In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Stalin was a frequent guest here as well. He had his eye on the younger sister, Nadezhda. She was seventeen, he was thirty-nine, and she fairly swooned at the sight of his revolutionary moustache. Rumour had it that Nadezhda was in fact Stalin's daughter; as a young man, he'd had an affair with Mother Alliluyeva. Five months after they married she bore him a son, Vasil, followed in 1927 by a daughter, Svetlana. In November 1932, Nadezhda, who contradicted her husband too often, was apparently driven to suicide. Her sister Anna was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1948, her brother-in-law was shot in 1938, her daughter Svetlana fled to the United States, her son Vasili joined the air force, ended up in prison for corruption and died a lonely alcoholic in Kazan. But the stern-looking housekeeper tells us none of that.

  As we drive out of town, the tyres of our Lada are put through a living hell: the worn and mangled road to the island fortress of Kronstadt. Until only four years ago this area was off-limits, but this Sunday afternoon we can drive right in. Here lay the heart of Petrograd's Bolshevik revolution. This was home base for the sailors of the Aurora. Here is where the new future began. And here too, in February 1921, arose the first opposition to the Bolsheviks.

  The dam we drive across took years to build, and has created considerable problems for the Neva Delta ecosystem. Along the way we pass dozens of petrified projects: half-completed locks, bridges that end somewhere in mid-air, viaducts with neither entrance nor exit. Everything here is in one great state of incompletion. The island itself houses two centuries of military architecture: red arsenals, yellow barracks and elegant nineteenth-century officers’ messes, bullet holes from the 1920s and the Second World War, stark, rectangular neighbourhoods full of living quarters from more recent decades. Beside the huge Seaman's Cathedral lies Anchor Square, now empty and bare, but once known as the ‘Free University’ because of the fiery speeches made there.

  The sun is shining. Little groups of cadets stroll along the waterfront. With their black caps and gold clasps they look like fishermen from some Zuider Zee town. A little further along is a row of huge, grey warships, the remnants of a proud Soviet fleet. Encouraged by the sailors, I take a few pictures. Five years ago, that would have cost me a few months in jail. The rust and poverty aboard these ships are much greater enemies than any spy could ever be.

  In the car, the talk turns to leaving and staying. Yuri and his wife Ira have always dreamed of escaping the flat tyres and flaking concrete. Their son Sasha, a twenty-two-year-old law student, definitely wants to stay, as do his friends. ‘That's the striking thing about this generation,’ Ira says. ‘They love this city. They know that all kinds of things can happen, good and bad, from one day to the next, and they want to be around to see it.’

  Sasha says his friends all have their own reasons for staying. ‘A lot of people simply can't leave. Others stay for the scams. They see so much murky water to fish in, so many opportunities to make some fast money, you'd never find that in the neat, orderly West. And then there are the students, people like me. We think it's more exciting here. We don't feel like listening to the biased viewpoints of the Americans and the Europeans, the kind of people who think they know everything about Russian literature.’

  ‘We never used to have the feeling that this country was our country,’ Yuri says. ‘But now we do, no matter how miserably things are going. Under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the general feeling was that it was “them against us”. Now we know that we're ruled by a clique of bandits, but somehow it's still our regime.’

  Ira believes it's a bit more complicated than that. ‘Stalin and Brezhnev didn't cheat us. They didn't act as though they were anything but what they were. “Love us, or we'll have you shot,” they said. So we pretended we loved them. Now we have the right to respond. They cheat everyone, they buy people's favours, but you can still say: don't let yourself be bought. Now we truly have the government we deserve.’

  At that point, the Lada finally comes down with a puncture. Yuri stops in the middle of the road to change the back tyre, the traffic goes racing by on both sides.

  At last we arrive in the little village of Razliv, a group of wooden houses where Lenin, disguised as a worker, hid in a barn in 1917. A series of demonstrations had got out of hand, and the Bolsheviks could not avoid taking the blame. Lenin himself was on holiday at the time, and the ‘attempted revolution’ degenerated into a looting party. To make matters worse, the public's opinion of Lenin and his crew took a huge swing when the provisional government published evidence of German aid to the Bolshevik cause.

  Lenin had no intention of standing trial. His life and work were too important to him to risk playing the martyr, and he was less courageous in practice than he was in theory. So he took to his heels, along with his old friend Grigori Zinovyev. They spent four days in a barn, until a worker, Nikolai Yemelyanov, rowed them across the lake at Razliv and hid them for a while in a straw hut. After that the great leader went to Finland until the affair blew over. That's the whole story.

  The Bolsheviks, though, did have an excellent feeling for theatre, and knew that their ideology could only be made palatable to the Russian people by turning it into a new religion. As far as that went, Lenin's early hardships came as a godsend. In the Museum of Political History I had seen a huge painting of a room full of workers, right before the start of a strike. Their pose was that of the disciples in The Last Supper. At the Smolny Institute, Lenin's shirts are cherished as relics. And Lenin's official life story was moulded in the same way by Soviet writers to resemble that of Christ. Just as in the Gospels, Lenin's destiny was established at birth, and from that moment on everything went as it had been appointed. Never did he doubt, never did he make a mistake.

  Every religion, of course, contains the same particular episode: the prophet's flight from evil. Marxist-Leninism needed something of the sort too. The days at Razliv were made to fit the bill. Not long after Lenin's death, a monument was erected next to the little straw hut. A museum was built as well; it contained, among other things, Lenin's pillow and his feather bed (today there is a little sign beside those objects saying ‘Replica’). And so Razliv became a prosperous place of pilgrimage to which crowds of visitors came each year, and where the legend was sold in the form of books and souvenirs.

  Fifty years later, the original hut was absolutely rotten and worn out. In deepest secrecy, therefore, Lenin's hiding place was torn down in 1970. The whole thing was then rebuilt in the old style, but with new materials. In addition, a kind of glass box was erected around the hut, the kind one sees more often at sacred sites. Through it, we can view the interior: a table, a bed, a samovar, a chair at the window, a teacup with four dead flies in it, a stable with space for one cow. Lenin's stable at Bethlehem.

  Yemelyanov, the only real worker in the whole story, came to rue the day he rowed Lenin to the other shore. He was dragged from one prison camp to the next. ‘Stalin was in the rowing boat, too,’ the party chieftains maintained for years, but Yemelyanov knew that it had actually been Stalin's great rival, Grigori Zinovyev. That was enough to ruin the rest of the man's life. He died in 1958. Even after his death, he was still harassed. The workers from the nearby factory wanted to bear him to the graveyard on their shoulders, but for some reason the local party committee had decided he was to be buried in secret. A tug of war ensued, the police trying to shove his coffin into a truck, the workers pulling it out again.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ says the neighbour who tells us the story. ‘It was no better than when Yemelyanov was still alive. Put him in prison, take him out again, put him back in. Good Lord, what a life!’

  In the woods around the little hut in the glass box, children are playing in the snow. Smoke curls from the chimney. We take a short stroll. Yuri tells me of his discovery, when leafing through the latest edition of the Great Encyclopaedia of Russian Philosophy last week, that Karl Marx was no longer stuck between McLuhan and Marcuse. ‘What, is Marx suddenly not a philosopher any more?’ he said. ‘I
went back and took a good look at the list of editors who worked on the encyclopaedia. They're exactly the same ones who did it back in the days of communism. And they're still just as trigger-happy with the red pencil!’

  The parking lot is crowded with the Mercedes and American jeeps of the modern-day residents of Razliv. Until the 1980s, the little straw hut was taken down in winter and then set up again each spring. But after perestroika it was burned down so often that they stopped trying. Unbelief had become the order of the day.

  The heart of the ancien régime was the Winter Palace. With its 1,057 crystal rooms and 117 golden stairways, it was a gigantic beehive where some 4,000 courtiers lived and schemed as they swarmed around the absolute centre of power, the czar. It was the stage of Russian power, and in 1917 it was, of course, the stage for the revolution.

  For one whole summer the palace housed the provisional government led by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. The gilded chambers were the scene of endless meetings. Kerensky's secretary at the time. Pitirim Sorokin, described the prime minister as a man with ‘a terrible aversion to authority, force and cruelty … He believes it is quite possible to govern by means of kind words and noble sentiment. A good man, but a weak leader. In essence, the very picture of the Russian intelligentsia.’ For the Bolsheviks, the Winter Palace was the grand prize, the symbol of everything that was wrong with Russia.

  Today, more than eighty years later, Yuri Klejner shows me around the palace. For decades, his father worked here as head of the technical service. To him, the Winter Palace is like a second home. He shows me the sunny winter solarium with its view of the Neva, the hanging gardens on the roof (complete with trees), the immense marble throne room, the floors inlaid with dozens of types of wood, and the most ornate golden coach I had ever seen. The imperial eagles on the chandeliers survived the revolution, as did the iron coat hooks in the quarters of the czar's palace guards. ‘Very little has changed here since 1917,'Yuri tells me. ‘The palace was made into a museum almost at once.’ Picassos now hang in Nicholas II's private chambers. Some of the rooms have a splendid view of the square, the rest are low-ceilinged and plain.

  In the hall is a huge block of marble bearing the text: ‘In memory of the storming of this palace by the revolutionary workers, soldiers and seamen on the evening of 26 October …’

  Yuri takes me to a small set of stairs close to a side entrance. ‘If fighting went on anywhere, it was here. In all the Soviet films you see the soldiers running up the central stairway with lots of shooting and people taking cover behind the pillars. Those are the images that are burned into our collective memory. But in reality, none of that took place. There was no real storming of the palace. It all went very quickly. All of the central points in the city, the train stations, the electricity plant, the telephone switchboard, were already in the hands of the Bolsheviks. In the street, life went on as usual, the trams were running, the restaurants remained open. And there was no mass uproar. In the old pictures of the October Revolution you can see how few people were really involved.’

  Yuri stresses it over and over: the only real revolution in 1917 was the February Revolution, the revolt by the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries, Western-oriented intellectuals who hoped gradually to mould Russia into a European democracy. The Bolsheviks’ October Revolution (for Westerners it was actually in November, because of the different calendars used) was in every way a forced and unnatural happening. Their coup would ultimately clear the way for a brand of Eastern despotism of which Czar Nicholas II could only dream, but then behind a socialist façade.

  ‘Look how easy it must have been: if there had been one man with a machine gun on those stairs, and another one on the landing, the Winter Palace could never have been stormed. But it was complete chaos. Kerensky had already fled the city. The rest of the provisional government was in the Winter Palace, without lights, without a telephone, with no idea what to do. The building was defended by a battalion of women and cadets. A couple of Bolshevik commissioners simply forced their way in through a side entrance, a few soldiers followed them, and the initial looting was stopped. Then the commissioners came back outside through the big front doors and told the crowd: “Go home, it's all over.”’

  But what about the world-famous cannonade from the cruiser Aurora, which supposedly signalled the start of the revolution? ‘That was just a single blank shell, it didn't mean a thing. There's still a replica of the Aurora in the Neva, you can see it from here. All fake. The Bolsheviks never cared about the substance, it was always the theatrics.'Yuri Klejner tells me how, in recent years, guides at the palace tried to tell the real story. They had to stop, because they received too many complaints. ‘These days they're back at the Jordanian Stairs again, up to their knees in blood.’

  He shows me the Malachite Room with its enormous green pillars and its view of the river. ‘This is where the provisional government met for the last time. The ministers were arrested afterwards in the private dining room next door. In the 1950s, an old man came to the palace and insisted on seeing this room. “You know, this is where they arrested me,” he said. “When was that?” “In 1917.” As it turned out, he had been the state secretary of railways in the provisional government, too insignificant a post to be killed.’ The clock in the side room has been stopped at the time the arrests were made, 1.40 a.m.

  The cabinet ministers of the provisional government were carried off, like so many others, to the Peter and Paul Fortress. ‘The winter season at the Peter and Paul Fortress Health Spa got off to a roaring start,’ the satirical magazine the Devil's Peppermill wrote in early 1918. ‘Government ministers, statesmen, politicians, elected officials, writers and other prominent figures from the czarist regime and the provisional government, members of the soviets and the constitutional assembly, social democrats and social revolutionaries all arrived at this well known holiday resort with its illustrious therapies: cold, starvation and mandatory rest, punctuated on occasion by surgical procedures, bloodbaths and other exciting activities.’

  In the meantime, the old Russia was falling apart. On 3 March, 1918, the Bolsheviks and the Germans signed the ‘humiliating treaty’ of Brest-Litovsk. The Russian Empire lost Finland, Russian Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. Russia's ‘warm’ connections to Europe via the Caspian and the Black Sea were cut off. The country lost thirty-two per cent of its agricultural land, thirty-four per cent of its population, fifty-four per cent of its industry and eighty-nine per cent of its coal mines. The terms of the treaty were so humiliating that the party leadership almost decided to resume the war against Germany. Lenin was able to prevent that, but the motion was defeated by only a single vote. His German financiers had every reason to be satisfied. As a European power, Russia was finished.

  A series of famines broke out, and at the same time two civil wars were fought: the first between the Reds and the Whites (the latter including countless social democrats), and the second between central Russia and the warlords of the Ukraine and Caucasus. In southern Russia and the Ukraine, the Whites murdered at least 100,000 Jews between 1918–19. Kiev changed regimes no fewer than sixteen times between the end of 1918 and summer 1920. By 1921, the entire Russian production of foodstuffs had shrunk to half the level of 1913. Between 1917–20, the population of Moscow decreased by a half, that of Petrograd by two thirds.

  Lenin used the chaos to start immediately on a programme of agricultural reforms. ‘Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than a hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,’ he directed in a letter to the Bolsheviks in a distant, troubled province. ‘Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: They are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks … Find some truly hard people.’

  As early as August 1918 he ordered the first forced-labour camps to be built, to accommodate ‘unreliable elements’. Four years later there were eighty-four of
them, with more than 80,000 prisoners, more than had ever been arrested under the czar. During his time in power, Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, was probably responsible for some 200,000 executions. In 1922 the Cheka was renamed, but during that brief period ‘those two syllables’ – as Ilya Ehrenburg wrote – ‘summoned up so much fear and emotion in every citizen who had lived through the revolution’ that they were never forgotten. During the chaotic period between 1917–22, an estimated three to five million people were killed. This was how Russia separated itself from Europe.

  ‘Now I'm going to tell you a story from my own life,’ Yuri says once we are standing outside, in the square before the Winter Palace. ‘In the early 1950s my father was responsible for all technical matters in the Hermitage. During popular demonstrations in this square, it was his job to make sure those statues up there did not fall off the roof. And that huge pillar was to remain standing as well, of course. An accident like that would have been an absurd coincidence, but whenever something like that did happen it was called “sabotage”, and someone had to bear the blame. That person was my father, a scapegoat from the word go. That's the way the Soviet system worked.

  ‘My father would therefore climb up onto this pillar and onto the roof with the other man responsible, the head municipal architect, they would look around, mumble to each other about what a load of nonsense it was, and have a little drink together. That's the way the Soviet system worked as well.

  ‘Every year on 1 May and 7 November, a huge parade and demonstration was held here. There was no television at the time, so everyone wanted to be there. Thanks to his remarkable responsibility for roof and pillar, my father was on good terms with the security service at the Winter Palace, and one day we received permission to view the parade from the palace itself. I was even allowed to bring a friend.