The foreword to Part One of this edition contains the following sentence:
The novel condemns all that is sordid and degrading to human dignity, as may be seen from Pavel's attitude towards the depraved Trotskyite Dubava, his encounter with the lewd Failo, and from the author's treatment of what passed between Razvalikhin and Lida. Nikolai Ostrovsky shows how political double-dealing goes hand in hand with moral dissipation.
We have reissued this novel without cuts, and we are not going to pretend that sentence is not in front of it. Part Two of How the Steel Was Tempered contains a sustained dramatisation of the Party discussion of 1923 and 1924, in which the Left Opposition is the enemy; and this introduction exists because a publishing house in the tradition of the Fourth International cannot put that book into a reader's hands with a note about the marsh.
We think you should read it. We think it is one of the most valuable documents in this series, and that its value depends entirely on its not having been cut.
Before any of that, Part Two contains the passage every Soviet schoolchild copied out, and it needs to be read in its place rather than on a poster.
Pavel walks out past the gossiping housewives of his home town, who take him for a consumptive scarecrow in a stolen jacket, and finds himself at the pine woods. To the right is the old prison behind its spiked fence. He stops on the broad common where the hangman's noose "had choked the warm life out of Valya and her comrades", stands in silence on the spot where the gallows had been, then goes down the bluff to the little cemetery where the victims of the White terror lie in common graves. Someone has laid spruce branches on them and built a green fence. The trees whisper, the young grass is coming up, and it was here that his comrades died so "that life might be beautiful for those born in poverty, those for whom birth itself had been but the beginning of slavery."
Slowly Pavel raised his hand and removed his cap, and an overpowering sadness pervaded his whole being.
Man's dearest possession is life, and it is given to him to live but once. He must live so as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he can say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world — the fight for the Liberation of Mankind. And one must make use of every moment of life, lest some sudden illness or tragic accident cut it short.
Detached from the graves, that becomes an exhortation to production quotas, and it was used as one for fifty years. In place, it is something else: a man who has lost his sight and the use of his body standing over the graves of friends who were hanged at twenty, working out what a life is for. The last clause — "lest some sudden illness or tragic accident cut it short" — is not rhetoric. It is the author's own case, and he knew it.
Hold that page in mind through what follows. The same novel, the same narrator and very nearly the same chapter produce both this and Pankratov's speech. Anyone who wants to read How the Steel Was Tempered as a tract has to explain the cemetery, and anyone who wants to read it as a masterpiece has to explain the conference. We are not going to do either. Both are in the book because both were in the movement.
Dmitri Dubava, called Mityai, is Korchagin's closest friend. He is a worker from the arsenal, a Komsomol veteran known to the Solomenka railwaymen, a student at the Kharkov Communist University, and one of the two or three most convincingly drawn people in the book. He is married to Anna Borhart. Ostrovsky gives him energy, stubbornness and physical presence, and gives him lines that land.
In 1923 he joins the opposition, and the novel tells you the pedigree it wants you to notice. Talya, speaking from the rostrum of a city Party conference, reminds the hall:
"Three years ago in this very theatre Dubava came back to us with the former 'Workers' Opposition.' Remember? And do you remember what he said then: 'Never shall we let the Party banner fall from our hands.' But hardly three years have passed and Dubava has done just that."
That is the amalgam being built in public: yesterday's Workers' Opposition is today's Trotskyism, one continuous thread of unreliability running through the same man. And a few pages earlier the novel has named the actual document at issue. Zharky, Dubava's friend at the university, "had sharply censured the declaration of the 'forty-six' at a meeting of the Party bureau."
So this is not a vague fiction about deviationists. The Declaration of the 46 was a real letter, sent to the Politburo on 15 October 1923 by forty-six leading Bolsheviks, and what it asked for was a Party conference to reconsider the ban on factions adopted at the Tenth Congress, together with a serious economic plan. Ostrovsky is dramatising a real event, and the reader of Part Two is watching the conference the 46 asked for being used to finish them.
The scene runs for several pages and it is worth reading slowly, because almost every rhetorical device of the next fifteen years is in it already, in the mouths of sympathetic characters, at a Komsomol meeting in a provincial theatre.
Talya opens:
"Today we are very glad to note that in our organization Trotsky's followers have been defeated. They cannot complain that they were not given a hearing. On the contrary: they have had every opportunity to express their point of view. As a matter of fact they have abused the freedom we gave them and committed a number of gross violations of Party discipline."
Freedom granted and then abused; the hearing generously extended and then forfeited. She goes on to explain that the districts "deliberately sent them here to give us another opportunity to hear them out", and that "it is not our fault if they are not making full use of this opportunity." Dubava calls out from the right-hand corner, "We haven't had our say yet!" Talya answers, "All right, Dubava, come up here now and speak, we'll listen to you," and Dubava — who was crushed in his own district the day before and knows exactly what the platform is for — refuses: "We'll talk when the time comes!"
Ostrovsky is a better writer than his purpose. He lets you see that the invitation is a trap and that Dubava sees it too, and he gives Pankratov the shout from the floor that tells you what the room is actually for: "Going to try shaking up the Party again, eh?" Then the hall: "Are they going to stop fighting the Party or not? Let them answer that!" and "Let them tell us who wrote that anti-Party declaration!" The chairman rings his bell "long and insistently" and Talya's voice is drowned out.
A letter is read aloud from a Komsomol organiser in an outlying area, and it supplies the scene's decisive detail. In a nucleus of forty-two members where the opposition had gathered its forces, "one of the Military Commissariat members got up and said outright: 'If the Party apparatus doesn't give in, we will smash it by force.'" The oppositionists applauded. Korchagin took the floor: "How can you applaud that fascist and call yourselves Party members?" — and could not be heard for the uproar.
Consider what has been done there in three sentences. An anonymous member, at an unnamed meeting, reported in a letter read out by someone else, is made to say the one thing that converts a political argument about the Party regime into a threat of armed force against it. The opposition applauds him. And the hero, in 1923, calls him a fascist. The word is doing work a decade early.
Then Pankratov goes to the rostrum, and the novel gives him the floor for two pages. This is the passage this whole introduction is really about, and we quote it at length because paraphrase would be a favour to it.
"Comrades! For nine days we have listened to the speeches of the opposition, and I must say quite frankly that they spoke here not as fellow fighters, revolutionaries, our comrades in the class struggle. Their speeches were hostile, implacable, malicious and slanderous. Yes, Comrades, slanderous! They have tried to represent us Bolsheviks as supporters of a mailed-fist regime in the Party, as people who are betraying the interests of their class and the revolution. They have attempted to brand as Party bureaucrats the best, the most tried and trusty section of our Party, the glorious old guard of Bolsheviks, men who built up the Russian Communist Party, men who suffered in tsarist prisons, men who with Comrade Lenin at their head have waged a relentless struggle against world Menshevism and Trotsky. Could anyone but an enemy make such statements? Is the Party and its functionaries not one single whole?"
Take the moves in order.
The expulsion from the category. The oppositionists "spoke here not as fellow fighters, revolutionaries, our comrades in the class struggle." Before any argument is answered, the arguers are removed from the community that could be argued with. Everything afterwards is easier.
The charge of slander for accurate description. They "tried to represent us Bolsheviks as supporters of a mailed-fist regime in the Party." That is, near enough, what the Declaration of the 46 said: that the Party was being run by an apparatus that had substituted itself for the membership. Pankratov does not answer the description. He classes it as a lie about the character of good men, which converts a question about institutions into an insult to individuals — and individuals who "suffered in tsarist prisons", so that the answer to a charge about 1923 is a claim about 1905.
The invented history. "Men who with Comrade Lenin at their head have waged a relentless struggle against world Menshevism and Trotsky." In 1923 this was a novelty; by 1938 it was the Short Course. Later Pankratov makes it a programme: "Let the old Bolsheviks tell us about Trotsky's 'Bolshevism.' It is very important for the youth to know the history of Trotsky's struggle against the Bolsheviks, about his constant shifting from one camp to another." That is the literary campaign of 1924 being announced at a Komsomol meeting as a curriculum. It worked. It is the reason the readers of this series have to be told things about 1917 that everyone knew in 1920.
The identification of apparatus with Party. "Is the Party and its functionaries not one single whole?" This is the question at issue, presented as its own answer. If the two are one, criticism of the officials is an attack on the Party, and the argument is over before it starts. The sentence is the hinge of the entire subsequent history, and Ostrovsky puts it in as a rhetorical flourish that needs no defence.
The state of emergency. "What would we say of men who would try to incite young Red Army men against their commanders and commissars, against army headquarters — and at a time when the unit was surrounded by the enemy?" The Party is an army under fire, therefore discussion is mutiny. Any moment can be shown to be such a moment. This one was 1923, with the civil war three years won.
The amalgam by grievance. Pankratov lists oppositionists who had been removed from posts — Tufta for bureaucracy, Tsvetayev, Afanasyev three times for high-handedness — and concludes: "It turns out that all those whom the Party has punished have united to fight the Party." The opposition is not wrong; it is aggrieved. Its politics is a symptom of its demotions. There is no reply to this, which is the point of it.
And then the forecast. "The hysterical panicmongers of the opposition are predicting complete economic and political collapse. Our tomorrow will show how much these prophecies are worth."
We would not dress the 1923 Opposition in prophetic robes. Its economic warnings were about the scissors between industrial and agricultural prices and about the absence of a plan; they were not a forecast of everything that came, and on several questions the Opposition was wrong or divided. But on the question actually before that conference — whether the Party and its functionaries were "one single whole" — the answer arrived, and it arrived on the bodies of the men in the hall. Of the forty-six who signed the declaration Zharky censured, almost none were alive in 1940. Preobrazhensky, who drafted it, was arrested in December 1936 and shot in July 1937. Serebryakov was shot in February 1937. Muralov, Smirnov, Sapronov, Drobnis, Beloborodov: the same years, the same end. Our tomorrow did show how much the prophecies were worth.
Here is the part that a Marxist reader should attend to most closely, because it is a technique and not an opinion.
After the conference, the novel never argues with Dubava again. It rots him.
Korchagin calls at the flat in Kiev and finds him on the landing, ashen, dark under the eyes, smelling of onions and alcohol, a woman's leg and shoulder visible on the bed through the half-open door, which Dubava kicks shut. Anna has gone. Dubava, belching, suggests that Pavel has come to fill the vacancy. Pavel, with difficulty: "What are you doing to yourself, Mityai! I never thought you'd fall so low. You weren't a bad fellow once. Why are you letting yourself go to the dogs?" The door opens and a face with swollen eyes and puffy cheeks says, "Come back in, duckie, what're you standing out there for?" Dubava shouts, "Run along and tell them all that Dubava has taken to drink and sleeping with loose women." Pavel asks once more, quietly — "Mityai, get rid of that woman. I want to talk to you, for the last time...." — and Dubava turns and goes inside. "The swine!" Pavel mutters, and walks down the stairs.
Two years later we learn the rest in passing. Zharky has married Anna. Dubava has been expelled from the Party and has left the university; he is at the Bauman Institute in Moscow. "I hear he's been reinstated. Too bad, if it's true. He's rotten through and through...."
That is the whole treatment. The oppositionist loses his politics, his Party, his university, his wife — to the loyal man — and finally his moral standing, and the last word on him from his oldest comrades is that his readmission would be regrettable. Not one line of his political position is stated after the conference so that it might be refuted. He does not need refuting. He stinks.
This is the sentence in the 1952 foreword doing its work: "Nikolai Ostrovsky shows how political double-dealing goes hand in hand with moral dissipation." The foreword is not misreading the novel. It is describing, with satisfaction, the most consequential literary device of the Stalin era — the one that made the show trials writable, and then watchable. Once dissent is a symptom of degeneracy, the confession of sabotage is merely the degeneracy becoming explicit; and a reader who has learned to feel about Dubava what Ostrovsky teaches him to feel has been prepared for 1937 by a novel published in 1932.
There is a coda to the Dubava story that most accounts of this novel pass over, and it shows how closely Ostrovsky was tracking the real chronology.
Pavel, by now badly ill, is in a sanatorium when Dora brings several people into his room. She glances at the decoration on the jacket of his visitor Zharky and asks whether he is a Party member and where he works; told, she says: "Good... Then he can remain." The newcomers, all old Bolsheviks but for Pavel and Zharky, have just come from Moscow to hold "a sort of closed Party meeting" and give the latest news. Bartashev, a member of the Moscow Control Commission, tells them about "the new opposition headed by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev."
"At this critical moment we ought to be at our posts," Bartashev said in conclusion. "I am leaving tomorrow."
Three days later the sanatorium is deserted. Pavel leaves too, before his time is up, and is given a Komsomol secretaryship in an industrial region; within a week he is addressing a city meeting. That autumn the car he is travelling in overturns, his right knee is crushed, and the descent into total immobility begins.
Four things in that half-page. The United Opposition of 1926 is named accurately, with all three of its leaders. A room is vetted for Party membership before the news is given, and the reader is expected to find that proper. The response of the loyal is to abandon medical treatment and return to their posts, which is presented as devotion and which in Pavel's case directly produces the accident that finishes him. And a man from the Control Commission — the body that would shortly be expelling oppositionists by the thousand — is the one who carries the word.
Ostrovsky is not hiding the sequence. He is proud of it. The reader in the 1950s was meant to take from this that a Bolshevik leaves the sanatorium when the Party is threatened. The reader now can see that the threat was a political disagreement, that the mobilisation against it broke the health of the men mobilised, and that the Control Commission was already the instrument it later became.
None of which makes Nikolai Ostrovsky the author of that outcome, and this house does not deal in retrospective indictments of the dead.
He was blind and paralysed when he wrote this. He had been a Komsomol organiser in a border town during the discussion he is describing, on the side he depicts as right, believing what he had been told by the people who had recruited him to the revolution. He died on 22 December 1936 — four months after the first Moscow trial, weeks before the second, and before the annihilation of the Party generation whose politics he had helped to caricature. He never learned what "rotten through and through" was going to mean administratively. He was thirty-two.
And he left, in the character of Dubava, more than he intended. Dubava is not a puppet. He is a worker whose defeat is rendered with enough physical particularity that a reader can still feel what it is to be in that hall, shouted down, offered a rostrum as a humiliation, with the friends of one's youth on the other side. Ostrovsky was too good a writer to make the man contemptible from the start, which is precisely why he had to make him contemptible later.
One last thing, and it is the perfect image of the relation between this novel and the institution that produced it. How the Steel Was Tempered does not end with a battle, a death, or a declaration. It ends with the arrival of a telegram:
"Novel heartily approved turned over to publishers congratulations on your victory."
His heart beat fast. His cherished dream was realized! The steel trap had been rent asunder, and now, armed with a new weapon, he had returned to the fighting ranks and to life.
The last event in the most influential novel of the Soviet Union is a favourable decision by a Party committee on a manuscript. The weapon is the book, and the book is a weapon only once a committee has said so. Ostrovsky wrote that as triumph, and it is one — a blind man on his back had got back into the world. It is also the whole problem, set down in six words by the person least able to see it.
Not as evidence against Ostrovsky. As evidence about the thing he was inside.
We have hundreds of pages of documents from the 1923 Opposition, and they tell us what the Left said. What they cannot tell us is what the campaign against it felt like to a twenty-year-old worker who believed it: the relief of unanimity, the excitement in the hall, the certainty that the friend who dissents has begun to smell. For that, there is this novel, written from inside a mind the apparatus had formed, by a man too honest to fake the details and too loyal to question the frame.
Read Pankratov's speech with the dates in your hand. Read what is done to Dubava and notice that nothing is refuted. Then read the last sentence of the book again.
Our tomorrow will show how much these prophecies are worth.
It did.