The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

  We went walking in the woods with Varia and talked of how good things would be when she graduated and began to work. She promised that as soon as she got her diploma she would take me immediately and then, later, the boys. “You understand that I now live in a dormitory and cannot pay for a room until I start working.” “I understand and how!” I exclaimed, kissing her.

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  I was happy. There was something new to hope for. I liked the orphanage and the director was a simple and kind lady. She saw to it that the “laundry girl” was allotted a little income. She would come by to see how I was doing. Comfortable about us, Varia left for Leningrad. I wrote a letter to Vera An-dreevna thanking her for everything that she had done for me.

  I didn’t see the boys much. They had a precise daily schedule. School in the morning, return, dinner, homework, work in the service shops, a walk, supper, and to bed at nine o’clock. It was worse with my studies. I was able to go to school three times a week. True, the teacher assigned lessons to do at home. I tried to study in the evenings but frequently fell asleep over a book.

  During free time in the day I ran into the woods. In the fragrant thickets of pine, walking on dry crunchy needles, I was immersed in a kingdom of silence. The pine forest—a forest that is mysterious, dense, devoid of the singing of birds—the impenetrable forest of nanny’s stories. Ivan Tsarevich [folk tale hero] galloped through it on his gray wolf. Making my way through the reddish trunks of the pines I felt a kind of indescribable joyous agitation, the expectation of “the beautiful” and vaguely foreseen. The most optimistic of hopes, the bravest of plans were born during these walks. With a living force they fed my monotonous existence divided by time spent in the laundry, the kitchen, and doing homework. The days passed slowly, marked like signposts on the road, by Varia’s letters. In her last letter she related to me that a teacher from the Advancement of Arts would be in Kiev on business. He promised to take me with him on his way back to Leningrad. Varia was now living with her high school friend, Vera Naumova. I could live there with her for a while until her final exams. She would notify me about the day of departure at the last moment. I shared this happily with the director. “That is good! You made a little money and you can take it with you.”

  Three weeks passed after that. No other news came. Finally a letter arrived from Vera Naumova. She wrote that Varia had contracted typhoid fever, but that she was getting better and that nothing had changed regarding my trip to Leningrad. Ultimately, after another ten days of waiting, I was sitting in a second class compartment on a train heading toward the city of my youth in the company of a quiet, affable companion. The train clicked off the versts, bringing me closer to my longed-for dream.

  A damp winter evening had fallen upon the city when, hurried along by impatience, I ran up the steps three at a time. On the fourth floor a business card on the door read: M. Naumov. I rang. They took their time behind the door which was opened by a small old lady. I entered and through the open door of the kitchen I saw the sturdy figure of Varia’s friend, Vera Naumova. She stood with her back to me without moving. Her shoulders shook with sobs.

  “Vera, what’s the matter?”

  Vera Volkonskaia, Orphaned by Revolution

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  “Variushka died. She had a recurrent wave of ulcers and could not endure it.”

  Stricken as by thunder, I fell upon a stool. It was all over for me. All my plans, all my joys ended in this kitchen. Everything was cut at the root. The old lady, Vera’s mother-in-law, came in. She commenced to take off my damp coat, led me to the dining room, and sat me at the table. Everything occurred as if it was not me but someone else, a mannequin. Vera came in and embraced me while drowning in tears. I seemed to freeze and did not cry. I was given linden tea with something from a small bottle poured into it.

  Evidently, I slept for a very long time. I awoke with the thought: Variushka is dead. I could not believe or comprehend this. I got up and walked out of the room. Some people came and talked with me, others wept. I remained quiet, my heart wrung. I could not believe it.

  Only at the funeral did I realize the full extent of my misfortune. The open casket stood in the little hospital chapel. I bent over the delicate, waxen face with its closed eyes, long eyelids lowered, the thin hands crossed on the chest, the long white dress, like a bride’s, and a white rose placed at the feet. I kissed her forehead which was cold as marble. And suddenly my heart was pierced by an acute sense of hopelessness and a repressed scream burst from my mouth. Unfamiliar people took hold of me from both sides.

  Then, for a long time, we walked along the streets behind the funeral hearse. For a long time I walked despairingly behind the casket of my beloved sister—always so far away and now gone forever.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mikhail Gol’dshtein, My First Recital

  In 1937, at the age of twenty, Gol’dshtein wrote his first memoirs encompassing some 400 pages. The great composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who perused them, suggested that they be hidden well but not destroyed. Gol’dshtein burned the manuscript in fear of discovery. As he notes, in a normal country the memoirs would have readily been published. He was to emigrate to Europe in the late 1960’s and continue his career as a violinist (cherishing his 1643 Amati violin). Finally, feeling at home in freedom, he turned again to his memoirs, forty years after the initial writing. The thought of that manuscript consigned to flames in 1937 never faded from his consciousness. Taken from Mikhail Gol’dshtein, Memuary dvadtsatiletnego muzykanta [The Memoirs of a Twenty-Year Old Musician]. New York: The New Review, No. 145, December, 1981.

  One cannot say that people in Odessa were bloating up and dying of hunger as they were in the other cities of Russia. Tasty dishes were available in restaurants. The abundance of mackerel helped greatly. It was eaten fried, smoked or raw. Mullet, bullheads, and fluke were also served. The selection was ample. Nor was there a shortage of alcoholic beverages. Home brew came to the rescue. Drunken Bolsheviks experienced great pleasure in demonstrating their militant revolutionary spirit in restaurants. They would discharge their firearms not only at the ceiling but at living human beings as well. Babel [Isaak Babel, the famous writer] would recall that in one restaurant there was a sign next to the piano player: “Please don’t shoot the piano player, he’s playing the best he can.” However, things were tight when it came to bread. But the Americans, out of the kindness of their heart, decided to save the Soviet regime which was being choked by hunger. Ships loaded

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  with grain began to arrive in Odessa. Lenin outfoxed the capitalists and cleverly took advantage of their sympathy toward the starving. But there was no sympathy for the innocent victims of the terror. No one reacted to the mass executions. The murderers received bountiful food rations. They feasted. Especially during their new holidays.

  I remember the time when the fifth anniversary of the October coup approached. Huge red canvases smeared with slogans were stretched over dilapidated houses. Preobrazhenskii [Transfiguration] Street was renamed Trotsky Street. The Cathedral of the Transfiguration stood on this street. The faithful managed to keep it functioning. One could regularly hear the ringing of the bells from this cathedral. But some extremely logical person decided to rename it in honor of Trotsky Street: since the street was Trotsky, the cathedral should be Trotsky as well.

  Celebratory concerts were being arranged in Odessa. There was no shortage of artists. The popular couplet-rhyming singers merely moved to the workingmen’s clubs. The concerts were broad in nature: mandatory revolutionary poems were read and songs were sung; magicians, acrobats, sword swallowers, comedians, and violinists playing serious classical music all performed.

  Once someone came to Stoliarskii [a famous violin teacher] in order to select a violinist for a concert. I was the one chosen. I had been playing a Vivaldi concerto. After listening, the political commissar deem
ed Vivaldi totally compatible with the revolutionary spirit. My parents were told that I had to appear at a particular place at a particular hour or else. My parents humbly fulfilled this command and brought me to some smelly hall. I remember it even now. Someone was vomiting; someone was fighting and cursing. Apparently the audience at this concert sacredly held to the oath of Genghis Khan and did not wash. They smoked all kinds of crap. Breathing was impossible. I was choking and a vial of perfume was brought up to my nose. They stood me on a table—the better to see me. Some very tall dame accompanied me on the piano. The audience listened with great attention and rewarded me with a storm of applause.

  As reward for the performance I was given a small bag of flour. This was considered a high honor, even for well-known artists. They also handed me an official paper declaring my participation in the concert and receipt of an honorarium. The document was signed by a commissar who was covered with machine-gun bandoleers from head to belly button. He spat on the seal and slammed it against the paper. Mother hurriedly removed me from the stinking hall where I could barely breathe.

  Out on the street I greedily swallowed the fresh air and mother kept saying that “tomorrow we would celebrate my birthday in royal style.” She kept her

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  word. We ate mamalyga [a dense corn bread] with our fingers after cutting it with a string. From the flour mother baked up a tasty pirog of sautéed cabbage and fish. Cherry brandy appeared on the table. Intricate toasts, each carrying a subtext, were made. Jokes were told. I was made to play and performed several exercises and etudes which required no accompaniment.

  Suddenly, amidst the celebration there was a pounding on the door. Shouts and gunfire were heard. One would have thought that the regime had fallen and the Bolsheviks had been cleared from Odessa. But, unfortunately, that did not occur. A gang of drunken sailors burst into our apartment. They waved pistols and fired into the ceiling, shouting “mother f––ing this” and “mother f––ing that.” “What is this, the constituent assembly?” one of the enraged “guests” shouted. “The bourgeoisie is feasting during famine! We will crush all of you like bedbugs!” A sailor, who possessed a high, rooster’s voice was especially furious in his invective; he kept screaming, piercingly: “What did we struggle for, what did we shed our blood for?” “You’re traitors, counterrevolutionaries! Vipers! A conspiracy against the revolution! It won’t happen! It won’t happen!”

  One of our guests discreetly disappeared during the confusion. He sensed that the situation might have a terrible outcome. These tyrants were merciless. They disregarded the screams of my sister and the weeping of women. They were ready to kill even a child. One of them ordered that all the food on the table be seized, and immediately a blanket was ripped from the bed and food thrown into it, not only the food but also plates, dishes, and flatware. Then they began pulling wedding rings off the women’s fingers and ripping the crosses from their breasts. “You’re all under arrest,” screamed the “revolutionary” in his piercing voice. “You’re all going to prison.”

  Mother asked me to pick up the violin and play as loud as I could. One of the monsters tried to grab the violin, but mother stood in his way, shouting: “Stab me, kill me, but don’t touch the boy. Yesterday he gave a concert for the likes of you, and today, on his birthday, you want to take away his violin?! Here, read this official paper.” Mother proffered the paper, but the tyrants assured her that they were illiterate and would not read any high-fa-lutin document. The guests armed themselves with chairs. A sailor took aim at a guest, but the pistol misfired. No one was ready to go to prison for everyone knew that no one came out of there alive.

  Suddenly there was insistent rapping on the door. One of the tyrants opened it. A whole squad of the Cheka [secret police] entered along with an officer. The discreetly disappearing guest had brought the squad. The appearance of an officer brought the looters into confusion. They saw that the officer was not sympathetic to them. The officer turned out to be a graduate of the private gimnazium which my parents had once managed. He wanted

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  to get to the bottom of things. My mother was permitted to speak first. She presented the official paper from the concert which stated that I had received a small bag of flower. The signature on the paper was rather impressive. Mother also presented my birth certificate with the date of birth clearly indicated. How could we not celebrate it with our family? Besides, my mother added, one of the looters ate the whole pirog which had been baked from the concert flour. This made a great impression. The officer ordered the looters to put all their weapons on the table and to turn their pockets inside out: Gold jewelry and silver poured onto the table. The looters were tied up and led from the apartment. In parting the officer said that everything would be settled the next day and that we would be given a document safeguarding us. Then, embarrassed, he added: “These men came to rob our dear teachers; they would seize gold items and other valuables and then get on a ship and leave Russia. We know such brave types. Put a Mauser in their hands and they go off killing and robbing.” The officer said a polite goodbye and promised to come the next day. It could have turned out much worse. We could have all been hauled off to prison and finished off there, having been the object of some absurd accusation.

  The next morning our “savior” came with three sailors. He handed us the safeguarding document and told us that, if need be, we were to invoke the name of a particular commissar who was aware of our situation. Two small bags of American flour, expensive wines, chocolate and other edibles were placed on the table. And an invitation was proffered to perform at a concert. We had to consent.

  It was a concert and a political rally. They stood me on a table and I had to play. I tuned my violin and played all three parts of a Vivaldi concerto with the accompaniment of a grand piano. When they asked me to play some more, I had nothing except for some etudes. But they wouldn’t let me off the stage. So I got really brave and played a revolutionary song, “We’re Blacksmiths.” The audience began to sing along. The success was incredible. Finally they let me off the stage. A commissar in black leather approached my mother, gave her gifts which were precious to us, and assured her that we were “under special protection.” A special directive had been issued about this. I was also asked to give professor Stoliarskii their heartfelt gratitude. But when I came for my lesson the next day, Stoliarskii had been informed of everything to the smallest detail. He was very amused that I had played an ordinary etude which was intended for the training of one’s fingers.

  And then in all seriousness, Stoliarskii said: “You see how beneficial it is to learn etudes, especially by heart.” Stoliarskii knew that I would be invited to perform in the future and that to decline would be taken as a hostile attitude toward the Soviet regime. So, I had to consider my concert repertoire

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  and learn some other revolutionary songs as well. But I was able to play them by ear. Stoliarskii also gave me specific instructions as to which songs I should play. God forbid that I play a song of the White Army. And so I became a child virtuoso. I performed at concerts not only in Odessa but in places a great distance away. At one such concert Isaak Babel [the famous author] came up to me. That’s how our friendship began. Many years later Babel would recall our first meeting. He even meant to write a story about it. But he was not to realize his intention. His life was broken off prematurely. [He died in 1939 in a Soviet slave-labor camp.]

  Chapter Eighteen

  Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red

  Kravchenko’s story as the first major defector from the Soviet Union to the West was once well known. There were others who followed his example. But our interest in selecting this passage partly reflects the subtitle of his book regarding his personal life. The various motivations which turned him to communism in his youth are absorbingly articulated: words, ideas, faith, enthu
siasm. In a revolutionary setting, all of these increased sharply in meaning and resonance. Kravchenko’s predisposition toward radicalism was also shaped by his father, a worker-agitator, who devoted his life to the revolutionary movement. Taken from Viktor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1946.

  Here, for the first time, I came to know an intellectual household, where literature, music and the theater seemed as real and vastly more important than bread and work. The elder Spiridonov steered our avid reading into broader channels, not only among the Russian classics but among the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Anatole France, Knut Hamsun, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Dickens.

  Looking back, I am amazed by the extent and variety of my reading during that springtime of mental discovery. Somehow the beauty and the pathos of books, along with the exalted hopes of my father, became part of the revolution as it swept over an eleven-year-old boy. It seemed as if in a few weeks the distance between literature and reality, between words and deeds, was being bridged.

  The storm clouds burst in the last week of February 1917 (early March in the Western calendar). Even those who had been most certain of its advent were surprised and bewildered. Revolution, which had been an intimate and half-illicit word, was suddenly in the open, a wonderful and terrifying reality.

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