Coming up as an only child in pre-Revolution Petersburg, Sergey Sokolov had never thought of himself as a member of the proletariat. His father, Arkady, a toolmaker’s son, had risen to the rank of foreman at the Petrograd Metal Works, where he adapted designs of Rateau turbines and boilers of Vulcan destroyers that the foundry was commissioned to make for the French and Germans. Sergey’s mother, Yelena, was a sought-after seamstress to society ladies. Together the Sokolovs brought home enough money to enroll Sergey in one of the city’s top boys’ schools: the Second Petrograd Gymnasium, near St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Attending class with the children of civil servants, doctors, merchants, clergymen, and a few of the lesser nobles, Sergey was expected to further his father’s ascent, to become a top engineer in one of the many factories that were rising like a brick shadow around the marble-colonnaded city. By the time Sergey was in the sixth form, Arkady was in his fifties, occupying his own office in the workshop, fixing workers’ hours and pay and waiting for his chance to retire on the family-owned plot outside the city. Then the Revolution came, and Arkady’s dreams of moving to the countryside were cut short. The Metal Works were nationalized, the Sokolovs’ plot was requisitioned by the government for a workers’ sanatorium, and the Sokolovs were forced to suffer mutely as their five-room apartment was subdivided and stuffed with shrill, illiterate workers who promptly destroyed their floors and furniture.
To the young Sergey, whose classes had dwindled with the sudden emigration of his classmates, the Revolution was a mixed prospect. He’d seen the cretins it brought to power, endured his father’s complaints about the new Metalworkers’ Union, dominated no longer by master craftsmen like himself but by unskilled dolts; he had watched his mother suffer as their new “neighbors” flung muddied boots on her brocade chairs. At the same time, he thrilled at Russia’s industrial ambitions: building steel mills in Siberia and oil refineries on the Caspian Sea, laying out factories in Stalingrad. As a boy enamored of machinery, he shared the Bolsheviks’ love of bigness. His parents’ weariness could not dampen the boy’s wonder at the great dams thrown across broad rivers, the awesome machines so complex he couldn’t imagine how human hands had built them or how human minds had conceived them. He knew that, to ensure a place for himself in the new order and among the rising ranks of young engineers, he would need to join the youth division of the Party: the Komsomol. But at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute this proved to be far from simple.
Not long after he entered, the first purge of the student body was conducted. He was called into a room and questioned by an unfriendly troika including the flabby-faced Party Committee secretary in a worker’s leather jacket. They asked him questions about his mother and father, his grandparents, uncles, his former classmates at the gymnasium. With a father who had been a foreman in a tsarist factory, there was now some doubt as to whether the Sokolovs were true proletarians or “hostile class elements.” Sergey tried to answer the questions modestly and directly, concealing his fear and pretending to show no insult. He said that his father, a simple man, had been promoted gradually from the shop floor to the lowest rung of management because of his skill. He spoke of how he himself had worked for a year on the same factory floor, in a cold-shop, before attending the Polytech. At the end of the purge, all students with a bourgeois class background were expelled. He had been spared, though barely. From that moment on, he understood that he would have to work harder than the others to keep his nose clean. His first two attempts to join the Komsomol were unsuccessful. It wasn’t until his penultimate year that he was given another chance, thanks to the endorsement of a girl—a combustible little blonde named Olga, a Komsomol organizer he’d somehow become involved with. Taken with his impressive height and aloofness, she’d pursued Sergey as a conquest. He had discovered early on that, though the tall, slender beauties were shy around him, something about his size provoked the scrappy ones to want to climb him like alpineers.
It was the year the government had started collectivizing the farms, and Olga told him she’d help him get his Komsomol ticket in the fall if he did “social work” with her brigade over the summer. That June, he exchanged his britches for a pair of overalls and traveled with a student brigade to the town of Tikhvin to educate the peasants in the surrounding villages.
In many of the villages that were forced to collectivize, the peasants had already slaughtered their animals so that they would not have to hand them over to the collectives. He’d never seen a town market so full of meat. Shanks of cow and pork attracted hordes of flies. In the village of Luginy, the peasants were prosperous and did not want to join the commune. Inside a church that had had its steeple lopped off, the young communists showed the peasants pictures of buxom women in wheat fields with full baskets on their shoulders, and the gleaming tractors and combines they’d get when they joined the collective farm. “First give us the machines; then we’ll think about joining your collective,” one silver-haired farmer had said, drawing cheers from the others.
“Old kulak thinks he’s clever,” Olga had remarked afterward.
“What makes you think he’s a kulak?” Sergey had wondered. “He doesn’t hire anyone—he’s got his three huge sons to help him till his land.”
“Don’t be na?ve, Seryozha. No one does that well working the land with his own hands. The man is a kulak, and we will find someone to testify to it.”
At the following week’s meeting of the Regional Party Committee, a skinny, half-drunk peasant had shown up to say the old man had hired him during harvests, and to throw in that the farmer was a speculator who bought pig bristles from the villagers, made them into hairbrushes, and sold them at a profit in town. The whole thing had been a farce. Olga had practically fed him the script; Sergey guessed that she’d bought him off with a few bottles of vodka. He had not challenged her at the meeting, but protested to her privately afterward: “Plenty of peasants do a little trading on the side. It’s not the truth to call him a speculator.”