Part 1 - Chapter 11

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During this period of expectation arrived the time of the Provincial Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, Soldiers’, and Cossacks’ Deputies and the Peasants Unions. [August 5–7, 1918]

An assembly of the Peasants’ Union was held in Gulyai-Pole. We discussed the agenda of the Provincial Congress. We spent a lot of time discussing the re-organizing of the Peasants’ Unions into Peasants’ Soviets and finally decided to send delegates to the Provincial Congress. I was elected representative of the peasants, and Comrade Seregin was elected representative of the workers.

I was particularly happy to go to Ekaterinoslav where I hoped to make contact with the Anarchist Federation and discuss all the questions which were of interest to our Group (especially the question: why are there no anarchist agitators going from the city into the villages?).

I deliberately arrived at the Congress a day early. From the railway station I went directly to the Federation’s office. I found there the secretary — Comrade Molchansky, an old friend from Odessa. We knew each other in prison. With great joy we embraced each other.

I immediately pressured him: what were they doing in the cities? Why didn’t they send organizers around the whole province?

Comrade Molchansky, waving his hands excitedly, said: “Brother, we don’t have the forces. We’re weak. We’ve only just pulled together a group and we’ve hardly attended to the workers in the local factories and soldiers in the garrison. We hope that with time our strength will increase and then we can establish closer links with you and the villages and begin more energetic work in the countryside... .”

For a long time after this we sat quietly and looked at each other, each of us absorbed in thinking about the future of our movement in the revolution... . And then Comrade Molchansky began to reassure me, affirming that in the near future there would arrive in Elizavetgrad Rogdaev, Roshchin, Arshinov and a bunch of other comrades and the focus of our work would be shifted into the villages. Then he led me into the Federation’s club, which had earlier been known as the “English Club”.

There I found many comrades. Some were arguing about the Revolution, others were reading, a third bunch were eating. In a word, I found an “anarchist” society which did not allow, as a matter of principle, any order, any authority, and which did not devote a moment to propagandize among the mass of toilers in the countryside who were in such dire need of this propaganda.

Then I asked myself: why did they requisition from the bourgeoisie such a large and well-appointed building? What use is it to them when, in this babbling crowd, there is no order even in the animated discussions with which they resolve the most important problems of the Revolution? Meanwhile the hall is not swept, in many places chairs are overturned, and the big table, covered with luxurious velvet, is scattered with lumps of bread, fish heads, and picked bones.

I observed all this with a heavy heart. At that moment into the club came Ivan Tarasyuk (actually Kabas), comrade Molchansky’s deputy. With anguish and indignation he yelled, at first quietly, then at full voice: “Whoever ate at this table, clean it up!”... . Then he began to straighten the chairs... .

Quickly everything was removed from the table and people set about sweeping the floor.

From the club I returned to the Federation office and picked out a bunch of brochures to take to Gulyai-Pole. I was intending to go to the office of the Congress to get a billet for the duration of the event when a young woman entered who turned out to be a comrade. She asked the comrades present to go with her to the Winter Theater to back her up in a debate with the S-D “Nil” who was winning over a good number of workers. But the comrades present told her they were busy. Without another word she turned and left.

Comrade Molchansky asked me: “Do you know her? She is a fine, energetic comrade.” I immediately left the office and overtook her. I proposed that we go together to the meeting but she answered: “If you will not speak, you will not be necessary to me there.” I promised her I would speak.

Then she took me by the hand and we hurried to the Winter Theater. This young and charming comrade told me along the way that she had become an anarchist three years earlier. It wasn’t easy for her. She had been reading Kropotkin and Bakunin for about two years. Now she felt that the works she read had helped to confirm her convictions. She had become an active proselytizer. Up until July she had spoken before worker audiences but had not dared to debate with the enemies of anarchism — the social democrats. In July at one of the open air meetings she debated “Nil”. He had whipped her. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to try as hard as I can to go up against ‘Nil” again. He is the agitational superstar of the S-Ds.”

Our conversation ended there.

At the meeting I spoke against the celebrated “Nil”, using the pseudonym “Skromny” (my nickname in prison). I spoke badly although my comrades later assured me that I had been very good, just a little nervous.

As for my young and energetic comrade, she won over the whole hall with her pleasant but strong speaking voice: the auditorium was delighted with this voice and there was dead quiet when they listened to what she said, changing to stormy applause and thunderous cries: “Excellent, excellent, Comrade!

The comrade didn’t speak long, 43 minutes, but she stirred up the mass of listeners against the positions espoused by “Nil” so that when the latter tried to respond to all those who had spoken against him, the entire hall erupted against him: “That’s not true! Don’t make up false stories — the anarchists are telling the truth — you are telling lies!... .”

When we returned from the meeting, several comrades joined us. Our young comrade said to me: “You know, Comrade Skromny, this ‘Nil” with his influence over the workers up to now has been driving me crazy. I have set myself the goal of destroying his influence, whatever the cost. There’s only one thing holding me back — my youth. The workers are more trusting of older comrades. I’m afraid that this will prevent me from fulfilling my duties to the workers... .”

I could only wish her further successes in her revolutionary anarchist work, and we separated after promising to meet the next day to speak about Gulyai-Pole about which she had heard good things.

This meeting caused me to arrive late at the office of the Congress and I was unable to obtain a hotel room. So I spent the night in Comrade Seregin’s room.

I devoted the whole next day to the Congress and could not find a moment to meet with the young comrade as I had promised her. The second day of the Congress I was occupied the whole time at the Land Commission. Here I met with the Left S-R Schneider, sent to the Provincial Congress from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ & Cossacks’ Deputies and elected to the Land Commission of the Congress. The Commission unanimously passed a resolution about socializing the land and passed this resolution on to the presidium of the Congress. After this the Commission asked Comrade Schneider to make a report about what was happening in Petrograd.

He made only a brief summary as time was lacking, he said, and asked us to support the resolution about re-organizing the Peasants’ Unions into Soviets. This re-organization was, subsequently, approved by the Congress. This was the only question on the agenda at the Congress which had not been considered at the meeting in Gulyai-Pole.

On our return from the Congress, and after a series of reports, the Peasants’ Union of Gulyai-Pole was transformed into a Soviet of peasants; its principles were not modified nor were its methods of struggle which it was intensively preparing the peasants to use in its upcoming struggles. It appealed to the workers to drive out the owners of the factories and plants and to liquidate their right of private ownership of social enterprises.

During this time, while we were busy with the formal transformation of Union into Soviet, in Moscow on August 14 opened the All-Russian Democratic Conference and on its tribune appeared our esteemed, dear elder — Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin.

Our Anarchist Communist Group of Gulyai-Pole was dumbfounded by this news, although we appreciated very well that it was difficult for our old friend, after so many years of work and being shunted about foreign lands, preoccupied in his old age with humanitarian ideas, to return to Russia and refuse his assistance to this Democratic Conference. But all such considerations had to take a back seat to the tragic crisis in the Revolution which immediately followed this Conference.

We condemned our old friend for taking part in the Conference. We naively imagined that the former apostle of anarchism had transformed himself into a sentimental old man searching for peace and quiet and the strength for applying his knowledge to life one last time. But this blame we kept inside our group, and our enemies were not aware of it, because deep down Kropotkin remained for us the greatest and strongest theoretician of the anarchist movement. We knew that if he were not so advanced in years, he would have put himself at the head of the Russian Revolution and would have been the uncontested chief of anarchism.

Whether we were right or not, we never discussed with our political enemies the question of the participation of Kropotkin in the All-Russian Democratic Conference of Moscow... .

Thus with a sinking feeling we listened to what Petr Alekseevich said. We didn’t lose faith that he remained always dear and close to us, but the revolutionary moment called us in a different direction. For a number of reasons of purely artificial character, the Revolution showed signs of reaching an impasse. On it was fitted a noose by all the political parties participating in the Provisional Government. And all these parties were gradually becoming more entrenched in power and becoming in themselves a threatening counter-revolutionary force.