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The uproar increased. Pankratov got up and shouted:

"Let him speak. We might as well hear what he has to say. Tufta may blurt out what the others prefer to keep to themselves."

The hall quieted down. Tufta realised that he had gone too far. Perhaps he ought not to have said that now. His thoughts went off at a tangent and he wound up his speech in a rush of words:

"Of course you can expel us and shove us overboard. That sort of thing is beginning already.

You've already got me out of the Gubernia Committee of the Komsomol. But never mind, we'll soon see who was right." And with that he jumped off the stage into the hall.

Tsvetayev passed a note down to Dubava. "Mityai, you take the floor next. Of course it won't alter the situation, we are obviously getting the worst of it here. We must put Tufta right. He's a blockhead and a gas-bag."

Dubava asked for the floor and his request was granted immediately.

An expectant hush fell over the hall as he mounted the platform. It was the usual silence that precedes a speech, but to Dubava it was pregnant with hostility. The ardour with which he had addressed the cell meetings had cooled off by now. From day to day his passion had waned, and after the crushing defeat and the stern rebuff from his former comrades, it was like a fire doused with water, and now he was enveloped by the bitter smoke of wounded vanity made bitterer still by his stubborn refusal to admit himself in the wrong. He resolved to plunge straight in although he knew that he would only be alienating himself still further from the majority. His voice when he spoke was toneless, yet distinct.

"Please do not interrupt me or annoy me by heckling. I want to set forth our position in full,although I know in advance that it is no use. You have the majority."

When at last he finished speaking it was as if a bombshell had burst in the hall. A hurricane of angry shouts descended upon him, stinging him like whiplashes.

"Shame!"

"Down with the splitters!"

"Enough mud-slinging!"

To the accompaniment of mocking laughter Dubava went back to his seat, and that laughter cut like a knife-thrust. Had they stormed and railed at him he would have been gratified, but to be jeered at like a third-rate actor whose voice had cracked on a false note was too much.

"Shumsky has the floor," announced the chairman.

Shumsky got up. "I decline to speak."

Then Pankratov's bass boomed from the back rows.

"Let me speak!"

Dubava could tell by his voice that Pankratov was seething inwardly. His deep voice always boomed thus when he was mortally insulted, and a deep uneasiness seized Dubava as he gloomily watched the tall, slightly bent figure stride swiftly over to the platform. He knew what Pankratov was going to say. He thought of the meeting he had had the day before with his old friends at Solomenka and how they had pleaded with him to break with the opposition. Tsvetayev and Shumsky had been with him. They had met at Tokarev's place. Pankratov, Okunev, Talya,Volyntsev, Zelenova, Staroverov and Artyukhin had been present. Dubava had remained deaf to this attempt to restore unity. In the middle of the discussion he had walked out with Tsvetayev,thus emphasising his unwillingness to admit his mistakes. Shumsky had remained. And now he had refused to take the floor. "Spineless intellectual! Of course they've won him over," Dubava thought with bitter resentment. He was losing all his friends in this frenzied struggle. At the university there had been a rupture in his friendship with Zharky, who had sharply censured the declaration of the "forty-six" at a meeting of the Party bureau. And later, when the clash grew sharper, he had ceased to be on speaking terms. Several times after that Zharky had come to his place to visit Anna. It was a year since Dubava and Anna had been married. They occupied separate rooms, and Dubava believed that his strained relations with Anna, who did not share his views, had been aggravated by Zharky's frequent visits. It was not jealousy on his part, he assured himself, but under the circumstances her friendship with Zharky irritated him. He had spoken to Anna about it and the result had been a scene which had by no means improved their relations. He had left for the conference without telling her where he was going.

The swift flight of his thoughts was cut short by Pankratov.

"Comrades!" the word rang out as the speaker took up a position at the very edge of the platform. "Comrades! For nine days we have listened to the speeches of the opposition, and I must say quite frankly that they spoke here not as fellow fighters, revolutionaries, our comrades in the class struggle. Their speeches were hostile, implacable, malicious and slanderous. Yes, Comrades, slanderous! They have tried to represent us Bolsheviks as supporters of a mailed-fist regime in the Party, as people who are betraying the interests of their class and the Revolution. They have attempted to brand as Party bureaucrats the best, the most tried and trusty section of our Party, the glorious old guard of Bolsheviks, men who built up the Russian Communist Party, men who suffered in tsarist prisons, men who with Comrade Lenin at their head have waged a relentless struggle against world Menshevism and Trotsky. Could anyone but an enemy make such statements? Is the Party and its functionaries not one single whole? Then what is this all about, I want to know? What would we say of men who would try to incite young Red Army men against their commanders and commissars, against army headquarters — and at a time when the unit was surrounded by the enemy? According to the Trotskyites, so long as I am a mechanic I'm 'all right', but if tomorrow I should become the secretary of a Party Committee I would be a 'bureaucrat' and a 'chairwarmer'! Isn't it a bit strange, Comrades, that among the oppositionists who are fighting against bureaucracy and for democracy there should be men like Tufta, for example, who was recently removed from his job for being a bureaucrat? Or Tsvetayev, who is well known to the Solomenka folks for his 'democracy'; or Afanasyev, who was taken off the job three times by the Gubernia Committee for his highhanded way of running things in Podolsk District? It turns out that all those whom the Party has punished have united to fight the Party. Let the old Bolsheviks tell us about Trotsky's 'Bolshevism'. It is very important for the youth to know the history of Trotsky's struggle against the Bolsheviks, about his constant shifting from one camp to another.

The struggle against the opposition has welded our ranks and it has strengthened the youth ideologically. The Bolshevik Party and the Komsomol have become steeled in the fight against petty-bourgeois trends. The hysterical panic-mongers of the opposition are predicting complete economic and political collapse. Our tomorrow will show how much these prophecies are worth.

They are demanding that we send old Bolsheviks like Tokarev, for instance, back to the bench and replace him by some weather-vane like Dubava who imagines his struggle against the Party to be a sort of heroic feat. No, Comrades, we won't agree to that. The old Bolsheviks will get replacement, but not from among those who violently attack the Party line whenever we are up against some difficulty. We shall not permit the unity of our great Party to be disrupted. Never will the old and young guard be split. Under the banner of Lenin, in unrelenting struggle against petty-bourgeois trends, we shall march to victory!"

Pankratov descended the platform amid thunderous applause.

The following day a group of ten met at Tufta's place.

"Shumsky and I are leaving today for Kharkov," Dubava said. "There is nothing more for us to do here. You must try to keep together. All we can do now is to wait and see what happens. It is obvious that the All-Russia Conference will condemn us, but it seems to me that it is too soon to expect any repressive measures to be taken against us. The majority has decided to give us another chance. To carry on the struggle openly now, especially after the conference, means getting kicked out of the Party, and that does not enter into our plans. It is hard to say what the future holds for us. I think that's all there is to be said." Dubava got up to go.

The gaunt, thin-lipped Staroverov also rose.

"I don't understand you, Mityai," he said, rolling his r's and slightly stammering. "Does that mean that the conference decision is not binding on us?"

"Formally, it is," Tsvetayev cut him short. "Otherwise you'll lose your Party card. But we'll wait and see which way the wind blows and in the meantime we'll disperse."

Tufta stirred uneasily in his chair. Shumsky, pale and downcast, with dark circles under his eyes,sat by the window biting his nails. At Tsvetayev's words he abandoned his depressing occupation and turned to the meeting.

"I'm opposed to such manoeuvres," he said in sudden anger. "I personally consider that the decision of the conference is binding on us. We have fought for our convictions, but now we must submit to the decision that has been taken."

Staroverov looked at him with approval.

"That is what I wanted to say," he lisped.

Dubava fixed Shumsky with his eyes and said with a sneer:

"Nobody's suggesting that you do anything. You still have a chance to 'repent' at the Gubernia Conference."

Shumsky leapt to his feet.

"I resent your tone, Dmitri! And to be quite frank, what you say disgusts me and forces me to reconsider my position."

Dubava waved him away.

"That's exactly what I thought you'd do. Run along and repent before it is too late." With that Dubava shook hands with Tufta and the others and left. Shumsky and Staroverov followed soon after.

Cruel cold marked the advent in history of the year one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four.

January fastened its icy grip on the snowbound land, and from the second half of the month howling storms and blizzards raged.

The Southwestern Railway was snowed up. Men fought the maddened elements. The steel screws of snowploughs cut into the drifts, clearing a path for the trains. Telegraph wires weighted down with ice snapped under the impact of frost and blizzard, and of the twelve lines only three functioned — the Indo-European and two government lines.

In the telegraph office at Shepetovka station three apparatuses continued their unceasing chatter understandable only to the trained ear.

The girl operators were new at the job; the length of the tape they had tapped out would not have exceeded twenty kilometres, but the old telegrapher who worked beside them had already passed the two-hundred-kilometre mark. Unlike his younger colleagues he did not need to read the tape in order to make out the message, nor did he puzzle with wrinkled brow over difficult words or phrases. Instead he wrote down the words one after the other as the apparatus ticked them out.

Now his ear caught the words "To all, to all, to all!"

"Must be another of those circulars about clearing away the snow," the old telegrapher thought to himself as he wrote down the words. Outside, the blizzard raged, hurling the snow against the window. The telegrapher thought someone was knocking at the window, his eyes strayed in the direction of the sound and for a moment were arrested by the intricate pattern the frost had traced on the panes. No engraver could ever match that exquisite leaf-and-stalk design!

His thoughts wandered and for a while he stopped listening to the telegraph. But presently he looked down and reached for the tape to read the words he had missed.

The telegraph had tapped out these words:

"At 6.50 in the afternoon of January 21. . .." Quickly writing down the words, the telegrapher dropped the tape and resting his head on his hand returned to listening.

"Yesterday in Gorki the death occurred...." Slowly he put the letters down on paper. How many messages had he taken down in his long life, joyous messages as well as tragic ones, how often had he been the first to hear of the sorrows or happiness of others! He had long since ceased to ponder over the meaning of the terse, clipped phrases, he merely caught the sounds and mechanically set them down on paper.

Now too someone had died, and someone was being notified of the fact. The telegrapher had forgotten the initial words: "To all, to all, to all." The apparatus clicked out the letters "V-1-a-d-im-i-r I-1-y-i-c-h ', and the old telegrapher translated the hammer taps into words. He sat there unperturbed, a trifle weary. Someone named Vladimir Ilyich had died somewhere, someone would receive the message with the tragic tidings, a cry of grief and anguish would be wrung from someone, but it was no concern of his, for he was only a chance witness. The apparatus tapped out a dot, a dash, more dots, another dash, and out of the familiar sounds he caught the first letter and set it down on the telegraph form. It was the letter "L". Then came the second letter, "E"; next to it he inscribed a neat "N", drawing a heavy slanting line between the two uprights, hastily added an "I" and absently picked up the last letter — "N".

The apparatus tapped out a pause, and for the fraction of a second the telegrapher's eye rested on the word he had written: "LENIN".

The apparatus went on tapping, but the familiar name now pierced the telegrapher's consciousness.

He glanced once more at the last words of the message — "LENIN". What? Lenin? The entire text of the telegram flashed before his mind's eye. He stared at the telegraph form, and for the first time in all his thirty-two years of work he could not believe what he had written.

He ran his eye swiftly thrice over the lines, but the words obstinately refused to change: "the death occurred of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin." The old man leapt to his feet, snatched up the spiral of tape and bored it with his eyes. The two-metre strip confirmed that which he refused to believe! He turned a deathlike face to his fellow workers, and his frightened cry fell on their ears: "Lenin is dead!"

The terrible news slipped through the wide open door of the telegraph office and with the speed of a hurricane swept over the station and into the blizzard, whipped over the tracks and switches and along with the icy blast tore through the ironbound gates of the railway shops.

A current repair crew was busy overhauling an engine standing over the first pit. Old Polentovsky himself had crawled down under the belly of his engine and was pointing out the ailing spots to the mechanics. Zakhar Bruzzhak and Artem were straightening out the bent bars of the fire grate.