The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

It was the spring of 1899. I was taking final examinations. I did not break off my foreign contacts; I just became more careful while my political convictions continued developing along the same lines. I already had a small collection of forbidden books: Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System, Kautsky’s Erfurt Program, Renan’s Life of Jesus, Bebel’s Women and Socialism—all in German. I gave them to my father for safekeeping and he kept them for me at one of his storage facilities (he definitely knew from me what he was hiding). I asked him to bring them home to me the next day. He promised to do so. This was the 19th of May, on the eve of my Russian language exam. I slept peacefully before a dangerous and difficult ordeal.

In our apartment, my room was the last one. It could only be reached by going through my brother Mikhail’s room. For some reason, I had always locked my door. Suddenly in my sleep I clearly heard the sound of spurs and then a loud knocking on the door. I immediately guessed what the matter was and managed to take Voronov’s last letter from the table, crinkle it up and shove it into my mouth. Then I opened the door. Standing on the threshold was the same captain who had talked to my father and me at the Okhrana. Behind him was a suspicious looking character who turned out to be a detective in the Okhrana, and our caretaker Egor, a close friend of mine who had been invited along as a “witness.”

“We have an injunction for a search and seizure here,” the captain told me politely. And he showed me a written order signed by the director of the Okhrana. “Please.” Both drawers of my desk were opened and all my letters taken. My large bookcase drew careful attention but nothing incriminating was found. Renan’s book Life of Jesus, which I had received from abroad, went unnoticed, and this made me gloat. The night visitors went through my things for no less than three hours. Finally, they placed the seized items into a large packet and sealed it with wax. They then wrote a report of the search and forced me and Egor, the caretaker, to sign it. He wrote an X instead of a signature.

When we were passing through the dining room we found our whole family there in their nightclothes. My mother was in her nightgown. The captain and the detective walked ceremoniously through the room and, in parting, the captain said to my father: “It doesn’t appear that we have found anything incriminating in your son’s possession, but I do direct your attention to the ten-

Vladimir Zenzinov, Coming of Age

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dentiousness of his book selections.” My father did not answer and merely escorted him out of the apartment with an unfriendly look. Afterwards, neither my parents, sister, or brothers said anything to me, but I read no disapproval in their faces. What would have happened if I had asked my father to bring me my revolutionary collection a day earlier and it had been discovered during the search?

I could sleep no more that night. I doubt that my parents slept either. I went to the gimnazium in the morning for I had a difficult exam to take. I went to the examination that spring morning with a special feeling, a consciousness of the significance of what had occurred that night, and with a heightened sense of respect for myself. I did not, of course, say anything to any of my friends but, I must admit, I looked at them with a certain sense of superiority.

The exam went well. I had to write on the topic of “Positive Characters in the Works of Pushkin” (this was the so-called “Pushkin Year”—the centennial of his birth). I passed the exam. And I also passed all of the other exams. I graduated from the gimnazium and attained the diploma. For this I was obliged, after all, to the “blue uniforms” who allowed me to graduate from the gimnazium.

Now the doors of the university were open to me. But during the winter just passed, a different decision was coming to fruition within me. In some newspapers, and then in Mikhailovskii’s Russkoe Bogatstvo, I read that a new socialist university had opened in Brussels. There classes were taught not only by leading Belgian and French scholars, but also by leaders of the workers’ and socialist movements. So this intention entered my soul, to bypass a Russian university and go to Europe, to the sources of science, socialism, and revolution! When I approached my parents with this project, I was surprised that there were no particular objections. The decisive argument turned out to be my supposition that I would not be able to study at a Russian university anyway, because of the recurrent student disturbances—they were occurring yearly. My parents could not but agree with the logic of my arguments. My educational career was decided: I was allowed to go to Brussels.

Chapter Eight