The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

In the midst of these preparations came the news that Lenin had died, on January 24, 1924. The shock and the sorrow were real and deep in this corner of the Donets valley. The reaction had little to do with politics. To the plain people in the collieries—even to the gamblers and brawlers in the barracks, the swaggerers with shoes that creaked, let alone to the Communist Youths— he had become a symbol of hope. We needed to believe that the sufferings of these bloody years were an investment in a bright future. Each of us had a feeling of personal loss.

I marched three miles, with thousands of others, to the memorial meeting outside the mine office, called “Paris Commune.” It was a bitterly cold, snowy afternoon; the winds cut like sharp knives. The rostrum in the open air was draped in red and black bunting, though a pall of snow soon covered everything. One after another the orators shouted above the howling wind, declaiming formulas of official sorrow.

“Comrade miners!” a pompous delegate from Kharkov shrieked, “Lenin is dead, but the work of Lenin goes forward. The leader of proletarian revolution . . . leader of the working class of the world… best disciple of Marx and Engels. . . .”

The formal words left me depressed. Why don’t they talk simply, from the heart rather than from Pravda and Izvestia editorials? Trudging home through the snowstorm I was pleased to discover that Senia and others had the same let-down feeling. The orators had failed to express how we felt about Lenin, because what we felt had less relation to the dead leader than to our own living hopes.

Several days later we read in the local newspapers Joseph Stalin’s oath at Lenin’s bier on Red Square in Moscow. It was a short, almost liturgical promise to follow in the path indicated by the dead leader and it moved me as the oratory at our memorial gathering had not done. Stalin was a member of the all-powerful Political Bureau, Secretary General of the Party, and had been an important figure in the new regime from the beginning. Yet this was the first time that I had become acutely aware of his existence. Strange, I thought, that his portrait was not even on our walls.

From that day forward the name Stalin grew so big, so inescapable, that it was difficult to recall a time when it had not overshadowed our lives.

Chapter Nineteen

Vasilii Ianov, The Heart of a Peasant

From the 1890’s to persecutions of the mid-1930’s there existed a movement in Russia which, in varying degrees, reflected the social, ethical, and religious ideas of Leo Tolstoy. Though labeled “Tolstoyism,” the movement was not monolithic, nor could any of its factions claim exclusive rights to Tolstoy’s legacy. There were groups of adherents, discussion circles, and publications of various kinds. Pacifism was certainly a major binding force. Vasilii Ianov (1897-1971) was a peasant and a follower of what he fervently professed to be Tolstoy’s views. Memoirs of a peasant are quite rare. And certainly, even more so of one who was an ardent believer in Tolstoy’s moral stance. Taken from Vasilii Ianov, “Kratkie vospominaniia o perezhitom” [Brief Memoir of my Experiences] in Pamiat’. Paris: YMCA Press, 1979.

MY BIRTH AND DEATH OF MY FATHER

I was born in 1897 at the end of July in Kaluga Province, district of Zhizdrensk, village of Bol’shaia Rechka. The latter is now called Malaia Pesochnia.

For some reason I do not remember all of the talk and circumstances regarding my birth, thus I will relate what I heard from others.

On this day, my father and his oldest daughter had just returned from tilling potatoes and he was unharnessing the sweaty horse. A neighbor came up to him and with a mix of bashfulness and joy said to him: “Well, Vasilii Ivanovich, I congratulate you on the birth of a son!”

“Well, thank God, thank God,” answered father. And the neighbor said: “Now the family is large, your health is poor, may the Lord take the child quickly.”

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Chapter Nineteen

“It is a sin to think that way aunt Mar’ia,” said father. “On the contrary, we must make all effort to raise and bring him up to be a good person and a hardworking peasant.”

Father was carrying the harness to the fence when aunt Mar’ia again came up to him. “He is a real copy of you, you can’t get a cry out of him. I moved him this way and that, but he stayed quiet. He’s not sensitive to pain. He’s forbearing like his father.”

“That’s good. He feels that it’s silly to be irritated by trifles. Nervousness and caprice don’t lead to anything good. This experience will benefit him in life.” Father went into the izba [peasant hut] and walked up to mother who was lying on the bed. Greeting him with her large, tear-stained, but happy eyes, mother said, “Vasia, how nice he is; hurry up and look at him!”

“Thank God, thank God, and how are you doing?”