TE23 Double Feature

The President Shop

Vesna Mari ć

reached the borders of his country again. Throughout this time, he learned that he hated war and that the spirit of the revolution had to be strengthened at all costs, and that the upper class was exploiting the workers for its own gains and for the preservation of its wealth, and that this had to stop. During his time in Russia, he had also managed to marry and have a son, all by the age of twenty-two. Mona had cut out a picture of the President’s first wife and little son, and kept it pinned to her bedroom wall. Upon returning to his native land, the President took to or-ganizing the Communist Party, and trying to bridge the various factions that appeared amongst the unions, and he emerged as the strongest candidate for a unified party leader. He worked as a machinist again, at shipbuilding yards in various parts of the country, but was always fired because of his revolutionary activities. He was again persecuted and arrested, and again 301

the President learned that humiliation was inherent in-side hierarchical systems.

World War I broke out while the President was in the army. He wished to surrender himself to the Bolshevik Russians, but found that difficult, since the local police arrested him on vari-ous occasions; his political views were becoming more widely known. Despite this, wherever he went, the President took up with the local workers, organizing them into unions and help-ing the peasants. Through various military operations and wartime arrests, the President ended up in Siberia, as a pris-oner of war. He escaped and hid for several months in Kazakh villages, working as a machinist and living inside caves, keeping up with the progress of the Bolsheviks through meetings with local workers. He illegally boarded trains in attempts to escape, was arrested again, spent weeks in rat-infested cells, was sick to the point of dying, shared meager food with his fellow pris-oners, until he finally

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