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