The Bolshevik Myth · Chapter
Rest Homes for Workers explained
The narrator describes their involvement in Zorin's project to create summer rest homes for Petrograd's workers on Kameny Island, transforming former noble villas into proletarian resorts.
What happens
The narrator describes their involvement in Zorin's project to create summer rest homes for Petrograd's workers on Kameny Island, transforming former noble villas into proletarian resorts. Despite initial enthusiasm, the project is mired in Soviet bureaucracy, material shortages, and the Cheka's control over supplies. The narrator refuses to evict bourgeois families without alternative housing, leading to their removal from the work. Forced labor from camps is used instead of voluntary worker participation, and the narrator's proposal to form a committee of Buford deportees is lost in red tape.
Themes in this chapter
Betrayal of Revolutionary Ideals
The rest home project, meant to benefit workers, is undermined by bureaucratic privilege, favoritism in rations, and brutal evictions of the bourgeoisie without alternative shelter.
Economic Collapse and Survival
Chronic shortages of building materials, reliance on forced labor, and the workers' desperate focus on the pyock (food ration) highlight the struggle for basic survival.
Dictatorship and State Absolutism
The Cheka's absolute control over warehouses, the dismissal of non-Party suggestions, and the arbitrary eviction of 'bourzhooi' demonstrate state absolutism overriding justice.
Characters to notice
- Liza Zorin
Project initiator and head of the rest home plan; appointed the narrator as general manager but becomes displeased with their 'sentimentality' over evictions.
- Unknown Narrator
Enthusiastically accepts Zorin's offer to manage the rest home project, works out detailed plans, but refuses to execute unjust evictions and is gradually eliminated from the work.
- The Chekist
The Cheka maintains control over sealed warehouses and frowns upon the narrator's suggestion to inventory supplies, especially coming from a non-Party member.
Key passages
“The actual worker,” a soldier said to me, “will not get into the summer resort. It will be only for Commissars and Communists.”
A soldier told the narrator that ordinary workers would be excluded from the rest homes, which would instead be reserved for party officials and communists.
Highlights the class divide and betrayal of the project's stated purpose.
“I had to refuse to cooperate in what seems to me gross injustice and needless brutality.”
The narrator declined to carry out the eviction order because they saw it as unjust and unnecessarily cruel.
Shows the narrator's moral conflict and the cost of opposing party directives.
“Nitcheve ne podelayesh , Zorin says.”
Zorin says 'nothing can be done' about the bureaucratic obstacles.
Reflects resignation to the inefficiency of the Soviet system.