In February 1918, we see him in the wheat fields of Tula, Tambov, and Orel, on the banks of the Volga, in Kharkov, where under his supervision convoys of confiscated wheat were sent up to Moscow. In the black leather uniform of a commissar, with shiny boots, and a leather and sheepskin cap without insignia, he dispatched the convoys, his hand on his Mauser, until the last boat disappeared into the hazy distance. In May of the following year, he put on a camouflaged uniform and became a sharpshooter cutting off Denikin's rear guard. The terrifying explosions in the southwest sector of the front, taking place suddenly and mysteriously, leaving a slaughterhouse behind them, bore Novsky's stamp just as handwriting can reveal character to an expert. In late September, on the torpedo boat Spartacus, which flew the red flag, Novsky set off for Reval on patrol. Suddenly the boat ran into a strong British squadron of seven light vessels armed with 25-millimeter guns. The torpedo boat swerved and, with a reckless maneuver under the cloak of the descending night, succeeded in reaching Kronstadt. If we can believe the testimony of Captain Olimsky, the crew of the torpedo boat should have been much more grateful for their lucky rescue to the shrewdness of a woman, Zinaida Mihailovna Maysner, than to Novsky's presence: she was the one who negotiated by signal flag with the British flagship.
A letter from those years, written in Novsky’s hand, remains the only authentic document that combines, deeply and mysteriously, revolutionary passion with sensual love: "… As soon as I entered the university I found myself in prison. I was arrested exactly thirteen times. Of the twelve years that followed my first arrest, I spent more than half at hard labor. In addition, three times I walked the painful road of exile, a road that took three years of my life. During the brief periods of my "freedom" I watched, as in a movie theater, the passing of sad Russian villages, towns, people, and events, but I was always in flight-on a horse, on a boat, in a cart. I never slept in the same bed for more than a month. I've come to know the horror of Russian reality in the long tedious winter evenings when the pale lights of Vasilevsky Island barely blink, and a Russian village emerges in the moonlight in a false and deceptive beauty. My only passion was this arduous, rapturous, and mysterious profession of revolutionary… Forgive me, Zina, and carry me in your heart; it will be as painful as a kidney stone."
The wedding ceremony was performed on December 27, 1919, on the torpedo boat Spartacus, which was anchored in Kronstadt harbor. The documents are few and contradictory. According to some, Zinaida Mihailovna was deathly pale, with "the pallor that unites death and beauty” (Mikulin), and looked more like an anarchist before a firing squad than the muse of the Revolution who has just escaped death by a hairbreadth. Mikulin mentions a white wedding wreath on Zinaid's hair, the sole symbol of old times and custom, while in his memoirs Olimsky talks about the white gauze which "like a wedding wreath” was wrapped around Maysner's wounded head. The same Olimsky, who proved more objective in his memory than the lyrical Mikulin (who passed Novsky by in silence, so to speak), gives an altogether schematic picture of the political commissar in that intimate moment. "Handsome, with a stern look, dressed monastically even for that solemn occasion, he appeared more like a young German student who had emerged the victor in a duel than a political commissar who had just come back from a fiery skirmish." Everyone more or less agrees in other details. The boat was quickly decorated with signal flags and lit up with red, green, and blue bulbs. Simultaneously celebrating the wedding and their victory over death, the crew appeared on deck freshly shaved and pink-cheeked, fully armed, as if for an inspection. But the cables informing the general staff about the course of the operation and the lucky rescue had drawn the attention of the officers of the Red fleet, who now arrived in blue military overcoats over their white summer uniforms. The torpedo boat greeted them with whistles and the cheers of the crew. The breathless radioman brought to the commander's bridge, where the young married couple had taken shelter, uncoded cables with congratulations from all the Soviet ports from Astrakhan to Enzeli: “Long live the newlyweds!", "Long live the Red fleet!", "Hurrah for the brave crew of the Spartacus". The Revolutionary Council of Kronstadt sent armored can with nine cases of French champagne seized from the anarchists the day before. Kronstadt's brass band climbed up the gangplank and onto the deck playing marches. Because of the temperature, 22° below zero (Fahrenheit), the instruments had a strange, cracked sound, as if made of ice. Patrol boats swarmed around, greeting the crew with signals. Three times stern trios of Chekists came on deck, their guns drawn, demanding that the celebration be stopped for security reasons; three times they returned their guns to their holsters at the mention of Novsky's name, and joined the officers, chorus in its shouts of "Bitter! Bitter!… Sweet! Sweet!" The empty champagne bottles flew over the sides like 25-millimeter artillery shells. At dawn, when the sun broke through the fog of the winter morning like the flame of a distant fire, one drunken Chekist saluted the birth of the new day with a salvo from the antiaircraft gun. The crew was strewn all over the deck as if dead, lying on heaps of broken glass, empty bottles, confetti, and small frozen puddles of French champagne rosy as blood. (The reader recognizes, surely, the awkward lyricism of Leo Mikulin, a student of the Imagists.)
This marriage was dissolved after eighteen months, and Zinaida Mihailovna, during an illegal excursion to Europe, became the companion of the Soviet diplomat A. D. Karamazov. As far as her brief marriage to Novsky is concerned, some documents tell of tormented scenes of jealousy and passionate reconciliations. The claim that Novsky used to whip Zinaida Mihailovna in his jealous fits, however, may well be the fruit of another jealous imagination-that of Mikulin. In her autobiographical book Wave After Wave, Zinaida Mihailovna passes over her personal memories as if writing them on water: the whip appears here only in its historical and metaphorical context as the "knout” that mercilessly whips the face of the Russian people.
(Zinaida Mihailovna Maysner died of malaria in August 1926. In Persia. She was not quite thirty years old.)
As we have mentioned before, it is impossible to establish the exact chronology of Novsky's life during the civil war years and those immediately following. It is known that in 1920 he fought against the rebellious and despotic emirs in Turkestan, and subjugated them with their own weapons of cunning and cruelty; that during the hot summer of 1921, noted in the annals for the invasion of malarial mosquitoes and horseflies that swarmed down to suck the people's blood, he was in charge of the liquidation of banditry in the Tambov Region, on which occasion he received a saber or knife wound that gave his face the cruel stamp of heroism. At the Congress of Eastern Peoples we find him at the presidential table, aloof, with the perennial cigarette between his yellowed teeth. His speech was greeted with applause, but one reporter observed the absence of zeal, and the dull gaze of this man whom they had once called "the Bolshevik Hamlet". We know also that for a time he served as the political commissar of the Caucasus-Caspian Revolutionary Naval Committee, and that he was an artillery corps officer in the Red Army, then a diplomat in Afghanistan and Estonia. At the end of 1924 he appeared In London as a member of the delegation negotiating with the perpetually distrustful British, On that occasion he personally initiated contact with representatives of the trade unions, who invited him to the next congress in Hull.