Pyotr Andreyevich Zalomov (1877–1955) — standard-bearer of the May Day demonstration of 1902
Pyotr Zalomov was born in Sormovo District. The defining event of his life was the May Day demonstration in his home settlement. That workers' demonstration provided Maxim Gorky with the subject for his novel Mother. But Gorky's Pavel Vlasov — modeled on Zalomov — is above all a literary hero, and the actual workers' rally was far less romantic than its portrayal in the book. The archival documents bear this out.
May 1, 1902 fell on a Thursday — an ordinary workday. "…Until six o'clock in the evening there were no disturbances of order, but at six o'clock groups of people began appearing on Bolshaya Shosseynaya Street; about 2,000 had gathered, of whom some 200–300 were shouting 'hurrah', whistling, and responding to police officers' demands that they disperse with nothing but mockery…" — so the district police chief of Balakhninsky District reported that evening to the prosecutor of the Nizhny Novgorod District Court. "At seven o'clock in the evening I informed His Excellency the Governor of this by telephone, requesting orders for troops to be dispatched. While awaiting the arrival of troops at the Sormovo landing stage… a large crowd of demonstrators moved from Shosseynaya Street toward the factory's main gates and began breaking windows in the precinct office and the factory counting-house, and in the precinct office all papers were torn up and thrown into the street. At about half past eight in the evening the troops arrived. During a sweep by police and troops through the streets of Sormovo District, a large crowd was encountered, among whom one group of eleven persons surrounding a standard-bearer was detained. The person carrying a large red banner bearing the inscription 'Down with the autocracy! Long live political freedom!' proved to be Pyotr Zalomov, a worker at the Sormovo Plant." It is worth noting that even the newspaper Iskra, in issue No. 21 of June 1, 1902, viewed the hooliganism of the demonstrators negatively, observing that "shortly afterward a crowd of class-conscious workers arrived at the scene. 'What are you doing?' they said. 'We will gain nothing by wrecking the factory office…'" From October 28 to 31, 1902, in Nizhny Novgorod, the court of the Moscow Judicial Chamber tried the case of Pyotr Zalomov and his comrades. By May 1902, Pyotr Zalomov was already an experienced revolutionary. Four years earlier, as a "political," he had been dismissed from his first job at the Kurbatov plant and had been forced to leave Nizhny Novgorod for Perm, where he was unknown, and took work as a fitter in the state-owned railway workshops. Two years later he returned to the Sormovo Plant and, on the recommendation of an acquaintance who was an engineer, was hired as a fitter in the machine shop. He knew that covert police surveillance had been placed on him, and until May 1902 Zalomov gave no grounds for arrest. The red flags were brought to Sormovo by Pyotr Andreyevich's mother, Anna Kirillovna. They had been passed to her by Ivan Ladyzhnikov, one of the leaders of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Despite a Social Democrat call for a strike, no strike took place. The demonstrators marched through the streets of Sormovo twice. But the plant continued to operate and 12,000 men remained at their workstations in the workshops. The demonstration did not become a mass event. The police had been ordered not to react to the procession so as not to provoke disorders — yet disorders were precisely what the Social Democrats needed. The working shift ended. The streets grew crowded. With red flags raised, the demonstrators moved from the Daryinskaya gatehouse along the main road toward the Head Office, where the Sormovo precinct office was also located, and there occurred what has already been described. Thirty-four people were arrested for participating in the Sormovo disorders; twenty-eight were brought to trial, and only six were sentenced to permanent exile in Siberia. Pyotr Zalomov was among them. Under the terms of a tsarist manifesto, Zalomov received a document from the Yeniseysk prison administration in the summer of 1906 that allowed him to regularize his status and obtain a passport. However, because he had fled Siberian exile and taken part in the Moscow armed uprising in December 1905, he was forbidden to live in the capitals or major provincial cities, and was therefore required to settle in the district town of Sudzha, near Kursk. In Sudzha, Zalomov wrote an autobiographical novella, "Petka from the Widows' Home," about his childhood in the family of a drunken father and his years at the "widows' home" maintained at the expense of the merchant Bugrov. The pages of another novella, "My Life," recounted his Siberian exile and how Maxim Gorky never forgot his fellow countryman and reliably sent him fifteen rubles a month. Hunting and fishing, mushrooms and berries provided sustenance. His wife Josephine Eduardovna, who had come to join him, taught the daughter of their landlords to read and write in exchange for payment. The October Revolution, followed by the Civil War, found the Zalomovs still in exile in Sudzha. In 1919 the town was occupied by Denikin's forces, and Zalomov, the district labor commissar, was arrested and spent several months in a prison cellar together with other prisoners. He was tortured, and only the hasty retreat of the Denikinists prevented them from carrying out the death sentence they had passed on Zalomov. In 1924, Molotov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), visited Zalomov. He was resting nearby — in Maryino — and decided to call on the Sormovo standard-bearer. Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich was surprised to learn that Zalomov was not a party member, and gave Pyotr Andreyevich a recommendation for admission to the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). When the front drew close to Sudzha at the start of the Great Patriotic War, Zalomov requested that he and his family be evacuated to Gorky. Back in his homeland, he visited the wounded in hospitals, corresponded with soldiers at the front, and spoke at rallies. In 1949, when the centenary of the Krasnoye Sormovo Plant was celebrated, the former fitter-turned-standard-bearer served on the jury of a competition for the best song about the enterprise. Although several of the submitted entries mentioned Zalomov by name, Pyotr Andreyevich cast his vote for the "Sormovo Lyrical" by Boris Mokrousov and Evgeniy Dolmatovsky.