THE endless white snow glows with a bluish light, under the star-jammed sky. Our boots make fresh, crunching sounds as the six of us, arm in arm, singing, tramp along the broad highway:
"Endless the way of the millions--Out of the past toward the future, As free men we labour and strive...."
We are on our way from the club to the workers' new town. No one seems tired, although we have put in a full day of it, yes, and evening too, with Jade and his young comrades. What enthusiasm and energy these youth possess! At their machines for six hours they have worked with pep and udarnik tempo, then to department meetings of young workers, to discuss their part in the fight to improve quality of output.
To the club gym for physical culture, followed by showers, supper in a recently opened factory kitchen, nearby. Back to the club for classes in political economy and current events, the nine o'clock movie show, and now home for a round of sleep before beginning another day.
Jade Nickamkin goes with us as far as the Youth Commune where the rest of us live. He shares a room with his brother, in an apartment a short distance away. Even while we sing, his thoughts are busy with tomorrow's affairs.
Barely twenty-two, heavy responsibilities rest on his firm shoulders, placed there by his eighteen hundred comrade youths of the machine factory. A year ago they took him from his work bench and placed him as secretary of their "Comsomol" (Young Communist League).
His mobile, sensitive face, topped by waving red hair, is quick to light as he discusses politics or jokes with his pals. Every one of the twelve thousand workers at the plant knows Jack. "There's a young fellow who'll go far," they say, "he has all the makings." So he has. Regardless of age, I have seen few who could guide their fellows with a more sure, sympathetic hand. Furthermore, having observed him at close range, under varying circumstances, I wager my next copy of the Crocodile that here is one who disproves the old adage about redheads. Not once have his patience and good humour deserted him!
Even at the meeting with the Comsomols from the needle department, when they were caught napping, his good temper held.
Called together for a political discussion, he found a scant half-dozen out of twenty had prepared themselves. Largely village girls, and a few youths, but a few months in industry, they sat stolid, hushed, while he quizzed, explained, tugging away at loosening their tongues. Jack's quiet kidding was more telling than any scolding could have been.
At last the dam burst. Questions, opinions poured forth. "Don't worry, Jack," they said toward the close, "you'll not catch us short-handed again."
It was an unlucky day for the needle department. Mary, a soft-cheeked girl with dancing eyes, called for a check-up on the last subbotnik--the term applied to the hours of voluntary labour given, during free days on a collective farm, or in community work. Mary declared that several who had signed up to come, failed to appear. The gathering grew silent: a serious breach of discipline. Jack read off the list. Each who had been absent gave his reason, good, bad, or indifferent. One was sick, another had her laundry to do, and so it went. When an excuse was too obvious, murmurs ran about the room. "The action to be taken will be decided by the nucleus bureau," Jack said, "and reported at-our next meeting." Afterwards, Mary challenged him, "Say, why did you let Valya off so easy? Not soft on her, maybe?" Now it was their turn to kid. Flushing, Jack joined in, asking, "How about it Valya, did I let you off too easy? Or didn't I treat you just like the others?" Grabbing one of the boys around the neck, he began wrestling with him, trying to hide his confusion.
"It's true, Jack likes Valya," some of the girls added. Calling, chasing one another, they ran gaily between their machines, and down the stairs.
How does It happen that Jack has learned the art of leadership, when still so young? His story, which we get out of him with some difficulty--for he is not a lad to talk about himself--explains a good deal.
Jack has travelled a long road in his brief twenty and two years. Born in the Ukraine, son of religious and poverty-stricken parents, all the training he received in his early days was from street gangs. The tsarist government did not bother with schools for workers' kids, like Jack. "And my mother, poor, ignorant woman that she was, could give us children little," he adds, "so what sort of understanding of life did we naturally develop?" Not long before the world war broke out, Jack's father set out for the land of magic, America. He would quickly save enough to send for his family; that was the plan. The war put an end to this. The mother, weakened by hunger, fell a victim of typhus. Jack and his younger brother joined a ragged illiterate army of homeless waifs--bezprizorni.
"How did we live?" Jack gives a wry grin. "No different from the others. Beating our way an trains, begging, stealing. Living by our wits." The workers' revolution made no immediate difference in, their mode of life. Then, early in 1919, Jack and his brother were rounded up by the Soviet Government, along with hundreds of other waifs who had been made orphans, homeless, and set adrift by the war. He was sent to one of the children's towns organized for their re-education.
Jack, however, like many another, at first felt far from grateful. He preferred the road. Besides, he was suspicious of what it was all about. Step by step, he was won over. He learned to read and write. His naturally quick mind began to reach out--to gain, under sympathetic direction, a new grasp on the world about him. He joined in the boys' games and self-government. In the school shop he found many interesting things to do. As a member of the Pioneers, he became a leader among the other children. After a few years, he was given the chance to attend a four-year technical school, where he continued his general education, became skilled as a machinist, and graduated from the Pioneers into the Comsomol.
Finishing his course in 1926, and receiving an urgent call from his father to join him in America, Jack set out on what promised to be a great adventure. To see that strange land; to take part there in the workers' struggle for freedom!
Jack found Chicago, where his father worked as a watchman, far different from what he had expected. "After nine years of new life under our Soviet power," he tells us, "capitalism was more terrible than I had remembered. When I'd ride to work in the morning, I'd look about at the downcast, thin faces, and such a pain'd go through me! They were slaves. Though at that time, many didn't know it." He worked fifty hours a week for the Lawrence M. Stein Sewing Machine Company, situated near Van Buren and Walstead. From his weekly pay of twelve dollars, he must help support his father. After six months, he drew fifteen. Yet he saw older men, less skilled than he, drawing much more for the same work.
His father, a religious and ignorant man, began to torment him for his bolshevik ideas. "Why, I promised the American Government that you'd uphold the constitution and not take part in any revolutionary movement," his father mourned. "Look at you! Reading those Red papers, and always going to demonstrations. You'll bring disaster on us all!"
Jack tried to explain to his father. But his sister Becky and her husband Solomon Nobroff, who belonged to the right-wing faction in the clothing trade union, poisoned the old man's mind against his son. During the world-wide protests against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Jack was very active. After this, the old man gave him no peace, threatening, pleading. Jack stood by his principles. Finally, his father went secretly to his employer. "My son is a Communist!" At once Jack was fired. He found out later that his sister and brother-in-law had put the old man up to it: "That's how the right-wingers stop at nothing," Jack adds, "even spying for the bosses. My own sister!"
After four months of unemployment, Jack found another job, at the Well-Made Company, doing general repairs on sewing machines, turning out two or three a day. Again he finished more work than older workers, yet received less pay.
In June 1919, he was arrested with thirty other comrades in a demonstration of solidarity with the striking New Bedford textile workers, and listed for deportation. When out on bail, he reported for work, but found he had no job.
"Well, the comrades arranged that I return to the Soviet Union. Was I glad! To tell the truth, I'd been homesick to get back the whole time I'd been away, but had no means, I came straight to the Podolsk Machine Factory. Working as a mechanic, I began studying in the evenings and--well, the rest you know."
Our boots crunch against the slumbering snow. Jack muses, "Some big job--a fierce struggle, to make ourselves and our whole life over." Yet, for him I know that it holds all the high-hearted adventure that he once set out to find on the road, then in America: searched for--but missed.