Chapter 6: The Masked Polemicist

“But… how, when you’re this young….”

“My mother taught me.”

“No, no, even if she taught you, this is….”

Georgy Gapon clearly remembered the child’s mother, Natalya.

A socialist activist, yes, but a woman whose bearing had been so exceptional that anyone would have assumed she once belonged to high society.

And he knew very well how rigorously the children of Europe’s royal houses were educated.

Reading in one’s mother tongue had to be fully mastered before the age of six, and around seven, foreign languages, mathematics, and the arts were usually added on top.

But even supposing Natalya had given this child, Mikhail, an education on par with royalty’s, it still made no sense.

Could a seven-year-old, no matter how hard he studied, speak this coherently and think on such a high level?

Hadn’t he blown far past merely having a good memory and quick comprehension?

“Father, why do you think Russia became such a hard country to live in?”

“…Pardon?”

“Lots of people say the poor are poor because they’re lazy. But nobody in the neighborhood where I used to live is lazy. They go out at dawn and come home late at night. So why do they stay poor?”

Every time a question like this came, Gapon found himself at a loss for words.

“…Young Master, why do you ask such things?”

“Because I want to know the answer. The men in our neighborhood always work hard at the factory, but the factory owner never comes to the factory, not even once. He doesn’t even live in Petersburg. He lives in Moscow. But he’s the one who takes all the money.”

“…….”

“They say the owner put up something called capital, so he’s allowed to take all the money. But when the men who actually do the work get sick, the owner just pretends not to notice. Is that a good country?”

For words coming from the mouth of a child who had only just turned seven, the question cut far too close to the bone.

Gapon’s head began to spin.

“That is… well, Young Master. The world has always had its ranks, and God assigned each person a role….”

“Did God tell the factory owner to ignore the people who work for him when they get sick?”

“…….”

“Is that written in Scripture? In the Bible stories I’ve heard, Jesus lived among the poor, and He said it’s harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”

Did the imperial palace teach debate to children from the cradle these days?

The boy hadn’t merely memorized Scripture; he had fully digested the meaning of the verses and made them his own. It was enough to leave a man in awe.

“So, Father, here’s what I think.”

The child’s voice continued, calm and even.

“For Russia to change, two wheels have to turn together. One is the Orthodox Church, with people like you, Father. The other is people like my mother, who fight for the poor. If the two turn separately, the cart can’t go anywhere.”

“The two… must turn together?”

“Yes. The Church has to protect people’s hearts, and those people have to change people’s lives. You need both.”

“…Young Master. Socialists deny God.”

“Aren’t there some who deny God, and some who don’t? My mother believed in God. And she wanted to help the poor. Is that really a contradiction?”

Gapon slowly shook his head.

Before this child, the doubts he had carried for years seemed to shatter far too easily.

“Young Master. Did your mother truly teach you these ideas?”

“She didn’t teach me everything. I thought about the stories she told me, and this is the conclusion I came to.”

“Haah….”

Normally he would have suspected a lie.

But when the evidence was moving and breathing right before his eyes, what could he do?

Even if someone had made the boy memorize an entire script beforehand, could a seven-year-old act it out this convincingly?

No matter how he looked at it, the only possible conclusion was that this child truly thought this way.

Then again, that must be why the Tsar had taken him into the palace.

Who would leave a genius like this alone?

Naturally he would want to keep the boy close and raise him into a talent loyal to the imperial house.

Gapon found himself accepting, quite naturally, why Mikhail had been granted the exceptional privilege of living at the palace.

“…Young Master. When you next come, I would like to see you again. There is more I wish to ask.”

“Me too, Father.”

From then on, Mikhail visited the soup kitchen in the Vyborg District regularly.

Officially, he came as a young lord assisting the Empress’s charitable works; in practice, every visit turned into another deep conversation with Gapon.

“Young Master. Strikes have been increasing among the factory workers lately. How do you see this?”

“Striking is fine, but I don’t think strikes alone will be enough.”

“…Why not?”

“A strike happens because people are hungry, right? But if only hungry people gather and shout that they’re hungry, you just get more hungry people. You have to make the people with full bellies move too.”

“…And how do you make the people with full bellies move?”

“You make them scared. If you show them that when the poor band together the world really might change, then even the people with full bellies will start thinking they’d better share a little.”

Gapon drew in a breath without realizing it.

The boy was talking about nothing less than the politicization of the labor movement.

That the economic struggle must expand into political struggle was a conclusion socialist theorists had taken decades to reach.

And a seven-year-old was laying it out in his own words.

“Young Master….”

“Yes, Father?”

“No… it’s nothing.”

Days like these kept piling up.

A few weeks later, Mikhail called Gapon into a storeroom and handed him a small sheaf of papers.

Written across the top was a title that made his head swim at a glance.

[A Few Proposals on the Direction of the Russian Social-Democratic Movement]

“Y-Young Master… this is….”

“We’re not publishing it in Russia, and sending it to England isn’t that hard, is it?”

“Bringing things in from London would be another matter, but getting them out is not so difficult. But this content….”

“Oh, and when you send it to England, could you polish the sentences for me, Father? I tried my best to write like a grown-up, but it was hard. Apparently these things are supposed to sound more impressive.”

“Yes… well, that… that is my specialty, I suppose.”

He had lost count of how many times this child had astonished him, but he obediently took the contributed article Mikhail held out.

Not because he particularly agreed with what was written in it.

It was because he had grown curious what sort of reaction the socialists over there would show once this reached London.

The reaction on their faces when they read it… he simply, purely wanted to see it.

* * *

London, the spiritual and physical oasis of twentieth-century socialist activists.

The Iskra editorial office in Clerkenwell.

“Rejected.”

Ilyich flung the manuscript he had just read onto the side of the desk.

“Rejected again?”

“Read it yourself. This fellow copied chapter three of What Is to Be Done? wholesale and dressed up only the final paragraph as his own thinking. We can’t show this to the comrades.”

Vera Zasulich, watching from the side, let out a sigh.

“Every contribution that comes in these days is like this.”

“Blame the great book our comrade published.”

One of the other editorial board members glanced sideways at Ilyich as he offered the joke.

“Ever since What Is to Be Done? came out this spring, every contribution from Russia has turned into a commentary on that book. Ilyich, don’t you think you laid it on a bit thick?”

“What was I supposed to do? And say what you will, that book is what this moment requires.”

“Required, yes. But now not a single comrade writes anything that strays even an inch from it. They all worship the book like scripture, so theory isn’t developing at all.”

“…Tsk.”

Even Ilyich could not deny that point.

For a revolutionary, nothing is more dangerous than one’s own writings becoming scripture.

Theory must continually chase reality, be tested against it, and be revised.

Yet every contribution arriving these days began with “According to what Comrade Ilyich has said…” and ended with “Therefore Comrade Ilyich’s line is correct”.

By any measure, it was not a good sign.

“Still, the comrade I brought in this time is brilliant, isn’t he?”

Zasulich, seeing straight through Ilyich’s attempt to change the subject, quickly nodded along.

“Ah, right. The response to that fellow’s piece we ran last month was excellent. It’s been ages since we had such delicious writing with real theoretical depth.”

“His stuff is a genuine pleasure to read, I’ll grant him that.”

As the comrades chimed in one after another, Ilyich allowed himself a faint smile.

Would another contribution that set the heart racing ever come along?

Ilyich rummaged through the pile of manuscripts stacked on the desk, sorting out the ones he hadn’t yet read.

“This one I haven’t seen.”

His eye came to rest on one of them.

A contribution from Russia.

The signature was nothing but the single initial M.

At the sight of the title, Ilyich’s brow gave a fine twitch.

[A Few Proposals on the Direction of the Russian Social-Democratic Movement]

“This again? It’ll be more mindless praise of my book, or opposition for opposition’s sake….”

Still, he could hardly dispose of it without so much as a look.

Grumbling, Ilyich turned the first page.

And about three sentences in, his posture changed without his noticing.

-What Is to Be Done? is a work absolutely necessary to the Russian social-democratic movement at present. But there is one thing the comrades reading it are missing. If they fail to understand why Comrade Ilyich deliberately “bent the stick the other way”, the book will become scripture and the movement will calcify.

“Hm…?”

Ilyich’s back straightened.

This writer had put his finger, with chilling precision, on the true context in which he had once written the book.

Above all, the expression that he had bent the stick hard the other way because the Economists had bent it so severely to one side.

Was this not the formulation that came closest to the private thinking he had never yet confided to anyone?

His heart pounding for the first time in ages, Ilyich squared his posture and took a sip of water.

For now, keep reading.

-The essence of the work is that an organization of professional revolutionaries suited to the present reality of Russia must be built. This stage is one that must be passed through, and any attempt to skip it will inevitably collapse the foundations of the socialist movement.

But this stage must not become a permanent line. The organization of professional revolutionaries is a means, not an end.

If at some point that organization fails to dissolve into the broad laboring masses, the group will end as nothing more than a self-enclosed circle of the intelligentsia.

Without his realizing it, his grip on the pages tightened.

-Our immediate task, therefore, is profoundly twofold.

First, to establish the iron discipline that professional revolutionaries must follow.

Second, to prepare, at the earliest possible date, a concrete plan for when and by what means this organization will transform into a mass organization.

If the second task is not prepared now, the organization will bureaucratize the moment the first task is complete. A bureaucratized revolutionary organization risks becoming not the maker of the revolution but a new ruling class that replaces it.

Ilyich drew a deep breath and nodded.

The writer was looking ahead to the dangers latent in the world after the revolution.

And there could be no doubt he saw, with total clarity, exactly what shape those dangers would take.

-As concrete means of dissolving into the masses, I offer the following proposals…

The seven proposals that followed tackled head-on every single subject Iskra was currently debating.

The peasant question, the national question, the combination of legal and illegal struggle, the relationship between the exiled leadership abroad and the organizations at home, tactical alliances with the bourgeois liberals, and on and on….

The reasoning behind each proposal was precise, and, most shocking of all, each came complete with concrete, executable methods.

By the time he reached the final paragraph, Ilyich’s hands were trembling with excitement.

-Comrade Ilyich’s work is, at this very moment, the spine of the Russian revolutionary movement. But a spine alone cannot move a body. The time has come to attach arms and legs to that spine, and above all, a heart.

Respectfully, a comrade living in Russia.

Now who was it who had been complaining that only second-rate contributions came in?

From the motherland, from Russia itself, a comrade capable of writing prose this stirring had sent an answer to his book.

Desperate to know who had written this contribution, he hurried to check the name, but sure enough there was nothing beyond the initial M.

Well, of course. With the Okhrana liable to intercept it along the way, no fool alive would stamp his real name on the thing. [TL Note: Okhrana was a secret police force of the Russian Empire.]

“C-Comrades, look at this… come look at this!”

To think a mind of such deep insight still remained in Russia.

Who could it be?

A university student bursting with fire? No, judging by this erudition, it was most likely a researcher with decades of study behind him, or some eminent professor.

Burning to share his excitement with the others, Ilyich waved his hand at the young comrade who happened to walk into the editorial office at that very moment.

“Trotsky! Here, come here. I want to invite the scholar who wrote this to London… isn’t there some way?”

One of Iskra’s founders and the fastest-rising young titan among Russia’s socialist activists, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

Pen name, Lenin. Looking at the pages in his hand, he was certain.

Another great tree had taken root in the world of the socialist movement.