In the Social Storm Memoirs of the Russian Revolution
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In the Social Storm Memoirs of the Russian Revolution Boris Yelensky 1998 I was born February 17th, 1889, in the city of Yekotirenodar (the gift of Catherine the Great), now known as Krasnodar, located in the province of Kuban, in the northern part of southern Russia. I was the fourth child of a middle-class family. My father had a shop that manufactured fur hats for the Cossacks. When I was five years old we moved 125 miles south to the city of Novorossiysk on theshores of the Black Sea. It was my parents’ ambition that I should become a doctor. My mother particularly, who could neither read nor write, was prepared to make any sacrifice to fulfill this dream. Since only avery small percentage of Jewish children were accepted at the Gymnasium, I was tutored privately to prepare me for examinations. My parents’ ambitions for me were to remain only dreams though for from an early age my thoughts were concerned mainly with the simple questions of why the majority of the people had nothing while the few had so much. In Russia, the transfer of prisoners from one city to another in large groups was called Etap. Since Novorossiysk was a port city, groups of these prisoners were continually coming through town, transferring from ships to trains. They would come in by ship, spend the night in the city, and the next day be marched up the main street to the train station. The picture of these worn-out groups of human beings, chained hand and foot, and theclink of their irons were with me all of my childhood as a continual reminder of oppression. When I was twelve years old I accidentally found a handful of underground revolutionary literature. I brought it home innocently enough and nearly got a beating from my father when he saw it. The fear in the faces of my parents and the few pages that I read started mymind working, and within a year I was involved in the underground revolutionary movement in our city. I continued studying with my tutor but my thoughts were too deeply involved with the revo- lutionary movement and I made little progress. With every pamphlet or book that I readinthe underground I got further away from any possibility of becoming a doctor. Within a few months, after a bitter fight with my parents, I finally told them I had no intention of becomingadoctor and that I would run away from home if they insisted that I continue with my studies. The work with my tutor and two years of grammar school was the extent of my formal education but I continued to educate myself by reading world literature. I was 16 when revolution began in Russia in 1905. Novorossiysk was the second city in Russian (after St. Petersburg) to organize a Soviet Republic, which existed for six weeks andinwhichI took an active part. Naturally, when the repressive general reaction of the Tsarist government reached Novorossiysk, I had to leave the city in a hurry to escape arrest. I hid out in various parts of Russia and finally decided to look for better luck outside the country. In 1907,after stopping in Germany, Switzerland and France, I was on my way to the United States. The dark side of immigrant life in the United States in those days is a story in itself.Suffice it to say we were not treated then as the Cuban Catholics are now, with government subsidies. An immigrant from Europe considered himself lucky if he could get $3.00 a week for 48 hours of backbreaking labor. We were often hungry, but also often happy, for we had certain inner values that gave us the hope to go on with our poor lives. We all kept our free time filled with activity and there was always the hope and dream that some day we would be able to return home. Filled with this dream I did manage to return to Russia in 1910 but after ten months I had to flee for my life and returned again to the United States. In the following years economic conditions improved slightly for the immigrants and the edges of their dream of returning home were dulled. Many of them married and settled down to raise families and began to regard their dream as an illusion. Then, in the early months of 1917 the immigrant community was suddenly wakened fromtheir lethargy when the shattering news of a revolution in Russia came through. The Tsar was ousted and the illusion became a possible dream again. The immigrant colony came back to life with the electrifying news of a General Amnesty forall political prisoners and political immigrants and, at least for a time, even the animosity between some of the socialist groupings disappeared and warm human relations established themselves in the happy holiday atmosphere of going home. On June 16th, 1917, we left the U.S. on the way to the new Russia, and, after more than amonth of travel, my family and I arrived in Novorossiysk on July 18th, 1917. This book is my own story of that time; of my own active participation in the great Russian social revolution. Even though I eventually had to leave the shores of the beautiful Black Sea again, and several times brushed closely with death, I am not sorry that I returned when I did. Even now, at 82, I would do it again if the opportunity arose. Much has been written on the history of the various colonies, communes and co-operatives which experimented with new social orders but I consider the experiment I have presented in this book the first serious large-scale attempt to create a nucleus for a free society based onthe foundation of full equality and human dignity. I have attempted to present my own appraisal of everyday life, from my viewpoint as a private citizen and an anarchist activist, with as little personal bias and prejudice as possible. I have tried to present the reality I saw, a reality one can only live through once in a century. It is impossible to forget that winter night in March, 1917, when we came out of the Chicago Opera House and heard the newsboys shouting loudly: ”Revolution in Russia! Tsar Nicholas abdicates!” Each one of us bought a paper and we rushed into a restaurant where we read every word twice and then looked for the news between the lines. We saw that the Romanoff dynasty had come to an end, yet our minds were still full of suspicion, and we couldn’t get used to the idea that our long fight to liberate Russia from the Tsar and his corrupt government had atlast been successful. We were skeptical and thought that it might be merely an attempt to depose 2 the Tsar which would have no lasting effect. But the next day brought more and fuller newsand our doubts began to vanish. The Russian colonies all over the United States began to celebrate and high-spirited political meetings were held by every political group. In the joy of the moment every radical seemed to feel it was his duty to attend the functions of other parties and groups and it was in every way a time of brotherly feeling. As soon as the first news of the Russian Revolution reached them the vast majority ofthe political refugees then living in the United States thought immediately of returning to Russia to help build a new society and to help defend the new freedoms which had been won with so much suffering. At first these desires seemed far from fulfillment, partly because the great majorityhad no financial means and also because of the massive disruption of transportation facilities incurred by the first World War. However, the dream of returning came true when Kerensky cameinto power and the Provisional Government decided that it would pay all the expenses for political refugees and their families who wished to return to Russia. The first small group, which included Leon Trotsky, left immediately. It was detained fora while in Halifax, Canada, but was set free and allowed to go on as a result of representations by Kerensky’s government. Soon afterwards a special committee of representatives of all the Russian political groupings was formed in New York, and this committee, working in co-operation with the Russian consul, became the clearinghouse for those who were entitled to a free passage home. A similar com- mittee was later formed in Chicago to represent the political refugees in the mid-Western states; in a few weeks it approved several hundred applications, and soon the first group was ready to leave Chicago, accompanied by a contingent from Detroit. Since the Atlantic was a dangerous place to cross at this time it was decided that all the political refugees would leave from the Pacific coast and go through Siberia to whatever point inRussia they wished to reach. The departure of the first group from Chicago was a sight never to be forgotten. Itseemedas though the whole Russian and Jewish radical colony had come to the station to see their friends go home. Later, during April, May and June, 1917, contingents from the Eastern States were constantly passing through Chicago and each arrival became the excuse for another celebration. The first months of the Russian Revolution brought a feeling of brotherhood between thevar- ious political groups, but this spirit didn’t last long. The well-known Bolshevik, Bukharin, came to Chicago to give a few lectures on the revolution, predicting that a ”proletarian” revolution would soon take place in Russia.