by Follett, Ken
After a few moments he smelled smoke.
The sniper was having a cigarette. But the pungent smell of burning tobacco could travel a long way, and Grigori could not be sure how close the man was.
Ahead and above he saw reflected sunlight. He crept upward, ready to fire. The light was coming through a glassless window. The sniper was not there.
Grigori climbed farther and saw light again. The smell of smoke grew stronger. Was it his imagination, or could he sense the presence of the sniper just a little farther around the curve of the stairwell? And, if so, could the man sense him?
He heard a sharp intake of breath. It shocked him so much that he almost pulled the trigger. Then he realized it was the noise a man made when inhaling smoke. A moment later he heard the softer, satisfied sound of the smoker blowing out.
He hesitated. He did not know which way the sniper was looking or where his gun might be pointing. He wanted to hear the rifle fire again, for that would tell him that the sniper’s attention was directed outward.
Waiting might mean another death, another Yakov or Varya bleeding on the cold cobblestones. On the other hand, if Grigori failed now how many more people would be brought down by the sniper this afternoon?
Grigori forced himself to be patient. It was like being on the battlefield. You did not rush to save a wounded comrade and thereby sacrifice your life. You took chances only when the reasons were overwhelming.
He heard another intake of breath, followed by a long exhalation, and a moment later a crushed cigarette stub came down the staircase, bouncing off the wall and landing at his feet. There was the sound of a man shifting position in a confined space. Then Grigori heard a low muttering, the words sounding mostly like imprecations: “Swine . . . revolutionaries . . . stinking Jews . . . diseased whores . . . retards . . . ” The sniper was winding himself up to kill again.
If Grigori could stop him now it would save at least one life.
He went up a step.
The muttering continued: “Cattle . . . Slavs . . . thieves and criminals . . . ” The voice was vaguely familiar, and Grigori wondered if this was a man he had met before.
He took another step, and saw the man’s feet, shod in shiny new police-pattern black leather boots. They were small feet: the sniper was a diminutive man. He was down on one knee, the most stable position for shooting. Grigori could now see that he had positioned himself inside one of the corner turrets, so that he could fire in three different directions.
One more step, Grigori thought, and I will be able to shoot him dead.
He took another step, but tension caused him to miss his footing. He stumbled, fell, and dropped his gun. It hit the stone step with a clang.
The sniper uttered a loud, frightened curse and looked around.
With astonishment, Grigori recognized him as Pinsky’s sidekick, Ilya Kozlov.
Grigori grabbed for his dropped gun and missed. The revolver fell down the stone staircase with agonizing slowness, one step at a time, until it came to rest well out of reach.
Kozlov began to turn, but he could not do so quickly from his kneeling position.
Grigori regained his balance and went up another step.
Kozlov tried to swing his rifle around. It was the standard Mosin-Nagant, but with a telescope attached. It was well over a yard long even without the bayonet, and Kozlov could not bring it to bear fast enough. Moving quickly, Grigori got close, so that the barrel of the rifle struck his left shoulder. Kozlov pulled the trigger uselessly, and a bullet ricocheted around the curved inside wall of the stairwell.
Kozlov sprang to his feet with surprising agility. He had a small head and a mean face, and some part of Grigori’s mind guessed he had become a sniper to get revenge on all the bigger boys—and girls—who had ever pushed him around.
Grigori got his hands on the rifle and the two men struggled for possession, face to face in the cramped little turret, next to the glassless window. Grigori heard excited shouting, and guessed they must be visible to people on the street.
Grigori was bigger and stronger, and knew that he would win possession of the gun. Kozlov realized it too, and suddenly let go. Grigori staggered back. In a flash the policeman drew his short wooden club and struck out, hitting Grigori on the head. For a moment Grigori saw stars. In a blur, he saw Kozlov raise the club again. He lifted the rifle and the club landed on the barrel. Before the policeman could strike again, Grigori dropped the gun, grabbed the front of Kozlov’s coat with both hands, and lifted him.
The man was slight and his weight was little. Grigori held him off the floor for a moment. Then, with all his might, he threw him out of the window.
Kozlov seemed to fall through the air very slowly. The sunlight picked out the green facings of his uniform as he sailed over the parapet of the church roof. A long scream of pure terror rang out in the silence. Then he hit the ground with a thump that could be heard in the bell tower, and the scream was abruptly cut off.
After a moment of quiet, a huge cheer went up.
Grigori realized the people were cheering him. They could see the police uniform on the ground and the army uniform in the turret, and they had worked out what had happened. As he watched, they came out of doorways and around corners and stood in the street, looking up at him, shouting and applauding. He was a hero.
He did not feel comfortable about that. He had killed several people in the war, and was no longer squeamish about it, but all the same he found it hard to celebrate another death, much as Kozlov had deserved to die. He stood there a few moments longer, letting them applaud but feeling uneasy. Then he ducked back inside and went down the spiral staircase.
He picked up his revolver and his rifle on the way down. When he emerged into the church, Father Mikhail was waiting, looking scared. Grigori pointed the revolver at him. “I ought to shoot you,” he said. “That sniper you allowed onto your roof killed two of my friends and at least three other people, and you’re a murdering devil for letting him do it.” The priest was so shocked to be called a devil that he was lost for words. But Grigori could not bring himself to shoot an unarmed civilian, so he grunted in disgust and went outside.
The men of his platoon were waiting for him, and roared their approval as he stepped into the sunshine. He could not stop them lifting him onto their shoulders and carrying him in procession.
From his elevated viewpoint he saw that the atmosphere in the street had changed. People were more drunk, and on every block there were one or two passed out in doorways. He was startled to see men and women doing a lot more than just kissing in the alleyways. Everyone had a gun: clearly the mob had raided other arsenals and perhaps arms factories too. At every intersection there were crashed cars, some with ambulances and doctors attending to the injured. Children as well as adults were on the streets, the small boys having a particularly good time, stealing food and smoking cigarettes and playing in abandoned automobiles.
Grigori saw a fur shop being looted with an efficiency that appeared professional, and he spotted Trofim, a former associate of Lev’s, carrying armfuls of coats out of the store and loading them onto a handcart, watched by another crony of Lev’s, the dishonest policeman Fyodor, now wearing a peasant-style overcoat to hide his uniform. The city’s criminals saw the revolution as an opportunity.
After a while Grigori’s men put him down. The afternoon light was growing dim, and several bonfires had been lit in the street. People gathered around them, drinking and singing songs.
Grigori was appalled to see a boy of about ten take a pistol from a soldier who had passed out. It was a long-barreled Luger P08 machine pistol, a gun issued to German artillery crew: the soldier must have taken it from a prisoner at the front. The boy held it in both hands, grinning, and pointed it at the man on the ground. As Grigori moved to take the gun away, the boy pulled the trigger, and a bullet thudded into the drunk soldier’s chest. The boy screamed, but in his fright he kept the trigger pulled back, so that the machine pistol continu
ed firing. The recoil jerked the boy’s arms upward, and he sprayed bullets, hitting an old woman and another soldier, until the eight-round magazine was empty. Then he dropped the gun.
Before Grigori could react to this horror he heard a shout, and turned. In the doorway of a closed hat shop, a couple were having full sexual intercourse. The woman had her back to the wall and her skirt up around her waist, her legs spread apart and her booted feet firmly planted on the ground. The man, who wore the uniform of a corporal, stood between her legs, knees bent, trousers unbuttoned, thrusting. Grigori’s platoon stood around them cheering.
The man appeared to reach his climax. He withdrew hastily, turned away, and buttoned his fly, while the woman pushed her skirts down. A soldier called Igor said: “Wait a minute—my turn!” He pulled up the woman’s skirts, showing her white legs.
The others cheered.
“No!” the woman said, and tried to push him away. She was drunk, but not helpless.
Igor was a short, wiry man of unexpected strength. He pushed her up against the wall and grabbed her wrists. “Come on,” he said. “One soldier’s as good as another.”
The woman struggled, but two other soldiers grabbed her and held her still.
Her original partner said: “Hey, leave her alone!”
“You’ve had your turn, now it’s mine,” said Igor, unbuttoning.
Grigori was revolted by this scene. “Stop it!” he shouted.
Igor gave him a challenging look. “Are you giving me an order as an officer, Grigori Sergeivich?”
“Not as an officer—as a human being!” Grigori said. “Come on, Igor, you can see she doesn’t want you. There are plenty more women.”
“I want this one.” Igor looked around. “We all want this one—don’t we, boys?”
Grigori stepped forward and stood with his hands on his hips. “Are you men, or dogs?” he cried. “The woman said no!” He put his arm around the angry Igor. “Tell me something, comrade,” he said. “Is there anywhere around here where a man can get a drink?”
Igor grinned, the soldiers cheered, and the woman slipped away.
Grigori said: “I see a small hotel across the street. Shall we ask the proprietor whether, by any chance, he has any vodka?”
The men cheered again, and they all went into the hotel.
In the lobby a frightened proprietor was serving free beer. Grigori thought he was wise. It took men longer to drink beer than vodka, and they were less likely to become violent.
He accepted a glass and drank a mouthful. His elation had vanished. He felt as if he had been drunk and sobered up. The incident with the woman in the doorway had appalled him, and the small boy firing the machine pistol had been horrendous. Revolution was not a simple matter of throwing off your chains. There were dangers in arming the people. Allowing soldiers to commandeer the cars of the bourgeoisie was almost as lethal. Even the apparently harmless freedom to kiss anyone who took your fancy had led, in a few hours, to Grigori’s platoon attempting a gang rape.
It could not go on.
There had to be order. Grigori did not want to go back to the old days, of course. The tsar had given them bread queues, brutal police, and soldiers without boots. But there had to be freedom without chaos.
Grigori mumbled an excuse about needing to piss and slipped away from his men. He walked back the way he had come along Nevsky Prospekt. The people had won today’s battle. The tsar’s police and army officers had been defeated. But if that led only to an orgy of violence, it would not be long before people clamored for a return of the old regime.
Who was in charge? The Duma had defied the tsar and refused to close, according to what Kerensky had told Grigori yesterday. The parliament was more or less impotent, but at least it symbolized democracy. Grigori decided to go to the Tauride Palace and see if anything was happening there.
He walked north to the river, then east to the Tauride Gardens. Night had fallen by the time he got there. The classical façade of the palace had dozens of windows, and they were all lit up. Several thousand people had had the same idea as Grigori, and the broad front courtyard was crammed with soldiers and workers milling around.
A man with a megaphone was making an announcement, repeating it over and over again. Grigori worked his way to the front so that he could hear.
“The Workers’ Group of the War Industry Committee has been released from the Kresty Prison,” the man shouted.
Grigori was not sure who they were, but their name sounded good.
“Together with other comrades, they have formed the provisional executive committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.”
Grigori liked that idea. A soviet was a council of representatives. There had been a St. Petersburg soviet in 1905. Grigori had been only sixteen at the time, but he knew the soviet had been elected by factory workers and had organized strikes. It had had a charismatic leader, Leon Trotsky, since exiled.
“All of this will be officially announced in a special edition of the newspaper Izvestiia. The executive committee has formed a food supply commission to ensure that workers and soldiers are fed. It has also created a military commission to defend the revolution.”
There was no mention of the Duma. The crowd was cheering, but Grigori wondered whether soldiers would take orders from a self-elected military commission. Where was the democracy in all this?
His question was answered by the final sentence of the announcement. “The committee appeals to workers and soldiers to elect representatives to the soviet as quickly as possible, and to send their representatives here to the palace to take part in the new revolutionary government!”
That was what Grigori had wanted to hear. The new revolutionary government—a soviet of workers and soldiers. Now there would be change without disorder. Full of enthusiasm, he left the courtyard and headed back toward the barracks. Sooner or later, the men would come back to their beds. He could hardly wait to tell them the news.
Then, for the first time, they would have an election.
{ IV }
On the morning of the next day, the First Machine Gun Regiment gathered on the parade ground to elect a representative to the Petrograd soviet. Isaak proposed Sergeant Grigori Peshkov.
He was elected unopposed.
Grigori was pleased. He knew what life was like for soldiers and workers, and he would bring the machine-oil smell of real life to the corridors of power. He would never forget his roots and put on a top hat. He would make sure that unrest led to improvements, not to random violence. Now he had a real chance to make a better life for Katerina and Vladimir.
He walked quickly across the Liteiny Bridge, alone this time, and headed for the Tauride Palace. His urgent priority had to be bread. Katerina, Vladimir, and the other two and a half million inhabitants of Petrograd had to eat. And now, as he assumed responsibility—at least in his imagination—he began to feel daunted. The farmers and the millers in the countryside had to send more flour to the Petrograd bakers immediately—but they would not do so unless they were paid. How was the soviet going to make sure there was enough money? He began to wonder whether overthrowing the government might have been the easy part.
The palace had a long central façade and two wings. Grigori discovered that both the Duma and the soviet were in session. Appropriately, the Duma—the old middle-class parliament—was in the right wing and the soviet in the left. But who was in charge? No one knew. That would have to be resolved first, Grigori thought impatiently, before they could start on the real problems.
On the steps of the palace Grigori spotted the broomstick figure and bushy black hair of Konstantin. He realized with a shock that he had not made any attempt to tell Konstantin of the death of Varya, his mother. But he saw immediately that Konstantin knew. As well as his red armband, Konstantin was wearing a black scarf tied around his hat.
Grigori embraced him. “I saw it happen,” he said.
“Was it you who killed the police sniper?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. But her real revenge will be the revolution.”
Konstantin had been elected as one of two deputies from the Putilov works. During the afternoon more and more deputies arrived until, by early evening, there were three thousand of them crammed into the huge Catherine Hall. Nearly all were soldiers. Troops were already organized into regiments and platoons, and Grigori guessed it had been easier for them to arrange elections than for the factory workers, many of whom were locked out of their workplaces. Some deputies had been elected by a few dozen people, others by thousands. Democracy was not as simple as it seemed.
Someone proposed that they should rename themselves the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and the idea was approved by thunderous applause. There seemed to be no procedure. There was no agenda, no proposing or seconding of resolutions, no voting mechanism. People just stood up and spoke, often more than one at a time. On the platform, several suspiciously middle-class-looking men were scribbling notes, and Grigori guessed these were the members of the executive committee formed yesterday. At least someone was taking minutes.
Despite the worrying chaos, there was tremendous excitement. They all felt they had fought a battle and won. For better or worse, they were making a new world.
But no one was talking about bread. Frustrated by the inaction of the soviet, Grigori and Konstantin left the Catherine Hall during a particularly chaotic moment and walked across the palace to find out what the Duma was up to. On the way they saw troops with red armbands stockpiling food and ammunition in the hallway as if for a siege. Of course, Grigori thought, the tsar is not simply going to accept what has happened. At some point he will try to regain control by force. And that would mean attacking this building.
In the right wing they came across Count Maklakov, a director of the Putilov works. He was a delegate for a right-of-center party, but he spoke to them politely enough. He told them that yet another committee had been formed, the Temporary Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Individuals and Institutions. Despite its ludicrous title, Grigori felt it was an ominous attempt by the Duma to take control. He became more worried when Maklakov told him the committee had appointed a Colonel Engelhardt as commandant of Petrograd.
