Cries In The Wilderness: Alexander Berkman and Russian Prisoner Aid by Barry Pateman

“Not even a miserable piece of stone is dedicated to their memory for fear of rippling a placid

existence.” —Francesc Torres[235]

You can get tired of anniversaries. As you get older there are more and more of them, rolling towards you like a never ending freight train carrying commentary after commentary as the skeleton of each event is enthusiastically picked over to justify the positions and ideas that groups and individuals now hold. I am not interested in doing that for October 1917 (or for any other anniversary come to think of it). I rather think peoples lives and experiences are important in themselves and don’t need to be filleted to fit some contemporary idea or abandoned because they don’t appear relevant. Their lives might insist we ask questions, though. Even if the answers are difficult.

For Alexander Berkman the Russian events of October 1917, seen from America, appeared to be the hope of the world. The fourteen years of imprisonment he had endured between 1892 and 1906 in the most brutal of conditions, the countless struggles against the viciousness of capitalism that he took part in, and those long evenings arguing about the possibility and nature of revolutionary change all seemed suddenly to have had a purpose.[236] Russia was his birthplace and also home to those heroes and heroines of Narodnaya Volya and the other combatant units of the Russian revolutionary tradition that had so influenced him as a young man. He had sensed that the February revolution in Russia had not gone far enough but felt that all the efforts and sacrifices of these revolutionary forebears had finally come to fruition in the events of October 1917. In the October 1917 edition of the New York based anarchist journal Mother Earth he described the Bolsheviks as “the true revolutionists.” He would go on to describe his first day on Soviet soil in January 1920 as “the most sublime day of my life.” Such positive feelings did not last. Bitter and disillusioned by his two years in Bolshevik Russia he had ended his book The Bolshevik[237] with the line: “The Bolshevik Myth must be destroyed.” He presented readers with a harrowing assessment of life in Russia: “The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.”

The purpose of this piece is not to fully discuss the causes of this disillusionment, the trajectory of which you can easily trace in The Bolshevik Myth. Some points do need a little explanation and context, however. Bitterly opposed to World War One and, in particular, to America’s recent involvement in the conflict, Berkman had been imprisoned in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in America from February 8, 1918 on charges of violating the Espionage Act and “conspiracy to interfere with the draft.” Sentenced along with Emma Goldman to two years imprisonment, both were also recommended for deportation to Russia at the end of their sentences. They were shipped from America on the 21^st of December 1919 and after a long journey arrived in Soviet Russia on January 20^th, 1920. The isolation of Berkman and Goldman while in prison make it hard for us to be clear what they actually knew and understood about the situation in Russia. The events around their hurried deportation did not give them much time to ponder and reflect on Russian realities even when they were released. We do know that rumors of tensions between anarchists and Bolsheviks were circulating within the New York anarchist milieu, but there was also considerable sympathy within anarchist circles as to what Revolutionary Russia was, apparently, trying to do. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Saul Yanovsky, editor of the Yiddish anarchist paper Freie Arbeiter Stimme, was one of the most prominent critics of the Bolsheviks. Yanovsky’s relationship with Berkman and Goldman had always been fractious and his support for America’s entry into World War One certainly hadn’t helped matters.

It is unlikely, then, that Berkman had a clear perception of the relationship between anarchists and Bolsheviks in Russia before he and the other deportees sailed out of New York on that cold December morning. By all accounts he was excited and happy and certainly less bothered about leaving America than Emma Goldman was. One newspaper describes the sombrero wearing Berkman as being the center of a “merry group” on the day of deportation.— The group played banjos, and sang the Internationale. He probably did not know that on April 12, 1918, Moscow’s Anarchist Club and 25 other anarchist centers had been attacked by the Bolsheviks. In the fighting 12 Chekists had been killed, around 40 anarchists killed or wounded, and hundreds taken prisoner. Nor, perhaps did he know, that on April 13, 1918 the anarchist press had been suppressed. He may have heard that in November 1918 all attendees at the AllRussian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists in Moscow were arrested. He may also have heard that the “Underground” Anarchists, together with some Left Socialist Revolutionaries had bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party in September of 1919 in retaliation for the execution of seven Makhnovists by the Cheka in Kharkov on June 17, 1919. A plenary meeting of the Party was taking place and twelve were killed and many more wounded. He had certainly heard of Nestor Makhno and his comrades and their remarkable attempts to build libertarian communism whilst fighting both Bolshevik and counterrevolutionary armies.

He would arrive in Russia, then, at a time of Bolshevik repression against anarchists. He also arrived at a time when the anarchist movement was riven with internal arguments, often regarding the relationship between anarchism and Bolshevism. Alliances inside the anarchist movement were complicated and unclear and therefore difficult for outsiders to understand. His account of these experiences is chronicled in The Bolshevik Myth, ending with the defeat of the Kronstadt rebels and his departure from Russia into a life of permanent exile. What isn’t clear to the modern reader is the tremendous damage that his time in Russia had done to his revolutionary optimism as well as his sense of himself.

We have to remember that his time in prison had left a permanent mark on Berkman.[239] Primarily it had made him prone to depression and the events around the Kronstadt Rebellion had a profound effect on him. Those slaughtered rebels had, alongside other comrades in Russia, stood with him, Warren Billings, and Tom Mooney in 1917 by protesting against Mooney’s planned execution and the attempt to extradite Berkman from New York to California to stand trial for the Preparedness Day bombing of July 22 nd 1916 in San Francisco.[240] All he could do was listen to the Communist guns destroying his comrades. He, Goldman and the other anarchists in Petrograd were helpless to intervene, to stop anything, to make any kind of difference at all. Even his isolation cell in prison had not destroyed his self worth as much as had his helplessness over the deaths at Kronstadt. In a letter to a comrade, the New York anarchist Michael Cohn, in October 1922, Berkman described himself as “disheartened, discouraged, almost desperate.”[241]

One of his first acts when he came out of Russia was to pen the article “Bolsheviks Shooting Anarchists” with Emma Goldman that first appeared in the London anarchist paper Freedom in January 1922. With its call to arms: “Make haste for the blood of our comrades is flowing in Russia” it had a profound effect in the anarchist world. Of course pessimistic rumors were rife before its publication. Comrades had traveled to Russia and no word had come back from them—or comrades had returned from there with worrying stories of repression. Here, though, were two respected anarchists, with years of sacrifice and devotion to the cause, stating quite clearly, on their return from Russia, that the Bolsheviks were not our allies but our enemies. It became an iconic document. Even then, some anarchists found it hard to believe, and it shocked many others even though they thought it could be true.

Berkman did what he could to let people know about the Bolshevik state. He found public speaking difficult so writing became, more than ever, his primary form of communication. Based in Berlin he wrote his pamphlet The Russian Tragedy between January 5^th and 10^th 1922, in a kind of white heat, and finished his pamphlet The Kronstadt Rebellion, later that year. In 1923 he also translated the pamphlet The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, written by four Moscow anarchists. Together the pamphlets constituted what he referred to as his Russian Revolution series. Others were planned but did not materialize. He also spent the year helping Emma Goldman with what would become her book My Disillusionment In Russia (which was not her title!) published in 1923.[242] In early January 1923 he began work on The Bolshevik Myth.

Alongside all of this writing Berkman still searched for things to do, things that could ease his feeling of helplessness as well as challenge the conception of revolution that was reflected in Bolshevik Russia. Gradually he gained some sense of what was possible for him. In his introduction to The Bolshevik Myth he wrote: “The inner life of revolution, which is its sole meaning, has almost entirely been neglected by writers on the Russian revolution.” Of course the book is about his inner life but such an approach helped him focus on the experiences of the individual victims of Bolshevism. If he was disheartened and desperate as a result of his experiences then the “inner life” of others must be similar. Physically he was free; other comrades were not. The state of repression in Russia was so intense, so suffocating that just to tell an individual story, to send provisions to a prisoner, to discover one person’s fate were acts not just of solidarity but of affirmation of their lives, their ideas, and their experiences with Bolshevism. The revolution was not just about economic structures but people and their experiences.

From early 1921 all sorts of international anarchist groupings and organizations had spmng up to publicize the cases of anarchist prisoners in Russia. The Anarchist Black Cross was operating as well as it could within Russia but by 1925 many of its members had been arrested and prisoner support became more and more a clandestine activity. American anarchists had formed the International Aid Federation and were attempting to offer material and political support to anarchists both in Russia and Spain. The London-based group for the Relief of Russian Anarchists published the Yiddish newspaper Hilsruf. Three of its contributors—Berkman, Mark Mratchny, and Rudolf Rocker would go on to play important roles in Russian prisoner aid. Things came to an organizational head with the publication of the article “In Russia’s Prisons” in the January 1923 Freedom. The article urged militants to challenge Communist Party members whenever they could—Anarchists must insist that all the imprisoned and deported/exiled be released and “that an end be put to the absurd system of terrorism now inflicted on the workers.” The article was signed by the Union of Maximalist Socialist Revolutionaries, the Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee of Russian Defense appointed by the recently formed International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), The Group of Anarchist refugees in Russia (represented by the anarchist Voline) and Representatives Committee for Aid to Anarchists Imprisoned in Russia (represented by Berkman).

The article ended by asking that all correspondence be sent to the anarchist publisher Franz Kater in Berlin on behalf of the Committee for Aid to Imprisoned Revolutionists and it was that group that in October 1923 published the first issue of the Bulletin of the Joint Committee For the Defense of Revolutionists Imprisoned in Russia.[243] Berkman played a large role in the appearance of the Bulletin, translating material from Russian into English, including an article by I. N. Steinberg on the situation of imprisoned Left Socialist Revolutionaries in prions and exile. The Bulletin would be published from “time to time” with the aim of “supplying the world with information concerning the situation of the revolutionists in Russia.”[244] It set the style for future issues with details of anarchists and other revolutionists who had been recently arrested or exiled, together with calls for money to keep the Bulletin going and provide funds and supplies for imprisoned comrades. Behind the scenes we can imagine the time taken to retrieve scraps of information, listening to recently arrived Russian refugees and attempts to distinguish between rumor and fact as arrests continued unabated.

Berkman was a sound choice for involvement in this type of work. It was work that played to some of his strengths. He was multi-lingual and able to translate Russian into German or English and was diligent and thorough in wading through all the paperwork that a project like this engendered. Just as importantly he also had a “name”—one that transcended the splits and tensions inside Russian anarchism, and indeed American and European anarchism as well. Essentially he was an honest broker who was seen by most anarchists as a person of his word. His life spoke for his dedication to the anarchist ideal and was thought of with respect by some beyond the left; people he would try to use to publicize the situation of imprisoned revolutionists in Russia.

Yet problems arose soon after the publication of the first issue. That issue had been incorporated into a one-off journal, Behind The Bars (January 1924) published in New York by the Anarchist Red Cross. The approach to prisoners taken by the Bulletin appeared to cause tension in some New York anarchist circles that were worried about the amount of work that the Bulletin was doing for non-anarchist prisoners. As a result of this concern a letter was sent to Berkman, probably by the New York Branch of the ARC, suggesting that prisoner support work in Russia that was being carried out by the group around the Bulletin should concentrate only on looking after imprisoned anarchists. The writers certainly had history on their side. The Anarchist Red Cross in the United States had been formed in 1907 because, despite anarchists raising funds for political prisoners in Russia (including anarchist prisoners), money appeared to go only to the Social Democrat prisoners there through the various Social Democratic Russian prisoner support groups. To some anarchists in 1923, it seemed history might be repeating itself and Berkman, of all people, was encouraging this to happen. To other anarchists all types of Socialism and Marxism had been tainted by Bolshevik practice. Why support any of them? Berkman replied rather tersely to the letter a month later, arguing that supplying bread to Maria Spiridonovna (who was a Left Socialist Revolutionary) should be just as imperative as to aid Aron Baron (who was an anarchist).[245] If the people in the Anarchist Red Cross were asserting that they could not work with imprisoned Left Socialist Revolutionaries he himself would find it impossible to work with some of the imprisoned anarchists who he thought were “worse than crazy.” He would still support these anarchists in any way he could, however. He suggested that being a revolutionist was the primary criteria to receive prisoner support. How he defined “revolutionist” would change and morph slightly at different periods of his life, but basically he identified revolutionists as those who used decisive action to bring about a wholesale revolutionary change. For him, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were revolutionists even if he disagreed with them politically. Moreover, he felt that political tendencies mattered far less in prison than outside when it came to matters such as food or mutual aid. Consequently the Bulletin would later publicize the cases of imprisoned Social Democrats and Socialist Zionists.

The publishing schedule of “from time to time” was reasonably adhered to.

The next issue came out in October-November 1924 with more news of hunger strikes and prison life. Berkman had spent much of that year collating as much information as he could about imprisoned and exiled Russian left wing revolutionists, passing the information on to Roger Baldwin, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, whom Berkman had known in America.[246] This information, essentially documentary in nature, was published for the International Committee for Political Prisoners by the New York publisher Albert and Charles Boni in 1925 as Letters From Russian Prisons and published in England by C.W Daniel Co the same year. Baldwin was nominally editor of the project that Berkman had collated. Berkman obviously realized that the International Committee had more influence and could be far more effective in publicizing what was happening in Russia than the anarchists could. Together with Grigori Maksimov’s The Guillotine At Work, this volume remains essential reading for evidence of Bolshevik repression.[247] We should add that, according to Boris Yelensky in his account of the Anarchist Red Cross, Berkman suggested Maksimov’s magisterial work to the Chicago Prisoner Aid group in a 1935 letter.[248]

By December 1926 the Bulletin was under the wing of the International Working Men’s Association and became The Bulletin of the Relief Fund of the International Working Men’s Association for Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists Imprisoned in Russia. More anarchists became involved in its collation and it advertised itself as now being based in Paris and Berlin. The Bulletin had also attempted to widen its readership with issues published in English, French, Spanish, and Russian. The odd issue was also published in Dutch and Esperanto. No matter it’s new title, the Bulletin still provided readers with details of prisoners who were not anarchists. The December 1926 issue, for instance, carried an appeal from Kharkov prison signed by anarchists, a Left Socialist Revolutionary, Socialist Zionists, and a member of the Socialist Youth. In October 1925 Berkman had, with some difficulty, moved to Paris and continued to help edit the Bulletin from there. This was a role he continued until May 1930 when he was deported to Belgium for “conducting anarchist propaganda.” He managed to return but faced further expulsion battles in November 1930 and July 1931. He had to publicly withdraw from this and other projects but privately he dealt with the English correspondence for the Committee and continued to help with the accounts until his death on June 28 th 1936. After Berkman’s death his anarchist comrades in America recognized his work on behalf of Russian prisoners. The Chicago Aid Group (a strong financial supporter of the Bulletin and its work) renamed itself the Alexander Berkman Aid Fund.[249] After the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1939 the Alexander Berkman Aid Fund provided help to Spanish anarchist refugees in France and elsewhere.

His work for Russian prisoner aid was, by any standards, remarkable. I think it’s very easy to underestimate what Berkman and his comrades were up against. We need to remember that those who tried to help Russian prisoners were a very small group indeed. It meant facing up to very unpleasant realities. The anarchist movement was, to quote Emma Goldman, everywhere “shot to pieces”[250] and Soviet Russia had the overwhelming sympathy of many on the left. Even if some were bothered and concerned by what they heard or sensed about the reality of life under Bolshevism they always gave Russia the benefit of the doubt. Consider this extract from a 1922 letter to an anarchist from Andres Nin, Spanish Marxist, later leader of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista/ Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) in the Spanish Revolution and murdered by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in 1937:

Were there errors, injustices? Who doubts that? But who would be able to avoid them? Are we all faultless? Anything but! And we have not had a revolution.[251]

Give it time. Don’t provide bad publicity. Don’t push the baby when it is starting to walk. Perhaps many of the people in prison were counter revolutionary. Mistakes will be made. Not to accept the reality of the situation makes one a traitor to the revolution. Such genuinely felt attitudes, articulated by so many people, some whom were former allies, only emphasized the emotional and political isolation felt by Berkman and his comrades. Being prescient can be a lonely business.

This isolation was compounded by the nature of the work that had to be done. It certainly wasn’t glamourous or eye-catching. We can imagine Berkman sitting at his desk in Berlin or Paris surrounded by paper: letters, memos, scraps smuggled in from Russia that had gone through countless hands. Reading it all. Making endless lists, trying to find patterns, and trying to make sense of any patterns he found. Stopping occasionally as he becomes aware of the growing and smothering oppression that has so professionally taken over the revolution. Sitting and trying to remember the faces of comrades he knew and wondering if they are still alive. Besides all this bureaucratic work decisions had to be made. How can we gain access to progressive labor forces and encourage them to publicize the situation of prisoners in Russia? Just which, of all the deserving cases, should we prioritize for help? If we mention the names of some prisoners are we putting their families in danger? The questions were exhausting and relentless, the answers were not easy and optimism was hard to find.

Also relentless was the constant struggle for funding. Food and medical parcels needed to be sent. Prisoners’ families needed to be supported whether inside or outside of Russia. The Bulletin needed to be produced, as did leaflets and brochures about a specific person or group of prisoners as well as articles for whatever paper would publish them. Berkman wrote circular after circular asking for money, “who deserves our efforts more than those brave men and women who are persecuted for their loyalty to an ideal?” he writes in one, going on to stress that no-one on the Relief Fund committee receives any money for what they do. All money goes to the relief of prisoners. It did and the Bulletin regularly published detailed accounts of donations and expenditure. Berkman lived on what money he could earn from his translation work and the odd handout from American comrades.

Of course there is added poignancy for us in the knowledge that very few of the people whose names appear in the Bulletin ever returned to their homes. Contact with prisoners, exiles, and their families became far less regular as the years rolled on. In his book In The Struggle For Equality, Yelensky writes these chilling words “Finally, in 1939, every contact with our comrades in Russia was broken, and our work for the political prisoners in that country came to an end.”[252]

So there we have it. Anarchists and radicals of many persuasions lost in the camps, the prisons, and isolated villages of Russia. Starving, alone, and casually executed. Many have just simply disappeared from memory. Repressed, isolated and under surveillance for decades. If you weren’t shot for active resistance or simple opposition you might starve to death. Some may have remained anarchist out of sheer stubbornness. We know that others tried to keep up connections, waiting for the next revolution. Many just disappeared from history.

I suggested at the beginning of this essay that the lives and experiences of the people Berkman and his comrades were trying to aid might lead us to ask questions. I’d suggest that the most important one is pretty obvious. What are we to do with all this knowledge, these names that Berkman called “The Tragic Procession,” name after name of comrades exiled, imprisoned or just disappeared?[253] How are we to process them? Are we to see them as belonging to the past—a sad story but that was then and this is now? Should we compliment Berkman and the others on their work on Russian prisoner support ninety years ago and move on?

I have to say it is tempting. Sometimes history can weigh you down and getting rid of that weight is an attractive idea. The trouble with that approach is we shouldn’t want to let this history go! The work that Berkman and the others carried out sadly remains unfinished. We only know fragments of what happened to these comrades, if we know anything at all. The group carrying out research for the website “Anarchists in the Gulag (and prison and exile)” are carrying on the work begun by Berkman and his comrades all those years ago.[254] Fine scholars like Malcolm Archibald at Black Cat Press[255] and Nick Heath[256] are busy working in the field. Exciting work by Russian and Ukrainian historians has been carried out for some time and slowly some of their work is becoming available to English readers.[257] They are all still picking up tattered pieces of paper with indecipherable scrawl on them and bringing people back to life. What type of movement, what type of fighters for a world of individual freedom and mutual aid would we be if we left undiscovered those who shared similar beliefs but perished in the most desperate and tormented of circumstances?

If finding a name and their individual fate is in itself an affirmation of that person and the philosophy by which they lived their lives, so is it also a condemnation of all those who forced them to suffer so brutally. Surely the emotional and physical torment unleashed on our comrades should make us regularly consider who we can work with now in order to realize our ideal? Berkman, himself, believed that we should support all revolutionists in Bolshevik prisons not just anarchists. He had been a prisoner himself and recognized that political differences count far less in prison than out of it. He was an intelligent man, though, and he must have realized that if the prisoners were ever released it would be near impossible to find a similar unity of purpose outside the prison walls. Simply put, because we have the same enemy does it necessarily mean we should be friends?

I think we probably need to try and ask the right questions. I am not convinced that it is sensible asking whether or not there are good Marxists or bad ones; nor if there are good interpretations of Marxism and bad ones. Berkman, himself was asking those questions from 1922 onwards although, as the years passed, he appears to have abandoned them and others took their place. There have been consistent attempts by comrades to find the best in both anarchism and Marxism and create some wonderful bionic radical movement that shares a common history and somehow makes us more potent revolutionaries. Certainly Russian (and other) anarchists and Marxists did some work together before 1917. They shared cells and exile in Czarist Russia. Perhaps some were friends? Perhaps they, too, looked for the best in each other and their respective ideologies. By 1918 those Marxists and Bolsheviks were sending anarchists to prison, exile, or execution for arguing against Bolshevik ideas. Now we all know this is complicated. Some anarchists weren’t imprisoned for a while, some anarchists turned to Bolshevism, others died as anarchists fighting side by side with Bolsheviks, and Bolsheviks slaughtered their own comrades as happily as any other tendency. Sometimes anarchists and Bolsheviks shared common interim goals. And yes, as Berkman argued, some anarchists were a little...strange. Reality is a messy business but constant oppression and death do appear to be a regular theme in how Marxists and their various groupings relate to anarchists. Is it inevitable that we will always be the canary in the mine?

I rather think Berkman understood all this complexity as well as anyone and a little better than most. After all he spent a good few years working with the horror created by Marxist state solutions to the eradication of capitalism. The primary questions that he asked in 1921, and refined throughout the rest of his life were centered around what we understand revolutionary change to be and what it means to “take power.” For Berkman these were the central questions we should be asking and, to be honest, I don’t think we have truly answered them yet. What we can see in his public writings and letters, from 1922 onwards, is a distinct wariness in his approach to the obsessive self-righteousness of Marxists and their groupings. Taking power for them meant that only they could be right in any assessment of any situation. Only they could decide who was worthy and who wasn’t. All their decisions were, of course, based on their correct interpretation of the words of Marx and his acolytes. Once you have got rid of your opposition all that is left is for the various tendencies in your group to turn on each other in search of that seductive revolutionary purity mixed with a twist of political expediency. In all of this the working class and dispossessed became irrelevant—irritants to be shaped and controlled by those who knew best. This assurance of being absolutely right coupled with an unsettling certainty quickly became deadly and nightmarish. Their corrosive effects were clearly on show in Russia from 1918 onwards, where dictatorial behavior was justified by “circumstances.” “Circumstances” is a wonderful, convenient idea and, of course, sometimes has to be recognized. After all, circumstances can be irritatingly difficult. Just what “circumstances” necessitated the isolation, exile, and death of so many, however, is a question well worth asking!

If we are looking for friends (and are we that lonely?) we might want to consider how our friends feel about their relationship to power—both personal and political. We may feel we have the answers but how do we, as anarchists, work with the economic and emotional victims of capitalism to create a better world remained, for Berkman, the central question of revolutionary practice. In his pamphlet The Anti-Climax (which was essentially the last chapter of The Bolshevik Myth that his publishers didn’t publish because they thought it an “anti-climax”), Berkman suggested the beginnings of an answer “Not by order of some central authority, but organically from life itself”[258] would social regeneration occur with a firm and secure foundation—a process that he saw as the beginnings of anarchist communism—“a free non-authoritarian communist society.”[259]

There are so many books, pamphlets, and papers published about the Russian revolution. In the 1930s the great proletarian writer Jack Common suggested that Socialism would not be built book by book. Neither will anarchy. It could have been built by the actions of people such as Fanya Baron (executed 1921), Maria Weger (arrested 1921), Vladimir Yegorov (exiled to Siberia after three years of isolation, 1931), M.A. Sednev (arrested 1925), Polya Kurganskaya (died in exile 1929), and thousands like them whose names are still waiting to be discovered, but it wasn’t. Even after some of them, and thousands and thousands like them, had helped make February and October 1917 happen, their actions appear to have counted for nothing in Bolshevik minds. We might want to argue that times have changed but we need to also face the fact that the reality of their suffering all those years ago hasn’t. Whatever further questions these names and lives force us to consider it’s up to us to answer them as truthfully as we can.

However many books on Russia we read we shouldn’t ever forget who they were. We owe them that.