The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  The Marinsky Palace was a beautiful building of classical lines across a square from St Isaac’s Cathedral. I had seen it before but had not known its name. Napoleon mightn’t have captured Russia but all the French architects seemed to have done all right here. There was a crowd on the steps of the palace – thousands trying to get in.

  We walked down a street off the square – it took us about five minutes. All the houses around the locality seemed to be palaces too. And then we emerged in the corner of the huge Winter Palace Square with its cobbled surface stretching away. We stood and looked across the square to where there were cannon – twelve of them arranged in front of the building to defend it. Others were visible at the side of the vast building. Soldiers stood by them. Kerensky’s cannon and Kerensky’s gunners. Behind the cannon the artillery horses were being led away somewhere safe – at the back of the palace.

  Those boys are Junkers, said Reed. Officer candidates. Kerensky has them guarding the place, poor guys! There’s a rumour he’s moved his government in there. I don’t know if it’s true or not but the cannon – they sure seem to imply it.

  Now he decided we were late for Kerensky’s speech. We sprinted back to the Marinsky Palace and Reed turned out to be a bit of an American athlete. The press of the crowd on the steps soon slowed us down. But I saw in front of us a head on top of narrow shoulders – a combination that looked familiar to me.

  Suvarov, I called.

  If it was Suvarov his head didn’t turn.

  I said to Reed, I’ll just go ahead. I think I’ve spotted a friend of mine from Brisbane.

  My God, said Reed, there are more of your fellows here than there are Americans.

  He joined me in my scrimmaging towards the head I was aimed for. I called Suvarov’s name again – Suvarov ...Grisha – and the humorous Reed was kind enough to take up the yell as well. Finally the man I suspected of being Suvarov turned around. And it was Suvarov himself – the corners of his mouth pulled down in that smile I knew.

  I reached him and turned into a Russian, hugging him and kissing his not-very-well-shaven cheek.

  I knew Artem was back, he said. I read his name in Rabochii Put. But I thought he was in Kharkov.

  Yes. But he’s here now.

  If I believed in the saints, Suvarov said, I’d say it was a miracle.

  I introduced him to Reed.

  And what are you doing here? Suvarov asked me. Have the police chased you out of Brisbane?

  I’m trying to learn Russian, I told him. And writing pieces for the Australian Worker. No shortage of stuff to write about. What about you?

  It turned out he’d been at the Smolny since July, working with the Bureau of Factory Committees in one of the classrooms.

  I can’t wait to hear what that conceited bugger Kerensky has to say, he told me. And he laughed exactly the same laugh he’d had in Brisbane before the police tried to pin Menschkin’s death on him.

  You’ll both enjoy this, Suvarov guaranteed. It’s Kerensky’s last throw of the dice. This is the fellow who now lives in apartments in the Winter Palace like some tsar and who plays around with his sisterin-law and eats opium.

  That’s all true, said Reed, from what I hear.

  Inside what must have been a big ballroom once – with its columns and its angels and its painted ceiling still intact – more people were standing than sitting. Suvarov started smoking a cigarette and Reed offered him a Turkish one from his own case. Suvarov took it and stashed it away without apology in a pocket for use in the future. It was peculiar how want made people do things like that without feeling any shame.

  Onto the rostrum near the front of the stage – partly screened by a crowd of military officers – rose a man I recognised from postcards and newspapers as Kerensky. He had in the past dressed up in generals’ uniforms – and even as an admiral – and had carried his hand inside his jacket like Napoleon. But now he was wearing a plain military uniform and stepped out away from the protection of his military staff to hold his hands out – Moses parting the waters. He was a neat, slim fellow, even smaller than I’d imagined. He looked as harried as Suvarov had predicted he’d be. Even now nearly everyone in the hall kept talking. If anything they raised the volume a bit in defiance of his gesture.

  I saw Reed strain his ears and begin taking notes on a pad. It was obvious he could speak and understand Russian. He was certainly the one person listening most closely to what Kerensky had to say.

  Vladimir Ilich would have been flattered because Kerensky mentioned him within five seconds of starting. He claimed Vladimir Ilich was a criminal at large and often disguised as a woman.

  Horsefeathers, Reed told me.

  Together with the president of the Petrograd soviet – Bronstein-Trotsky – Lenin told the people and the Petrograd garrison to begin an immediate armed rising. The result would be ruin and pillage and massacre and the death of free Russia. Russia would then be thrown open not just to anarchy and rapine but also to the kaiser’s iron might – because Vladimir Ilich intended to do a lot for the German governing classes by surrendering to Kaiser Wilhelm and his soldiers. Vladimir Ilich and all who followed him were guilty of acts of treason to Russia! said Kerensky.

  There was a huge amount of yelling and laughter and mockery in the hall. Suvarov shook his head and laughed and Reed scribbled. Kerensky said he was going to make the arrests needed to stop the uprising. Again booing and catcalls and yells as Kerensky declared that he and others would prefer to be killed rather than betray the independence of Russia and the revolution of last February.

  A man suddenly climbed onto the rostrum and put a paper in Kerensky’s hand. He read it and then he yelled that he’d just received the proclamation the Bolsheviks were distributing to the regiments. It ordered the soldiers of the army to mobilise as for war and await new orders – not from Kerensky himself but from room No. 36 at the Smolny. Trotsky – with Antonov-Ovseenko and big Dybenko– dared to proclaim that any units that failed to obey their order were guilty of treason to the revolution.

  This order Kerensky – in contempt but also with fear – read out to the raucous crowd. It was not clear whether the cheers that followed were for Kerensky or for the Military Revolutionary Committee. I wondered if Kerensky himself knew. He shouted that his provisional government had never stood in the way of the liberty of citizens. Now it was going to come down with a heavy hand against those who wanted to destroy the free will of the people. It is time, he shouted, to liquidate the Bolshevik elements!

  Amid the howls of the ordinary people in the chamber I could recognise two words that came up again and again. Nepravda: lie. Stydno: shame.

  In the end Kerensky didn’t so much finish his speech as give it up and step down looking ill – walking out with his escort of officers on his way to get the Bolshevik criminals! That didn’t stop the arguments in the Marinsky. The famous Martov – he’d once been kind to Tasha and Olya in their Swiss exile and his face was almost overgrown with white hair of old age – said there would be civil war if the Bolshevik decree was followed by the army. All would fall apart and the tsar – mark Martov’s words! – would be back. And so would the Black Hundreds, the gangs of criminals and insane that the tsar had armed with orders to shoot and hack Jews and socialists. To hang them from lampposts with their testicles and penises rammed in their mouths.

  I can’t say that I wasn’t fascinated to see in the flesh these men who had been names to me until now – Kerensky and Martov. But at the same time I started to feel faint. Kerensky and Martov had taken all the air and now there were only the gases given off by the crowd and by the speechifying. And no one had stopped smoking through it all – we could all have been incinerated if the glowing tip of a cigarette reached the grease in our clothes.

  We’ve got to get back to the Smolny, Suvarov told me just in time. Or at least I have to. There’s a meeting.

  Another meeting, I thought. To go with all the others! The Russians had a bottomless appetite for bloody
meetings. But I was going wherever Suvarov went. We said goodbye to Reed. I did not know then that this amiable fellow was putting together articles that would then be gathered to make a classic book of those days – one far superior to my scratchy account.

  21

  When we made it through the lobby of the Marinsky and stood outside, the fresh, cold air hit me like a kindly slap on the cheek from a mother. But there were no trams. We marched across to the cathedral into a side street skirting the Winter Palace – guarded by cannon and gunners on the orders of Kerensky – and walked flat-out to the Prospekt. Part of the way down this broad thoroughfare we came to sandbags and barbed wire behind which stood soldiers and sailors in place. Though they wore no red armbands we presumed they belonged to us – none of the sailors were for Kerensky. Antonov-Ovseenko – the calm, grubby, tiredlooking fellow back in No. 36 – had placed such barriers and squads all around the city to stop Kerensky ordering more of his troops into the area around the Winter Palace.

  Suvarov stopped and talked to them and the sailors told him more of their comrades were coming – there were still thousands of them on the way or waiting to come across from Kronstadt in launches and other vessels.

  I noticed a string of cars lined up empty along the pavement between the autumn trees. Another automobile on the way to the river rolled up to the barrier and the soldiers and sailors stopped it. Inside were a driver and a prosperous-looking middle-aged man and his wife. The guards told them that if they wanted to get where they were going they’d have to walk. A soldier took to the wheel of their car and roughly kangarooed it into place among the others. Suvarov asked me did I think we should use one of these to get to the Smolny. But a tram was waiting further down the Prospekt and Suvarov and I hurried towards it.

  Did you see? Suvarov asked me once we were aboard and rattling along. Those sailors had on their hats the name of their ship. It was Aurora – the name of the cruiser in the river. If it starts firing on Kerensky and his cabinet – well, it’ll be the end of all blather.

  A barefoot urchin jumped on the tram selling copies of Rabochii Put, the newspaper Koba had been editing overnight. Suvarov read headlines which told soldiers, workers and citizens of Piter that the enemies of the people had gone on the offensive by bringing into the capital by dead of night the female Shock Battalions of Death from Oranienbaum – a palace west of the city – to join forces with Junkers from the officer schools. Even so some of the Junkers were refusing to defend Kerensky and the provisional government. I thought it was strange that women’s battalions – if you were going to have them in the first place – would put together the two words Shock and Death in their title. You’d think one of those alone would have done. It was another Russian mystery.

  A number of delegates and others joined our tram as it rolled along and it was nearly full by the time we arrived at the Smolny. Suvarov knew the clerk on the desk and got me inside again. Then he went into the main ornate hall where once the noble girls of Smolny had danced with naval cadets to a meeting at which – I would learn later – five delegates from each city ward convened with Trotsky and the other members of his military committee. Suvarov represented Vyborg.

  I went back to the room where I’d met Reed and tried to get my thoughts in order. There was no message waiting from Artem. Why would there be? As later reading of the history of those days would show – there was a ferment in No. 36 where Vladimir Ilich and a few allies like Artem were trying to persuade the doubters that they must act before the Congress of Soviets met in less than two days’ time. Otherwise the party would be swamped and its plans blunted down to nothing – to some daydream of a future always far off.

  Now I wrote a note to Artem telling him that I’d found Suvarov – that he’d been working all the time downstairs in the Bureau of Factory Committees. I gave it to a typist delivering documents to take it in to him and I waited. I wrote about the afternoon but did not work at any speed. I was still a bit edgy about the fact Mr Reed was writing the same story as me but with the extra advantage that he could speak Russian and seemed well educated.

  When night fell outside the bare windows the darkness looked cold. Even though I stuck to the Roman calendar printed in one of my little notebooks – which said it was October in the world I’d left – it was already in fact the Russian month of November and nights felt even to me as if the air was getting itself together to produce snow. I sat on the office floor with my back to the wall and fell asleep. I slipped into one of those dreams where the same thing happens over and over but it’s totally crazy – in this case that Commissioner Urquhart of the Queensland police would cancel all charges against me if I would marry Trofimova, and though Trofimova stood by smiling I couldn’t get her to speak. So I began to feel rage towards her. I harangued her as I climbed with Urquhart over breakneck sandstone rocks. Trofimova stopped to smoke a pipe. I didn’t know you smoked a pipe, I growled at her. She told me Krakowski – the man whose warehouse we plundered – had given it to her and she didn’t want to waste it.

  Suvarov woke me. I was embarrassed to be caught asleep on a day like this – when hardly anyone in the Smolny was sleeping. Behind Suvarov I saw Slatkin. He was wearing his usual knowing grin and his overcoat with fur lapels. But he’d taken off his tie and his collar looked greasy in the Smolny style.

  Suvarov was saying to Slatkin as I stirred, This is the same argument we had this afternoon. And it’s rolling on and on. Then he saw my eyes were open. Ah, Paddy. Welcome back to the evil waking world, my friend. Do you know Mr Slatkin?

  I told him I did.

  He wants you to go on an errand with him.

  I immediately struggled to my feet. Would he put a Mauser in my hand again? With the Junkers placing their artillery in front of the Winter Palace, why shouldn’t I have a bloody Mauser?

  Ready to go? Slatkin asked.

  I was still dopey from sleep. But I said I was ready.

  Bring your rifle – though it’s only for window-dressing.

  I didn’t know what in the hell he was talking about but I went and fetched it from the corner of the room I’d left it in earlier – not even leaned against the plaster but lying still like Moses’ rod that might turn into a snake.

  Suvarov offered me an overcoat. I found this for you, he said. You’ll need it tonight.

  It smelled of sour wool but I put it on gratefully and followed the two of them out into the hallway.

  Where are we going? I asked.

  Slatkin placed his finger at the side of his nose. Something about all this fake secrecy and smart-alecry of his angered me.

  Tell me, I insisted. Where in the hell are we going?

  Slatkin didn’t seem put out by my insistence. He said, We’re going to meet some of the sailors.

  That makes everything clear, I muttered.

  You’ll be an example to them, Paddy, Suvarov assured me.

  Slatkin was for once sober-faced. It’s an order of the military committee, he said.

  I shook my head but was willing to serve. We bid Suvarov farewell then went down the stairs and pushed and shoved across the crowded lobby.

  Out we went through the front door past the sentries sitting at their Mannlicher machine-guns. The soldiers in the garden stood by their fires with a strange mixture of seriousness and dreaminess. Slatkin fetched a rifle for himself from a stacked stand of them and slung it over his shoulder. He collected four young soldiers who had been waiting by a fire and we marched out the front gate to one of the armoured cars now waiting there.

  There were two more soldiers in the car. One was standing up on a platform in the middle – the machine-gunner – and another sat at the steering wheel in the front. As soon as we were seated on the benches – rifles between knees – he drove off. Because we were encased in steel I couldn’t see out into the streets. But squinting through the front slit of the armoured car they looked strangely empty to me except for trams. Their drivers stood beside them waiting for something definite to ha
ppen or for news about which routes were barricaded and which not.

  We cut off a main road and followed narrower ones until we reached the river and turned left along an embankment. The armoured car soon pulled up and the machine-gunner got down from his stand and came and opened the rear door for us. Slatkin and his four soldiers and I jumped out. We were right outside the door of a tabak – a sort of tobacco and cigar shop that also sold coffee and liquor. It was locked up. But Slatkin gave his rifle to one of his soldiers and crossed the pavement and hammered on the double doors.

  One of the leaves of the door opened a crack and I got a glimpse of a young man in a navy blue overcoat. He and Slatkin seemed to exchange passwords and the door opened fully.

  We entered a long bare room. All the tobacco had vanished from the shelves and all the liquor from the counter. The room was bare of the normal furniture too – it had a scrubbed table lit by a kerosene lamp set in the middle, and around the table six or seven sailors were sitting. They were drinking vodka out of pannikins – there were two nearly empty bottles on the table.

  The fellow at the head of the table was an older man with a heavy beard. By the air of command I saw when he pointed us to two empty chairs he must have been elected to some level of power by the fleet soviet. Slatkin and I set our rifles aside and sat down. A young sailor along the table offered us each a pannikin of liquor. I said no and the bearded sailor frowned at me.

  Then – picking up a mug – he flicked some drops left from a previous drinker onto the floor before half filling it and passing it to Slatkin.

  Slatkin began talking to the sailors. When he finished the older sailor at the head of the table spread his hands and argued for a while. Slatkin pointed to me. He made quite a long speech then turned to me.