XX
Nikolai let out a sigh of relief as he
sat down, exhaustedly knocking some papers off his cluttered desk. He took a deep breath before reaching down to
grab them. A smile formed on the corner
of his lips as he realized the paper on top was his most recent publication
with the nice little earmarked corner slightly cutting off the 9 on the
1909. He leaned back in his chair
wondering if moving the date would change how people perceived the paper. Perception was what it was all about when you
were the 20 year old Chief Organizer of the Bolsheviks in the important
Zamoskvereche district of Moscow. And
recently the Bolshevik organization had been shredded by the Tsar. The Okhrana was raiding district after
district. Membership had already fallen
by as much as 50% by some reports.
Many of the party leaders had already
been imprisoned or detained, some had even been shipped away to prison camps in
the north. His district had not been
untouched either, but the headquarters was still intact. He rifled through the leaflet distractedly
holding it next to his ear to cover the sound of silence in the
background. Silence? His eyes snapped up while the leaflet
crumpled in his shaky hands. He stood up
slowly and edged back towards the old wooden door that was the entrance to
their hideout.
Headquarters was a very well chosen spot
by all accounts. It was right next to
one of the river tributaries meaning the bridge next to it created a kind of
natural hiding place. The bridge and the
road rose a few feet with a guardrail on the side until a single hole a few
hundred feet from the riverbank opened to allow travelers to pass to the bridge
or down onto the street below. The
street to the door started wide and narrowed as it passed an old church on the
left, and right behind the church, built into the very same wall, was that
small rickety door. Headquarters wasn’t
always empty, but it was strangely silent tonight, nothing disturbed the
silence, even from the street outside.
Nikolai reached his shaky hands to the
door, and slid it open. The night sky
greeted him with silence. He quietly
exited and locked the door behind him, hurriedly starting a brisk walk towards
the bridge. As he did so he could see
figures emerging below him near the river, more emerged in front of him coming
down from the road to the river. He
stopped, unsure of where to go, and then he thought of the church and started
to walk quickly towards the doors, but they too opened revealing a man in a long
petticoat, which buttoned all the way up to just below his chin. His army style boots with baggy pants
revealed him to be an officer. He looked
Bukharin up and down coolly.
“Hello, Nikolai, I don’t think we’ve
met?”
“No, sir, we haven’t.” Nikolai answered stiffly, the men around him
had him rattled.
“Well I think it’s about time we should,
yes?” And with that the man waved at the
men, who moved forward, grabbing and chaining Nikolai’s wrists coarsely. It was his first foray in a Russian
prison. In two months time he would be
out again and back to his Marxist schemes.
By late fall he was to be arrested again, and this time released with
the fear of a pending trial that never came.
He was to continue his role as a Muscovian leader until the end of 1910,
when almost all the Social Democratic Labor Party leadership was arrested. This was the low point mark in Bolshevik
history. They did not reemerge as the
leading party until after the revolution itself. While in 1907, records state that 100,000 people
were members of the party but by the end of 1909 less than 10,000 remained
loyal. The next few years were perilously dark for the Bolshevik leaders. Russia
had become a pit of venomous vipers for them.
But it was during this time in exile, when the party leadership that would
eventually lead the new, glorious revolution, emerged.
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