The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  When my uncle’s workers’ circle met two evenings a week to read and discuss works of literature and philosophy, the thin young woman from Moscow would attend to urge them to seek election against the mere intellectuals on the committee. She was confident she could get a number of the intelligentsia to resign. Efim stood and was elected. He was also appointed chairman of the propaganda subcommittee, but the committee and subcommittee meetings, and even those of workers’ circles, grew argumentative over time. They reflected the old clash in the party between what Vladimir Ilich called the Economists, and the revolutionary Marxists. Economists, my uncle explained to me, applied themselves to a day-to-day battle against employers for better wages and conditions, and often dreamed of having their members elected to imaginary parliaments, ones the tsar had not yet authorised. My uncle believed instead in the overthrow of any parliament (if ever one existed), and of church and state. Uncle Efim’s position became and remained mine, not from imitation – at least I would like to think not – but because of its inherent sense.

  Not all socialists thought kindly of Efim’s Kharkov committee and so it worked in considerable secrecy, he told us. Yet they were the instigators of the 1900 May Day strike in the city. They had printed and distributed the May Day leaflets that called for a general strike. Stirred by the posters, the men at the locomotive works marched towards the rail yards at the centre of Kharkov and then intended to meet up with other railway workers at Yuzhny station. But on the way they were ambushed by the Cossacks from among the tall blocks of French-style apartments. A Cossack ran down Uncle Efim and he was arrested and sent to prison in Cheboksary, in Chuvash province, far to the east of Moscow, on the charge of instigating the demonstrations. The thin Jewish girl was sent into exile in Chuvash, a softer fate: she was required to live in the town and report to the gendarmes, but did not go to prison and had the fortunate buffer of family wealth, much of which she spent on food and bribes for the benefit of prisoners.

  Weeping and screaming, my aunt turned up at our house in Glebovo, cursing Uncle Efim’s radical opinions. I was still at a technical high school, but I had already by then read a great deal in newspapers about the rail workers and carriage workers marching towards each other to link up on May Day in Kharkov. They were blocked by a strong force of Cossacks who obeyed their officers and brutally laid about them with sabres.

  My uncle was in the end let go on remand from prison and, thinner but unbroken, told us stories of the sinisterly silent jail corridor in which he had heard no words but only sobbing. He was changed, subdued, watchful. Even I could look at him and gauge that opposing the tyrant was no light thing. But one saw, too, that it had to be done. It was the Russian task. Uncle Efim feared being sent back after his trial, but fortunately – to his own enormous relief – the prosecution was dropped in his case. We found out for the first time that the Jewish girl had been his lover. She had also, in the end, bravely hammered on a judge’s door and insisted on imprisonment instead of availing herself of all her family could do. In prison she went on a hunger strike, telling the jail’s governor that she had done it to become a skeleton and thus avoid being raped. In the end, she consented to being taken to Vitebsk for medical treatment by her parents.

  Uncle Efim spoke of this woman in front of his wife with an admiration that obviously rose above desire. My uncle intended to write to the exile Pavel Axelrod, a friend of Plekhanov’s, in Zurich, to get her pulled out of Russia when her prison term was up.

  After Uncle Efim’s return from exile in Chuvash, I became an attendee at meetings that went on secretly in the countryside among miners. Sometimes I would travel an hour or two by train to meet with others in someone’s apartment or squalid rooms in Kharkov. We pretended we knew what we thought, and we did have some concepts via men like Uncle Efim, but really our ideas were circling like birds, waiting for somewhere to land. For example, we all went crazy about a novel called The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich. It stressed the revolutionary nature of Christianity, and made us dream we could have our icons and our Marx at the same time. To keep up our Marx, we read editions of The Southern Worker. My own imagination was consumed by romantic dreams of Uncle Efim’s thin, unquenchable flame of a girl. Sometimes her articles in Iskra, the esteemed Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s newspaper, would reach my uncle through underground networks. Articles by the aged Plekhanov, by Martov and Vladimir Ilich, turned them into my heroes, the equivalent of Leo Tolstoy or Maxim Gorki. When the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, meeting in London and Brussels, split in two, I was – like Uncle Efim – with Vladimir Ilich’s Bolshinstvo, the Bolsheviki. Like him I chose to believe, at that stage almost romantically, that the party should admit as members only those devoted body and soul to the revolution. As a sixteen-year-old I was willing to be one of those. What the powers of the earth will never understand is that in the arrest of an uncle, even for a few months, might lie the making of another revolutionary. There was no doubt that I was attracted, too, by the idea of meeting pale, ruthless bourgeois girls in dim but opulent apartments to plan the end of the tsar and of capital. I also innocently believed that I could handle possible imprisonment and brutality with great composure.

  Some of our group, though I confess not I – I was probably protected because of my age – were involved in the rescue of a number of people from the prison in Kiev, when a handmade ladder of sheeting, fortified by wooden rods, was thrown over the wall and an astonishing twelve men escaped. Arrived safely in Zurich, these Kievite escapees were, according to Iskra, greeted as men returned from a tomb. The Kievites were shocked to see there were quarrels among the leadership about future directions. Old Georgi Plekhanov, said one of the escapees who went to Switzerland and wrote from there to our group, was grumpy and volatile and in bad health. Vladimir Ilich Lenin was a difficult man to get on with, he said. But then another of the Kiev escapees wrote that Vladimir Ilich lived like a monk and was everyone’s beloved uncle and sage, and Krupskaya insisted that everyone was fed properly – the cook in the house was Krupskaya’s own mother.

  For our meetings in Kharkov and elsewhere, we had developed complicated passwords to ensure that outsiders did not get into our sessions. There was perhaps a little romance to this as well, but I took it all seriously. I remember a challenge, which I uttered myself one day at the top of the stairs to a young man climbing up. Kostroma, nizhnyaya Debrya...

  Ah, he said, yes, we are the swallows of the coming spring.

  Which was the right answer.

  One day it was my uncle’s bourgeois Jewish hostess, codenamed Pelageya, returned from Zurich, who came up the stairs. I was very impressed that she had come direct from a meeting in Moscow with Maxim Gorki, my favourite author, whose My Childhood had recently captivated me in the intense way only the young can be captivated by writing. I had not nearly as hard an upbringing as Gorki, but his book made me remember the airy callousness with which my father imposed extra duty on my mother, and general male injustices of behaviour and demands. In company with Gorki, Pelageya had actually seen a performance of The Lower Depths. She remembered that Gorki was so young, was clumsy on stage, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief all the time. His nervousness seemed so endearing to me – my sweating Russian brother, Maxim!

  I now took formal membership of the Russian Social Democratic Party – if Pelageya’s example was to be followed, it was the equivalent of becoming a nun or monk taking vows. It was not to be a party of dilettantes, of yearning amateurs, Vladimir Ilich announced again and again in articles. I spent a year in meetings and in study. My energy, I remember, was limitless. I turned seventeen, and to my mother’s relief found I was to be sent to the Moscow Technical Institute – what had previously been called the Emperor’s Vocational School – on a scholarship.

  With one side of my soul I could see the attractions of a student life, of concentrating merely on questions of bridges and railway culverts and being a mere dance-hall-and-café revolutionary. I did study my introductory texts very
well, but of course joined the institute’s social democratic club. As for the ever-present possibility of arrest for anyone involved in political action, I denied it could happen to someone as young and unexposed to civil censure as I was. After all, many of my fellows were of far more elevated background than myself and had hosted or visited many workers’ circles. I went to meetings in factories under the privileged but potentially dangerous description of student leader. The workers I met were likeable and passionate, honest men and women, many of them peasants come up to the city and not much different in background from myself or Uncle Efim.

  On a clear winter’s day in 1902, the students of the social democratic clubs of the technical institute and the University of Moscow itself proceeded up Volkhonka Street. We were protesting the fact that the education minister had suddenly shipped two hundred teachers to Siberia, and also that the St Petersburg protest march, led by Gorki, had been ambushed by Cossacks.

  At the marshalling area at the head of the boulevard, we were joined by workers from the Prokhorov cotton mill and the Stürmer furniture factory, whose progressive owners did not dock their workers for participating in the march. There were railway workers as well, and printers who wanted to be paid for the multiple apostrophes they were required to print but were not rewarded for. As always, the future we marched for meant different things to all the people there. For some – Mensheviks, weak social democrats – a British-style liberal democracy would have done; for many of the compositors a kopek per apostrophe; for others of us only a socialist revolution would serve. And we marched with each other in fraternity since we needed each other’s cooperation.

  To make us less scared of arrest, one of the leaders of a contingent from the University of Moscow, an impressive-looking young man in a handmade suit and overcoat and a rich-textured homburg, told us that the fifteen hundred arrested in St Petersburg and sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress in the Neva were being supplied with free cigarettes by the manufacturer father of one of the prisoners. Since I had never seen the inside of a prison, all this sounded very jaunty to me, a little picnic of detention. So I marched lightly out under our red banner towards the Pushkin Memorial, and felt armoured in layers of fraternity.

  All this I told Podnaksikov as we scrubbed the gallows floor in Boggo Road, with the ghosts of those who had died in that shed hanging about our shoulders like cobwebs.

  Well, I told Podnaksikov, that was my first experience of being rushed by Cossacks. It’s an alarming thing. The trampling horses seemed to pass on to the marchers their own fright and panic. And then five hundred of us were arrested and sent to Poltava.

  And how was Poltava? asked Podnaksikov, interested for once.

  It was very ... brutal. They sent all the troublemakers from the south there. But, I have to admit, it was part of my education.

  He could see, though, that I had tired, something like exhaustion setting in for now.

  A beanpole of a guard was at the door. He said, I suppose you bastards consider this clean?

  Well, I knew from Poltava and elsewhere that it was suicidal to answer a rhetorical question.

  18

  It was after about a fortnight of our detention that I was called to the visitor’s hall and saw sitting there beyond a grille of thick wire Hope Mockridge in an unpretentious tan dress. I was exhilarated but also resented the intervening grille. As I sat down myself, she said, Forgive me, Artem. They did not let me come earlier.

  Then she choked on tears for a while. Diffused though she was by wire mesh, I got a sense from her look of health and her outright beauty, that if I concentrated on her I could become part of her and in a way escape with her.

  Please, I told her. Don’t be distressed, Hope. We’re not in here forever.

  You should not be in here at all, she whispered. Besides, I miss your company.

  And I bitterly miss yours.

  She sucked in a lower lip as she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. She told me then she had heard that Thompson had begun a hunger strike. Was it true? she asked me.

  I hadn’t heard that, I told her.

  If you hear he has, tell him Walter O’Sullivan wants him to stop.

  She assured me we had not been at all forgotten. Donations to make up for our lost wages and to buy us comforts were coming in. But the chief warden had not let any visitors or money reach us yet. Money had been used to buy us food hampers and it should not be too many more days before we received them. The idea cheered Hope as much as it cheered me.

  Walter O’Sullivan has not abandoned you either, she told me, beginning to look brighter through the remains of tears. He has sent one of his lieutenants up from Melbourne. A Scotsman named Buchan. His job is to organise the effort on your behalf.

  When she laughed, part of the laughter was for scenes from which I was excluded.

  This Buchan dresses a little strangely for a socialist, she said, but he’s been very helpful. She laughed again. He does a very funny imitation of Olive O’Sullivan.

  In a sudden fit of jealousy I thought that shouldn’t take too much effort, given Olive’s eccentricities.

  Does he? I asked stiffly.

  My God! Is that bourgeois jealousy I hear in your voice, Tom? Fear not, he’s returning to Melbourne next week. By the way, Paddy Dykes – you know, the Broken Hill man – wants to see me. There are all sorts of rumours around about Freeman Bender.

  Then a warder moved in. Her visit was curtailed before I could properly thank her for it.

  For a time, all exercise was cancelled. I thought that – according to the strange irrationality of jails – it was because of demonstrations outside the prison. Suvarov and I were, however, taken from our cells each afternoon and required to sweep the main floor of our wing. One of the older warders who supervised us was in a rosy mood – he was about to get his pension, and he let us talk.

  Has Thompson gone on hunger strike? I asked Suvarov, since Thompson’s cell was close to his.

  Suvarov told me it was true – that was the real reason exercise had been cancelled for us. I thought at once, A hunger strike is too much. With a hunger strike, one should at least undermine a tsar. But to go on a hunger strike against the Queensland attorney-general seemed a waste of grand intent.

  And so does he expect us to join him? I asked Suvarov.

  Not yet, said Suvarov. One is enough for the moment.

  I agree. I received a message from Walter O’Sullivan via Hope. O’Sullivan wants Thompson to stop. Tell him that!

  The food Thompson was renouncing was not so sumptuous anyhow. In the morning we were given a sort of gruel with very little salt and no sugar, and black tea. At lunch it was bread and hard cheese, and in the evening the thinnest stew in the Southern Hemisphere. The Irish guard who had beaten me would, as the old Communard of Paris predicted such men would do, occasionally bring Suvarov and me a chop each, wrapped in cheesecloth, from his own table, and would stay in my cell a little while chatting about the situation of Ireland, for whose cause he was a powerless advocate, and comparing it with that of Russia under the tsars. Whether Russia or Ireland, he said, it’s all a matter of land and who owns it! He was right on that.

  I told him it was a matter of capital also, and of who owns the means of production and exchange.

  Jesus, he told me, just give me two hundred acres up the coast a bit, on one of them lush rivers, and that’ll be enough production and exchange for me. But the day is coming, and the question is, who’ll rise first, Russia or Ireland? You could put a good bet on it one way or another.

  Yet this same man, of kindly tendencies and flaws of brutality, was very contemptuous of Hope Mockridge. Perhaps it was because she came from a pastoral family. And she was a woman, and didn’t know a woman’s place.

  19

  The promised food hampers arrived with a note in each. From your friends Hope Mockridge, Paddy Dykes and Walter O’Sullivan. A committee of salvation! The hampers restored everyone. Thompson had come off his hunger strike at
Walter O’Sullivan’s insistence, and Suvarov was permitted into his cell to feed him Scottish broth. And in my hamper came a notepad and a set of pencils. If I handed them through the window to the Irish guard, he would get them sharpened. Don’t go bloody cutting your throat with them, Ivan, he warned me, or my job’s fucked and I’ll have to beat the squealing tripes out of you.

  Dear Mr Previn, I then wrote in my cell to the editor of the St Petersburg Proletary,

  I hope you will find my attached article on the Working Man’s Paradise of Australia of interest for your magazine’s enlightenment. I have to say that I write it with your eminent Petersburg journal in mind. So we begin:

  I write to you from a country which, due to a strange set of circumstances, bears the title ‘Australia, the Lucky Country’. We are told by some of the intelligentsia of Russia that Australia is populated by people who have found a solution to all the problems of Europe, that democracy owns the day in Australia to an extent that cancels the need for a social revolution. Learned men will tell you in drawing rooms of Russian cities that in Australia, they have heard, the class struggle has vanished, classes are reconciled to each other in fraternity, and there exists no wage slavery or industrial servitude. Here – according to the familiar line – there are no strikes, women are equal, landowners and labourers have come to reconciliation, and so no agrarian struggle exists. Here as well is the phenomenon of a national army and not an army of conscripts or mercenaries. And here a party named Labor exercises power, or if not, is capable of doing so.

  This is a touching picture of class cooperation, uttered by those who have never gone to the trouble of travelling this far, even though one would think the paradise of it all, the ease of life reported to exist here, would have attracted them to do so. These gentlemen who vapour on about the remote Australian paradise remind me of the Australian advertisements one sees in the offices of shipping agencies and immigration societies in British ports, designed to attract the dregs of British towns to this fortunate country...