Distribution According to Need
Anna's collapse had been caused by benzene. Of that there could be no doubt.
Once the fact had been clearly established, Foreman Ivan spent some time avoiding me. He seemed to feel the full weight of responsibility for all that talk of demons.
But he was the man left in charge of the 3rd Galosh Factory in the vanished director's place, and I was the Production Inspector whose duty it was to bring the place back to life. He could not keep dodging me forever.
"Foreman Ivan, this is not the first death caused by benzene."
The first officially reported cases of benzene poisoning dated to 1897, when four women workers died of chronic benzene poisoning at a tire factory in Sweden. The Swedish pharmacologist Karl Gustaf Santesson published the findings in a paper and brought them to the world's attention.
After that, the danger of benzene poisoning kept surfacing across printing, petroleum refining, rubber, leather, and industry at large. By the 1920s it was becoming clear that aplastic anemia was not the only blood disease linked to benzene; in 1928 two physicians in Lyon, Delore and Borgomano, would establish for the first time the correlation between benzene exposure and leukemia.
"This is not your fault, Foreman. The real devil was that materials manager."
"…"
Ivan pressed a hand to his forehead. The weight of everything I had just laid out seemed to be crushing him.
"So it wasn't a demon. It really… wasn't a demon…"
I nodded calmly. He swayed, then crumpled to the floor.
"…"
For a long moment he could not speak. Then, in a trembling voice, he began to look back over the years.
"I'm sorry, my love… I truly believed it was a demon's curse. But what took our daughter Mariya so senselessly wasn't the work of any devil. It was my own greed…"
He told me, quite calmly, that his daughter had lost her life in this very factory—the 3rd Galosh Factory. Tears tracked down the creases of his cheeks.
Only then did I understand what had been going on inside him. He had not been avoiding me out of shame at his own ignorance. He had simply been unable to face a reality he had wanted so badly to look away from.
But no one, no matter what tragedy they have endured, can look away forever. Having been tempered in the fire, he would have to become harder steel still and run this factory—for the Soviet Union, for me as Production Inspector… and for the family he had left.
Not long after, the man of steel sought me out without warning and hurried me into his office. Something urgent had come up, he said, by way of opening.
— Creeeak…
The door swung open and the smell of rubber rolled out to meet us. Ivan went in first and set a leather satchel on the desk.
— Thud.
There must have been a lock; when the clasp gave way, the contents that had been sleeping inside the bag came into view.
"What is all this, Foreman?"
The satchel was stuffed with bundles of Chervonets. Even at a glance it was an enormous sum.
"It's about Materials Manager Zverev—the one we met before…"
Zverev? Ah. The counterrevolutionary who had been dragged off to a Siberian labor camp.
Ivan rubbed his palms against his apron, scratched the back of his neck, and went on.
"Not long ago he suddenly announced he would repay, all at once, the value of every drop of benzene this factory had lost. Out of nowhere, like a formal notice…"
So I went and collected the rest, he said, and pointed at the bundles in the bag.
"He really said that?"
"Well… he muttered some strange things—that he was sorry, that he begged for clemency…"
Ivan gave a dry little laugh. I nodded quietly. Both of us knew perfectly well this money had not come from any goodwill of his.
The storehouse of a corrupt official who had been scraping together that bourgeois leftover called "private property" had finally been pried open only after he was hauled off to a Siberian gulag. Whether he called it settling accounts or anything else made no difference to us.
— Swish.
"Use this for rebuilding the factory. Full authority is yours, Foreman."
Ivan's eyes went wide. His callused fingers clenched and unclenched several times on the leather handle.
"I-Inspector… are you certain you want to leave a sum like this with me?"
"If we still had a factory director, I would have given it to him. But right now the man who knows this place best is you. There is no one more suited to the job."
"B-but… this money only exists because of the militsiya you called in…"
"Mm. On that point, actually."
I looked down at him and spoke with deliberate seriousness.
"I would prefer that the militsiya's involvement in this matter remain a secret known only to you and me."
"Y-yes…? What?"
"I don't know whether you noticed, Foreman, but those militsiya were not ordinary militsiya."
"I-is that so?"
"The work they do is, by its nature, rather… confidential."
"Ah—ah…! Don't worry, Inspector Svanidze! I won't breathe a word of this even to my wife!"
The OGPU—the Joint State Political Directorate. On paper they were secret police answering to the Council of People's Commissars; in practice they answered to the Communist Party, and more precisely to the organs at the very center of power.
In other words, the OGPU was nominally a government agency, but it took its orders from the Politburo and the Secretariat. And Felix Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the OGPU, was politically very close to Stalin.
He was the sort of man who would issue special instructions to his subordinates—"Surveillance of the General Secretary has been detected; investigate it"—so carefully did he guard Stalin's safety. Fortunately he was also on good terms with Mikoyan, which had made it easy enough to move the OGPU's Leningrad branch chief.
In any case, even though I had had Mikoyan's help, it would become extremely awkward if word got out that a mere Production Inspector could summon secret police like the OGPU. At least for the present moment.
I tapped the clasp of the satchel.
"I'm counting on you."
Ivan looked down at the bag in silence. His fingers clenched tight again. Then he gripped the edge of his apron and nodded.
"There's… one other thing, if I may."
"Go ahead."
"Since you've entrusted this money to me, may I tell you in advance how I intend to use it?"
"As you see fit. All I want is for this factory to function normally again."
"…In that case, I would like to take a portion of this money…"
He swallowed hard.
"…and give it back to the women workers who fell ill in this factory."
"…"
That was an unexpected choice. When I did not answer at once, he hurried on as if making excuses.
"Setting my own daughter's case aside, quite a few women have been injured or killed in this place. Those with light injuries came back soon enough, but for the ones who never returned, I want to put some reward in their hands for the work they did here. …Isn't that what Comrade Marx meant by distribution according to need?"
"Oh…?"
Distribution according to need.
"N-no, forget I said that! I dared to mix a base impulse of charity into a great idea…"
"I don't see it that way."
I shook my head. Ivan was berating himself for harboring charity, but distributive justice is a different act from charity. Charity may be regarded as a moral deed, yet it is not the share a person is properly owed.
Of course, what he was proposing was closer to the practices of a "welfare state" born of capitalism's castle than to the "distribution according to need" Marx had proclaimed… but in my eyes, at least, he looked like an ideal Marxist.
If there were more people like him, the world would be a cleaner place.
"Every human being has complete ownership of himself."
— Thok.
"And labor is the act of producing something through one's own body. The ownership of the product that results from that labor belongs to the producer."
I rose from my seat.
"Therefore, for the wealth obtained through labor to be distributed to the producer in proportion to his contribution is a just thing."
"Th-then…!"
"Yes. We'll do it your way, Foreman Ivan."
Color flooded back into his face.
"Th-thank you, Inspector Svanidze!"
"Ah—and this…"
I drew one stack of notes from the satchel and held it out to him.
"This is the share your daughter contributed. I do not presume to be in a position to put a value on it… but please take it."
A bitter smile touched my mouth. Looking at me, Ivan's eyes began to redden again at the rims.
"If it isn't enough, I can set something more aside—"
"No, Inspector! It is more than enough!"
He clutched the bundle of notes I had given him tight against his chest.
"Thank you…"
The bills crumpled against his breastbone.
"Truly—thank you, Inspector Svanidze…"
Foreman Ivan wept without a sound. At the sight of him I turned and walked to the window. Leningrad's cold wind swept across my face in greeting. The sweet smell of benzene that had filled the factory was washed away on the breeze.
Stalin, I was certain, was looking at some similar scene from the Kremlin at this very moment. If he had been standing in my place, what decision would he have made? I did not bother to think it through too deeply.
He was the philosopher of steel who had discarded himself for the sake of the state… and I was still an unfinished human being. What I would become was something even I did not know.