The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  “It’s every woman’s right to have children. Don’t give up that right. Don’t die before you’ve really begun to live.”

  I was deliberately manipulating them, playing on their emotions – and I believed every word I was saying.

  “I joined the army to fight Germans, not Russians,” one of the girls said, lowering her weapon.

  “An’ they never told us we’d have to defend the palace anyway,” another chipped in. “They said we was coming here for a parade.”

  Now the crack in the dam had appeared and water was trickling through for all to see, most of the women nodded their heads in agreement. The Corporal gave in to the inevitable. “How do we do it?” she asked.

  “Go through any of the doors which open onto the Winter Canal. There’s no one to stop you.”

  The Corporal thought about it. “All right,” she agreed.

  “And before you leave, try to persuade your comrades to go with you,” I implored her. “They have the right to be mothers too.”

  The journalist nods his head. I have to find out what he’s looking for. I have to discover why, after four years, I’m suddenly worth visiting. He says he only wants the truth – but that’s what the interrogators used to say.

  “We only want the truth, Comrade Lyudmila. Tell us how long you’ve been spying for the enemy. Tell us about your meetings with German agents.”

  “I never—”

  Slap!

  “Tell us the truth, comrade. We only want the truth.”

  I’ve been telling the truth to this journalist, but perhaps it’s not the right truth for him. I’m willing to lie. I’ll tell him anything he wants if it will keep me out of the Gulag. But like the interrogators of old, he has to communicate to me what truth he wants. He has to help me define what truth is.

  “Does what I’m saying square with what you learned in school?” I ask.

  He has only to say, “You’re memory is defective, old woman. You’ve forgotten how heroic it was,” or, “You haven’t mentioned the fact that Lenin himself was there,” and I’ll know what he’s after.

  “Don’t worry about what the official histories say,” the journalist tells me, his voice flat, expressionless. “Just go on telling the story in your own way.”

  Bolshevik agitators – some recruited by me, others acting independently – swarmed all over the building like leeches, slowly sucking the blood out of the palace defences. A squad of Cadets left under their urging, a unit of Cossacks decided to pull out. The palace was slowly dying, the MRC now had troops concentrated in some force at the other end of the square – and still the attack hadn’t come. Didn’t the MRC realize that at any moment they might hear a new noise, the sound made by the tramping boots of troops still loyal to the Provisional Government?

  And what about Sasha? Peter could even at that moment be orchestrating a trial in some grimy cellar – although he would keep well away from it himself.

  “Sasha Krasnov, you stand accused of stealing funds meant for our glorious Revolution. How do you plead?”

  Sasha would shake his head in bewilderment. “I’d … didn’t do it.”

  “Then where’s the money?”

  “I d … don’t know.”

  They would shoot him then and there. I could see him, lying against a blood-stained wall, a reproachful look in his dead eyes, a look which, though not intended me for me, cut deep into my soul.

  I looked across the square at the massed Bolshevik troops. “Attack, you idiots,” I urged them across the still air. “Storm the Palace, you bastards.”

  The shooting started at nine-thirty in the evening. It was mainly machine guns and light cannon at first, their shells streaking through the night like demented fire flies. Then the armoured cars joined in, adding their own peculiar growl to the cacophony of explosions. The noise of battle – finally! – should have cheered me, but it didn’t. Both the defenders and attackers were safely behind barricades. It was all only sound and fury, and it wouldn’t advance the palace’s fall one jot.

  At ten o’clock the firing stopped, as suddenly as it had started, though the explosions continued to echo in my ears.

  Was that it? I wondered desperately. I thought of ringing Lenin and begging him to write the letter which would get Sasha released, but I knew that until I could report the Winter Palace had fallen, he would be deaf to my pleas.

  It was after midnight when I found the small, sharp-faced man. He was dressed incongruously in a pea-green sailor’s jacket and a wide-brimmed, white hat – the sort a painter or poet might wear. Antonov-Ovseyenko, the man in charge of the assault on the Winter Palace, was wandering its corridors like a little, lost boy.

  “Hello, Lyudmila,” he said, as if we were meeting each other unexpectedly in the park. “Where is everybody?”

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “I’m here to negotiate a surrender,” he told me. “But I can’t find anyone to negotiate with.”

  “They’re mostly gone,” I said, trying to hide my contempt.

  “Then we could just walk in and take over?”

  Bloody fool! Bloody, bloody fool!

  “You might meet some resistance,” I said, “but not much.”

  Antonov-Ovseyenko thought for a moment. “It’ll probably be best to bring the troops in through the Winter Canal entrances, the same way as I came,” he said. “Then the opposition’ll be taken by surprise, and we’ll have the defenders at the barricades sandwiched between two forces.”

  Yes, that would be the logical way to do it, but I didn’t think it would be the right way. I thought back to the scene in the streets that morning. Unexcited. Uninspring. A revolution by default. I remembered Lenin’s words—

  “It’s more than a building. It’s a symbol of the old order.”

  Just as the Bastille had been in the French Revolution.

  “If you want History to love you, comrade,” I told Antonov-Ovseyenko, “you’ll go in from the front.”

  I stood at the gates of the Litovsky Barracks, grateful for a chance to catch my breath, yet knowing every second mattered.

  “Seems to be in order,” the sentry conceded, handing back my Bolshevik pass. “All right, Lyudmila, you can come in.”

  “Executions?” I gasped. “Where do they hold executions?”

  “Parade ground,” the soldier said. “Beyond the main barracks. At dawn.”

  The darkness was already fading. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the beginnings of a crimson glow.

  I ran furiously along the narrow passageway between the barrack blocks, avoiding sleepy soldiers who had just risen and were heading for the ablutions.

  Parade ground … beyond the main barracks … at dawn … went my thoughts, matched in their urgency and jerkiness by my pounding feet.

  I reached the parade ground and saw the execution party at the far end, six men with rifles, an officer and the condemned man with his hands tied behind his back, all bathed in the blood-red light of the relentlessly rising sun.

  I would never make it! “Stop! Stop!” I shouted, but my words came out as no more than a strangled croak.

  The officer walked over to the wall, and held out a strip of white cloth. The prisoner shook his head. Sasha didn’t want a blindfold. Even back in the mir, he had always looked fearlessly into the face of death.

  My lungs were burning, my heart was at bursting point.

  Would they give the condemned man one last request? “Ask for a cigarette, Sasha!” the voice in my head pleaded.

  But I knew he didn’t smoke.

  The officer stepped clear of the line of fire and unsheathed his sabre. He raised it high in the air, and in response the soldiers brought their rifles up to their shoulders.

  “Wait!” I screamed.

  The squad turned their heads to look at me. I was close enough now to see the expression of annoyance on the officer’s face. He barked an order, and the soldier at the end of the line detached himself, placed his rifle o
n the ground, and turned to me, arms outstretched.

  Sasha had seen me, too. “K … keep back, Anna,” he shouted. “Keep back, it’s t … too late.”

  I had been unable to prevent Konstantin’s death – I would not let them shoot Sasha.

  “Stay of execution,” I yelled, waving the document in my hand.

  The soldier waiting to catch me shook his head disbelievingly. Hysterical girlfriend, his look said. Try any trick in the book to stop us shooting her sweetheart.

  I weaved to left and so did he, then to the right and he followed. I felt his arms grasp my hands.

  “Easy, love,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Take aim,” the officer called out.

  I lunged out with my knee and felt it make contact with my captor’s groin. Air whooshed from his mouth, he released his grip, doubled over and staggered backwards. I ran around his crumpling body. I was heading for Sasha, but I was looking at the man with the sabre.

  The officer’s face was almost purple with rage. “Get out of the way, or you’ll be shot, too!” he yelled.

  I didn’t doubt it. Officers like him had ordered their men to fire on crowds of women and children – he would not lose any sleep over me. But nothing would stop me now.

  “No, Anna, no!” Sasha, moving awkwardly because of his bound hands, was rushing towards me.

  We met half-way between the firing squad and the wall. I was trying to throw my arms around Sasha, to lock him to me. He was doing his best to shoulder me out of the way. We were both shouting madly, though I’ve no idea what.

  “Fire!” the officer commanded.

  My fingers gripped Sasha’s jacket. I leant backwards and pulled with all my might. We hit the ground at the same moment as I heard the shots.

  It was difficult to say, sprawled there, whether I’d been shot or not. Difficult to know for sure if I was even still alive. Perhaps my body was already dead and my soul merely lingering. Then four rough hands pulled me to my feet.

  “Get the bitch away from here,” the officer said furiously. “I’ll deal with her when we’ve finished with the prisoner. You two, get him back against the fucking wall.”

  I looked down at the piece of paper Ilyich had so hurriedly scribbled. I looked up again, and saw that the officer had noticed it, too. “You’d better read that first, you bastard,” I said. “It’s a free pardon signed by Lenin himself. If you shoot Sasha, you could find yourself the next one standing against that wall.”

  “I w … wish I’d been with you to watch the storming of the W … Winter Palace,” Sasha said later.

  “You didn’t miss much,” I told him.

  “D … didn’t miss much?” Sasha protested, half joking, half serious. “It was o … only the most important thing that’s ever happened.”

  He thought it was like the pictures, you see, Mr Journalist. You know the ones I mean. The workers and soldiers are charging forward. It’s obvious this is no easy attack, but they’re not to be deterred. In the foreground, a soldier with a red flag attached to the barrel of his rifle is urging his firm-jawed, resolute companions on. Some are already firing their weapons and one is even bayoneting a fallen enemy.

  I gave up trying to tell Sasha the truth. What would have been the point – he’d wanted to believe it had been an inspiring sight, and nothing I could have said would have persuaded him otherwise. But I’ll tell you, Mr Journalist, what I really saw as I stood at one of the windows overlooking Palace Square and watched it all.

  At one-twenty on the morning of the 26th of October, Antonov-Ovseyenko launched his assault. A whole day later than Lenin had expected it! It didn’t look very military, or even very threatening. A telephonist who saw the start of the action phoned through to the Ministers, we discovered later, to tell them that a delegation of three or four hundred was approaching.

  A delegation! Not the armed vanguard of the Proletarian Revolution, at the very thought of which, the capitalist lackeys tremble in their boots. A delegation.

  The ‘delegation’ didn’t even attack the barricades in front of the main door. Instead, they went in through two other entrances, which were not guarded at all. Once inside, it was easy to overwhelm the remaining Cadets. It took longer to arrest the Ministers – but only because the Red Guard didn’t know exactly where, in that vast palace, to look.

  The popular story of the storming was a lie, but it was a necessary one. Every revolution needs its mythology, and Antonov-Ovseyenko and I had created ours.

  “A g … glorious event,” Sasha said.

  I ran my finger tenderly along the scar on his forehead. “Yes, my dear,” I agreed. “A glorious event.”

  “And now I’ve got my f … free pardon, I can start to work for the Party again.”

  It was almost as if he’d never been through his terrible ordeal, almost as if he’d not missed death by inches. But that was Sasha, a passionate idealist, never stopping to think about how he’d got into trouble in the first place, never considering that Peter, having once been thwarted, would redouble his efforts to destroy his old enemy.

  “The W … Winter Palace has fallen,” Sasha said again, as if it were a magic spell. “The revolutionary struggle is over.”

  The revolutionary struggle was not over – it had only just begun. The ousted Prime Minister, Kerensky, was advancing on Petrograd with a small army. Moscow was proving difficult to subdue, and there were several days of bitter fighting when victory could have gone either way. All the other political parties combined with the most important unions – railway, telegraph and postal – to bring us down. We sent messages to distant cities informing them that we had taken power, but if they refused to accept our authority we had no way of enforcing it. We were a party of less than two hundred and fifty thousand members trying to control a vast empire of over one hundred and seventy-five million souls.

  Lenin waited desperately for the revolutions in the more developed countries of Europe – France, Britain and Germany – which would save his own. They never came.

  Yet we survived – survived to fight a bloody civil war. Admiral Kolchak’s White Army attacked us from the east and General Denikin’s from the south. And we did not only have to battle our fellow Russians – the whole world seemed to be against us. The British invaded, and the French, the Romanians, Poles, Baltic Germans, Letts, Finns, Canadians, Italians, Serbs and Czechs.

  We survived that too, but at what a cost. Whites massacred Reds, Reds massacred Whites. Bolshevik Commissars, sent to requisition food from the peasants to feed the towns, were killed in horrible – indescribable – ways. New Commissars, appointed to fill their places, retaliated by taking the crops by force, often expropriating so much that the muhziks starved to death.

  Tears are streaming down my face now, just at the thought of it. Some terrible, terrible things were done … terrible, terrible things …

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “They dug up my husband, you know,” I tell the journalist, who says his name is Yuri.

  Great salt tears pour down my face. Pull yourself together, old woman! This is not the way to get what you want.

  “Dug him up?” Yuri asks.

  “The local soviet. They opened his tomb and burned the body. I didn’t find out until much later. My comrades in Moscow kept it from me. I … I don’t even have his ashes.”

  “These things happen in a revolution,” Yuri says.

  How many times have I used just those words myself?

  Yuri clicks the recorder and slips it back into his pocket.

  “Is that all?” I ask, alarmed.

  Is he leaving? I can’t let him leave!

  “It’s only a start,” Yuri says, shifting to a more comfortable position in my hard chair.

  He’s not going, he’s merely stopped recording. Why has he stopped recording? I’ve pinned so much hope on this man, and yet it’s hard to see a way in which he can help me. Money? Journalists often pay for their material, but how much will a news
paper – a Russian newspaper – give me for my story? Not enough to save me from the clutches of Sonia and Jennifer. And if not money, what can he offer me, this saviour to whom I speak in my native language?

  “Do you remember La Pasionaria, the great Spanish Communist?” Yuri asks.

  “Of course I remember her. Do you ever forget your enemies? She and her people used the Spanish socialists I was working with, and then they sold them down the river.”

  “In other words, you lost!” Yuri says.

  His tone is not aggressive, yet there’s an edge to it. It’s as if he’s testing me. In fact, this whole meeting has seemed more like a test than an interview. But what is he testing, old woman? And why does he want this part of the test off the record? Before you can turn the game to your advantage, you must first discover what the rules are.

  “You did lose, didn’t you?” he prods.

  “Not in the end,” I say. “Where’s Joe Stalin’s monolith now? I wish … I wish I could bring him back to life, so I could take him round his Empire and show him what’s happened to it.”

  Yuri smiles, as if I have passed the preliminaries and can now compete for the major prize. “La Pasionaria lived in exile for over forty years,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “But in the end,” and he is annunciating his words very slowly and deliberately, “in the end, they allowed her to go home.”

  Home! The idea had never occurred to me. “You … you want me to go back to Russia?” I ask.

  “Initially, just for a visit. We have the idea of producing a new television history of the early Soviet period, and you are in an almost unique position to tell us about it. We’d take you round the old sites, the Winter Palace, the Eastern Front, and you could talk about your experiences and how things have changed.” He pauses. “It would be just like bringing Joe Stalin back to life and showing him his crumbling empire.”

  “Are you really a journalist?” I ask.

  His eyes flicker, as if he is about to lie, then he sees I have noticed, and changes his mind. “I am a journalist,” he says carefully, “but I’m also a Party member – a progressive.”