p When the prison doors closed behind Sverdlov on 10 June 1906, he was aware that they would not open for a long time7 Insufficient evidence would not save him from being held, tried, and given a severe sentence.

p At first the police had no material proof that he had been campaigning against the government. He had a false passport and they did not even know his real name. He had managed to destroy all incriminating documents, and wheil" they searched him they found only a few insignificant notes. All that was irrelevant, though; they knew they were at last holding Comrade Andrei, who had eluded them for so long.

p Meanwhile there were more arrests. Ultimately 36 people were charged with membership of a criminal organisation, which, ’taking the name of the Perm RSDLP committee, did knowingly incite the populace to overthrow the government, subvert the monarchy and set up a democratic republic, with the aim of establishing a socialist order in Russia’. Most of the accused were 22 or 23; the eldest was 30, and Shura Kostareva was only 17. Sverdlov had had his twentyfirst birthday the week before his arrest.

p As a result of these arrests and the discovery of our press, the prosecution finally managed to lay hands on some documents, including the drafts of leaflets and the committee’s accounts for May. Although they were not signed, a handwriting expert testified that Sverdlov had written them, but this was still not adequate grounds for accusing him of leading the Ural Party organisation, and none of us would give any information about our roles within the Party. It was a Bolshevik rule not to admit anything that would help to reveal the secrets of our underground network—the fainthearted who broke under questioning were always expelled. But the gendarmes did not need us to tell them Andrei’s role.

p We were transferred from cell to cell, from prison to prison, and still the investigations continued. The trial finally took place in the autumn of 1907, a year and a half later. We received varying sentences: Sverdlov was given two years in a strict security prison in addition to the 18 months that he had already been detained; my sentence was 41 12 months in a strict security prison, making two and a half years in all. But we counted ourselves lucky, for it was the last trial in which Bolsheviks received such comparatively light sentences; later defendants were condemned to convict labour or to longer prison terms.

p Strict security imprisonment was the harshest kind, reserved for particularly dangerous enemies of the autocracy. In principle, prisoners should have been held in solitary confinement, but, as the only strict security prisons in the Urals, in Perm and Ekaterinburg, were both permanently overcrowded in those days, there were no individual cells available.

p While awaiting trial we were held first in Perm and later allocated to prisons all over the Urals. At the end of 1906 a number of the accused, including Sverdlov, were transferred to a penal institution in Nikolaevka, a place which had the most dreadful reputation. We had heard that prisoners were brutally beaten and tortured there: one method was apparently to take prisoners to the yard in sub-zero temperatures and douse them with water. Sverdlov and others had been condemned to this hell-hole.

p He was put into solitary confinement immediately on arrival but the other political prisoners chose him as their spokesman, so that he did not have to suffer in total isolation from his comrades. Taking advantage of his position, he visited the other cells, checked on the food and the condition of the sick, and obtained books for the prisoners.

p The trial was held after Sverdlov had spent about a year in Nikolaevka. He was then moved to the overcrowded prison in Ekaterinburg, where I had been for some time, to serve the remainder of his sentence in one of the ordinary cells there.

p For Sverdlov the fight continued even in prison. He maintained his links with the outside world—no easy task in his circumstances, as he was allowed no parcels and few visitors. Only members of his immediate family would be permitted to see him, and he had been out of touch with them since leaving Nizhni Novgorod, though his youngest sister did visit him once, in the spring of 1907.

p We were able to keep up spasmodic and precarious contact, exchanging a few words through my casement when he was taken to the exercise yard, or passing occasional notes to each other. Though we spent over two years in the same prisons, we met rarely, and then thanks to the ‘liberal’ condescension of the prison authorities. And how immeasurably brief those meetings were! We were never left alone together, were never able to express even a hundredth part of all we wanted, needed so badly, to say.

p Many of the political prisoners, especially those whose families 42 lived nearby, were in a much better position than Sverdlov. They regularly received parcels and were sometimes allowed visitors, who could keep them in touch with the outside world. Notes would covertly change hands in any of a dozen cunning ways: hidden in pots with a false bottom, in loaves, in the covers of books, which prisoners in those days were still permitted to receive, in the birch-bark containers used in the Urals for milk or beer.

p It was also sometimes possible to bribe certain of the junior warders, who often had a hard time managing on their less than ample wages. Some of the prison administrative staff also secretly sympathised with the political prisoners and were brave enough, as the opportunity arose, to do various jobs for them.

p As his communications with the outside world expanded and stabilised, Sverdlov began to send his advice and instructions to those comrades who had not been arrested. He also used his contacts to inform the organisation of decisions taken by the imprisoned Bolsheviks, to tell them the results of their debates and to get the drafts of political leaflets out to them. He gave those who were leaving the prison advice on contacts to make and methods to adopt.

p But he was still behind bars, and longing to be free, to return to the battle. His inventive mind was constantly turning over outrageously daring plans of escape, although he soon came to see that escape in the near future was out of the question. He then turned his attention to his colleagues’ education, and continued his own study of revolutionary theory; he read extensively, made notes and prepared articles. I have before me one of his notebooks from those days, which contains synopses of Lenin’s The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, What Is To Be Done! and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and also of works by Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Mehring, of Louis Paul’s L’Avenir du Socialisme, The History of Trade Unionism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Charles Gide’s La Cooperation, Victor Clark’s The Labour Movement in Australasia, Rozhkov’s The Economic Development of Russia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, and Werner Sombart’s Der Moderne Kapitalismus.

p Sverdlov read works such as What Is To Be Done?, Capital and the letters of Marx and Engels several times while in prison, each time making new notes and synopses. He made sure somehow that his personal copy of Capital, studded with pencil marks and comments, was never taken from him when he was moved from one prison to another.

p His cell-mates could hardly believe his diligence. He often worked far into the night, taking advantage of the sleepy silence in the cells. Sverdlov’s working habits were, of course, familiar to me; I often 43 remember him returning home after an exhausting meeting and immediately taking up a book. Maybe it was hereditary or maybe the result of long practice, but he seemed to find five hours’ sleep sufficient.

p He had what I can only describe as a tremendous thirst for life; he tried to live every moment to the full and hated wasting time. Never lukewarm about anything, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to whatever he was doing, be it work, study or even relaxation when he found time for it.

From prison he wrote: ’Life is a wonderful thing—varied, interesting, inexhaustibly profound. No matter how hard we try, we can only grasp a tiny part of it—but it is our duty to make that tiny part as large and as interesting as we can...’