personal interests to the common cause, it was considered ‘philistine’ to think about one’s private life at a time when the Party was engaged in the decisive struggle for the liberation of humanity.1
In the end, hunger drove Elizaveta to approach her father. She had just finished lunch in the smoke-filled basement dining hall when a small but muscular and handsome man in military dress and a pince-nez came in, trailed by a retinue of Party workers and Red Guards, and sat down at the long central table, where two soldiers were serving cabbage soup and porridge to the eager proletarians. Elizaveta was still hungry. From a smaller table in the corner, she watched the new arrival as he ate his soup with a spoon in one hand and, with a pencil in the other, signed the papers his followers placed in front of him.
The four secretaries of Iakov Sverdlov, chief Party organizer of the Bolsheviks, the Smolny Institute, October 1917: Drabkina second from right
Suddenly I heard someone call him ‘Comrade Gusev’.
So this must be my father, I realized. Without thinking, I stood up and squeezed my way around the crowded tables towards him.
‘Comrade Gusev, I need you,’ I said. He turned to me. He looked very tired. His eyes were red from lack of sleep.
‘I am listening, comrade!’
‘Comrade Gusev, I am your daughter. Give me three roubles for a meal.’
Perhaps he was so exhausted that all he heard was my request for three roubles.
‘Of course, comrade,’ Gusev said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a green three-rouble note. I took the money, thanked him, and bought another lunch.2
Lenin loved this story. He often called on Drabkina to retell it in the years before his death, in 1924, when she became close to him. The tale took on legendary status in Party circles, illustrating the Bolshevik ideal of personal sacrifice and selfless dedication to the revolutionary cause. As Stalin was to say, ‘A true Bolshevik shouldn’t and couldn’t have a family, because he should give himself wholly to the Party.’3
The Drabkins were a good example of this revolutionary principle. Elizaveta’s father (whose real name was Iakov Drabkin) had joined Lenin’s Social Democrats as a schoolboy in 1895. Her mother, Feodosia, was an important agent (‘Natasha’) in the Party’s underground who took her daughter along as a foil on the frequent trips she made to Helsingfors (Helsinki) to purchase ammunition for the revolutionaries in St Petersburg (the dynamite and cartridges were smuggled back in a bag containing Elizaveta’s toys). After the abortive Revolution of 1905 Elizaveta’s parents were driven into hiding by the tsar’s police. The five-year-old girl went to live with her grandfather in Rostov, where she remained until the February Revolution of 1917, when all the revolutionaries were released by the newly installed Provisional Government.* Elizaveta was reunited with her mother in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was then called). She joined the Bolshevik Party, became a machine-gunner in the Red Guards, took part in the storming of the Winter Palace during the Bolshevik seizure of power on 25 October and was hired as a secretary to Iakov Sverdlov, chief Party organizer of the Bolsheviks. The job brought her to the Smolny, where her father, Gusev, worked.4
The Bolsheviks in power urged their rank and file to follow the example of the revolutionaries in tsarist Russia who had ‘sacrificed their personal happiness and renounced their families to serve the working class’.† They made a cult of the ‘selfless revolutionary’, constructing a new morality in which all the old commandments were superseded by the single principle of service to the Party and its cause. In their utopian vision the revolutionary activist was the prototype of a new kind of human being – a ‘collective personality’ living only for the common good – who would populate the future Communist society. Many socialists saw the creation of this human type as the fundamental goal of the Revolution. ‘The new structure of political life demands from us a new structure of the soul,’ wrote Maksim Gorky in the spring of 1917.5
For the Bolsheviks, the radical realization of the ‘collective personality’ involved ‘blowing up the shell of private life’. To allow a ‘distinction between private life and public life’, maintained Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, ‘will lead sooner or later to the betrayal of Communism’.6 According to the Bolsheviks, the idea of ‘private life’ as separate from the realm of politics was nonsensical, for politics affected everything; there was nothing in a person’s so-called ‘private life’ that was not political. The personal sphere should thus be subject to public supervision and control. Private spaces beyond the state’s control were regarded by the Bolsheviks as dangerous breeding grounds for counter- revolutionaries, who had to be exposed and rooted out.
Elizaveta rarely saw her father after their encounter. They were both preoccupied with revolutionary activities. After 1917, Elizaveta continued to work in Sverdlov’s office; during the Civil War (1918–20), she served in the Red Army, first as a medical assistant and later as a machine-gunner, fighting the White, or counter- revolutionary, armies and the Western powers that supported them in Siberia, the Baltic lands and south Russia. During the campaign against Admiral Kolchak’s White Army on the Eastern Front she even fought under the command of her father, who by that time held a senior position in the Revolutionary Military Council, the central command organ of the Soviet forces, headed by Leon Trotsky. Elizaveta frequently heard her father address the soldiers, but she never approached him, because, as she later put it, she did not think that Bolsheviks should ‘concern themselves with personal affairs’. They met only twice during the Civil War, once at Sverdlov’s funeral in March 1919 and then, later that year, at an official meeting in the Kremlin. In the 1920s, when both father and daughter were actively involved in Party work in Moscow, they met more frequently, and even lived together for a while, but they never became close. They had spent so long apart that they could not form a familial relationship. ‘My father never talked about himself to me,’ Elizaveta recalled, ‘and I realize now that I got to know him only after he died [in 1933], when people told me stories about him.’7
The Civil War was not just a military struggle against the White armies: it was a revolutionary war against the private interests of the old society. To fight the Whites the Bolsheviks developed their first version of the planned economy (War Communism), which would become a model for Stalin’s Five Year Plans. They tried to stamp out private trade and property (there were even plans to replace money with universal rationing); seized the peasants’ grain to feed the cities and the troops; conscripted millions of people into labour armies, which were used on the ‘economic front’ to cut down trees for fuel, build roads and repair railways; imposed experimental forms of collective labour and living in dormitories and barracks attached to factories; waged a war against religion, persecuting priests and believers and closing hundreds of churches; and silenced all dissent and opposition to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. On the ‘internal front’ of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks unleashed a campaign of terror (the ‘Red Terror’) against ‘the bourgeoisie’ – former tsarist officials, landowners, merchants, ‘kulak’ peasants, petty traders and the old intelligentsia – whose individualistic values made them potential supporters of the Whites and other ‘counter-revolutionaries’. This violent purging of society, the Bolsheviks believed, offered a short-cut to the Communist utopia.
By the spring of 1921, the policies of War Communism had ruined the Soviet economy and brought much of peasant Russia to the brink of famine. One-quarter of the peasantry in Soviet Russia was starving. Throughout the country the peasants rose up against the Bolshevik regime and its grain requisitionings in a series of rebellions which Lenin himself said were ‘far more dangerous than all the Whites put together’. In much of rural Russia Soviet power had virtually ceased to exist, as the peasants took control of the villages and cut off grain supplies to the cities. Hungry workers went on strike. The sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, who had helped the Bolsheviks seize power in nearby Petrograd in October 1917, now turned against them in a mutiny whose Anarchist-inspired banners of revolt called for free elections to the Soviets, ‘freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labour’, and ‘freedom for the peasants to toil the land as they see fit’. It was clear that the Bolsheviks were facing a revolutionary situation. ‘We are barely holding on,’ Lenin acknowledged at the start of March. Trotsky, who had called the Kronstadt sailors the ‘pride and joy of the Revolution’, led the assault against the naval base. Military might and ruthless terror were used in equal measure against the peasant uprisings. An estimated 100,000 people were imprisoned or deported and 15,000 people shot during the suppression of the
