Sverdlov’s and Voronsky’s faith, unlike Avvakum’s, is to be strengthened by reading as broadly as possible. In Sverdlov’s view, once a Marxist “consciousness” has been acquired, everything, without exception, becomes proof of its truth. “The greater the knowledge and the more wideranging it is, the vaster the space, the broader the horizons for creativity and, most important, the more conscious that creativity is.” In 1916, with “the light of the kerosene lamp shining through the frozen glass and casting a pale reflection on the snow drifts” outside his house in Monastyrskoe, Sverdlov wrote to a young friend:
For a better understanding of Ibsen, I would recommend reading everything by him, in a particular order. The best edition is the Skirmunt, reprinted by Znanie in eight volumes, in Hansen’s translation. That is the best edition. It should be read in the order in which it was published, although you don’t have to read the last volume: it’s his correspondence, which, as I recall, is of little interest. But before you get started, it would be a good idea to read something appropriate about the history of Sweden and Norway over the last thirty or forty years, in order to become familiarized with the development of social relations there during this period. Such familiarity will help you understand Ibsen. For the same purpose, it would be good to read Lunacharsky’s article [“Ibsen and Philistinism”] in the 1907 issue of Obrazovanie, the brochure about him by Roland-Holst, and Plekhanov’s article in, I think, Sovremennyi mir, also from 1907.95
“Putting books to the test of life and putting life to the test of books” is hard work and requires constant vigilance and self-examination. In this sense, Sverdlov’s faith is similar to Archpriest Avvakum’s. “I watch myself very closely sometimes. You know my habit of self-analysis. I see clearly every fleeting movement of my soul. And right now I cannot detect any dangerous symptoms. There is none of the intellectual laziness and mental torpor that haunted me for a while. There is only a desire to study, to learn.”96
But what if self-analysis revealed some dangerous signs of moral torpor? What happens when endless suffering breeds doubt, and doubt is deepened by reading and self-analysis? Are the Bolsheviks in danger of falling, one by one, into the chasm separating their ability to “foresee the future of mankind as a whole” and their all-too-human inability to “lift the veil of individual fate”? Sverdlov’s answer is a thoughtful but resolute no. In 1913, he started writing to Kira Egon-Besser, the fourteen-year-old daughter of his close friends from Ekaterinburg, Aleksandr and Lydia Besser. Like many intelligentsia adolescents at the time, Kira suffered from chronic “pessimism” and occasional thoughts of suicide. Sverdlov’s advice to her is remarkably consistent. “We were born at a good time,” he wrote in January 1914, “in the period of human history when the final act of the human tragedy is at hand…. Today only the blind and those who do not want to see fail to notice the growing force that is fated to play the main part in this final act. And there is so much beauty in the rise of this force, and it fills one with so much energy, that, truly, it is good to be alive.” Universal redemption is the key to personal fulfillment. “Allow me to kiss you on both cheeks when we meet,” he wrote in May 1914, “for I have no doubt that I will see you and L. I. again. I’ll kiss you in any case, whether you like it or not.”97
They continued to correspond, and Sverdlov continued to urge hope and faith (hope as a function of faith). The first of his surviving letters was the one sent to the Dormitory for Female Students on Sophia Embankment in May 1904, when he was nineteen (“The real day is coming, after all…. The dawn, which sheds its fantastic, enchanting, and transparent light over everything and everyone, is near”). The last one, to Kira Egon-Besser in Petrograd, was written in Monastyrskoe on January 20, 1917, when he was thirty-two and she was eighteen:
My worldview ensures that my certainty in the triumph of a life of harmony, free from all manner of filth, cannot disappear. Just as unshakeable is my certainty that future life will produce pure human beings, beautiful in every respect. Yes, there is much evil in the world today. But to understand and discover its causes is to understand its transient nature. That is why isolated, but sometimes difficult, feelings of dejection are drowned out by the overall optimism of my approach to life. That’s the whole secret. It has nothing to do with a rejection of private life. On the contrary, it is precisely this approach to life that makes a full private life possible, a life in which people are fused into a single whole not only physically, but also spiritually.98
Around the time this letter would have arrived in Petrograd, the workers of the Putilov Plant began the strike that would become the first phase of the February Revolution—and possibly the last act of the human tragedy. Sverdlov heard the news in early March, and, accompanied by Filipp (“Georges”) Goloshchekin, jumped into a sled and set out up the Enisei in a mad rush to reach Krasnoiarsk before the ice began to break up. After more than two weeks of ceaseless travel, they arrived, and by March 29 had made it all the way to Petrograd.
According to Novgorodtseva, they went straight to the apartment of Sverdlov’s sister Sarra.
Later she talked about how Yakov Mikhailovich had appeared out of nowhere and started peppering her with questions about what was happening in Petrograd, with their comrades, and in the Central Committee (at the time, Sarra was helping Elena Stasova in the Central Committee secretariat).
Having answered barely a tenth of the questions, Sarra suddenly remembered that her brother must be hungry after his long journey and started to fan the samovar when Yakov Mikhailovich suddenly grabbed his head and moaned:
“Oh no! Georges!”
“Georges? Georges who?”
“Goloshchekin! I left him downstairs by the entrance, told him I’d go see if you were in and be right back. It’s been half an hour. Would you mind going to get him? He’ll kill me for sure if I go. He’s easy to spot: tall, skinny, with a goatee, and wearing a black hat. In other words, a regular Don Quixote.”
Sarra ran out and immediately spotted Goloshchekin, who was shifting from one foot to the other, looking despondent. She brought him in, served them both tea, and then took them to the Tauride Palace, where, in a corridor, at the entrance to one of the rooms, Elena Dmitrievna Stasova had placed a desk under a large, handwritten sign that said: “RSDRP(b), Central Committee Secretariat.”99
Kira Egon-Besser had to wait a day or two longer. “One evening in late March [she writes in her memoir], the doorbell rang. When I heard the sound of his familiar booming bass coming from the entryway, I came running and saw Yakov Mikhailovich. He kissed me on both cheeks.”100
■ ■ ■
Revolution was inseparable from love. It demanded sacrifices for the sake of a future harmony, and it required harmony—in love, comradeship, and book learning—as a condition for fulfillment. Most revolutionary leaders were young men who identified the Revolution with womanhood; many of them were men in love who identified particular women with the Revolution. Becoming a Bolshevik meant joining a band of brothers (and, possibly, sisters); living as a Bolshevik meant favoring some brothers over others and loving some sisters as much as the Revolution. “Who do I confess my weakness to, if not to you, my dear, my sweetheart?” wrote Sverdlov to Novgorodtseva. “The more thorough the analysis to which we subject our relationship, the more profound, I would even say, thrillingly profound, it becomes.” Revolutionary introspection relied on “a union of two kindred spirits filled with the same emotion and faith.” After 1914, Sverdlov’s hope for the real day seemed fused with his wish to kiss Kira Egon-Besser.101