The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I did not feel insulted. The sensation of an incredibly lucky outcome crowded out all other feelings and thoughts. Had the guard run his hands on the front and back rather than along the sides, I would not have made it alive. Moscow had been placed on military alert, and those held on suspicion, let alone those caught red-handed, were frequently executed on the spot. While unloading the cartridges, I said to my friends:

“I survived my ordeal—a miraculous deliverance from death.”

There were other risky assignments. Actually appearing on a street was accompanied by risk. One evening five of us went out. We had just approached the corner, when we heard the rhythmic clicking of horses’ hooves. The clatter was so close that it was too late to retreat and there was nowhere to run. The leader of our combat units, Aleksandr Gudkov, who was later to die as a Russian volunteer on the French front during World War I, pulled out his revolver and stood first along the edge of the wall. Behind him, also with revolvers in hand, were Oskar and Aleksandr Vysotskii. Fondaminskii and I shuffled from foot to foot: we had no weapons, and didn’t know how to use them anyway. Many tense seconds passed. My heart beat faster in rhythm with the approaching thud of the horses. Suddenly, a shaft of light from a lantern fell on a peacefully passing carriage, not on a dragoon patrol as we had supposed.

On a different occasion I was sent with another person to deliver dynamite in tea tins decorated with birds of paradise and other birds. The dynamite had to be brought to Chulkov’s house on Smolenskii Boulevard. On the way back I stopped to see Sventsitskii who lived in the same neighborhood. He was also storing either dynamite or arms. I found Andrei Bely [the famous poet and novelist] there. I did not know whether he was an SR, an SD [Social Democrat], or a member of the Christian Brotherhood for the Struggle. One did not ask these things. But I can be a definite witness to the fact that at this time he “listened to the music of the revolution” and was captivated by it.

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Chapter Nine

During the uprising, the Moscow soviet began to issue the newspaper Izvestiia. In principle, the editorial work was to be done by a collegium consisting of representatives of the soviet and the SR and SD parties. The SR’s appointed me as their representative on the editorial staff. Having collected all the information that came in during the day from supporters in all parts of the city, I set out late at night through the quiet and snowy lanes of the Po-varskii and Arbat neighborhoods to the address given me. There I found only one person—Ermanskii. I did not know whether he was a Menshevik or Bolshevik but soon became convinced that he acted like a Bolshevik. He greeted me affably:

“Well, how did it go? What have you brought?”

I laid out my material—reports from on site: conditions, morale, and losses.

“Leave it! Later we’ll see what to include.”

In next day’s Izvestiia, there was almost nothing from the material that I had brought. When I met Ermanskii again next evening, I suggested that we decide jointly what material to include. He firmly rejected this and, after some wrangling, he unambiguously let me know that I had a choice: either leave the material and trust him, or take it back with me. Either choice was painful. Both were equally unacceptable but, in fact, I assented to both. At first I took the material and left. Then having walked two blocks, confused and angry—both at Erman-skii and myself for my own weakness and capitulation—I returned and left my papers. I could do nothing with them, and they would have been out of date by the next day, anyway. Perhaps the unscrupulous and factious Ermanskii might still use even a part of them.

Later it became clear that Ermanskii was a “left” Menshevik. The Bolsheviks accepted him into their Communist Academy, but he was expelled in 1930 and liquidated during Ezhov’s purges.

The draft board gave me a one-year deferment and I left for Moscow the same evening. In an upper berth of a third-class railway car I gave myself up to sorrowful considerations of the immediate future. To knock about from house to house of relatives and acquaintances—a night here, a day there— seemed a boring and useless waste of time. Without a specific task—whether work or assignment—it was easy to fall out of the habit of systematic work. The thought of a personal life would also simultaneously surface. In order to marry, the law required an ID in the form of a passport or a residence permit. I had a university residence permit which I did not register with the police, but which was good until 31 August 1908. Only two days remained until its expiration. With acute awareness, I realized that this was my last chance to legally marry.

Mark Vishniak, In Two Worlds

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