The truth, they knew, was to be found in larger groups of like-minded believers. After more conversations and confessions, several clusters of friends would come together as a secret reading circle:
Seven or eight fifth-grade Realschule students were sitting on the chairs, bed, and couch of the low attic room lit up by a kerosene lamp with a white glass lampshade. The portraits of Kautsky, Engels, Marx, Mikhailovsky, Uspensky, Korolenko, and Tolstoy looked down sternly and protectively. On the bookshelf in the corner, one could see the names of the same heroes of the age….
The air was filled with an energy that could only be sensed by the nerves, which, like little cobwebs, connected everyone and made them feel related and bound together forever, for many centuries to come. The young men barely knew each other, but each looked at the others with an almost ecstatic affection, proud to be there, next to all those others, who were so mysterious and, just like him, full of fire. Every face seemed to be saying: “Starting today, this very minute, I, so-and-so, have joined the ranks of fighters.”12
They would then elect a chairman (on this occasion, Skriabin) and decide on book lists, passwords, and nicknames. Skriabin became “Uncle,” and later “Molotov”; Arosev became “Z”; and, in other rooms in other towns, Sverdlov became “Comrade Andrei”; Brilliant became “Sokolnikov”; Obolensky became “Osinsky”; and Voronsky—“a pale, thin, curly-haired, blue-eyed young man with full, bright red lips” —became “Valentin.”
Voronsky’s circle of Tambov seminarians was born “within the damp, musty walls steeped in the balm and incense of Orthodox Christianity,” but its members—“adolescent runts with prominent collarbones and awkwardly flailing arms”—read the same books as their Kazan and Moscow contemporaries—and held similar meetings:
Imagine a tiny room somewhere on First Dolevaia Street, in the house of a clerk’s widow: faded wallpaper, calico curtains on the windows, three or four chairs with holes in the seats, a table, an iron bed, a bookshelf, a tin lamp with a paper lampshade (with a burnt trace left by the light bulb), fresh faces with downy upper lips, and open double-breasted gray jackets with faded white buttons. Two gymnasium girls in brown dresses are hiding in a dark corner; their hair is pulled back tightly in braids; one of them is so shy she almost never lifts her eyes. We are arguing about the commune, the land strips, and the relationship between the hero and the crowd. We are overconfident and full of peremptory fervor. Someone is plucking the strings of an old guitar or mandolin.13
What bound them together were the books they read and the omnipresent lampshades—white, brown, or green—which stood for both common reading and shared spaces. Sometimes Arosev’s friends would just sit quietly reading by lamplight, with “cups of hot tea steaming on a little round table.”
The open pages of [Plekhanov, Pisarev, and Belinsky] filled us up so completely and blinded our eyes to such an extent that sometimes, lifting our tired heads, we would be surprised to find ourselves in a room cast into shadows by a green lampshade. The lampshade would veil the sinful, messy world outside, while shedding its bright light on white sheets and black lines—those streams of intricate thought. I don’t know about the others, but I was in awe of the tenacity, durability, and terrible fearlessness of human thought, especially that thought within which—or rather, beneath which—there loomed something larger than thought, something primeval and incomprehensible, something that made it impossible for men not to act in a certain way, not to experience the urge for action so powerful that even death, were it to stand in the way of this urge, would appear powerless.14
Aleksandr Arosev
Viacheslav Skriabin (Molotov) (Courtesy of V. A. Nikonov)
Joining “the camp of the dying” was a vital ingredient of the urge for action nurtured by collective reading. As Kon put it, from a position of nostalgic immortality, “we were all going to die, of course, this much was clear. In fact, as I saw it at the time, it was even necessary,” especially since death was “a wonderful, beautiful detail,” remote and perhaps fleeting. “My state of mind at the time resembled the mood of a young knight who is determined to wake up a sleeping princess even if he has to undergo severe personal trials…. Awakened by the miraculous touch of socialism, the working people would wake up, rise, shed the terrible shackles of slavery, and liberate themselves and everyone else. The capacity for friendship and willingness to die is what separated “the sensitive and young at heart” from those Feliks Kon and his friends called the “Zulus”—or, “in the terminology of the time, the savages who only cared about their future careers and present comforts and had no interest whatsoever in the rest of humanity.” The Zulus were divided into the “naked ones” and the “hypocrites.” The sensitive and young at heart were divided into reading circles.15
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.”