Our intelligentsia guide would introduce us in a loud voice, emphasizing the words: ‘conscious workers’. Then we were regaled with tea and all manner of strange snacks that we were afraid to touch, lest we make some embarrassing blunder. Our conversations with such liberals had a very strained character. They would interrogate us about this or that book we had read, question us about how the mass of workers lived, what they thought, whether they were interested in a constitution. Some would ask us if we’d read Marx. Any stupidity that we uttered in our confusion would be met with condescending approval.
On leaving these parties, Kanatchikov and his friends ‘would breathe a sigh of relief and laugh at our hosts’ lack of understanding about our lives’. While on the surface they agreed with their student mentors that the liberals might be useful to the revolutionary cause, ‘a kind of hostility toward them, a feeling of distrust, was constantly growing inside us’.52 It was precisely this feeling of distrust, the workers’ awareness that their own aspirations were not the same as the liberals’, that hastened the downfall of the Provisional Government in 1917.
Kanatchikov’s conception of socialism was extremely malleable at this stage. And the same was true of most workers. They found it difficult to take on board complex or abstract ideas, but they were receptive to propaganda in the form of simple pamphlet stories highlighting the exploitation of the workers in their daily lives. Gorky’s stories were very popular. Since escaping from Krasnovidovo, he had roamed across the country doing various casual jobs, until he had met the novelist and critic V. G. Korolenko, who had encouraged him to write. By the mid-1890s Gorky had become a national celebrity, the first real writer of any quality to emerge from the urban underworld of migratory labourers, vagabonds and thieves, which his stories represented with vividness and compassion. Dressed like a simple worker, with his walrus moustache and his strongly chiselled face, Gorky was received as a phenomenon in the salons of the radical intelligentsia. The workers could easily identify themselves with his stories, because they drew on the concerns that filled their everyday lives and, like the writer’s pseudonym, captured their own spirit of defiance and revolt (gor’kii means ‘bitter’ in Russian). Moreover, Gorky’s obvious sympathy for the industrial worker, and his equal antipathy to the ‘backward’ peasant Russia of the past, gave workers like Kanatchikov, who were trying to break free from their own roots, a new set of moral values and ideals. In a famous passage in My Childhood (1913), for example, Gorky asked himself why he had recorded all the incidents of cruelty and suffering which had filled his early years; and he gave an answer with which many workers, like Kanatchikov, would have sympathized:
When I try to recall those vile abominations of that barbarous life in Russia, at times I find myself asking the question: is it worth while recording them? And with ever stronger conviction I find the answer is yes, because that was the real loathsome truth and to this day it is still valid. It is that truth which must be known down to the very roots, so that by tearing them up it can be completely erased from the memory, from the soul of man, from our whole oppressive and shameful life.
All the characters in Gorky’s stories were divided into good or bad — both defined in terms of their social class — with little shading or variation. This moral absolutism also appealed to the workers’ growing class and revolutionary consciousness. But, perhaps above all, it was the spirit of revolt in Gorky’s writing that made it so inspiring. ‘The Stormy Petrel’ (1895), his bombastic eulogy to the romantic revolutionary hero, disguised in the form of a falcon flying above the foamy waves, became the revolutionaries’ hymn and was circulated through the underground in hundreds of printed, typed and hand-written copies. Like most workers, Kanatchikov had learned it by heart:
Intrepid petrel, even though you die,
Yet in the song of the bold and firm in spirit,
You’ll always live as an example,
A proud summons — to freedom and light!53
The workers also liked to read stories about the popular struggle for liberation in foreign lands. ‘Whether it was the Albigenses battling against the Inquisition, the Garibaldians, or the Bulgarian nationalists, we saw them all as our kindred spirits,’ wrote Kanatchikov. It did not matter that these foreign heroes had fought very different battles from their own, since the workers were quick to reinterpret these stories in the Russian context. Indeed the censorship of literature about Russia’s own historic ‘revolutionaries’, such as Pugachev or the Decembrists, obliged them to look abroad for inspiration. In that good old Russian tradition of reading between the lines they seized upon the Netherlanders’ struggle against the Inquisition as a stirring example of the spirit and organization they would need in their own struggle against the police. It was the stories’ emotional content, their romantic depiction of the rebel as a fighter for freedom and justice, that made them so inspiring. From them, Kanatchikov wrote, ‘we learned the meaning of selflessness, the capacity to sacrifice oneself in the name of the common good’.54 By identifying themselves with the fearless champions of human emancipation everywhere, they became converted to the revolution.
The special attraction of Marxism stemmed from the importance it gave to the role of the working class and to the idea of progress. The popular Marxist pamphlets of the late 1890s, which for the first time attracted large numbers of workers like Kanatchikov to the cause, drove home the lessons of the famine crisis of 1891: that the peasants were doomed to die out as a result of economic progress; that they were a relic of Russia’s backward past who would be swept away by industry; and that the Populists’ belief in the commune (to which many of the peasant-workers still adhered) was no longer tenable. Only Marxism could explain to workers why their peasant parents had become so poor, and why they had been forced into the cities. There was thus a close link between Kanatchikov’s attachment to the Marxist exaltation of industrialization and progress and his own psychological rejection of his peasant past. Like many workers from the countryside, Kanatchikov invested much of his own personality in the ideal of liberation through industry. He found ‘poetry’ in ‘the rumblings and the puffings’ of the factory. To workers like him Marxism appeared as a modern ‘science’ that explained in simple black-and-white terms why their world was structured the way that it was, and how it could be transformed.
Many people have argued that Marxism acted like a religion, at least in its popular form. But workers like Kanatchikov believed with the utmost seriousness that the teachings of Marx were a science, on a par with the natural sciences; and to claim that their belief was really nothing more than a form of religious faith is unfair to them. There was, however, an obvious dogmatism in the outlook of many such workers, which could easily be mistaken for religious zealotry. It manifested itself in that air of disdain which many workers, having reached the uplands of Marxist understanding, showed towards those who had not yet ascended to such heights. One ‘comrade’, for example, arrogantly told a police officer, who was in the process of arresting him, that he was a ‘fool’ because he had ‘never read Marx’ and did ‘not even know what politics and economics [were]’.55 This dogmatism had much to do with the relative scarcity of alternative political ideas, which might at least have caused the workers to regard the Marxist doctrine with a little more reserve and scepticism. But it also had its roots in the way most of these workers had been educated in philosophy. When people learn as adults what children are normally taught in schools, they often find it difficult to progress beyond the simplest abstract ideas. These tend to lodge deep in their minds, making them resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge on a more sophisticated level. They see the world in black-and-white terms because their narrow learning obscures any other coloration. Marxism had much the same effect on workers like Kanatchikov. It gave them a simple solution to the problems of ‘capitalism’ and backwardness without requiring that they think independently.