p We needed money to live, so I went back to work. We stayed with Glafira Okulova,  [47•1  who was living with her two children in a smallish flat. Her husband, Ivan Teodorovich, had been sent directly from Ekaterinburg prison to a term of forced labour.

p Okulova had heard a lot about Sverdlov from her husband’s prison letters and she was glad to take us in. Her life was extremely difficult at that time, as she had two small children to provide for and was also trying to send money to her husband. We would both often come home late after work, worn out, to find the children fast asleep. On the 48 evenings when he was free, Sverdlov would give the children their supper and put them to bed.

p As he had hoped, he was able to reach Lenin and the Central Committee through his Petersburg comrades. He first contacted Mikhail Olminsky  [48•1  and they soon became close friends. Olminsky felt that Sverdlov was too careless of his own safety and especially foolhardy to stay with Okulova, the wife of a well-known Bolshevik, whose flat could well be under police surveillance. Sverdlov took this to heart, and we tried several times to find another flat but failed.

p This was how Lenin viewed the changed political situation in November 1910: ’The three-year period of the golden days of the counter-revolution (1908—10) is evidently coming to a close and being replaced by a period of incipient upsurge. The summer strikes of the current year and the demonstrations on the occasion of Tolstoy’s death are a clear indication of this.’  [48•2 

p Sverdlov was of the same opinion. He wrote on 31 October 1910 to his friends in Narym:

p ’It gets better every day—our links expand, grow stronger and more stable. And there has been a noticeable change in the atmosphere during the last couple of weeks. A number of comrades have returned to us and the organisation is heaving, if you’ll pardon the expression, with young workers and the formerly benighted masses. Groups are springing up in the colleges and institutes to discuss social issues. There are more strikes. This all clearly shows that things are looking up—it’s not just wishful thinking, it’s absolutely, palpably real...’

p The growing revolutionary mood among the people prompted the Central Committee to increase their demands on the Petersburg Bolsheviks, Sverdlov among them. It was a time to stand up and be counted, to come out into the open, to abandon the hints and innuendoes that we had used when writing for the legal liberal press. The Bolsheviks should speak to the workers again through their own newspaper Zvezda.  [48•3  The cream of the Party should be united and a militant monolithic organisation created, capable of leading the working class in its mood of mounting revolutionary enthusiasm.

p The Central Committee heard that Sverdlov was back in Petersburg 49 and looked to him to restore the local organisation, which had suffered at the hands of the secret police. He was also to help create Zvezda.

p On their advice he proceeded with extreme caution; it was known that the organisation in Petersburg, like its Moscow counterpart, was rotten with informers. The Central Committee itself arranged his first secret appointments with Bolshevik workers from the local factories; he had decided to begin his reconstruction work in Petersburg in this way.

p Sverdlov’s understanding of the political situation enabled him to turn any event into an agitational vehicle. He proved invaluable, for example, in the Bolshevik campaign during the State Duma  [49•1  debates on the abolition of capital punishment.

p He also gave detailed advice to the workers when they began to set up their own Bolshevik groups, explaining the importance of a broad base and helping them to establish efficient communications and plan their public addresses. He was in close contact with the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma.

p I was able to help him in two ways. I checked all his contacts in advance, as a security measure. In the evening after work I would go to the working class districts on the city limits, give the password and question the person I found there closely on his political background and role in the Party. Only when I was convinced of his reliability would I arrange the meeting with Sverdlov. If the flat seemed totally secure Sverdlov would go there; otherwise they would meet at the house of some comrade already known to be trustworthy. Of course I named no names; I spoke only of Comrade Andrei, a Party worker, which gave Sverdlov some measure of security against betrayal. Through each of these individuals he made further contacts among the Petersburg factory workers.

p I also helped him put his letters to Lenin and the Central Committee into his own special code. There is even a mention of this, referring to me by name, in police records dating from 1910.

p At times the informers in our ranks managed to complicate our work considerably. We needed to act in total secrecy, while at the same time we had a bitter fight on our hands against the liquidationists and those who wanted to recall our deputies from the Duma.

p Zvezda was also a bone of contention; the Mensheviks tried to take it over and turn it into a mouthpiece of liquidationism. But Sverdlov, Olminsky and Poletaev, in recruiting the editorial board and chief 50 editor, did their best to ensure that the paper would be truly Bolshevik. In early November 1910 Sverdlov reported to the Central Committee:

p ’Dear comrades, first about the paper... A group of objectors invited me, as you said they would, to a meeting to elect a candidate for the editorship. It pains me to report that there was absolutely no one in any way suitable... Baturin would have been more or less adequate and I wanted to put his name forward but was not sure that he would want me to...’

p This letter was never dispatched. On the evening of 14 November I came home from work and settled to the arduous task of encoding it but it was not even half finished when there was a hammering on the door and the gendarmes burst in. During the time it took them to get to our room I managed to destroy the half-coded letter and the code itself. That was most important. The police discovered the original, written in Sverdlov’s hand but it had no address and no signature. They turned the place upside down, broke the furniture, tore the paper off the walls and slit open the mattresses, but found nothing else— not for the first time—because we had been expecting a raid since 9 November, when Sverdlov noticed that he was being followed. At first he eluded them with his usual skill but he knew that he was a marked man; the remarkably zealous informers soon put the police on to his trail again. At that stage we began the essential business of passing everything we could to our colleagues.

p One would have thought that, once his whereabouts were known, arrest would follow shortly. We were sufficiently familiar with the gendarme mentality, however, that we were not surprised when they held back. They thought he did not suspect he was being followed and were waiting for him to betray his contacts to them first.

p We were sure that it was only a matter of time and hurriedly began to look for a place where Sverdlov could go into hiding for a while. But they forestalled us. After first arresting him not far from our flat, they came and took me.

p After only three months, in February 1911, I was released, expelled from Petersburg and sent to Ekaterinburg under strict police surveillance. I had got off so lightly because they could hardly detain a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, as I then was, especially as there was little material evidence against me.

p Until his trial Sverdlov was kept in solitary confinement. Immediately before his arrest—and in fact during all our years in the underground—we were in bad financial straits. Sverdlov had no regular source of income and depended, when driven to it, on tiny and erratic sums made over to him as a professional revolutionary by the Party 51 from its own meagre reserves. My income was less than generous and it was hard to make ends meet.

p When I was released I got a little money together and sent it to him, insisting that he spend it primarily on food, as I was concerned for his health. He reassured me but once admitted: ’Not scrimp on food? I confess—through scrimping I have bought over eight roubles’ worth of books, including the fourth volume of Mehring’s Theories of Surplus Value, and a change of linen—you know how badly off I am in that line.’

p Meanwhile my confinement was approaching, which disturbed Sverdlov greatly, especially as he was in prison and unable to help directly. He tried to give me moral support by quoting medical texts on the subject of hygiene and the care of infants. He also went into the question of marriage and birth in some detail, studying the opinions of Plato, Thomas More, Tolstoy and various contemporary sociologists—for Sverdlov never considered any issue superficially.

p Our son was born on 4 April (17 April, New Style) 1911. Long before that, however, Sverdlov was reflecting on how to bring the child up as a ‘real’ human being. On 29 March 1911 he wrote:

p ’Upbringing is the decisive, if not the exclusive, influence. Inherited traits are merely potential—they can be realised or not, depending on several circumstances, which we can summarize as “ environment”.’

p There was so much tenderness, so much concern in every line of those letters, such bitterness at being separated from his wife and child at such a difficult time. ’I can’t tell you,’ he wrote, ’how much it hurts to sit here uselessly when the dearest person in the world is in distress, when all I want is to look after you. But here I am, a thousand miles away... I’d do anything, absolutely anything, to make things easier for you. I’m trying to think of something cheerful to write but I can’t— not because I’m lacking myself in that respect, for what we have between us makes me rich indeed. If we were together, how different things would be! But I want you to feel the strength of my love from far away—may it warm you, ease your sufferings, make them easier to bear.’

p Though we spent little time together, there was no happier or closerknit family, and no better father than Sverdlov.

p Thinking about his wife and child did not prevent him from working with his usual concentration. In almost every letter he asked for more books and reported on those he had read. In his first letter to me, dated I March 1911, he asked for Bebel’s Aus meinem Leben, Spinoza’s Ethica, the letters of Marx to Sorge and of Lassalle to Marx. Later he asked me to send a one-volume edition of Heine in German, 52 and ’as many German books as you can’, then Finn’s Industrial Development in Russia in the Past 20 Years, Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value, Parvus’ Der Weltmarkt und die Agrdrkrisis, Bernstein’s Historical Materialism, and the third volume of Capital.

p He wrote: "There is not much change here. I am working an average of ten hours a day... I am still reading a lot, though at times my brain refuses to come to grips with a complicated concept and then I take up a more mechanical task, such as making notes. I can hardly wait for some maths books to arrive.’

With the approach of spring Sverdlov’s impatience to hear his sentence grew. He was not afraid of Siberia.