The Accidental Anarchist Read Free Page A

upon this soup as though it were fresh-baked bread, none of the Jews in our group tasted a drop. We tore into the provisions from home. Not that we wouldn’t, eventually, have to eat the same unclean food as everyone else, but in this way we put off that moment for a little longer.
     
    At two o’clock in the morning, we were herded back to the station. Along the way, our comrades discussed their first military supper. One said it was perhaps a little too salty, another complained there wasn’t enough fat in it. A third guessed that the cook had washed his dirty clothes in the water, and a fourth agreed that the soup did have a slight taste of army soap. And all of them roundly cursed Vanya for his stinginess with food.
     
    We returned to the box cars, traveling under those inhuman conditions for two days until, at four o’clock one morning, we reached Petersburg. My older brother, Mordechai, who had attained a position of some influence, had planned to meet me at the station. But to my great disappointment he was not there. (It turned out that he had already been to the station several times. In fact, that very morning the stationmaster, with that wonderful Russian efficiency even the Communists could never change, told him that our train was not due until the following day.)
     
    No one at the station was prepared for our arrival with even a caldron of tea. The first snows of September had just fallen. We trudged through this with our belongings along endless Petersburg streets for what seemed like a good five hours. Finally, panting, staggering with exhaustion, and drenched with sweat, we reached the Novocherkassky Barracks.
     
    Our feet were swollen, and a man would have needed an ice pick before he could blow his nose. On top of which, we were hungry as wolves, and our revolutionary spirits were at a pitch not to be reached again until 1904.
     
    I must admit that, on this occasion, Vanya treated us all – Jew and gentile, alike – with perfect equality: none of us got a thing. One of our guards explained that they could not give us food because our names were not yet on the roster. They did, however, give us free hot water and I, for one, was relieved to hear nothing more mentioned about our “mutiny” on the train.
     
    By ten o’clock the next morning, we were at the induction center, mother-naked (which raised some comments on the sacred art of circumcision), for a medical examination by several army doctors who fell all over themselves to pronounce us fit. I suspected that, by this time, they had probably seen such an epidemic of remarkably similar injuries that they assumed the boys from the occupied portions of the Russian empire were unusually clumsy or particularly unlucky, and considered their afflictions an acceptable norm.
     
    Later, we were measured like yard goods, next to be assigned to platoons according to our talents. Toward this end, we were asked our civilian occupations. I already knew from some of the veterans back home that getting into a good platoon made all the difference in the world. A ‘good’ platoon meant sitting in an office and being part of natchalstva , officialdom. A bad one was bitter as death. As my brother’s letter had advised (no doubt afraid that, in my youthful stupidity, I would give my profession as “labor organizer” or “terrorist”), I called myself a tailor (which was Glasnik’s occupation), even though I had never threaded a needle in my life. But, possibly because of the incident on the train, I was put into the 15th Company, which had the reputation of being the “Convicts’ Company.” From the first morning on, I understood why.
     
    In other companies, the men were treated in a fairly civilized way. They were awakened at six o’clock in the morning, cleaned their floors, and polished their boots and brass buttons until seven, when they were taken out into the waist-high snow and made to run for an hour.
     
    With the 15th they were less gentle.