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5. Ten Denari

A better set of nicknames for my father and his two inseparable friends in those early days might have been Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. Before he came along, Porfri and Lucas were famous for their unresolved arguments.

“Socialism is inseparable from democracy,” Porfri would proclaim, “If property is not directly in the control of the workers, where are we?”

“I fully agree, Comrade,” said Lucas, “But the question is, what form shall this democracy take? If every little factory votes on its own affairs, you end up with some benighted co-operative, or with syndicalism, both deficient not only in productivity and effectiveness, but also in truly meeting the wishes of the people. In communism, socialism is inseparable from democracy, yes, but so is democratic centralism. You should understand this.”

My father always seemed to be able to produce a view which both sides were able to endorse, but it was a remarkable achievement. Stilin was a quiet man, who rarely offered a view in public debate; but when he did speak, a sharp, rather cold intellect and a store of reading and deep thought became apparent. If he had had more presence, and more inclination to it, he could perhaps have been a persuasive orator. But in practice he preferred to sit listening with a black cigarette burning down to nothing in the corner of his mouth; almost the only thing that could draw him into open argument was when Essedrin started to lay down the law.

Porfri, a broad-set, red-faced man with an habitual smile and a habit of clutching his head in moments of stress which left his hair perpetually ruffled, had an intellect which was not, perhaps, especially distinguished; but his proletarian credentials were impeccable. It was a source of slight embarrassment to the Dubitanian party, and its Sescastri branch in particular, that most members were from a middle or upper-class background. Porfri, however, was not just a worker, but a manual factory worker to boot, and he had developed a tendency to explain to his comrades what the real working class thought and felt, in a way which wasn’t always as welcome as he imagined. All too frequently he would stand up in the middle of some heated debate and say:

“Comrades, comrades. Let me assure you, the working people of Sescastri would have no idea what you are all talking about. They would say…”

My father used to say that Porfri was very wedded to the concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but that unfortunately his interpretation of it was not quite correct.

The trio were nevertheless well-liked in the local Party, and my father, with his natural common sense and gift for rhetoric, was always heard with enthusiasm. This, I’m afraid, began to attract the envy of the party Chairman, Pavari, a man whose face was so corrugated with deeply-scored lines he always looked worried. My father began to find that sub-committees were stacked against him and business arranged in such a way that his motions were not debated. The growing tension came briefly to the surface in one stormy meeting about the correct tactics for the Party, in which my father was finally accused of being an objective Menshevik. That wounding accusation does not, of course, feature anywhere in Mischkoff’s account, which has my father actually founding the local party and then instructing a circle of adoring members and disciples.

It was never my father’s way to harbour grudges over such matters, however; whenever he found himself frustrated in one direction, he simply redirected his energies. So instead of continuing to sit on committees and discuss ideological principles, he and his friends began to travel around the factories and farms of Dubitania. Here they soon found problems enough to keep them busy.

The sporadic reforms of the Dubitanian government had finally led to the legal abolition of feudal land tenure some years before, but this had not been followed up by any systematic land reform, and in many parts of the country the former peasants were still very largely at the mercy of their aristocratic landlords. Quite a few of these gentlemen continued to run their estates in the same old way as if nothing had happened. Generally worse than them, however, were the ones who now embarked on programmes of modernisation. Sometimes this involved overturning the rights of the former peasants and clearing them off the land altogether, but more frequently the drive for new profits led to inflation of rents and a relentless attempt to pare wages down.

Following a large-scale beer fraud a few years before, the Sestenburg brewery had developed the practice of sending a clerk out to take careful account of all its deliveries. My father was able to take advantage of this practice and his position in the brewery by going out with deliveries all over Sescastri province and beyond; he used to say that Doppelbock went everywhere. While the barrels were being unloaded, and frequently while the driver and his assistant were refreshing themselves afterwards, he had time to talk to local people, and he could not help becoming aware of the growing poverty among agricultural workers.

He told me how in the dim back room of a traditional tavern he had encountered a wizened old peasant, a man who looked at least a hundred years old, scorched brown by the sun and bent over with long years of hard labour, clutching a small glass of mild beer. He bought the old man a jug of Doppelbock, which he greeted with a look that combined gratification with frank doubt about my father’s sanity. They had a friendly conversation during which it emerged to my father’s utter amazement that far from enjoying a well-earned retirement, the old man was merely taking a morning break before returning to work in the fields. The old man, amused by his surprise, explained that this was only his day job; in the evenings he loaded trucks at the local cement works: no-one these days could afford to rely on a single job if they had a young wife and six children, he said.

My father was highly amused: in his view, he said, the old man was a true son of Dubitania. But not everyone could match this Stakhanovite standard of energy and resilience, and many families were gradually sliding down into worsening poverty. There had always been poverty among the peasants, of course, but now formerly prosperous workers , while working harder than ever, were having to think seriously about where next week’s meals were coming from. My father decided that something had to be done, and on quarter-day in the leafy little market town of Belparica, which stands in the wheat fields to the west of Sescastri, he stood up, supported by Stilin and Essedrin and made a speech proposing the establishment of an association to protect the workers’ interests and enable them to give each other support. The crowd that gathered around him attracted the attention of the landowners and the local police were eventually despatched to break things up, but not before my father had succeeded in establishing a nucleus of members for his new association. The Mutual Association of Agricultural Workers of Western Sescastri Province had its inaugural meeting in secret a week later.

But I have fallen into the trap, like Mischkoff, of giving the impression that my father was always and everywhere the initiator and leader. In fact, these agricultural associations were springing up throughout the country at the time and if anything my father was belatedly climbing onto a bandwagon. But he and his colleagues had the advantage of a clear sense of direction and the backing of a strong organisation. At that stage many of the associations were little more than primitive mutual insurance societies, but once his own association was established my father was able to play a key role in drawing together a co-ordinating body, the National Board of Agricultural Workers Associations (CINDATA*) which began to give them a more coherent purpose. In nearly every town, using Stilin or Essedrin to back him up as the occasion demanded, he was able either to recruit for the Party one or more leading members of the local association, or to promote within the association some of his recruits. Communist party membership within Dubitania was doubled inside three months purely through these efforts, and a strong network of contacts in the emerging workers’ movement established.

Again, I must not give the impression that it was my father who originated the idea of the Ten Denari Stand – it came from a relatively obscure association which met in Andra-Nipoli – but I think it is probably fair to claim that it would never have assumed such formidable proportions without his efforts. The idea was simply that at the next quarter-day all the agricultural workers of Dubitania would refuse to work for anything less than ten denari per week. There was naturally a great deal of discussion about this, but the transparent reasonableness of the stance eventually won over all but a handful of the workers. Ten denari was not a great deal of money, even in those days.

You would think that all this ferment of organisation, debate, and preparation would attract some attention from the Dubitanian land-owners, but in fact when the quarter-day came round the discovery that they could not recruit or retain a single worker at the offered rate of seven denari struck the employers with all the force of a thunderbolt. It had been established between them that seven denari was to be the rate this quarter, and at first none of them knew what to do. Two weeks passed and the farms stood idle. The workers’ associations had accumulated enough reserve cash and supplies in kind to support their members for several months, so they were not disturbed, and held firm. One or two landlords began to settle at ten denari; but the majority held out for seven, or offered an intermediate amount. Unprecedentedly, the Court of Knights of Dubitania, the organisation of aristocratic landholders, agreed to open its special meeting on the issue to the rich commoners who by now were the proprietors of a substantial part of Dubitania’s farm land. My father contrived to attend this critical meeting as the representative of a friendly barley grower, one of the three who by tradition supplied all the brewery’s needs.

The meeting took place in the Gothic splendour of the Great Hall of the Candlemakers’ Guild, with its magnificent stained glass windows depicting the Seven High Kings of Dubitania : Dubito the legionary; Wilfred Magnus the Saxon king whose knights had carved out the boundaries of the land; Adalbert the Martyr, strapped to his horse after death so as to ride out once more against the paynim; Henri Lacktongue, named for his refusal to negotiate with the Holy Roman Emperor; Maximillian the First, with all twelve of the sons who after his death pursued a civil war of unfathomable complexity; Henri the Pious who signed the world-famous Treaty of Andra, a cornerstone of European liberties; and Ferdinandi the Traveller, depicted with a Chinese entourage, which somewhat overstates his actual venturesomeness.

The meeting took some time to come properly to order. It became clear at once, however, that the landowners were by no means unanimous. By my father’s estimation, there were three main camps. About a quarter of those present actually favoured accepting the workers’ demands, either outright or with some qualifications. This group was partly made up of aristocrats with liberal views and partly of middling landowners who felt they had more to lose from further delay than from paying the ten-denari rate. But there were also a number of owners of large modernised estates, set up on a more business-like basis than most of Dubitania’s farms. These concerns, efficient and partly mechanised, could easily afford a ten-denari rate, and were quite ready to pay it in order to help run their smaller competitors out of the market and appropriate their land holdings.

At the other extreme, nearly half the landowners were against any kind of concession. In this group were a few smaller feudal landholders who genuinely could not afford ten denari, or thought they couldn’t; middling landowners of a right-wing tendency, who feared that collective bargaining of any kind was the thin end of the socialist wedge, and some large landowners, mostly aristocrats, who thought that the loyalty of their peasants and their lack of debts or shareholders meant they could stand a long dispute better than most, and thought it would be worth it in the long run to teach the workers a lesson.

In the middle stood a group who favoured negotiation, either because they thought it was the quickest way to a resolution or simply because bargaining was their instinctive response to any situation.

The diehards opened the meeting; they made the mistake of putting forward Andri Postrin, a well-known right-wing politician with tremendous white side-whiskers, who happened to own a couple of farms. They reckoned his relative fame and oratorical gifts would give them an advantage, but many members felt that his appearance meant that his party was attempting to co-opt their cause for its own purposes. He proposed resolutions calling on the government to outlaw trade associations and put the police on standby to break up seditious meetings; but the diehards were unable to attract any support from other factions and consequently could not get a majority for any of their measures.

The liberals put forward a young aristocrat named Obertin, well-known because of his successful career in athletics, who made a speech which combined sarcastic wit with a sincere appeal to the sense of duty which, or so he said, the Dubitanian upper class had always displayed towards its tenants and dependents. He was more loudly applauded than Postrin, and many felt that the aristocrat had beaten the professional politician at his own rhetorical game; but it made no difference: the liberal faction had no majority either, and could not get agreement to a quick acceptance of ten denari. However, they backed a motion proposing negotiations which was now put forward by a less articulate landowner, and this motion was therefore carried . After several hours of further debate the meeting was unable to agree a remit for these negotiations, but decided they should be opened anyway on an exploratory basis.

The chief impression left on my father was of the absolute disunity of the landowners. After the vote, he spent time talking to some of them in the bar, and he was surprised to find that one of them, a man named Lodovi Molerin, was already paying 13 denari. This individual, with large gold rings on all his fingers, was clearly a self-educated former peasant.

“See, the workers are not all the same,” he explained, “At the bottom, the worst ten per centum, are useless or perhaps even harmful. But the top ten per centum, the very best workers, ah! I want no others, and by paying thirteen pieces I get my choice. It’s a good bargain for me, because my workers are twice as productive as anyone else’s, and far more skilled; moreover, I employ no overseers and only one supervisor, since these people supervise themselves, and are more zealous about my interests than I should be myself. All in all, it is a bargain for me to pay a few extra pieces.”

“”So you voted to agree the ten?”

“Not at all: I voted with Postrin. I shall pay thirteen myself in any case, but if these idiots all start paying ten, I might have to go to fourteen.” He took a deep draught from his beer glass. “Listen,” he said, “I want a word with you. A discreet word. I know who you are.”

“Who I am?” asked my father, as calmly as he could manage.

“Yes: you’ve been recognised. You’re no barley grower. Quite the reverse. You’re from the brewery, aren’t you? Now listen. I know Sestenburg, by tradition, only buys from certain areas, but I’d like some of that business and I think I can make it worth your while. I reckon that when I tell you the price of my barley and show you the quality, we can do a deal that’ll be very good for both of us…”

My father was encouraged by the way the discussions had gone. He reported back to his Party comrades that negotiations would in his view have a good chance of achieving the 10-denari rate, or something close to it. However, that was not the course he recommended. Instead, he proposed that they should do their best to ensure negotiations were refused. If this happened, he believed the fragile unity of the landowners would break up; many of them would start paying the 10 denari anyway; others would come under pressure to do the same, and the diehards would soon be isolated. Any action they tried to take without wider support would be a damaging failure. He thought this was the best available outcome.

Pavari was not interested in any of this. He did not believe that my father was acting out of concern for the workers; all he noticed was that my father had signed up a whole series of new members, who, if they voted together, would outnumber all of the existing Party, never mind Pavari’s own friends and followers. He denounced my father and his friends, claiming that the new Party members’ credentials and political soundness had not been properly tested. He announced that all the new memberships were summarily cancelled, and asked for a formal censure of my father to be recorded in the minutes.

This naturally led to a bitter and inconclusive argument; the censure of my father was not agreed, but letters revoking the membership of my father’s contacts had already been sent. This naturally made my father’s position much more difficult, and he was temporarily unable to exert much influence. As a result, or so I believe, the governing committee of CINDATA agreed to negotiate with the landowners.

At this point the Royalist government suddenly decided it should make one of its clumsy interventions. Seven ringleaders of the association movement, five of them cancelled communists, were arrested on the charge of having sworn a mutinous oath. The charge was absurd: it was framed under a law which clearly applied only to members of the armed forces; and there was in any case, no evidence whatever. Nevertheless, all seven were immediately found guilty and sentenced to exile.

The first result was inevitably that the negotiations between landowners and the associations, which had barely begun, were broken off. In this way the government had inadvertently achieved the situation which my father had wanted, and it soon became clear that his insight was sound. Several large landowners and many middling ones announced that they would pay ten denari a week forthwith.

In the meantime the government was faced with the task it had set itself of exiling the seven workers. They were put into a prison wagon which set off for the Hungarian border: a huge procession of agricultural workers formed up behind the wagon and marched behind it in protest as it slowly trundled across the country. It took a week to get there, and a whole series of panicky reports from local officials were sent back to the central government, forecasting a general uprising and warning of their inability to do anything about it.

Pavari now said he had instructions from the Moscow party that the Russians were about to strike a special economic deal with the Dubitanian government and they did not wish the current administration to be destabilised: he instructed my father to use his contacts to bring about a resumption of negotiations, but my father said he could do nothing.

“It’s not as if they were Party members,” he explained.

At the border, the embarrassing procession was halted; the Hungarian authorities, always eager for an opportunity to humiliate the Dubitanian government, refused to allow it to enter their country. After a day’s hesitation, the prison wagon was turned around and began crawling back towards Sescastri. This was too much; the King, who had been watching the situation with increasing nervousness, dismissed his council, declared a state of emergency, and appointed Franki Millarin, a leading liberal, as special Chancellor with dictatorial powers for one year. Millarin at once released the seven workers, paid compensation, and issued an edict establishing CINDATA as a recognised guild with a royal charter. My father thought this last measure was absurd, and it is certainly true that the legislation was swept away again as soon as Millarin left office.

Pavari, needless to say, thought my father had been working against him in secret. He pointed out that my father’s contacts, the ‘cancelled communists’ coincided to a remarkable degree with the organisers of the great workers’ procession which had followed the prison wagon to the Hungarian border, and accused my father of having re-established his network and fomented the whole thing.

“Those fellows would never have listened to me, comrade:” said my father, “to be honest, they’re a bunch of objective Mensheviks.”

*Consilla Infedera Nacionala Dubitanin Asocicine Travalorine Agricoles

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