The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  What can I give him? What can I do that will save me?

  “Sasha’s back,” said my washroom informant.

  Relief flooded through me. My old friend and lover had returned. How foolish I’d been to worry.

  “Where is he?” I asked excitedly.

  “Well, he was here. He went to see Comrade Stalin, and then left.”

  I set out straightaway for his lodgings, hope bubbling up inside me. It was nearly three months since he’d first seen Tania – since he’d learned about Peter and me. Perhaps time had blunted his hurt and he would be able to forgive me.

  I was on the corner of his street when I realized that something was terribly wrong. Small groups of people stood tightly bunched together, talking animatedly but falling silent when I approached. Bedroom curtains twitched as I walked past. The air was filled with the atmosphere of fear and excitement which always settles after an act of violence.

  I started to run, and by the time I reached Sasha’s house, I was gasping for breath. I took the stairs two at a time, one hand held out to steady me in case I fell, the other clutching my pistol. One look at the door to Sasha’s room told me I was too late. It had been battered in, and now hung at a crazy, twisted angle, only holding onto the jamb by one hinge. What few sticks of furniture Sasha possessed lay smashed on the floor, as if they themselves had engaged in a bloody battle.

  Sasha wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t there!

  I knocked frantically on the door next to Sasha’s.

  “Go away!” a fearful voice called from within.

  “Please let me in!” I begged. “I have to know what’s happened to Sasha.”

  “Go away!” the man said again.

  I turned the handle, but the door was locked. I put my pistol against the lock, pulled the trigger, and kicked the door open with my boot. The man who wouldn’t help me was cowering on his bed. I waved my pistol in his face. “Where is he?” I screamed.

  “They … they came and took him away,” he moaned.

  “Who came and took him away? The soldiers?”

  “Not soldiers. Just men. Men with guns.”

  Men with guns. I didn’t know who they were, or where they’d taken him, but I was sure that Peter was behind it.

  The march of history is not halted, even for a second, by personal tragedies. I might have lost Sasha, but the Revolution was going ahead. On the evening of the 23rd of October, only hours after my one real friend had disappeared, Trotsky sent Political Commissars to every garrison in Petrograd.

  “We’re from the Soviet,” they told the soldiers. “We’re your new commanders.”

  A few regiments rejected them, but most were prepared to follow their orders – at least as far as they were prepared to follow anyone’s orders.

  Now we controlled the army, the theory went, and therefore we must control the city, and hence the country. A Bolshevik delegation was sent to see the Military Governor of Petrograd, to demand that he recognize the Political Commissars as the legitimate source of authority in the army.

  “Get out of here before I hang the lot of you,” the Governor told them.

  We should have sent in the Red Guards to arrest him. Instead, we did nothing. Lenin was right to distrust the rest of the Central Committee – they didn’t have the will to carry it off properly. They didn’t even begin to fortify our headquarters until after Governor had sent the delegation away with a flea in its ear.

  Nor was the Governor any more decisive. He didn’t have many loyal troops still at his command, but he had enough. If Konstantin had been in charge, he’d have marched them to our headquarters then and there, and bagged the almost entire Bolshevik leadership, but the Governor just sat and waited.

  I was Lenin’s eyes and ears. However much I ached to be with Nicky and Tania, however desperate I was to find Sasha, I had other responsibilities. On this, the second day of our grab for power, it was my duty to report to our leader on the Revolution’s progress.

  What progress? What revolution? The shops were open as usual, the streets as crowded as ever. Tramcars ran as they did every other day. The cinemas were selling tickets for their evening performances. Trotsky had sent out an impressive proclamation to all military units and to the factories on the Vyborg side, but many citizens in the central district had no idea that this was anything other than a normal day.

  Only outside the Winter Palace, to which Prime Minister Kerensky had moved his government, was the Bolshevik threat being treated at all seriously. Guard posts had been set up round the palace approaches. Six armoured cars stood in front of the Palace itself. Soldiers, mainly Cadets, were marching up and down. Both the Revolution and the Government were digging in. Neither of them seemed prepared to launch an offensive.

  The more I walked around the city, the more depressed I became. We weren’t in power, we were only pretenders to it. We were acting like some ousted Central European monarch who sits in London or Paris and issues impressive documents bearing the royal seal which are ignored by everyone.

  It’s not enough to say we’re in control, I thought angrily. We have to prove it.

  And soon – before Kerensky could bring in loyal troops from Moscow or the Front.

  It was early evening by the time I reached the Smolny Institute and heard the awful news that Sasha had been arrested.

  “Who arrested him?” I demanded.

  “The Party. Us,” said my informant.

  “But what for? What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “Friend of yours, is he?” the man asked.

  “Just tell me what you know, you bloody fool!”

  “All right, all right, keep your hair on. The way I heard it, Comrade Stalin’s been using him as a fighting fund collector. He’s been all over Russia collecting money.”

  “And?”

  “And then he stole it.”

  The money had gone missing, I was sure of that, but it wasn’t Sasha who had taken it. Now I knew what Peter had been doing since he left Petrograd. Visiting the same cities Sasha would be going to. Laying his trap. How like Peter to accomplish two things with one action – frame Sasha and enrich himself. How like Peter to use the Party Sasha had given his life to as his instrument of destruction.

  “Where are they keeping him?” I demanded.

  “Don’t know,” my informant admitted. “But I’ll tell you something for nothing. As soon as anybody can find the time, they’re going to try him. And then they’ll shoot the bastard.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Only Lenin could help me save Sasha, and Lenin had disappeared again. I spent a long night searching, questioning everyone who might know where he was. Every second counted. Every minute which passed increased Sasha’s danger. Where the hell was Lenin?

  It was not until early the next morning – the third day of the Revolution – that I tracked him down to the Smolny Institute, our headquarters.

  There were guards outside what had once been Ladies’ Classroom Number Seven, and was now the meeting room of the Bolshevik Central Committee.

  “Can’t go in,” one of them told me. “Nobody can. Lenin’s orders.”

  I stood by the door, waiting and worrying. They were too busy with other problems to think about Sasha. They wouldn’t do anything to him until the Provisional Government had really fallen. Unless Peter decided that a dead Sasha was a safe Sasha, and arranged for his execution.

  Around me, everything was confusion and excitement. Peasant and worker delegates rushed to meetings, tramping the mud from their boots all over the floors of the long, vaulted corridors. Girls with short skirts and bobbed hair staggered under the weight of piles of newspapers, proclamations and propaganda leaflets. Red Guards boasted loudly of their exploits and slapped each other on the back.

  Inside the Committee Room, they were arguing so loudly that the sound carried beyond the door.

  “We’re letting it slip through our fingers,” Lenin complained bitterly.

  “We’ve got the
power station,” someone shouted back, “and the telephone exchange and the state bank.”

  “Yes, yes,” dismissively from Lenin.

  “And the Baltic, Nicholas and Warsaw Stations, so now Kerensky can’t get any troops by rail.”

  “I know all that.”

  “We’re in control of almost the entire city except the General Staff Headquarters, the Admiralty and the Winter Palace.”

  There was a thud, and I pictured Lenin banging his fist on the table as I’d seen him do so often in the past. “Exactly!” he said. “We don’t control the Winter Palace! It’s more than a building, it’s a symbol of the old order. As long as it remains untaken, the Provisional Government still exists. As long as it remains free it will serve as a rallying point for the soldiers who Kerensky’s called in and who are marching on the city at this very minute.”

  He was right. We’d never convince the people we really were in charge until the Winter Palace had fallen.

  The meeting broke up, a chastened Central Committee left, and Lenin was alone in the room. I knocked and walked in. He was sitting at a battered table, his head in his hands. He looked up at me, and smiled. “Ah, Lyudmila, my eyes and ears. How—”

  “I need a favour,” I interrupted.

  “What sort of favour?”

  “I want Sasha Krasnov to be granted a free pardon.”

  Lenin frowned, as if trying to remember the name.

  “He’s charged with stealing Party funds,” I explained, “but I know he didn’t do it.”

  “I can grant no pardons,” Lenin said firmly. “He will be given a fair trial by a revolutionary court and subjected to revolutionary justice.”

  A trial, fair or not, was of no good to Sasha. He had been tried before, back in the mir, and found guilty. And he would be found guilty again, because once more, Peter had stacked the evidence against him.

  “Ilyich—” I began.

  “This is neither the time nor the place to discuss such trivial matters.”

  There had to be something I could offer which would buy Sasha’s freedom. I could not stand by and watch him dragged away in chains once more – this time for ever. But what could I offer? Back at the Big House, I’d threatened to return to the mir if Sasha wasn’t freed, and the Count had called my bluff. I was older now, and had more resources at my command, but I felt as helpless, as powerless, as I had back then.

  “If I could speed up the fall of the Winter Palace, would you give Sasha a pardon?” I asked.

  “Speed up the fall …? If the Military Revolutionary Committee can’t do it, how do you expect to?”

  “Let me try,” I pleaded. “What have you got to lose?”

  Lenin nodded, sombrely. “What, indeed?”

  He picked up a piece of paper and scribbled a hasty note on it. He looked at what he’d written, frowned and scrawled his signature at the bottom. I think he would have liked to have added an official stamp, but he didn’t have one. We weren’t that organized yet … and we were nowhere near official.

  He handed the paper to me. “This says you are my personal representative,” he said. “Go the Winter Palace. See what you can do.”

  That I had made the offer shows the extent of my desperation, that he had accepted it shows the depth of his.

  I have rarely known such despair as I experienced on that journey between the Smolny Institute and the Winter Palace. In my bid to free Sasha, I had set myself an almost impossible task, and I would fail him, just as I had failed him when I was a little girl.

  Nor was Sasha the only cause of my misery. During the heady days before the Tsar fell, the air had buzzed with danger – but also with excitement. When we’d marched down Nevsky, there’d been a general feeling we mattered. That we were making history. And this feeling was absent on the second day of the Bolshevik takeover.

  There’d been no real fighting, no heroic struggle to grapple the power from the hands of entrenched interests. Not a shot had been fired. Shops were open. Citizens moved freely. It was business as usual. If there was so little enthusiasm now, I thought, how would we ever persuade the masses to follow us as we embarked on the gigantic task which lay ahead of us?

  I reached Palace Square – that great, open space between the Winter Palace and the mighty River Neva. The barricades around some of the palace’s larger arched entrances had been strengthened since the previous day – if no one else was taking us seriously, at least the Provisional Government was.

  Not that there seemed to be anything to take seriously. The big square should have been packed with Bolshevik shock troops, ready to storm the barricades. Instead, apart from one military vehicle at the end furthest from the palace, it was completely deserted.

  Podvoisky – the Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee’s second-in command – stood by his staff car, examining the palace through a pair of field glasses. I gave him Lenin’s letter. He read it, and sniffed.

  “He’s been on at me all day,” he said. “Threatened to have the whole MRC shot. Who’s he going to get to shoot us, that’s what I’d like to know. We’re the only ones with guns. Is he going to get us to shoot ourselves?”

  “You promised him you’d take the palace by noon,” I said, “and it’s nearly two o’clock now. What’s the new estimate?”

  “Three o’clock,” he said decisively.

  I looked around at the empty square. “Doesn’t seem to me as if you’ll be ready, even by then.”

  “Listen,” Podvoisky exploded, “I’ve taken the Mariinsky Palace. Why isn’t Lenin happy with that?”

  “The Mariinsky wasn’t guarded, and there was no one important in it anyway. It’s Kerensky you’ve got to worry about, and he and his ministers are in the Winter Palace.”

  “The ministers might be, but Kerensky left just after dawn,” Podvoisky said. “Borrowed a car from the American Embassy. Nobody knows where he’s gone to.”

  It was obvious where he’d gone. To rally troops outside the city! “You must attack immediately!” I said.

  “Can’t do it without the men,” Podvoisky sniffed, “and I haven’t got enough of them yet. Maybe when the sailors from Khronstadt get here …”

  “And when will that be?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Should be some time today.”

  I could have killed him for his complacency. He was losing us the Revolution. And yet … and yet at the same time, I wanted to kiss him. His inactivity meant there was still a chance to play a part in the fall of the palace and save Sasha. But what part could I play, one woman alone?

  “What’s the geography of the palace?” I asked.

  “The Provisional Government occupies the rooms on the second floor looking out on the Admiralty and the Neva,” Podvoisky replied, glad to get off the subject of Lenin and stormings.

  “And what’s the rest of the building used for?”

  “Mainly a hospital for war invalids.”

  “How strong is the defence force?”

  “Hard to say, exactly. There’s some Cadets, some Don Cossacks and a company from the Women’s Battalion. Maybe … round about two thousand all together?”

  Two thousand. To defend a building of fifteen hundred rooms which covered four and a half acres. Pathetic!

  “What about the entrances?” I asked. “Are they well guarded?

  He pointed to the barricade. “You can see for yourself.”

  “I mean the ones around the side and the back?”

  Podvoisky rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Hadn’t thought of them,” he admitted.

  There were scores of unguarded entrances along the side of the Winter Canal. Too easy, I told myself as I stepped inside the palace.

  Far too easy. It had to be a trap. There had to be an ambush waiting for me at the top of the narrow flight of servants’ stairs. I climbed the stairs and froze, waiting for the inevitable and hoping it would be over quickly. Nothing happened. No ambush – no tell-tale click, followed by burning agony and leading to an all-e
ncompassing blackness.

  Corridors, miles of corridors stretched before me, corridors which had once been trodden by hundreds of servants carrying trays weighed down with delicacies. I strained my ear for the sound of an approaching patrol and heard only silence. Taking my courage in both hands I set off in search of someone to corrupt.

  The sound of female voices drifting through an open door told me that I’d reached my destination. I stopped, and looked inside the room. Most of the furniture had been removed – probably sent to Moscow to save it from the Germans – and the rest was covered with dust sheets. The ten young women were sitting on the floor. They were dressed in khaki uniforms, and speaking in heavy working class accents.

  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that women don’t make good soldiers, Mr Journalist. Those girls might not have had the strength of most men, but they looked tougher – and much more ruthless. For a moment, my courage almost failed, then I took a deep breath and walked into the room.

  God, they moved quickly. One second their rifles were on the floor, the next the stocks were against their shoulders and the barrels pointing at me. “Who are you?” said their Corporal, a thin, pointy-faced woman. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to leave before it’s too late,” I told her. “When the attack comes, you’ll be outnumbered. And the attackers will mostly be from Khronstadt.”

  A couple of the girls shivered at the mention of the savage sailors, but the Corporal merely glared at me. “You’re a Bolshevik agitator, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. There was no point in denying it.

  “Then you’re as good as dead,” she said.

  “Please, I’m a mother—”

  “That won’t save you.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s because I’m a mother that I’ve come to see you.”

  The women looked puzzled, as I’d hoped they would. “What’re you talking about?” the Corporal said. “You’re not making no sense.”

  “I know how wonderful it is to give birth,” I told her, “to hold a new-born baby in my arms. Do you?”

  Some of the girls shook their heads, others looked away for a second – but their rifles were still pointing squarely at me. “Get on with it!” the Corporal barked.