***In The Heat Of the Be-Bop 1960s Rock Night- Yah, We Were All Exiles On Main Street- “The Rolling Stones: Stones In Exile"

I am sure that Mick and the boys will gladly take a back seat to Howlin' Wolf on this one.

In the old days, the old high school days when such things mattered, my best friend at North Adamsville High School (we actually went back to old North Adamsville Middle School days together), Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley to give his full moniker, spent endless hours arguing over the merits of the Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones as the primo rock band of the times. The times being the early 1960s, the time of the edge, just the wee edge of the beginning of the uprisings associated with our generation, the generation of ’68.


I will get into the specifics of that Frankie controversy a little later but for the purposes of this review of a film documentary about the making of the Stones’ 1972 album, Exile on Main Street, the real controversy is over whether this album was their best ever or not. At that point Frankie and I had lost contact so that I will just give as my opinion that for pure blues-ness, pure Stones’ foundational blue-ness, for country rooted-ness, and for musicianship it is hard to argue that any other Stones' album was better. And that opinion, now with the benefit of the documentary footage and current interviews with many of the personalities from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to the sidemen, hangers-on, gofers, and their manager during this period, Marshall Chess (son of the legendary blues label founder, Leonard Chess), about how it was produced, and what it all meant, still holds up.


I noted in the headline that in the 1960s we, at least those of us who were politically alienated from mainstream Western social norms or at wits end for some other more personal reasons, were all exiles on Main Street. Main Street being a convenient term of art for all that was square, not cool, up-tight, piggish, and a thousand other words we used to separate our youth culture out from the ticky-tack little white house with the picket fence dream that passed for social reality then (and, unfortunately, now, well kind of now). For the Stones this notion of exile, self-imposed exile, not glad-tiding self-imposed exile to hear the lads tell it, had another element. They had to flee England in order to escape from some terrible tax burdens that had accumulated and for which they did not have control over solving (or money to pay). So off to the south of France they go, to live and to produce the new album and in order to get some dough.


Of course, with such well-known edge city crazies as Mick and Keith this was not going to be a Sunday in the park. Along the way they picked up musicians, groupies, hangers-on, bag men, bad guys, dope dealers and everyone with a little cache who could get to France and be around the scene. And that scene included, surprise, surprise, dope of every kind- from pills to smack (heroin, then, as now, not a “cool” drug staple), booze by the buckets full, women, sex, and everything else under the sun. Let’s leave it that the scene was the epitome of the slogan “drug, sex and rock and roll” and along with the expression “live fast, die young and make a good corpse” will get you the flavor of what went on just about right.

Oh yah, in case you forgot, it also included an incredible amount of work by Mick and Keith writing material, all members playing riffs until arms got sore, throats died and fingers began to bleed. Not a recipe that your mothers would suggest for making successful careers, of any kind. But just the right recipe to unleash the rock energy built up in one of the great rock bands that every existed, then and AARP and old age home-worthy now.

Take an hour out and look at some serious rock history. Then go up in the attic and dust off the album, or check it out in your CD collection, or download it to your iPod, or Google it on YouTube but listen to it. Especially the blues-ish stuff like Tumblin' Dice (that will get even grandpa out of his rocking chair); Sweet Virginia; Sweet Black Angel; and the rootsy (Robert Johnson rootsy) Stop Breaking Down.

Now back to serious Frankie business. The Frankie business of figuring out the real places of The Stones and the Beatles in the rock pantheon, for eternity. Back on those hot, steamy, endless summer nights standing (or sitting on the curb) beneath those North Adamsville street lights when that question mattered, mattered as a "universal one" question. I am not sure exactly when I first hear a Stones song, although it was probably Satisfaction, and it was probably up in Frankie’s cluttered bedroom, a place that served as a refuge from my own storm-tossed house what with my mother’s tirades against, well, against anything that I might do, or might think of doing. You know that song, or have heard about it.


However, what really hooked me on The Stones was when they covered the old Willie Dixon blues classic, Little Red Rooster. If you will recall that song was banned, at first, from the radio stations of Boston. Later, I think, and someone can maybe help me out on this, WMEX broke the ban and played it. And no, the song was not about the doings of our barnyard friends. But beyond the implicit sexual theme was the fact that it was banned that made me, and perhaps you, if you are from the generation of ’68, want to hear it at any cost. That says as much about my personality then, and now, as any long-winded statement I could make. And that is what also set Frankie and me apart on this question.


See, Frankie was from nowhere on the blues. And I mean nowhere. Although Frankie reigned supreme as the king hell king of our corner boy high school scene (headquartered at the local pizza parlor, Salducci’s, owned by a mad-hatter of a zen pizza-maker, Tonio, who loved Frankie practically like a son for some reason never explained, at least that I could figure out) and was cool in many things, he was pretty square in his music tastes. He never got over Elvis, really, and followed his ever depressing descend into Blue Hawaii-dom (or worst) avidly, and Frankie really believed that Roy Orbison was a demon (there is a story behind that belief which involved the machinations of his girlfriend, Joanne, which need not detain us here). Carl Perkins was another idol, and I need not speak of the fact that he almost cried when they started picking on Jerry Lee Lewis just because he married his cousin, or something. Thus far though we were not that far apart.


But get this. He, king of the be-bop night, no question, a guy whom I talked about universal things to and got a thoughtful talking back to on, took it in strife when guys like Fabian, Booby (oops) Bobby Vee, Conway Twitty (be serious), Bobby Darin, the Everly Brothers, and Rick Nelson, jesus, Rick Nelson led the musical counter-revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Music that made me, on certain days, abandon the transistor radio that was central to my home life peace. (Yah, that Ma thing mentioned previously). So when the Beatles turned up he was kind of nonplussed by them, and I swear he actually said this one night and I will quote his words exactly just in case there are any legal ramifications over it- “They did a nice cover of Twist and Shout”-jesus christ. Even I saw them as a breath of fresh air then.


Now you get the idea of the musical gap that developed between us. That hearing of Little Red Rooster, moreover, began my long love affair with the blues, although somewhere deep in my psyche, my projects boy psyche, I had that beat in my head way before I could name it. I swear I grabbed every Muddy Waters, Joe Turner, Ike Turner, John Lee Hooker album that I could get my hands on. And then branched out to such esoteric stuff as the work of blues pioneers like Son House, Robert Johnson, and Bukka White (he did Panama Limitedand Aberdeen Mississippi Woman on the sweat-dripping National Steel guitar and flipped me out, and still flips me out. Google those on YouTube) and other early country blues boys. Some of this also got mixed in at the time with my budding interest in the folk music scene, the folk protest music scene. And that is probably why, although the blues, particularly the Chicago blues, also influenced the Beatles, it is The Stones that I favor. Their cover on Roosterstill holds up, by the way. Not as good, as I found out later, as the legendary Howlin' Wolf's version but good.


I have also thought about the Stones influence more recently as I have thought about the long ago past of my youth. Compare some works like John Lennon's earnest, plaintive Working Class Hero and The Stones' agitated Street Fighting Man (yes, I know these are later works, later than the be-bop corner boy schoolboy night, but they serve to make my point here) and I believe that something in the way The Stones from early on presented that angry, defiant sound appealed to my sense of working class alienation. Let’s leave it as they “spoke” to me and the Beatles didn’t. Frankie, always caught up with some twist (although mainly the Joanne mentioned above) moved to less defiant sounds. But he was the king hell king corner boy, and bailed me out of tough situations, tough girl situations and some other semi-legal things, more times than not so he draws a pass on his vanilla tastes here. Thanks, Frankie.


Note: If we were really thinking about comparisons between rock groups the better one is actually not the Beatles vs. The Stones but Stones vs. The Doors. On any given night in the late 1960s when Jim Morrison dug deeply into his psyche and bared his shamanistic soul (and dug, dug deeply, into his medicine bag as well) The Doors were the best rock band in the world. No question. But when you start to list the all-time classic Stones hits from Gimme Shelter toTumblin’ Dice (like I say the one that will still get even grandpa up and about) and how they stand the test of time The Stones win hands down.

Street Fighting Man Lyrics
Artist(Band):The Rolling Stones
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)


Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy

'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy

But what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

No

Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution

'Cause where I live the game to play is compromise solution

Well, then what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

No

Hey! Said my name is called disturbance

I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants

Well, what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

No



"Working Class Hero" lyrics- John Lennon

As soon as your born they make you feel small,

By giving you no time instead of it all,

Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,

A working class hero is something to be,

A working class hero is something to be.

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,

They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,

Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,

A working class hero is something to be,

A working class hero is something to be.



When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,

Then they expect you to pick a career,

When you can't really function you're so full of fear,

A working class hero is something to be,

A working class hero is something to be.

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,

And you think you're so clever and classless and free,

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,

A working class hero is something to be,

A working class hero is something to be.



There's room at the top they are telling you still,

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,

If you want to be like the folks on the hill,

A working class hero is something to be.

A working class hero is something to be.

If you want to be a hero well just follow me,

If you want to be a hero well just follow me.



The Red Rooster
Howling Wolf



I have a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day

I have a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day



Keep everything in the barnyard, upset in every way

Oh the dogs begin to bark,

and the hound begin to howl

Oh the dogs begin to bark, hound begin to howl

Ooh watch out strange kind people,

Cause little red rooster is on the prowl

If you see my little red rooster, please drag him home

If you see my little red rooster, please drag him home



There ain't no peace in the barnyard,

Since the little red rooster been gone

Willie Dixon

***On The 100^th Anniversary Of The Great IWW-led Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-Reflections In A Wobblie Wind

Every kid who has had wanderlust, even just a starry little, little bit on his or her way to the big, bad world had it. Meaning every half-starved, ill-clothed, hard-scrabble kid reduced to life in walking paces, footsore, time-lost sore, endless bus waiting sore, and not the speed, the “boss” hi-blown ’57 gilded cherry red Chevy speed of the 20^th century go-go (and, hell, not even close in the 21^st century speedo Audi super go-go) itching, itching like crazy, like feverish night sweats crazy, to bust out of the small, no, tiny, four-square wall “the project” existence and have a room, a big room, of his or her own.

Meaning also every day-dream kid doodling his or her small-sized dream away looking out at forlorn white foam-flecked, grey-granite ocean expanses, flat brown-yellow, hell, beyond brown-yellow to some evil muck prairie home expanses, up ice cold, ice blue, beyond blue rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (or name your very own generational signifier) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it?

And every kid who dreamed the dream of the great jail break-out of dark, dank, deathic bourgeois family around the square, very square, table life and unnamed, maybe un-namable, teen hormonal craziness itching, just itching that’s all. Waiting, waiting infinity waiting, kid infinity waiting, for the echo rebound be-bop middle of the night sound of mad monk rock walking daddies from far away radio planets, and an occasional momma too, to ease the pain, to show the way, hell, to dance the way away. To break out of the large four-square wall suburban existence, complete with Spot dog, and have some breathe, some asphalt highway not traveled, some Jersey turnpike of the mind not traveled, of his or her own.

Meaning also, just in case it was not mentioned before, every day-dream kid, small roomed or large, doodling, silly doodling to tell the truth, his or her dream away looking out at fetid seashores next to ocean expanses, corn-fed fields next to prairie home expanses, blasted human-handed rocks up rocky mountain high expanses and stuck. Just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck in the 1950s (oh, yah, just name your generational signifier, okay) red scare, cold war, maybe we won’t be here tomorrow, one size fits all, death to be-bop non-be-bop night. Yah, just plain, ordinary, vanilla stuck. What other way is there to say it?

And every guy or gal who has been down on their luck a little. Like maybe he or she just couldn’t jump out of that “the projects” rut, couldn’t jump that hoop when somebody just a little higher up in the food chain laughed at those ill-fitted clothes, those stripped cuffed pants one size too large when black chinos, uncuffed, were called for. Or when stuffed bologna sandwiches, no mustard, had to serve to still some hunger, some ever present hunger. Or just got caught holding some wrong thing, some non-descript bauble really, or just had to sell their thing for their daily bread and got tired, no, weary, weary-tired weary, of looking at those next to ocean, prairie, rocky mountain expanses. Or, maybe, came across some wrong gee, some bad-ass drifter, grifter or midnight sifter and had to flee. Yah, crap like that happens, happens all the time in “the projects” time. And split, split in two, maybe more, split west I hope.

And every guy or gal who has slept, newspaper, crushed hat, or folded hands for a pillow, all worldly possessions in some ground found Safeway shopping bag along some torrent running river, under some hide-away bridge, off some arroyo spill, hell, anywhere not noticed and safe, minute safe, from prying, greedy evil hands. Worst, the law. Or, half-dazed smelling of public toilet soap and urinals, half-dozing on some hard shell plastic seat avoiding maddened human this way and that traffic noises and law prodding keep movings and you can’t stay heres in some wayward Winnemucca, Roseburg, Gilroy, Paseo, El Paso, Neola, the names are legion, Greyhound, Continental, Trailways bus station. Or sitting by campfires, chicken scratch firewood, flame-flecked, shadow canyon boomer, eating slop stews, olio really, in some track-side hobo jungle waiting, day and day waiting, bindle ready, for some Southern Pacific or Denver and Rio Grande bull-free freight train smoke to move on.

Hell, everybody, not just lonely hard- luck project boys, wrong, dead wrong girls, wronged, badly wronged, girls, wise guy guys who got catch short, wrong gees on the run, right gees on the run from some shadow past, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, society boys on a spree, debutantes out for a thrill, and just plain ordinary vanilla day-dreamers who just wanted to be free from the chains of the nine to five white picket fence work forty years and get your gold watch (if that) retirement capitalist system was (and, maybe, secretly is) an old Wobblie at heart. Yah, just like Big Bill (Haywood), Jim Cannon, the Rebel Girl (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn), Joe Hill, Frank Little, Vincent Saint John (and me). Yah, all the one big union boys and girls from way back, just to name a few.

Except when you need to take on the big issues, the life and death struggle to keep our unions against the capitalist onslaught to reduce us to chattel, the anti-war wars giving the self-same imperialists not one penny nor one person for their infernal wars as they deface the world, the class wars where they take no prisoners, none, then you need something more. Something more that kiddish child’s dreams, hobo camp freedom fireside smoke, or Rio Grande train white flume smoke. That is when day dreaming gets you cut up. That is when you need to stay in one place and fight. That is when you need more than what our beloved old free-wheeling wobblie dream could provide. And that is a fact, a hard fact, sisters and brothers.

***Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Night-I’ll Get By As Long As I Have You-For Prescott And Delores Breslin

Scene: Brought to mind by the sepia-toned family album-style photograph that graces the cover of some long ago CD and by the song Far Away Places.

“Prescott James Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute, yelled Delores Breslin (nee Leclerc), Mother Breslin to some, including the yelled at Prescott, honey, to Prescott Breslin, Senior, Father Breslin to the junior one being yelled at just this minute. Just as Mother Breslin, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Prescott, Junior’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WJDA air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Their song. Their forever memory song.

Delores flashed back to the night in 1943 over at the Stardust Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach that she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right here in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl) and Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while the boys were off fighting. They hit it off right away, made Far Away Places their song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and they could get their dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although they never specified a number. The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a not from hunger breathe.

Just then Delores snapped back into the reality, the two by four reality, of their made due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house the housing-hungry returning vets and give them a leg up. Add on the further reality that Prescott’s job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure now that rumors were circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Prescott, Junior, Kendrick, and most recently still in the cradle Joshua. And three is enough, more than enough thank you. But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes singing Little White Lies was making its way into her air space she fell back to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few kids (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around next corner. And just as she was winding up to blast young Prescott, his dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended before, her thoughts returned to her Prince Charming, Starlight Ballroom1943, and their song. Their forever memory song. Yes, she would get by.

***Out In The 1950s Be-Bop Night- Josh Breslin Comes Of Age- Kind Of

Scene: Brought to mind by the black and white family album-style photograph that graced the cover of a golden age (ouch!) of rock and roll CD glanced at in some cheapo retro record store. (For the young or the forgetful records were, oh hell, it would be really too hard to explain why we bothered with such an odd-ball way to listen to our music, jesus, on 45 RPMs only one song at a time. Look it up on Wikipedia like everything else from olden times, ah, that is everything before last week.) On this one we are treated to a photograph of a well-groomed boy and girl, teenagers of course, who else would listen to rock and roll in the be-bop 1950s night. Every parent, every square parent, and they were legion, who had any sense at all was banning, confiscating, burning, or otherwise destroying every record, 45 RPM or long-playing, that came through the front door with junior and missy. Reason? Said rock ‘n’ roll led to communistic thoughts, youth tribal hanging together (to the exclusion, no, to the denials of the existence of, parents), bad teeth, acne, brain-death, or most dreaded the “s” word, s-x.

But let’s leave the world of parents and concentrate on the couple in the photo, Josh Breslin, and his date, his first date, his first date ever, Julie Dubois, who are just now shuffling the records looking to see if Earth Angelby the Penguins is in the stack to chase away the awkwardness both are feeling on this first date. It turns out that both are crazy about that platter so they are reaching way back in their respective minds' recesses to come up with every arcane fact they know about the song, the group, how it was produced, anything to get through that next few moment until the next dance started.

Now Josh always thought he was cool, at least cool when he was dealing with his corner boy boys that hung out in front of Mama’ Pizza Parlor on Main Street up in Olde Saco, that’s up in Maine. But this girl thing was a lot harder than it looked, once he had exhausted every possible fact about Earth Angeland then had to reach way back in the mind’s recesses again when he tried to do the same for The Clover’s version of Blue Velvet. No sale, Julie didn’t like that one; she smirked, not dreamy enough. Then ditto when, Julie, seriously trying to hold up her end went on and on about Elvis’ Blue Moon cover. No sale, no way, no dice said Josh to himself and then to Julie since they had vowed, like some mystical rite of passage passed down from eternal teenager-ness, be candid with each other. Finally, Julie’s shuffling through the platters produced The Turban’s When You Dance and things got better. Yes, this was one tough night, one tough first date, first date ever night.

Maybe the whole thing was ill-fated from the beginning. Josh’s friend, maybe best friend, at Olde Saco Junior High, Rene Leblanc, was having his fourteenth birthday party, a party that his mother, as mothers will, insisted on being a big deal. Big deal being Rene inviting boys and girls, nice boys and girls, dressed in suits, or a least jackets and ties (boys), and party dresses (girls) and matched-up (one boy, one girl). Mrs. Leblanc was clueless that such square get-ups and social arrangements in the be-bop teen night would “cramp” every rocking boy and girl that Rene (or Josh) knew. But the hardest part was that Josh, truth, had never had a boy-girl date and so therefore had no girl to bring to Rene’s party. And that is where Julie, Rene’s cousin from over in Ocean City, came in. She, as it turned out, had never had a girl-boy date. And since when Mrs. Leblanc picked Josh up on party night and then went over to Ocean City for Julie, introduced them, and there was no love at first sight clang, Josh figured that this was to be one long, long night.

So the couple, the nervous couple, nervous now because the end of the stack was being reached when mercifully Marvin and Johnny’s Cherry Pie came up, both declared thumbs up, both let out a simultaneous spontaneous laugh. And the reason for that spontaneous laugh, as they were both eager to explain in order to have no hurt feelings, was that Josh had asked Julie if she was having a good time and she said, well, yes just before they hit Cherry Pie pay-dirt. Just then Rene came over and shouted over the song being played on the record player, The Moonglow’s Sincerely,“Why don’t you two dance instead of just standing there looking goofy?” And they both laughed again, as they hit the dance floor, this time with no explanations necessary.

Larissa Reissner on Trotsky’s Red Army-The Battle of Svyazhsk, a Revolutionary Legend

Spartacist English edition No. 63	Winter 2012-2013

Larissa Reissner on Trotsky’s Red Army-The Battle of Svyazhsk, a Revolutionary Legend

(Women and Revolution pages)

We print below an account of the battle of Svyazhsk and Kazan, a turning point in the first year of the Civil War that erupted in 1918 against the victorious October Revolution. This eyewitness account was written around 1922 by the Bolshevik political journalist Larissa Reissner, who, as a Red Army soldier, participated in the battle. “Svyazhsk,” translated into English by John G. Wright and Amy Jensen, was published in the June 1943 issue of Fourth International, the theoretical organ of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.

In 1918, amid the devastation wrought by World War I, the young workers state faced a counterrevolutionary onslaught of 14 imperialist/Allied expeditionary forces as well as an array of tsarist White Guard armies in collusion with the ousted landlords and capitalists (see “Bourgeois Liberalism vs. the October Revolution,” page 4). In late summer, the Red Army under the leadership of Leon Trotsky engaged in battle about 500 miles east of Moscow on the Volga River on an approach to Kazan. Trotsky’s famous armored train, stationed at Svyazhsk as the command center, was used for the first time in this campaign. Vastly outnumbered Red Army soldiers turned back the Czechoslovak counterrevolutionaries there through sheer revolutionary determination, heroism and self-sacrifice. It was this victory that made possible the rapid concentration of Red Army, Navy and Air Force units that took Kazan, where a workers uprising also contributed to driving out the Whites. In 1922, Trotsky wrote of the battles:

“Out of a shaky, unsteady, disintegrating mass, a real army was created. We took Kazan on September 10, 1918, and recovered Simbirsk on the following day. That moment was a notable date in the history of the Red Army. Immediately, we felt firm ground under our feet. These were no longer our first helpless attempts: from now on we could fight and win.”

— “The Path of the Red Army” (May 1922), The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky: How the Revolution Armed, Vol. 1 (London: New Park Publications, 1979)

Reissner’s vivid essay brings these events to life.

Heroic Woman Communist

Larissa Reissner was born in 1895 in Lublin, Poland, then under Russian tsarist rule, into a family of Polish-Russian-German origin. She spent her early years in the Siberian capital city of Tomsk, where her father Mikhail had procured a law professorship. In 1903 her family fled tsarist repression to Berlin, where Larissa spent four years. Exiled Russian revolutionaries and leading members of the German Social Democracy, such as Karl Liebknecht, were familiar guests in the household. Larissa’s father joined the Bolsheviks for a few years. On returning to Russia, Larissa led a privileged, actively intellectual life in St. Petersburg, traveling in socialist circles and writing articles and literary pieces.

Joining the Bolshevik Party a few months after the Bolshevik conquest of power, Reissner went on to become the first woman political commissar in the Red Army. For five years she was married to Fyodor Raskolnikov, a leading Bolshevik in the Kronstadt naval garrison rebellion in July 1917. During the siege of Kazan, Raskolnikov was appointed Commander of the Volga Naval Flotilla. Reissner headed the Volga Fleet intelligence section and specialized in espionage work behind enemy lines.

Everywhere Reissner went, she wrote passionately of her experiences in the revolution. As Karl Radek, her companion in her last years, wrote in a memoir after her death from typhus in 1926, “She was not a contemplative artist but a fighting artist who sees a struggle from the inside and knows how to convey its dynamics—the dynamics of humanity’s destiny” (Richard Chappell, ed., Hamburg at the Barricades and Other Writings on Weimar Germany [London: Pluto Press, 1977]).

Numerous collections of Reissner’s essays and articles appeared in Russian in the early and mid 1920s. Some were also published in German, but very little exists in English or other languages. Her books include The Front, a collection of her Civil War sketches from which “Svyazhsk” was taken; Afghanistan, based on her experiences as part of the Soviet diplomatic delegation at the court of the Emir; and Coal, Iron and Living People, articles on her travels through the industrial areas of the young Russian workers state. Hamburg at the Barricades, vignettes from the days of the aborted 1923 revolution in Germany where Reissner was a Comintern representative, is available in English and German.

Reissner recounts the heroic roles of many individuals in the battle of Svyazhsk. She too played an important part in the hard-won victory. In his autobiography, My Life (1929), Trotsky wrote of her:

“Larissa Reisner, who called Ivan Nikitich [Smirnov] ‘the conscience of Sviyazhsk,’ was herself prominent in the Fifth army, as well as in the revolution as a whole. This fine young woman flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many. With her appearance of an Olympian goddess, she combined a subtle and ironical mind with the courage of a warrior. After the capture of Kazan by the Whites, she went into the enemy camp to reconnoitre, disguised as a peasant woman. But her appearance was too extraordinary, and she was arrested. While she was being cross-examined by a Japanese intelligence officer, she took advantage of an interval to slip through the carelessly guarded door and disappear. After that, she engaged in intelligence work. Later, she sailed on war-boats and took part in battles. Her sketches about the civil war are literature. With equal gusto, she would write about the Ural industries and the rising of the workers in the Ruhr. She was anxious to know and to see all, and to take part in everything. In a few brief years, she became a writer of the first rank. But after coming unscathed through fire and water, this Pallas of the revolution suddenly burned up with typhus in the peaceful surroundings of Moscow.”

The Vision of Women’s Emancipation

The young workers state mobilized the masses of workers and peasants in a political and military war to defeat the imperialist invasion and defend the proletarian revolution. Inspired in part by the Bolshevik promise of women’s emancipation, tens of thousands of women joined the military, becoming soldiers, nurses, commanders and political leaders. Their talents as spies were so valuable that Lenin ordered the establishment of a special school where numerous young women were trained to carry out espionage, scouting and sabotage behind White lines. Many, such as Varsenika Kasparova, head of the Agitational Department of the Bureau of Military Commissars in the Civil War, were later adherents of Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

Integral to the Bolshevik vision was the understanding that the liberation of women could not be separated from the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat as a whole. However, given the desperate conditions of the Civil War and the massive poverty and social backwardness of the predominantly peasant country, the Bolsheviks’ determination to draw women into full participation in economic, social and political life was an overwhelming challenge (see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English edition], No. 59, Spring 2006). Lenin and the Bolshevik Party knew that the complete liberation of women depended on the international extension of socialist revolution, to which the Communist International, founded in 1919, was dedicated.

The continuing postponement of international revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to usurp power in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24. Many of the heroes described in Reissner’s piece fell to Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. Among them was Ivan Nikitich Smirnov who, like many of Stalin’s victims, had been part of the Left Opposition. A whole generation of revolutionary communists was destroyed; many were executed. Reissner’s writings were disappeared. Even when her works saw a revival under Khrushchev in 1958, the volume dropped “Svyazhsk” with its depiction of Trotsky as the leader of the Red Army.

Just as the Stalinist bureaucracy wiped out Lenin’s party, it also reversed many of the gains of Soviet women. But the ensuing Stalinist Thermidor could not wholly erase the gains achieved by women as a result of the socialization of the means of production. The 1991-92 counterrevolution under Boris Yeltsin thrust the working people into misery, exploitation and oppression under capitalism. The International Communist League embraces the liberating goals of communism that inspired such heroism and sacrifice in the Civil War and strives for new October Revolutions worldwide.

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From the Archives of Marxism

Svyazhsk

by Larissa Reissner

Whenever two comrades who worked together in the year 1918, fought beneath Kazan against the Czechoslovaks and then in the Urals or at Samara and Tsaritsin, chance to meet again many years later one of them is bound to ask after the first few questions:

“Remember Svyazhsk?” And they will clasp each other’s hand again.

What is Svyazhsk? Today it is a legend, one of the revolutionary legends which still remain unchronicled but which are being retold over and over again from one end to another of this Russian vastness. Not one of the demobilized Red Army men from among the old-timers, the founders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army, upon returning home and reminiscing about the three years of Civil War will skip over the fabulous epic of Svyazhsk, the cross-roads whence the tide of the revolutionary offensive started rolling on all four sides. On the east—toward the Urals. On the south—toward the Caspian shores, the Caucasus and the borders of Persia. On the north toward Archangel and Poland. Not all together, of course; nor simultaneously. But it was only after Svyazhsk and Kazan that the Red Army became crystallized into those fighting and political forms which, after undergoing change and being perfected, have become classic for the RSFSR [Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic].

On August 6 (1918) numerous hastily organized regiments fled from Kazan; and the best among them, the class-conscious section, clung to Svyazhsk, halted there and decided to make a stand and fight. By the time the mobs of deserters fleeing from Kazan had almost reached Nizhny Novgorod, the dam erected at Svyazhsk had already halted the Czechoslovaks; and their general who tried to take the railroad bridge across the Volga by storm was killed during the night attack. Thus in the very first clash between the Whites who had just taken Kazan and consequently were stronger in morale and equipment, and the core of the Red Army seeking to defend the bridge-head across the Volga, the head of the Czechoslovak offensive was lopped off. They lost their most popular and gifted leader in General Blagotich. Neither the Whites, flushed by their recent victory, nor the Reds rallying round Svyazhsk had any inkling of the historical importance that their initial trial skirmishes would have.

It is extremely difficult to convey the military importance of Svyazhsk without having the necessary materials at hand, without a map, and without the testimony of those comrades who were in the ranks of the Fifth Army at that time. Much has already been forgotten by me; faces and names flit by as in a fog. But there is something that no one will ever forget and that is: the feeling of supreme responsibility for holding Svyazhsk. This was the bond between all its defenders from a member of the Revolutionary Military Council to the last Red rank and filer in desperate search for his somewhere extant, retreating regiment, who suddenly turned back and faced Kazan in order to fight to the last, with worn-out rifle in hand and fanatic determination in his heart. The situation was understood by everyone as follows: Another step backward would open the Volga to the enemy down to Nizhny (Novgorod) and thus the road to Moscow.

Further retreat meant the beginning of the end; the death sentence on the Republic of the Soviets.

How correct this is from a strategic point of view, I know not. Perhaps the Army if rolled back even further might have gathered into a similar fist on one of the innumerable black dots which speckle the map and thenceforth carried its banners to victory. But indubitably it was correct from the standpoint of morale. And insofar as a retreat from the Volga meant a complete collapse at that time, to that extent the possibility of holding out, with ones back against the bridge, imbued us with a real hope.

The ethics of the revolution formulated the complex situation succinctly as follows: To retreat is to have the Czechs in Nizhny and in Moscow. No surrender of Svyazhsk and the bridge means the reconquest of Kazan by the Red Army.

The Arrival of Trotsky’s Train

It was, I believe, either on the third or fourth day after the fall of Kazan that Trotsky arrived at Svyazhsk. His train came to a determined stop at the little station; his locomotive panted a little, was uncoupled, and departed to drink water, but did not return. The cars remained standing in a row as immobile as the dirty straw-thatched peasant huts and the barracks occupied by the Fifth Army’s staff. This immobility silently underscored that there was no place to go from here, and that it was impermissible to leave.

Little by little the fanatical faith that this little station would become the starting point for a counter-offensive against Kazan began to take on the shape of reality.

Every new day that this God-forsaken, poor railway siding held out against the far stronger enemy, added to its strength and raised its mood of confidence. From somewhere in the rear, from far-off villages in the hinterland, came at first soldiers one by one, then tiny detachments, and finally military formations in a far better state of preservation.

I see it now before me, this Svyazhsk where not a single soldier fought “under compulsion.” Everything that was alive there and fighting in self-defense—all of it was bound together by the strongest ties of voluntary discipline, voluntary participation in a struggle which seemed so hopeless at the outset.

Human beings sleeping on the floors of the station house, in dirty huts filled with straw and broken glass—they hardly hoped for success and consequently feared nothing. The speculation on when and how all this “would end” interested none. “Tomorrow”—simply did not exist; there was only a brief, hot, smoky piece of time: Today. And one lived on that, as one lives in harvest time.

Morning, noon, evening, night—each single hour was prolonged to the utmost count; every single hour had to be lived through and used up to the last second. It was necessary to reap each hour carefully, finely like ripe wheat in the field is cut to the very root. Each hour seemed so rich, so utterly unlike all of previous life. No sooner did it vanish than in recollection it seemed a miracle. And it was a miracle.

Planes came and went, dropping their bombs on the station and the railway cars; machine guns with their repulsive barking and the calm syllables of artillery, drew nigh and then withdrew again, whilst a human being in a torn military coat, civilian hat, and boots with toes protruding—in short, one of the defenders of Svyazhsk—would smilingly produce a watch from his pocket and bethink himself:

“So that’s what it is now—1:30 or 4:30 o’clock. Or, it is 6:20. Therefore I am still alive. Svyazhsk holds. Trotsky’s train stands on the rails. A lamp now flickers through the window of the Political Department. Good. The day is ended.”

Medical supplies were almost completely absent at Svyazhsk. God knows what the doctors used for bandages. This poverty shamed no one; nor did anyone stand in fear of it. The soldiers on their way with soup kettles to the field kitchen passed by stretchers with the wounded and the dying. Death held no terrors. It was expected daily, always. To lie prone in a wet army coat, with a red splotch on a shirt, with an expressionless face, a muteness that was no longer human—this was something taken for granted.

Brotherhood! Few words have been so abused and rendered pitiful. But brotherhood does come sometimes, in moments of direst need and peril, so selfless, so sacred, so unrepeatable in a single lifetime. And they have not lived and know nothing of life who have never lain at night on a floor in tattered and lice-ridden clothes, thinking all the while how wonderful is the world, infinitely wonderful! That here the old has been overthrown and that life is fighting with bare hands for her irrefutable truth, for the white swans of her resurrection, for something far bigger and better than this patch of star-lit sky showing through the velvet blackness of a window with shattered panes—for the future of all mankind.

Once in a century contact is made and new blood is transfused. These beautiful words, these words, almost inhuman in their beauty, and the smell of living sweat, the living breath of others sleeping beside you on the floor. No nightmares, no sentimentalities but tomorrow the dawn will come and Comrade G., a Czech Bolshevik, will prepare an omelet for the whole “gang”; and the Chief of Staff will pull on a shaggy stiffly frozen shirt washed out last night. A day will dawn in which someone will die, knowing in his last second that death is only something among many other things, and not the main thing at all; that once again Svyazhsk has not been taken and that the dirty wall is still inscribed with a piece of chalk: “Workers of the World Unite!”

Against the Stream

The rainy August days thus passed one by one. The thin, poorly equipped lines did not fall back; the bridge remained in our hands and from the rear, from somewhere far away, reinforcements began to arrive.

Real telephone and telegraph wires began to attach themselves to autumn spider-webs flying in the winds and some kind of enormous, cumbersome, lame apparatus began to operate on the God-forsaken railway station—Svyazhsk, this tiny, hardly discernible black dot on the map of Russia, at which in a moment of flight and despair, the revolution had clutched. Here all of Trotsky’s organizational genius was revealed. He managed to restore the supply lines, got new artillery and a few regiments through to Svyazhsk on railways that were being openly sabotaged; everything needed for the coming offensive was obtained. In addition, it ought to be borne in mind that this work had to be done in the year 1918, when demobilization was still raging, when the appearance on the Moscow streets of a single well dressed detachment of the Red Army would create a real sensation. After all, it meant to swim against the stream, against the exhaustion of four years of war, against the spring floods of the revolution which swept through the whole country the debris of Czarist discipline and wild hatred of anything resembling the bark of old officers’ commands, the barracks, or old army life.

Despite all this, supplies appeared before our very eyes. Newspapers arrived, boots and overcoats came. And wherever they actually hand out boots, and for keeps, there you will find a really solid army staff; there things are stable; there the army stands firmly entrenched and has no thought of fleeing. That’s no joking matter, boots!

The Order of the Red Flag was not yet in existence in the era of Svyazhsk, else it would have been issued to hundreds. Everybody, including the cowardly and the nervous and the simply mediocre workers and Red Army men—everybody, without a single exception, performed unbelievable, heroic deeds; they outdid themselves, like spring streams overflowing their banks they joyfully flooded their own normal levels.

Such was the atmosphere. I remember receiving at that time by extraordinary chance a few letters from Moscow. In them was some talk about the exultation of the petty bourgeoisie preparing to repeat the memorable days of the Paris Commune.

And in the meantime the foremost and most dangerous front of the Republic hung by a thin railway thread and flamed, setting up an unprecedented heroic conflagration which sufficed for three more years of hungry, typhus-ridden, homeless war.

The Men Who Did It

In Svyazhsk Trotsky, who was able to give the newborn Army a backbone of steel, who himself sank roots into the soil refusing to yield an inch of ground no matter what happened, who was able to show this handful of defenders a calmness icier than theirs—in Svyazhsk, Trotsky was not alone. Gathered there were old party workers, future members of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, and of the Military Councils of the several Armies to whom the future historian of the Civil War will refer as the Marshals of the Great Revolution. Rosengoltz and Gussev, Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, Kobozev, Mezhlauk, the other Smirnov, and many other comrades whose names I no longer recall. From among the sailors, I remember Raskolnikov and the late Markin.

Rosengoltz in his railway car almost from the very first day sprouted the office of the Revolutionary Military Council; extruded maps and rattled typewriters—obtained God knows where—in short, he began building up a strong, geometrically perfect organizational apparatus, with precise connections, indefatigable working capacity and simple in scheme.

In the days to come, whatever the Army or the front, wherever the work began to sputter, Rosengoltz was immediately brought in like a queen-bee in a sack, placed into the disturbed bee hive and would immediately proceed to build, organize, forming cells, buzzing over the telegraph wires. Despite the military overcoat and enormous pistol in his belt, nothing martial could be discerned in his figure, nor in his pale, slightly soft face. His tremendous force did not lie in this field at all, but rather in his natural ability to renew, establish connections, raise the tempo of a halting, infected bloodstream to an explosive speed. At the side of Trotsky he was like a dynamo, regular, well-oiled, noiseless, with powerful levers moving day after day, spinning the untearable web of organization.

I do not recall just what kind of work I.N. Smirnov officially performed in the staff of the Fifth Army. Whether he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council or at the same time also head of the Political Department; but apart from all titles and frameworks he embodied the ethics of the revolution. He was the highest moral criterion; the communist conscience of Svyazhsk.

Even among the non-party soldier masses and those communists who had not known him previously, his amazing purity and integrity were immediately recognized. It is hardly likely that he himself was aware how much he was feared; how everyone feared nothing so much as to reveal cowardice and weakness before the eyes of this man, who never yelled at anyone, who simply remained himself, calm, courageous. No one commanded as much respect as Ivan Nikitich. Everyone felt that in the worst moment he would be the strongest and most fearless.

With Trotsky—it was to die in battle after the last bullet had been fired; to die enthusiastically, oblivious of wounds. With Trotsky—it was the sacred pathos of struggle; words and gestures recalling the best pages of the Great French Revolution.

But with Comrade Smirnov (so it seemed to us at the time and so we spoke in whispers to each other as we huddled close together on the floor during those already cold autumnal nights)—Comrade Smirnov: this was pure calm when “up against the wall”; or when being grilled by the Whites; or in a filthy prison hole. Yes, that is how one talked about him at Svyazhsk.

Boris Danilovich Mikhailov came a little later, directly from Moscow, I believe, or generally from the center. He arrived in a civilian coat, with that bright, rapidly changing expression on his face that people have on being freed from prison or big cities.

Within a few hours he was completely overcome by the wild intoxication of Svyazhsk. Changing clothes, he went out on reconnaissance patrol in the vicinity of White Kazan, and returned three days later, tired, his face wind-tanned, his body crawling with the ubiquitous lice. By way of compensation, he was all in one piece.

It is a fascinating spectacle to observe the profound inner process taking place in people who arrive at a revolutionary front: they catch fire like a straw roof lit on all four sides, and then on cooling off become transformed into a fire-proof, perfectly clear and uniform piece of cast iron.

Youngest of all was Mezhlauk. Valerian Ivanovich. He had a particularly hard time. His younger brother and wife had remained behind in Kazan and, according to rumor, had been shot. Later it turned out that his brother actually had died there, while his wife suffered indescribably. It was not customary to complain or talk about one’s misfortunes at Svyazhsk. And Mezhlauk kept an honest silence, did his work, and walked through the sticky autumn mud in his long cavalry coat, all of him concentrated on one burning point: Kazan.

Meanwhile the Whites began to sense that with its strengthened resistance, Svyazhsk was growing into something great and dangerous.

Intermittent skirmishes and attacks came to an end; a regular siege, with large organized forces on all sides was started. But they had already let slip the propitious moment.

Old Slavin, Commander of the Fifth Army, not a very gifted colonel but one who knew his business exactly and thoroughly, fixed on a key point of defense, worked out a definitive plan and carried it through with truly Latvian stubborness.

Svyazhsk stood firm, its feet planted in the ground like a bull, its broad forehead lowered toward Kazan, standing immovable on the spot and impatiently shaking its horns sharp as bayonets.

One sunny autumn morning came narrow, agile and swift torpedo-boats from the Baltic fleet to Svyazhsk. Their appearance created a sensation. The Army now felt the river side protected. A series of artillery duels began on the Volga, occurring three or four times daily. Covered by the fire of our batteries concealed along the shore, our flotilla now ventured far forward. These forays were crowned by such extremely audacious ones as that undertaken on the morning of September 9 by Sailor Markin, one of the founders and outstanding heroes of the Red fleet. On an unwieldy, armor-plated tug boat he ventured far out to the very piers of Kazan, landed, drove off the crews of enemy batteries by machine gun fire and removed the locks from several guns.

Another time, late at night on August 30, our ships came flush up to Kazan, shelled the city, set fire to several barges loaded with munitions and food supplies, and withdrew without losing a single ship. Among others Trotsky, together with the Commander, was aboard the torpedo-boat “Prochny” which had to fix its steering gear while drifting alongside an enemy barge and under the muzzles of the White Guard artillery.

Vatzetis, commander-in-chief of the Eastern front, arrived at a moment when the offensive against Kazan was already in full swing. Most of us, myself among them, had little exact information concerning the outcome of the conference; only one thing quickly became a matter of general knowledge and was greeted with deep satisfaction on all sides: Our old man (that is what we called our commander among ourselves) declared himself opposed to Vatzetis’ views, who wanted to undertake an attack against Kazan from the left river bank, while our commander decided to storm Kazan on the right bank which dominates the city and not on the left bank which is flat and exposed.

The Whites Advance

But precisely at a time when the entire Fifth Army was tensely poised for the attack, when its main forces at last began pushing forward under constant counter-attacks and many heavy day-long battles, three “luminaries” of White Guard Russia got together in order to put an end to the protracted epic of Svyazhsk. Savinkov, Kappel and Fortunatov at the head of a considerable force undertook a desperate raid against a railroad station adjoining Svyazhsk, in order in this way to capture Svyazhsk itself and the Volga bridge. The raid was brilliantly executed; after making a long detour, the Whites suddenly swooped down on the station Shikhrana, shot it to pieces, seized the station buildings, cut the connections with the rest of the railway line and burned a munition train stationed there. The small defending force at Shikhrana was slaughtered to the last man.

Nor is this all; they literally hunted down and extirpated every living thing in this little station. I had the opportunity to see Shikhrana a few hours after the raid. It bore the stigma of the completely irrational pogrom violence that stamped all the victories of these gentlemen who never felt themselves the masters and future inhabitants of the soil accidentally and temporarily conquered.

In a courtyard, a cow lay bestially murdered (I say murdered advisedly, not slaughtered); the chicken coop was filled senselessly with chickens riddled in all too human a fashion. The well, the little vegetable garden, the water tower and the houses were treated as if they had been captured human beings and, moreover, Bolsheviks and “sheenies” [a derogatory term for Jews]. The intestines had been ripped out of everything. Animals and inanimate objects sprawled everywhere, decimated, violated, ugly-dead. Alongside this horrible shambles of everything that once had been a human habitation, the indescribable, unutterable death of a few railway employees and Red Army men caught by surprise appeared quite in the nature of things.

Only in Goya’s illustrations of the Spanish campaign and guerrilla war can a similar harmony be found of wind-swept trees bending low beneath the weight of hanged men, of dust on roadways, of blood and stones.

From the station Shikhrana, the Savinkov detachment turned toward Svyazhsk, moving along the railroad. We sent our armored train “Free Russia” to meet them. So far as I am able to recall, it was armed with long range naval guns. Its commander, however, did not rise to the level of his task. Being surrounded on two sides (so it appeared to him), he left his train and rushed back to the Revolutionary Military Council in order “to report.”

In his absence “Free Russia” was shot to pieces and burned. Its black, burning hulk lay derailed for a long time beside the roadbed very close to Svyazhsk.

After the destruction of the armored train the road to the Volga seemed completely open. The Whites stood directly beneath Svyazhsk, some 1-1/2 to 2 versts away from the Fifth Army’s headquarters. Panic ensued. Part of the Political Department, if not all of it, rushed to the piers and aboard the steam boats.

The regiment, fighting virtually on Volga’s banks but higher upstream, wavered and then fled with its commanders and commissars. Toward morning, its maddened detachments were found aboard the staff ships of the Volga war fleet.

In Svyazhsk only the Fifth Army staff with its officers and the train of Trotsky remained.

How Svyazhsk Was Saved

Lev Davidovich [Trotsky] mobilized the entire personnel of the train, all the clerks, wireless operators, hospital workers, and the guard commanded by the Chief of Staff of the fleet, Comrade Lepetenko (by the way, one of the most courageous and self-sacrificing soldiers of the revolution whose biography could very well provide this book with its most brilliant chapter)—in a word, everyone able to bear a rifle.

The staff offices stood deserted; there was no “rear” any longer. Everything was thrown against the Whites who had rolled almost flush to the station. From Shikhrana to the first houses of Svyazhsk the entire road was churned up by shells, covered with dead horses, abandoned weapons and empty cartridge shells. The closer to Svyazhsk, all the greater the havoc. The advance of the Whites was halted only after they had leaped over the gigantic charred skeleton of the armored train, still smoking and smelling of molten metal. The advance surges to the very threshold, then rolls back boiling like a receding wave only to fling itself once more against the hastily mobilized reserves of Svyazhsk. Here both sides stand facing each other for several hours, here are many dead.

The Whites then decided that they had before them a fresh and well organized division of whose existence even their intelligence service had remained unaware. Exhausted from their 48-hour raid, the soldiers tended to overestimate the strength of the enemy and did not even suspect that opposing them was only a hastily thrown together handful of fighters with no one behind them except Trotsky and Slavin sitting beside a map in a smoke-filled sleepless room of the deserted headquarters in the center of depopulated Svyazhsk where bullets were whistling through the streets.

Throughout this night, like all the previous ones, Lev Davidovich’s train remained standing there as always without its engine. Not a single section of the Fifth Army advancing on Kazan and about to storm it was bothered that night or diverted from the front to cover a virtually defenseless Svyazhsk. The army and the fleet learned about the night attack only after it was all over, after the Whites were already in retreat firmly convinced that almost a whole division was confronting them.

The next day 27 deserters who had fled to the ships in the most critical moment were tried and shot. Among them were several communists. Much was later said about the shooting of these 27, especially in the hinterland, of course, where they did not know by how thin a thread hung the road to Moscow and our entire offensive against Kazan, undertaken with our last means and forces.

To begin with, the whole army was agog with talk about communists having turned cowards; and that laws were not written for them; that they could desert with impunity, while an ordinary rank and filer was shot down like a dog.

If not for the exceptional courage of Trotsky, the army commander and other members of the Revolutionary Military Council, the prestige of the communists working in the army would have been impaired and lost for a long time to come.

No fine speeches can make it sound plausible to an army suffering every possible privation in the course of six weeks, fighting practically with bare hands, without even bandages, that cowardice is not cowardice and that for guilt there may be “extenuating circumstances.”

It is said that among those shot were many good comrades, some even whose guilt was redeemed by their previous services, by years in prison and exile. Perfectly true. No one contends that they perished in order to prop up those precepts of the old military code of “setting an example” when amidst the beating of drums “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” were exacted. Of course, Svyazhsk is a tragedy.

But everyone who has lived the life of the Red Army life, who was born and grew strong with it in the battles of Kazan, will testify that the iron spirit of this army would have never crystallized, that the fusion between the party and the soldier masses, between the rank and file and the summits of the commanding staff would have never been realized if, on the eve of storming Kazan where hundreds of soldiers were to lose their lives, the party had failed to show clearly before the eyes of the whole army that it was prepared to offer the Revolution this great and bloody sacrifice, that for the party, too, the severe laws of comradely discipline are binding; that the party, too, has the courage to apply ruthlessly the laws of the Soviet Republic to its own members as well.

Twenty-seven were shot and this filled in the breach which the famous raiders had succeeded in making in the self-confidence and unity of the Fifth Army. This salvo which exacted punishment from communists as well as commanders and simple soldiers for cowardice and dishonor in battle forced the least class-conscious section of the soldier mass and the one most inclined toward desertion (and of course there was such a section, too) to pull themselves together, and to align themselves with those who went consciously and without any compulsion into battle.

Precisely in these days was decided the fate of Kazan, and not that alone but the fate of the entire White intervention. The Red Army found its self-confidence and became regenerated and strong during the long weeks of defense and offense.

In conditions of constant danger and with the greatest moral exertions it worked out its laws, its discipline, its new heroic statutes. For the first time, panic in the face of the enemy’s more modern technique became dissolved. Here one learned to make headway against any artillery; and involuntarily, from the elemental instinct of self-preservation, new methods of warfare were born, those specific battle methods which are already being studied in the highest military academies as the methods of the Civil War. Of extreme importance is the fact that in those days in Svyazhsk there was precisely such a man as Trotsky.

Trotsky’s Role

No matter what his calling or his name, it is clear that the creator of the Red Army, the future Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, would have had to be in Svyazhsk; had to live through the entire practical experience of these weeks of battle; had to call upon all the resources of his will and organizational genius for the defense of Svyazhsk, for the defense of the army organism smashed under the fire of the Whites.

Moreover, in revolutionary war there is still another force, another factor without which victory cannot be gained, and that is: the mighty romanticism of the Revolution which enables people straight from the barricades to cast themselves immediately in the harsh forms of the military machine, without losing the quick, light step gained in political demonstrations or the independent spirit and flexibility gained perhaps in long years of party work under illegality.

To have conquered in 1918 one had to take all the fire of the revolution, all of its incandescent heat, and harness them to the vulgar, repellent age-old pattern of the army.

Up till now history has always solved this problem with imposing but moth-eaten theatrical tricks. She would summon to the stage some individual in a “three-cornered hat and a gray field uniform” and he or some other general on a white horse would cut the revolutionary blood and marrow into republics, banners, slogans.

In military construction, as in so many other things, the Russian Revolution went its own way. Insurrection and war fused into one, the Army and the Party grew together, inseparably interwoven, and on the regimental banners were inscribed the unity of their mutual aims, all the sharpest formulas of the class struggle. In the days of Svyazhsk all this remained as yet unformed, only hanging in the air, seeking for expression.

The Workers’ and Peasants’ Army had to find expression somehow; it had to take on its outward shape, produce its own formulas, but how? This no one clearly knew yet. At that time, of course, no precepts, no dogmatic program were available in accordance with which this titanic organism could grow and develop.

In the party and in the masses there lived only a foreboding; a creative premonition of this military revolutionary organization which was never seen before and to which each day’s battle whispered some new real characteristic.

Trotsky’s great merit lies in this, that he caught up in flight the least gesture of the masses which already bore upon it the stamp of this sought-for and unique organizational formula.

He sifted out and then set going all the little practices whereby besieged Svyazhsk simplified, hastened or organized its work of battle. And this, not simply in the narrow technical sense. No. Every new successful combination of “specialist and commissar,” of him who commands and the one executing the command and bearing the responsibility for it—every successful combination, after it had met the test of experience and had been lucidly formulated, was immediately transformed into an order, a circular, a regulation. In this way the living revolutionary experience was not lost, nor forgotten, nor deformed.

The norm obligatory for all was not mediocrity but on the contrary, the best, the things of genius conceived by the masses themselves in the most fiery, most creative moments of the struggle. In little things as well as big—whether in such complex matters as the division of labor among the members of the Revolutionary Military Council or the quick, snappy, friendly gesture exchanged in greeting between a Red Commander and a soldier each busy and hurrying somewhere—it all had to be drawn from life, assimilated and returned as a norm to the masses for universal use. And wherever things weren’t moving, or there was creaking, or bungling, one had to sense what was wrong, one had to help, one had to pull, as the midwife pulls out the newborn babe during a difficult birth.

One can be the most adept at articulating, one can give to a new army a rationally impeccable plastic form, and nonetheless render its spirit frigid, permit it to evaporate and remain incapable of keeping this spirit alive within the chickenwire of juridical formulas. To prevent this, one must be a great revolutionist; one must possess the intuition of a creator and an internal radio transmitter of vast power without which there is no approaching the masses.

In the last analysis it is precisely this revolutionary instinct which is the court of highest sanction; which exactly purges its new creative justice of all deeply hidden counter-revolutionary back-slidings. It places its hand of violence upon the deceitful formal justice in the name of the highest, proletarian justice which does not permit its elastic laws to ossify, to become divorced from life and burden the shoulders of Red Army soldiers with petty, aggravating, superfluous loads.

Trotsky possessed this intuitive sense.

In him the revolutionist was never elbowed aside by the soldier, the military leader, the commander. And when with his inhuman, terrible voice he confronted a deserter, we stood in fear of him as one of us, a great rebel who could crush and slay anyone for base cowardice, for treason not to the military but the world-proletarian revolutionary cause.

It was impossible for Trotsky to have been a coward, for otherwise the contempt of this extraordinary army would have crushed him; and it could never have forgiven a weakling for the fraternal blood of the 27 which sprayed its first victory.

A few days before the occupation of Kazan by our troops Lev Davidovich had to leave Svyazhsk; the news of the attempt on Lenin’s life called him to Moscow. But neither Savinkov’s raid on Svyazhsk, organized with great mastery by the Social Revolutionists, nor the attempt to assassinate Lenin, undertaken by the same party almost simultaneously with Savinkov’s raid, could now halt the Red Army. The final wave of the offensive engulfed Kazan.

On September 9 late at night the troops were embarked on ships and by morning, around 5:30, the clumsy many-decked transports, convoyed by torpedo boats, moved toward the piers of Kazan. It was strange to sail in moonlit twilight past the half-demolished mill with a green roof, behind which a White battery had been located; past the half-burned “Delphin” gutted and beached on the deserted shore; past all the familiar river bends, tongues of land, sandbanks and inlets over which from dawn to evening death had walked for so many weeks, clouds of smoke had rolled, and golden sheaves of artillery fire had flared.

We sailed with lights out in absolute silence over the black, cold, smoothly flowing Volga.

Aft of the stern, light foam on the dull humming wake washed away by waves that remember nothing and flow unconcernedly to the Caspian Sea. And yet the place through which the giant ship was at this moment silently gliding had only yesterday been a maelstrom ripped and plowed by wildly exploding shells. And here, where a moment ago a nightbird tipped noiselessly with its wing the water from which a slight mist curled upward into the cold air, yesterday so many white spumy fountains were rising; yesterday, words of command were restlessly sounding and slim torpedo boats were threading their way through smoke and flames and a rain of steel splinters, their hulls trembling from the compressed impatience of engines and from the recoil of their two-gun batteries which fired once a minute with a sound resembling iron hiccups.

People were firing, scattering away under the hail of downclattering shells, mopping up the blood on the decks.... And now everything is silent; the Volga flows as it has flowed a thousand years ago, as it will flow centuries from now.

We reached the piers without firing a shot. The first flickers of dawn lit up the sky. In the greyish-pink twilight, humped, black, charred phantoms began to appear. Cranes, beams of burned buildings, shattered telegraph poles—all this seemed to have endured endless sorrow and seemed to have lost all capacity for feeling like a tree with twisted withered branches. Death’s kingdom washed by the icy roses of the northern dawn.

And the deserted guns with their muzzles uplifted resemble in the twilight cast down figures, frozen in mute despair, with heads propped up by hands cold and wet with dew.

Fog. People begin shivering from cold and nervous tension; the air is permeated with the odor of machine oil and tarred rope. The gunner’s blue collar turns with the movement of the body viewing in amazement the unpopulated, soundless shore reposing in dead silence.

This is victory. 

In Honor Of  Women’s History Month- In Nana Kamkov’s Time- For All The Red Emmas

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Frank Jackman was not sure where or when he first heard the term “Red Emma” applied to the old- time revolutionary women who came of age around the turn of the 20^th century and who blossomed in the time of the Russian revolution, particularly its Bolshevik phase and of the time of the defense of the revolution in the few year period of the civil war against the national and international White Guards. He did know that Emma Goldman the old bomb-throwing (at least in her mind) firebrand anarchist and early defender (and early non-defender) of the Bolshevik experiment bore that sobriquet and so that might have been the genesis of the term but in any case here is the story, or really sketch of a story since a lot was unknown about her exploits, of one such Red Emma, Nana Kamkov, who held her own in the dark days of the Russian revolution of the eve of the decisive battle for Kazan…

Nana Kamkov’s name first became known to revolutionary history indirectly through her membership in the remnants of a red peasant brigade fighting the Whites in the Russian Civil War around 1919 , a bare platoon at that point whose core were five peasant soldiers from Omsk who had been conscripted and fought together for the Czar in the disastrous World War I battles, gone home at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, farmed their newly Soviet-provided land, were subsequently dispossessed of that land by Orlov the previous owner when the White Guards came through Omsk , and in reaction they had joined the Reds in 1919 to get that land back. After several engagements crisscrossing Central Russia they, the remnant anyhow, found themselves in soon to be besieged Kazan. Nana had been assigned to their unit in the crush of organizational tangles preparing for the defense of Kazan. Nana had also been caught inside Kazan at a time when that locale was being besieged by White Guard forces, particularly the feared Czech Legion that was running amok from Siberia to the Urals in their attempts to get home. Previously Nana’s story, the story of a mere slip of girl of sixteen, had been submerged as part of the story of this unit, a unit now led by one of the peasant soldiers, Vladimir Suslov, but further research found that she deserved, more than deserved, additional recognition in her own right

Yes, Nana Kamkov, deserved a better fate that to written off as some play thing for some loutish peasant boy, Grunsha Zanoff by name, no matter how Red Army brave he was just that moment and no matter how peasant handsome he was, and he was, to Nana’s eyes. Nana had come off the land as a child, land in Omsk and as fate would have it also Orlov’s land, when after the last revolution, the one in 1905, the government encouraged capitalist exploitation of the land in order to break down the backward-looking peasant communes. Her parents had abandoned the land and had travelled to live in Kazan and her father had set up shop as a locksmith, a good one. Nana had gone school and had been an outstanding student if somewhat socially backward, she had not been like the other girls boy-crazy, although she confessed in one girlish moment to a classmate that she thought some Prince Charming would see her on the Kazan streets, be immediately smitten by her purposeful carriage and carry her off to some golden palace but that was just a moment’s thought. Nana though desperately wanted to become an engineer although the family resources precluded such a fate.

One day in the summer of 1917 at the height of the revolutionary fervor she ran across a Bolshevik agitator in the central square of Kazan (later killed in Kiev fighting off some White Guards in that location) who told her, young impressionable her, aged fourteen, no more, that if the Soviets survived she would be able to pursue her engineering career, hell, the Bolsheviks would encourage it.

From that time Nana had been a single-minded Red Guard soldier performing many dangerous tasks (involving setting off explosives, some espionage work and so on, the specifics unfortunately have been lost despite further inquiry) until the Whites threatened Kazan and she was trapped in the city and had joined Vladimir’s remnants as a result of various organizational tangles. And there she spied Grunsha among his soldiers, loutish, foolish Grunsha, although handsome she admitted. Perhaps it was the time of her time, perhaps she still had a little foolish schoolgirl notion to be with a man, to be a woman, just in case things didn’t work out and she was killed, or worse, executed but one cold night she snuggled up to the sleeping Grunsha and that was that. And she was not sorry although she blushed, blushed profusely when Grunsha’s comrades from home would see them together and knowingly laugh they knew had happened. She had thereafter taken him under her wing and was teaching him to read and to think about things, big idea things, how to work that land back in Omsk better, more scientifically, just in case they weren’t killed, or worse executed. Practical young woman, very practical. And so young Nana entered the red pantheon, and maybe she would drag young Grunsha along too.

Just as she was instructing Grunsha in some Gogol short story a messenger came to their line, a messenger from the river in front of Kazan, from the wind- swept Volga. The message said that Trotsky himself , Trotsky of the phantom armored train rushing to this and that front, seemingly everywhere at the same time, a man that put fear in the hearts of whites and reds alike, had decided to fight and die before Kazan if necessary to save the revolution, to save their precious land. Vladimir and his comrades, including our Red Emma, Red Emma who if the truth be told despite her tender years of sweet sixteen was the best soldier of the lot, and should have been the commissar except those lumpish peasants would not have listened to her, reaffirmed their blood oath. They were not sure of Lenin, thinking him a little too smart, and maybe he had something up his sleeve, maybe he was just another Jew, he looked the part with that bald head of his, but stout-hearted Trotsky, if he was willing to die then what else could they do but stand. If they must die they would die in defense of Kazan, and maybe just maybe somebody would hear of their story, the story of five peasant boys and a pretty red-hearted city girl as brave as they, and lift their heads and roar back too.

And so young Nana entered the red pantheon, and maybe she would drag young Grunsha along too...

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.

*******

Spartacist English edition No. 63	Winter 2012-2013

Larissa Reissner on Trotsky’s Red Army

The Battle of Svyazhsk, a Revolutionary Legend

(Women and Revolution pages)

We print below an account of the battle of Svyazhsk and Kazan, a turning point in the first year of the Civil War that erupted in 1918 against the victorious October Revolution. This eyewitness account was written around 1922 by the Bolshevik political journalist Larissa Reissner, who, as a Red Army soldier, participated in the battle. “Svyazhsk,” translated into English by John G. Wright and Amy Jensen, was published in the June 1943 issue of Fourth International, the theoretical organ of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.

In 1918, amid the devastation wrought by World War I, the young workers state faced a counterrevolutionary onslaught of 14 imperialist/Allied expeditionary forces as well as an array of tsarist White Guard armies in collusion with the ousted landlords and capitalists (see “Bourgeois Liberalism vs. the October Revolution,” page 4). In late summer, the Red Army under the leadership of Leon Trotsky engaged in battle about 500 miles east of Moscow on the Volga River on an approach to Kazan. Trotsky’s famous armored train, stationed at Svyazhsk as the command center, was used for the first time in this campaign. Vastly outnumbered Red Army soldiers turned back the Czechoslovak counterrevolutionaries there through sheer revolutionary determination, heroism and self-sacrifice. It was this victory that made possible the rapid concentration of Red Army, Navy and Air Force units that took Kazan, where a workers uprising also contributed to driving out the Whites. In 1922, Trotsky wrote of the battles:

“Out of a shaky, unsteady, disintegrating mass, a real army was created. We took Kazan on September 10, 1918, and recovered Simbirsk on the following day. That moment was a notable date in the history of the Red Army. Immediately, we felt firm ground under our feet. These were no longer our first helpless attempts: from now on we could fight and win.”

— “The Path of the Red Army” (May 1922), The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky: How the Revolution Armed, Vol. 1 (London: New Park Publications, 1979)

Reissner’s vivid essay brings these events to life.

Heroic Woman Communist

Larissa Reissner was born in 1895 in Lublin, Poland, then under Russian tsarist rule, into a family of Polish-Russian-German origin. She spent her early years in the Siberian capital city of Tomsk, where her father Mikhail had procured a law professorship. In 1903 her family fled tsarist repression to Berlin, where Larissa spent four years. Exiled Russian revolutionaries and leading members of the German Social Democracy, such as Karl Liebknecht, were familiar guests in the household. Larissa’s father joined the Bolsheviks for a few years. On returning to Russia, Larissa led a privileged, actively intellectual life in St. Petersburg, traveling in socialist circles and writing articles and literary pieces.

Joining the Bolshevik Party a few months after the Bolshevik conquest of power, Reissner went on to become the first woman political commissar in the Red Army. For five years she was married to Fyodor Raskolnikov, a leading Bolshevik in the Kronstadt naval garrison rebellion in July 1917. During the siege of Kazan, Raskolnikov was appointed Commander of the Volga Naval Flotilla. Reissner headed the Volga Fleet intelligence section and specialized in espionage work behind enemy lines.

Everywhere Reissner went, she wrote passionately of her experiences in the revolution. As Karl Radek, her companion in her last years, wrote in a memoir after her death from typhus in 1926, “She was not a contemplative artist but a fighting artist who sees a struggle from the inside and knows how to convey its dynamics—the dynamics of humanity’s destiny” (Richard Chappell, ed., Hamburg at the Barricades and Other Writings on Weimar Germany [London: Pluto Press, 1977]).

Numerous collections of Reissner’s essays and articles appeared in Russian in the early and mid 1920s. Some were also published in German, but very little exists in English or other languages. Her books include The Front, a collection of her Civil War sketches from which “Svyazhsk” was taken; Afghanistan, based on her experiences as part of the Soviet diplomatic delegation at the court of the Emir; and Coal, Iron and Living People, articles on her travels through the industrial areas of the young Russian workers state. Hamburg at the Barricades, vignettes from the days of the aborted 1923 revolution in Germany where Reissner was a Comintern representative, is available in English and German.

Reissner recounts the heroic roles of many individuals in the battle of Svyazhsk. She too played an important part in the hard-won victory. In his autobiography, My Life (1929), Trotsky wrote of her:

“Larissa Reisner, who called Ivan Nikitich [Smirnov] ‘the conscience of Sviyazhsk,’ was herself prominent in the Fifth army, as well as in the revolution as a whole. This fine young woman flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many. With her appearance of an Olympian goddess, she combined a subtle and ironical mind with the courage of a warrior. After the capture of Kazan by the Whites, she went into the enemy camp to reconnoitre, disguised as a peasant woman. But her appearance was too extraordinary, and she was arrested. While she was being cross-examined by a Japanese intelligence officer, she took advantage of an interval to slip through the carelessly guarded door and disappear. After that, she engaged in intelligence work. Later, she sailed on war-boats and took part in battles. Her sketches about the civil war are literature. With equal gusto, she would write about the Ural industries and the rising of the workers in the Ruhr. She was anxious to know and to see all, and to take part in everything. In a few brief years, she became a writer of the first rank. But after coming unscathed through fire and water, this Pallas of the revolution suddenly burned up with typhus in the peaceful surroundings of Moscow.”

The Vision of Women’s Emancipation

The young workers state mobilized the masses of workers and peasants in a political and military war to defeat the imperialist invasion and defend the proletarian revolution. Inspired in part by the Bolshevik promise of women’s emancipation, tens of thousands of women joined the military, becoming soldiers, nurses, commanders and political leaders. Their talents as spies were so valuable that Lenin ordered the establishment of a special school where numerous young women were trained to carry out espionage, scouting and sabotage behind White lines. Many, such as Varsenika Kasparova, head of the Agitational Department of the Bureau of Military Commissars in the Civil War, were later adherents of Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

Integral to the Bolshevik vision was the understanding that the liberation of women could not be separated from the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat as a whole. However, given the desperate conditions of the Civil War and the massive poverty and social backwardness of the predominantly peasant country, the Bolsheviks’ determination to draw women into full participation in economic, social and political life was an overwhelming challenge (see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English edition], No. 59, Spring 2006). Lenin and the Bolshevik Party knew that the complete liberation of women depended on the international extension of socialist revolution, to which the Communist International, founded in 1919, was dedicated.

The continuing postponement of international revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to usurp power in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24. Many of the heroes described in Reissner’s piece fell to Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. Among them was Ivan Nikitich Smirnov who, like many of Stalin’s victims, had been part of the Left Opposition. A whole generation of revolutionary communists was destroyed; many were executed. Reissner’s writings were disappeared. Even when her works saw a revival under Khrushchev in 1958, the volume dropped “Svyazhsk” with its depiction of Trotsky as the leader of the Red Army.

Just as the Stalinist bureaucracy wiped out Lenin’s party, it also reversed many of the gains of Soviet women. But the ensuing Stalinist Thermidor could not wholly erase the gains achieved by women as a result of the socialization of the means of production. The 1991-92 counterrevolution under Boris Yeltsin thrust the working people into misery, exploitation and oppression under capitalism. The International Communist League embraces the liberating goals of communism that inspired such heroism and sacrifice in the Civil War and strives for new October Revolutions worldwide.

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From the Archives of Marxism

Svyazhsk

by Larissa Reissner

Whenever two comrades who worked together in the year 1918, fought beneath Kazan against the Czechoslovaks and then in the Urals or at Samara and Tsaritsin, chance to meet again many years later one of them is bound to ask after the first few questions:

“Remember Svyazhsk?” And they will clasp each other’s hand again.

What is Svyazhsk? Today it is a legend, one of the revolutionary legends which still remain unchronicled but which are being retold over and over again from one end to another of this Russian vastness. Not one of the demobilized Red Army men from among the old-timers, the founders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army, upon returning home and reminiscing about the three years of Civil War will skip over the fabulous epic of Svyazhsk, the cross-roads whence the tide of the revolutionary offensive started rolling on all four sides. On the east—toward the Urals. On the south—toward the Caspian shores, the Caucasus and the borders of Persia. On the north toward Archangel and Poland. Not all together, of course; nor simultaneously. But it was only after Svyazhsk and Kazan that the Red Army became crystallized into those fighting and political forms which, after undergoing change and being perfected, have become classic for the RSFSR [Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic].

On August 6 (1918) numerous hastily organized regiments fled from Kazan; and the best among them, the class-conscious section, clung to Svyazhsk, halted there and decided to make a stand and fight. By the time the mobs of deserters fleeing from Kazan had almost reached Nizhny Novgorod, the dam erected at Svyazhsk had already halted the Czechoslovaks; and their general who tried to take the railroad bridge across the Volga by storm was killed during the night attack. Thus in the very first clash between the Whites who had just taken Kazan and consequently were stronger in morale and equipment, and the core of the Red Army seeking to defend the bridge-head across the Volga, the head of the Czechoslovak offensive was lopped off. They lost their most popular and gifted leader in General Blagotich. Neither the Whites, flushed by their recent victory, nor the Reds rallying round Svyazhsk had any inkling of the historical importance that their initial trial skirmishes would have.

It is extremely difficult to convey the military importance of Svyazhsk without having the necessary materials at hand, without a map, and without the testimony of those comrades who were in the ranks of the Fifth Army at that time. Much has already been forgotten by me; faces and names flit by as in a fog. But there is something that no one will ever forget and that is: the feeling of supreme responsibility for holding Svyazhsk. This was the bond between all its defenders from a member of the Revolutionary Military Council to the last Red rank and filer in desperate search for his somewhere extant, retreating regiment, who suddenly turned back and faced Kazan in order to fight to the last, with worn-out rifle in hand and fanatic determination in his heart. The situation was understood by everyone as follows: Another step backward would open the Volga to the enemy down to Nizhny (Novgorod) and thus the road to Moscow.

Further retreat meant the beginning of the end; the death sentence on the Republic of the Soviets.

How correct this is from a strategic point of view, I know not. Perhaps the Army if rolled back even further might have gathered into a similar fist on one of the innumerable black dots which speckle the map and thenceforth carried its banners to victory. But indubitably it was correct from the standpoint of morale. And insofar as a retreat from the Volga meant a complete collapse at that time, to that extent the possibility of holding out, with ones back against the bridge, imbued us with a real hope.

The ethics of the revolution formulated the complex situation succinctly as follows: To retreat is to have the Czechs in Nizhny and in Moscow. No surrender of Svyazhsk and the bridge means the reconquest of Kazan by the Red Army.

The Arrival of Trotsky’s Train

It was, I believe, either on the third or fourth day after the fall of Kazan that Trotsky arrived at Svyazhsk. His train came to a determined stop at the little station; his locomotive panted a little, was uncoupled, and departed to drink water, but did not return. The cars remained standing in a row as immobile as the dirty straw-thatched peasant huts and the barracks occupied by the Fifth Army’s staff. This immobility silently underscored that there was no place to go from here, and that it was impermissible to leave.

Little by little the fanatical faith that this little station would become the starting point for a counter-offensive against Kazan began to take on the shape of reality.

Every new day that this God-forsaken, poor railway siding held out against the far stronger enemy, added to its strength and raised its mood of confidence. From somewhere in the rear, from far-off villages in the hinterland, came at first soldiers one by one, then tiny detachments, and finally military formations in a far better state of preservation.

I see it now before me, this Svyazhsk where not a single soldier fought “under compulsion.” Everything that was alive there and fighting in self-defense—all of it was bound together by the strongest ties of voluntary discipline, voluntary participation in a struggle which seemed so hopeless at the outset.

Human beings sleeping on the floors of the station house, in dirty huts filled with straw and broken glass—they hardly hoped for success and consequently feared nothing. The speculation on when and how all this “would end” interested none. “Tomorrow”—simply did not exist; there was only a brief, hot, smoky piece of time: Today. And one lived on that, as one lives in harvest time.

Morning, noon, evening, night—each single hour was prolonged to the utmost count; every single hour had to be lived through and used up to the last second. It was necessary to reap each hour carefully, finely like ripe wheat in the field is cut to the very root. Each hour seemed so rich, so utterly unlike all of previous life. No sooner did it vanish than in recollection it seemed a miracle. And it was a miracle.

Planes came and went, dropping their bombs on the station and the railway cars; machine guns with their repulsive barking and the calm syllables of artillery, drew nigh and then withdrew again, whilst a human being in a torn military coat, civilian hat, and boots with toes protruding—in short, one of the defenders of Svyazhsk—would smilingly produce a watch from his pocket and bethink himself:

“So that’s what it is now—1:30 or 4:30 o’clock. Or, it is 6:20. Therefore I am still alive. Svyazhsk holds. Trotsky’s train stands on the rails. A lamp now flickers through the window of the Political Department. Good. The day is ended.”

Medical supplies were almost completely absent at Svyazhsk. God knows what the doctors used for bandages. This poverty shamed no one; nor did anyone stand in fear of it. The soldiers on their way with soup kettles to the field kitchen passed by stretchers with the wounded and the dying. Death held no terrors. It was expected daily, always. To lie prone in a wet army coat, with a red splotch on a shirt, with an expressionless face, a muteness that was no longer human—this was something taken for granted.

Brotherhood! Few words have been so abused and rendered pitiful. But brotherhood does come sometimes, in moments of direst need and peril, so selfless, so sacred, so unrepeatable in a single lifetime. And they have not lived and know nothing of life who have never lain at night on a floor in tattered and lice-ridden clothes, thinking all the while how wonderful is the world, infinitely wonderful! That here the old has been overthrown and that life is fighting with bare hands for her irrefutable truth, for the white swans of her resurrection, for something far bigger and better than this patch of star-lit sky showing through the velvet blackness of a window with shattered panes—for the future of all mankind.

Once in a century contact is made and new blood is transfused. These beautiful words, these words, almost inhuman in their beauty, and the smell of living sweat, the living breath of others sleeping beside you on the floor. No nightmares, no sentimentalities but tomorrow the dawn will come and Comrade G., a Czech Bolshevik, will prepare an omelet for the whole “gang”; and the Chief of Staff will pull on a shaggy stiffly frozen shirt washed out last night. A day will dawn in which someone will die, knowing in his last second that death is only something among many other things, and not the main thing at all; that once again Svyazhsk has not been taken and that the dirty wall is still inscribed with a piece of chalk: “Workers of the World Unite!”

Against the Stream

The rainy August days thus passed one by one. The thin, poorly equipped lines did not fall back; the bridge remained in our hands and from the rear, from somewhere far away, reinforcements began to arrive.

Real telephone and telegraph wires began to attach themselves to autumn spider-webs flying in the winds and some kind of enormous, cumbersome, lame apparatus began to operate on the God-forsaken railway station—Svyazhsk, this tiny, hardly discernible black dot on the map of Russia, at which in a moment of flight and despair, the revolution had clutched. Here all of Trotsky’s organizational genius was revealed. He managed to restore the supply lines, got new artillery and a few regiments through to Svyazhsk on railways that were being openly sabotaged; everything needed for the coming offensive was obtained. In addition, it ought to be borne in mind that this work had to be done in the year 1918, when demobilization was still raging, when the appearance on the Moscow streets of a single well dressed detachment of the Red Army would create a real sensation. After all, it meant to swim against the stream, against the exhaustion of four years of war, against the spring floods of the revolution which swept through the whole country the debris of Czarist discipline and wild hatred of anything resembling the bark of old officers’ commands, the barracks, or old army life.

Despite all this, supplies appeared before our very eyes. Newspapers arrived, boots and overcoats came. And wherever they actually hand out boots, and for keeps, there you will find a really solid army staff; there things are stable; there the army stands firmly entrenched and has no thought of fleeing. That’s no joking matter, boots!

The Order of the Red Flag was not yet in existence in the era of Svyazhsk, else it would have been issued to hundreds. Everybody, including the cowardly and the nervous and the simply mediocre workers and Red Army men—everybody, without a single exception, performed unbelievable, heroic deeds; they outdid themselves, like spring streams overflowing their banks they joyfully flooded their own normal levels.

Such was the atmosphere. I remember receiving at that time by extraordinary chance a few letters from Moscow. In them was some talk about the exultation of the petty bourgeoisie preparing to repeat the memorable days of the Paris Commune.

And in the meantime the foremost and most dangerous front of the Republic hung by a thin railway thread and flamed, setting up an unprecedented heroic conflagration which sufficed for three more years of hungry, typhus-ridden, homeless war.

The Men Who Did It

In Svyazhsk Trotsky, who was able to give the newborn Army a backbone of steel, who himself sank roots into the soil refusing to yield an inch of ground no matter what happened, who was able to show this handful of defenders a calmness icier than theirs—in Svyazhsk, Trotsky was not alone. Gathered there were old party workers, future members of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, and of the Military Councils of the several Armies to whom the future historian of the Civil War will refer as the Marshals of the Great Revolution. Rosengoltz and Gussev, Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, Kobozev, Mezhlauk, the other Smirnov, and many other comrades whose names I no longer recall. From among the sailors, I remember Raskolnikov and the late Markin.

Rosengoltz in his railway car almost from the very first day sprouted the office of the Revolutionary Military Council; extruded maps and rattled typewriters—obtained God knows where—in short, he began building up a strong, geometrically perfect organizational apparatus, with precise connections, indefatigable working capacity and simple in scheme.

In the days to come, whatever the Army or the front, wherever the work began to sputter, Rosengoltz was immediately brought in like a queen-bee in a sack, placed into the disturbed bee hive and would immediately proceed to build, organize, forming cells, buzzing over the telegraph wires. Despite the military overcoat and enormous pistol in his belt, nothing martial could be discerned in his figure, nor in his pale, slightly soft face. His tremendous force did not lie in this field at all, but rather in his natural ability to renew, establish connections, raise the tempo of a halting, infected bloodstream to an explosive speed. At the side of Trotsky he was like a dynamo, regular, well-oiled, noiseless, with powerful levers moving day after day, spinning the untearable web of organization.

I do not recall just what kind of work I.N. Smirnov officially performed in the staff of the Fifth Army. Whether he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council or at the same time also head of the Political Department; but apart from all titles and frameworks he embodied the ethics of the revolution. He was the highest moral criterion; the communist conscience of Svyazhsk.

Even among the non-party soldier masses and those communists who had not known him previously, his amazing purity and integrity were immediately recognized. It is hardly likely that he himself was aware how much he was feared; how everyone feared nothing so much as to reveal cowardice and weakness before the eyes of this man, who never yelled at anyone, who simply remained himself, calm, courageous. No one commanded as much respect as Ivan Nikitich. Everyone felt that in the worst moment he would be the strongest and most fearless.

With Trotsky—it was to die in battle after the last bullet had been fired; to die enthusiastically, oblivious of wounds. With Trotsky—it was the sacred pathos of struggle; words and gestures recalling the best pages of the Great French Revolution.

But with Comrade Smirnov (so it seemed to us at the time and so we spoke in whispers to each other as we huddled close together on the floor during those already cold autumnal nights)—Comrade Smirnov: this was pure calm when “up against the wall”; or when being grilled by the Whites; or in a filthy prison hole. Yes, that is how one talked about him at Svyazhsk.

Boris Danilovich Mikhailov came a little later, directly from Moscow, I believe, or generally from the center. He arrived in a civilian coat, with that bright, rapidly changing expression on his face that people have on being freed from prison or big cities.

Within a few hours he was completely overcome by the wild intoxication of Svyazhsk. Changing clothes, he went out on reconnaissance patrol in the vicinity of White Kazan, and returned three days later, tired, his face wind-tanned, his body crawling with the ubiquitous lice. By way of compensation, he was all in one piece.

It is a fascinating spectacle to observe the profound inner process taking place in people who arrive at a revolutionary front: they catch fire like a straw roof lit on all four sides, and then on cooling off become transformed into a fire-proof, perfectly clear and uniform piece of cast iron.

Youngest of all was Mezhlauk. Valerian Ivanovich. He had a particularly hard time. His younger brother and wife had remained behind in Kazan and, according to rumor, had been shot. Later it turned out that his brother actually had died there, while his wife suffered indescribably. It was not customary to complain or talk about one’s misfortunes at Svyazhsk. And Mezhlauk kept an honest silence, did his work, and walked through the sticky autumn mud in his long cavalry coat, all of him concentrated on one burning point: Kazan.

Meanwhile the Whites began to sense that with its strengthened resistance, Svyazhsk was growing into something great and dangerous.

Intermittent skirmishes and attacks came to an end; a regular siege, with large organized forces on all sides was started. But they had already let slip the propitious moment.

Old Slavin, Commander of the Fifth Army, not a very gifted colonel but one who knew his business exactly and thoroughly, fixed on a key point of defense, worked out a definitive plan and carried it through with truly Latvian stubborness.

Svyazhsk stood firm, its feet planted in the ground like a bull, its broad forehead lowered toward Kazan, standing immovable on the spot and impatiently shaking its horns sharp as bayonets.

One sunny autumn morning came narrow, agile and swift torpedo-boats from the Baltic fleet to Svyazhsk. Their appearance created a sensation. The Army now felt the river side protected. A series of artillery duels began on the Volga, occurring three or four times daily. Covered by the fire of our batteries concealed along the shore, our flotilla now ventured far forward. These forays were crowned by such extremely audacious ones as that undertaken on the morning of September 9 by Sailor Markin, one of the founders and outstanding heroes of the Red fleet. On an unwieldy, armor-plated tug boat he ventured far out to the very piers of Kazan, landed, drove off the crews of enemy batteries by machine gun fire and removed the locks from several guns.

Another time, late at night on August 30, our ships came flush up to Kazan, shelled the city, set fire to several barges loaded with munitions and food supplies, and withdrew without losing a single ship. Among others Trotsky, together with the Commander, was aboard the torpedo-boat “Prochny” which had to fix its steering gear while drifting alongside an enemy barge and under the muzzles of the White Guard artillery.

Vatzetis, commander-in-chief of the Eastern front, arrived at a moment when the offensive against Kazan was already in full swing. Most of us, myself among them, had little exact information concerning the outcome of the conference; only one thing quickly became a matter of general knowledge and was greeted with deep satisfaction on all sides: Our old man (that is what we called our commander among ourselves) declared himself opposed to Vatzetis’ views, who wanted to undertake an attack against Kazan from the left river bank, while our commander decided to storm Kazan on the right bank which dominates the city and not on the left bank which is flat and exposed.

The Whites Advance

But precisely at a time when the entire Fifth Army was tensely poised for the attack, when its main forces at last began pushing forward under constant counter-attacks and many heavy day-long battles, three “luminaries” of White Guard Russia got together in order to put an end to the protracted epic of Svyazhsk. Savinkov, Kappel and Fortunatov at the head of a considerable force undertook a desperate raid against a railroad station adjoining Svyazhsk, in order in this way to capture Svyazhsk itself and the Volga bridge. The raid was brilliantly executed; after making a long detour, the Whites suddenly swooped down on the station Shikhrana, shot it to pieces, seized the station buildings, cut the connections with the rest of the railway line and burned a munition train stationed there. The small defending force at Shikhrana was slaughtered to the last man.

Nor is this all; they literally hunted down and extirpated every living thing in this little station. I had the opportunity to see Shikhrana a few hours after the raid. It bore the stigma of the completely irrational pogrom violence that stamped all the victories of these gentlemen who never felt themselves the masters and future inhabitants of the soil accidentally and temporarily conquered.

In a courtyard, a cow lay bestially murdered (I say murdered advisedly, not slaughtered); the chicken coop was filled senselessly with chickens riddled in all too human a fashion. The well, the little vegetable garden, the water tower and the houses were treated as if they had been captured human beings and, moreover, Bolsheviks and “sheenies” [a derogatory term for Jews]. The intestines had been ripped out of everything. Animals and inanimate objects sprawled everywhere, decimated, violated, ugly-dead. Alongside this horrible shambles of everything that once had been a human habitation, the indescribable, unutterable death of a few railway employees and Red Army men caught by surprise appeared quite in the nature of things.

Only in Goya’s illustrations of the Spanish campaign and guerrilla war can a similar harmony be found of wind-swept trees bending low beneath the weight of hanged men, of dust on roadways, of blood and stones.

From the station Shikhrana, the Savinkov detachment turned toward Svyazhsk, moving along the railroad. We sent our armored train “Free Russia” to meet them. So far as I am able to recall, it was armed with long range naval guns. Its commander, however, did not rise to the level of his task. Being surrounded on two sides (so it appeared to him), he left his train and rushed back to the Revolutionary Military Council in order “to report.”

In his absence “Free Russia” was shot to pieces and burned. Its black, burning hulk lay derailed for a long time beside the roadbed very close to Svyazhsk.

After the destruction of the armored train the road to the Volga seemed completely open. The Whites stood directly beneath Svyazhsk, some 1-1/2 to 2 versts away from the Fifth Army’s headquarters. Panic ensued. Part of the Political Department, if not all of it, rushed to the piers and aboard the steam boats.

The regiment, fighting virtually on Volga’s banks but higher upstream, wavered and then fled with its commanders and commissars. Toward morning, its maddened detachments were found aboard the staff ships of the Volga war fleet.

In Svyazhsk only the Fifth Army staff with its officers and the train of Trotsky remained.

How Svyazhsk Was Saved

Lev Davidovich [Trotsky] mobilized the entire personnel of the train, all the clerks, wireless operators, hospital workers, and the guard commanded by the Chief of Staff of the fleet, Comrade Lepetenko (by the way, one of the most courageous and self-sacrificing soldiers of the revolution whose biography could very well provide this book with its most brilliant chapter)—in a word, everyone able to bear a rifle.

The staff offices stood deserted; there was no “rear” any longer. Everything was thrown against the Whites who had rolled almost flush to the station. From Shikhrana to the first houses of Svyazhsk the entire road was churned up by shells, covered with dead horses, abandoned weapons and empty cartridge shells. The closer to Svyazhsk, all the greater the havoc. The advance of the Whites was halted only after they had leaped over the gigantic charred skeleton of the armored train, still smoking and smelling of molten metal. The advance surges to the very threshold, then rolls back boiling like a receding wave only to fling itself once more against the hastily mobilized reserves of Svyazhsk. Here both sides stand facing each other for several hours, here are many dead.

The Whites then decided that they had before them a fresh and well organized division of whose existence even their intelligence service had remained unaware. Exhausted from their 48-hour raid, the soldiers tended to overestimate the strength of the enemy and did not even suspect that opposing them was only a hastily thrown together handful of fighters with no one behind them except Trotsky and Slavin sitting beside a map in a smoke-filled sleepless room of the deserted headquarters in the center of depopulated Svyazhsk where bullets were whistling through the streets.

Throughout this night, like all the previous ones, Lev Davidovich’s train remained standing there as always without its engine. Not a single section of the Fifth Army advancing on Kazan and about to storm it was bothered that night or diverted from the front to cover a virtually defenseless Svyazhsk. The army and the fleet learned about the night attack only after it was all over, after the Whites were already in retreat firmly convinced that almost a whole division was confronting them.

The next day 27 deserters who had fled to the ships in the most critical moment were tried and shot. Among them were several communists. Much was later said about the shooting of these 27, especially in the hinterland, of course, where they did not know by how thin a thread hung the road to Moscow and our entire offensive against Kazan, undertaken with our last means and forces.

To begin with, the whole army was agog with talk about communists having turned cowards; and that laws were not written for them; that they could desert with impunity, while an ordinary rank and filer was shot down like a dog.

If not for the exceptional courage of Trotsky, the army commander and other members of the Revolutionary Military Council, the prestige of the communists working in the army would have been impaired and lost for a long time to come.

No fine speeches can make it sound plausible to an army suffering every possible privation in the course of six weeks, fighting practically with bare hands, without even bandages, that cowardice is not cowardice and that for guilt there may be “extenuating circumstances.”

It is said that among those shot were many good comrades, some even whose guilt was redeemed by their previous services, by years in prison and exile. Perfectly true. No one contends that they perished in order to prop up those precepts of the old military code of “setting an example” when amidst the beating of drums “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” were exacted. Of course, Svyazhsk is a tragedy.

But everyone who has lived the life of the Red Army life, who was born and grew strong with it in the battles of Kazan, will testify that the iron spirit of this army would have never crystallized, that the fusion between the party and the soldier masses, between the rank and file and the summits of the commanding staff would have never been realized if, on the eve of storming Kazan where hundreds of soldiers were to lose their lives, the party had failed to show clearly before the eyes of the whole army that it was prepared to offer the Revolution this great and bloody sacrifice, that for the party, too, the severe laws of comradely discipline are binding; that the party, too, has the courage to apply ruthlessly the laws of the Soviet Republic to its own members as well.

Twenty-seven were shot and this filled in the breach which the famous raiders had succeeded in making in the self-confidence and unity of the Fifth Army. This salvo which exacted punishment from communists as well as commanders and simple soldiers for cowardice and dishonor in battle forced the least class-conscious section of the soldier mass and the one most inclined toward desertion (and of course there was such a section, too) to pull themselves together, and to align themselves with those who went consciously and without any compulsion into battle.

Precisely in these days was decided the fate of Kazan, and not that alone but the fate of the entire White intervention. The Red Army found its self-confidence and became regenerated and strong during the long weeks of defense and offense.

In conditions of constant danger and with the greatest moral exertions it worked out its laws, its discipline, its new heroic statutes. For the first time, panic in the face of the enemy’s more modern technique became dissolved. Here one learned to make headway against any artillery; and involuntarily, from the elemental instinct of self-preservation, new methods of warfare were born, those specific battle methods which are already being studied in the highest military academies as the methods of the Civil War. Of extreme importance is the fact that in those days in Svyazhsk there was precisely such a man as Trotsky.

Trotsky’s Role

No matter what his calling or his name, it is clear that the creator of the Red Army, the future Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, would have had to be in Svyazhsk; had to live through the entire practical experience of these weeks of battle; had to call upon all the resources of his will and organizational genius for the defense of Svyazhsk, for the defense of the army organism smashed under the fire of the Whites.

Moreover, in revolutionary war there is still another force, another factor without which victory cannot be gained, and that is: the mighty romanticism of the Revolution which enables people straight from the barricades to cast themselves immediately in the harsh forms of the military machine, without losing the quick, light step gained in political demonstrations or the independent spirit and flexibility gained perhaps in long years of party work under illegality.

To have conquered in 1918 one had to take all the fire of the revolution, all of its incandescent heat, and harness them to the vulgar, repellent age-old pattern of the army.

Up till now history has always solved this problem with imposing but moth-eaten theatrical tricks. She would summon to the stage some individual in a “three-cornered hat and a gray field uniform” and he or some other general on a white horse would cut the revolutionary blood and marrow into republics, banners, slogans.

In military construction, as in so many other things, the Russian Revolution went its own way. Insurrection and war fused into one, the Army and the Party grew together, inseparably interwoven, and on the regimental banners were inscribed the unity of their mutual aims, all the sharpest formulas of the class struggle. In the days of Svyazhsk all this remained as yet unformed, only hanging in the air, seeking for expression.

The Workers’ and Peasants’ Army had to find expression somehow; it had to take on its outward shape, produce its own formulas, but how? This no one clearly knew yet. At that time, of course, no precepts, no dogmatic program were available in accordance with which this titanic organism could grow and develop.

In the party and in the masses there lived only a foreboding; a creative premonition of this military revolutionary organization which was never seen before and to which each day’s battle whispered some new real characteristic.

Trotsky’s great merit lies in this, that he caught up in flight the least gesture of the masses which already bore upon it the stamp of this sought-for and unique organizational formula.

He sifted out and then set going all the little practices whereby besieged Svyazhsk simplified, hastened or organized its work of battle. And this, not simply in the narrow technical sense. No. Every new successful combination of “specialist and commissar,” of him who commands and the one executing the command and bearing the responsibility for it—every successful combination, after it had met the test of experience and had been lucidly formulated, was immediately transformed into an order, a circular, a regulation. In this way the living revolutionary experience was not lost, nor forgotten, nor deformed.

The norm obligatory for all was not mediocrity but on the contrary, the best, the things of genius conceived by the masses themselves in the most fiery, most creative moments of the struggle. In little things as well as big—whether in such complex matters as the division of labor among the members of the Revolutionary Military Council or the quick, snappy, friendly gesture exchanged in greeting between a Red Commander and a soldier each busy and hurrying somewhere—it all had to be drawn from life, assimilated and returned as a norm to the masses for universal use. And wherever things weren’t moving, or there was creaking, or bungling, one had to sense what was wrong, one had to help, one had to pull, as the midwife pulls out the newborn babe during a difficult birth.

One can be the most adept at articulating, one can give to a new army a rationally impeccable plastic form, and nonetheless render its spirit frigid, permit it to evaporate and remain incapable of keeping this spirit alive within the chickenwire of juridical formulas. To prevent this, one must be a great revolutionist; one must possess the intuition of a creator and an internal radio transmitter of vast power without which there is no approaching the masses.

In the last analysis it is precisely this revolutionary instinct which is the court of highest sanction; which exactly purges its new creative justice of all deeply hidden counter-revolutionary back-slidings. It places its hand of violence upon the deceitful formal justice in the name of the highest, proletarian justice which does not permit its elastic laws to ossify, to become divorced from life and burden the shoulders of Red Army soldiers with petty, aggravating, superfluous loads.

Trotsky possessed this intuitive sense.

In him the revolutionist was never elbowed aside by the soldier, the military leader, the commander. And when with his inhuman, terrible voice he confronted a deserter, we stood in fear of him as one of us, a great rebel who could crush and slay anyone for base cowardice, for treason not to the military but the world-proletarian revolutionary cause.

It was impossible for Trotsky to have been a coward, for otherwise the contempt of this extraordinary army would have crushed him; and it could never have forgiven a weakling for the fraternal blood of the 27 which sprayed its first victory.

A few days before the occupation of Kazan by our troops Lev Davidovich had to leave Svyazhsk; the news of the attempt on Lenin’s life called him to Moscow. But neither Savinkov’s raid on Svyazhsk, organized with great mastery by the Social Revolutionists, nor the attempt to assassinate Lenin, undertaken by the same party almost simultaneously with Savinkov’s raid, could now halt the Red Army. The final wave of the offensive engulfed Kazan.

On September 9 late at night the troops were embarked on ships and by morning, around 5:30, the clumsy many-decked transports, convoyed by torpedo boats, moved toward the piers of Kazan. It was strange to sail in moonlit twilight past the half-demolished mill with a green roof, behind which a White battery had been located; past the half-burned “Delphin” gutted and beached on the deserted shore; past all the familiar river bends, tongues of land, sandbanks and inlets over which from dawn to evening death had walked for so many weeks, clouds of smoke had rolled, and golden sheaves of artillery fire had flared.

We sailed with lights out in absolute silence over the black, cold, smoothly flowing Volga.

Aft of the stern, light foam on the dull humming wake washed away by waves that remember nothing and flow unconcernedly to the Caspian Sea. And yet the place through which the giant ship was at this moment silently gliding had only yesterday been a maelstrom ripped and plowed by wildly exploding shells. And here, where a moment ago a nightbird tipped noiselessly with its wing the water from which a slight mist curled upward into the cold air, yesterday so many white spumy fountains were rising; yesterday, words of command were restlessly sounding and slim torpedo boats were threading their way through smoke and flames and a rain of steel splinters, their hulls trembling from the compressed impatience of engines and from the recoil of their two-gun batteries which fired once a minute with a sound resembling iron hiccups.

People were firing, scattering away under the hail of downclattering shells, mopping up the blood on the decks.... And now everything is silent; the Volga flows as it has flowed a thousand years ago, as it will flow centuries from now.

We reached the piers without firing a shot. The first flickers of dawn lit up the sky. In the greyish-pink twilight, humped, black, charred phantoms began to appear. Cranes, beams of burned buildings, shattered telegraph poles—all this seemed to have endured endless sorrow and seemed to have lost all capacity for feeling like a tree with twisted withered branches. Death’s kingdom washed by the icy roses of the northern dawn.

And the deserted guns with their muzzles uplifted resemble in the twilight cast down figures, frozen in mute despair, with heads propped up by hands cold and wet with dew.

Fog. People begin shivering from cold and nervous tension; the air is permeated with the odor of machine oil and tarred rope. The gunner’s blue collar turns with the movement of the body viewing in amazement the unpopulated, soundless shore reposing in dead silence.

This is victory.