In the autumn of 1896, I visited the country, after all; but the visit resulted only in a brief truce. Father wanted me to become an engineer, whereas I hesitated between pure mathematics, to which I was very strongly attracted, and Revolution, which little by little was taking possession of me. Every time this question arose there was an acute family crisis. Everybody looked depressed, and seemed to suffer intensely; my elder sister would weep furtively, and nobody knew what to do about it. One of my uncles, an engineer and owner of a plant in Odessa, who was staying in the country with us, persuaded me to come and visit him in the city. This was at least a temporary relief from the impasse.
I stayed with my uncle for a few weeks. We were constantly discussing profit and surplus value. My uncle was better at acquiring profits than explaining them. And meanwhile I did nothing about registering for the course in mathematics in the University. I stayed on in Odessa, still looking for something. What was I trying to find? Actually, it was myself. I made casual acquaintances among workers, obtained illegal literature, tutored some private pupils, gave surreptitious lectures to the older boys of the Trade School, and engaged in arguments with the Marxists, still trying to hold fast to my old views. With the last autumn steamer, I left for Nikolayev, and resumed my quarters with Shvigovsky in the garden.
And the same old business started in again. We discussed the latest numbers of the radical magazines and argued about Darwinism; we were vaguely preparing, and also waiting. What was it in particular that impelled us to start the revolutionary propaganda? It is difficult to say. The impulse originated within us. In the intellectual circles in which I moved, nobody did any actual revolutionary work. We realized that between our endless tea-table discussions and revolutionary organization there was a vast gulf. We knew that any contacts with workers demanded secret, highly “conspiratory” methods. And we pronounced the word solemnly, with a reverence that was almost mystic. We had no doubt that in the end we would go from the discussions at the tea-table to “conspiratia”; but nobody was definite as to how and when the change would take place. In excusing our delay, we usually told each other that we must prepare; and we weren’t so far wrong, after all.
But apparently there had been some change in the air which brought us abruptly onto the road of revolutionary propaganda. The change did not actually take place in Nikolayev alone, but throughout the country, especially in the capitals. In 1896, the famous weavers’ strikes broke out in St. Petersburg. This put new life into the intelligentsia. The students gained courage, sensing the awakening of the heavy reserves. In the summer, at Christmas, and at Easter, dozens of students came down to Nikolayev, bringing with them tales of the upheaval in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. Some of them had been expelled from universities boys just out of the gymnasium returning with the haloes of heroes. In February, 1897, a woman student, Vetrova, burned herself to death in the Peter-Paul fortress. This tragedy, which has never been fully explained, stirred every one deeply. Disturbances took place in the university cities; arrests and banishments became more frequent.
I started my revolutionary work to the accompaniment of the Vetrova demonstrations. It happened in this way: I was walking along the street with a younger member of our commune, Grigory Sokolovsky, a boy about my age. “It’s about time we started,” I said.
“Yes, it is about time,” he answered.
“But how?”
“That’s it, how?”
“We must find workers, not wait for anybody or ask anybody, but just find workers, and set to it.”
“I think we can find them,” said Sokolovsky. “I used to know a watchman who worked on the boulevard. He belonged to the Bible Sect. I think I’ll look him up.”
The same day Sokolovsky went to the boulevard to see the Biblist. He was no longer there. But he found there a woman who had a friend who also belonged to some religious sect.
Through this friend of the woman he didn’t know, Sokolovsky, on that very day, made the acquaintance of several workers, among them an electrician, Ivan Andreyevitch Mukhin, who soon became the most prominent figure in our organization. Sokolovsky returned from his search all on fire. “Such men! They are the real thing!”
Next day five or six of us were sitting in an inn. The deafening music of the automatic organ screened our conversation from the rest. Mukhin, a thin man with a pointed beard and a sort of shrewd, apprehensive look, watched me through a half-closed left eye, amiably scanning my still beardless face. In detail, with well-calculated pauses, he explained: “The Gospels for me, in this business, are just a peg. I begin with religion, and then switch off to life. The other day I explained the whole truth to the Stundists with navy-beans.”
“What do you mean, navy-beans?”
“It’s very simple. I put a bean on the table and say, ’This is the Czar.’ Around it, I place more beans. ’These are ministers, bishops, generals, and over there the gentry and merchants. And in this other heap, the plain people.’ Now, I ask, ’Where is the Czar?’ They point to the centre. ’Where are the ministers?’ They point to those around. Just as I have told them, they answer. Now, wait,” and at this point Mukhin completely closed his left eye and paused. “Then I scramble all the beans together,” he went on. “I say, ’Now tell me where is the Czar? the ministers?’ And they answer me, ‘Who can tell? You can’t spot them now.’ . . . ‘Just what I say. You can’t spot them now.’ And so I say, ‘All beans should be scrambled.’??
I was so thrilled at this story that I was all in a sweat. This was the real thing, whereas we had only been guessing and waiting and subtilizing. The music of the automatic organ was the “conspiratia”; Mukhin’s navy-beans, destroying the mechanics of the class system, were the revolutionary propaganda.
“Only how to scramble them, damn them, that’s the problem,” Mukhin said, in a different tone, and looked sternly at me with both eyes. “That’s not navy-beans, is it?” And this time he waited for my answer.
From that day we plunged headlong into the work. We had no older men to direct us. Our own experience was inadequate. But not once did we run into difficulties or get confused. One thing evolved from another as inevitably as in our conversation with Mukhin at the inn.
At the end of the last century the pivot of the economic development of Russia was shifting swiftly to the southeast. Great plants were being built one after another in the South, two in Nikolayev. In 1897, the number of workers in the Nikolayev plants amounted to 8,000, in addition to which there were 2,000 workers in various trades. The intellectual level of the workers was comparatively high, as were their earnings. The illiterates were few. The place that the revolutionary organizations came to hold later was then filled to some extent by the religious sects which engaged in successful warfare with the official religion. In the absence of political disorders, the secret police in Nikolayev were slumbering peacefully. They played into our hands admirably. If they had been awake, we would have been arrested during the very first weeks of our activity. But we were the pioneers and benefited by it. We shook up the police only after we had shaken up the workers.
When I made the acquaintance of Mukhin and his friends, I called myself by the name of Lvov. It was not easy for me to tell this first “conspiratory” lie; in fact, it was really painful to “deceive” people with whom one intended to be associated for such a great and noble cause. But the nickname of Lvov soon stuck to me, and I got used to it myself.
The workers streamed toward us as if they had been waiting for this. They all brought friends; some came with their wives, and a few older men joined the groups with their sons. We never sought them out; they looked for us. Young and inexperienced leaders that we were, we were soon overwhelmed by the movement we had started. Every word of ours met with a response. As many as twenty and twenty-five or more of the workers gathered at our secret readings and discussions, held in houses, in the woods, or on the river. The predominating element was composed of highly skilled workers who earned fairly good wages. They already had an eight-hour day at the Nikolayev shipbuilding yards; they were not interested in strikes; what they wanted was justice in social relations. They called themselves Baptists, or Stundists, or Evangelical Christians, but theirs was not a dogmatic sectarianism. The workers were simply breaking away from orthodoxy, and baptism became a temporary phase for them in their progress to ward revolution. During the first weeks of our conversations, some of them still used sectarian expressions, and often made comparisons with the period of the early Christians. But nearly all of them soon dropped this way of speaking when they found that they were only a laughing-stock for the younger men.
Even to this day the more striking figures among them seem alive to me. There was the cabinetmaker in his bowler, Korotkov, who had done with all mystics long ago, a jocular fellow and a rhymester who would say solemnly, “I am a rationlist,” meaning a rationalist. And when Taras Savelyevitch, an old evangelist and a grandfather, would begin, for the hundredth time, to talk about the early Christians, who like ourselves met secretly, Korotkov would cut him short with “A fig for your theology!” and toss his bowler indignantly up into the trees. He would wait for a while and then go into the woods in search of it. This all happened in the forest on the dunes.
Many of the workers were so infected by the new ideas that they began to compose verses. Korotkov wrote the Proletarian March which began this way: “We are the alphas and omegas, the beginnings and endings.” Nesterenko, a carpenter, who, like his son, was a member of the group of Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, composed a song about Karl Marx in Ukrainian, and we sang it in chorus. Nesterenko himself, however, ended very badly. He got in with the police and betrayed the whole organization.
A young laborer, Yefimov, a blond giant with blue eyes, who came of an officer’s family and was not only literate but really well read, lived in the slums of the town. I found him in an eating-place patronized by tramps. He worked in the harbor as a longshoreman; he neither smoked nor drank. He was reserved and well-mannered. But there must have been some thing mysterious about his life, despite the fact that he was only twenty-one, to account for his constant gloominess. He soon confided in me that he had been introduced to some members of the secret society of Narodovoltzi 1, and offered to put me in touch with them. Three of us, Mukhin, Yefimov and I, were sitting drinking tea in the noisy Russia inn, at the same time listening to the deafening music of the organ and waiting. At last, Yefimov indicated to us with his eyes the figure of a big, stout man with a small beard. “There he is.”
The man sat at a table by himself and kept on drinking tea. Then he began to put on his coat, and with a mechanical move ment of his hand, crossed himself as he looked at the ikons. “What! Is he the ’Narodovoletz’?” Mukhin exclaimed in a hushed voice. The “Narodovoletz&r............