The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  And in that, at least, they were right.

  New waves of strikes broke out all over the country and inevitably, in the late Autumn of 1913, a spark flew and ignited the discontent which, like so much cotton waste, had been lying around the Narva Mill.

  On the 11th of November a group of women reported late for work at the mill. “Our children are sick,” one of them said.

  “What do you expect me to do about it?” asked the foreman harshly.

  “Nothing, but we’d … we’d like to go and see them in the middle of the shift.”

  “You’re paid to weave cotton, and that’s what you’ll do.”

  “If just one of us could go—”

  “No!”

  The women bowed their heads and accepted the foreman’s ruling. Perhaps one or more of the children would die during the day, but that was only a possibility. Without their mothers’ wages, they would certainly starve to death.

  “One more thing,” the foreman said. “You were forty-five minutes late.”

  “The kids are sick!”

  “You’ll be fined half a day’s pay.”

  Like autocrats throughout history, the foreman had failed to learn one vital lesson: you can push people – but only so far. Within an hour the entire workforce, six hundred men and women, were out on the street.

  On the 12th of November, Sasha called an emergency meeting of our cell. “The st … strike is a fact,” he told us. “If we don’t take the lead, the Mensheviks will.” He turned to the grizzle-haired sweeper. “W … What are the workers demanding?”

  “That the women be given back their half-day’s pay and that nobody loses any money for the time they’ve been on strike.”

  “Not enough!” Sasha said, banging on the table with his fist. “D … double the wages, halve the hours! That has a good ring about it.”

  “There are other things more important,” I said. “Pete … the owner of the mill is in breach of the law. He’s required to provide free health, sickness benefit and pensions. He doesn’t do any of those things. If we could harness the strikers’ energy to press—”

  “D … Double the wages, halve the hours,” Sasha repeated, as if he had found a magic formula.

  I suddenly realized what he was doing – applying the two basic laws of revolutionary activity – ‘Things cannot get better until they have been made to get worse’ and ‘Never ask for the possible for fear that it will be granted’.

  He was right, I could see that. We’d never really improve conditions by concession and gradual reform. We needed sweeping change. It was because I believed this that I was a Bolshevik. Even so, I couldn’t wipe from my mind the image of the dormitory blocks, the sight of hollow-eyed, thin-chested children trudging grimly to work.

  I wasn’t a good revolutionary, I told myself. Sasha was being true to the cause, I was being weak and short-sighted. What I’d forgotten in the heat of debate was that Sasha wasn’t fighting just any capitalist. He was locked in a struggle with his old enemy Peter, and would do whatever it took to defeat him. A heart filled with hatred is easier to harden, and unlike Sasha, I didn’t have a personal hatred for Peter. Not then. That was a lesson I was to learn later.

  The Mensheviks called for moderation, but the workers were angry, and it was to us they turned for leadership. I played my part as Sasha’s lieutenant and had one small triumph of my own. By using Lenin’s technique of talking until I was blue in the face – and then carrying on talking – I had made the social programme part of the conditions of returning to work.

  The strikers blockaded the mill, stopping scabs and raw materials from entering. Deputations were sent to other local factories and to those in the Vyborg District, to encourage the workers there to walk out too. Though the weather turned bitter, the picket line held firm. The strike stretched into one week, and then into two.

  I addressed rallies and argued my way through meetings. I had no fear that anyone would recognize me as a princess. Dressed as I was, acting as I was, even I forgot that I belonged to the aristocracy. I was Lyudmila, a fiery peasant revolutionary, and only when I dragged my exhausted body home to snatch a few hours with my child did my other life exist.

  There was one link between my two lives – money. The workers ate better during the strike than they had ever done before, and if my husband had cared enough about possessions to put his hand into one of the crystal bowls of uncut gems, he would have found the bottom filled with pebbles.

  Konstantin never commented on my frequent absences. He had his own duties to attend to, and when he was at home, he became totally absorbed with Nicky. Besides, he was not the kind of man who thinks he can only retain his wife’s affection by keeping her a virtual prisoner. If it crossed his mind to wonder what I was doing, he probably concluded that I was having an affair. And I was.

  It was inevitable, I suppose. I was a child-bride, an almost-virgin mother, with, furthermore, my husband’s explicit permission to sleep with other men. I’d worshipped Sasha in the mir, and now we were working closely together, under great pressure, on something which really mattered to both of us. Moonlight, heavenly strings and chilled champagne were not necessary. As with the strike, it only needed the smallest of sparks to ignite us.

  It happened during the first week of the strike. Another meeting, another depressing boarding house room, the six of us sitting around a battered dining table.

  “The C … Central Committee is very pleased with the way things are going,” Sasha told the cell.

  “The Central Committee!” said one of the mechanics, with awe.

  “Lenin himself is following the st … strike with interest,” Sasha lied.

  The workers, simple souls that they were, broke into spontaneous, excited applause. Sasha let them run on for a while, then lifted his hands to call for silence. “W … Workers of the world unite!” he proclaimed. “The international pr … proletariat will have their revolution.”

  “… will have their revolution,” the faithful chimed

  “Get back to the picket lines,” Sasha continued, his voice quieter and more businesslike now. “Make sure they stand f … firm.”

  The strikers left, and Sasha and I were alone.

  “We’ve got the c … capitalist on the run,” Sasha said gleefully. “The spectre of a w … workers’ dictatorship hangs over him like the shadow of death.”

  It annoyed me to hear him still speaking jargon now that there were just the two of us in the room. “Remember the boycott in the mir?” I asked. “You thought you were going to win that time, too. Didn’t you? Then Peter blamed the barn-burning on you, you were sent to Siberia, and the muhziks were back in the Count’s fields that very day. So what makes you think Peter will give in so easily now? I know him. He’ll find another barn to burn.”

  Except for the pale scars on his cheek and forehead, the whole of Sasha’s face flushed bright red. “Peter! Peter!” he shouted. “You think he’s so clever, don’t you? You think he can beat me every time?”

  Men! Was there ever a man – apart from my Konstantin – whose ego wasn’t always teetering on the edge in my presence? They don’t care how they look in the eyes of an old crone like I am now, but stand them next to a pretty woman and they instantly feel an overpowering urge to appear strong, to seem right.

  “You’re clever too,” I said soothingly. “And we can win. All I meant was that we can’t afford to be be overconfident.”

  Sasha was not to be mollified. He sprang to his feet, sending his chair crashing against the wall. He grabbed me by the shoulders and swung me round to face him. My chair screeched its protest as it turned, my body cried out in pain as Sasha’s fingers dug into me. “I’ll r … ruin Peter,” he said, shaking me. “I’ll de … destroy him. Just you see!”

  The violence left him as quickly as it had entered. He stopped shaking me and though he didn’t relinquish his hold, it no longer hurt. His breath blew on my cheek, his face came closer and closer, and we were kissing.

>   His hands roved over me, worming their way under my clothes to play on my ribs, to caress my breasts. I was burning up – as I’d been on the river bank with Misha, as I had been on my wedding night with Konstantin.

  Sasha eased me to my feet and lent me back against the table edge. I felt his hand lift my rough peasant skirt and climb my thigh until it reached my silk drawers. His finger probed, and his breath quickened as he realized that I was already wet, already waiting for him.

  I heard the rustle of clothing and he was between my legs, entering me, moving slowly in and out, in and out. My knees rested on his hips. My ankles locked tight around his naked buttocks. He was moving faster and faster, penetrating deeper and deeper, until I thought I’d die.

  And then it was all over. The passion drained from my body leaving in its place a wonderful contentment.

  “It was you I escaped for,” Sasha said softly. “I t … told myself it was for my wife and ch … children, but it wasn’t. All the time I was on the run, walking through blizzards, f … falling down in the snow and f … forcing myself to get up again, it was your face that kept me going.”

  “Sasha, we—”

  “I hated you when I f … found out you were getting married. I st … stood on the bridge that night, imagining you in bed with him, and I wanted to kill him.”

  “We don’t make love,” I said. “Konstantin is a homosexual.”

  “A homosexual! Then you can c … come and live with me.”

  “We don’t make love, but I do love him,” I said as gently as I could.

  “And you d … don’t love me?”

  “I like you very much. I admire and respect you. And I want to make love to you again. Can’t that be enough?”

  “Of c … course it can’t,” Sasha said. “I want you to feel about me the way I feel about you.”

  “I’m sorry, Sasha, but I can’t. I have a husband and a child. We’re a family. There’s no room in my life for any other person.”

  The arrogance of youth! To imagine that love was so mean-spirited an emotion as to limit itself. To see sex as uncomplicated and manageable, even though, all the time we’d been making love, part of my mind – part of my soul – had been back at the river bank.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was in the third week of the strike that the rumours started.

  “He’s closing down the mill for good, and opening a new one in Moscow,” one of the workers told me.

  “He can’t do that,” I argued. “It would be far too expensive.

  “They’re going to arrest the leaders of the strike committee,” the worried sweeper confided in me.

  “How can they? They don’t even know who the leaders are.”

  “Do you think it’s true the army’s had orders to fire on us?” the younger of two mechanics asked. “They say the government wants to make an example of somebody.”

  “If that was their plan, don’t you think they’d have done it already?”

  Still the rumours grew, each more more extreme than the one it followed.

  “Can’t you see that it’s the owner’s agents who are spreading these stories?” I demanded exasperatedly. “He wants to break your spirits.”

  And it was working. I found myself spending time on the picket line, breathing fire into the souls of the waverers, coming out into the open far more than a member of the underground ever should.

  It was on Thursday afternoon that Peter decided to burn his barn, Thursday afternoon when those of us on the picket line first heard the dreadful sound.

  Clip-clop-clip. Clip-clop-clip.

  A murmur ran through the crowd. The strikers began to shift their feet and look nervously around them.

  “Stand firm!” I shouted at the top of my voice.

  Clip-clop-clip. Clip-clop-clip. Getting closer now.

  Necks craned, breaths were held. From round the corner emerged a score of mounted Cossacks, their whips already drawn. The crowd let out a groan. They all knew, as I did, that a Cossack can do more damage with his whip than an average soldier with a sabre.

  “Link arms!” I shouted, and the cry was taken up in other parts of the crowd – “Link arms. Link arms!”

  The Cossacks’ shaggy ponies trotted slowly towards us, their ears pricked up, their eyes alert. They had done this kind of thing before. They knew that at any moment the Cossacks might order them to charge the crowd, to weave in and out between the panicking people as their masters slashed with whips, to trample those who had fallen without losing their own footing. They knew all that – and they were ready.

  “Stand firm!” one of my neighbours called out.

  But how firm would he stand, I wondered, when he felt a Cossack whip across his cheek? How firm would I stand?

  The Cossacks were twenty yards from us, then ten. The pale winter sun shone on their fur hats and reflected off their polished, spurless riding boots. It would have been easier to face rifles and the possibility of death than the certainty of the damage these incredible fighting men would inflict. Yet the line still held.

  Five yards from us, without any visible signal passing between them, the Cossacks wheeled to the left and rode around the edge of the crowd. A great cheer went up, followed by cries of, “We’ve beaten them!” and, “They’re in retreat!”

  Fools! Did they really imagine the Cossacks would be deterred by a few hundred people? Did they know so little of their employer that they could think he’d let them snatch victory without a bloody battle?

  The hoofbeats grew distant, the Cossacks disappeared from sight. The crowd became restive again. After all the excitement, it seemed pointless just to stand there. They actually wanted something to happen.

  They didn’t have to wait long. A female mill worker appeared, running through the snow, carrying her small baby in her arms. “They’ve locked us out,” she screamed. “The Cossacks! They came to the dormitories and threw us all out onto the street. Then they nailed up the doors.”

  There were some initial cries of anger, but it didn’t take long for an air of despondency to settle over the crowd like a winter fog. It was November now, and cold – well below freezing at night – but it would get colder yet. They could have survived without wages, even if I’d stopped helping them. A little bread could have been scrounged from somewhere, and man does not live by bread alone. But without shelter in the Petersburg winter, man does not live at all.

  More horses hooves in the distance. The Cossacks returning? If it was, they would meet with little resistance this time.

  It was Cossacks, but only four of them, riding escort to an open cart. And on the back of the cart stood a man in a Savile Row suit which, despite his peasant bulk, he wore with a flair Sasha could never hope to emulate.

  The cart pulled up in front of the growling mob and Peter, hands on hips, looked calmly down at us. “Go back to your villages,” he said. “Go back and farm your land.”

  Silence. Sullen silence. Peter clicked his fingers at a man to my left.

  “You – Yuri Andreiovich! Why d’you stand here wasting time? Return to your izbá.”

  “I have no izbá any more, master,” the man muttered. He pointed in the direction of the barracks. “That’s my home now.”

  “No!” Peter retorted. “The building’s mine, and you live in it just as long as I let you.”

  Heads bent, acknowledging that what he said was true.

  “I’ve lost three weeks’ production because of this strike,” Peter continued. “That’ll have to be made up. By you – or by other workers. If I let you work for me again when I reopen my mill, I’ll expect longer hours for no more money.”

  “Until we’ve made up for the lost production, master?” a defeated voice asked.

  “Until I say otherwise,” Peter snarled.

  “What about medical care!” I called out desperately. “What about sickness benefit?”

  Peter turned his burning gaze on me. “I was wondering when you’d open your mouth, Lyudmila,” he sai
d.

  He knows me, I thought with rising panic. Or at least, he knew my nom de guerre and could fit the name to my face! I wondered what else he knew.

  “What about medical care?” I persisted, keeping my voice as steady as I could.

  “I pay my workers well,” Peter said. “How they spend their money is up to them.” He lost interest in me, and turned his attention to the strikers as a whole. “The dormitory will be closed until six o’clock tomorrow morning,” he told them. “At that time, any of you that still wants to work for me can go back into it. Work at the mill starts at six-thirty. Sharp!”

  They were all to have a night out on the streets as punishment. It would be miserable, but they would not die from a few hours exposure – at least, not many of them.

  Peter whistled, his driver flicked the reins and his harnessed horse set off at a trot. The crowd stood in stunned silence for a moment, then began to disperse, a great beast of socialist unity fragmenting into powerless individual cells.

  Cunning Peter. He could have locked them out of the dormitories at the start of the strike, but the weather hadn’t been so cold then. Now, they were beaten and demoralized, and would agree to whatever demands he made on them – at least as long as the winter lasted.

  I saw Sasha at the edge of the ever-decreasing crowd, grabbing workers by the sleeve, trying desperately to make them stay. “We’re not f … finished yet,” I heard him say. “We can break into the d … dormitory. We can expropriate it for the p … p … people.”

  He was wasting his time and even he knew it. Peter had beaten him again.

  As the clanking tram made its way back to the city, my thoughts shifted from the strike to my other failure – my poor crippled son.

  He’s not crippled, I told myself. All the doctors agreed that there was no apparent physical reason why he couldn’t move his legs.

  On Suvorovski Prospect, the tram came to a sudden, unscheduled halt. The Police? Stopping the vehicle so they could arrest Lyudmila the Bolshevik for her part in the cotton mill strike?

  I looked out of the window, and relaxed. Workers dressed in heavy shoobas and thick mittens were repairing the tramlines in front of us. The No. 14 was merely being diverted onto another track.