In Honor Of Leon Trotsky On The 74th Anniversary
Of His Death- For Those Born After-Ivan Smirnov’s Journey
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Ivan Smirnov came out of old Odessa town, came out of the
Ukraine (not just plain Ukraine like now but “the” then), the good black earth
breadbasket of Russian Empire, well before the turn of the 20th
century (having started life on some Mister’s farm begotten by illiterate but
worthy and hard-working peasant parents who were not sure whether it was 1880
or 1881 and Mister did not keep very good records up in the manor house)
although he was strictly a 20th century man by habits and
inclinations. Fashioned himself a man of the times, as he knew it, by
developing habits favored by those who liked to consider themselves modern. Those
habits included a love of reading, a love of and for the hard-pressed peoples
facing the jack-boot (like his struggling never- get-ahead parents) under the
Czar’s vicious rule, an abiding hatred for that same Czar, a hunger to see the
world or to see something more than wheat fields, and a love of politics, what
little expression that love could take even for a modern man stuck in a
backward country.
Of course Ivan Smirnov, a giant of a man, well over six
feet, more like six, two, well-build, solid, fairly muscular, with the Russian
dark eyes and hair to match, when he came of age also loved good food when he
had the money for such luxuries, loved to drink shots of straight vodka in
competition with his pals, and loved women, and women loved him. It is those
appetites in need of whetting that consumed his young manhood, his time in
Odessa before he signed on to the Czar’s navy to see the world, or at
least brush the dust of farmland Ukraine
and provincial Odessa off his shoes as the old saying went. Those loves trumped
for a time his people love (except helping out his parents with his wages), his
love of liberty but as we follow Ivan on his travels we will come to see that
those personal loves collided more and more with those larger loves.
So as we pick up the heart, the coming of age, coming of
political age, Ivan Smirnov story, he was no kid, had been around the block a
few times. Had taken his knocks on the land of his parents (really Mister’s
land once the taxes, rents, and dues were taken out) when he tried to organize,
well, not really organize but just put a petition of grievances, including the
elimination of rack-rents to Mister which was rejected out of hand and which
forced him off the land. Forced him off under threat to his life. He never
forgot that slight, never. Never forgot it was Mister and his kind that took
him away from home, split his family up. So off he went to the city, and from
there to the Black Sea Fleet and adventure, or rather tedium mixed with
adventure and plenty of time to read.
Ivan also learned up close the why and wherefores of modern
warfare, modern naval warfare. Knew too that come some minor confrontation the
Czar’s navy was cooked. As things worked
out Ivan had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass kicked by the Japanese
in 1904 (he never called them “Nips” like lots of his crewmates did not after
that beating they took that did not have to happen if the damn Czar’s naval
officers had been anything but lackeys and anything but overconfident that they
could beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval war game). And so Ivan
came of war age and political age all at once.
More importantly after that debacle he applied for, and had
been granted a transfer into in the Baltic fleet, the Czar’s jewel and
defending of citadel Saint Petersburg, headquartered at later famous Kronstadt when the revolution of 1905 came thundering
over their heads and each man, each sailor, each officer had to choice sides. Most
seaman had gone over the rebels or stood on the sidelines, the officers mainly
played possum with the Czar. He had gone wholehearted with rebels and while he
did not face the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin his naval career was over. That was where his love of
reading from an early age came in, came and made him aware of the boiling
kettle of political groupings trying to save Russia or to save what some class
or part of a class had an interest in saving Russia for their own purposes. He
knew, knew from his dismal experience on the land, that Mister fully intended
to keep what was his come hell or high water. He also knew that Mister’s
people, the peasantry like his family would have a very hard time, a very hard
time indeed bucking Mister’s interests and proclaiming their own right to the
land all by themselves. Hadn’t he also been burned, been hunted over a simple
petition.
So Ivan from the first dismissed the Social Revolutionary
factions and gave some thought to joining the Social Democrats. Of course being
Russians who would argue over anything from how many angels could fit on the
head of a needle to theories of capitalist surplus value that party
organization had split into two factions (maybe more when the dust settled).
When word came back from Europe he had sided with the Mensheviks and their more
realistic approach to what was possible for Russia in the early 20th
century. That basic idea of a bourgeois democratic republic was the central
notion that Ivan Smirnov held for a while, a long while, and which he took in
with him once things got hot in Saint Petersburg in January of 1905.
That January after the Czar’s troops, his elite bloody
Cossack troops in the lead, fired on (and sabre-slashed) an unarmed procession
led by a priest, damn a Russian Orthodox priest, a people’s priest who led the
icon-filled procession to petition the Czar to resolve grievances, great and
small, Ivan Smirnov, stationed out in the Baltic Fleet then after the
reorganization of the navy in the wake of the defeat by the Japanese the year
before had an intellectual crisis. He knew that great things were going to
unfold in Russia as it moved into the modern age. He could see the modern age
tied to the ancient agrarian
age every time he had leave and headed for Saint Petersburg with its sailors’
delights of which Ivan usually took his full measure. He could see in the city
within a city, the Vyborg district, the growing working-class district made up
of fresh recruits from the farms looking for higher wages, some excitement and
a future.
That was why he had
discarded the Social Revolutionaries so quickly when in an earlier generation
he might very well have been a member of People’s Will or some such
organization. No, his intellectual crisis did not come from that quarter but
rather that split in the workers’ party which had happened in 1903 far from
Russia among the émigré intellectuals around who was a party member. He had
sided with the “softs,” the Mensheviks, mainly because he liked their leader,
Julius Martov, better than Lenin. Lenin and his faction seemed more intent
on gaining organizational control, had more hair-splitters which he hated, and
were more wary of the peasants
even though both factions swore faith in the democratic republic for Russia and
to the international social democracy. He had sided with the “softs” although
he saw a certain toughness in the Bolshevik cadre that he admired. But that
year, that 1905 year, had started him on a very long search for revolutionary
direction.
The year 1905 had started filled with promise after that
first blast from the Czarist reaction. The masses were able to gather in a Duma
that was at least half responsible to the people, or to the people’s
representatives. At least that is what those people’s representatives claimed.
More importantly in the working class districts, and among his fellow sailors
who more likely than not, unlike himself, were from some strata of the working
class had decided to set up their own representative organs, the workers’
councils, or in the Russian parlance which has come down in the history books the soviets. These in 1905,
unlike in 1917, were seen as supplementary to other political organizations. As
the arc of the year curved though there were signs that the Czarist reaction
was gathering steam. Ivan had trouble organizing his fellow sailors to action.
The officers of his ship, The Falcon,
were challenging more decisions. The Potemkin
affair brought things to a head in the fleets. Finally, after the successes of
the Saint Petersburg Soviet under the flaming revolutionary Leon Trotsky that
organ was suppressed and the reaction set in that would last until many years
later, many tough years for political oppositionists of all stripes. Needless
to say that while Ivan was spared the bulk of the reprisals once the Czarist
forces regained control his career in the navy was effectively finished and
when his enlistment was up he left the service.
Just as well Ivan that things worked out as they did he had thought
many times since then because he was then able to come ashore and get work on
the docks through some connections, and think. Think and go about the business
of everyday life like marriage to a woman, non-political but a comfort, whom he
met through one of his fellow workers on the Neva quay and who would share his
home and life although not always understanding that part of his life or him
and his determination to break Russia from the past. In those days after 1905,
the dogs days as everybody agreed, when the Czar’s Okhrana was everywhere and
ready to snatch anyone with any oppositional signs Ivan mostly thought and
read, kept a low profile, did as was found out later after the revolution in
1917, a lot of low-level underground organizing among the dockworkers and
factory workers of the Vyborg district. In other words developing himself and
those around him as cadre for what these few expected would be the great awakening.
But until the break-out Lena River gold-workers strike in 1912 those were indeed
dog days.
And almost as quickly as the dog days of the struggle were
breaking the war clouds over Europe were increasing. Every civilized nation was
arming to the teeth to defend its civilization against the advancing hordes
pitched at the door. Ivan could sense in his still sturdy peasant-bred bones that
that unfinished task from 1905, that fight for the land and the republic, hell
maybe the eight hour day too, was going to come to a head. He knew enough too about
the state of the navy, and more importantly, the army to know that without some
quick decisive military action the monarchy was finished and good riddance. The
hard part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future peasant conscripts
who would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought out land adventures
to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly head-long into the Czar’s
arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there was plenty of work to do.
Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a kid. Glad he had learned enough to earn a hearing,
to spread the word.
As the war clouds came to a head after the killing of the
archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his
bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to
the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal
was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West,
Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the
Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the
other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan
hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the
Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had
definitely separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war
fever just because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that
the party wished to emulate in Russia.
He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the
Bolsheviks (almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was
happening down in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the
bitter end, about fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young
workers and the peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms
from becoming cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible.
Fortunately some of the local Bolshevik committee men in Russia and among their
Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yea this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s
tunnel vision, with great events working in the world.
Jesus, thought Ivan once the Czar declared his allegiance to
the Entente, once he had gotten the Duma to rubber-stamp his war budget (except
for a remnant of the Bolsheviks who were readied for Siberian exile), he could
not believe that Plekhanov, the great Plekhanov, the father of the Marxist
movement in Russia and mentor to the likes of Lenin, Martov, Dan, hell even
flea-bitten free-lancer Trotsky, had declared for the Czar for the duration and
half of Ivan’s own bloody Menshevik party had capitulated (the other half, the
leadership half had been in exile anyway, or out of the country for some
reason) this was going to be hell.
There would be no short war here, no quick victory over the
land hungry Huns, nothing but the stench of death filling the air overcoming
all those mobilization parades and the thrown flowers, the kissed girls, the
shots of vodka to fortify the boys for the run to the front. The Czar’s house,
double eagles and all was a house of cards or rather of sawdust like those
villages old rascal Potemkin put up to fool Catherine in her time. Most of the
peasant boys marching to the front these days would never see Mother Russia
again, never get to smell the good Russian earth. Yes but if he had anything to
say about it those who survived, those who would have to listen if not now ten
sometime, would have their own piece of good Russian earth unlike their fathers
who toiled on the land for Mister’s benefit for nothing. And went to early
graves like his father.
And so in the summer of 1914 as if led by blinders Europe,
along with solid phalanxes of its farm boys and factory workers, went to bloody
stalemated war.
Went without Ivan just that minute declared too old to fight
and relegated to the home guard. There would come a day, a day not too long in
the future when the “recruiting sergeants” would be gobbling up the “too old to
fights,” like Ivan the lame and the halt, any man breathing to fill the
depleted trenches on the Eastern front. By then though Ivan would have already
clamored to get into the ranks, get in to spread the new wave message about the
meaningless of the fight for the workingman and the peasant and that the fight
was at home not out in the trenches. But that was for the future, the music of
the future. Ironically Ivan’s unit wound up guarding the Peter Paul Fortress
for the Czar. The same place that would
see plenty of action when the time for action came.
The home guard was a loose operation, especially in Saint
Petersburg, which entailed not much more than showing up for guard duty when
the rotation called your turn and an occasion drill or assembly. The rest of
the time, or most of it, Ivan spent reading, reading clandestinely the sporadic
anti-war materials that were being smuggled in from various point in Europe by
whatever still free exiles groups had enough gall and funds to put together
those first crude sheets proclaiming the new dispensation. Ivan had time to
think too during those first eighteen months or so of war. Thought about how
right he had been that this “glorious little war” would not be over soon, would
devour the flower of the European youth and if enough lived long enough chance
the face of half-monarchial Europe. Thought about how, when, and where street
organizers like him (he admitted long ago that he was not a “theory man” would
get an opening to speak to the troops in order to end the mounting slaughter
and the daily casualty lists.
Ivan through all of early 1916 thought too that things
within his own Menshevik organization needed serious upgrading, needed to be
readied if the nation was to turn from semi-feudal monarchy to the modern
republic which would provide the jumping off point to agitate for the social
republic of the organization’s theory, and of his youthful dreams. Although he
was no theory man he was beginning to see that the way the bourgeoisie, native
and foreign, lined up it was as likely as not that they would not follow
through, would act even worse than in 1905 when they went hat in hand with the
Czar for the puny no account Duma and a few reforms that in the end only
benefitted them to the exclusion of the masses. He began to see Lenin’s point, if
it was Lenin’s and not some Okhrana forgery, that the new parties, the parties
that had not counted before, the peasant and worker parties, would have to lead
the way. There was no other way. And no, no thank you he was not a Trotsky man,
a wild man who believed that things had changed some much in the 20th
century that the social republic for Russia was on the agenda right away. No,
he could not wrap his head around that idea, not in poor, not in now wounded
and fiercely bleeding and benighted Mother Russia. Beside Trotsky was living
off his reputation in the 1905 revolution, was known to be mightier with the
pen than the sword and a guy whom the main leadership of the Mensheviks thought
was a literary dilettante (strange characterization though in an organization
with plenty of odd-ball characters who could not find a home with the
Bolsheviks and were frightened to death of working with the mass peasant
parties being mostly city folk).
He thought too about the noises, and they were only noises
just then, exile noises mostly that the Bolsheviks had had a point in opposing
the war budget in the Duma, those who had not deserted the party for the Czar
in the patriotic build-up, and who had been sent to Siberia for their
opposition. He admired such men and knew slightly one of the deportees who had
represented one of the Vyborg worker districts in the capital the Duma. Now
word had come back from Europe that a small congress held in some no-name
village in the Alps (Zimmerwald in Switzerland as he later found out) had
declared for international peace among the workers and oppressed of all nations
and that it was time to stop the fighting and bleeding. More ominously Lenin
and his henchmen had come out for waging a civil war against one’s own
government to stop the damn thing, and to start working on that task now. Worse
Lenin was calling for a new international socialist organization to replace the
battered Socialist International. To
Ivan’s practical mind this was sheer madness and he told whatever Bolshevik
committeemen he could buttonhole (in deepest privacy since the Czarist
censorship and his snitches were plentiful).
In Ivan’s mind they were still the wild boys, seemingly on principle,
and he vigorously argued with their committeemen to keep their outlandish anti-war
positions quiet for now while the pro-war hysteria was still in play. But deep
down he was getting to see where maybe the Bolsheviks, maybe Lenin, hell maybe
even goof Trotsky were right-this war would be the mother of invention for the
next revolutionary phase.
The Czar has abdicated, the Czar has abdicated, the new
republic is proclaimed! The whirl of early 1917 dashed through Ivan Smirnov’s
head. A simple demonstration and strike by women in the capital after the
bloodletting of over two years of war, after the defeats of 1905 and later
showed the monarchy, the now laughable double-eagle monarchy that held the
masses in thrall for centuries was shown to be a house of cards, no, less, a
house of sawdust blown away with the wind. While Ivan had not caught the early
drift of the agitation and aggravation out in the worker neighborhoods he had
played an honorable part in the early going. And the reason that Ivan had
missed some of the early action was for the simple reason that Ivan’s home
guard unit, the 27th Regiment, had been mobilized for the Silesian
front in early 1917 and had been awaiting orders to move out when all hell
broke loose.
This is where the honorable part came in. The 27th
Regiment had been fortified to a division with remnants of other front-line
divisions whose casualty levels were so high that they were no longer
effectively fighting units. As the units meshed and the action in the capital
got intense two quick decisions needed to be made by the 27th –would
the unit go to the front as ordered by the General Staff and subsequently would
the unit still stationed in Saint Petersburg defend the Czarist monarchy then
in peril. Now this new unit, this of necessity haphazard and un-centered unit,
was made up of the likes of Ivan (although none so political or known to be
political) and of disillusioned and bedraggled peasant boys back from the front
who just wanted to go home and farm the land of their fathers, for Mister or
for themselves it did not matter. And that is where Ivan Smirnov, of peasant
parents born, came center stage and made his mark. Ivan when it came time to
speak about whether they would go to the front argued that going to the front
meant in all probability that if they went that they would farm no land,
Mister’s or their own since they would be dead. And some other peasant boy
would come along to farm the ancient family lands. Ivan did not need to evoke
the outlandish theories of Lenin and Trotsky about civil war and the social
republic but just say that simple statement and the unit voted almost
unanimously to stay in the capital (those who did not go along as always in
such times kept quiet and did not vote to move out). Of course as always at
such times as well Ivan’s good and well-earned reputation among the home guard
members for prudent but forceful actions when the time was right helped carry
the day. That reputation, borne of many years of street organizing and other
work, also came in handy when the 27th was ordered to defend the
Czar in the streets. Again Ivan hammered home the point that there would be no
land, no end of the bloody war, no end of dying in some forsaken trenches if
the Czar stayed. The 27th would not defend the Czar to the death
(again the doubters and Czarist agents kept mum).
And for Ivan’s honorable service, for his honorable past,
when it came time to send delegates to the soviet, or the soldiers’ section of
the soviet (the other two sections being the workers and the peasants with
everybody else who adhered to the soviet concept filling in one of those three
sections) Ivan was unanimously elected to represent the 27 Regiment. Now this
soviet idea (really just Russian for council, workers councils mainly) was
nothing new, had been created in the heat of the 1905 revolution and had been
in the end the key governmental form of the opposition then. Now with the Czar
gone (and as our story moves on the government is in non-Czarist agents hands)
there were two centers of power- the bourgeois ministry (including representatives
of some worker and peasant parties) and the soviets acting as watchdogs and
pressure groups over the ministry. As Russian spring turned to summer Ivan from
his post in the Soviet saw some things that disturbed him, saw that “pretty
boy” Trotsky (who had just gotten back from American exile as had Lenin a bit
earlier) and now damn Lenin had begun to proclaim the need for the social
republic right then. Not in some few years future but then. But he was also
disturbed by the vacuous actions of his Mensheviks on the land question and on
social legislation. As the summer heat came Ivan began to see that defending
the people’s revolution was tough business and that some hard twists and turns
were just waiting ahead for him.
Jesus, Ivan said to himself
as summer turned to early Russian fall when is that damn Kerensky going to pull
us out of the war after that foolish summer offensive ordered by who knows who
collapsed and made Russia look ridiculous to the world, our ragged starving troops
are melting away from the trenches, his own 27th had repeatedly been
called up to the front and then mysteriously at the last moment held back to
defend something. Who knows what the General Staff had planned after Kornilov’s
uprising was halted in it tracks (everybody in the private drinking rooms laughed
at the fact that Kornilov could not move his troops step one once the Soviet told
the trainmen to halt all troop transfers). See here was the deal, the new democratic
deal. Now that Russia was a democracy, weak as it was, it was now patriotic no
matter what that madman Trotsky said, no matter what the man with the
organization Lenin said the brutal Hun must be defeated by the now harmonious
democracies.
Bullshit (or the Russian equivalent) said Ivan when a part
of his own party swallowed that line, went along for the ride. Lenin was
calling from the rooftops (in his Finnish hideout once old Kerensky put a price
on his head, wanted to smoke the old bald-headed bastard out and bring him to trial
for treason if he could) for a vote of “no confidence” in the ministry. Both were
beginning to call for the soviets to do more than express worker, soldier, and peasant
anger and to stop acting as a pressure valve for Kerensky and his band of fools
and take the power to change things into its own hands. And that madman Trotsky
was proclaiming the same thing from his prison cell at the Peter and Paul where
a remnant of the 27th was still doing guard duty (and standing in
awe of a real revolutionary giving him unheard of privileges). Meanwhile Ivan, Ivan Smirnov, the voice of the
27th, the well-respected voice of the peasant soldier, was twisting in
the wind. There was no way forward with Kerensky, the mere tool of the British and
French imperialists who were holding him on a tight string. But Ivan could not
see where poor, bloody, beleaguered and drawn Mother Russia, his earthen Russia
could move forward with the radicals who were beginning to clamor for heads,
and for peace and land too.
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