part of something new, big, exciting. In the Moscow Kremlin sat men whom we called simply Comrade—Lenin, Trotsky, Dzherzhinsky—but I knew them to be of the stature of gods.
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Looking back to my private history as a Communist, I am inclined to date my conversion to the arrival of Comrade Lazarev, who gave a series of lectures on the problems of socialism. He was a man of about thirty, on the staff of the University of Sverdlovsk, tall, slim, neatly dressed. He talked simply in his own words, not in quotations from Marx or Lenin. What impressed me especially was that he wore a necktie, thereby bringing powerful reinforcement to those of us who argued that one could be a good Soviet citizen yet indulge in such bourgeois accessories.
One day I was in the library, engrossed in a book, when someone behind me said:
“What are you reading? I’m curious.”
I turned around. It was Comrade Lazarev.
“
“So? Anatole France,” he said. “Why not the Russian classics, or some contemporary Soviet writer?”
“I find a lot in Anatole France that I don’t find in the Soviet writers,” I said. “He’s subtle and very honest. I do read Russian classics, but the new au-thors—they write only politically and seem to avoid the real life around us.”
“Very interesting, let’s discuss it some night. Come to my room and we’ll get acquainted.”
I met him again a few days later at a
That evening he saw me again in the library. And what was I reading now, he wanted to know.
“An important work,” he nodded approvingly.
“Yes, and his question, what to do, is one that bothers me now,” I said.
“It’s a question that has already been answered for millions by Lenin, and before him by Marx. Have you read Lenin and Marx?”
“A little of Lenin, here and there,” I replied, “but not Marx. I’ve read the Party literature, of course, but I’m not sure that it quite answers the question what to do.”
“Come over to my room, we’ll have a glass of tea and some refreshments and we’ll talk without disturbing anyone,” Comrade Lazarev smiled.
It was a spotlessly clean, bright room. The divan was covered with a gay rug; books neatly ranged on the desk between book-ends; a few flowers in a colored pitcher. On one wall hung several family pictures, one of them of
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Lazarev himself as a boy, in
“Since I have to live here for several months,” Lazarev explained, “I’ve tried to make the place homelike.”
We talked for hours that night, about books, the Party, the future of Russia. My place was with the Communist minority who must show the way, Lazarev said, and I ought to join the Komsomol and later the Party. Of course, he conceded, the Party wasn’t perfect and perhaps its program wasn’t perfect, but men are more important than programs.
“If bright, idealistic young people like you stand aloof, what chance will there be?” he said. “Why not come closer to us and work for the common cause? You can help others by serving as an example of devotion to the country. Just look around you in the barracks—gambling, dirt, drunkenness, greed where there ought to be cleanliness, books, spiritual light. You must understand that there’s a terrific task ahead of us, Augean stables to be cleaned. We must outroot the stale, filthy, unsocial past that’s still everywhere, and for that we need good men. The heart of the question Vitia, is not only formal socialism but decency, education and a brighter life for the masses.”
I had been “pressured” by Communists before this. But now, for the first time, I was hearing echoes of the spirit that had suffused my childhood. I argued with Comrade Lazarev; I said I would think it over, but in fact I agreed with him and had already made up my mind.
When Comrade Lazarev departed for Moscow some weeks later, I was in the large group—ordinary miners and office workers as well as the top officials of the administration—gathered at the station to see him off.
“There you are, Vitia,” he singled me out. “I head by accident that you’ve joined the Komsomol. Good for you! Congratulations! But why didn’t you tell me? I would have recommended you.”
“I know, and I’m grateful, but I wanted to do it on my own . . . without patronage.”
Now life had for me an urgency, a purpose, a new and thrilling dimension of dedication to a cause. I was one of the
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sounds pretentious, I know, yet that is how we talked and felt. There might be cynicism and self-seeking among some of the grown-up Communists, but not in our circle of ardent novitiates.
My privileges, as one of the elect, were to work harder, to disdain money and foreswear personal ambitions. I must never forget that I am a Komsomol member first, a person second. The fact that I had joined up in a mining region, in an area of “industrial upsurge,” seemed to me to add a sort of mystic significance to the event. I suppose that a young nobleman admitted to court life under the Tsar had that same feeling of “belonging.”
There was no longer much margin of time for petty amusements. Life was filled with duties—lectures, theatricals for the miners, Party “theses” to be studied and discussed. We were aware always that from our midst must come the Lenins and Bukharins of tomorrow. We were perfecting ourselves for the vocation of leadership; we
