a year and a half washing casings. —
Then our boss gambled away his factory, didn’t pay us a kopek for four months and disappeared. —
I got out of that hole, took a train to Zhmerinka and went to look for work. —
I was lucky enough to meet a railwayman there who took pity on me. —
When I told him I was a mechanic of sorts, he took me to his boss and said I was his nephew and asked him to find some work for me. —
By my size they took me for seventeen, and so I got a job as a mechanic’s helper. —
As for my present job, I’ve been working here for more than eight years. —
That is all I can tell you about my past. —
You all know about my present life here.”
Artem wiped his brow with his cap and heaved a deep sigh. He had not yet said the chief thing.
This was the hardest thing of all to say, but he had to say it before anyone asked the inevitable question. —
And knitting his bushy eyebrows, he went on with his story:
“Why did I not join the Bolsheviks before? That is a question you all have the right to ask me.
How can I answer? After all, I’m not an old man yet. —
How is it I didn’t find the road here until today? —
I’ll tell you straight, for I’ve nothing to hide. —
I missed that road, I ought to have taken it back in nineteen eighteen when we rose against the Germans. —
Zhukhrai, the sailor, told me so many a time. It wasn’t until 1920 that I took up a rifle. —
When the storm was over and we had driven the Whites into the Black Sea, we came back home. —
Then came the family, children. … I got all tied up in family life. —
But now that our Comrade Lenin is gone and the Party has issued its call, I have looked back at my life and seen what was lacking. —
It’s not enough to defend your own power, we have to stick together like one big family, in Lenin’s place, so that the Soviet power should stand solid like a mountain of steel. —
We must become Bolsheviks. It’s our Party, isn’t it?”
When he finished, a little abashed at having made such a long speech, he felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and, pulling himself up to his full height, he stood waiting for the questions to come.
“Any questions?” Sirotenko’s voice broke the ensuing silence.
A stir ran over the gathering, but no one responded at first to the chairman’s call. —
Then a stoker, straight from his engine and black as a beetle, said with finality:
“What’s there to ask? Don’t we know him? Vote him in and be done with it!”
Gilyaka, the smith, his face scarlet from the heat and the excitement, cried out hoarsely:
“This comrade’s the right sort, he won’t jump the rails, you can depend on him. —
Vote him, Sirotenko!”
At the very back of the hall where the Komsomols were sitting, someone, invisible in the semidarkness, rose and said:
“Let Comrade Korchagin explain why he has settled on the land and how he reconciles his peasant status with his proletarian psychology.”
A light rustle of disapproval passed over the hall and a voice rose in protest:
“Why don’t you talk so us plain folks can understand? A fine time to show off….”
But Artem was already replying:
“That’s all right, Comrade. The lad is right about my having settled on the land. —
That’s true, but I haven’t betrayed my working-class conscience. —
Anyhow, that’s over and done with from today.
I’m moving my family closer to the sheds. It’s better here. —
That cursed bit of land has been sticking in my throat for a long time.”
Once again Artem’s heart trembled when he saw the forest of hands raised in his favour, and with head held high he walked back to his seat. —
Behind him he heard Sirotenko announce:
“Unanimous.”
The third to take his place at the presidium table was Zakhar Bruzzhak, Polentovsky’s former helper. —
The taciturn old man had been an engine driver himself now for some time. —
When he finished his account of a lifetime of labour and brought his story up to the present, his voice dropped and he spoke softly but loud enough for all to hear:
“It is my duty to finish what my children began. —
They wouldn’t have wanted me to hide away in a corner with my grief. That isn’t what they died for. —
I haven’t tried to fill the gap left by their death,but now the death of our leader has opened my eyes. —
Don’t ask me to answer for the past. From today our life starts anew.”
Zakhar’s face clouded and looked stern as painful memories stirred within him. —
But when a sea of hands swept up, voting for his acceptance into the Party, his eyes lit up and his greying head was no longer bowed.
Far into the night continued this review of the new Party replacements. —
Only the best were admitted, those whom everyone knew well, whose lives were without blemish.
The death of Lenin brought many thousands of workers into the Bolshevik Party. The leader was gone but the Party’s ranks were unshaken. —
A tree that has thrust its mighty roots deep into the ground does not perish if its crown is severed.
