comrade. It made us all glad. We always liked you, tho we thought you were a bourgeois. Now we find out you are one of us, a real workingman, and we love you. We'll do anything for you."
Ninety-six per cent of the Bolshevik Party were workingmen. Of course the Party had its intelligentsia, not sprung directly from the soil. But Lenin and Trotzky lived close enough to the hunger line to know the thoughts of the poor.
The Bolsheviks were mostly young men not afraid of responsibility, not afraid to die,[1] and, in sharp contrast to the upper-classes, not afraid to work. Many of them became my friends, particularly the exiles returning on the immigrant tide now flowing back from America.
There was Yanishev, who was literally a workman of the world. Ten years earlier he had been driven out of Russia for inciting his fellow-peasants against the Czar. He had lived like a water-rat on the docks of Hamburg: he had dug coal in the pits of Austria and had poured steel in the foundries of France. In America he had been tanned in leather-vats, bleached in textile mills and clubbed in strike-lines. His travels had given him a knowledge of four languages and an ardent faith in Bolshevism. The peasant had become now an industrial proletarian.
Some satirist has defined a proletarian as a "talking workingman." Yanishev was not a talker by nature. But now he had to talk. The cry of millions
- ↑ Appendix I. The Death of a Red Regiment.
