Berezovo

by A J Allen

  “There are no blind spots at all?” he asked quietly.

  Sverchkov shook his head.

  “No. I climbed up and had a look myself, while the guard had gone off for a piss. You can see for over two versts in every direction. Probably more.”

  “But Dimitri, you still managed to get up there,” Trotsky insisted. “That shows that their back is turned occasionally.”

  “It’s no use, Lev. He was gone maybe five minutes, no more. Not long enough to get clear of the town, if that’s what you’re thinking. The Colonel is right. No one escapes from here, at least not until Winter is over.”

  “And by the time Spring comes,” said Trotsky bitterly, “we shall be far beyond the tree line, freezing ourselves to death in Obdorskoye.”

  Sverchkov was about to reply when he looked over Trotsky’s shoulder and frowned. The buzz of conversation from the groups around them begin to falter and die. In the silence that followed there came the sound of an embarrassed cough. Turning his head, Trotsky saw Roshkovsky standing in the doorway. Still inwardly wounded by Sverchkov’s unwelcome news he was grateful for this distraction. Excusing himself, he went to greet the land surveyor but instead of entering the lounge, Roshkovsky led him away until they were standing at the top of the broad staircase that led down to the vestibule.

  “I didn’t realise there were quite so many of you,” Roshkovsky said apologetically. “That makes everything rather awkward.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, some of the townsfolk wondered if you would be their guest at dinner tonight, here in the Hotel,” he explained. “I happened to mention that I was coming to see you when I was in the general store and I suppose…”

  “They want to come and gawk at us, is that it?”

  Roshkovsky shrugged and muttered a few words of apology.

  “It’s only natural, I suppose,” responded Trotsky. “We are just as curious about them. But a dinner tonight is out of the question. Your Colonel Izorov had told us that we have to be back in our cells by four o’ clock, otherwise…”

  Lifting his forefinger and thumb, he mimed the cocking and firing of a pistol.

  “I see,” said Roshkovsky. “What a pity.”

  “It’s probably for the best,” Trotsky assured him. “We should all get as much rest as we can before we continue our journey.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Trotsky hesitated, watching the man closely.

  “Perhaps if the invitation was transferred, say, to lunch? I am sure that some of us would be only too happy to accept, on the understanding that we are your guests. I am afraid that none of us are in a position to return your hospitality. Nor will be for some time to come.”

  Roshkovsky brushed this consideration to one side.

  “Of course not! There’s no need to mention it. If you will give me a few minutes, I shall take your proposal to the general store. In any event I would like to extend my invitation to you and any two of your friends who would like to join me.”

  Having politely thanked him for his invitation, Trotsky watched as the land surveyor descended the stairs and left the hotel. Then, returning to the hubbub in the lounge, he sought out the woman with the deep auburn hair who earlier had been introduced to him as one of the leaders of the local Mensheviki.

  “Comrade Karseneva?” he asked quietly as he drew her to one side. “What can you tell me about your Andrei Roshkovsky?”

  Chapter Four

  Monday 12th February

  Berezovo, Northern Siberia

  Fyodor Gregorivich looked on approvingly as the dining room began to fill up with each table including a strange mixture of local citizens and their “visitors” from the convoy. None of the more prosperous townsfolk who now were playing host to the “visitors” had been present at the Council banquet the previous day and they appeared determined not to be outdone in treating their guests to whatever dish took their fancy. He did not suppose that any of the exile’s illustrious predecessors – neither Prince Menshikov in 1728 nor Count Ostermann in 1742 – had been so charitably feted. As he watched Andrey Roshkovsky lead his party towards their table, threading their way across the crowded room, the hotel proprietor was relieved to see that Roshkovsky had had the good sense to exclude the local exiles from his luncheon party.

  Taking his place between Sverchkov and Dr. Feit, Trotsky tried to calculate how many months had passed since he had sat at a table dressed with white linen and bearing bottles of wine. Seated opposite them across the lunch table the town was represented by Andrey Roshkovsky (land surveyor), Pavel Nadnikov (grain merchant) and the librarian Maslov. The food was served quickly and, after an awkward beginning, the conversation began to flow naturally, greatly helped by the generous supply of wine. After the topics of travel, the climate and the local topography had been exhausted it was inevitable that the talk should come around to politics and, once their plates had been cleared away and a bottle of Fyodor Gregorivich’s second best brandy placed alongside the pot of coffee, opinions were quietly given free rein, well out of earshot of the police guards stationed by the doors at the far side of the dining room.

  “I’m not saying that things in Petersburg had not got out of hand,” Maslov said at one point, “but it’s different here, you know. That’s what you people fail to understand. You have spent too long at the centre of things, in big cities like Petersburg and Moscow. The majority of the country thinks like us and lives like us.”

  Waving his cigar, he included the other diners in his philosophy.

  “You mean we have become a land of exiles?” asked Sverchkov pointedly.

  “No, of course not!” Maslov replied with a short laugh. “All I am saying is that there is no need to tear everything down, just because of a few bad bricks.”

  “But you’re wrong, can’t you see that?” urged Sverchkov. “It’s because the very foundations of the building are rotten that the house is caving in. Just rearranging the tiles on the roof, or replacing the odd brick won’t change anything. You have to knock the whole building down and build a new one, discarding the bricks you don’t need.”

  “You won’t find many who will agree with you, young man,” rumbled Nadnikov. “Foreigners can say what they like about us Russians, and we are all Russian now, but however much we suffer, we’re patriots first and foremost. And nobody wants to risk everything that he has worked his whole life for by supporting a system of government that has never been tried here before. So, on both counts, once you start talking about knocking everything down, your average citizen will dig his heels in simply because it’s unpatriotic nonsense.”

  “The way I see it,” said Trotsky, “the revolutionary may be the only true patriot.”

  Maslov and Nadnikov both began to protest, but Roshkovsky held up his hand for silence.

  “Go on, please,” he said. “Explain what you mean.”

  “To be a revolutionary,” began Trotsky slowly, “you must, above all, love your land and your people. Because what, after all, is your country but the land and its people? What else can it be? Without them, you are lost; you are nothing. And if you love your country, like you love your sons and daughters, then you only want what is best for it, and that is a very hard thing to achieve. It means getting rid of a system of government, a way of doing things that shackles it to the bad old days of the past. A system of government and a ruling class which says ‘This is not your country at all, it is ours.’”

  Matching Maslov’s earlier gesture, he waved his hand to take in the exiles that sat at the tables around them. “Can you doubt that any of us are not prepared to sacrifice everything, our families, our homes, our freedom, our very lives if needs be, to bring about a better Russia? We love our country deeply but we want it to be a place where there is freedom, peace and justice, and beauty, and work, and health for everyone. If you doubt me, if you still require proof of the depth of our commitment to our country, then just look around you.”

  At the far end of the table Dr
. Feit puffed approvingly on his pipe.

  “Most public shows of patriotism are not genuine love of country but nationalist twaddle,” he interjected. “Personally I have no time for nationalism – it is the whore of political ideologies, willing to get in bed with anyone who offers to sate its appetite for imaginary privileges – but I recognise that in many people the thirst for freedom from want, and from poverty, and from fear manifests itself as longing for independent nationhood. ‘When we are an independent country everything will be better!’ and so forth. Time and again History has shown this to be a false promise, a blood stained illusion, yet people still go on believing it. They hark back to ancient kingdoms and wave forbidden flags. As if a flag ever fed the hungry! What they don’t realise is that it is the system they are living under, the capitalist system where man treads on man, that is responsible for their unhappiness, if you get rid of the foreign rulers but keep the same system then you are just exchanging one band of robbers for another. But, yes, I recognise that if you define patriotism as a deep love of one’s land and its people, then our commitment to the future should be regarded as patriotism.”

  “And in the name of this patriotism,” Nadnikov retorted, “you are prepared to rob banks, kill ministers, and terrorise innocent people? Where is your ‘justice’ then? What about the attacks on the police? How can you defend them when you talk about peace?”

  Dr Feit smiled wolfishly at the librarian, his pipe clenched firmly between his teeth. As a Socialist Revolutionary he was more than content with the principle of liquidating the agents of the oppressor.

  “That is not our doing,” said Trotsky, shooting the Doctor a warning glance. “I would never support a movement that relied on crime or the bomb. After all, we are communists, not gangsters, whatever you may think. Why should we put our trust in guns, when we have a far more powerful weapon: the Russian people itself and all the other peoples that constitute the Empire?”

  “Ah!” cried Maslov, pointing at him accusingly. “But you still support terrorism, don’t you? Even though you might not do it yourself.”

  “No!” said Trotsky truthfully. “The Social Democratic Labour Party supports the right of the working class to defend itself, which is not the same thing at all. Of course we understand the causes, the frustrations that give rise to the impulse to strike back. But none of us believes that terrorism is the way to go about effecting a permanent change. All it does is provide an unproductive distraction and provoke a reaction that makes the oppression even worse. If you like, it is just knocking off the occasional slate, instead of the whole roof.”

  “If you want to find the real terrorists,” broke in Sverchkov excitedly, “don’t look at us, look at the police! They’re the ones behind the massacres. For every policeman or government official killed, literally hundreds if not thousands of workers have been brutally murdered. Remember Bloody Sunday? How many policemen died then? None! How many troops? None! Remember October 1905? In the same month that we were finally promised a proper constitution, four thousand Jews were slaughtered. Four thousand, in the space of a single month!”

  “Ah well,” Nadnikov said with a shrug. “Jews. That’s different.”

  “They were still citizens of the Empire,” said Dr. Feit, “and human beings. Remember the massacres at Gamel and Vilna? In Bialystok, they were hanging them from lampposts.”

  “Bialystok is in Poland,” protested Maslov. “They’re always rioting. Stick to the point!”

  “But that is the point,” insisted Dr Feit. “The peoples of the Russian empire are not, and have never been, held together by love of the Motherland or loyalty to the Tsar but by an iron hoop of violence and despotism. The very same boot that crushed that unhappy country is crushing us. What about the murders at Kiev or Nikolaiev? At Alexandrovsk or Tsarizyne or Vologda? The list is endless. We Socialists aren’t the real terrorists.”

  Until this moment, their host had kept his counsel. Now, despite himself, Roshkovsky interrupted the Doctor.

  “But Doctor, on each of the occasions you have mentioned, it was the Black Hundreds who were to blame, not the police.”

  Inwardly Trotsky smiled, recognizing the land surveyor’s ploy. From what he had learnt from Karseneva and from observing the land surveyor across the table, Roshkovsky was being disingenuous. He knew very well what the Doctor’s reply would be and, rather than go on record as saying it himself, he was prompting one of the “visitors” to say it for him.

  “The answer is quite simple,” said Trotsky before the Doctor could reply. “Ask yourself who controls the Black Hundreds? Do you think that Dubrovin acts on his own, without checking with the police first? Behind every droujina there is a police captain, or a man like your Colonel Izorov, egging them on, making sure that there are no police patrols inconveniently in the area. Why, half the Black Hundreds are just policeman off duty.”

  “You don’t know Kostya Izorov, my young friend,” Nadnikov said warmly. “He’s just as tough a nut with that lot as he is with you exiles.”

  “That may be,” Trotsky agreed. “I hope he is. Equality before the law is something we have long given up hoping for. But what I say still stands. Don’t just take my word for it: remember what Prince Vrossoff said last year in the Duma? He said that General Komissoroff had boasted to him that the police were in a position to start a pogrom when and how they pleased ‘With ten men or with ten thousand if needs be’. Those were his exact words. He also revealed that the very printing press that proclaimed the Reaction was to be found… guess where? In the cellars of the Central Police Headquarters. Time after time the pattern repeats itself. The broadsheets appear, giving full warning of what has been planned and inciting the mob to violence. The police do nothing about this. A few hours before the pogrom starts the police are withdrawn, ostensibly needed for unforeseen ‘special duties’ elsewhere. The pogrom begins, and then after they have murdered a few hundred people, back come the police. They ride in, arrest the few Jews that are still left standing and announce that ‘order has been restored’. This isn’t our propaganda, just what Prince Vrossof said, and the world knows he’s not a revolutionary. And he went on to say something else, something with which I agree wholeheartedly. He said that it’s in the bloodstream now, and it’s been contaminating state policy for the last twenty years. The Tsar’s government has become a death machine.”

  The vehemence of this last remark cast a shadow over the table, and for a moment nobody spoke. At length, Maslov said gloomily:

  “You can say what you like. Things are going to get much worse before they get better. The trouble with us is that we are all too fatalistic. That’s where your grand design falls down.”

  Nadnikov drained his glass and stood up.

  “Alexander Vissarionovich is right,” he announced sourly. “The country needs a rest, and so do I. Good afternoon Alexander Vissarionovich, Andrey Vladimovich, gentlemen.”

  With this brief farewell and a stiff bow, the merchant turned on his heel and marched away from the table.

  “Was it something I said?” joked Trotsky.

  “Don’t worry about Pavel Stepanovich,” advised Maslov. “He’s just worried that one day the Revolution will break out again and commandeer all his grain. Someone once said, a foreigner I think it was, that Russians have the bodies of Caucasians and the souls of Tartars. They were wrong of course. We have the souls of small shopkeepers who can’t see even the shortest distance beyond their own serving counter. Let’s have another drink.”

  Dr. Feit held out his glass. When it was filled, he toasted the librarian.

  “There’s a lot in what you say,” he said gravely. “The trouble with most of the People is that they are too scared. There is too much fear, not only of the police and the unrest, but of taking the risk to change things for the better, though we all know that we can’t go on as we are now. What is capitalism after all, but a system where the worst of all people, operating for the worst of all motives, lay claim to producing th
e best of all worlds.”

  “The same might one day be said of Socialism,” murmured Roshkovsky.

  “No, my friend, you are wrong,” replied Dr. Feit. “On two counts. Firstly, whatever happens under Socialism, the majority of the people will be materially better off. Of that there is no doubt. That is the very thing that scares your friend Nadnikov. And secondly, anybody who believes in the progress of Mankind, as we do, has the one gift that our oppressors will never have. That gift is the power of imagination.”

  “Oh, anyone can dream,” said Maslov wistfully, staring at his glass. “Even I dream.”

  “The Doctor doesn’t mean just daydreams,” Trotsky said. “Socialism is about more than that, just as it is about more than fighting for a decent wage and better living conditions. It’s a creative process. Allow me to give you an example.”

  Reaching across the lunch table he began spreading out some of the empty glasses.

  “On our way here,” he continued, “for some of the journey we followed the course of the Ob. Now the Ob proper, as you know, is formed by the union of the two smaller rivers, the Biya and the Katun. By my reckoning, by the time it gets to pass here, Berezovo, most of it must be frozen for about four or five months of the year.”

  He glanced at Roshkovsky, who gave a nod of confirmation.

  “Go on,” said the land surveyor.

  “Well, as I say, it’s formed by two smaller rivers, thousands of versts away to the south, in an area which is badly watered, if not virtually desert. And it empties into the Arctic Ocean which is closed by ice for two thirds of the year and therefore useless during these months as a trade route.”

  “Yes,” Roshkovsky interrupted him. “But there are plans to get around that. People are now saying that if a railway was built between Obdorsk and Archangel, all the trade that has to go through the Central Siberian districts would be able to travel straight to the European markets via the Baltic.”