Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 8
Back in her hotel room, and still warmly wrapped in her coat, Caitlin forced open an ice-encrusted window and stared out at the snow-covered dome of the cathedral opposite. It was almost 2:00 a.m., and Russia had finally welcomed in 1918, thirteen days after everyone else.
How much longer should she stay? Arriving in November, she’d naïvely assumed that a few weeks would be enough to take it all in, to identify the changes and the future they suggested. But as she’d just heard at the party, two months had passed and so much remained unresolved. This, the biggest story on earth, was still unfolding, with no clear end—no end of any kind—in sight.
Her place was here—she was certain of it. She couldn’t understand why Louise Bryant and Bessie Beatty had already arranged their departures or why Jack Reed was staying only a week or so more. But she did know that convincing her editor and publisher that she should stay would not be easy. Since mid-December that editor and publisher had been alluding, with ever-decreasing subtlety, to those events across Europe that she wasn’t reporting, indeed could not report, as long as she remained out on her frozen Russian limb. And when the war resumed after its unofficial winter break and the generals started feeding young Americans into their meat grinder, she suspected an ultimatum—Russia or your job.
The night after the New Year’s Eve party, someone took a shot at Lenin as he left an organized farewell for one of the first Red Army units. Three bullets passed through the car he was in, slightly wounding a Swiss comrade who was sitting beside him. The man or woman responsible was not apprehended, but there was no sign of overreaction on the part of the Cheka—no roadblocks or combing of the city, no mass arrests. On the contrary, by the time Caitlin received news of the matter, her Bolshevik acquaintances were already laughing it off.
Which had to be good news, she thought. A less secure regime might well have lashed out.
On the following day, she met Kollontai at the building by the Moika Canal that was being transformed into the flagship Palace of Motherhood. The babies brought in from the streets, once known by the numbers inscribed on their knuckles, had all been moved into one wing, along with the countess in charge and the nurses who served beneath her, while an army of party volunteers scrubbed and painted the rest of the building. The plans that Kollontai proudly showed Caitlin included a model nursery, a library, a dairy, and extensive medical facilities. This was socialism in practice. This was the future.
The news from abroad was also heartening. Incidents of worker unrest had been proliferating across Germany in recent days, and on January 16 a near-general strike brought the Austro-Hungarian capital, Vienna, to a virtual standstill. In Petrograd, Caitlin heard Red Guards and party members eagerly discussing the latest reports, as if their own lives depended on these faraway events. As of course they did. She hadn’t yet met a Bolshevik who thought the revolution could survive on its own, and a German revolution was everyone’s great hope, offering both freedom from future attacks and the strongest of potential allies against the rest of the world.
Caitlin thought about the socialists she’d met there in the summer of 1915, the brave men and women who’d chosen prison or a life in hiding rather than support the war. Were they thinking their hour had come at last?
No one was counting chickens. On the day that the news from Vienna arrived, the Bolshevik government announced a state of siege in Petrograd: the Constituent Assembly elected in late November was due to convene in two days’ time, and trouble was expected.
It duly arrived. On the morning of the opening, groups of demonstrators refused to recognize the perimeter established by the Red Guards. Fights broke out, then shooting, leaving several dead in the snow. Caitlin heard the gunfire but only later learned that fifteen people had died.
Inside the Tauride Palace, she sat in the press gallery behind the podium watching the leaders of the various parties arrive. It felt like a reprise of the previous summer’s high-level gatherings, with Kerensky the most notable absentee. Kollontai waved to her, then sat reading through a file of notes, apparently oblivious to the strange atmosphere. There were guns everywhere, Caitlin noticed—in the hands of the sailors and Red Guards who ringed the chamber, peeking from the pockets of many politicians.
This was just theater, she thought, and dangerous theater at that. Having overthrown the rightists and moderates in November, the Bolsheviks would never meekly relinquish their power, election results notwithstanding.
The proceedings finally began at 4:00 p.m., after an argument over who should kick things off. The Bolsheviks won by sheer force of voice, and their spokesman, Sverdlov, read out a list of their achievements in government. A member of the opposition was then elected chairman, and the next few hours were spent rejecting all the laws and decrees that the Bolsheviks had put forward. After Lenin and his party had finally walked out, Spiridonova asked that the assembly recognize the steps toward peace with Germany and Austria that the government had taken. When the majority refused, arguing instead for a comprehensive international agreement, the LSRs walked out as well, leaving the liberals and moderate socialists alone in the chamber, surrounded by government guards.
And that, Caitlin thought, was that. The people in front of her, who carried on debating as if it actually mattered, thought they had turned the clock back to October, when Russia was still at war, the peasants were landless, and the workers were still waiting for any real change. But the power had passed on. At four in the morning, the guards announced that the task they’d been given was to protect the whole assembly and not just a mere party caucus. They invited the remaining delegates to go home, politely at first and then with more insistence. The Constituent Assembly had apparently outlived its usefulness.
The following Friday the also-elected Third Congress of Soviets opened in the same chamber. Caitlin attended on the first day and thought the difference noteworthy. Yesterday’s suits were gone, in their place a strikingly diverse group of workingmen and -women, come from every part of the country to discuss their mutual future.
Toward the end of the afternoon session, a hand tapped on her shoulder. It was Kollontai, silently urging her out of the gallery.
“You’re invited to a wedding,” her friend said once they were out in the corridor.
“Whose?” Caitlin asked, surprised.
“Mine. Mine and Pavel’s.”
“Congratulations! When are you—”
“In half an hour, in the office on Znamenskaya Street.”
Caitlin started to say she would be there, but Kollontai was already gone.
The service was as short and sweet as the new law intended. There were about forty other guests, most of them women or sailors. Flanked by Dybenko and her grown-up son, Misha, Kollontai looked a picture of happiness.
A long line of droshkies was waiting in the darkened street, each with a sailor holding the reins and a lantern swinging beside him. Kollontai and Dybenko took the one at the front, and the guests all bundled into those lined up behind. Caitlin found herself sharing a two-seater with one of the sailor comrades, who introduced himself as Sergei Piatakov. He was a good-looking young man of about her age, with an air of confusion that probably stemmed from finding himself so close to a female who wasn’t his mother or his sister.
The procession rattled across the Neva and up a broad avenue. Looking behind her, Caitlin could see the line of lanterns stretching back in the darkness, like a necklace of stars.
When they finally reached their destination, she could hardly believe her eyes. She’d ridden Petrograd’s roller coaster—the “American Mountain,” they called it here—back in early summer, but she knew that the park shut down in winter. It wasn’t closed today. According to Piatakov, one of the sailors had heard Kollontai tell Dybenko how much she loved roller coasters, and a plan had been born. Over the last couple of days, this sailor and others had cleared the tracks of snow, deiced the machinery, and lit numerous braziers beneath the structure to keep it from refreezing. And here it stood, surrounded by snow-covered Ferris wheels and carousels, reflecting the light of the moon now rising above the city. The red cars had all been adorned with yellow hammers and sickles.
A laughing Kollontai climbed into the front seat of the first car and almost pulled Dybenko in beside her. For someone who’d defended a revolution, he looked a little nervous.
All the other guests piled in, save one woman whom no one could persuade. Caitlin claimed a seat in the third car, feeling both excited and nervous. Climbing in beside her, Piatakov offered her a reassuring smile.
The switch was thrown, and the cars began to climb, Petrograd slowly spreading out beneath them. A moonlit stretch of the Neva appeared above the snowy roofscape, then a glimpse of the gulf to the west and the silhouettes of ships at anchor, before the world fell away from under them and the tiny train plunged downward, the screeches of the riders fusing joy and fear.
Another week went by. One hand extended in front of her, Caitlin felt her way up the hotel’s darkened stairwell. The electricity was out again, crippling the elevator, and candles were never left burning in untended areas. As a child she’d always rather liked the dark, but Petrograd had cured her of that. The long summer nights were entrancing, but winter’s price was much too high.
She felt exhausted and dirty. There’d been no running water for a couple of days, and the jugfuls the hotel provided were often layered with ice. There was no doubt about it—conditions were still getting worse, with no sign they’d ever improve. Even cutlery was running short. At the table where she’d just eaten dinner—cabbage soup and black bread for a change—she and six other people had taken turns with three wooden spoons and a single knife.
And as for getting around . . . She’d spent the better part of the day struggling from place to place on foot, because most of the roads were blocked by snow and no streetcars were running on the few that were not. The authorities had no sooner cleared the rails and wires than the power stations had run out of coal.
The news from the outside world offered little in the way of compensation. The only good tidings of recent days had come from Britain, where women over thirty had finally been given the vote. But even this was soured, at least in Caitlin’s mind, by the price that Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst had paid for this piece of male largesse—their almost rabid support for the war. Elsewhere the outlook was thoroughly bleak. Serious fighting had broken out in Ukraine between the right-wing breakaway government and the local Bolsheviks, and the same seemed about to happen in Finland. A renewal of fighting on the Western Front was still a month or more away, but the Germans had already transferred enough divisions from the Eastern Front to shift the balance. There were now four American divisions in France, with many more to follow, but by the time the latter arrived, it might well be too late.
Russia’s own military position remained precarious. Over breakfast that morning, Caitlin had eavesdropped on the conversation at a neighboring table between two long-term residents. The couple in question were minor aristocrats who had lacked the will or wherewithal to leave and were now pinning their hopes on the Germans. The woman would have preferred an English takeover, but as that seemed unlikely, she was willing to cope with the Kaiser. As long as the wretched Bolsheviks were gone and they got the chance to live the way they had.
It might still happen, Caitlin thought. Trotsky and his team had stalled the German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk for almost two months, but the latest reports suggested that the latter’s patience had finally run out and that an ultimatum was in the offing. No one knew how the Bolshevik leadership would respond, including the leaders themselves, who seemed to be split three ways, roughly half urging defiance and revolutionary war, a quarter backing Trotsky’s scheme to drag things out indefinitely, another quarter supporting Lenin’s call for peace at any price. If the German negotiators called Trotsky’s bluff and Lenin was outvoted by those of his colleagues who wanted a revolutionary war, then hostilities seemed set to resume, and German soldiers might well be marching down Nevsky Prospect before another week had passed.
Next morning Caitlin ran into Volodarsky at Smolny and solicited his opinion over tea in the noisy canteen.
He was worried, he told her, as much by the split in the party leadership as by the possibility of a new German offensive. “If you look at it from a pragmatic perspective, then it’s easy to appreciate all three points of view,” he told her. “Lenin’s right—we do need a breathing space. The rebels are right—it would be a betrayal of the German working class to make a loser’s peace. And since they’re both right, then putting off the decision for as long as possible makes perfect sense. So Trotsky’s right, too.”
“And from an unpragmatic point of view?” Caitlin asked.
“Oh, we have to keep fighting no matter what. We always knew we couldn’t stand alone, so saving our own revolution at the expense of others could never make sense.”
“Then Lenin’s wrong?”
Volodarsky smiled. “Not necessarily. It would all depend on how much we surrender and how long a breathing space we take.”
Caitlin shook her head. “Maybe the Russian people have carried the torch as long as they’re able.”
“Maybe, but I’ll tell you one thing.” Volodarsky leaned forward, as if to amplify his words. “In these few months, I have had more joy than any other man should have in all his life.”
That same afternoon Caitlin received a cable from New York. The message was friendly enough in tone, but her editor had clearly reached the limit of his patience. The time had come to choose—stay in Russia or resign from her job.
It felt like an impossible choice. She wouldn’t have gone quite as far as Volodarsky, but she had understood what he meant—she had never felt more useful, or more inspired by the people around her, than she had in this city. If she chose to stay, there would be other work that she could do, if not English translation, then something in Kollontai’s welfare department or the women’s organizations. Her Russian was probably good enough now, and it would only get better.
That evening she went to Kollontai’s flat and was relieved to find Dybenko out at a meeting of fellow Ukrainians. After telling her friend about the editor’s cable and her own inclination to resign, Caitlin was surprised by Kollontai’s response.
“I don’t want to lose you, of course,” the Russian said. “But really, you must go home. The Germans are about to attack, and the British and French are already ganging up on us, and we need every foreign friend we have to trumpet our cause in their own country. And it’s more than that. Remember what I said about us breaking a path for others to follow—well, they can only follow our path if they know about it, and it’s people like you, my dear, who have to tell them. You have to tell the world what we’ve discovered here—that, for a short time at least, everything is possible. That selfishness and war and doing others down no more define human nature than selflessness and peace and helping each other out.” Kollontai smiled. “And you know you can always come back.”
Which of course was true. After she’d agonized for another couple of days, Caitlin’s mind was made up by—of all things—a piece of unpublished fiction. She was talking to several young activists in a café when one insisted on outlining the plot of a new short story by the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. The protagonists of the story were young revolutionaries who were trying to communicate with potential allies on either Mars or the moon—the narrator had heard the story thirdhand and couldn’t remember which. Nor could he explain how people on earth had discovered the existence of this extraterrestrial population, but he insisted it was unimportant. “The point is that they were trying to communicate. And one of them has this bright idea of building a gigantic wooden “A” somewhere in the countryside and setting it on fire, the theory being that the people on the moon or wherever it was would see it and the two civilizations would gradually build up an alphabet between them with which they could converse. So they make the “A,” they set it ablaze, and they wait for a reply. But none comes. They wait and wait, but no reply ever comes. And they can’t understand it. They know that the “A” can be seen, so why is there no reply? The only reason they can think of is that the people on the moon just don’t understand what the “A” means.” The narrator sat back in his seat.
“And then?” one of the others asked.
“That’s it—there is no more.”
“Because that’s where we are,” another young man suggested. “We’ve sent out the message, and we’re still waiting for a reply.”
“I think Zamyatin is saying that we’ll wait in vain,” the original narrator said. “That no one else will understand the “A” we lit here in Petrograd.”
“Because they haven’t experienced what we have,” a young woman said. “And their governments are telling them that peace and brotherhood are lies. We need to be better at sharing our experience and exposing their lies.”
And not from this sort of distance, Caitlin thought.
The following afternoon she visited the Finland Station in search of a suitable train. One was leaving for the Swedish border in three days, which seemed ideal. She would still be able to attend the Palace of Motherhood opening on the thirteenth and have time to say her good-byes. At the central telegraph office on Pochtamtskaya Street, she cabled her editor, Ed Carlucci, with the news that she was on her way back to London. Her longer-term plan, which she didn’t mention, was to do a catch-up job on any other major European stories, then sail for home. If Americans weren’t understanding the “A,” it wouldn’t be for lack of a personal explanation.
