Some well-off socialists remembered having been impressionable or rebellious children sensitive to injustice and subject to “feelings of discomfort and shame” on account of their unearned privilege. Elena Stasova—the granddaughter of a prominent architect, daughter of an even more prominent lawyer, and niece of a famous art critic—suffered from a growing “feeling of indebtedness” to the people “who made it possible for us, the intelligentsia, to live the way we did.”5
But most, like Feliks Kon, were changed forever by reading, and even Stasova’s feelings of guilt “were partly derived from books.” The officer’s son and cadet corps student, Sergei Mitskevich, lived in the dark until the age of fourteen: “I read Turgenev’s The Virgin Soil, and my eyes were opened: I understood that revolutionaries were not the evil men our officials said they were, but people struggling for freedom, for the people. This realization led to a complete revolution in my thinking. I began to read a lot.” New reading led to new insights and the eventual “discovery of the key to the understanding of reality,” but it was the first youthful epiphany that separated life without “sense or meaning” from a purposeful quest for true knowledge.6
Kon (born 1864), Stasova (1873), and Mitskevich (1869) were among the oldest Bolsheviks. The vast majority—those born in the 1880s and 1890s—had their eyes opened in school, alongside their classmates. In Nikolai Bukharin’s Moscow Gymnasium No. 1 (on Volkhonka across from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior), some boys “went on living aimlessly—reading whatever was assigned and horsing around in the hallways,” but “the class elite” consisted of two groups of self-conscious apocalyptics: the decadents and the revolutionaries. According to Bukharin’s partisan account,
the aristocratic group—the loners, the sons of the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie (rich merchants, bankers, stock exchange speculators, and Jewish moneybags, who were trying desperately to make their way into the most refined spheres)—aped their older brothers, playing earnestly at beings snobs and dandies. They wore jodhpurs, pointy English dress shoes, expensive narrow-waisted, light-colored jackets made by well-known Moscow tailors, and wide, fancy leather sashes. Their collars were starched and their hair neatly combed, with impeccably straight parts and not a hair out of place. They acted as if they were doing the gymnasium a great favor by attending classes. They kept to themselves and often brought French books, from Baudelaire to Maeterlinck and Rodenbach, which they read with melancholy miens, to make clear that they lived in a world of altogether different dimensions. They were loose-limbed, pointedly polite, fond of exchanging remarks in French or English and conversing about art, and seemed to regard normal life as something to be held squeamishly between two fingers, pinkie extended. They dropped the names of Nietzsche and Solovyov but did not read them; carried around reproductions of the exquisitely depraved, elegant graphic masterpieces by Aubrey Beardsley and Félicien Rops; and talked in church whispers of Oscar Wilde. Of the new Russian poets, they only recognized the Symbolists, showing off by sharing the latest news of their literary and personal lives, which bordered on refined gossip.
The rival group consisted mainly of children from intelligentsia families. They wore Tolstoy shirts under their jackets and kept their hair deliberately shaggy and often uncombed; some older boys were beginning to grow beards. In class they secretly read Pisarev, Dobroliubov, and Shchedrin…. They worshiped Gorky, despised everything official, scorned all kinds of “pomp and circumstance,” and ridiculed “the white satin lining crowd,” their ideals, and the way they walked, giving them cutting and rather accurate nicknames, such as “the heavenly wagtail,” and occasionally entering into lively arguments with them, often on literary subjects. They sensed vaguely that the unstoppable stream of life would soon answer the question “When will the real day finally come?” They were impressed by every manifestation of open protest, every word of condemnation, every act of heroic resistance to established order. Even routine pranks had a certain value in their eyes: they were instinctively attracted to “undermining the foundations,” even in little things. They were impertinent, sharp-tongued, and prone to mocking their sheeplike neighbors.7
According to his classmate Ilya Ehrenburg, Bukharin was less morbidly earnest than most of his fellow underminers (especially his best friend, the unsmiling Grigory Brilliant), but he was just as cutting. He laughed a lot and “constantly interrupted the conversation with jokes and made-up or absurd words,” but “it was dangerous to argue with him: he tenderly ridiculed his opponents.”8
Yakov Sverdlov
Yakov Sverdlov’s (Y’s) biographers describe him as boisterously argumentative. One of six children in the family of a Jewish engraver in Nizhnii Novgorod, he excelled in elementary school and was sent to a gymnasium, where he fought with the children of noblemen and “baffled” his teachers with unexpected questions. “Bored in his classes, he figured out a way to read regular books instead of textbooks while sitting at his desk. Once, when he had been caught in the act and heard the teacher’s threatening ‘What are you doing?’, he answered calmly: ‘Reading an interesting book.’ ‘What kind of book?’ roared the teacher even more threateningly. ‘An ordinary, paper one,’ answered the student even more calmly.” True or not, this story is an accurate representation of a young rebel’s ideal (“quick-tempered,” “talkative,” and “contemplative”) disposition. After four years, Sverdlov left the gymnasium to become a pharmacist’s apprentice and a “professional revolutionary.” Sverdlov’s father cheered him on: all of Yakov’s five siblings were, in one way or another, waiting for the coming of the real day.9
The road to belief began with friendship. Sverdlov had Vladimir Lubotsky (later “Zagorsky,” the man after whom the town of Sergiev-Posad would be renamed); Kon had Ludowik Sawicki (who committed suicide in Paris in 1893); and Bukharin had Grigory Brilliant (the future people’s commissar of finance, Grigory Sokolnikov). The son of a Kazan merchant, Aleksandr Arosev, remembered finding a friend early on in his Realschule career: “At one point I was told there was a strong boy named Skriabin in Grade 3, Section B. I sought him out. One day he was in the hall washing the blackboard sponge under a faucet. He looked rather gloomy (the way he always did, as I found out later). I came up to him and proposed fighting. Skriabin agreed. Having exchanged several preliminary punches, we got into a stranglehold, to the delight of the whole hall. I don’t remember who won, but we became acquainted.”10
Acquaintance led to conversations, conversations to confessions, and confessions to intimacy. As Arosev wrote in one of his many memoirs, “Friendship begins when one reveals to the other a mystery that has never been revealed before. And when you are young, anything can become a mystery: the way you notice a passing cloud, delight in a thunderstorm, admire a girl, or dream of a faraway land.” For Skriabin, the mystery was music (he was a violinist and played quartets with his three brothers); for Arosev, it was novels. For both of them, it was the search for the true path to revolution. Arosev continues:
One night,… we were walking through the deserted streets, sprinkled with snow. The silence of the streets gave us a sense of intimacy, and the cold forced us to move closer to one another. We were walking arm in arm. It was well past midnight. From street corners, roadside posts, and porch awnings, shapeless shadows slid over the darkly glistening snow that looked like so many fish scales. Sometimes it seemed to us that those were the shadows of spies following us wherever we went, but there were no spies anywhere. Those shadows—the uncertain silvery flickerings in the night—were listening to our halting speeches, our words that sparkled with one thing only: a desperate eagerness to find a truth that we could give all of ourselves to in the name of struggle.11