The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Kravchenko’s story as the first major defector from the Soviet Union to the West was once well known. There were others who followed his example. But our interest in selecting this passage partly reflects the subtitle of his book regarding his personal life. The various motivations which turned him to communism in his youth are absorbingly articulated: words, ideas, faith, enthusiasm. In a revolutionary setting, all of these increased sharply in meaning and resonance. Kravchenko’s predisposition toward radicalism was also shaped by his father, a worker-agitator, who devoted his life to the revolutionary movement. Taken from Viktor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1946.

Here, for the first time, I came to know an intellectual household, where literature, music and the theater seemed as real and vastly more important than bread and work. The elder Spiridonov steered our avid reading into broader channels, not only among the Russian classics but among the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Dickens.

Looking back, I am amazed by the extent and variety of my reading during that springtime of mental discovery. Somehow the beauty and the pathos of books, along with the exalted hopes of my father, became part of the revolution as it swept over an eleven-year-old boy. It seemed as if in a few weeks the distance between literature and reality, between words and deeds, was being bridged.

The storm clouds burst in the last week of February 1917 (early March in the Western calendar). Even those who had been most certain of its advent were surprised and bewildered. Revolution, which had been an intimate and half-illicit word, was suddenly in the open, a wonderful and terrifying reality.

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Chapter Eighteen

What had seemed a simple solution of all problems had exploded into a million new problems, some of them ridiculously petty, like finding food and clothes.

The seams of accustomed life came apart. Schools, factories, public institutions lost their old meanings. The people of our city crowded into the snow-covered streets. It was as if homes and offices and workshops had been turned inside out, dumping their human contents into the squares and parks. Demonstrations, banners, cheering, flaring angers, occasional shooting—and above it all, enveloping it, almost smothering it all, there was talk, talk, talk. Words pent up for centuries broke through in passionate oratory; foolish and inspired, high-pitched and vengeful oratory.

Slogans filled the air and seemed to have a proliferating life of their own. Down with the war! War to a victorious end! Land and freedom! The factories to the workers! On to the Constituent Assembly! All power to the Soviets! New words and new names burst and sputtered in our minds like fireworks. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Kadets, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists. . . . Kerensky, Miliukov, Lenin, Trotsky. . . . Red Guards, Whites, Partisans. . . .

Platforms grew on the main squares. Speakers followed one another in a loud procession. Men and women who had never spoken above a timid whisper now felt the urge to scream, preach, scold and declaim. Educated men with well-tended beards made way for soldiers and workmen. “Right! Right!” the crowds thundered or “Doloi! Von!—Down with him! Out with him!”

Once, on a day of demonstrations under a forest of homemade banners, my father spoke from a platform. Everyone seemed to know his name.

“Friends and brothers! Workers, peasants, intellectuals and soldiers!” he began.

It was the first time I had heard him speak in public and I could scarcely contain my excitement. His voice was resonant and he seemed transfigured, so that I had to reassure myself that it was, indeed, my own father. Words and ideas that had been intimately our own, almost a family secret, were miraculously public, so that everyone became part of the family. He told about prison and exile, about the heroic life of Comrade Paramonov, about the beautiful future. He pleaded for order and self-control and warned against those who would drown the revolution in blood. He spoke with marvelous simplicity and sincerity, as if these were his three sons multiplied to hundreds.

When he stepped from the platform and a band played the Marseillaise, I rushed toward him, elbowed a way through his admiring friends, and shouted “Hurrah, papa!” Father laughed with a full voice.

“You see, Vitenka,” he said, “now people will be free. It was worth fighting for this!”

Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red

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I knew then, or perhaps I only understood later, that he was justifying himself, explaining the years of penury and worry he had visited on his family.