Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 18
All of which boded ill for those who wished the revolution well. If the Bolshevik experiment ended in failure, Caitlin thought the failure should be their own. If Lenin and the party went down to defeat, it should be at the hands of the Russian people, not a cabal of foreign interests in league with past oppressors.
When all was said and done, there was still so much to hope for. Zoya was eager to show Caitlin the scale of the transformation they had already wrought, taking her to factories and shipyards, introducing her to those who now ran them in their former owners’ stead. There were many problems, but no one tried to gloss these over, and the levels of enthusiasm were almost scary.
Most of those she met on these visits were workers born and bred, unlike Zoya and her friends, who were mostly from bourgeois homes. It was these better-educated young men and women—most of them younger than Caitlin—who supplied the political organization, who called the meetings, wrote the agendas, got out the leaflets, who kept the city ticking even as they changed it. Most touching of all, at least to Caitlin, was the way they held themselves to account, constantly checking their own motivations and striving to be the best advertisement their revolution had. When they weren’t at work or singing revolutionary songs in some café, they were arguing with one another, about everything from Brest-Litovsk to Kollontai’s writings on love and sex.
One such after-work discussion in the city hall’s chamber had only just finished when Aidan Brady walked in through the door. Caitlin didn’t recognize him at first—the way the big man moved was strangely familiar, but she needed to mentally add a mustache before she realized who it was. He didn’t see her right away, and she took some time to bring her emotions and thoughts into some sort of order.
They had met in the spring of 1914, in another hall on the other side of the world. A demonstration had been called in Paterson, New Jersey, a year after the broken silk workers’ strike, and he’d given a short speech on recent events in Detroit. Seán Tiernan, her brother Colm’s friend from Dublin, had brought Brady over before the speech, but she didn’t know whether or not they’d already known each other before then. Their subsequent partnership was certainly no surprise—Tiernan was on the socialist wing of Irish republicanism, Brady a longtime Wobbly; both were lifelong renegades, and neither shrank from violence, as they would demonstrate several months later in England, mounting the failed operation that saw Caitlin’s brother arrested and eventually shot in the Tower of London. Tiernan had died in the course of the operation, but Brady had escaped his pursuers and somehow returned to the States.
He was striding toward her. “My God, it’s a small world,” he said, taking the chair next to hers. “Are you on your way out or in?”
“In, if I can get a train. How about you?”
“In. Most definitely in.” He turned toward her. “I’m sorry about Colm,” he said softly.
“Thanks,” she said, believing him sincere. Brady had his faults, but being devious was not one of them. And the fact that he seemed genuinely pleased to see her meant that he didn’t know what had happened in Dublin two years before. Her rescue of Jack McColl, the British agent who’d thwarted his earlier plot, was not something he would have forgiven.
“The goddamn English,” he said. “I won’t be sorry to be fighting them again.”
His face was harder without the mustache, but also younger.
“I can guess what you’re doing here,” he went on. “I’ve read some of your pieces over the last year. Good stuff.”
“Thanks. It’s actually been a privilege just being here.”
“I can imagine. And being on the winning side for once in our lives can’t be bad, eh?”
She knew what he meant. “What have you been doing since—”
“The fiasco in England? I went back to Ireland for a while—have you heard the latest news?”
She hadn’t.
“The English have finally introduced conscription, and everyone—the Volunteers, Sinn Fein, the old Citizen Army people—they’ve all agreed to fight it. And the people are supporting them.”
“That’s great,” she said, trying to sound enthused. These days Ireland seemed more a source of sadness than hope. “So where else have you been?” she asked.
“After Ireland I worked a passage to Mexico. I was with Pancho Villa for a few months, but the revolution down there had run out of steam and Villa’s no better than a bandit. So I snuck back home across the border and reached Montana just in time for the IWW’s bust-up with Anaconda.”
“I know about that,” Caitlin said. The big mining corporation had waged a vicious war against its own workers.
Brady sighed. “Yeah, well, after the company goons lynched Frank Little, I laid low for a while, and when Bill Haywood and the other leaders decided that a Chicago courthouse was the best podium they were ever going to get, I washed my hands of the IWW. Why put yourself in a jail cell when there’s a real revolution to fight for? It took almost six months to work my way across the goddamn ocean, but here I am. And from what I can see, probably just in time. Next couple of years, the Bolsheviks are gonna need every gun they can get.”
Caitlin agreed with that but didn’t share Brady’s obvious pleasure at the prospect. The Bolsheviks she knew had taken such pride in their almost bloodless revolution, and not without reason. As one had once told her, “You don’t get real change at the point of a gun. Obedience, perhaps, but nothing more.”
They talked about practicalities. Brady had arrived only that morning and still didn’t know where the station was. “I’ll walk down there in the morning,” he told her. “Tell me where you’re staying, and I’ll let you know if I hear of a train.”
It was three evenings later when he called at her lodgings. She and the others were singing revolutionary songs and didn’t hear his knock on the door, so he simply walked in and joined them.
“There’s a train at six in the morning,” he told her when the opportunity arose. “I’ve booked places as far as Chita, which is where our control runs out. We can wing it from there.”
She noticed the “our”—after only four days in Russia, it was already his revolution. Which was fair enough. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be there.” After everything that had happened in the States and in England, she felt more than a little wary of Brady, but they both wanted to reach Moscow, and traveling with a man who didn’t take no for a answer might be a good way to get there.
The others seemed to like him, and he ended up sleeping on the floor.
Lying on the rather more comfortable couch, she wondered why he wanted her company. She hadn’t felt he’d liked her that much in 1914—his opinion of journalists, though never spelled out, had clearly been low. Did he feel guilty for surviving what her brother had not? She doubted that.
There was always the usual reason a man went out of his way to help a woman.
Brady was good-looking enough, better without the mustache. Their political beliefs weren’t that far apart—a damn sight closer than hers and Jack’s—and she didn’t doubt his bravery. Colm had never lost faith in him; Zoya and her friends had seemed almost starstruck. But there was something about him. Something cold.
On the day of the demo in Paterson, McColl had seen him knife a cop to death in an alley. The cop had also been intent on violence, but still . . .
And then there was the night watchman at the English quarry, who’d stood between Brady and Colm’s group of renegades and the explosives they needed. One of them had killed him, and if she had to put her money on who . . .
A committed revolutionary would claim that the end justified the means and that killings like these were regrettable necessities. Caitlin accepted that they might indeed be necessary; what she doubted was that Brady found them regrettable.
Men like him might save her revolution, she thought. But what would be the price?
The following morning the two of them boarded their train. The distance to Moscow, as the sign at the station told them, was 5,768 miles. In 1914 the journey had taken ten days, in 1918 it sometimes took that many weeks.
The latter seemed more likely as the train worked its way northward along the Ussuri Valley, stopping frequently for no apparent reason and generally spending more time at rest than in motion. Once Brady found out that the locomotive’s boiler was leaking, their fitful progress became easier to understand, but the need for repairs at the next major stop was bound to cause a further delay. The springtime scenery offered some compensation—often the landscape was a carpet of flowers—but did nothing to lessen the general discomfort. The train was crowded, the toilets disgusting, and sleeping in a seat had never been one of Caitlin’s favorite pastimes. The food was basic but plentiful, alcohol in ample supply, both on the train and out on the platforms. If the number of peasants selling hooch was any guide, the region could match Kentucky for stills.
It took three days to cover the five hundred miles to Khabarovsk and another thirty-six hours to patch up the boiler. As the train rumbled across the new Amur Bridge, Brady did some calculations—at their current speed they should reach Moscow sometime in early June.
Few of their fellow passengers seemed overconcerned. They were another mixed crew—locals making short trips, businessmen bound for central Siberia, party men and women with meetings to attend in distant Moscow. There were several young men and women who seemed more like pilgrims than anything else—inspired by the revolution, these youths were simply heading toward its heart, with what intention they scarcely knew.
Brady talked to everyone. Like Caitlin, he had started learning Russian the moment the czar was overthrown, and once he was surrounded by native speakers, his fluency grew with remarkable speed. He would come back to their seats full of some story he’d just been told and insist that she include it in one of her pieces, behaving, in Caitlin’s jaundiced eyes, like some kid who’d just enjoyed another visit to the revolution’s candy store.
There was something about him she couldn’t trust, something she couldn’t quite explain, but she had to admit he was never boring or, indeed, ever bored. It wasn’t a comforting thought, but she could see why her brother had found him easy to follow.
The next thousand miles, winding through forested hills with occasional views of the Amur plain to the south, were traversed in only four days. According to the drivers, their engine was practically reborn, and it wasn’t mechanical failure that brought the train to a halt in Nerchinsk. The junction with the route across northern China was only a hundred miles ahead, and no one knew who held it. Their Red Guard protectors would venture no farther—this was the end of the line they controlled. Travel any farther and they risked ending up one of Semenoff’s captives, who rumor claimed were sometimes burned alive in locomotive boilers.
Having recognized the name of the town and been assured that the train would not proceed that day, Caitlin decided she would visit the prison camp where Maria Spiridonova had been incarcerated for almost a third of her life. The office of the local soviet was impressed by the arrival of a foreign woman journalist and offered to supply a cart and driver-guide for the journey, but they pointed out, almost apologetically, that visiting even one of the seven katorga prisons would take a week—all the camps were close to the Mongolian border and at least a hundred miles away. Perhaps madam would prefer to visit the Museum of the Katorga, which was under construction here in Nerchinsk.
“Under consideration” might have been a better description, but it was moving nevertheless. Two rooms of the old local governor’s house had been requisitioned for the task. The first had several exhibits—a wad of picture postcards from friends and relatives, paper flowers made by women prisoners, a zither with broken strings, a pile of thick gray trousers, tunics, and caps. The second held nothing but chains. They overflowed from baskets and trunks, hung from hooks on the walls, lay coiled like rusty snakes in every available space. Picking up an iron hobble and giving it a gentle shake, Caitlin was unexpectedly reminded of a day trip from Wesleyan College and the marching road gang they’d passed in the jalopy, much to their teacher’s dismay. The classic sound of oppression, the one that Spiridonova and so many others had heard on their long walk into exile.
“‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’” Brady muttered behind her. “Well, no one’s in these anymore.”
“They should melt them down,” Caitlin said, letting the links drop noisily onto the floor.
“Don’t be too hasty—we may need them for the bourgeoisie,” Brady joked.
Back at the station, there seemed little likelihood of an early departure, but returning to the train after a better-than-usual meal in town, they found it ready to leave. Word had reached the authorities that Semenoff’s forces were farther away from the junction than they were and that a quick departure should see them through before the dreaded Cossack arrived.
It took five hours, and dusk was falling when the tracks from China came into view, empty as far as the eye could see. The junction station was almost deserted, but there was coal enough for the locomotive and no news of any recent trouble between there and the next big town, some fifty miles ahead. This was Chita, which had changed hands several times over the last few weeks.
They arrived next morning to find Red Guards in charge of the station, but according to Brady the town was full of other armed groups, all trading hostile stares. Many people boarded the train during the day, and from the looks they gave the nervous Red Guards, Caitlin deduced that few of the newcomers were Bolshevik supporters. As night fell, a palpable rise of tension offered further proof that this was the case.
Leaving would have helped, but the crew seemed in no hurry, despite unconfirmed news that Semenoff’s men had seized the junction behind them. The situation up ahead was equally unclear—certainty, Caitlin realized, was something they would have to learn to do without. As day turned to night and the train continued to sit there, she drowsily wondered if she’d ever reach Moscow.
When she woke, it was almost light. Brady was snoring beside her, and the train was running through a wooded valley, alongside a fast-flowing river. A walk through the crowded carriages showed most of the passengers still asleep, a condition that suited them if the next twelve hours were any guide. The usual debates were soon underway in every car, but the customary tolerance of other views was conspicuous by its absence. Some arguments turned violent, and though no actual shots were fired, for most of the day it felt like only a matter of time.
But somehow no one was killed, and the next day the differences that had threatened a minor civil war turned into the train’s salvation. The many tunnels punctuating the route along Lake Baikal’s southern shore were held by different groups, some by Bolsheviks, others by Socialist Revolutionaries or Kadets, some by enterprising local bandits, and all but the last had supporters on the train who could argue their right to pass. The bandits, of course, needed buying off, but a hat was passed and filled. The passengers might have nothing else in common, but all them wanted to reach Irkutsk.
When they did so on the morning of May 13, they were told that the train would go no farther, at least for a couple of days. After almost a fortnight of sleeping in a seat, Caitlin felt that the prospect of a hotel bed offered ample consolation for this new delay, and while Brady took out his frustration on some hapless railway official, she inquired as to where she might find a good one. The Central was recommended but was probably full. If so, the Metropole was just as comfortable.
Brady shared her droshky to the hotel, then disappeared in search of something less expensive. She stood outside the entrance for several moments, gazing up and down the bustling street. Irkutsk felt like a real city, the first since Vladivostok.
After taking a room and enjoying her first hot bath in almost a fortnight, she went back downstairs and asked about getting her clothes washed. Informed of a Chinese laundry just around the corner, she dropped off everything she wasn’t wearing and went for a walk around town. There was still food in the shops, and the restaurant menus seemed almost extravagant.
A late lunch required a siesta, which turned into a fifteen-hour sleep. A second bath, somewhat colder than the first, certainly woke her up, and she was drinking tea in the marble-floored hotel restaurant when Brady came by with news he’d just picked up at the station—at least one train would be leaving for Moscow the next day. Two hours later he was back with less welcome tidings. There had been a major incident in the Ural city of Chelyabinsk, a violent fracas of some kind involving Bolshevik Red Guards and soldiers of the Czech Legion, which seemed to put their travel plans in doubt.
As the day wore on, the news grew worse. The Czechs in Chelyabinsk had taken control of that city, and their units in other towns were also up in arms. All travel west was suspended until order was restored.
Over the next few days, all sorts of rumors abounded. According to one, Trotsky had ordered the disarming of the Czechs after receiving orders to that effect from the Germans. Another claimed that the Czechs had decided against evacuation, choosing instead to fight with the “Whites”—as the conservative opponents of the Bolsheviks were now known. The Bolsheviks’ enemies thought the former story more convincing; their supporters favored the latter.
“How many Czech soldiers are there?” Caitlin asked Brady one evening.
“Between fifty and a hundred thousand. It’s the biggest army east of the Volga, but it’s strung out over thousands of miles.”
“And why in God’s name would they want to stay and fight for the Whites?” she wanted to know.
Brady shrugged. “Any number of reasons. I don’t expect that their officers like the Bolsheviks any more than the czar’s officers did. And you can bet they’re being paid, one way or another. I expect that the English and French have promised them independence once the war is over.”
