In Honor Of Leon Trotsky On The 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 the 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 semi-feudal country driven by the ruthless cops and General Staff
bayonets.
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 subsequently
when Mister took his revenge forced him off the land. Forced him off under threat
to his life. The rack none too good for him heard in some quarters by Mister’s
lackeys and henchmen. He never forgot that slight, never. Never forgot that it
was Mister and his kind, his class and its hangers-on that took him away from
home, split his family up, pushed the rack-rent higher and finally killed off
his benighted father at an very early age in an age when early age was the norm.
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,
read novels, big Tolstoy-sided novels, novels for long sea-ward trips, when he
could and clandestinely radical political tracts.
Ivan also learned up close, made it his business to learn up
close, the why and wherefores of modern warfare, modern naval warfare. Knew too
that between the stifling old-fashioned naval bureaucracy and the shoddily
built ships (many with badly welded seams) 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. And the Russian navy was in shambles.
More importantly after that debacle he applied for, and was
eventually granted a transfer into in the Baltic fleet, the Czar’s jewel and
defender of citadel Saint Petersburg, headquartered at later famous Kronstadt, and
so he was in the swirl 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 down like a cur 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, the taverns, music halls, and whorehouses of which Ivan usually took
his full measure. (Being sea-bound he was a proverbially “girl in every port
guy” although he had had one short serious affair with a girl student from the
university, a left-Social Revolutionary who had never been outside the city in
her life) 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. He had that kind of heart, the heart of a warrior –avenger with
the cool calculation of the average ward-healer. 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
the question of what kind and how much activity qualified an activists as 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 [CL1] 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 moreover 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. A
pressure group not a central contender for power. As the arc of the year curved though there
were signs that the Czarist reaction was gathering steam. Ivan had then had trouble
organizing his fellow sailors to action. The officers of his ship, The Falcon, were challenging more
decisions by the sailors’ committee. 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 up the war clouds over Europe were increasing. Every civilized nation
was impatiently 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, now
the army through his organizing contacts 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 –grabbing 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. To get people moving when the time for action came.
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 committeemen in Russia and among their
Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yes 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 subsequently relieved of immunity and 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. But if he had anything to say
about it those who survived, those who would have to listen if not now then
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 and 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 change
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 a chance to change the awful 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 in 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 monarchy
has fallen, the new republic is proclaimed! The whirl of early 1917 dashed
through sullen home guard soldier Ivan Smirnov’s head wondering in early
January whether the stalemated war was ever going to be done with. He knew the
invalided coming through the Peter and Paul either were sent back to get well
enough to return to the death-ridden front or to be discharged were increasing talking
about the uselessness of the war, the fact that their brethren were dying more
from frostbite and disease than anything the Germans (and their Eastern
European allies also manning that front) were throwing at them, mostly though
they spoke of land hunger, of getting a new crop in, of living to get that crop
in. Strangely land hunger, the fear of the damn trenches, and the thought of
another winter there were not enough to roll the tide of history, of 20th
century history. 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 that the monarchy, the now
laughable double-eagle monarchy that held the masses in thrall for centuries
was 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, having been somewhat constricted by his duties
inside the Peter and Paul, and thus not directly attuned to the agitation for
bread, for some damn thing to eat at a reasonable price he had played an
honorable part in the early going, once the women hit the road, started banging
their pots and pans. 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 were meshed, Jesus, with crippled- up
invalids, half-starved peasant boys and recently drafted grandfathers who could
carry a rifle, maybe not even carry since many soldiers were going to the front
just then unarmed and expected to pick up some dead or wounded soldier’s. Yah,
things were that bad at the front and no General Staff eyewash could disguise
that hard fact, not that winter.
As the action in the capital got more intense after the
women blew the lip off the monarchy’s pretensions, 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 as he) 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 spoke slowly as was his way, spoke in short clipped
sentences for this was not the time for rhetorical flourishes, not with this
soldier mass, not with bright eyes before him every time he spoke of the land,
of their land if they had the manhood to take it. (Yes, he had to make it a
question of manhood, new manhood striking out for their own versus old manhood
of taking it on the chin for the Czar or Mister whenever and wherever he
called.)
Ivan did not need to evoke the outlandish theories of Lenin
and Trotsky about turning the world war into a civil war, making the Czar and
his minions bleed, and proclaim the social republic right then and there 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 but rather kept their newly won democratic hands at
their sides). Did, although as an astute reader of all the illegal socialist
literature coming in over the borders from Europe, or who knows where, need to
drone on and on about the way the new society was going to be organized,
organized for them. 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 27th 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 although not in democratic, much less socialist hands) there were two
centers of power- the bourgeois ministry (including representatives of some
worker and peasant parties usually with socialist or social something attached
to the party name) 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 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 back to
Saint Petersburg 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, letting write whatever he wanted, giving him the
paper and pen to do it, and Ivan heard some soldiers were delivering the
literature to the printers in the Vyborg district-such are things when
revolution is in the air). 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.
Jesus, cried Ivan the Bolsheviks have this frosty October
day proclaimed the social republic, have declared that the war over in the East
(or that they were prepared to sue for peace with whomever would meet them at
the table and if not then they would go it alone). Ivan had heard that it might
be peace at any price in order to get the new order some breathing room. But
peace. Necessary peace if Russia was not to lose all its able-bodied men for
the next two generations. The longed for
peace that Ivan had spent his underground existence propagandizing for. Ivan
already knew as a soldier delegate to the Soviet that the trenches had been and
were at that moment being emptied out by land-hungry peasant soldiers, his
peasant soldiers who heard that there would be “land to the tiller” and they
wanted to till land not be under it. Ivan’s old call was being taken up by the
damn Bolsheviks who sent out a land decree as a first order of business once
they dumped the Kerensky ministry, once they flushed out the Winter Palace of all
the old deadwood. All kinds of things were being proposed (and sometimes
accepted even when the human and material wherewithal were non-existent which
worried Ivan to perdition).
But here is the funny part. Although Ivan had lined himself
up with Martov’s Left Mensheviks (those who wanted peace and some kind of
vibrant bourgeois democracy to pressure things forward into the social republic
at some undefined future date) in the Soviet for most of the summer and fall he
kept getting incessant news from the 27th that they were ready to
mutiny against the Kerensky ministry, they had had enough and wanted to go
home. Ivan was twisting in the wind. He saw that the idea of the social
republic was being presented too soon, that the resources were not there to
give the experiment a chance (who knows what outside force would come to the
aid of the Soviets and when). But he also knew that right that moment the old
ways could not relieve the impasse. And so he broke ranks with Martov and his
group, did not walk out as they did when the voting did not go the way Martov
wanted. In fact when the division of the house was called Ivan Smirnov,
longtime political foe of the madman Trotsky and scarred opponent of the damn
Leninists (he had not heard that Trotsky had quietly joined the Bolsheviks
earlier that summer), voted for peace, voted for the land distribution. The new
day had come and there would be hell to pay and he would not join the
Bolsheviks, no way, but in for a dime in for a dollar and he would defend the
Soviet power as best he could.
“Petrograd must be
defended to the last man, everyone to their posts, no Whites must get to the
city itself,” cried Political Commisssar Ivan Smirnov now that the Red Army (or
rather one of the Red armies since between the internally diverse White Guard
forces, their foreign imperialist backers and the vastness of Mother Russia
there were several fluid fronts and battles raging at any given time) had its
back to the wall and the working-class capital of the worlds’ only workers’
state in existence was threatened by Cossacks and other forces. It had come to
this, come to this as Ivan always knew it would, the forces of the past would
not let go without a bloody fight (even if the actual seizure of power by the
Soviets in October 1917 had been relatively bloodless), would scream bloody
murder about the land (the land that he had come off of at the turn of the
century), about the factories and about the very fact that the fellahin of the
world had decided to take matters into their own hands. Ivan had sworn once the
heads had been counted back in that cold October of 1917 that he was in the
fight to the finish (in for a dime, in for a dollar as the expression went
then), or until he had lain his head down from some stray bullet.
And it had almost come to that at Kazan in that desperate
struggle to hold Russia together before the Czech Legions that were marauding
their ways back from Siberia took the city and cut Russia into not much more
than a small province. Trotsky himself, then risen to War Commissar with
extraordinary powers had organized the fight, had put every resource at hand
(on that famous train that he rode through most of the civil war) and in the
fierce river battles before Kazan some sniper had popped Ivan in the shoulder
just above the heart. That seemed like years before as he now helped prepare
the defense of the capital. There had even been talk that Trotsky himself was
coming through to boost morale (and to die like Ivan and many others defending
the city street by street if need be. It was that perilous.). Yes, Ivan had
come a long way since those October days when he swore his oath. Of course a
military cadre like Ivan was hand-picked to move away from the placid Soviet parliamentary
job and into the yawning gap that needed filling of cadre who could fight and
give reason to the fight. And so Ivan, grown old in the previous two years, had
worked his way up to division commissar in the days when political reliability
meant-for or against the revolution, arms in hand. He had not, despite many
attempts by the Bolsheviks, joined the party (now called Communist harkening
back to Marx’s time). Yet there he was steadying the nerves of the raw recruits
from the factories in front of him. No the Whites would not pass, not while the
Ivan Smirnovs of the world drew breathe.
Finally, finally the Whites were being pushed back, the revolution,
the red revolution appeared to be saved after many losses, after the carnage of
the world war, after three years of civil war, the worst kind of war sometimes
pitting brother against brother although here the divide was closer to class
war, workers and poor peasants on one side and landlords and factory owners on
the other (or rather their agents, the army, and their paymasters, about twenty
foreign powers all circling for the kill). Ivan Smirnov, now political
commissar of the 5th Army (this commissar designation or rather
political and military commissar division of command was used as a check on the
reliability of the old Czarist officer corps that Trotsky in a stoke of
organizational genius had offered positions to in order to win and also helped
to political arm the ranks in a class war where things sometimes got bleary,
especially among the suspicious peasants who worried about their land tenure),
had done more than his fair share of bringing in that result, including
organizing and fighting, arms in hand, before Petrograd when that city was
threatened by the Whites. Hell, even Trotsky himself went crazy in defense of
the revolution during that action rallying the troops personally on his horse like
some whirling dervish. He would later reprimand himself for putting himself in
an operational position when he was the brains behind the military strategies
and did not need to put himself in harm’s way like that. But who would have
held him back once he got on the battlefield one might ask. They held in front
of Petrograd thanks in part to the fact that the Whites could not commandeer
the trains necessary to go forward. Everybody, after the emergency was over,
had a momentary laugh about that just like with Kornilov back in the dark days
before the October revolution when he too could not budge the railroad men to
move the trains. He had even received the Order of the Red Banner personally
from Trotsky for his heroic action before Petrograd. But now in the year 1921
Ivan was ready, more than ready, to take his place in the struggle to bring
socialism to Russia as a civilian as fast as possible. As fast as the soldier
demobilization come release his services. (He had turned red as a beet when
Trotsky, reverting to his wild man role after the war came up with the bright
idea to militarize the labor force to get production, any production going
again. He had all he could do to hold even the vanguard 5th Army
somewhere short of mutiny when the land hungry worn out soldiers heard that
one. Not a great Trotsky moment in Ivan’s whatever the episodic merits of the
plan.)
Still as he pondered the future Ivan was anxious for his Soviet
Russia alone in the world as a workers’ state with no prospects that he could
see in sight. Things had sputtered in Europe, the Hungarian Soviet ahd fallen
quickly out of its own hubris, Bavaria was just too short-handed of cadre,
other German attempts fizzled as the war-weariness and blame game took hold of
a defeated people. Britain and France seemed stillborn. Still had, despite
increasingly insistent requests, held off from joining the Communist Party
(Joseph Stalin himself, at Lenin’s personal request, had delivered the message
along with the lure of high position). One thing about Ivan Smirnov was that he
was a man of his word, had sworn to defend the revolution come hell or high
water once he broke with his Left Menshevik friends and voted for the soviet
power back in fateful October (old calendar) 1917. He would not desert the
revolution with so much work to be done although he still insisted on remaining
outside the party in order to have room to criticize what he did not like, have
room to speak for his peasant brethren to the powers that be. And so Ivan, as
he readied to demobilize himself, after the general demobilization of the red
armies needed now at the factory and farm fronts, decided that he would take
that lesser position in the commissariat of agriculture, deputy commissar since
party membership was required for the commissar-ship, when he paperwork was completed.
Ah, civilian life, he murmured to his wife, Inessa, whom he had seen
infrequently the past few years but who had kept his house in order during the
chaos of the bloody civil wars. Civilian
life indeed.
The revolution is in danger. Those words from the chairman,
from the Bolshevik leader and head of the government Vladimir Lenin
himself, came thundering throughout the
auditorium of the Commissariat of Agriculture as Ivan Smirnov, now Deputy
Agricultural Commissar Ivan Smirnov, stood against the wall behind him in some
disbelief. Stood in disbelief that in 1921, in the fourth year of the
revolution, after the last remnant of the White Guards and their imperialist
sponsors had been quelled Lenin, the total political realist, had uttered such
words. Disbelief that is until Ivan
realized that Lenin was not talking about the threats from the now White émigré
clots plotting in Paris and other destinations or from the now hamstrung
imperial powers that had tacitly accepted the Soviet regime for the most part.
What had Lenin in thrall was that factory production, farm
production, the distribution of goods, that what Trotsky in his flaming pen way
called the “scissors” crisis had caused such havoc that famine, hell, even
cannibalism gripped the country- side and was edging away the life of the
cities. The countryside was not producing the foodstuff necessary for the
cities to survive for the simple reason that there was no godly reason to sweat
away on the land if there were no products to buy except on some “black market”
items at extortion
prices.[CL2] Lenin was in this
auditorium specifically to address those like Ivan whose help he needed to call
the “retreat,” the need for the social revolution to take a step back to get
production going again and the only way to do that was to “reintroduce” a
certain controlled internal capitalism and foreign capitalist concessions.
Ivan was not sure, not sure at all if his peasant brethren
once they produced for the market would be able to switch back and try to produce
as collectives the way the commissariat plans had been mapped out. Plans that
even the week before he had gone to a conference in Minsk to push. He, unlike
the wild man Trotsky, who had thought up the bright idea of putting the
demobilized soldier-peasants under labor discipline (really military
discipline) to get the economy going, would hold his judgment out of respect
for Lenin and the enormous problems that Soviet Russia was facing with little
hope of help from the outside, particularly Germany where the working class
which to his mind seemed incapable of revolutionary action, except it heroic
elements, had just lost another opportunity to make their own revolution.
While Ivan held judgment on the new policy (the policy that
would come down in history as the NEP, New Economic Policy, the historic step
back that would give the isolated Soviet workers’ state some breathing room) worrying
still about those land-hungry petty peasants whose outlook on life he knew so
well despite being off the land for a couple of decades then that very day
after his speech Lenin had personally buttonholed him to join the Communist
Party. And while Ivan felt that he would chaff under the discipline of party
life (mainly the need to publicly spout the party line whatever the internal
doubts, especially since he was privy to information that internal party life,
debate, was getting narrower and narrower) the “revolution was in danger” and
as he had all his political life once again he would “be in for a dime, in for
a dollar.” And so he joined the party, went into the internal life, fought for
his agrarian policies and inner party democracy as best he could without siding
with the fast looming factions that were being formed around various
personalities.
Lenin gone, Lenin the greatest revolutionary theorist and an
utter political realist was gone on that sad cold snowy (as always) January day
in 1924. Once Ivan heard the word (second-hand from his wife, his beloved
Inessa, not a political bone in her body which was good since she could then
give him her “feelings’ about matters, who told it to him the news with some
trepidation) he immediately asked himself who would take the great leader’s
place. He had spent half his political life as an opponent of Lenin and his
“wild boy” Bolsheviks, had thought they were incapable of understanding the
land hunger of the poor peasants (which he country-born was acutely aware of
from the plight of his poor peasant parents now both long gone to early graves),
and if you could believe this, these city boys, mainly, then just decreed “land
to the tiller” as one of their first acts in October 1917. And blew their
thumbs as the Social Revolutionary Party, including its Lefts who were hemming
and hawing all though latter 1917 over the land question. And he had bought
into the struggle from that point on, fought with honor in the civil wars, and
had taken a senior position in the Agricultural Commissariat which he still
held. Although he had only joined the Communist Party in 1921 at the height of
NEP (at the specific urging of Lenin himself although he, Lenin, was aware that
Ivan had doubts about letting the peasantry return to small market production
for fear that you could never get them back on the socialist road once they
tasted the profit motive) he had taken part in all the inner party debates and
had developed certain important relationships with Lenin’s old right-hand man,
Gregory Zinoviev, although he still temperamentally heated factions and
factionalism seeing that as more evil that clarification. He would learn though, learn the hard way on
that issue.
With Lenin gone though who was to take control. Right that
minute the group around Zinoviev (not Ivan who was not in the inner circle but
more like a fellow-traveler to that group given his position on factions),
Kamenev, and the General Secretary of the Party, Stalin, whom he had had
cordial relations with ever since he, Stalin, had conveyed Lenin’s original
offer to Ivan of party membership and high rank looked like they would take
collective control on a day to day basis. He was not unhappy with that thought
although he did not see Zinoviev as anything but an acolyte of Lenin’s. Ivan
had heard the rumors (later proven true) of Zinoviev’s high-handed ways and his
mercurial temperament. Kamenev was an unknown and more of a pal to Zinoviev
than a leader.
Stalin he thought was the organizer and although rumors had also
spread about his high-handed ways of giving party jobs (later proven true as
well, deadly true) to some lesser cadre whom Lenin had derided as fools (and
political opponents as well) would probably rise out of the group and take
charge. The one person who stood kind of alone despite his obvious talents was
Trotsky. But Ivan felt that he was too much the free-lancer, too much given to
his admiring his own intellectual powers to fight with the inner circle boys down
and dirty. And so as Ivan made his political judgments he was none too happy
that Lenin, the great mind of the age, would not be around to guide Soviet
Russia forward.
The air, the political air, around Moscow, specifically
around the offices and corners of Red Square and the Kremlin had changed, had
changed dramatically over the past year since Vladimir Lenin had laid his head
down (had laid his head down for the revolution just as surely as any Red Army
soldier out in the myriad fronts in civil war days). The cliques had formed
(and re-formed as the tea leave-readers attempted to keep ahead of the
political storms), including the necessity of declaring allegiances, for and
against. Ivan had been somewhat close, a fellow-traveler of the
Zinoviev-Kamenev crowd, but he found that he had to draw closer, become
something of a yes man in the showdowns that were occurring more frequently among
the factions.
The final show-down loomed not far in the future. Every
political instinct told Ivan that. He noticed that in the close quarters of the
Kremlin that some strange social doings were going on as well. Political
opponent no longer nodded the nod to each other, wives, including Inessa who
felt the snubbed most bitterly since she had not unlike some of the wives,
Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s in particular, political comrades as well as bedmates,
no longer spoke, things like that. Things too like the new winning factions
riding around in the best of what was left of the high-end automobiles, being
seen at the ballet and other social functions more often than in the office,
and grabbing up the perks of office including the valued government ration cards
with both hands (which also had a black market value even in 1924 and 1925).
Something was going asunder, no question.
That all was surface however. Ivan had sensed since at least
1921 that the Soviet state would have to go it alone for a while, that the
immediate post-war upsurges in other parts of Europe (and the world although
that news was extremely late in arriving in Moscow except where Soviet agents
sent material in), were over for a while and while he projected as a good
Marxist and communist more uprising in the future that tide was ebbing just
then not rising. That political reality not expressed in public, not expressed
in the Communist International publications where if things were not presented
as rosy they were seen with some tinted glasses, worked its way through the
rooms of the various commissariats, was spoken of when day to day policies were
discussed where policy was not predicated on the urgency of international
working class aid. Those observations only became more pronounced after the aborted
revolution in Germany in 1923 (Ivan thought stillborn a better expression,
although he would say it ironically) in Germany. The revolutionary prospects
there after all the French provocations around reparations payments, the out of
control inflation, the readiness of key workers to rise and the malaise of the
ruling group made those prospects palpable. And, frankly necessary for the
Soviet survival since the German industrial might fed to the Soviet state as an
ally is the only way to get the economy going at toward some socialist future.
Ivan ever the perceptive observer whether on the sidelines
or in the heat of struggle noticed that the way things worked in the government
(and less noticeably in society) had changed after that German debacle. Soviet
Russia would henceforth go it alone, would according to the General Secretary
and his epigones built a mighty fortress in a sea of capitalist
encirclement. That essentially economic
and social retreat was bad enough since the full effects of the world war and
the civil war were just abating. What was worse was in the political
sphere-Stalin with the Lenin Levy had enlarged the party substantially with
hangers-on and go-fers, with “yes” men, with those who had not gotten their hands dirty in the
revolution and its defense who were getting plum jobs as long as they raised
their hands for the Stalin faction.
Here is how it went on the ground, here is how it affected a
real revolutionary once the tide shifted. Ivan had been the single deputy commissar
of agriculture since 1921. After the death of Lenin by bureaucratic fiat from
the Organization Committee (all Stalinists as far Ivan could tell) the number
of deputies had been expanded to three, the other two appointees of General
Secretary Stalin (and who had no experience, none, in agriculture having been
second-level ex-Mensheviks who had lived in Moscow since well before the
revolution) who were expected to make decisions jointly with any dispute taken
to the Commissar. Yes, things had changed, the purposes of the revolution had
become distorted and the thoughts of world revolution relegated to the back
closet. Ivan feared his days were numbered in the government (numbered too
since he knew, knew deep in his bones that Zinoviev, his erstwhile leader, had
no stomach for a serious political fight and especially so when the odds were
stacked against him and he had an uphill fight- Grunsha was made for sunny days
and rising tide revolutions). Ivan had taken, taken against his will, his
political will and instincts against the “wild boys” and their leaders to
reading, reading clandestinely, literature Trotsky and his associates were
putting out among party members to raise the alarm in order to “save the
revolution.” The times were out of joint.
The party is in danger, the party is in danger! That transcendent
thought had caused Ivan Smirnov many sleepless nights in the years 1926 and
1927 when the old flaming radical, the old “wild boys” leader Leon Trotsky and
then Zinoviev (whose faction Ivan was aligned with in the intra-party struggles
except on China where Ivan thought Trotsky had the better of the argument since
his boy Zinoviev had been knee-deep in the failed strategy there when he ran
the Communist International) once he broke up with Stalin (or better Stalin
broke with him but Zinoviev always was the showman and so presented the break
that way) and had aligned himself with the Left Opposition as it came to be
called. Strangely during those sleepless nights Ivan would also think back to
the days before 1921, the year he had joined the party (at the now mummified and
entombed Lenin’s persistent urging), that he had not joined the Bolsheviks (old
names die hard now called Communists since the revolution) because he wanted to
maintain his freedom to differ from the party line, to be able to speak as a
senior member of the Commissariat of Agriculture to his left behind poor
peasants out in the wildernesses without blinkers on. Then once the threat of
civil war had passed, the work of reconstruction had begun, and, frankly the
independent space for “free-lancers” had dried up there had been few better
party members. Few better even among the Society of Old Bolsheviks who kept
touting their own virtues as if time served rather than active commitment was
the key to revolutionary virtue. (The
Society, an organization of those who had been Bolsheviks before 1917, even as
was more often the case that one might have thought lapsed and inactive
Bolsheviks so he, and Trotsky, could never become members of due to their late
adherence to the party).
So, yes, the party was in danger, each day the more
ridiculous personnel (example-city boys working in the agricultural
commissariat who did not know what a pood was, how the land was cultivated,
what could be grown under what conditions and where causing much confusion when
policy went down to the town and village level, stuff like that ) were being
assigned major positions in all party and governmental organizations, including
his own commissariat all to enhance the bloc power of Stalin (and his newfound
allies, the old ultra-radical Bukharin and the staid Tomsky and Rykov, Christ
the revolution and not just the party was in danger with that crew). The odds
were long that Trotsky and the admittedly proven group of senior party cadre
around him could pull the party back from the brink but he was beginning to
form that feeling that he would be in for a dime, in for a dollar with the
joint opposition once the dust settled (he never saw his nominal factional
leader, Zinoviev, as capable of leading serious opposition when the fighting
got down and dirty since he had seen Grunsha in operation and knew him to personally
be made for sunny days). The thought though that he would break bread with
Trotsky after so many years of seeing him as, and calling him, an old flaming
radical and out of touch with political reality in first Mother Russia and now
Soviet Russia seemed rather bizarre. More pressingly, more personally he was tired,
tired unto death, as he told his long-suffering wife who saw the toll the
struggle took on him daily of the political wrangling and longed for the days
when he could leave that behind. The year 1927 was not that year though and
thus the sleepless nights. Probably not any year after that either, not for
revolutionaries.
Jesus, Ivan Smirnov shuttered, they had finally thrown the
one serious revolutionary leader left, Leon Trotsky, into exile (they meaning
mainly the dear General Secretary Joseph Stalin and his new bloc partners,
chiefly the pliable Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, their respective hangers-on and
anybody who played their politics in the year 1929 in the Soviet Union by
seeing which way the wind was blowing and acted accordingly), had finally
thrown the “Old Man” into another Siberian exile, this time in godforsaken Alma
Ata (that “Old Man” designation had hung to Trotsky among his acolytes,
associates and run-of- the-mill acquaintances almost since the revolution even
though he had only just turned fifty. Ivan found himself calling Trotsky that
moniker although he was only a couple of years younger than him. Such was Trotsky’s
look, such was his authority among whatever Russian revolutionaries who were
still devoted to the cause, come what may). Ivan had seen it coming once
Zinoviev and Kamenev had given up the fight against Stalin, had frankly
capitulated. Had seen that the ground was crumbling under the Left Opposition
leaving the lone figure of Trotsky to lead the fight. He had always respected
Trotsky even in the old days when he was nothing but a wild man in the
wilderness with his grandiose theories even though Ivan had found himself in
political disagreement and usually far from whatever organization Trotsky was
aligned with.
Although Ivan had formally been in the Zinoviev bloc he held
himself somewhat apart as he always did from kowtowing to the leaders, but he
had been clearly more in sympathy with that bloc than with Trotsky’s wild men.
However he now sensed that the time for standing aside, for standing on some
kind of archaic principle of formerly rational politics was coming to a close.
The time for sorting out the wild men from the wily politicians was coming to a
close too. Ivan, as always, avidly read all the literature, read the
increasingly clandestine literature carried to him and the others via the old
time underground revolutionary methods like under the Czar coming out of the
various Siberian exile places.
He could see the winds shifting beneath his feet at work too,
at his job where although he was still formally a deputy commissar of
agriculture (having given up years previously the idea that he would become
commissar, especially after Zinoviev’s break with Stalin, or rather the
opposite way around Stalin’s boot of Grunsha) he was now one of five deputies
and not even senior although he had more time on the job. Worse he was deputy
in charge of the emerging tractor stations that were now beginning to dot the
countryside as some of the land was being collectivized even while the majority
was being farmed out to kulaks and their agents for their personal profit. On
that job he was out of Moscow most of the time, and thus out of the loop. Yes,
the time for maneuvering, the time for standing in the shadows was getting
shorter.
The year 1933 was not a good year for the revolutionary
remnant, for solid backbone of the revolution revolutionists like Ivan Smirnov
who also took their places in the
construction of the socialist future as they saw that future by their light,
Not a good year for those who had suffered through the hard clandestine days
under the Czar trying to put out little
holographic sheets of literature in the hopes of sparking the masses and
yet wondering eternally when the shoe would drop and they were stifled in their
efforts, suffered too various privations and exiles (and as Ivan could testify to from
among his dwindling cadre friends shorter lives filled with sicknesses as a
result), saw a gleam of light in 1905 with the beloved Soviet experiment only
to be extinguished for decade, a decade that included the mass slaughter of the
world war, then the big glow revolution of 1917, the trials and tribulations to
preserve the new state and then the constant back-sliding at home and now
worse, the coming of the “night of the long knives” in Europe which did not
bode well for Soviet Russia.
The year 1933 was moreover not a good year for one member of
the revolutionary remnant, Ivan Smirnov. First his beloved if apolitical wife,
Inessa who had seen him through most of the ups and downs since the end of the
Revolution of 1905 and who had borne him two sons (both also apolitical and
thriving as university students away from the hubbub of the fierce political
struggles inside the country and abroad) had passed away early in the year. He
had depended on her counsel when times were rough, had come to depend on that
counsel more and more as he saw the revolution essentially going off the rails and
he frankly missed her words. Secondly he had been “demoted” from his position as
one of the seven deputy commissars of agriculture for of all thing “political
unreliability” although no one, not even the dear General Secretary, had ever
told him that he was anything but super-competent at his job, that he did not
have a grasp of the plight of the poor peasantry from which he came. That
competency had been especially true and had come to the fore over the previous
couple of years, the years 1931 and 1932, when Stalin and his cronies (there
was no other word for the cretinist hangers-on who sat at the General
Secretary’s feet) throwing all caution to the wind, began the mass
collectivization of agriculture at one swoop. Did a 180 turn from conciliating
the rich kulaks who were sucking up the land and the profits and purged the
land and the villages from top to bottom. This to Ivan was shear political,
economic and social craziness in one fell swoop. Those ill-disposed effects
were beginning to become apparent but as the word from above (meaning Stalin
and his increasingly fewer close cronies) came down the door was being shut on
any discussion, any talk of what those effects were doing to the peasant mass.
Now Chief Tractor Inspector Ivan Smirnov was permanently stationed in Minsk far
from being able to effect agricultural policy in any meaningful way.
Worse, worse than those personal and professional woes was
the war drums that Ivan could hear coming from Europe with the madman Hitler
storming to power in Germany with the mass Social-Democratic and Communist
Parties prostrate before the onslaught when a little foresight could have
averted that pending disaster, could see that another major bloodletting of the
youth of Europe was ahead (and this time probably beyond) just like anybody who
wanted to see could have seen that the world war in 1914 was coming. Yeah, the
night of the long knives was coming, and Soviet Russia would once again be
ill-prepared and bleed rivers of blood. And so Ivan Smirnov, an old time
revolutionary, a remnant, decided that he had to follow his heart and join the
new movement that Leon Trotsky (Jesus, that wild man, that “free-booting
free-lancer,” that poseur Trotsky Ivan muttered under his breathe even as he
was making his decision) had announced needed to be formed, a new communist
party and a new communist international in light of the massive political defeats
at home and in Europe. So Ivan made the contacts, made them like in the old
days clandestinely and cast his fate with whatever those winds would bring.
After the vaguely understood and mysterious murder of
Leningrad Party boss Kirov Ivan Smirnov became fearful, fearful that in the
year 1934 some new turning point lie ahead. Clearly the death of the popular
Kirov, a possible rival and/or successor to the General Secretary, left no room
for a new leader to emerge. (Rumors moreover were persistent that Stalin or his
henchmen were deeply implicated in the murder.) The power of the small but
potent Stalin faction was now supreme and they were beginning to take revenge
for all slights against them in the old days, those who could trace their
usually sordid political histories including in some cases devil’s work for the
Czar and the dreaded Okhrana back that far, although mainly these were younger
men who had no past, none. (They had just held a rubber stamp Congress of the
Soviets which they had labelled the “Victors’ Congress.) Previously Ivan, now
secretly in contact with members of the old Trotsky-led internal underground Left
Opposition that had now proclaimed for the new party according to recently
smuggled literature that came his way, had been pretty much left alone in his
job as a deputy commissar of agriculture although that position lost effective
power once the number of deputy commissars had increased and Ivan, once the
sole deputy, had to fight, mainly rearguard actions, against every new policy
coming down from the Kremlin. Then came that serious demotion to the tractor
farm and what amounted to exile in backwater Minsk.
Mainly he was left alone because of his competent and while
he was known to harbor some off-beat views and had been a lukewarm supporter of
the Zinoviev faction in the old days he did not wear his politics on his
sleeves. Besides he had been if not an Old Bolshevik an old revolutionary and
that distinction had still meant something in certain circles. He had begun to
see the writing on the wall though the previous year, 1933, when he had been
permanently assigned to be the Chief Inspector of the tractor stations in
Minsk, a serious demotion. That only intensified his feelings that his time was
short and that he needed to do as much political work, clandestinely of course,
as he could before the internal “night of the long knives” came down on his
head. He was glad his wife, his dear
wife, Inessa, was not around to see this turn of events although he missed her
counsel at such times. He did fear for his sons, having seen what had happened
to the sons of other prominent leading comrades.
One look at Pravda on a cold day in March of 1936 told Ivan
Smirnov the internal “night of the long knives” had arrived and that he best
prepare for the worst. The headline that day told of old Zinoviev, his buddy
Kamenev and many others from their old-time opposition had been taken into
custody in regard to the murder of Kirov a couple of years before. The words
used in the article described the coterie as a vile counter-revolutionary
grouping directed by a foreign powers, and backed by the demonic Trotsky. In an
editorial, if such garbage could be called an editorial, the editors howled for
the blood of those taken into custody, and the blood of Trotsky if he could be
found. Yes, a bloodbath loamed in the future Ivan knew that now. Knew also that
the time of even clandestine political propaganda in European Russia was coming
to an end and that all the old places of internal exile in Siberia would be
filled to the brim. Filled with anyone who had opposed, maybe even thought to
oppose the maximum leader.
Personally Ivan knew that his time had come, he had been
fired from his job as staff man at the tractor station ending a long road down,
not quite parallel with the demise of the revolution but close. In any case not
long after that first glance at the Pravda headlines the trials began, the
trials in Moscow of the Old Bolsheviks, the remnant left from the old days. And
shortly after that the executions (they say Zinoviev did not stand up well
under the thought of his execution, cried for mercy, begged like a baby, who
knows what a broken man will do though or what lies might be told to defame an
old broken down man. Farewell, sunny times Grunsha.)
They say that when the GPU came for Ivan Smirnov in his
small unheated apartment in Minsk where he had resided after he was fired from
his tractor station job that he resisted arrest, went limp like in the old days
when the Czar’s police came for him. They say he was sentenced to eighteen
years and sent to the Vorkuta, the old Artic labor camps. They say he worked
with the other exiles, political exiles, to write everything down from the
revolutionary past in order to instill faith in the new generations which would
have to carry on later. They say that he was one of those photographed in the
summer of 1940 calling on Stalin to release them from their Siberian exile in
order to join the army and defend the Soviet Union against the Hitler
onslaught. That is all conjecture however
since after the GPU picked up Ivan in late 1937 nothing more was heard about
him, nothing one could pin down. We would all like to believe that part about
begging to defend the Soviet Union in its hour of need, despite the Stalinist
idiocies but we just don’t know. All we know is that Ivan Smirnov was a
revolutionary cadre, had long before, way back at the turn of the 20th
century, had long before whatever his final destination made his decision-‘in
for a dime, in for a dollar” for the revolution. That we know at the end too.
