Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 5
Caught up in her friend’s enthusiasm, Caitlin was already mentally writing her first dispatch from Russia. She asked who was most in need of help.
Kollontai sighed and seemed to age twenty years in the process. She counted off with her fingers: “Two and a half million maimed soldiers, another four million sick or wounded, 350,000 war orphans, 200,000 deaf, dumb, or blind. Heaven knows how many people in lunatic asylums. Elderly people who aren’t being paid their pensions, others who never had a pension to begin with—there are bound to be some I’ve forgotten. This country was in dire straits in 1914, and three years of war have made everything so much worse.”
“So where’s the money going to come from?”
Kollontai delved into a drawer and brought out a pack of playing cards. “These,” she told Caitlin.
“Those?”
“I forgot. You don’t do this in America or England, but on the Continent it’s quite common. Governments grant themselves a monopoly on production, and most use the profits to fund social programs.”
“And there are that many people who want to buy them?”
“That’s what I asked the veterans here, and they laughed at me. And it doesn’t seem to matter how much you charge—I raised the price tenfold last week, and the orders are still pouring in. Next to a tax on vodka, it’s the surest thing we have.”
Caitlin couldn’t help laughing. “I suppose that’s wonderful, in a strange sort of way.”
“Whatever works,” Kollontai said. “We don’t have time for anything else.”
“So give me a rundown on what’s happened in the last ten days.”
Kollontai looked surprised. “Don’t you know?”
“I was in Scotland when I heard about the revolution, and I’ve been traveling ever since. The Norwegian papers seemed confused by it all, and the Swedish ones had nothing to say.”
“Wonderful,” Kollontai said sarcastically. “The first government in history to really change anything, and no one’s reporting it. Let me tell you what we’ve done in ten days. We’ve given the land to the peasants who till it. We’ve abolished private education—from this moment all Russians, no matter how wellborn, will attend the same schools. We’ve abolished the death penalty. We’ve published all the secret treaties that Russian governments signed with other nations, and we’ve demanded an immediate peace without annexations or penalties. How’s that for a start?”
Caitlin could hardly believe it. “That’s wonderful.”
“And we’re only getting started. There’s a conference for women beginning on Monday—you have to be there.”
“I will be.” Caitlin hesitated. “As a journalist I have to ask this question—how secure is your government? Surely every other government in the world will try to bring you down. Do you really think you can survive?”
Kollontai took the question seriously. “It’s a question we all ask ourselves. But if we are conquered, we will still have done great things. We are breaking the way, erasing old ideas. Blazing a trail that others can follow.”
“Do you think your revolution can survive without others?”
“In the long run, no. But let’s enjoy the moment we have.”
“You seem like you are.”
“Oh, I am. I know we talked about this for years—thousands of us imagined this moment—but I’m not sure I ever believed that the day would truly come.” She laughed. “And wouldn’t you know I would choose this moment to fall in love. What an idiot! You need leisure to fall in love, time together, time to breathe. Pavel and I—”
“Pavel?”
“Dybenko. The sailors’ leader. Lenin has made him one of the three in charge of our defenses.”
“How long have you . . . ?”
“Since May. And of course we’re totally unsuited. Different class backgrounds, different ages—I’m fifteen years older than he is. But”—she threw out her hands—“I can’t help loving him, and in that all-embracing stupid way.” She laughed. “And how about you and Jack? Are you still together?”
“As far as I know. He knows I’m in Petrograd, although I haven’t a clue where he is. But yes, we are still together, as much as the war allows us to be.”
Kollontai sighed. “Such a time! And so much work! But how many people are given the chance to really change the world?”
The Women’s Conference was held at a small hall in Vyborg. Kollontai and the other organizers had laid on food and lodging for eighty delegates, but more than five hundred turned up, some having traveled that many miles. They had come as representatives of eighty thousand factory workers and union and political-party members. Inside the hall it was something of a squeeze.
The usual arguments soon flared up, the mostly Bolshevik leadership stressing the need for working through their governing party, the mostly middle-class feminists making the case for separate organizations. On the second day, Kollontai stressed the need for women to push their own issues—equal pay and paid maternity leave in particular—but not to expect an economically stretched government to take immediate heed. What they could demand—and expect to receive—was legal equality in family matters.
No one was completely satisfied, but neither did anyone leave in a terrible huff. As an observer Caitlin was fascinated by the difference between this and all the other women’s meetings she had ever attended—this one had a government that was, at least in theory, fully on its side.
This was the second story she filed; the first had been her general impressions of how the revolution was doing. As winter slowly tightened its grip in the weeks that followed, there was no shortage of things to write about; on the contrary, there seemed too many stories clamoring for her attention. In the first half of December, she attended at least a meeting a day, listening to workers debating one another in vast factory yards, watching Austrian POWs pledge themselves to the cause in the vast arena of the Cirque Moderne, imbibing the arguments at the Tauride Palace or Smolny, as the political stars of the revolution debated the course ahead.
There was new legislation to report. Having given the peasants their land, the Bolsheviks stopped short of giving the workers their factories, but the playing field between employers and employees was leveled, with committees taken from both making all the important decisions. In some places this wasn’t enough for the workers, who simply took over their places of work and elected their own committees to run the enterprise in question. These committees then spent much of their time trying to lower inflated expectations.
There were new laws regulating the press. These were introduced reluctantly, almost apologetically, the Bolshevik government pointing out that the wealthy few still owned the newspapers and were using them to “poison the brains and consciences of the masses.” To leave the press “in enemy hands at such a time” was “out of the question.” But the restrictions were temporary and would be lifted once the new order was fully established.
If Caitlin, as a journalist, found this a little worrying, her American editor and publisher seemed a great deal more concerned. She was sure that Ed Carlucci felt that way for the best of liberal reasons, but her publisher was another matter. She had met him more than once and knew how much he would loathe the new regime. He would want to print tales of Bolshevik crimes and panegyrics for the opposition martyrs.
There was little she could do to appease them. Whenever a vote was held, socialists of one stripe or another would win it, usually by a large majority. And disputes among the various socialist parties—important as some of these seemed—were not resolved by imprisonment or violence. The small parties of the wealthy, which had done so much to neuter the first revolutionary government, had lost all popular support and been reduced to inciting administrative sabotage, printing slanderous news stories, and generally whining about their present condition. To see them as victims required more sympathy than Caitlin possessed.
She did talk to them. The woman who thought her cook should be “beaten with a knout” for wanting a new pair of shoes; the family who burned their spare clothes out of spite rather than send them off to the front as their hated new government asked.
She talked to foreign diplomats, who all expressed their astonishment that the Bolsheviks were still in power. The Americans at the Red Cross Mission were less judgmental and almost made up for their embassy’s undying antagonism. Foreign businessmen were unreservedly hostile, with one touching exception, an American millionaire so entranced by his experience of the revolution that he lost all interest in business. “If I were thirty years old and had no family,” he told Caitlin, “nothing on earth would take me away from here.”
She interviewed prominent members of the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, otherwise known as the LSRs. Most were highly educated men with years of opposition and exile behind them, who could hardly believe their luck at the opportunities now on offer. If any were taking advantage of their new positions to enrich or privilege themselves, Caitlin saw no sign of it—everyone ate the same food, earned the same paltry income, and dressed in the same shabby suits. Kollontai was the only Bolshevik who took any trouble over appearance.
Few of the leaders were women, but these all seemed extraordinary. The Bolsheviks had her friend Kollontai and the equally cultured French-born Inessa Armand, who held a high-ranking post in the Moscow Soviet and was close to Lenin and his wife. Konkordia Samoilova and Klavdia Nikolayeva ran the unofficial women’s section. One was the daughter of a priest, the other from much humbler beginnings. Both had been Bolsheviks for more than a decade.
And then there was Maria Spiridonova of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. All these women had stirring life stories, but Spiridonova’s was the most dramatic. In 1906, aged twenty-one, she had shot and killed the czarist security chief then terrorizing the province of Tambov. Tortured and raped in detention, she had seen her subsequent sentence of death eventually commuted to life in a Siberian prison. The train that carried her eastward had been besieged by supportive crowds every time it stopped.
The first revolution had released her after eleven years of brutal incarceration, but the woman Caitlin met in the summer of 1917 seemed utterly unbowed by what fate and the czar had thrown her way. Though frail and tiny—Spiridonova was less than five feet tall—she radiated a rare combination of authority and compassion and was loved and respected in equal measure. She was the peasants’ champion and, for many, the soul of the revolution. Her, and her party’s, support for the Bolsheviks was what kept the revolution true, and Caitlin found herself dreading the prospects if Lenin and Spiridonova ever decided on taking divergent paths.
She also caught herself wondering what might happen if the two of them fell in love and Lenin gave up the admirable but rather stolid Nadezhda Krupskaya for Spiridonova’s slow-burning passion. Not that it was likely—both were too busy changing the world to have any time for romance.
Caitlin’s own social life was hardly exciting. She spent several evenings each week drinking, arguing, and swapping stories with one or more members of the English-speaking foreign press corps—the Americans Jack Reed, Louise Bryant, Albert Rhys Williams, and Bessie Beatty, the Brits Morgan Philips Price and Arthur Ransome—but the only Russians she actually thought of as friends were Kollontai and Volodarsky. She often met the latter for lunch, and she found him excellent company, sharp, well informed, and amazingly positive. If he wanted more than friendship—and occasional gazes of more-than-usual intensity sometimes suggested he did—he was clearly too shy to say so.
She saw her other friend as often as ministry work and Dybenko would allow, which wasn’t very often. If Kollontai wasn’t combating sabotage at the ministry, trying to conjure up loaves, fishes, and homes for Russia’s hungry and dispossessed, or pushing through highly contested measures like the new marriage law, she was enjoying a few precious hours with her equally overworked lover. Caitlin met Dybenko at Kollontai’s apartment—he was preparing to leave as she arrived—and was struck by how well matched they seemed, despite the obvious disparity in ages. The sailors’ leader was certainly handsome, though not in a way that Caitlin found attractive—perfectly trimmed goatees, rolled mustaches, and rakishly perched Astrakhan hats were hardly the sort of keys to unlock an Irish-American heart. The two things that most impressed her were his obvious daring—something that Kollontai also had in spades—and how much in awe of her he was. Caitlin knew from others that he was thought to be less than faithful, but in her presence he seemed utterly spellbound.
Away from him Kollontai was a ball of energy belying her forty-four years, furiously intent on changing as much of the world as the hours allowed. There were still so many “great things” left to do.
December marched on, the days and food stores growing shorter. Lying awake in her icy bed at the Angleterre Hotel, Caitlin would listen to the occasional clip-clop of horses below or the rarer clang of a streetcar bell on Nevsky Prospect. There was no denying it—in most measurable respects, things were getting worse. And yet, for all that, there was still so much enthusiasm, so much hope.
The city, the country, were growing poorer, but life kept on getting richer.
On December 20 the Petrograd press announced the setting up of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Sabotage and Counter-Revolution, otherwise known as the Vecheka, or Cheka for short. And all over the city that day, opponents of the Bolsheviks—from right-wing monarchists to Marxist Mensheviks—could be heard telling each other that this was it—the beginning of the long-promised terror. Caitlin, listening to three such conversations in three cafés patronized by the better-dressed few, couldn’t help noticing how appealing they found the thought—they couldn’t wait for blood to flow, if only to prove them right.
Which didn’t prove they were wrong. So far the Bolsheviks had treated their opponents with breathtaking leniency, and given their leaders’ fondness for quoting precedents from the French Revolution, she found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistakes as Robespierre and company and erect a guillotine in front of the Winter Palace. But she understood what most of her compatriots would make of this new organization and decided that a preemptive investigation might be useful. She would interview one of its leaders.
The man in charge was unwilling to see her, but one of his deputies, the Latvian Yakov Peters, had employed some of the socialist American correspondents as part-time translators when he was a member of the Cheka’s immediate predecessor, the Military-Revolutionary Committee. According to Albert Rhys Williams, Peters not only spoke perfect English but was usually willing to speak his mind. Caitlin phoned for an appointment and was given one the next day.
The Cheka offices were in the old police building at 2 Gorokhovaya Street, just around the corner from her hotel. Peters’s room was on the third floor; the man himself, slimly built with a fighter’s face and dark wavy hair, came out from behind his overloaded desk to shake her hand warmly. He didn’t look old enough for his life story, but then few of the Bolshevik leaders did. Peters had spent four years as a revolutionary activist in Latvia and another nine in England, where he’d been arrested, tried, and acquitted in the famous Houndsditch murder case, which had ended in the equally notorious Siege of Sidney Street. When news of the first revolution had reached him in London, he’d immediately set out for Russia.
Rather to Caitlin’s surprise, he knew as much about her.
“Am I right in thinking your brother was shot by the British?” was the first thing he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Almost three years ago now.”
“Did you share his belief in the Irish Republican cause?”
She hesitated before deciding that openness might be reciprocated. “That’s a difficult one to answer,” she said. “My family is Irish, and I support Irish independence. But I’m not convinced that an alliance with Germany was the best way to get it.”
Peters shook his head. “They accuse us of that. Just because the Germans let some of our leaders pass through their country in a sealed train, some people think that we’re all German puppets.”
“Well, they should know better by now.”
“Ah, people believe what they want to believe.” Peters smiled to himself. “When were you last in England?”
“Six weeks ago.”
“And how are things there? My wife and daughter are still in London,” he added in explanation.
“Life isn’t easy, not after three years of war. But not as hard as it is in Germany. Or here.”
Peters seemed pleased to hear that. “So how can I help you? You’re writing a piece on the new commission?”
“In part. How would you define its role?”
“It’s what it says it is—an organization to protect the revolution from enemies who engage in sabotage or secretly plot against us.”
“What do you mean by sabotage?”
Peters sighed. “Everything from deliberately destroying official documents, which has happened at most of the ministries, to interfering with the transport of essential supplies. Things that prevent us from doing our job, which is to run the country in the interests of ordinary people.”
“You know what some people are saying,” Caitlin responded. “And not all of them bourgeois. That this is the thin end of the wedge, that the more opposition you face, the harsher you’ll have to be, and that a reign of terror is only a matter of time.”
