Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 9
Later that day she kept an appointment to see Spiridonova. Once the samovar had come to boil, they sat and sipped tea in the LSR leader’s spartan room by the light of a single candle.
Caitlin was keen to understand why a big majority of the LSRs were now so opposed to signing a peace treaty with the Germans. “Most of your support comes from the peasants,” Caitlin said, “and they bore the overwhelming brunt of the war. Why would your party want it to continue?”
Spiridonova shook her head. “We don’t want that war to continue. That was a war for the landlords and bosses and the nation they claimed we all belonged to. It wasn’t our war, wasn’t a war from which our people could derive any benefit. But a war for the revolution—my party believes that this would be a war for humanity, a war for us all.”
“Some have told me that you’re not completely convinced by this argument.”
Spiridonova’s smile was a sad one. “That’s true. I do see both points of view, and sometimes I feel that a breathing space might be more important. But what really worries me is that this issue will split our government. My party will not accept the sort of peace that Lenin will. It will quit the government rather than sign such a treaty. And the Bolsheviks will be left to rule on their own.”
This prospect was clearly cause for anxiety on Spiridonova’s part, and as she walked her way back across town, Caitlin found herself sharing the feeling. Though largely sympathetic to Bolshevik views, she often doubted their commitment to democracy. The Bolsheviks were happy to accept the outcomes of their own internal votes but inclined—as in the case of the Constituent Assembly—to find reasons to ignore democratic procedures when dealing with opponents. If the LSRs were removed from the decision-making process, the revolution would lose its balance in more ways than one.
Back at her hotel, she found a message from Yakov Peters. Dzerzhinsky’s deputy had learned that she was leaving and asked if she’d be willing to take out a letter for his wife in England. He assured her that the message was purely personal and would not lead to her being arrested should the “British Cheka” insist on reading it.
The penultimate night in Petrograd was undoubtedly her worst. In the early hours of the morning, Caitlin was walking up Nevsky Prospect, on her way home from a farewell party thrown by correspondent friends at the International Café, when she noticed an orange glow above the roofs to the west. She hastened her pace, with every step she took more afraid of what she might find, and as she turned the final corner, all those fears proved founded. The new Palace of Motherhood was burning, huge flames licking up into the sky. There were firemen in attendance, but she could see at a glance that the building was beyond saving—the middle section was a ruin of charred wood and shattered glass, its windows like the fire-filled eyes of a Halloween pumpkin.
Across the street a crowd had gathered, and one of the nannies from the old “angel factory” was loudly blaming the nurses whom Kollontai had brought in—“whores with their sailors, always dropping lighted cigarettes.” Another woman was shouting that this was God’s revenge on the Bolsheviks for removing all the icons.
“It was arson,” one of the Red Guards told Caitlin. “Several fires were started in different places, all within a few minutes.”
Why? Caitlin wanted to ask, but she already knew the answer. This was revenge all right, but not God’s. Kollontai and her supporters had pushed too fast and hard for some people. Something that Kollontai, and Caitlin, considered self-evident—the belief that women who gave birth deserved the best the state could offer regardless of how they had come to conceive—was, to others, a condoning of immorality. To these ignorant bigots, Kollontai’s dream was a nightmare, promoting indecency, corrupting children, and sanctioning blasphemy. And one or more of them had lit the deadly candles.
Kollontai would be devastated.
Caitlin found herself hoping that the Cheka would catch whoever was responsible and that the courts would sentence them to something worse than “the reprehension of society.”
As she stood there watching the fire, Caitlin remembered the one she had seen from the train. Seven months had passed since then, seven months in which so much had happened. And if that first fire had told her that Russia’s revolution was far from over, then this one carried the opposite message, that those who’d grown fat on the old status quo had not abandoned the fight.
6
Letters to Soph
Half a mile of rough track separated the disheveled-looking huts that housed the Persian and Russian border posts. After a sleepy official at the former had signed McColl’s and Cheselden’s passes, they said good-bye to their local guides and helpers, remounted their mules, and rode out across no-man’s-land. As the Russian post slowly came into focus, McColl could see several soldiers sitting outside it, watching their approach. No one seemed particularly bothered, or at least not enough to reach for a horse or a gun.
As they dismounted outside the wooden hut, an officer in uniform emerged. McColl introduced himself and Cheselden and explained that they were on a diplomatic mission to Ashkhabad. The young man seemed to accept this at face value. He barely looked at their passes before waving them through with a smile. “You have three hours to reach the station,” he added in warning. “The train only runs twice a day.”
“Well, that wasn’t too difficult,” Cheselden remarked once they were out of earshot.
In front of them, a vast plain stretched to the horizon. Somewhere out there—allegedly twelve miles distant—were Kaakhka, its station, and the train to Ashkhabad. Behind them the mountains they’d crossed since leaving Meshed rose into the southern sky. The journey had taken four days but hadn’t been hard. The worst nights of winter were over, the worst days of summer still some months away, and both walking and riding had proved easier than either man expected.
They had met several groups of refugees heading into Persia, and on each occasion McColl had swapped letters of introduction to the British consulate in Meshed for information on the state of affairs in Transcaspia. He had no idea how Cluett and company would react when these refugees knocked at the gates of Eden, but he was sure that Cumming would back him. The two men he had spoken to had provided the names of friends in Ashkhabad and Krasnovodsk who would be sympathetic to a British approach. One had been at the meeting that Poletaev had mentioned, between cotton wholesalers and potential German buyers.
So they had some cards to play. On more than one occasion during their thousand-mile trip from Basra, McColl had found himself speculating on what sort of idiots sent two men halfway around the world to infiltrate a country of which they knew next to nothing and still expected a happy ending. He hadn’t shared this thought with his companion, since he knew that Cheselden would think he was joking. Because almost alone among those still fighting for King and Country, his partner, God help him, still believed that the authorities usually got things right.
The cluster of black dots lining the horizon had to be Kaakhka and its station. Closer at hand, another small farm clung to the side of the road, its small green garden like an island of misplaced hope in the dry brown immensity that surrounded it. The cottage was of sturdy construction, and the machines in the yard were definitely European. And all of it was Russia, McColl told himself. He remembered a line that Caitlin had quoted: “A country that refutes all preconceptions, a people that never fails to surprise.”
“It’s really quite civilized,” Cheselden said, suitably disconcerted.
Kaakhka, when they reached it, was barely awake. They found a serai for the mules and paid for a fortnight’s board—if McColl and Cheselden hadn’t returned by then, the owner was welcome to keep or sell the beasts. The station was unpopulated, but there was shine enough on the rails to prove their recent use. McColl stared down the line in both directions, thinking that this was an arm of the old Silk Road, the track bed flattened by centuries of plodding camels. He felt a very long way from home.
Thirty minutes before the train was due, a man arrived on foot and promptly shut himself inside the station buffet. Minutes later smoke curled out of the chimney; a few minutes more and the door was flung open. A basket piled high with hunks of black bread sat on the counter; behind it a samovar and a cauldron of soup were heating on the stove.
As McColl and Cheselden were being served, the sound of a train became audible. They were still hurriedly eating, and burning their tongues in the process, when the engine wheezed into the station and what looked like all the passengers tumbled down from the carriages and swarmed into the buffet. McColl and Cheselden watched in awe as the motley scrum engulfed the counter, waving and shouting at the unperturbed proprietor. There were Russians and Turks and Persians and Indians, tribesmen and traders and farmers, wearing everything from sheepskin hats and boots to suits and dresses that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the prewar Champs-Élysées.
Out on the dusty platform, McColl bought tickets for himself and Cheselden. The guard-conductor insisted on seeing inside their suitcases but wasn’t unfriendly. “The revolution has many enemies,” he explained apologetically, as if he couldn’t imagine the British playing such a role. Boarding the seven-coach train, McColl managed to find an empty window seat from which he could watch for any bridges seemingly ripe for destruction.
The eighty-mile trip took just over four hours, and all he saw were culverts of varying sizes for channeling runoff under the tracks. As they reached the outskirts of Ashkhabad, he and Cheselden scanned opposite sides of the line for any stockpiled cotton, but the only wagons on show were full of strange-looking logs.
“It’s saxaul,” Cheselden said, plucking another plum from his tree of esoteric knowledge. “A desert tree they use for fuel.”
The station platform was lined with people waiting to board, but much the same number seemed to get off. The two of them took their time, Cheselden staying with their suitcases while McColl quizzed the Russian booking-office clerk about hotels. The two deemed suitable for Europeans were the London and the Germania, which didn’t make for a difficult choice. By the time McColl rejoined his partner, the platform was almost clear, just a single man sitting on one of the benches. He wasn’t staring at them, but McColl had few doubts that this was their official watcher. After hiring a phaeton and riding a hundred yards down the long road into town, he heard the sound of another horse behind them. There was no need to turn and look back.
The town was laid out on a flat grid, the few substantial buildings at its center surrounded by small streets and alleys lined with low-level mud-brick houses. The London Hotel had three floors, and the steel poles sticking out of its roof suggested a possible fourth in its future. The desk clerk was surprised to see two Englishmen but had no apparent anxieties about renting them a room. They took the first he offered, a mostly empty double with two large mattresses and windows providing a view of the Persian mountains. Once the young man had left them, McColl glanced down at the street below—their watcher’s phaeton was still parked opposite, the man himself probably down at reception, reading their register entries.
Away to the west, the deep red sun was poised above the darkening line of mountains.
“I’m hungry,” Cheselden announced.
“Then let’s go and look for food.”
Their watcher was talking to the desk clerk. As they walked down Annenkovskaya Street in search of a restaurant, he ambled along some fifty yards behind them. It was getting colder, and the light was rapidly fading, but most of the shops were still open for business and the streets by no means empty. Lights were shining in the posher Russian emporiums, kerosene lamps being lit in the narrower streets of the trading quarter. Above the buildings to their right, a minaret was silhouetted against the yellow-green sky.
There was no obvious police or military presence. Indeed, the only proof that the revolution had reached this far south was the red flags adorning the larger establishments; in all other respects, life in Ashkhabad seemed little different from life in Meshed or Teheran. When they did find somewhere to eat, the menu board was scrawled in Farsi, the sparse clientele a mixture of Russians and locals, whom Cheselden said were called Sarts. The place was clean, the food was good, and the other patrons showed a healthy lack of interest in who the two of them were, even when they tried conversing in German. That language was obviously not as rare in Ashkhabad as they would have liked.
Night had fallen by the time they finished, and the street outside was lit only by occasional lamps still hanging from storefronts. Their watcher tailed them back to the hotel, a moving shadow in the gloom, his footsteps barely smudging the silence. Though sorely tempted to turn and confront the man, McColl restrained himself. “You never force your opponent into making a hostile move” had been one of his father’s favorite sayings, and what was good for Glasgow labor disputes was surely good for the mean streets of Ashkhabad. If the other side wanted a war, then let them declare it.
The knock on the door came at seven in the morning, and McColl was encouraged by its civilized tone. It was a peremptory rap, no more. Not a frenzied hammering, let alone a splintering of wood.
The uniformed Russian whom McColl invited in was outwardly apologetic. About the early hour, about the need for them to dress and come with him at once. About the need for ablutions and breakfast to wait.
The two of them insisted on taking a piss but otherwise did as requested. A phaeton was waiting outside, its driver enjoying a particularly evil-smelling cigarette. Once the three of them had climbed in behind him, he jerked the horses into motion and the vehicle began rattling south along Annenkovskaya. There was no sign of their shadow from the previous day.
The town fell away behind, until only the station and its surrounding buildings were left between them and the distant mountains. These looked gorgeous in the early-morning sun, but McColl found himself wondering if, by the end of that day, he and Cheselden would regret ever crossing them. The Russian beside him had refused to answer questions but had remained polite, and, in lieu of anything more positive, McColl was clinging to that. It didn’t feel as if they were headed out into the desert for a summary execution.
A hundred yards short of the station, the phaeton abruptly pulled off the road and came to a halt outside a modern two-story building. According to the signs by the door, it housed the railway board and the telegraph office. After ushering the two of them up the stairs and into a room with a long wooden table and more than a dozen seats, their escort told them to wait and promptly disappeared.
McColl sat himself down in one of the chairs and gazed out the east-facing window at the receding ribbon of track.
“What do you think?” Cheselden asked him.
“An interview with the current powers-that-be would be my guess. Everyone tells us they’re railwaymen, and here we are next door to the station.”
A large clock on one wall loudly ticked the minutes away. Five became ten, ten became thirty, and soon a whole hour had gone by. They could hear people below, but it was almost ten o’clock when footfalls sounded on the staircase.
Five Russian men filed into the room, three in workmen’s clothes and two in shabby military uniforms. The latter pair removed their guns from leather holsters and set them down on the table, then took seats on either side of the door. The other three sat themselves down at the head of the table, like a row of presiding judges.
“Your papers,” the one in the middle asked, holding out a hand. He seemed the oldest of the three and had a darker complexion than his two companions. Like the man on his right, he was wearing a red enamel star in his lapel.
McColl passed them across and waited while the three men examined them.
“Which of you is McColl?” the middle one eventually asked, making the name sound like a glottal stop.
“I am. And whom am I addressing?”
All three looked surprised, by either the impudence or the fact that someone might not know. “This is Citizen Semashko,” the middle one said, indicating the weasel-faced man on his right. “And this is Citizen Volkhov,” he added, turning to the bulky, red-nosed man on his left. “And my name is Strakhov, Arkady Strakhov. We are the Emergency Defense Committee of the Ashkhabad Soviet,” he concluded his introduction, with an admirable lack of self-importance. He turned to McColl’s companion. “You are Cheselden?”
The latter looked to McColl for guidance.
“My partner does not speak Russian,” McColl told them.
“But he does speak German?”
“Yes. And French.”
Strakhov ran a hand through his thinning black hair. He looked Armenian to McColl, but the name was Russian. “So why have you come to Ashkhabad?” Strakhov asked. “To spy out the land for your army in Persia?”
McColl smiled and spoke slowly. “There are very few British troops in Persia, and there is absolutely no possibility of their crossing the border without the permission of the Russian government.”
“You are expecting an invitation?” the one on the left—Semashko—asked sarcastically.
“We have been allies for almost four years in the war against the Germans and the Turks. Would it be so strange if we joined forces against an invasion of Turkestan?”
“A month ago no,” Strakhov said, “but our government has made it clear that we are no longer at war.”
McColl had heard in Teheran that the Bolshevik negotiator Trotsky had informed his German counterpart that Russia was adopting a “neither war nor peace” policy, which raised any number of questions. “I was not aware that a peace treaty has been signed,” he told the three men, hoping that was still the case.
