10 The Young Broz
this second Circassian, with his enormous eyes and heavy brows.”^18 He fell to
the ground. The last thing he noticed was a Russian soldier, who tried to pre-
vent the assailant from dealing a mortal blow. He was taken prisoner, along
with his entire battalion. When he came to, he was in the military hospital.^19
Prisoner of WarWhile his name appeared in the list of war casualties suffered by the Habsburg
army between 10 and 12 April 1915, it was the beginning of a new chapter in
the life of Josip Broz. He was one of two million Austro-Hungarian prisoners
scattered throughout the far-flung territory of the tsarist empire. For nearly a
year, between May 1915 and March 1916, he was under treatment in a hospital
that had been hurriedly opened in the Uspenskii Monastery on the Volga
River. He was later transferred to a camp among Chuvash, near the city of
Alatyr on the Sura River. There he became acquainted with the daughter of
a local doctor and her friend, who used to pay visits to the prisoners of war.
They brought him books and often invited him to their homes: “They kept
insisting I should play the piano.” So he learned.^20 He would have been freed
had he enlisted in the volunteer corps organized by the Serbs among their
Austro-Hungarian “compatriots” for the Dobrudja front, but he refused to
return to combat along with seventy other comrades. As an officer, according
to the Hague Convention, he was not obligated to do manual labor. Even so, he
accepted the offer of a rich peasant in the village of Kalashevo, near Ardatov,
to work in his flour mill. In the autumn of 1916 he was transferred with other
prisoners to the Urals, and the town of Alatyr, not far from Ekaterinburg. There
he worked on the railway as an interpreter and “elder” prisoner, or supervisor.
In May of the following year, he was sent to the small station of Ergach, near
Perm. After a run-in with the commander of the prison camp, he was arrested
and beaten by three Cossacks with a knout (an event which he never forgot),
prompting his escape.^21
In the disorder following the February Revolution of 1917, he managed to
reach Petrograd in early summer, traveling mostly on foot. Once there he hoped
to find a job in the Putilov factories. He actually worked there for two or three
days, and even had the chance to hear Lenin at a rally and to see the famous
left-wing writer Maxim Gorky. He felt a deep veneration for Lenin throughout
his lifetime, keeping his photo in his Belgrade office and a bronze bust on a shelf
of his library.^22 When the Bolsheviks attempted to seize power on 13 July 1917,
Broz took part in the demonstrations. When the police sent to quell the upris-
ings opened fire, luck was on his side: he first found shelter under the bridges
of the Neva and later escaped to Finland, an autonomous principality of the
former Russian Empire. However, he was arrested as a “dangerous Bolshevik”