The revolutionist, p.24
The Revolutionist, page 24
From the far end of the square, a stallion pulling a carriage with only one wheel came careening past the palace. Some of the sentries lunged for their rifles, then laughed when they saw what it was. Lather covered the horse's flanks. Foam seeped from its mouth. Sparks leapt as its hooves, and the wheelless axle, struck the cobblestones.
"What a beautiful thing!" exalted Lili. "It is like our revolution, Alexander. Wild! Inarticulate! Unstoppable!"
Zander, struggling against a persuasive despair, watched the horse disappear out the other end of the square.
"What is it, Alexander.''" Lili asked when she saw the expression on his face.
Zander said, "I have always detested the sound of horses' hooves." He winced with uncertainty; he wasn't sure if he was remembering ... or anticipating.
nn
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Just as the English have a special gift for humor, so do the Russians have one for cruelty. It is a peculiar, cold-blooded cruelty which tests the limits of human endurance. . . .
—Maxim Gorky, in his 1922 booklet, never published in the Soviet Union, About the Russian Peasant
TO PUT IT INTO TIME
Afterward, all of Petrograd went on a binge. Some sailors broke into the tsar's wine cellars. Trotsky ordered the Preobraznensky Reginnent, one of the most disciplined in the capital's garrison, to guard the cellars. The entire regiment wound up drunk. The Pavlovskys took up positions around the palace. They got drunk. Bolsheviks from other regiments were trucked in. They got drunk. Red Guard commanders took over the job. They got drunk. Word spread. Crowds formed. Soldiers manning the armored cars sent to disperse them swayed suspiciously on their feet. The Soviet had the entrances to the cellars walled up. People pried the bricks from the windows and climbed in. Lenin ordered the cellars flooded. The fire brigades sent to carry out the order got drunk. A special commissar was endowed with emergency powers and dispatched to the scene. He wound up drunk.
Eventually the Bolsheviks succeeded in having the contents of the wine cellars pumped into the river. The Neva turned red with wine. Peasants selling cabbages on the quays took it as an omen. The Neva would run red again, they said, this time with blood.
1
En Route Ekaterinburg, 1918
The train crawled into the tunnel at Alataoust and ground to a stop halfway through it. Vasia Timofeyevich Maslov moaned, "Jesus, not again," and clutched his satchel full of cameras to his chest in the pitch black compartment. Zander, crammed onto the wooden bench next to Vasia, reached across in the darkness to touch Lili's knee and felt her fingertips run lightly over his knuckles to acknowledge the contact. With a series of jerks and the whine of metal resisting metal, the train lurched forward again. Minutes later it steamed out of the tunnel into the blinding, brittle sunlight and passed the enormous sign alongside the tracks marking the spot where Europe ended and Asia began.
"As-i-atika," said a peasant, sounding out the word on the sign syllable by syllable, and then the sense of what he had read penetrated and he leapt from his seat into the air and kicked the heels of his birch-bark shoes together.
Farther along the train others took up the cry as their compartments came abreast of the sign. "Asiatika! Asiatika!"
"I have never set foot in Asia," Zander told Lili. "The word sounds as magical as America did when I was a boy."
"I was raised in Asia," Lili said across the aisle. She fingered the cameo brooch, with the red stone in the center, pinned under the top button of her shirt and mouthed, "My love." Zander grinned in embarrassment and nodded quickly back at her.
"Where are your honors headed, then.''" asked the peasant woman balancing a large bell jar full of leeches on her knees.
Vasia replied, "God willing, Ekaterinburg."
THE REVOLUTIONIST
"Isn't Ekaterinburg where our new masters are keeping the batyushka Father?"
Zander's eyes met Lili's. "So they say," he told the woman, and to discourage more questions he turned away to look out the window at two shoeless peasant children and a goat sullenly studying the passing locomotive from a small rise.
At noon the train crossed a rusted steel trestle spanning a broad, rippling river. The peasant men stood up in the crowded compartments and solemnly tipped their caps to Mother Volga. Soon after, three short blasts of the engineer's whistle drifted back and the train, with a metallic screeching that dispatched shivers down spines, drew to a stop. One of the Red Guards trotted alongside the carriages shouting, "Wood time, everyone out."
The able-bodied men. Zander and Vasia among them, lined up in front of a cattle car for saws and axes and then slipped down the embankment and began attacking the birches beyond the rail line. The men cut the trees into meter-long lengths and stacked them on the flat-car behind the engine, while the women drifted through the shade of the birch forest hunting mushrooms. Then there was a twenty-minute wait while the engineer stoked the boiler with newly cut green logs. Lili kicked off her shoes and tied her skirt up at her knees and waded into a clear, shallow stream. On the bank Zander spread his map and tried to figure out where they were.
"What if the Whites take Ekaterinburg before we get there.''" Lili called from the stream. "What if they execute the girls, and the Germans get insulted and attack.^"
"What iP What if.^" Zander called back, and he had a sudden vision of his father, pacing back and forth in frustration, saying, "What if the tsar was circumcised, or Jews didn't answer a question with a question.^"
"That's no answer," Lili said from the stream.
Before Zander could be drawn into a discussion, three blasts sounded on the train's whistle. Zander scurried up the slope toward the carriages. Muttering playful obscenities, Lili followed, and the train started out again on its long, slow painful trek across the vast barba, the birch steppes that began on the outskirts of Moscow below the pistachio-green walls of the Zagorsk monasteries and stretched north and east to the end of everyone's imagination.
Trotsky had relieved Zander of his translating chores at the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and had dispatched him, with Lili as his code clerk and Vasia as his official photographer, to Ekaterinburg and the Ipatiev Mansion in the center of town that served as a prison for the former tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children.
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Arriving at Moscow's Yaroslavsky Station with priority travel vouchers in their wallets and Trotsky's handwritten instructions sewn into the lining of Zander's jacket, they had been caught up in the chaos of a Russia at civil war. There were no fixed schedules for trains, and they had had to camp on the quay along with hundreds of others. "We will never get there in time," Lili said anxiously after they had been there for sixteen hours; she had to shout to be heard over the droning voice on the platform loudspeaker reading, for the dozenth time that day, Mayakovsky's latest poem, "Order Number Two to the Army of the Arts."
. . . Comrades,
give us a new form of art—
an art
that will pull the republic out of the mud.
Zander spoke several times with the Bolshevik trainman who headed the committee that ran the station, but he only shrugged tiredly and said he couldn't produce a train even if the travel priority being held up before his eyes had been signed by God the Father and countersigned by the Holy Ghost.
Zander and Lili and Vasia eventually clawed their way onto a train and into a crowded compartment, where the windows were nailed closed and the smokers, Vasia among them, outnumbered the nonsmokers. In no time at all the air turned putrid, and things only improved after Lili, her lips visibly green, threatened to vomit on the next person to light up. Outside, stations flitted past, all of them mobbed with masses of coughing, spitting, cursing peasants carrying large gunnysacks and fighting to get on the train without bothering to find out where it was going. The peasants surged first one way and then another like algae in a tide. To Zander, watching from the window seat, his cheek pressed to the glass, it seemed as if the entire population of Russia were either in stations waiting for trains, or riding them.
Their train, pulled by a locomotive that looked like a relic from the previous century, was shunted onto sidings for hours at a time, and once for an entire day; the Bolsheviks who routed rail traffic that July later admitted they had simply forgotten about it. Sometimes trains passed filled with conscripts—city lawyers, factory owners, bankers— crammed into open cattle cars, being sent off to dig trenches. Once they spotted Trotsky's famous armored train, with its steel-plated boxcars and machine guns mounted on the roofs, speeding by. Several hours later, rounding a long curve that wound like a vine around the side of a mountain, they came to a smoldering village, and word
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quickly spread through the carriages that Trotslcy's armored train had machine-gunned it to put down a peasant revolt. The lacelike wooden frames around the windows hung in tatters from the brightly colored izbas, and horses and cows and goats and several humans lay belly-up in the rutted paths. At twilight one day, Zander spotted a horse-requisitioning unit with its herd spread out under a gutted monastery on a rolling hill awash in baby sunflowers. And with the last intermittent rays of sunlight stabbing through a distant birch forest, they passed a sacked station with three figures hanging by their necks from beams. Each corpse had a notice pinned to the breast that read DEATH TO SPECULATORS. A nearsighted Red Guard in a belted leather jacket, who had expelled a peasant from the compartment the previous day and taken his place, squinted at the corpses through the streaked window, and repeated a Stalinism that had been making the rounds in Moscow: "So there is a bit of noise from the cells. Prison is not a resort!"
The latest Stalinism seemed to Zander a universe away from the idealism of Lenin's "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!" In the exhilarating days after the Bolsheviks seized power, everything, anything, had seemed within the realm of possibility. Since no one had actually constructed socialism before, the comrades argued about how to go about it. Nobody, not even Lenin, dictated decisions. Everyone had an opinion and stated it. Factions formed, split, reformed as the debate—always open, often ferocious—raged. Votes were taken. Majorities ruled. On the question of brothels, for instance, the minority wanted to close them, but the eventual majority decided to collectivize them. There was general agreement that the sprawling cemeteries should be plowed up. (Signs were posted around Petrograd saying, IF YOU WANT YOUR DEAD, COME AND GET THEM, and people dragged rotting coffins through the street frantically searching for new burial places.) But there was a lively difference on what use the cemeteries should be put to. One faction proposed building enormous sports stadiums on the sites, another recommended constructing satellite cities, a third suggested recreating London's Kew Gardens on a larger, "Socialist" scale.
There was no lack of grandiose schemes. As Moscow and a string of other large cities fell to the revolutionists, someone proposed linking the Socialist outposts by enormous Zeppelins, each of which would be capable of transporting hundreds of passengers and thousands of tons of freight. The cemeteries, the Zeppelin faction proposed, could be transformed into sprawling ports for the lighter-than-air vessels. Stalin came up with the idea of putting demobilized soldiers to work building modern subway systems. Someone else seriously suggested constructing revolving iron-and-glass towers in the centers
ROBERT LITTELL
of the major cities. The structures, taller than the Eiffel Tower, would have huge open-air screens on which news films and Socialist slogans would be projected. The slogans would be composed, not by plodding propagandists, but by the country's poets who, following Mayakovsky's lead, would fulfill work quotas like any other proletarian. "Why should literature occupy its own corner.'"' declared Mayakovsky, who night after night roamed through raw, drafty factories bellowing out his poetry to puzzled workers. "Either it should appear in every newspaper, every day, on every page, or it is totally useless."
Faced with the prospect of building socialism from scratch, some comrades lost their nerve. An old Bolshevik named Teodorovich, upon learning he had been appointed Commissar of Food Supplies, suddenly remembered his asthma and headed for a Siberian spa; he had to be forcibly returned to his desk and the problems piling up on it.
Teodorovich had reason to panic. The food situation was desperate. The daily ration in Petrograd had been reduced to one hundred grams of bread, and an occasional herring head. Various comrades had different explanations for the shortages. Stalin saw sabotage at the root of the problem. Zinoviev came to the ingenious conclusion that there would be enough bread to go around if only the slices weren't so thick; he recommended something called "Soviet slices." Kamenev proposed digging up the main avenues of Petrograd and planting potatoes, but Lenin convinced a majority to vote against the idea on the theory that you don't give hungry people fish—you give them fishing rods.
Almost every issue aroused passions, touched nerves. Including that of the Party restaurant. Arguing that Communists with important responsibilities often lacked the energy to cope with them, a handful of comrades circulated a petition asking the authorities to set up a closed restaurant to provide nourishing meals for Party members only. In the time it took for the word to spread through Smolny, two factions formed. Tuohy, a member of the first faction, was all for the idea; if the vanguard of the proletariat didn't have the physical force to lead, he said as he passed around the petition, the working class would certainly fail to build a new society. Zander got wind of the plan from Lili, who had heard about it from Arishka, and promptly organized a petition against it. "You don't understand what the revolution is all about if you want to open a restaurant for Party people only," he protested, his eyes narrowing in indignation. "In the old days, the ruling classes used to say, 'The shortage shall be divided among the peasants.' We made this revolution"—in his mind's eye Zander could hear his brother Abner's voice, husky, ardent—"so that the shortages would be divided, as the surpluses eventually will be, equally among everyone."
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"Alexander is quite right," Lili declared flatly.
"If they create a restaurant for Party people," Arishka said uncertainly, "it will be a temporary expedient—until the food situation is straightened out."
"We Communists are bearing the brunt of the fight," Tuohy insisted. "Our own restaurant is the least they can give us."
"We are creating precedents," Zander said. "If we give special privileges to Party people today, God knows what we will do tomorrow when things become plentiful."
"Sign here," Tuohy instructed Arishka. She refused to be ordered around. "The Bolsheviks have given the vote to women," Arishka observed coolly. "I am casting mine with Alexander." And she signed under Lili's name.
Eventually the two petitions wound up on Lenin's desk. He weighed both sides of the issue, and tipped the scales in favor of those calling for a special restaurant. "The working class cannot march in the vanguard of the revolution without its activists," he reasoned. "And the activists have to be cared for. It is my opinion that a closed restaurant should be organized."
It was—though Zander, nursing his moral center, steadfastly refused to set foot in the place.
Even after the Bolsheviks, five months in power, moved the capital to Moscow and installed themselves in the Kremlin, the business of the special restaurant left Zander visibly depressed. Lili, who was beginning to understand his moods, tried to reassure him. "You can't establish a new society overnight," she told him. "You have to give it time, my love."
Time, however, was the one thing the revolution didn't have. Lenin had been obliged to sign a humiliating peace treaty with the Germans, because without it there was nothing to prevent the Teutonic hordes from continuing their advance; the Russian armies, lured by the prospect of land distribution, had melted away. The first White Guards, under the command of Kornilov and Denikin, were taking to the field on the Don; their ranks swelled daily as an assortment of monarchists, former army officers, vengeful antisocialists, land owners and plain adventurists rallied to their standard. The Cossacks of Orenburg were mustering around their Ataman, and would soon join the fray against the Bolsheviks. A crack Czech division, stranded inside Russia at the end of hostilities, had taken over much of the trans-Siberian railway and turned on the Bolsheviks. French, British, American, Canadian, and Italian units had landed at Murmansk; some saw the hand of the British Secretary of State for war, a rabid antibolshevik named Winston Churchill, behind the invasion. Advance elements of Japanese armies had come ashore in Vladivostok. In
ROBERT LITTELL
Moscow, Trotsky was frantically scraping together a ragtag army of Red Guards, sailors, and factory workers to stem the tide, but the prospects of success were not bright.
Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had resurrected the little-known Marxist notion of the withering away of the state; armies, police forces, bureaucracies, would begin to disappear the very day the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin had promised. But once he took power, Lenin appeared to see things in a different light. He still talked about the withering away of the state, but postponed the joyous event to some distant future "when no possibility of exploitation remains on earth." Armies were being fielded to defend the revolution from its external enemies. So it seemed only logical when, a month after the fall of the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks took up the question of organizing a secret police to protect the revolution from its internal enemies. Trotsky was heard to quote Saint-Just—"Nobody governs innocently"—as he raised a finger in the affirmative. When he voted yes, Stalin muttered that to make an omelet you had to crack eggs. (Stalin's quip was greeted with nervous smiles; everyone understood that in Russian the word for "egg" also meant "testicle.") Lenin noted that when you cut down a tree, chips flew; it was clear where he stood. There were no dissenters. Which is how the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution and Sabotage came into existence. The commission instantly became known by its Russian initials "Ch.K." which was pronounced "Cheka." The Politburo named Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the gaunt-faced, fiery-eyed Polish Communist, as the Cheka's first chief. And Lenin himself provided Dzerzhinsky with his brief. "Remember: the good of the revolution," he remarked, his eyes wandering, his mind skipping ahead to the next item on the agenda, "is the highest law."
