Fellow Travelers (7 page)

I sometimes had nightmares about the mountains that towered over the town. Waking nightmares, that is, that would overcome me like a chill when I trudged down the road to the mine office or turned up the wick on the oil lantern on my desk. I had the sense that their immensity was beginning to avalanche down upon us all, obliterating the town, myself, and all humankind, not necessarily as weight and momentum, but with the power of darkness, extinguishing the universe it encompassed and all the creatures within it, sucking the life from your throat with your breath.

We lived in a big two-story white house fronted on either side by second-floor balconies. It was the only house in the village with central heating, but that wasn't enough. I sometimes thought I would go mad that winter with the cold, the unceasing noise of the wind, the howling wolves in the woods or on the hilltops, the snow trailing like smoke across the ground. There were four of us living there, the mine superintendent, his deputy, and the deputy's wife, but our quarters were separate, and I saw less of them than I thought I wanted to until I actually spent some time with them, as I did maybe one night a week over dinner. The mine superintendent was a closed-mouthed Russian named Omitri Pudovkin, Mitya as we usually called him. His assistant was an Englishman named Willy Smith, who had married a Russian woman before the war and become a citizen. His wife, Lena, cooked, served, and presided over the table, but otherwise had nothing to do with me, and as far as I could tell with Willy Smith either.

The two men had run the mine when the British owned it and continued to run it after the government took over, except that their roles were now reversed. Pudovkin was superintendent, Smitty the mine manager; but nobody seemed to mind.

That winter, I spent much of my time poring over the Russian grammar I had picked up before leaving New York, trying to retain words and phrases in a language that seemed impossibly bizarre, formal, elaborate, brutal, without those connections with other European languages that might make you feel you were not venturing into totally unfamiliar territory. Mitya's broken English was hard to follow, but Smitty had a Yorkshire accent so thick that I had almost as much trouble understanding him as I did Mitya. The Russian words I picked up were those that came out of the job. The words for adit and stope, mine opening, shaft, drill, explosive, you name it—production, shift, worker, timekeeper—so that, even if I could get by in Platinumgrad, nobody anywhere else would know what I was talking about.

Smitty spoke no more Russian than he had to, and the miners didn't always speak Russian either. A good half of them came from barbaric places on the northern slopes of the Himalayas—Tien Shan, Sayan, and Alma Ata, ranges nobody else ever heard of, places with exotic names like Kazakh, Turkeman, Kirghiz, and Uzbek—and they knew even less Russian than I did, spoke their own languages and communicated with Smitty through the foremen who actually ran the mine and who could generally make sense of their dialects.

You were no longer in Russia, in Europe, you were in Asia on the eastern edge of the Siberian steppe that rolled endlessly beyond the hills that closed the valley in on the east. Nothing was quite familiar. There were mornings you were awakened by the Muslim call to prayer, to submission to Allah, and you would see the men dropping to their knees, pressing their foreheads to the frozen earth, humps and grumps of skins, furs, and cloth.

The workers lived in barracks, with maybe fifty to seventy people apiece, and most of the larger barracks had a Red Corner—a sort of assembly hall that was also used as a classroom—to teach those who couldn't to read and write and those who didn't understand the social system and the principles of Marxism on which the new system was being built. In the evenings, the Red Corner became a sort of nightclub or dancehall, with the workers providing their own entertainment. Vodka had been outlawed during the revolution, but the workers made an acceptable substitute out of potatoes or grain, a sort of Russian version of bathtub gin, and though it was cloudy rather than clear it packed a bigger wallop than any of the legitimate vodkas I've ever tried.

People played the guitar, the balalaika, and the accordion, and everyone sang and danced. I would often go down to the nearest Red Corner and sit in the shadows for hours listening to sounds that I'd never heard before. Frantic, frenzied, passionate, barbaric. The excitement was palpable, compounded of noise and energy and alcohol, and for a time you almost stopped feeling the cold, forgot that you were trapped there, at the edge of the world.

The officials who now ran the mine—the directors, I suppose, of the operation—represented the local soviet, or town council, but they ran the mine just as it had been run before the Revolution, except that socialist thugs replaced capitalist bullies, with no appreciable improvement for anyone. The managers still retained seigniorial rights over the women and children—not just Mitya, Smitty and I, but the dozen or so mine foremen as well. They could take them into their beds when they were of a mind to, and nobody thought to question them about it. Women, children, it made no difference. It was the way the world was run and had been from the beginning of time. Mitya, Smitty, and some of the other managers availed themselves of the privilege (the presence of their own wives notwithstanding), and I stood by with utter amazement. Most of the women were filthy and smelly, not likely to cause most men to lose their senses in an excess of desire, though with enough vodka to fire you up you might well not worry about that or remember where you were or who was watching. Indeed, you might not even care about being watched in an act so swaddled in coverings it might scarcely seem to be visible. I didn't partake myself. Not because I had moral qualms, but because the seigniorial right was a claim too personal for me ever to imagine myself making on somebody else.

When Manny had arrived there the previous spring, the town was in turmoil. Production had come to a halt; the miners were starving, and though it might be illegal to strike they had in fact stopped working. As Manny explained it to me, they considered it all our fault. As concessionaires, we had promised to provide them with food at the company store, and the food had not been forthcoming. The workers were ready for blood. Manny's blood, my blood, if I had been there. Manny promised them the moon, stars, and borscht, and took off with his skin intact for Ekaterinenberg to look for the food shipment he had sent east from Moscow a month or two before.

He found the boxcars without any great difficulty sitting on a siding on the edge of town where they had been ever since they arrived. Manny demanded an explanation, and the stationmaster explained innocently that the rail was too light to move such heavy equipment north. Manny didn't know anything about railroads, but the stationmaster offered so many excuses for not transferring the loads into lighter cars that Manny became convinced he was angling for a bribe. He ordered the stationmaster to get the train moving at once, and when the man failed to do so, Manny got in touch with the Cheka, the local secret police, flashed his passport from Lenin, and had the stationmaster executed on the spot. Within an hour, the trains had begun moving north, without incident, over rail supposedly too light to bear their weight.

“Shot him?” I said. “You had him shot?”

“Him and a lot of others.” From then on, they shot anyone caught interfering with food shipments east of the Urals.

“How could they allow you to do that?” I said “Just up and shoot somebody without any charges or trial or anything?”

“They're used to it. The secret police shot them under the tsar and they shoot them under Lenin. How else do you think they've been getting the country running again? I may not like it, but I can see that it's necessary. How else do you think 20,000 party members brought order and stability to 160 million disordered Russians? You gave them orders, and if they didn't obey, you shot them. You can't do anything else. I can accept that.”

“Wow!” I said, helplessly “I'm not sure I could accept that.” But I decided not to make an issue of it.

“I don't expect any more disruptions,” Manny announced, “and if anything like that happens again, you'd better be prepared to take it to the secret police or you might end up dead yourself.”

With the mine workers fed and the mine in production again, Manny wanted me to do a thorough assessment of it and its operation with the idea that American know-how would be enough to put it back on a sound economic basis. Where Manny got such an idea, I have no idea, much less that I was the man to do it, but he went back to Moscow a few days later and left me to figure out what had to be done.

I had never been in a mine before in my life, and for weeks I was terrified every time I entered the place. I walked bent forward into the shadowy dark as if every step would be my last. I was terrified by the mass of rock hanging down over my head, by the narrowness of the passages, by the pounding hammers and explosions that shook the earth, by the dark, the wet, the running water, the candles, the lanterns that lit my way or blew out in some subterranean wind leaving me groping the walls for the next turn in the passage or picking my way over the rocky path to some pinpoint of light who knows how many yards ahead.

I tramped through those miles of corridors following the eccentricities of the vein, up and down, around corners, into the bowels of the earth. I went down from level to level, riding in a bucket, clinging to a chain in the dark. I went to the mine face where in the underground heat men, stripped to the waist, held drills to the rock face for other men to hit with sledgehammers. I watched the explosives being packed in the hole, the wick touched with flame, spurting, flaring, and everybody running back, stumbling over me to escape the explosion.

You felt as if you had gone back a thousand years, ten thousand, to the mines of the Pharaohs, King Solomon, or the Incas. The miners were beasts of burden, moving the raw ore back from the mine face in baskets hung from their foreheads onto their bent backs. There were children among them—boys eight, ten, twelve—handling the simpler underground jobs, delivering the fuel to the lanterns, guiding the mules. I never got used to it.

Mitya, Smitty, and the others were suspicious of what I was up to. They didn't like me; they didn't want me coming in questioning what they were doing. But for all that, they told me what I needed to know, and what had to be done. The mine was operating just as it had when it opened a half century before, and nobody had spent any money on it since. There were no mechanized shovels, no electric drills, no mechanical crushers to break down the ore. The men still worked mainly by hand, with pickaxes and shovels, in the light of kerosene lamps or even candles, and mules pulled the ore cars up the slope to the mine entrance. So the solution was obvious. You mechanized where you could. But Mitya and Smitty didn't like that. They worried about the men. You introduced this equipment and you put people out of work.

I told them that that wouldn't happen—I hoped it wouldn't—we would increase the output of the mine instead. The miners were suspicious as well when they got word of what I was planning to do. So I began holding talks with their union, until I discovered that the union meant nothing, that everything was run by the local town council, the local soviet, that is. And since as concessionaire I was the representative of the government the party would deny me nothing.

At the Miller School of Typing & Shorthand in New York, I had taken the courses Manny had prescribed for me and had discovered that accounting, at least, was not all that uncongenial to me. I liked reducing everything to numbers, manipulating these numbers to produce changes in the real world. All that winter, I pored over my worksheets with fingers so stiff I could hardly move them, calculating the cost of every procedure we undertook—from breaking up the ore, moving it out of the mine, loading it onto the sledges, and moving the sledges to the rail head.

But we were still losing money and so I came up with a scheme to build some incentives into the system. We would no longer pay the men by the day, but by how much they produced. The more tonnage the miners produced, the more money they would make. However, I couldn't just divide these gains equally. People had always been paid according to their skills—an explosives expert earned more than a driller, a driller more than an ore breaker, an ore breaker more than a mule driver. I didn't change that; I worked out a formula for apportioning by skills the labor costs per ton produced and allotted the savings proportionately. The scheme gave the workers an incentive not only to increase production, but to monitor the productivity of their coworkers as well. Somebody who was malingering wasn't monitored by us but by his peers, whose output and compensation depended on the production of the mine. I always had the feeling that this wasn't a very Marxist arrangement but nobody raised any objection. It wasn't quite the piecework that provided most of the discipline in Russian industry in the decades ahead but it was as close as I could come to it.

Winter was the busiest time of the year. We stockpiled the ore during the warm months and when snow fell began shipping the ore out by horse-drawn sleigh to the railhead ten miles away. There it was transshipped to the south, to Bakema, where the ore was smelted into metal.

Every couple of weeks I would ride with the sledges to the railroad. I had made friends with the regional superintendent there and I'd generally spend the evening with him eating, drinking, talking about home. He was an American in his late twenties and had come to Russia because of his commitment to the socialist cause. We drank vodka in quantities that left my head spinning and my legs weak, and somehow this compensated me for what was otherwise an intolerable life. I soon discovered why the Russians drank so constantly. Drinking was the only thing that made their lives bearable.

But my new friend didn't share my cynicism. He had seen everything since he had been there—the famine, the shootings, the prison camps, the slave workers—and it didn't dampen his faith in the slightest. All these things were necessary to achieve the dream of human justice and equality.