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
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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.