During the Easter vacation, when we attended Church to cry ‘Christ is Risen!’, and when we exchanged painted eggs, and ate fish and cranberries, I took time off from my studies to accompany the Zinovieff girls and their boy-friends to watch a military display on the Field of Mars. As we looked at the cavalry and the Guards and the streltsi and all the other traditional regiments parading and presenting arms, their banners and flags and pennants fluttering in the first warm winds of Spring, it was simply ridiculous to think any enemy could defeat us. The Tsar was not present at this particular display, but his portrait dominated the event and we all cheered it mightily and sang the National Anthem:
God Save Our Tsar!
Rule for Our Glory!
And terrorise Our Enemies!
Orthodox Tsar!
I had become rather lugubrious, I think, from reading too much. This event lifted my spirits and I became quite gay, agreeing to go with the Zinovieffs and their fiancés later that week to a performance of Tchekoff’s famous Three Sisters. What a mistake! I was never more bored in my life.
In spite of the War, the revolutionaries were out in force. Jews and Masons, saboteurs and wreckers, continued to incite the honest people to strike. Cossacks were from time to time forced to make a show of strength, though few people were hurt. Feeling against the Reds grew as the news from the Front became grimmer. More ‘brown-coats’ - political police - paid visits to the school. I was completely above suspicion. The fact that I was unpopular with the young radicals counted in my favour. Dr Matzneff, however, was frequently questioned. He would sometimes emerge from these sessions looking pale and extremely distracted.
There were more and more soldiers coming and going in the city: marching troops, military trains, artillery teams clattering through the streets, large guns being transported on wagons to and from the station. The papers at one time made a great deal of Kiev being threatened and swore that the Germans would ‘never take our Mother City!’ The War had almost ceased to be one in which various allies fought various other allies. It had taken on the nature of a Patriotic War, like the war against Napoleon. Increasingly the newspapers harked back to this. Since the Germans did not take Kiev, I did not worry very much and was in the main unmoved by the War news. Kiev could never come to harm and even if the Germans occupied it, my mother and Esmé would not suffer. There was a good deal said of rape, crucifixion and wholesale murder and looting by German troops, but I did not expect such things to happen in Kiev, even if they happened elsewhere. The Germans, I knew, were an orderly, scientific people. I was not completely undisturbed by the thought of our Mother City being entered by Teutons. But the original founders came from Northern Europe in the first place. Better Teutons than Turks or Tatars.
The Petersburg spring arrived. It was greeted by the entire population as if Jesus had created a miracle! It was true that the famous ‘crystal days’ of the winter were the only positive factor in favour of the months between October and April, but I, coming from the South, could hardly believe it when that pathetic Baltic spring filled the hearts of the citizens with so much joy. Wading through dirty slush in felt overshoes, having miniature green buds pointed out to me, being shown some already-wilting flower as proof that summer was on the way, watching a demonstration of Futurists, in orange top-hats and yellow frock-coats, marching along the centre of the Nevski holding placards announcing the death of art, the end of ’the greater illiteracy’ and so on, was one of the most disappointing times of my life. I had been led to expect a great deal more. For me, St Petersburg was at her most beautiful in the mist. Then all but the great buildings were obscured and the trees looked like petrified, many-tendrilled Martians forming a guard of honour for the few of us who chose to walk the boulevards and parks. The blocks of flats and offices, set back from the Prospects, became natural cliffs, orderly and quiet and completely devoid of life. This impression was best gained in the early mornings of spring. In the evening, the yellow gaslight and electricity (including the multi-coloured advertising signs) would make every building a cave in which denizens crowded around their fires and plotted forays into the world. In this most artificial of all cities, this forerunner of the great housing estates and high-rise pseudo-towns of the modern world, boredom seemed endemic. As the War went on, little theatres and cabaret bars proliferated and crime and vandalism, violent terrorism and morbid ‘modern’ art were at their peak. Police and soldiers appeared in even greater numbers but revolutionary literature poured from secret presses. The police and soldiers had become as corrupt as their masters, and were everywhere held at bay, by profiteer and Red alike, by the greased palm or the threat of death. Jewish agitators knew how to wheedle their way round their ‘comrades’ the soldiers; and Jewish speculators knew where to find the weaknesses in their ‘friends’ the police and politicians. The Russian people were being sold back into slavery by the very men employed to protect them.
For my part, of course, I knew very little of this at the time. I studied. Even through the Summer vacation I continued to study. It was a joy to learn from Dr Matzneff. He evidently got great pleasure from teaching me. He swore to me that he would make up for the injustices I had suffered. He appeared to focus all his idealism upon me. I believe he made enemies amongst the pupils and staff as a result. He encouraged me in every field of learning. He encouraged me to think for myself; to speculate. As the end of the year exams arrived, he told me I had no need to fear them, for I was bound to pass. And pass them I did (they were chiefly oral). I would leave the Institute with flying colours, Dr Matzneff told me. If I kept up my studies as well as I did, a diploma was assured. I would be a qualified engineer and ready to begin working for a firm.
As groups of students, we visited factories. These were in the nature of ’field trips’. We saw foundries, with their scarlet crucibles of steel, their rivers of liquid metal, their sweating, dark-skinned workers. We went to locomotive plants. We saw how weaving machines and printing presses were made. Only the armaments plants were restricted to us. We went to see motor-cars reassembled. Most of these trips were of little interest to me. I had learned far more with my Armenian boss two years before than I learned here. In Kiev I had been expected to do the work, not watch it from a distance while scowling men made comments about ‘gentlemen workers’. By the students of the military academies, who regarded themselves as the elite of St Petersburg’s youth, we were known simply as ‘blue meat’. We were not, in their eyes, gentlemen at all. We knew better than to clash with these cadets. Not only could they rally greater numbers, but they were better favoured by police and soldiers who would always take their part. Every one of the cadets was well-connected. They were often already Princes and Counts.
I returned to Kiev for the Christmas holiday and found Esmé older-seeming, while my mother had made a good recovery.
She was still something of an invalid and had continued to hire her interest in the laundry to a friend. Esmé now worked at the nearby grocery shop. She had hoped I would have stories to tell her of Petrograd as I had had stories of Odessa, but I had to admit I led a dull life, with my books, and that, with Dr Matzneff’s help, I was getting on well. She said she was pleased.
She had become very womanly. I asked her, as a joke, if she had a boyfriend as yet. She blushed, saying she was waiting for someone. I wished her good luck in her hunting.
The holiday was quickly over. I returned to Petrograd in a second-class carriage shared with one other student and several junior officers, all ex-cadets who had received their first commissions and were planning how to win the War. They were elated because we had recently made one or two victories in Poland. It seemed the German invader was on the run. The news from France was bad. Hundreds of thousands of people were being killed. It appeared to my fellow student (he was at University and rather superior about it) that the world would go on fighting forever until it was one vast battlefield and the world’s population was eventually dead in a trench of gas or shrapnel-wounds. I was not
interested in defeatist talk and joined the junior officers in condemning him for his cynicism. He came quite close to being punched. For a little while I left the compartment and tried to get served in the restaurant, but the food was already exhausted. I had to go into the lavatory and eat the sausage and potatoes my mother had given me.
Because of the difficulties of travelling, I had been forced to leave Kiev on my birthday. Thus I celebrated it sitting on a wooden lavatory seat in a cold, slow train which jolted over every sleeper, eating a piece of inferior salami and half-frozen potato. Needless to say, I would not be the only Russian looking back on the winter of 1916 as something of a Golden Era!
Arriving at my lodgings I was greeted by a weeping landlady and two grinning daughters. They had made their conquests and were officially engaged to their beaux: the elder, Olga, to a corn-chandler called Pavloff, the younger, Vera, to a travelling salesman representing the Gritski Soft Drink and Mineral Water Company. Thus, within a year, they had given up dreams of Eugene Onyegin and had settled for a couple of wage-earners with a potential future. What both these husbands did after 1917 I do not know. Presumably, if he was good, one would remain a manager in the State Corn Division (with an appropriately ugly name like Statcorndiv) and continue to short-weight his customers whenever there was corn to sell (which would not be often). The other might represent the Statminsoftdrink Bureau in Leningrad and the Novgorod district, colouring all beverages red. Since he would not have to sell the stuff because it would be the only drink available he would enter the Statminsoftdrink Information Bureau where he would praise the virtues of Communist pop over the decadent Capitalist kind. He would have no real work, a better bread ration, and would risk being shot by the Cheka if the Party Line on soft drinks changed and he was discovered to have praised the virtues of cherryade over raspberryade when it should have been the other way round.
All this was in the future. We still had another year of freedom. A year in which food rationing became more and more stringent, in which the life of the capital began slowly to prefigure the life all would lead under the Reds. At least by paying a little more money from my allowance I was saved the sickly taste of horse-meat. Madame Zinovieff continued to serve the best she could and this was far better than most. She was helped, as so many others were helped, by Green and Grunman. They had once employed her husband. He had been killed on an errand for them in Denmark. My allowance was increased as inflation grew steadily worse. Dr Matzneff continued to give me extra tuition. With the Zinovieff girls working and spending their spare time with their fiancés, I had precious little company. Because of my studying, I had lost the self-confidence necessary to write to Marya Varvorovna, although she filled my fantasies. Her address was still safely kept, as was that of Sergei Andreyovitch. Sometimes, when my eyes grew tired from reading by the light of oil-lamps (both gas and electricity were often rationed and candles were quite hard to find) I would consider getting in touch with them, or even of asking Olga if she could introduce me to a nice girl. But I was too tired. If I stopped reading, I fell immediately asleep. I took the precaution of getting into bed as soon as I had had my supper, so that when I did go to sleep in the middle of a book, at least I did not wake up in the morning wearing my outdoor clothes.
The dreary winter of Petrograd was followed by a dreary spring in which there were further minor demonstrations, further scandal concerning Rasputin and the Court, further large gatherings of Cossacks and police in the streets. There were further visits of ‘brown-coats’ to our school, further news of defeats of our forces. I became incensed by the ludicrous public posturings of the so-called ‘Futurist artists’ who celebrated the Age of the Machine. They could not tell one end of a bicycle from another, and would have been horrified if they had had to spend half-an-hour at work in the grease, fumes and soot of an ordinary factory. The snow turned to dirty slush; the miserable buds poked cautiously forth, the tramlines were taken up from the Neva’s ice, the ‘white nights’ gave way to nights with a peculiar, greenish tinge to them, and the Prospects, so frequently in darkness due to power-cuts, were made scarcely more cheerful by pinch-faced girl thieves of ten years old or less selling withered bunches of violets for extortionate prices and, if no policemen were in hearing, offering their own dirty little private parts for a few kopeks more.
In my tired and somewhat depressed condition, I came to yearn for Odessa, for Katya or even Wanda (who had written once, claiming without proof that I was the father of her ‘lovely, healthy boy’), for the jolly company of Shura, who might now be unemployed because of what I had told our uncle. It is no wonder at all that the poets of Ukraine cease producing their light-hearted, happy, optimistic work the moment they arrive in the capital. Immediately, they begin telling gloomy tales of poverty and death and unjust fate in imitation of the neurotic Dostoieffski and his kind. I began to feel homesick for Kiev, but I was determined to return home with all the proper credentials. I would practise as a fully-qualified engineer with a good firm who would gradually learn my worth and give me a laboratory of my own. I thought of working for the State Aircraft Company, where I could easily have got a job at once, save that I did not possess the ‘official’ scraps of paper proving my abilities.
* * * *
Another Easter. Exchanges of eggs. ‘Christ is Risen!’ The sonorous chanting in the church, the procession, the prayers for our Tsar; for Russia in her struggle against Chaos and Barbarism. We were attacked from every side by Turk and Hun as we had been attacked for centuries. It seemed to me, as I kneeled to pray between the Zinovieff sisters, that the great area of green which was the Russian Empire, one-sixth of the entire globe, could be wiped out overnight, as that Carthaginian Empire had been destroyed. I rose to my feet wondering if it was my duty to join the army, to fight against our enemies, to ensure the future of the Slav people. The mood passed. I was still too young to be an ordinary soldier. This was one of my few experiences of hysterical patriotism. My understanding of the enduring Slav soul was to come many years later. In exile in England I was in a position to compare our virtues with the proud vices of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples. These peoples are materialists through and through, corrupting Science, imbuing it with an orthodoxy which allows no alternative interpretations.
Any idea I had of serving my country as cannon-fodder rather than as a cannon-maker disappeared when I returned to the Institute after Easter to find a third of the students vanished and three professors summarily dismissed. The Okhrana had visited the principal. They had had a list of ‘undesirables’ likely to damage the War Effort, who could be potential spies for the enemy. The outspoken Reds had all gone and for this, of course, I was grateful, but it was when I went into Dr Matzneff’s class I realised my own bad luck. Dr Matzneff had gone. In his place was his rival, the black-bearded, bulky, dark-uniformed Professor Merkuloff, who told me to take a seat at the back of the room and pay attention, for I would be receiving no favouritism from him. My ‘friend Matzneff’ was out of a job and lucky not to be in prison. I was shocked by the open aggression shown by Merkuloff. ‘You will have to study very hard if you want any sort of pass at the end of this year, Kryscheff,’ he added. He knew very well that I was the best student in the whole Institute, that I could discourse on virtually every subject taught there, and many more besides. But now I was faced with his blatant opposition to my advancement. Professor Merkuloff hated Dr Matzneff and hated anyone whom Dr Matzneff seemed to like.
Leaving school that evening, feeling utterly downcast, beginning to wonder if I had been foolish in all my ambitions, I considered going to see Dr Matzneff at his gloomy flat. I knew this would be stupid. The ‘brown-coats’ would be on the look-out for any student who seemed to be hob-nobbing with a suspected traitor. It would mean the end of my own schooling.
I returned to my lodgings where Madame Zinovieff handed me a letter. It had arrived, she said, shortly after I had left. The post, along with all other services, was in a state of parti
al breakdown due to the War.
The letter was from Dr Matzneff. He told me he had been dismissed because in his youth he had shown sympathies with the ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin, the anarchist-intellectuals. His son, as I knew, was in exile in Switzerland, still a violent and outspoken Social Revolutionary. It was only by a miracle he had escaped imprisonment or exile to Siberia.
Dr Matzneff advised me not to contact him unless I was desperate. If I needed to borrow books I should try to borrow them through an intermediary. Then suspicion would not fall upon me. He knew I had no interest in politics. He would be with me in spirit. I should not be down-hearted. If I worked hard there was no reason I should not still be the star pupil at the Polytechnic, triumphing over all difficulties.
Byzantium Endures - [Pyat Quartet 01] Page 21