At a meeting of the C.P.C. on March 8 Ilyich wrote the following note to his secretary concerning Khryashchova, a member of the Board of the Central Statistical Department:
"If Khryashchova lives a long way and walks home, it's a shame. Explain to her tactfully when opportunity offers that she can leave earlier on the days when statistical questions do not come up, or not come at all." (Ibid., p. 287.)
Ilyich showed particular concern for the living conditions of staff workers. It was a time when even high-ranking officials and their families did not have enough to eat. It transpired that A. D. Tsyurupa, Markov of the Commissariat of Transport, and others were starving.
On August 8, 1919, Ilyich wrote the following letter to the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee:
"I have just received additional information from a reliable source that Board members are starving (for instance, Markov of the Commissariat of Transport). I insist most energetically that the C. C. should: 1) order the Central Executive Committee to issue a grant of 5,000 rubles by way of relief to all Board members (and those of equal position); 2) put them all permanently on maximum quotas for specialists.
"It is a shame, really—they are starving and their families are starving!!
"100 to 200 people should be better fed." (Ibid., p. 317.)
At the end of April a turning point was reached on the Eastern Front. The Red Army began to score victories. Ufa and a number of other towns were recaptured from the Whites. The offensive against Ekaterinburg and Perm was developing successfully. At the end of June the agitation steamboat Krasnaya Zvezda was fitted out for a trip of the Volga as far as the Kama, then up the Kama as far as possible, then dawn the Volga to the last navigable place of safety. The task of the Krasnaya Zvezda was to follow in the wake of the Whites land agitate for the line adopted at the Eighth Party Congress, and consolidate the Soviet power everywhere. The Political Commissar on the Krasnaya Zvezda was V. Molotov. The boat was equipped with a cinema and a printing plant and had radio and a large stock of books. It was staffed by representatives of various Commissariats (I represented the Commissariat of Education) and the trade unions.
Before sailing I had a long talk with Ilyich about what we had to do, how to assist the population, what questions had to be focussed on, and what things we had to study more carefully. Ilyich would have liked to go himself but he could not give up his work for a minute. On the eve of my departure we talked all through the night. Ilyich went to the station to see me off, and made me promise to write him regularly and talk with him on the private line. I went up the Volga and the Kama as far as Perm.
Molotov was in charge of all the work. He got us together before each stop, and we discussed what we were going to do, what we were going to bay special stress on. After each stop we reported back on what we had done and compared notes. That trip was extremely useful to me. I had lots of things to talk to Ilyich about after that trip, and he listened to me with tremendous interest, going into every little detail.
We held endless meetings during the trip, and addressed mass meetings at the Bondyuzhsky Works, in Votkinsk, Motovilikha, Kazan, Perm, Chistopol, Verkhniye Polyany, and so on. Our ship's newspaper reckoned that I had addressed 34 meetings. I am no orator, but the things I spoke to the men and women workers about, to the Red Army men and the peasants, were things that deeply agitated them and intimately concerned them. Wherever the Whites had been, the hatred of the population towards them was intense. I shall never forget the meeting at the Votkinsk Works, where the Whites had shot almost all the teenagers—those "accursed Bolshevik spawn" as they called them. The crowded mass meeting sobbed to a man when we started singing the revolutionary funeral march. There was hardly a family there that had not had a son or daughter killed. Never shall I forget the story of how partisan girls and school-teachers were flogged to death, never shall I forget the countless outrages and acts of violence which the peasants—mostly middle peasants—living around the Kama told us about.
The ignorance among the population was very great. Peasant women were still afraid to send their children to the nurseries. A furious agitation against the Soviet power was being conducted among the school-teachers. I saw an instance of that agitation at Chistopol. However, the close contact which the rural teachers had with the peasant and working-class masses induced many of them to side with the peasants and the workers. At the Izhevsk Works 95 out of 96 engineers had run away with Kolchak, but the wife of one of them, a school-teacher in Izhevsk and a former class-mate of mine at the high school, did not run away with her husband but remained with the Reds. "How could I leave the workers?" she said to me when we met.
The privileged intellectuals sided with Kolchak at the time, and went away with the Whites; our chief agitators were men and women workers, and Red Army men. They stood close to the masses. The Second Army had a rather peculiar agitator; he had been a priest before the October Revolution, but after October he became an agitator for the Bolsheviks. At a meeting of five thousand Red Army men in Perm he spoke of the Soviet power's intimate link with the masses. "The Bolsheviks," he said, "are today's apostles." When asked by a Red Army man in the audience: "What about baptism?" he answered: "That would take a couple of hours to explain, but briefly it's pure eyewash!" The speeches of the army commanders from among the workers were very convincing. I told Ilyich about this meeting and how one commander had said: "Soviet Russia is unconquerable on account of its squarity and sizability." We laughed, but afterwards, with the fall of the Hungarian Republic, Ilyich said that, strictly speaking, that commander had been right—we had room to manoeuvre in during the civil war.
Azin, a Red Army commander, came to see me on the boat at Yelabug. He was a Cossack, ruthless to the Whites and deserters, a man of reckless daring. He spoke to me chiefly about the care he was taking of the Red Army men. His men loved him. I received a letter this year from a Red Army man who had fought Kolchak under him. Every line of the letter breathes of warm love for Azin. Recently Pastukhov, a member of the Central Executive Committee, related how a detachment of the Red Army under the command of Azin had suddenly burst into Izhevsk, which was still occupied by the Whites, riding horses whose manes were plaited with red ribbons, and captured the jail in which prisoners under sentence of death were kept (including Pastukhov's seventy-year-old father and his youngest eleven-year-old brother; Pastukhov's two other brothers had been killed at the front). Azin afterwards fell into the hands of the Whites on the Lower Volga and was tortured to death.
The agitation of the Krasnaya Zvezda was very effective in Tataria, where the population gave their fullest support to the Soviet power.
Vladimir Ilyich asked me about everything in full detail; he was particularly interested in what I told him about the Red Army, the temper of the peasants, of the Chuvashes and the Tatars, and about the growing trust towards the Soviet power among the masses.
The latter half of 1919 was much more difficult than the first. This especially applied to September, October and the beginning of November. The civil war was spreading. Kolchak had been defeated, but the Whites were bent on capturing the centres of the Soviet power—Moscow and Petrograd. Denikin started to advance from the south, where he had seized a number of important points in the Ukraine, and Yudenich began to advance from the west, and already stood at the approaches to Petrograd. The victories of the Whites encouraged the enemies who had been lying in hiding. At the end of November a counter-revolutionary organization connected with Yudenich and subsidized by the Entente was discovered in Petrograd.
All the time that Denikin and Yudenich were winning Vladimir Ilyich received a lot of anonymous letters of a threatening character, some of them with caricatures. The intelligentsia was still vacillating, and only the more progressive sections of it headed by Timiryazev had gone over to the Soviets. The Anarchists, supported by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, had engineered a bomb explosion on the premises of the Moscow Committee of the Party in Leontyevsky Street on September 25, in which a number of our comrades were killed.
Famine and poverty were rife. The Red Army had to be strengthened, its fighting spirit sustained, and plans for conducting the struggle at the battle fronts had to be thought out. The Red Army, the population and working class centres in the rear had to be supplied with grain, explanatory and agitation work had to be launched on a wide scale, and the whole administrative machinery had to be built up on new lines—not on the old bureaucratic lines, but along new Soviet lines, new cadres had to be selected and trained, one had to go into a mass of petty details.
Although Ilyich's confidence in victory never weakened for a moment, he worked from morning till night, and the tremendous burden of all those cares gave him no sleep. He would get up in the night and start ringing up on the telephone to check whether this or that order of his had been carried out, or to send another telegram somewhere. He spent most of his time in his office, receiving people, and hardly stayed at home during the day. I saw still less of him during those hectic months; we almost stopped going out for walks together, and I did not like going into his office on private matters for fear of interrupting his work.
The most acute problem was that of grain. The simple purchase of the required amount of grain under the existing conditions of small peasant holdings and wild speculation was simply unthinkable. Some kind of planning and system had to be introduced here, a number of laws enforced and suitable people mobilized for the purpose. It was not mere accident, therefore, that Alexander Tsyurupa was appointed People's Commissar of Food Supply on January 17, 1919. We had known him for a long time; I had bean in exile with him in Ufa.
