In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Two –A Child Of The Revolution

In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Two –A Child Of The Revolution

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

 

He was a child of the revolution, the big old Bolshevik Revolution that had enveloped Russia couple of years back, back in November 1917 (new calendar, new like everything else that was good happening in that formerly benighted land although there was plenty that was still bad, bad as human experience could fathom going on what with the Whites raising their ugly heads wherever they could find an opening like with that damn Czech Legion that almost did the country in before Kazan and the stout defense there to speak nothing of the bloody imperialists and the bloody rumors of famine), if anybody was asking. And if while you were asking you wanted a name to attach to that child then Boris Yanoff (or Yanov, if you like), all of sixteen but already with a couple of revolutionary years under his belt.

See Boris had lost his father in one of those ill-advised Russian Army advances if you could it an army what with the old weapons the old General Staff that was no good except to put down workers and peasants in their factories and fields against the Germans on the eastern front, maybe at Tannenburg, or someplace like that and around that same time so he would tell everybody that had been the place where his father fell defending the Czar, the bloody bastard Czar and his bloodless off-spring .

The upshot of that father death was that Boris had travelled to Moscow from his wretched family farm in Omsk to find work in the textile mills that were in need of help to supply the huge needs of the Russian Army in advance, or retreat, mostly the latter. Hell, that family farm thing was really a joke it had only been barely a garden plot, and the crops wouldn’t show up half the time and the landowner had his old father (and his father before him) in hock up to his neck forever so he probably did himself a favor by getting killed in that Eastern front and all that but he was done with that he was a working man now, a proud young worker.

Boris, like a lot of fourteen -year old coming to the city, any city but particularly Moscow, was kind of a hayseed, in one country bumpkin set of clothes and a couple of things in a small valise, a kind of a know-nothing kid when he came to get that factory work which the foreign owners were desperate to get workers for since it seemed every able-bodied male over sixteen was at some front or dead. But he was a fast learning, fast learning how to operate the machinery but also to figure out where he stood in the world, his new working-class world. So when the Bolsheviks in the textile plant in the summer of 1917 started going on and on about the wretched war and how it wasn’t the Germans, the rank and file German soldiers anyway but their own government that was the enemy that needed to be dealt with, needed to be swept away,  about how the Czar and now the bourgeois government, some coalition between socialists and capitalists, wanted to stay in the damn war, wanted to let the big landowners keep their land, wanted to let the factory owners keep their blood-stained profits he was all ears. It was icing on the cake when one Bolshevik rank and filer whom he worked with got him going by saying that if he went with the Bolsheviks that would help avenge his father’s cruel death for no reason out in some forgotten Czarist killing field. So Boris was in, read the newspapers, and, more importantly joined the factory defense committee and learned how to shoot, shoot for real, not that silly goose pop gun stuff back on the farm.

Then the day of reckoning came. November 7, 1917 (again new calendar to herald a new era). He had heard through the factory grapevine that the Bolsheviks had risen in Saint Petersburg and had declared the Provisional Government null and void, the war null and void, and the big landowners and capitalists null and void and in their place the Soviets, the workers, peasants, and soldiers councils, the people’s voice. Right after that his factory committee was put on notice that they would try to take power in Moscow and while Saint Petersburg’s had been relatively bloodless they, he and his comrades, had a hell of fight, a bloody fight where he lost more than a few shop mates, before they could declare the Moscow Soviet.

As he sat at his bench reading a much passed copy of Pravda now in early March 1919 he thought about that bloody fight, about how he had joined the Red Guards after that, had been called up a couple of times to go out on the outskirts of Moscow and defend the city against the White Guard bastards who were trying to take the land and factories back. No way, no way in hell not after what he and his father had been through in Old Russia. Now they, his Bolshevik comrades, were going to hold a conference, an international conference, where the idea was that what he and his comrades had done in Russia would get done all over the world.

That idea, that idea of other countries getting their soviet power and then helping poor Russia appealed to him. He was not so sure about Lenin, although he was the head of the government and  he had heard him speak in Red Square after the government had moved here to Moscow when things got tough but he read where Trotsky was all for this Communist International and was going to speak at the conference.  And if Trotsky and his fighting phantom train mates were for it then it must be okay. He kind of got a lump in his throat when he thought about that, about how, for once, he was among the first to be fighting for that new world that got him motivated in1917. Yes, he was a child of the revolution and he hoped juts that minute that he would see it through to the end…