Free Fellow Travelers by James Cook

a driller more than an ore breaker, an ore breaker more than a mule driver. I didn’t change that; I worked out a formula for apportioning by skills the labor costs per ton produced and allotted the savings proportionately. The scheme gave the workers an incentive not only to increase production, but to monitor the productivity of their coworkers as well. Somebody who was malingering wasn’t monitored by us but by his peers, whose output and compensation depended on the production of the mine. I always had the feeling that this wasn’t a very Marxist arrangement but nobody raised any objection. It wasn’t quite the piecework that provided most of the discipline in Russian industry in the decades ahead but it was as close as I could come to it.
    Winter was the busiest time of the year. We stockpiled the ore during the warm months and when snow fell began shipping the ore out by horse-drawn sleigh to the railhead ten miles away. There it was transshipped to the south, to Bakema, where the ore was smelted into metal.
    Every couple of weeks I would ride with the sledges to the railroad. I had made friends with the regional superintendent there and I’d generally spend the evening with him eating, drinking, talking about home. He was an American in his late twenties and had come to Russia because of his commitment to the socialist cause. We drank vodka in quantities that left my head spinning and my legs weak, and somehow this compensated me for what was otherwise an intolerable life. I soon discovered why the Russians drank so constantly. Drinking was the only thing that made their lives bearable.
    But my new friend didn’t share my cynicism. He had seen everything since he had been there—the famine, the shootings, the prison camps, the slave workers—and it didn’t dampen his faith in the slightest. All these things were necessary to achieve the dream of human justice and equality.
    There was no telephone service beyond the Urals, but I could reach Manny through the railroad telegraph system, even talk with him sometimes over the wire. He had started placing orders for the equipment we needed and gradually it began to appear at the railhead at the far end of the valley.
    At the end of March, when the snow would actually melt a little in the sunlight, Manny came back from Moscow, looked over what I had done, and found it acceptable. I had got my incentive systems in place, and with Mitya and Smitty on the scene we could safely return to Moscow, order the rest of the equipment we needed, and begin the development of the other Faust enterprises.
    You did a good job, Manny told me, a really good job, and I beamed at that. He had one exception. He cut back the salary base, so that we captured for ourselves part of the productivity gains the workers made. But at least they weren’t any worse off than before. With the increased productivity, they were making the same amount as they did previously. This was unusual among Siberian mines, I later discovered, because at most other mines, you didn’t share anything with the workers. You simply cut wages and let the workers make the best of it. It wasn’t much to ask of people when they were building a socialist paradise.
    Before he went back to Moscow, Manny decided he had to climb those mountains that towered over our narrow world. The Raptors of the Dawn, they were known as—I forget now what the name was in the local dialect, but it referred to the carrion birds that caught the morning in their talons—hawks, eagles, falcons—and brought daylight to the world.
    I could come along if I wanted to, Manny said. That was up to me. He was determined to go. It was the chance of a lifetime. I could stay at home if I liked, he was going anyway. But there was an edge of scorn in his voice. So what could I do? I was never one who got a kick out of looking at the world from on high, but what did I have to lose?
    And so we started out one