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The free fellowships preparing for the leap to the kingdom of freedom (by means of agitation and propaganda and through the trials of prison and exile) were organized into “parties,” each one with its own program and statutes, but all of them sharing a fundamental rejection of the existing order of things and a withdrawal into a secret community of the self-chosen. The most important part of being a revolutionary was, in Voronsky’s words, the “habit of dividing people into two camps: us and them.”
“Us” was the underground: a secret, exclusive circle of people fastened together by a voluntary, iron bond of mutual responsibility, with our own understanding of honor, right, and justice. This circle was invisible but always present, militant and unbending. It was like a volcanic island rising up in the middle of the ocean. Everything else—huge, ever multiplying, earthbound—was the world of the enemy. Everything else needed to be remade and reshaped; it was loathsome and deserved to die; it kept resisting, persecuting, expelling, pursuing, and living its own life. And so I learned how to despise everything that was outside our secret free fellowship.71
Aleksandr Voronsky
The first part of Voronsky’s autobiography came out in Novyi mir in 1927; the full version appeared as a book in 1929. Some critics did not like its excessive “reflexivity,” but, as Voronsky’s wife wrote at the time, its “content could not possibly raise any objections.” Gorky called it “the voice of a true revolutionary, who knows how to talk about himself as a real, live human being.” The book’s publication was approved by the censorship office and formally endorsed by Viacheslav Molotov (formerly Skriabin), on the recommendation of Platon Kerzhentsev (formerly Lebedev), under the “editorial responsibility” of Semen Kanatchikov (formerly a Gustav List worker). Voronsky’s underground self seemed no different from that of any other revolutionary.72
I used to walk down Nevsky. The sight of the glittering shop windows, the carriages and trotting horses, the top hats and bowlers filled me with a sense of superiority. I would think to myself: here is a gentlemen with a bushy moustache wearing a shiny English suit, and here is a stout lady with a pink face rustling her silks…. They can walk into a store, casually pick out something expensive, have it delivered to their home by a delivery boy, walk into this or that restaurant, go to the opera in the evening and then sit down to dinner, unfolding a crisp, well-starched napkin. And here am I, with a fifty-kopeck coin in my pocket, wearing a ragged fall coat and rust-colored, worn-out shoes, but I don’t mind: I am carrying out the will of the anonymous people who are marching unwaveringly toward their goal of destruction. I, too, am a member of their secret fraternity. In the shop window, precious stones sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow: they are for you, the full-bellied, the well-groomed, the satisfied. Inside my coat, piles of leaflets are stuffed under my tight belt. They are for you, too. They are just as good as dynamite or a Browning pistol. You walk by, shoving me aside, but you don’t know what I know; you don’t suspect anything; you don’t realize the danger you’re in. I am stronger and more powerful than you, and I enjoy walking among you, unnoticed.73
The underground men had a variety of names for the loathsome “everything else” that “kept living its own life” outside their secret free fellowship. The most common was “philistines” (obyvateli), or people without higher principles or interests, people absorbed in the pleasures and failures of everyday existence, people whose “opinions, thoughts, gossip, and desires were petty and pitiful,” people who were not fully human because they had no spark of “consciousness.” In Russia, according to Voronsky, they were doubly damned, and possibly not human at all, because they combined protocapitalist acquisitiveness with the “primeval and utter swinishness” of provincial backwardness: “the driveling, hiccuping, and lip-smacking gluttony, the unctuousness mixed with beastliness.”74
Have you ever been to the meat row at the market? Pig and cow carcasses hang from the ceiling, and counters and carts are all covered with chunks of fat, yellow grease, and coagulated blood. Pieces of bone and brain fly everywhere, attracting packs of dogs. Aprons are stiff with blood, and the sickly-sweet, nauseating stench of rotting flesh is stifling. I always imagine these to be the embodied feelings, hopes, and thoughts of the average inhabitant of our Okurovs, Rasteriaevs, and Mirgorods. They are his life, his world. Observe his excitement as he turns over and digs through the lumps of fat and lard! His eyes are oily; his lower lip droops; his filthy, foul-smelling mouth fills with saliva; afraid that someone might snap up the coveted piece before him, he snarls hungrily and sticks out his elbows. Shove against him at this moment, touch him by accident, and he is ready to kill you on the spot. I’ve seen people standing by the meat counters with their eyes glassed over and their fingers trembling, looking at the hunks of meat the way some men stare at naked women. You think I’m exaggerating? Go see for yourself, but make sure you look closely.75
The “philistine” had long been the stock antipode of the “intelligent,” and provincial Russia was his natural habitat. “The town of Okurov” was Gorky’s version; “Rasteriaeva Street” was Gleb Uspensky’s; and Mirgorod was Gogol’s pastoral prototype. What the socialists did was to turn the philistine into a “bourgeois” and sentence him to death as a matter of Marxist inevitability and personal gratification. What the socialists feared was his ability to grow new heads and tempt new victims. The most common metaphor for “philistinism” was a “swamp” that posed as solid ground while seeping into homes, souls, and Bolshevik reading circles. Voronsky’s native town of Tambov reminded him of the swamp he used to go to when he was a little boy. “Under its murky, dead film, the swamp bubbled, rumbled, rotted, and gurgled, exhaling foul odors and swarming with myriads of midges, soft, plump tadpoles, water spiders, red beetles, and frogs; it slurped and rustled with reeds and bulrushes. Farther in, if you made it across the shaky hillocks of grass to its depths, the quagmire yawned. Any calf, cow, or horse that lost its way would perish there.”76
Whereas the SRs believed that the revolution would prevent the swamp from submerging the whole of the Russian countryside, the Marxists assumed that the flood was a fait accompli, welcomed it as a necessary interlude, and endorsed Engels’s warning to the driveling gluttons: “You shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife—but do not forget that ‘The hangman stands at the door!’” The Bolshevik-Menshevik disagreement concerned the question of who the hangman should be: the Mensheviks favored the proletariat; the Bolsheviks (some of whom recognized the original Heine in the prophet’s words) demanded the leading role for themselves.77
Voronsky’s alter ego Valentin was a true Bolshevik.
Some day soon the third angel will sound his trumpet. And then we will show all those who wish to enjoy life with some fat, a little manure, a bit of dirt, and a few legalized rapes what the end of the world is about. We will show them the price of categorical imperatives and civic cloaks. We will remind them of their little albums of those who have been hanged and the little amateur libraries they have collected about them. We won’t forget anything: the innocent tears of the children, the wasted youth in the back alleys and basements, the destroyed talents, the mothers’ grief, Sonechka Marmeladova and little Ilya, and all those hanged on the gallows as the sun was sending out its first, sinless rays.78