The present situation, N⸺ believes, is the inevitable result of Bolshevik dictatorship. The Communists have discredited the ideas and slogans of the Revolution. They have started among the people a counterrevolutionary wave which is bound to destroy the conquests of 1917. The strength of the Bolsheviki is in reality insignificant. They remain in power only because of the weakness of their political opponents and the exhaustion of the masses. “But their Ninth Thermidor33 must soon come,” N⸺ concluded with conviction, “and no one will rise to their defense.”
Returning late in the evening to the room assigned me in the home of G⸺, a former bourgeois, and finding the bell out of order, I knocked long and persistently without receiving a reply. I almost despaired of gaining admittance, when there resounded the clanking of chains, a heavy bar was lifted, someone fumbled with the keys, and at last the door opened before me. I could see no one about, and a feeling of uneasiness possessed me when suddenly a tall, slender figure stepped before me, and I recognized the owner of the apartment.
“I did not see you,” I exclaimed in surprise.
“A simple precaution,” he replied, pointing to the niche between the double doors where he had evidently been hiding.
“One can’t tell these days,” he remarked nervously: “ ‘they’ have the habit of visiting us unexpectedly. I can slip through,” he added significantly.
I invited him to my room, and we talked until early morning. G⸺’s story proved a most interesting page from the recent life of Russia. He formerly lived in Petrograd, where he was employed as a mechanical engineer in the Putilov Mills, his brother-in-law serving as his assistant. Neither of them participated in politics, all their time being devoted to their work. One morning Petrograd was stirred by the killing of Uritsky, the head of the Cheka. G⸺ and his brother-in-law had never before heard of Kannegisser, who committed the deed, yet both were arrested together with several hundred other bourgeois. His brother-in-law was shot—by mistake, as the Cheka later admitted, his name resembling that of a distant relative, a former officer in the Tsar’s army. The wife of the executed, G⸺’s sister, learning of the fate of her husband, committed suicide. G⸺ himself was released, then rearrested, and sent to forced labor in Vologda as a bourzhooi.
“It happened so unexpectedly,” he related, “they did not even give us time to take a few things along. It was a windy, cold day, in October, 1918. I was crossing the Nevsky on my way home from work, when all at once I realized that the whole district was surrounded by the military and Chekists. Everyone was detained. Those who could not produce a Communist membership card or a document proving themselves Soviet employees were arrested. The women also, though they were released in the morning. Unfortunately I had left my portfolio at my office, with all my papers in it. They would not listen to explanations or give me a chance to communicate with anyone. Within forty-eight hours, all the men were transported to Vologda. My family—my dear wife and three children—remained in complete ignorance of my fate.” G⸺ paused. “Shall we have some tea?” he asked, trying to hide his emotion.
As he continued, I learned that together with several hundred other men, almost all alleged bourgeois, G⸺ was kept in the Vologda prison for several weeks, being treated as dangerous criminals and finally ordered to the front. There they were divided into working parties of ten, on the principle of collective responsibility: should one member of the party escape, the other nine would forfeit their lives.
The prisoners had to dig trenches, build barracks for the soldiers, and lay roads. Often they were forced to expose themselves to the fire of the English, to save machine guns deserted by the Red Army during the fight. They could be kept, according to Soviet decree, only three months at the front, yet they were forced to remain till the end of the campaign. Exposed to danger, cold, and hunger, without warm clothing in the raw winter of the North, the ranks of the men thinned daily, to be filled by new parties of forced labor collected in a similar manner.
After a few months G⸺ fell ill. By the aid of a military surgeon, a drafted medical student whom he had known before, he succeeded in being returned home. But when he reached Petrograd, he failed to locate his family. All the bourgeois tenants of his house had been ejected, to make place for workers; he could find no trace of his wife and children. Laid low by fever acquired on the front, G⸺ was sent to a hospital. The physicians held out little hope of recovery, but the determination to find his family rekindled the dying embers of life, and after four weeks G⸺ left his sick bed.
He had just started his search again when he received an order mobilizing him, as an engineer, to a machine factory on the Ural. His efforts to secure delay proved fruitless. Friends promised to continue looking for his loved ones, and he departed for the East. There he applied himself conscientiously to the work, making the necessary repairs, so that the factory could presently begin operations. After a while he asked permission to return home, but he was informed that he would go as
