In Honor Of The 95^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Two –A Child Of The Revolution

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He was a child of the revolution, the big old Bolshevik Revolution that had enveloped Russia a couple of years back, back in November 1917, if anybody was asking (according to the new calendar, new like everything else that was good happening in that formerly benighted land although there was plenty that was still bad, bad as human experience could fathom going on) And if while you were asking you wanted a name to attach to that child then Boris Yanoff (or Yanov, if you like), all of sixteen but already with a couple of revolutionary years under his belt. Revolutionary years that counted for decades of normal time experience under the whirl of history where what was okay today was not okay tomorrow and the day after both would be passé-whee!   See Boris had lost his father in one of those ill-advised Russian Army advances against the Germans on the eastern front, maybe at Tannenburg, or some place like that and around that same time so he would tell everybody that was where his father fell defending the Czar, the bloody bastard Czar. The upshot of that father death once word came to the family three weeks later was that Boris had travelled to Moscow from his wretched family farm in Omsk to find work in the textile mills that were in need of help to supply the huge fabric needs of the Russian army whether in advance, or retreat, mostly the latter. Shotty fabric, as in every war,  produced cheaply for threadbare tundra greatcoats, for the luxury of underwear which many peasant conscripts had never worn (and never changed or washed either as he later found out), for blouses and pants and above all those guaranteed to dissolve socks that provided no protection against the depth snows. He saw first- hand what was produced for the decrepit crawling Russian army and if he had known then what he came to know after the revolution he could have accurately estimated the capacities of that lumped mass and the time of its demise without any Marxist classics at hand. Although those classics could have been put to good use figuring out the textile magnates rates of profit, no question. That knowledge came later too. In any case he had left that farm without looking back on old Omsk. Hell, that family farm thing was really a joke it only barely a garden plot, and the crops wouldn’t show up half the time and all that but he was done with that. He was a working man now, a proud young worker. Boris, like a lot of fourteen -year old coming to the city, any city but particularly Moscow, was kind of a hayseed, kind of a know-nothing kid when he came to get that factory work. But he was a fast learning, fast learning how to operate the mind-numbing machinery but also to figure out where he stood in the world, his new working class world with its cramped workers quarters, its endless dirt and grime, endless noise and the talk, the endless vodka talk in the taverns that overwhelmed that landscape in those day. So when the Bolsheviks in the textile plant in the summer of 1917 (and there were only a few who answered to that designation in those turbulent days of reaction after the hubbub in Saint Petersburg in July) started going on and on about the wretched war, about how the Czar and now the bourgeois government under a socialist, Kerensky the lawyer, no less, who had formed some coalition between socialists and capitalists, wanted to stay in the damn war, wanted to let the big landowners keep their land, wanted to let the factory owners keep their blood-stained profits he was all ears. Discreet ears but open ears nevertheless. It was icing on the cake when one Bolshevik rank and filer whom he worked with, and who was well-respected by the more political workers had gotten him going by saying that if he went with the Bolsheviks that would help avenge his father’s cruel death for no reason out in some forgotten Czarist killing field. So Boris was in, started to read the newspapers, and, more importantly joined the factory defense committee and learned how to shoot, shoot for real, not that silly goose pop gun stuff back on the farm. Then the day of reckoning came. November 7, 1917 (again new calendar to herald a new era). He had heard through the factory grapevine that the Bolsheviks had risen in Saint Petersburg and had declared the Provisional Government null and void, the war null and void, and the big landowners and capitalists null and void and in their place the Soviets, the workers, peasants, and soldiers councils, the people’s voice. Right after that his factory committee was put on notice that they would try to take power in Moscow and while Saint Petersburg’s had been relatively bloodless they, he and his comrades, had a hell of fight, a bloody fight where he lost more than a few shop mates, before they could declare the Moscow Soviet. As he sat at his bench reading a much passed copy of Pravda now in early March 1919 he thought about that bloody fight, about how he had joined the Red Guards after that, had been called up a couple of times to go out on the outskirts of Moscow and defend the city against the White Guard bastards who were trying to take the land and factories back. No way, no way in hell not after what he and his father had been through in Old Russia. Now they, his Bolshevik comrades, were going to hold a conference, an international conference, where the idea was that what he and his comrades had done in Russia would get done all over the world. That idea, that idea of other countries getting their soviet power and then helping poor Russia appealed to him. He was not so sure about Lenin, although he was the head of the government and  he had heard him speak in Red Square after the government had moved here to Moscow when things got tough but he read where Trotsky was all for this Communist International and was going to speak at the conference . And if Trotsky and his fighting phantom train mates were for it then it must be okay. He kind of got a lump in his throat when he thought about that, about how, for once, he was among the first to be fighting for that new world that got him motivated in1917. Yes, he was a child of the revolution and he hoped just that minute that he would see it through to the end…