Debate on Revising the Railway Workers' Union Charter: “Enable and Ensure”

The debate over revising the railway workers’ charter turns on a small choice of words: whether the Union’s work should be said to “facilitate” communication and trade, or to “enable and ensure” them. The argument gives a crowded political assembly the force of a comic performance, while revealing how seriously its participants take the language used to describe collective labor.

A hidden view of the Assembly

On August 2, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov follows Nina to the second floor of the Metropol. They skirt the entrance to the Boyarsky Restaurant, make sure the way is clear, and use Nina’s key to open an unmarked balcony door. From there they watch the Second Meeting of the First Congress of the Moscow Branch of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers assemble below. About a hundred men are already seated, with another hundred conferring in the aisles; three officials take their places behind a long wooden table on the dais.

The Count’s presence is as precarious as their hiding place. Nina crawls behind the balustrade on her hands and knees, and when he bends to follow her, the seam in the back of his trousers gives way again. The setting is stifling: this is the day’s second Assembly, following two earlier meetings, and the ballroom is already at 91 degrees. As the Count watches, he reflects on the continuities of political display. The workers’ caps and patched clothes differ from the gold and epaulettes of the old order, but both kinds of dress can make a public statement about the wearer. Then the secretary raps his gavel, and the Assembly begins.

The Count has not come because he approves or disapproves of the delegates’ politics. He finds political discourse tedious in any form. Yet the balcony’s separation from the floor lets the scene hold two perspectives at once: the proceedings are official business to the assembled workers, and a spectacle—at first an overheated one—to the Count and Nina concealed above them.

From routine business to a disputed verb

The first fifteen minutes pass through six administrative matters in quick succession. The Count can imagine that the meeting might finish before the watchers’ backs give out. The next item, however, proves less disposable: a proposal to amend the Union’s charter, specifically the seventh sentence of its second paragraph. The secretary reads the full sentence, an elaborate catalogue of the Union’s virtues: its steadfastness, its labor in summer and winter, and the sound of its whistles at night. Its culminating claim is that the Railway Workers of Russia “facilitate communication and trade across the provinces.”

For the Count, the sentence’s grand buildup makes its final claim something of an anticlimax. The delegates’ objection, though, is not simply that the phrase lacks rhetorical grandeur. They object to “facilitate” as too mild and genteel a verb for the work being described. A voice from the back objects that the men are not helping a lady put on her jacket; another adds the example of painting her nails. The jokes make the perceived mismatch concrete: a word associated with delicate assistance seems to shrink labor that the speakers regard as strenuous and indispensable.

The question therefore becomes how to name that work adequately. The speakers point toward the labor of engineers, the vigilance of brakemen, and the physical effort of tracklayers. Suggestions rise from the floor, including “To spur,” “To propel,” and “To empower.” Each alternative has merits and limitations, and the meeting’s orderly business becomes a lively dispute, punctuated by arguments, shouted reactions, and the secretary’s gavel. The temperature on the balcony climbs to 96 degrees as the Count begins to sense a risk of disorder.

“Enable and ensure”

A shy-looking young man in the tenth row proposes replacing the single verb with the paired phrase “to enable and ensure.” His reasoning gives the amendment a practical reach: the phrase can encompass not only laying rails and manning engines, but also maintaining the system afterward. The suggestion wins immediate support. Delegates repeat its logic—laying, manning, and maintenance—and the proposal appears to be moving toward adoption.

A thin clerk or accountant in the second row then stands to object. He argues that poetic concision counsels against using two words where one will do. Several men rise as if to seize him and drag him from the room, but a burly delegate in the fifth row answers without standing: “With all due respect to poetic concision, the male of the species was endowed with a pair when a single might have sufficed.” The reply turns the clerk’s defense of the single word into a joke about the supposed superiority of singularity. Thunderous applause follows.

The resolution to replace “facilitate” with “enable and ensure” passes by a unanimous show of hands and a universal stomping of feet. Its adoption resolves the formal question, but the scene’s comic energy comes from the path to that decision: an abstract preference for concision is challenged by a concrete account of work that includes both construction and continued upkeep. The paired verbs prevail because, in the young delegate’s explanation, the Union’s responsibility does not end once the tracks have been laid or the engines put to work.

The Count’s changed impression

The episode alters the Count’s judgment of political debate. He had expected tedium, but from the balcony he watches a disagreement grow from a word’s connotations into a dispute about the breadth and dignity of railway labor. The proceedings remain funny to him; they are also lively enough that he privately acknowledges political discourse may not always be dull.

At the Assembly’s conclusion, the Count and Nina crawl off the balcony and back into the hallway. He is pleased with his own comparisons between the meeting’s respect-payers, back-patters, and latecomers and their counterparts in the past. He has also privately devised a range of livelier alternatives to “enable and ensure,” from “bustle and trundle” to “carom and careen.” He plans to call the debate Shakespearean, intending the comparison in the manner of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing—as much ado about nothing. But he does not get to deliver the quip: Nina asks what he thought and, unwilling to wait for his impressions, proceeds with her own. The ending leaves the Count’s private amusement intact while making clear that the debate has already exceeded the dismissive verdict he had prepared.