The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Alliluyev was now recognised by the chair. The soldiers in the garrison towns in the rear would follow us to a man, he argued – the Bolsheviks were the only ones who wouldn’t send them to the trenches to fight for something that didn’t interest them at all. Especially when they know that they wouldn’t get proper food or proper clothes when winter struck.

  When Bukharin’s motion was put to the vote, it was voted down too. Across the room I suddenly saw Slatkin’s sharp face. He hadn’t dressed down to suit the proletarian company. He was keenly watching everything.

  Koba was up by now and could have been entertaining the crowd as a comedian if I hadn’t known he was talking politics. He’d helped Vladimir Ilich escape and declared himself now in favour of his leader coming back to Petrograd and appearing in court – but only if his safety could be guaranteed. No one should surrender without guarantees. But if he came back the trial itself might bring on the revolution.

  The congress ran till close to midnight and after the last round-up conversations ended we caught a tram back to the Alliluyevs’. And next morning it all started again. No one could say that Russians were shy with their oratory or their contrariness. Koba’s motion from the day before – that Vladimir Ilich should turn himself in – was voted down. He took the loss without emotion – I’m tempted to say with good grace except there was something about him that made such polite terms irrelevant. The tiger doesn’t take the loss of the gazelle with good grace!

  So at last they got around to electing a Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Vladimir Ilich got the most votes, of course, but among the others was a thin Pole named Dzerzhinsky and Alexandra Kollontai. Artem was elected eighth and got more votes than Koba. He now had the full authority of the Central Committee with him.

  We caught the train to Kharkov that night. The list of the Central Committee was already published in the papers – in which I searched out Artem’s name and pointed it out to him. It was mid-morning the next day before we were back in Kharkov and took a tram to the Gubin mansion. Here we went past the guards and up the steps into Federev’s study. When he saw Artem, Federev’s eyes glittered too fiercely – like those of a man trying his level best to celebrate in a way he didn’t feel inside himself. But he had a letter from Australia for Artem. He’d collected it from his postbox at the apartment and now handed it over.

  Artem held the letter in his hand as he and Federev inspected a map of the city mounted on the wall. Then they moved on to a further map of the outskirts. I went out and waited in the hall and when he emerged Artem held up the letter as if it were a treasure to share and led me to a parlour behind the guardroom. He sat at a remaining occasional table and read it carefully. When he was finished, he passed it to me.

  It’s from Hope Mockridge, he said.

  At the top of the page was her address in St Kilda in Melbourne and a date from three months earlier.

  Dear Artem,

  I hope things go well in your native country. The newspapers here say that the provisional government is falling apart, and that must be good news for you. I know you must be very busy now, but I needed to report to you on what is going on in Australia.

  Walter O’Sullivan and his demented wife are still running their party as their own small cell. They make no effort to go into the factories and talk to the real workers in hope of raising their perception of the world. I think that at heart they have contempt for working people and soldiers. In regard to soldiers, let me say incidentally that the casualties from France have multiplied horribly.

  When Buchan and I undertake the tasks the O’Sullivans neglect, and go to speak to the waterside workers and the men in the heavy engineering section of the railways, O’Sullivan attacks us in his newspaper using words such as ‘syndicalists’ the way other people might say ‘scoundrels’.

  We have got our labour college up and running, and all manner of men and women attend – the range of our lecturers is much praised by the people who attend. Of course, nothing like it has been done by O’Sullivan’s branch. In the meantime I trust that you and Paddy, and Grisha Suvarov if you have met him, are all in the pink. Every news report from Russia tells us that food is scarce. And the accompaniment of hunger is, of course, disease. So please take care of yourselves.

  Could you please write us a letter supporting Buchan’s and my labour schools, which are open to anyone who wants to attend – except, naturally, agents of the police. If you could express in your letter the opinion that Walter O’Sullivan is mistaken in his attitudes, it would be a great service to the movement and to socialism generally in Australia. For O’Sullivan does nothing but meet with his small band of supposed conspirators – in reality sycophants – who have done nothing, absolutely nothing, but talk among themselves. Do you have similar men in Russia? Men who think that the revolution will be achieved by angels, not by men and women who sweat at their work? I suppose you do, since human nature is the same everywhere on the globe.

  In the hope that you are free of all threats, I remain,

  Your sincere friend,

  Hope Mockridge.

  I finished reading the letter and Artem looked at me in the way Dickens used to call ‘quizzical’.

  Too early, wouldn’t you say, Paddy, to ordain a socialist pope in Melbourne?

  Especially Buchan, I agreed.

  Yes indeed. On the other hand, speaking of Kharkov, my sister Trofimova is too good and competent a woman to be left in her little miner’s cottage wearing her black sash. At the end of the month we have a meeting in Ekaterinoslav again, and I’ve asked her to turn up at that. We’ll bring her to Kharkov with us.

  I felt anticipation and nervousness. It seemed he had his womenfolk well organised – Tasha and her sister in the office opposite ours and Trofimova on her way. That sort of skill was beyond me.

  15

  So there we were at the end of the month standing under the great murky rafters of the Briantsk factory in Ekaterinoslav. The uplifted faces Tom spoke to seemed pale and anxious, but expectant as well. Federev and his aides were also in Ekaterinoslav and Trofimova was due at some stage, but – for whatever reason of organisation – Tasha and Olya had stayed in Kharkov.

  I had noticed that Artem and Tasha had recently gone for many secretive walks together and shared long conversations in the basement dining room at the Gubin mansion. Other people – even the guards – were sensitive enough not to sit down with them. Olya seemed a bit awed and bemused by what was happening and looked lost as she dined among young women from the Red Guards.

  It had been a hectic month since we’d seen Vladimir Ilich in his cabin. My main memory is of great factory ceilings and dimness. And of oratorical heat and fire. Businessmen in Kharkov were frankly telling the press they’d like Germany to advance – in spite of the ceasefire – and take the Ukraine and Russia over and subject them to their gift for administering foreign nations. That’s the size of what we were up against. Yet when I think of that month of crisis and arguments and meetings I remember above all Artem’s good humour in debate – in a month when other people’s faces and delivery were getting grimmer and more sour. Up in the north-east the great General Kornilov decided he was going to capture Piter and save the provisional government from the soviets. Artem would ask audiences, Do you agree that we need to be saved from ourselves? Do we agree with Kornilov? Are you a man, are you a woman, who needs to be saved from yourself?

  One night Artem and Tasha and a host of newly elected officers and NCOs from the barracks around town hurried into Federev’s office. For a telegram had arrived at the Gubin mansion announcing that Kornilov’s Third Cossack army were on their way to Piter under his command. Even in Kharkov everyone other than those who would benefit from Kornilov’s success was thrown together by fear. Kornilov intended to put an end not only to Bolsheviks and the Council of Soviets but even to Kerensky and his Duma. There was an emergency meeting of the Kharkov soviets at the town hall. The soviets comprised all sorts of people, even som
e of the Cadets who didn’t want Kornilov to win, who didn’t want to do away with what had happened the February before and didn’t want the tsar back. Even the Rada delegates, from the Ukrainian parliament, were as scared as anyone in Petrograd by Kornilov’s advance. Because – under Kornilov – the tsarist oppression would be back.

  Artem moved a resolution at the municipal soviet – attended by soldiers from the regimental soviets – about placing troops on the main roads leading to Kharkov. It was passed not only by our people but by the Mensheviks and socialist revolutionaries as well – the threat of Kornilov made us all brothers. Dear Olya herself rose and moved that a military council should now be created to handle the defence of Kharkov and all the hands went up again. Artem – with the great authority of being a member of the Central Committee – was elected. So was Federev and a sergeant-major named Brevda – a veteran of the Galician front – and a strong-minded factory foreman by the name of Ismaylov.

  I was up early at the Gubin house when Federev’s young men started to arrive by car and come into his office. They seemed to like wearing leather jackets and army pants with glistening boots. This morning as they brushed past without looking at me I smelled cologne on them and something else – something peppery and clinging. I’d smelled it infrequently before: it was cordite. I knew at once what had happened. Federev had sent them around the city to shoot the men who would have welcomed Kornilov and his tsar. He had built up his list with the help of these clever young aides and now he had cleared it.

  I chose to tell myself we were at war. The idea of revolution would not protect itself by its own force. It had to have its acolytes. Federev’s boys? I pushed aside the question of whether Artem knew. I also pushed aside the question of whether it mattered to me whether he did or not. Soon I was busy enough myself. I found myself travelling out of town with Brevda the sergeant-major and Tasha and Olya – who wore army coats themselves – in trucks laden with boilers and mobile ovens and army cooks we’d gathered up from army barracks. We’d done it all without having to ask anyone’s permission. Tasha and Olya sat forward on their seats. They were defiant and tense. Brevda was a man with such a huge grey moustache that you had to look at him closely to see how young he was – maybe twenty-five or so. A person could only imagine what had turned his moustache grey.

  We laboured together with other men and women to set up a field kitchen and bakery in a meadow of rank grass on the side of the Sumi road. The sisters worked cheerily and seemed to enjoy the country air that might soon be full of the Cossacks’ shells. I reflected while we worked that the matters in which I had been educated by now ran from stealing firearms to putting together makeshift field bakeries to rudimentary Russian. And I was as good as anyone else as a packhorse and a collector of timber and water for the boilers.

  Some of the NCOs my sergeant-major knew came across the field from the woods or camps on low hills to chat with him. Many of them were commanding regiments and they were too serious to tease or flirt with the women working on the bakery as soldiers usually might. They were the first fair-dinkum field commanders I would meet and most of them were much younger than the colonels or majors who had once commanded their battalions. These men out here – wearing red armbands over their sleeves – were willing to fight under their own authority to beat back Kornilov and his Cossacks. One of them told Brevda that Kornilov couldn’t beat the Germans so God would make sure he didn’t have a chance with us. God was still powerful in the minds of some of our soldiers even though the tsar no longer was.

  That night the sisters and I took a truck back to Kharkov. I crept into our office and found Artem still turning in his bed obviously awake.

  What is it like out there? he asked.

  I told him how hard the sisters had worked and about the impressive regimental elected leaders I’d met. I heard him sigh.

  After a while he said, It’s a wonderful thing that they’ve all been elected. But when they give orders, will the men obey them or take a vote?

  I remembered the smell of cordite on the leather jackets of Federev’s men. Artem must know about it – that’s what I decided. He was a member of the military council of Kharkov. Surely Federev just didn’t do it off his own bat without saying anything.

  So I thought – in a way I hadn’t thought about it that morning, in a way that seeped through me like a dye – it is war!

  I fell asleep but seemed to be instantly awoken by Artem. He roused me with the idea that like Olive O’Sullivan I could and should write about absolutely everything. A person should be awake to see all there was to see. In any case I woke up quickly at that stage of history. We drove around at the head of a convoy of trucks all the rest of the night and collected rifles and machine-guns from warehouses – accumulating as many as we could fit at the mansion. We packed out the main building and the stables and even the garage and a garden hut. From an early hour we handed them out to new Red Guards who came tramping through the Gubin mansion saying they were ready to go to battle for the city. I saw young factory girls in army caps and wearing red armbands taking rifles as if glad to get hold of them. Some of the slighter girls would slump a little under the unexpected weight of their firearms. Over the next day or two, Artem and the war committee would start arming the rest of us.

  One morning I woke from a two-hour sleep on my cot upstairs and found the room empty. I dressed and then ran downstairs. Artem was in the entrance hall, fresh-faced though not shaven and wearing his soldier’s jacket. (I still wore the old checked suit I’d bought in Broken Hill but it was getting worn and might not last the coming winter.)

  In the avenue beyond the gate I saw a crowd of soldiers and Red Guards. The street was choked with them and though they weren’t in strict columns they seemed ready to move on orders. I had never seen so many armed men and women in the one place and it was intoxicating in its way but also took your breath with a kind of dread. The sentry on the gate knew me and nodded his head. He too was in good humour. He called me Tovarishch Dikesh. I noticed men in football uniforms – blue and white – from one of the Kharkov teams. They looked strange with their rifles slung on the shoulders of their jerseys.

  Back inside the building I saw Federev and Sergeant-Major Brevda cross the lobby with three aides and signal to Artem; Ismaylov the factory worker must have been attending to business elsewhere. Federev was dressed up for the excitement of the day in a snug leather jacket and military pants and boots. He smoked Turkish cigarettes nonstop – many more than he had in previous days in his flat. He had taken to barking at his young men in their trim uniforms in a voice full of nervousness and urgency. I took the time to look at the closed and neutral faces of the three young assassins. I decided I’d think about what they had done after the coming battle.

  Artem called to me once the conference ended.

  A big military procession today – right through the square. Just so Kornilov’s spies know we’re not under strength.

  Then he beckoned me and I followed him across the hall into the guardroom that had been a small ballroom or a large parlour. I had not actually been in there before. I found it messy – a dosshouse for soldiers and Red Guards. But the open spaces on the floor among the blankets were crowded with stands of Mannlicher rifles and the empty racks from which rifles had been taken and put into the hands of the citizens outside.

  Isn’t this a sight? You should get yourself one while there are still some left.

  I don’t think I’m a military man yet, I told him.

  You looked military enough with that Mauser.

  Artem took one of the rifles and forced it into my hands.

  Best to take it now, he repeated. He picked up four clips of bullets. Put the clips in your pocket. We’ll get you some rifle training when we can.

  Did he foresee some final stand against the Cossacks in the Gubin house? I leaned the heavy rifle against the wall. It would never feel like an extra limb to me the way it seemed to be to the soldiers. When I walked I was half emba
rrassed at the unfamiliar weight and clink of the ammunition clips in my coat pocket.

  As Artem had described there was a great fraternal march of soldiers and Red Guards through the middle of the city at noon that day. He and I watched with Tasha and Olya from the running board of a truck in the square near the Russian Cathedral of the Epiphany. It was led by two members of the military council – Federev and Sergeant-Major Brevda. Artem did not want – or else need – to be seen as a general.

  At the end of the march, Federev – standing on the tray of a truck – gave the final exhortation to the troops. The parade broke up into detachments and marched out on various roads to the outskirts to join troops already in place. It bowled me over that all this show of force had been put together inside the walls of the Gubin mansion.

  Back at the Gubin house I wrote my article on the events of the day while Artem and the other members of the council met in Federev’s office. Red Guard dispatch riders constantly came in on motorbikes with their reports for Artem and he was woken many times in the night so that he could read messages from the defence line. He’d wander out of our room and once came back in to say, They wake me up to tell me nothing’s happening. Hooray!

  It was about three o’clock in the morning when someone woke me again. The moonlight from the uncurtained windows was so bright at that moment that it looked a solid mat of white-blue thrown across the floor. It was Olya who had shaken me. Her eyes looked panic-stricken. She whispered to me in simple Russian, Gde Tasha? Where is Tasha?

  I noticed Artem’s cot wasn’t occupied. Fortunately I was wearing my old suit pants and shirtsleeves, so I stood up crookedly and shook myself out of a messed-up dream of Trofimova.