The revolutionist, p.27
The Revolutionist, page 27
With no previous military experience, Trotsky, at forty-one, had been appointed Commissar of War. He had equipped a train with iron plating and layers of sandbags, installed gun turrets on the roofs of the boxcars, filled the wagons—by then so heavy the train required two engines—with a hundred or so crack sharpshooters, a contingent of Chekists, ammunition, an assortment of rifles and machine guns and grenades, radio equipment, food, medical supplies, automobiles for scouting, a supply of gasoline, tobacco to hand out to the troops, even a printing press, and headed for the front. "My strategy," he announced, borrowing Wellington's comment on the eve of Waterloo, "is one against ten; my tactics, ten against one."
Along the route Trotsky was forced to dispatch "landing parties" to plug gaps in the line or put down local revolts, after which the train would work up steam and race off to the next trouble spot. At every junction or station, Trotsky assembled the raw Bolshevik recruits, mostly factory workers with civilian clothes still on their backs and the five-pointed red star sewn onto their shirts, and delivered his pep talk. Dressed in a belted leather jacket, breeches and boots, and a battered peaked cap, he portrayed the struggle as a crusade, and the recruits as "participants in a historic attempt to create a new society." To stiffen the Red Army's determination to fight, he issued a warning: "If any detachment retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the commissar, the next the commander. Revolution," Trotsky added pointedly, "is a great devourer of men."
In the command car aboard his train parked at Sviyazhsk, Trotsky was poring over maps, trying to anticipate where the next White blow would fall when a messenger galloped up to the siding. Trotsky leaned out of a window to take his report: The Whites had ferried several bargeloads of troops across the Volga and landed them on the marshes north of Sviyazhsk. The Bolshevik troops facing them had abandoned their positions without firing a shot. The situation was desperate. If the Whites weren't pushed back immediately, they would consolidate their bridgehead on the west side of the Volga, and the road to Moscow would be open.
THE REVOLUTIONIST
Trotsky ordered everyone on the train to arms, including the cooks and the telegraphists. With the sharpshooters and the Chekists in the lead, and Trotsky himself following along in one of his automobiles stocked with boxes of grenades, the Reds rushed to plug the breach.
By early afternoon Trotsky had moved his "landing party" into position. With three blasts of the automobile's claxon, he signaled the attack.
Tuohy, crawling on his belly along a drainage ditch parallel to the Volga, had difficulty keeping himself and his rifle above water. He thought of Arishka curled up in a nice dry bed in Moscow, and wished he were back with her. He wondered if she was being faithful to him. When her husband had been away at war, she had allowed herself to be seduced by Tuohy. Why should she act differently now that it was Tuohy who was off to war.'' The thought of Arishka spreading her legs to another man depressed him enormously. If she has been unfaithful, Tuohy decided, I will track down the man and kill him. "Here lies Atticus Tuohy," he said aloud, "who died a hero's death while his common-law wife was raising the morale of the troops behind the lines."
There were bursts of rifle fire from the left as the sharpshooters poured bullets into the White positions. From a rise on the other side of a dirt path, the Whites fired back. "Do you see any of the bastards.^" the Chekist crawling behind Tuohy whispered. A machine gun swept the White position. The Chekist behind Tuohy rose to one knee and fired blindly. Up ahead, three Whites broke from the cover of a peasant's tool shed and raced for the river and the barges drawn up on its bank. Working the bolt of his Nagant, the Chekist behind Tuohy picked off one of them, and then a second. Leaping up and running in a crouch, Tuohy dashed for the river's edge. He reached it as the third White soldier, leaning on a long pole, shoved the raft off from the shore. The two regarded each other for a moment. Tuohy lifted his rifle to his shoulder, took deliberate aim, and squeezed the trigger. The weapon misfired. He worked the bolt and squeezed the trigger a second time, with the same result. The click of the misfire appeared to enter the soldier's body. He doubled over, then straightened and heaved on the pole again.
Behind, near the drainage ditch, several grenades exploded and Sergeant Kirpichnikov, yelling hoarsely, led the sharpshooters in a charge against the remaining Whites. Trotsky had ordered his men not to take prisoners. As the White Guards rose with their hands clawing the air, they were cut down.
At the Volga's edge, Tuohy pulled his heavy pistol from its holster and, holding it with both hands, sighted on the boy on the raft. He slowly squeezed the trigger. The pistol jerked up against his palms,
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blocking his view. When he lowered the pistol, the raft, spinning slowly upstream in a countercurrent, was empty.
That evening, in a clearing next to the armored train, Trotsky mustered the Bolshevik company that had broken and run at the sight of the Whites crossing the Volga on their barges. Trotsky himself presided over the drumhead court-martial. The company's commissar and commander were prodded forward at bayonet point until they stood in front of the kitchen table behind which Trotsky sat. "You are cowards and traitors to the cause of world revolution," Trotsky cried. "You know the penalty that awaits you. Do you have anything to tell me before I pass sentence.''"
The commissar, an earnest, bearded young man in his middle twenties, managed a sad smile. "I have nothing to say in my defense. I was ready to die for the revolution when I quit law school for the army. I am still ready to die for the revolution."
The commander, a former tsarist officer in his forties, stepped toward the table. "I ordered them to stand and fight," he told Trotsky in a husky voice. "It was no fault of mine that they did not obey."
"Did you set the example.'*" Trotsky shot back. "Did you stand and fight.?"
The former tsarist officer avoided Trotsky's eye. "I would have been alone. I would have been killed."
"Better to have been killed by them than by us," Trotsky sneered. He raised his voice. "I sentence the commissar and the commander to death by firing squad, sentence to be carried out immediately. As for the men in the company, I order one in ten to be shot, sentence to be carried out immediately." Trotsky waved a hand at the two hundred and sixty men lined up facing him. "Let our Chekists count out one in ten and carr>' out the verdict. Court adjourned."
Tuohy, the senior Chekist on the spot, strode across the clearing until he was face-to-face with the first soldier in the front rank, a veteran in his late fifties with a large scar where his right ear should have been. "You," Tuohy said. The man looked down and spat on the ground and stepped boldly forward. Tuohy counted down the rank, watching the relief flood onto the features of the men he passed. At the eleventh soldier, a bov of seventeen or eighteen, he said, "You."
The boy turned to his right and to his left for help, then looked back at Tuohy. "Why me.'*" he whined. "I only ran because the others ran. I don't want to die!"
"Stop sniveling and step out," Tuohy ordered.
Wiping his nose with the back of his hand, the boy limped forward, and Tuohy suddenly recognized him—it was the teenage messenger with Sergeant Kirpichnikov's thread through his blister.
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In the hollow silence of the clearing, Tuohy continued down the ranks, counting out one in ten until twenty-six soldiers had been selected for execution. They and the commander and commissar were issued shovels and ordered to dig a trench at the edge of the woods bordering the clearing. When they finished, the shovels were collected and the condemned men were lined up, with their ankles bound, on the lip of the trench. The sharpshooters set up a machine gun facing them and fed the end of the belt into the breech with a metallic snap that resounded through the clearing. Some of the condemned men began to weep. The former tsarist officer traced the sign of the cross on his chest. The young company commissar straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath, his last.
"To a gangrenous wound," Trotsky told those within earshot, "a red-hot iron must be applied." And he nodded to the sharpshooters manning the machine gun.
As soon as he set about arming the revolution, Trotsky realized the new Red Army couldn't be led by soldiers' committees voting on whether to attack or retreat. To triumph over the Whites, his army desperately needed an officer corps. The only experienced officers available had served under the tsar. Eventually, Trotsky permitted some twenty thousand former tsarist officers to serve in the Red ranks, a fact that aroused a great deal of resentment, and no small amount of concern about where their loyalties would rest when the shooting started. Trotsky himself shared this concern, and took precautions. He had lists of the tsarist officers' wives and children compiled to discourage defections and treason. And he created a dual system of command, which had a Bolshevik commissar looking over the officer's shoulder at every level of the military structure. No order was valid unless it was signed by both, a stroke of genius that gave to the fledgling Red Army the military expertise to wage civil war, and the political expertise to defend the revolution.
W^hich is how Sergeant Kirpichnikov came to be detached from the armored train and assigned as commissar to the Twenty-third Petrograd rifle battalion, dug in on the west bank of the Volga facing Kazan. "The trouble is, our men are not aggressive enough," Trotsky told the sergeant when he signed his commission. "They have become prisoners of the Bolshevik belief in the historic inevitability of our cause; they think all they have to do to win is survive."
Sergeant Kirpichnikov, who only vaguely grasped Trotsky's references to the dialectic and historical inevitability, understood from his tone that the commissar's job was to give the troops, and the officers who led them, a healthy kick in the ass. As soon as he arrived at the
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Reds' command post in a manor house behind the line, he goaded the battalion's battle-weary commander into action.
"You want me to send patrols across the river?" the commander asked incredulously.
"You are a prisoner of something or other," Sergeant Kirpichnikov replied firmly. "You think all you have to do to win is sit on your ass. Sending men across the river will make the Whites think we are stronger than we really are, since it is not the kind of thing we would do if we were as weak as we are."
The officer followed his new commissar's advice—with startling results. The first raiding party brought back two prisoners, which raised Red morale, and a deserter who had a copy of a map showing the White positions on the east bank of the Volga. Trotsky studied the map and, concentrating his forces, applied his "ten against one" tactic. There followed a series of raids across the river that kept the Whites bloodied and off balance, and bought time for the Reds to bring up recruits from the cities.
As the Reds gained confidence, the pace of their probes across the river picked up. Sergeant Kirpichnikov invariably "chaperoned," as he laughingly put it, his commander on these nightly forays. Signs of battle fatigue appeared on the commander's face, but goaded by his commissar, he kept at it. After overrunning a White outpost at a mill one night, the sergeant suggested that they bring up reinforcements before dawn and hold the position for a day or two. "What do you say, Dmitri.'' Trotskv will be very pleased to have a foothold on this side of the Volga."
"You are a crazv man. Pasha," the commander replied, "but why not.?"
Predictably, the Whites reacted violently to the presence of Reds on their bank of the river. At daybreak, the units of the Twenty-third at the mill found themselves surrounded and outnumbered. They fought off attacks all that day, and the next. Neither the commander nor the commissar slept. Nerves frayed. The commander blamed Pasha for their predicament. Sergeant Kirpichnikov pointed out that on military matters he gave suggestions, the commander gave orders. Observing the commander's glazed eyes, the sergeant began to suspect he had pushed him too far.
That night they decided to break out. Using lumps of sugar set out on the floor to represent his own and the enemy's forces, the commander briefed his unit commanders. There would be a blocking force set up, he said, moving a lump of sugar into position, to protect the flank while the bulk of the Twenty-third—here he maneuvered other lumps of sugar—would leapfrog their way along a gulch to the river. "Any questions.'"' he asked, pressing a hand to his cheek to suppress a twitch.
THE REVOLUTIONIST
As they were leaving, the commander, his hds drooping from fatigue, noticed the half-witted peasant who lived at the mill retrieving the lumps of sugar. "A spy!" he cried. "He is taking the lumps to reconstruct our battle plan for the Whites."
"Dmitri, he was only collecting the sugar to eat it," Sergeant Kirpichnikov said.
"He must be shot," the commander insisted, "and the lumps of sugar must be eaten immediately."
The officers looked in bewilderment from their commander to their commissar. Sergeant Kirpichnikov caught the eye of a young officer wearing bright red breeches, and winked pointedly. "Take the peasant out and shoot him. Distribute the sugar to the men."
The peasant, whimpering unintelligibly, was dragged from the room. Moments later a shot rang out. Sergeant Kirpichnikov flashed what he thought of as his fatherly smile at his commander. It is not his fault, he thought. A man can take only so much. As soon as we get back to our lines, I will send him to the rear for a rest.
The sergeant and the commander stepped outside. The night was fragrant with the aroma of wild thyme, which grew along the rim of the gulch. Lying sprawled on the cobblestone walk leading to the mill was the body of the half-witted peasant. Blood seeped from an ugly head wound. The peasant was not yet dead, but soon would be. Several of the young officers stood around the body vigorously chewing on lumps of sugar. The young officer with the bright red breeches stepped up to Sergeant Kirpichnikov and fired off a smart salute. "I have carried out your orders. Comrade Commissar," he said.
Sergeant Kirpichnikov looked from the body of the peasant to the others eating the sugar to the battle-worn commander, and back to the officer who had carried out the order. "But I winked," the sergeant whispered.
"You what.''" the officer asked in a puzzled voice.
"I winked an eye," Sergeant Kirpichnikov bellowed, "so you would know I was not serious!"
"I took it for a nervous tic," the officer said weakly.
Around them the other officers swallowed the last of the sugar. At their feet the peasant gasped, and lay still.
"Now the Whites will never know our plans," the commander said with satisfaction. And he laughed wildly into the fragrant night.
From behind a polished mahogany desk that had been used, until recently, by a Bolshevik commissar, a gaunt colonel with a patch over one eye surveyed the day's catch. "I want to congratulate you," he said without visible enthusiasm, fixing his good eye on each man in turn, "for having had the sense to abandon godless Bolshevism. The White cause welcomes you with open arms. You will understand, however, that before we can offer you unconditional amnesty, we will require proof of your loyalty. In intellectual circles, this is called reciprocity. Something for something, if you see what I am driving at."
A tall peasant in the middle of the line spoke up. "We was told, your honor, we would be enlisted in the White Army. Give me a rifle and I will prove you my loyalty."
The colonel swallowed a yawn. This was his fourth batch of defectors since the beginning of the week. "There is no question of us giving you a rifle until we can be sure in which direction vou will point it."
"So what is it we have to do to show our loyalty.^" another of the defectors, a factory worker, asked.
"Let your imaginations guide you," the colonel said pleasantly. "We want information about the Reds. We want details of their order of battle. We want to know what they intend to do next. Most of all, we want denunciations. The bigger the fish you denounce, the more likely we are to believe that you really have had a change of heart."
Vasia raised a finger to attract the colonel's attention. "What will happen to those of us who do not succeed in convincing you of our
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loyalty?" he asked in a voice so low the colonel had to strain to hear him.
The colonel's facial muscles worked hard to produce a tired smile. "We will shoot you," he explained.
They pumped up a tubful of water and sponged each other and then stood in front of an open window to let the warm night breeze dry their bodies. Somewhere on Voznesensky Avenue a dog howled at the half moon, but the sound only accentuated the absolute stillness of the evening. Instead of going to the bedroom, they piled up cushions on the floor near the open window and made love lingeringly, drowsily. It was as far removed from violence as lovemaking can get.
"There are so many ways to make love," Lili whispered into his ear.
"When we have tried them all," Zander whispered back, "we will invent new ways."
Afterward, they fell into a deep sleep where they were. Which was why, when the door was shattered off its hinges, neither Zander nor Lili had a pistol within arm's reach.
Armed men flooded into the apartment. Gas torches exploded into light. Shadows danced across the walls. Lili, clutching a sheet she had pulled from an armchair, was thrust roughly against a wall. She tried to shield her eyes with a forearm and called, "Alexander!" From the darkness beyond the torches she heard the sound of something heavy thudding into something soft, and a man grunting in pain. Underwear, a skirt, a shirt, stockings, a pair of shoes came flying out of the darkness and landed at her feet. With a semi-circle of men looking silently on, Lili dressed. An incredibly soothing voice ordered her to turn around and a hood was drawn over her head. Her wrists were bound tightly behind her back with a length of cord.
"My hands are numb," she complained as she was being led down the stairs.
"The rest of your body," the soothing voice replied, "will soon follow."
There was a short ride in an automobile, during which not a word was uttered by her captors. There was the sound of heavy doors opening and her Own steps on a narrow, winding staircase, and endless corridors with doors opening in front of her and closing behind her with clicks that stabbed through her skull. Eventually the hood was pulled from her head and the cord was cut from her wrists and a door was opened and she was forced into a space so small that when they slammed the door behind her she could feel it pressing into her shoulder blades. She tried to raise her hands to massage her wrists, but
