The Russian Century

were the acolytes of a sort of materialist religion.

Having discovered that I could write and speak on my feet with some natural eloquence, I was soon an “activist.” I served on all kinds of committees, did missionary work among the non-Party infidels, played a role in the frequent celebrations. There were endless occasions to celebrate, over and above the regular revolutionary holidays. The installation of new machinery, the opening of new pits, the completion of production schedules were marked by demonstrations, music, speeches. Elsewhere in the world coal may be just coal—with us it was “fuel for the locomotives of revolution.”

Through the intercession of Comrade Lazarev I had been transferred to work in the pits. I no longer needed to envy Senia [diminutive of Arsenii] on that score. The two of us and several other young miners formed an artel, a cooperative group doing jobs and being paid as a unit. The artel system was at this time encouraged as a means of raising output. Members of efficient artels usually earned more than individual miners. This, however, was the least of our concerns. We bid for the most difficult and dangerous assignments, eager to prove our zeal by deeds. We even had a slogan which we solemnly communicated to the officials: “If it’s necessary, it can be done.”

The members of our artel lived together in a clean and comfortable house stocked with good books. We took turns at scrubbing the floor and other household chores. The Soviet leaders and classic Russian writers deployed on our walls looked down approvingly, I was sure, on this example of “culture” in the midst of backwardness. Among them was Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of the men close to Lenin and later to become Commissar of Heavy Industry. I liked his rough-hewn Georgian face, with its huge eagle beak and a shaggy drooping mustache. Perhaps I had a vague premonition that this man would one day be the patron, and in a sense the inspiration, of my busiest years as a Communist.

Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red

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On occasion, of course, we allowed ourselves an evening of light-hearted sociability. Friends and comrades liked to gather in our house—it was so “civilized” and the talk so “elevated.” One of our crowd played the guitar superbly; we would sing and dance and dispute far into the night. A number of the more attractive girls in the community would join us on these occasions. If we had too good a time we all felt a bit guilty and did Komsomol penance by more intensive work, study and political discussion in the days that followed.

In the late fall the boastful slogan of our artel was put to a critical test. One of the mines had been flooded. It was propped with wooden beams for fear of collapse, but work went on without interruption. It was this mine that we offered to operate, in order to set an example to the regular miners there, mostly Tatars and Chinese.

I was in the pit, working intently though I was almost knee-deep in icy water. Suddenly the whole world seemed to shudder, creak and groan. I heard someone shriek in terror—probably it was my own voice in my ears. Part of our shaft had caved in. When I opened my eyes again I was in a large whitewashed room, in one of a row of hospital beds. A doctor in a white gown was feeling my pulse and a handsome middle-aged nurse stood by with pad and pencil in hand. She smiled in greeting when she saw I had regained consciousness.

“You’ll be all right, Comrade Kravchenko, don’t worry,” she said, and the doctor nodded in confirmation.

They told me I had been in the water inside the caved-in mine for two or three hours. The Chinese worker next to me had been killed. Little hope had been held out for me—if I had not been finished off by the collapsing walls, I must have drowned in the ice water. But here I was, with bruised legs and a high fever, but otherwise in good shape. The fever later developed into pneumonia.

The two months in the hospital of Algoverovka, curiously, remain with me as one of the pleasantest interludes of my youth. The story of my artel and its climax in the cave-in was embroidered, in the telling, into a saga of socialist heroism in which I was one of the heroes. Important trade-union and Party officials came to my bedside; the boys and girls of my Komsomol unit visited me regularly and never failed to bring little gifts. I was still in the hospital on my eighteenth birthday. Members of the artel and its friends arrived in a body in a heart-warming show of fellowship.

The handsome nurse treated me as if I were her own son. Indeed, in the cozy languor of convalescence I had the sense of having been adopted by all of Russia—its workers, its Komsomols, its officialdom—as the favorite son of a vast and wonderful family.

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Chapter Eighteen

The doctors forbade me to return to the mines, at least for a year, and no pleading on my part could upset their injunction, conveyed to the administration. I had no wish to go back to an office job and therefore prepared to return to the Tocsin commune and Ekaterinoslav.

In the midst of these preparations came the news that Lenin had died, on January 24, 1924. The shock and the sorrow were real and deep in this corner of the Donets valley. The reaction had little to do with politics. To the plain people in the collieries—even to the gamblers and brawlers in the barracks, the swaggerers with shoes that creaked, let alone to the Communist Youths— he had become a symbol of hope. We needed to believe that the sufferings of these bloody years were an investment in a bright future. Each of us had a feeling of personal loss.

I marched three miles, with thousands of others, to the memorial meeting outside the mine office, called “Paris Commune.” It was a bitterly cold, snowy afternoon; the winds cut like sharp knives. The rostrum in the open air was draped in red and black bunting, though a pall of snow soon covered everything. One after another the orators shouted above the howling wind, declaiming formulas of official sorrow.

“Comrade miners!” a pompous delegate from Kharkov shrieked, “Lenin is dead, but the work of Lenin goes forward. The leader of proletarian revolution . . . leader of the working class of the world… best disciple of Marx and Engels. . . .”

The formal words left me depressed. Why don’t they talk simply, from the heart rather than from Pravda and Izvestia editorials? Trudging home through the snowstorm I was pleased to discover that Senia and others had the same let-down feeling. The orators had failed to express how we felt about Lenin, because what we felt had less relation to the dead leader than to our own living hopes.

Several days later we read in the local newspapers Joseph Stalin’s oath at Lenin’s bier on Red Square in Moscow. It was a short, almost liturgical promise to follow in the path indicated by the dead leader and it moved me as the oratory at our memorial gathering had not done. Stalin was a member of the all-powerful Political Bureau, Secretary General of the Party, and had been an important figure in the new regime from the beginning. Yet this was the first time that I had become acutely aware of his existence. Strange, I thought, that his portrait was not even on our walls.

From that day forward the name Stalin grew so big, so inescapable, that it was difficult to recall a time when it had not overshadowed our lives.

Chapter Nineteen