Pyotr Zalomov: The Real Story of the Rebel from Gorky's Novel "Mother"

At school, most of us sincerely hated Maxim Gorky's novel "Mother." It was a heavy, viscous book from the compulsory curriculum that we were forced to read through yawns. The cardboard characters, correct speeches, monumental pathos. The main character, Pavel Vlasov, seemed not like a living person, but a walking mouthpiece for Bolshevik propaganda. Sinless, steel, boring.

And you know what the main injustice is? Behind this bronze literary facade, they hid a real, flesh-and-blood guy. Pyotr Zalomov. A man with calloused hands who once decided that he no longer wanted to be just a cog in a huge, smoky machine. A man whose real life was like a thrilling thriller, not political information.

Hell on Earth and Red Silk

Sormovo in the early twentieth century is not the romance of industrialization. It's dirt. Cold. A fourteen-hour workday for pennies. The factory siren that tore eardrums and sucked the life out of people drop by drop. People were born, went to the shop, drank to oblivion on weekends to forget, and died before they turned forty.

Pyotr was born into such a family. His father drank, beat his mother, and died early. No philosophical circles in French. Only soot and poverty. But there was some stubborn, almost animalistic craving for justice in Zalomov. He started reading. First secretly, then gathering around him the same desperate workers.

And then came May 1, 1902. The very demonstration that was included in all history textbooks. But let's brush off the textbook dust from it. Imagine: a crowd of exhausted people. Police with sabers at the ready. Scary? Madly. And at that moment, 25-year-old Pyotr comes forward. In his hands is a homemade red flag, sewn from pieces of cheap fabric. He begins to sing "La Marseillaise". Not with a perfect operatic baritone, but with a broken, hoarse voice of a Sormovo locksmith.

He was, of course, twisted. Beaten. Thrown in jail. But that day something broke in the usual course of things. The gears of the system creaked.

Mother, Writer, and Escape from Siberia

At the trial, Zalomov did not justify himself. He made a speech that was later secretly reprinted in underground printing houses. He was sentenced to life exile in Eastern Siberia. It would seem, the end of the story. The hero goes to the snows to perish there from scurvy.

But then his mother, Anna Kirillovna, appears on the scene. The very Pelageya Nilovna from the novel. A simple, illiterate woman, beaten down by life. Before her son's arrest, she was afraid of her own shadow. And after - she began to carry leaflets under the hem of her skirt, hide illegal literature. Love for her son turned out to be stronger than fear of the gendarmes. This is an amazing metamorphosis, which Gorky captured absolutely accurately.

Gorky, by the way, was personally present at the trial. The writer was so impressed with Zalomov that he decided to get him out at all costs. He handed over three hundred rubles - a huge amount of money in those days - to organize the escape.

The escape from the Yeniseysk province was cinematic. Pyotr walked through the taiga on foot, hid at stations, traveled on fake documents. He reached Kiev, and then, with the help of underground fighters, moved to Switzerland. From the snow-covered penal servitude - to Lake Geneva. However, emigration did not attract him. Too crowded. Too many empty conversations over coffee. In 1905, he illegally returned to Russia to climb the barricades again.

Life After the Feat

You know what is the most difficult thing for a revolutionary? To survive the revolution. To see how your dream, for which you went under Cossack whips, becomes a state apparatus. With its own prisons, bureaucracy and rations for the chosen ones.

After 1917, Zalomov did not make a brilliant party career. He did not become a people's commissar or a red commander. Instead, he went to the Kursk province, to the town of Sudzha. He tried to organize an agricultural commune there. Worked on the land. In fact, he returned to where he started - to hard physical labor.

His life in the Soviet Union was paradoxical. On the one hand - a living legend. Pioneers came to him, he was invited to the presidiums. On the other hand, he saw the repressions of the 30s, saw how those with whom he once shared a cell or a piece of bread in exile were shot. They say he tried to stand up for old comrades. Wrote letters to the top. But the old legend was of little interest to anyone.

Pyotr Andreyevich Zalomov died in 1955. He outlived Gorky by nineteen years. He survived Stalin. Survived the very era of romantic rebellion.

Sometimes I think: what did he remember in his declining years, sitting on the porch of his house in Sudzha? About meetings with Lenin? About the pages of the novel, where he remained forever young Pavel? Probably not. It seems to me that he remembered the very moment when he first raised over his head the heavy, paint-smelling red silk. The moment when he was damn scared, but he still took a step forward.

Because real heroes are not those who are not afraid. These are those who go against fear. Even if they then write a boring book about them.