The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  The entry hall was all veined marble and ran away for acres – or so it seemed. It was designed to make the smallest sound bounce off the walls and belt you about the ears. Above our heads hung chandeliers as big as the house I’d grown up in. Either side of a central door in the furthest wall, two staircases rose to the upper floor. Our boots thundered on the marble as we crossed a space large enough to fit a village in and climbed one of the staircases. At the top we ran into a young officer in the sort of uniform I had only seen either on stage or on the dead boy in Kharkov. The man kneaded the right side of his face and knotted his brows, fiddling with his moustache. On top of that he carried his face to one side as if he had a toothache. Suvarov saluted him and went on with his urgent rigmarole about news from the Smolny – telling him breathlessly that a battalion from the Smolny had been dispatched with orders to capture the Interior Ministry and that the minister must be told.

  In return the officer said curtly that the cabinet already knew this. Suvarov had some experience as an actor and really hammed up the urgency. He must be permitted to tell Kerensky. You see, the young officer told us suddenly in French, Monsieur Kerensky wasn’t here so we should simply go. Monsieur Kerensky had gone to fetch une armée de sept divisions from the northern front .

  Thank God! said Suvarov with an air of piety.

  The officer waved us away now and told us to leave the building. Suvarov saluted him and he turned away and disappeared up a further staircase without seeing to our departure at all.

  Suvarov and I wandered down a corridor and stopped at a panelled doorway.

  Listen to the sound in there, he said.

  I could hear a gramophone record scratching along and men shouting to each other and – now and then – laughter. An old Winter Palace flunky in his blue uniform came limping along the corridor. Shaking the handle Suvarov asked him why the door was locked. The old man told him that it was locked by order of the officers. Suvarov rose up to his fullest height – so much higher than myself or the old servant of the tsar – and asked him did he mean that unless the men were locked in they wouldn’t fight for the home of God’s Great Servant the Emperor or for the cabinet?

  The old man told Suvarov he knew nothing about that. But Suvarov had impressed him and he began calling him barin as if he was a member of the nobility. It made Suvarov adopt a pose even more grand. Open it at once, he told the man.

  The old official found a key from his pocket and opened it. Tell me when you leave, barin, he pleaded with Suvarov.

  How are the Junkers going to get out to fight, Suvarov asked him, if they are locked away?

  The old man shrugged reverentially. This question touched on only one of all the stupid orders he had received in a lifetime of bowing to people who barely deserved a nod.

  We entered what I would have considered a massive room if I had not seen the hallway downstairs. The lower walls were wainscotted with beautiful wood and further up there was gold paintwork on the mouldings and French chandeliers hanging above us. I had never seen such splendid items as I’d seen in Piter – even though they were built on the misery of ordinary men and women. High up on the walls beyond the wainscotting were paintings of the battles of 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia. Brave Russians were dead and dying in neat lines up there on the wall for their tsar. But at floor level the whole place was a shambles. Junkers were lying down on palliasses and blankets and further up the room was a group drinking with women in soldiers’ uniforms – no doubt part of one of the famous Shock Battalions of Death. Cigarette butts littered the floor and so did copies of nearly every stripe of paper, Bolshevik, Menshevik, Cadet. Those defenders of the Winter Palace who were wearing their jackets carried the patches at their collars that meant they were officers-in-training. But here they were no better than privates. Unwilling ones too. Their rifles weren’t stacked – some of them leaned against the wall and some of them just lay around on the polished wood as if they didn’t belong to anyone. At one end of the room machine-guns were sited in the tall windows overlooking Palace Square. No one manned them at the moment but they were capable of executing plenty of besiegers.

  We weren’t far into the room when a number of the men on their blankets spotted us and rose – impressed by Suvarov’s air of command. It wasn’t something I’d noticed in Brisbane but he certainly had it now. He asked these men who’d stood why their friends were entertaining the women’s battalion. The girls were nervous – one Junker said – and had got in by hacking out a panel in the wall with bayonets. Suvarov turned and winked at me before telling a handsome young officer candidate to go and order them back into their section of the building. The young man obeyed. He strode across the room and was booed by the men who had been sharing wine with the girls. We saw the girls get up – heads down in shame. There were whistles and catcalls as they crawled – one at a time – through a sort of mouse hole in the panelling. When the last had gone the conscientious young Junker then blocked the place up with blankets and kitbags.

  Where are your officers? Suvarov asked.

  On the next floor, they said. It’s an officers’ mess.

  Suvarov relaxed then and introduced me as a journalist from the West who wanted to write about how well and loyally defended the Winter Palace was. A number of the men shook their heads at what they saw as simple-mindedness. A few cried out they’d do their very best. I don’t like Kerensky much, said one. But I don’t like Bolsheviks at all. Others wanted no part of it – the journalism or dying for the Winter Palace. I felt sorry for them. One of them told Suvarov that he intended to keep a last bullet for himself because there was something so large and so diabolical about the Winter Palace that it turned normal men into savages. Look what it had done to the tsars and to the crazy tsarina who sought God through that devil Rasputin. It would turn the Reds into beasts too.

  You may not need your last bullet, Suvarov suggested to them.

  But one thing was clear. These were not true tsarist officers – not from the old tsarist officer corps. They were men chosen from the ranks because they could read and because they either hadn’t seen battle or hadn’t run away during a brief exposure to it. (All those who had long exposure under generals like Brusilov and Kornilov were dead.) Now these young men might need to die for all this holy architecture. How easy it was for men to end up locked in on the wrong side. Here I was – a rough trade unionist from the ends of the earth – but I wasn’t locked in – I had strong hopes of getting outside again and crossing the square.

  We left the defenders to their waiting and went out the way we’d come. We nodded to the old attendant in the main corridor and he locked the Junkers in again. Downstairs we roughly saluted the Cossack officers drawn up in front of the steps and walked back across the square like princes. We stamped on the stones and were indifferent to the cannon in either corner of the palace. It was a long promenade across to the far side and the Red guns.

  Another battery of our guns had come in by now. More sailors were marching up from the direction of the post office. They were massing around the Russian Imperial Staff building – a big red pile near the cathedral that seemed to be empty of all staff officers today.

  We stopped and told our gunners what we’d seen. There were arguments in progress. Some men wanted to ease the tension by going in against the palace right now. But Slatkin told them everything was waiting for the sailors. When they heard the guns from the Peter and Paul and from the Aurora in the river – then it would be time!

  Suvarov and I decided on a brisk walk to get back to the Smolny. My rifle seemed to weigh nothing now. We were full of energy – almost drunk on it – and could have marched thirty times to the Smolny and back and not complained. We were so full of the moment. Along the Nevsky soldiers and sailors were crowding around barefoot newspaper boys to buy the latest edition of whatever they had. We saw Red Guards outside a bank they had taken over. They looked as calm and careful as any board of directors.

  We got back to the Smolny
gates in the early dark of evening. We had become familiar figures and the sentries didn’t ask us to show passes any more as we ran into the building past the sandbagged strong points. From the great hall to one side of the lobby we could hear the shouts and laughter and hooting and foot-stamping of the congress in its opening session – the three main parties all competing to register their delegates. But we were full of mad haste to see Artem or someone else from the Central Committee or Trotsky’s Military Council. Upstairs the Central Committee was still installed in No. 36. They would leave it till a little later to invade the congress downstairs. Suvarov demanded that Artem Samsurov be brought out to see us because we were just back with important news from the Winter Palace.

  We went to wait in my accustomed haunt – the typing room. There was poor old Rybakov who’d come home to Russia on the one day no one had time to make a fuss of him. He was sitting at a desk and had gone to sleep on his folded arms.

  At last Artem came through the connecting door into the office where we stood still fizzing with our afternoon adventure. He seemed full of the same delirious tension as we had and had the air of a man who was enjoying himself again and had forgotten the business of the backsliding railway men.

  Did you see Rybakov’s here? he asked us first. What an omen!

  I said I’d met him that morning – which now seemed to me just minutes before.

  He’s here with his plans, said Artem. I tried to send him off to the Alliluyevs’ for a rest but he’s waiting to see Vladimir Ilich and hear some of the speeches downstairs. He’s got a long wait ahead of him. But we’ve got to build that thing for him. It’ll be a symbol.

  Artem gave full attention to us now. Well, what can you tell me, gentlemen?

  Suvarov and I – but mainly Suvarov – then made a report of what we’d seen in the Winter Palace. Suvarov’s opinion was that our men should try to take the palace immediately.

  I’m certain you’re right, Grisha. But it’s Antonov-O pulling the strings from here. He and his friends think we need more numbers, and he’s supposed to be the expert. I’ll pass all you’ve told me on to them, but I know what they’ll say. It’s easier to get a party of one or two inside than it will be to storm the place.

  Artem lowered his voice. But I think you’re right. We should just go ahead with it and take the cabinet prisoner. Then the news could go out to Moscow and all the cities that we control all the organs of government and most of the army. I mean, the congress is starting, and they’re messing around with credentials and that sort of thing. But Vladimir Ilich wants to announce the fall of the palace before the first session really starts. He thought he’d have it by three o’clock this afternoon, then by five. But here it is – after six! So there’ll be all sorts of speechifying from some of the older gents about how we’ve failed and should get back into our box. But they can’t say that once we get the damned place!

  We could take it ourselves if you like, I offered. Suvarov and me. Just waltz in there and make the buggers surrender.

  Artem was amused and shook his head. Our journalist has become a warrior, he said. Yes, it’s hard to believe sometimes we’re not just kids playing games in our heads. Just hold hard for now, boys.

  He said goodbye and walked back into No. 36.

  24

  While Suvarov went downstairs to see how the congress was getting on I took a desk in the typists’ room and began writing a feverish account of what I’d seen this afternoon. The thing – as journalists say – wrote itself. I was agog with the adventure and was finished writing in forty minutes. Then I found in a corner the Roman alphabet typewriter Reed had been using and began to tap out my account with four clumsy fingers.

  When I was finished I decided to try to visit the congress downstairs in the ballroom.

  In the lobby I found Suvarov arguing outside the double doors to the great hall with a grey-bearded man in a worker’s ragged suit. It was – I would discover – an old friend of his from the metalworkers’ trade union. The argument was the same one that was occurring all over the building. If we destroyed Kerensky’s government, said the man, no international revolution would be sparked by what happened in Russia. The fact it happened only in Russia would help the rest of the world destroy Russia – if Russia didn’t destroy itself first.

  Having been to the palace and seen the possibilities Suvarov found the man an annoyance, and brushed past him to approach me.

  He made a fist and knocked his brow with it. They’ve been waiting all their lives for this day, he said furiously, and when it bites them on the arse they don’t want it to be here. The hardest thing about a revolution is persuading the damned revolutionaries.

  Then – dragging me by the elbow – he pushed me forward past the man and through the double doors into the ornate hall. I’d thought this room was grand beyond belief when I first saw it. But now that I’d had my architecture lesson from the palace it looked only medium ornate.

  The first thing I saw was a young soldier at the front of the hall standing on his seat and pointing to some officers with neat uniforms at the back of the hall, declaring they were not true delegates. Women delegates and soldiers and sailors began jeering at them too. The women wore their shawls and dresses or their bits of army uniform.

  On the rostrum above the credentials table – where things were still being hammered out – appeared a young soldier in the uniform of the Latvian division. This division was devoted to Vladimir Ilich’s side and – shaking his fist and roaring through the mists of tobacco smoke – the young soldier called for the impostor delegates to be hanged in the garden.

  At last the crowd around the credentials tables cleared. The congress began and the secretary at the rostrum called on the first speaker on his list. Suvarov and I stood for a while by a fluted column at the side of the room as a Menshevik in a bad suit spoke – no doubt uttering the usual condemnation of room No. 36 and all its contents. And the predictable cries went up from our people who had done well enough in the credential process but hadn’t got as many delegates as the Mensheviks.

  None of that mattered now while No. 36 controlled so much of the army. And none of it would matter either if the palace was captured.

  Suddenly there was a huge amount of cheering and whistling going on. Trotsky was coming up to the rostrum and the soldiers greeted him like a messiah. With his eyes of mercury and his composer’s face and flying hair, Trotsky had a presence that grabbed the room by its lapels. His gestures took on a new scale and huge meaning. He could look amused and ironic and then angry as well as any world-class Hamlet.

  He gave a speech often reproduced in years to follow. The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries had last February conquered the Cadets, he said. And then when they got to power in the Duma, they gave it all back to the Cadets. Such was their natural taste for serfdom!

  Our delegates were laughing in great waves of sound at his jokes and then cheering his political jibes like thunder.

  Old Martov – who had for years shared exile and the occasional coffee and pastry with Vladimir Ilich – scrambled up to the rostrum with the same message as a few days earlier at the Marinsky. His faction wasn’t opposed to the power of the people and only opposed to the Bolsheviks. But this was not the time to seize power.

  Noise followed by noise followed by more still. The Winter Palace stands! a number of Menshevik delegates cried. A fortress in the sea. And may it stand long since it is the home of the cabinet to whom the decisions of this congress will be taken and upon which the cabinet could not help but act! Why does there need to be a sudden coup tonight, they asked, when every sign suggests it’s wise to wait?

  I could not see Artem here and even Trotsky had gone back upstairs after his speech. In their absence an expected motion was offered by the Mensheviks condemning any uprising, and then the debate became apparently endless and – for Suvarov – infuriating. The hot gas given out by the naysayers might kill for him all the fervour and fizz of the day that was now
closing. Maybe there was a kind of sickly comfort in always being a righteous persecuted group and if it was so it was turning men into revolutionary eunuchs.

  Suvarov and I turned to leave the meeting. But as we reached the lobby we heard the enormous sound of a cannon firing and of a shell that seemed to me to have been fired in the street just near the Smolny. Suvarov stood still staring at me until we heard an explosion from wherever the thing fell.

  The Aurora, Suvarov told me. The start of things.

  We fetched our rifles and left the building straight away – discussing nothing but knowing by some intuition where we were heading. In the garden many Red Guards and soldiers were craning their necks to try to read the dark sky and to see the Aurora’s thunder reflected in low clouds. We couldn’t find a truck to the palace at first. As we waited a number of civilian congress delegates – a few brave Cadets might even have been among all these Mensheviks – filed out through the door into the garden and on into the street. They were men and some women – I would discover – who’d been members of the former Duma. Some of them carried little parcels or string bags of provisions with them which must have been under their chairs in the hall. They announced to the surrounding troops they meant to march through the firing lines to the Winter Palace and make a human shield for Kerensky’s cabinet – as imperfect as it might be – and help supply the garrison with what was in their bags and parcels. Other delegates followed them out to the arched doorways of the Smolny and shouted insults after them.

  In the street they formed up and started marching and no one interfered with their progress. Departing in their rescue column they looked braver than they’d sounded inside. But they also seemed a bit theatrical and overblown.

  How ridiculous! Suvarov said.