“Turn your bayonets against your masters”

“Turn your bayonets against your masters” is the slogan that redirects Taraska’s military skill toward revolutionary allegiance. As the prosector tells it, the phrase does not create Taraska’s appetite for power so much as give it a new direction: the rifle has already taught him that an armed man can command attention and exert force, and the slogan turns that lesson against the old order.

The slogan in Taraska’s story

Taraska is described as a soldier-Bolshevik who moves about the country, sometimes visiting his wife and otherwise appearing in villages or on trains as he takes part in building a new life. The prosector presents him not as a theorist but as a man whose practical aptitude becomes an organizing force in his life. Whatever he undertakes, he does well; in the army, he learned to fight as he might have learned any other trade.

His decorations, the prosector says, were awarded not for courage but for accuracy. Taraska became a crack rifleman because his eyes and hands were first-rate and he consistently hit his mark. Skill at arms therefore precedes the slogan: his political turn grows out of a capacity already developed through military service.

From military skill to political force

The prosector’s explanation hinges on the rifle’s social meaning. It gives Taraska power and distinction; he comes to want to be a power himself. The remark that an armed man is not simply an ordinary man describes the transformation of a weapon from a military instrument into a source of personal authority. The account links Taraska’s attraction to fighting with the status and agency the rifle seems to confer.

The prosector then places this desire in a longer pattern: in earlier times, he says, men like Taraska might have turned from soldiers into brigands. The slogan supplies a different political channel for the same force. When the call comes to turn bayonets against masters, Taraska turns; in the prosector’s compressed conclusion, that is the whole story. The phrase thus names a change of allegiance without implying that the underlying appetite for armed power has disappeared.

Narrative framing and significance

The slogan appears in reported speech within a conversation about soldiers who have entered Bolshevik life. The prosector’s account is deliberately brisk and personal: rather than explain Taraska through doctrine, it traces his political identity through temperament, competence, military reward, and the allure of the weapon. His final assessment that this is Marxism straight from life underscores the distance between ideological language and the lived motives he has just described.

Elsewhere, the wartime narrative gives this account a stark material context. Soldiers run across open ground toward enemy trenches while some fall and do not rise; wounded men are jolted toward first-aid stations in ammunition carts, and the hospitals in Moscow overflow after fighting. These scenes show the violence and bodily cost surrounding the military world in which a rifleman such as Taraska acquires his skill. The slogan’s significance lies in the direction it gives that force: a political call turns the weapons and habits of war toward the men presented as their masters.