Kanatchikov’s conception of socialism was extremely malleable at this stage. And the same was true of most workers. They found it difficult to take on board complex or abstract ideas, but they were receptive to propaganda in the form of simple pamphlet stories highlighting the exploitation of the workers in their daily lives. Gorky’s stories were very popular. Since escaping from Krasnovidovo, he had roamed across the country doing various casual jobs, until he had met the novelist and critic V. G. Korolenko, who had encouraged him to write. By the mid-1890s Gorky had become a national celebrity, the first real writer of any quality to emerge from the urban underworld of migratory labourers, vagabonds and thieves, which his stories represented with vividness and compassion. Dressed like a simple worker, with his walrus moustache and his strongly chiselled face, Gorky was received as a phenomenon in the salons of the radical intelligentsia. The workers could easily identify themselves with his stories, because they drew on the concerns that filled their everyday lives and, like the writer’s pseudonym, captured their own spirit of defiance and revolt (gor’kii means ‘bitter’ in Russian). Moreover, Gorky’s obvious sympathy for the industrial worker, and his equal antipathy to the ‘backward’ peasant Russia of the past, gave workers like Kanatchikov, who were trying to break free from their own roots, a new set of moral values and ideals. In a famous passage in My Childhood (1913), for example, Gorky asked himself why he had recorded all the incidents of cruelty and suffering which had filled his early years; and he gave an answer with which many workers, like Kanatchikov, would have sympathized:
When I try to recall those vile abominations of that barbarous life in Russia, at times I find myself asking the question: is it worth while recording them? And with ever stronger conviction I find the answer is yes, because that was the real loathsome truth and to this day it is still valid. It is that truth which must be known down to the very roots, so that by tearing them up it can be completely erased from the memory, from the soul of man, from our whole oppressive and shameful life.
All the characters in Gorky’s stories were divided into good or bad — both defined in terms of their social class — with little shading or variation. This moral absolutism also appealed to the workers’ growing class and revolutionary consciousness. But, perhaps above all, it was the spirit of revolt in Gorky’s writing that made it so inspiring. ‘The Stormy Petrel’ (1895), his bombastic eulogy to the romantic revolutionary hero, disguised in the form of a falcon flying above the foamy waves, became the revolutionaries’ hymn and was circulated through the underground in hundreds of printed, typed and hand-written copies. Like most workers, Kanatchikov had learned it by heart:
Intrepid petrel, even though you die,
Yet in the song of the bold and firm in spirit,
You’ll always live as an example,
A proud summons — to freedom and light!53
The workers also liked to read stories about the popular struggle for liberation in foreign lands. ‘Whether it was the Albigenses battling against the Inquisition, the Garibaldians, or the Bulgarian nationalists, we saw them all as our kindred spirits,’ wrote Kanatchikov. It did not matter that these foreign heroes had fought very different battles from their own, since the workers were quick to reinterpret these stories in the Russian context. Indeed the censorship of literature about Russia’s own historic ‘revolutionaries’, such as Pugachev or the Decembrists, obliged them to look abroad for inspiration. In that good old Russian tradition of reading between the lines they seized upon the Netherlanders’ struggle against the Inquisition as a stirring example of the spirit and organization they would need in their own struggle against the police. It was the stories’ emotional content, their romantic depiction of the rebel as a fighter for freedom and justice, that made them so inspiring. From them, Kanatchikov wrote, ‘we learned the meaning of selflessness, the capacity to sacrifice oneself in the name of the common good’.54 By identifying themselves with the fearless champions of human emancipation everywhere, they became converted to the revolution.
