about moral corruption, settling-down, and formerly honest Communist lads from the working class becoming bureaucrats and time-servers sucked in by the swamp of philistinism. 33 To keep their faith amid corruption and imperfection, Party and Komsomol members had to continuously cleanse themselves of impure thoughts—while the Party and Komsomol continuously cleansed their ranks of impure members. Baitalsky’s Komsomol comrade Eve (who bore him a son they named Vil, and whom he never formally married because it would have been a philistine thing to do) was the daughter of a poor shtetl tailor. Everything she did, every step she took, Eve dedicated to the revolution. Every single moment was lived with enthusiasm, whether it was volunteer work unloading coal at the port or the study of Russian grammar in a workers’ club. Having been unable to attend school as a child, she took up the study of grammar late in life, but in the firm conviction that she was doing it not for herself, but for the proletarian revolution. Looking back at my own life and that of my companion, I can see: most of Eve’s actions were like solemn religious performances. 34 Hope for universal redemption depended on personal righteousness and on the imminent triumph of the revolution. When, after the murder of Kirov, all deviationists had to be purged, Eve banished Baitalsky (a onetime Left Oppositionist) from her house. When, in 1927, war seemed imminent, Mikhail Svetlov looked forward to “marching westward” again (“The Soviet bullets / Will fly like before . . . /Comrade commander, / Open the door!”). And when, in 1929, the final offensive against the countryside was getting underway, he—ever the voice of Komsomol activism—asked for his civil war wound to be opened so that the old bullet lodged in his flesh might be reused. “The steppes are ablaze, my friend, / My lead is needed again!” 35 They got their wish. The veterans of the civil war and the “Komsomols of the 1920s” were in the forefront of the great battles of the First Five-Year Plan. They vanquished the unctuous shopkeepers, “reforged” the shrill streetwalkers, purged the morally corrupt, and “liquidated the kulaks as a class.” It was a time to be firm: according to Kopelev—who took part in the confiscation of peasant property in Ukraine, witnessed the famine that followed, and attempted to reconstruct, many years later, the way he had felt then—“You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our