Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  On my way down Moskovsky Prospect toward Skorokhod, I encountered a crowd of unemployed workers protesting before a closed factory. As I grew closer, I read their signs. BOLSHEVIKS—ANSWER BEFORE THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE FOR YOUR CRIMES! and SOVIETS WITHOUT COMMUNISTS!

  Soviets Without Communists! I trembled with the boldness of it. After years of hardship, of Red Terror, of incompetence and arrogance and spacemen, Bukharin’s ABCs, Krasnaya Gazeta’s baying for blood, shuttered factories, and dead buildings, a tiny crack of hope bloomed in the crusty snow of the Moskovsky District. My eyes bulged from their sockets. Soviets Without Communists! Proletarians daring to protest the so-called Proletarian Dictatorship. A year ago that would have been unimaginable. It reminded me of that day in March 1917, in Znamenskaya Square, when we’d watched the Volynsky guards arrive on their blooded horses. These brave, desperate workers—they had had enough. They were going to be arrested. They were going to be executed. Yet they stood up with their signs.

  Thank God Skorokhod’s ugly brick building was still open. “I didn’t know if you’d still be here,” I said to my students, putting down the books I’d brought for them.

  “You should have been here yesterday,” said my young poet, Yeva. “We stopped work. Demanded category one rations, and a pair of boots for every family.”

  “Our own kids don’t have boots. I gotta keep ’em home from school,” said outspoken Irina. “We go from one office to the next, begging to get a boot ration for our own kids. For what we make with our own two hands!” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her dye-stained hand. “What Communist have you ever seen without boots?”

  “They get a galoshes ration,” agreed Galya. “Every year.”

  I wasn’t sure that was precisely true, but the inequality rankled more than the sheer scarcity.

  Irina leaned over her poems in the freezing committee room. “They sit up there, faces plastered with makeup, telling you no, your kids aren’t good enough to get boots, get back to work. She closed the counter right in my face!”

  “It wasn’t this bad under the emperor,” said Polya, a believer whose poems were about a village called Pocha. “We never starved like this before. The Bolsheviks just want us to go off and die so they don’t have to feed us.”

  Her comment weighed on me. Not this bad under the emperor. All that had happened, all our hopes, our hard work, had brought us to this? A starving worker wishing for the return of the tsar. But there was another way: Soviets Without Communists! I once thought that only the Bolsheviks had the will to bring us this far. But now we’d reached the end of that road. The Bolsheviks had revealed themselves for what they were, vicious opportunists who were single-mindedly interested in gathering all power into their own hands. For their own benefit. The greengrocer with our heads on sale. I had the women write poems about their own aching, wise hands.

  The Vikzhel club buzzed with angry men. There wasn’t an empty seat in the low-ceilinged rooms. Everyone shouted at once, the air grown unbreathably smoky. An old man, Rodzevich, greeted me. “Welcome to the ‘school for Communism’” he sneered, his teeth splayed in his lined mouth. “Like it?”

  “A school for Communism?”

  “That’s what they’re calling us in the papers. That’s what they’re saying a union’s for. So we can dust off the chair for some fat Bolshevik to sit down and tell us what to do.”

  “It’s Bukharin—you tell a snake by its bite.”

  The ABC of Communism. I remembered it well. I would remember it until the day I died.

  The men showed me the article in Petrogradskaya Pravda, a piece on the usefulness of unions—to help teach the worker about Communism. That was the official line now. I knew the argument—if the proletarian state was already the true voice of the proletariat, the worker had no need of protection from their own state. It was a clear threat to the independent power of the unions, and Vikzhel, the railway union, was the most prominent, the last one with any real power. Lobachevsky, a fitter and one of the worst poets, a Vikzhel organizer, called out from his chair. “Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t Bukharin. This is coming right from the top. You think Lenin’s not behind every word? Not a goddamn sparrow falls, brother.”

  I put my books down on the table at the head of the room. I had a feeling there wouldn’t be much poetry written here tonight. One of the younger men and a sharp rhymester, Markel, put a cup of hot tea into my hands. “Bukharin’s saying the union’s role is to ‘educate the worker, pass along party policy,’ and make goddamn sure he knows his place. The hell with what we want.” He pulled a pamphlet from his jacket pocket and tapped the headline: The Workers’ Opposition, by Alexandra Kollontai. It called for worker control in the factory and in the party. “We’re gearing up for the Tenth Party Congress. We’re going to fight this.”

  What the Vikzhel men were so angry about was a new tactic by Trotsky to weaken the unions. He’d called for further labor militarization, the strict discipline of the army transferred into the factories, to revitalize production and restore our broken economy. I’d agree, that things were desperate. Trotsky had brought back discipline in the army, abandoning early principles of soldier democracy and returning to the old model of ranks and capital punishment. It had won us the civil war, why not the economy? But there was infinitely more at stake here than simple efficiency. After all, what was a Soviet government without worker control? Slavery. Without their unions, the workers would have no voice except outright revolt.

  “What does Trotsky know about how to run a train, just because he rode on one? How does he know how to run a factory?” Lobachevsky bellowed. “The Bolsheviks got a lot of theories but they can’t run a corner grog shop.”

  “They can kiss my Red ass,” said the old man.

  I remembered the left opposition, Kommunist, back in the old days. That was Bukharin. Now he was the status quo and Kollontai was forming some kind of worker resistance group. This one the Bolsheviks couldn’t blame on the Whites. The civil war was over, and now the Workers’ Opposition wanted the party to make good on its promises for worker control and Soviet democracy.

  Lobachevsky leaned to one side and spit a mouthful of sunflower-seed shells onto the debris-strewn floor. “I’ve been a Bolshevik since ’09, but I’m about ready to tear up my party card. That little dictator’s got something coming if this union has anything to say about it. Wait until that armored train of his ends up on a spur at Gatchina.”

  That got a laugh. Everyone remembered when Vikzhel shunted the tsar’s train around the countryside when he’d tried to get back to Petrograd and stop the unfolding revolution. But Trotsky’s train had won the civil war. I couldn’t reconcile my love of the revolution and certain of its leaders with my disgust with what they, and we, had become.

  “Ever seen convict labor, Comrade?” said Lobachevsky. “Go into the factories. That’s your so-called militarization of labor. How it works is this: they close down the factory, get rid of the ‘troublemakers’—meaning union men—then they reopen and march the workers in, under guard. Special factory committees, only nobody elected ’em. They watch the benches all day long. Poor bastards too hungry to lift a hammer? They’ll call it a stoppage and shoot ’em.”

  I thought of my women at Skorokhod. They’d already had a stoppage. “Nobody got shot at Skorokhod.”

  “Guess they haven’t reorganized it yet,” said Markel. “Metal first, electrical. They shot a guy this week at Dinamo.”

  Dinamo!

  “It’s that little yid,” said Lobachevsky. “He’s gotten so used to running the army, he thinks he can run labor the same way.”

  “I’m a Jew,” said Markel.

  “I’m not talking about Jews,” said the organizer. “I’m talking about Trotsky.” He threw a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth, crunched on them angrily. “‘If you ain’t got bosses, whaddya need unions for?’ Except we do have bosses. We got the whole goddamn Communist Party sitting on our necks. I’m going to th
e Tenth Congress, and if they vote against us, I’m going to tear up my party card in their faces.”

  The country was turning against the Bolsheviks. Not furtive reactionary fliers in the street, not poems about heads and rutabagas, but workingmen moving into open rebellion. I felt dizzy, excited, and terrified all at once. The Workers’ Opposition had revealed a fundamental flaw in the Communist ABCs. If the party and the advanced proletariat weren’t identical, if the workers were ready to throw the Communist Party overboard from the ship of socialism, then the theory was incorrect. We didn’t need the Bolsheviks to build our socialist state.

  But what would the party do? They would never allow the workers to dictate to them. They would do something—demonize the unions, break their backs. Shoot the leaders, and turn the workers into virtual slaves.

  Yet—though I wouldn’t say so in this angry hall—I could see the other side of the argument as well. The country was broken. Jesus Christ couldn’t make it run at this point. I could see the dilemma Trotsky found himself in. The Bolsheviks had to get our factories running somehow, and worker control was fractious and time-consuming. It could never be as nakedly efficient as it would be with specialists running it, and soldiers to stand over the worker with rifles. Democracy was never the most efficient way to run things. It took time, and people could be wrong too. But it was just as Mandelstam had said—once you sold your soul to the devil, just try getting it back again.

  “Comrade Marina, we want you to help us write a poem,” Lobachevsky declared. “About all this.” He pounded his table and shouted, “Shut up! We’re writing now.”

  They got out paper and licked their pencils, and waited. Was this happening to Gumilev in his groups? The Vikzhel men were in revolt, and they were asking me to help them write slogans. What if there were a Cheka agent here? What if Lobachevsky himself was an agent provocateur? I had been in that cell at Gorokhovaya 2. I knew what was waiting for those who opposed the regime.

  And yet, if this unrest could turn the revolution back to what it was supposed to be, if it could restore Soviet democracy, it wasn’t counterrevolution, it was the revolution. The one we had fought for. During the civil war, every voice in Russia that didn’t belong to the party—and the upper party at that—had been silenced one by one. These men were entering dangerous territory, and they were asking me to help them.

  How Varvara would love to see me back in Cheka hands. Smearing the House of Arts in the process, she would probably win some award. If I were arrested, there would be no one to rescue me. An agitator, daughter of a well-known Kadet executed for treason? Fomenting counterrevolution among the disgruntled workers? She would stamp me out like a lit match. What could the House poets do for me then? Hold a poets’ stoppage? Put their pens down? They didn’t have the massive reach of the railway union. I wished I could talk to Gorky, to Gumilev, but it was too late to ask for advice. The Vikzhel men wanted me now.

  How could I refuse? I had to put my trust, not for the first time, in them.

  The prolet’s chained to the fact’ry bench

  The union’s got the gag

  The ration’s down to begging scraps

  The country’s dressed in rags.

  But your commissar, he rides in cars,

  His girlfriend’s dressed in minks,

  They tell you now the union’s dead,

  It ain’t the streets that stink.

  51 Pushkin Days

  Pressure was building, not just in the factories but in our refuge, our beleaguered ark. After the poem by Browning No. 215,745 appeared in Krasnaya Gazeta, the newly reorganized Petrograd Narkompros—Commissariat of Enlightenment—threw the hammer at us. It found the House of Arts lacking in public zeal, pointed out what we did not yet have—no music course, no art workshop, only a hundred students actually attending classes out of the three hundred on the books. Never mind the impossible conditions, the brutal weather that might have discouraged participants. They questioned our financial affairs, the art auctions—wasn’t that akin to private trade? I just had to pray no one discovered my collusion with Vikzhel’s defiant rhymesters. As it was, Krasnaya Gazeta made our art sales out to be almost a black market—never mind that we used the money for events and books. Our House manager came under special scrutiny—they recommended the Cheka examine the dealings of our canteen. Luckily for him, the turmoil of the streets delayed action in our direction. Zinoviev evidently had his hands full with industrial havoc and worker demonstrations. Soviets Without Communists!—it felt like it had just before the February Revolution. And it was February again—the significance escaped no one.

  Meanwhile, I turned twenty-one, and was touched by a small celebration in the House canteen, hatched by my friends. How could I have forgotten, that day by the river, how many people considered me part of their lives? There was a potato-peel cake and the stub of a candle Sasha had carved into the shape of a cone on a sphere on a cube. He gave me an ink drawing—of me, bent over my desk, writing by lamplight, clutching my hair. Dunya embroidered a handkerchief with a willow tree. Anton even wrote me a poem, full of jokes and inside references. The first initials of the lines spelled out Marina My Madness.

  A far more significant occasion was the Pushkin anniversary, February 23, 1921, when literary Petrograd turned out during a snowstorm for its celebration of the anniversary of the poet’s death. It wasn’t a major milestone, the eighty-fourth, but it was a time of anniversaries—the winter was thick with them, like mushrooms in soggy loam. We needed something right now to connect our past with our present, some justification of the continuance of culture.

  Pushkin was not a neutral choice. Yes, he was our greatest artist, but more importantly, his name in particular resonated with overtones of freedom of thought and expression. His genius was both our shield and our sword. Most of the institutions took part, seizing the chance to close ranks against the snapping dogs of the Left.

  Our House of Arts elders were on the presidium that night: Kuzmin, Sologub, Blok, Gumilev. Even Akhmatova came out of hiding, marking the gravity of the event. She was very erect, gaunt, thin cheeked—she had been starving as much as the rest of us, but she bore it with greater dignity. I saw her speaking with Gumilev—it was uncanny, a moment in history. I wish Solomon Moiseivich had been there to capture it. He took her hand. Although they probably had once fought like wildcats, that night they sat side by side, the very picture of nobility.

  There were other speakers, but the only one anyone remembered was Alexander Alexandrovich Blok. The hall at the House of Writers wasn’t large, but it was larger than ours, and packed like a tin of smelts. I stood in the back with Anton and Oksana and Arseny and Tereshenko—we’d been lucky to squeeze in—and could just see Blok’s suffering head and cropped curls as he began his speech, listed in the program as “The Mission of the Poet.” Innocuous enough.

  But within the first paragraph, I saw that he was skating right for the patch where the ice was thinnest. Freedom against tyranny, freedom of the artist. He posed the name of Pushkin against all the other names that history preserved—“the somber names of emperors, generals, inventors of instruments of murder, names of torturers and martyrs of life, and together with them, the radiant name Pushkin.”

  No one failed to understand the message. I could see people in the audience nodding, or clutching each other’s arms in shock. No one blinked. No one coughed. How far would he go?

  He was not an orator of the Mayakovsky type, he was a poet whose foot barely made a print in snow. But his words held thunder enough. He began to explain that it was often painful just thinking about Pushkin, because the poet’s course had been that of an artist whose endeavor, an inward endeavor—culture—“was all too often disrupted by the interference of people for whom a stove pot is more precious than God.”

  Even the angels held their breaths. He began speaking about the “rabble.” We knew he was referring to the Pushkin poem “The Poet and the Mob,” but would the Proletcultists know that? Blok w
as playing a dangerous game. His revolutionary poem “The Twelve” had been misunderstood by readers on the right and on the left—but like Pushkin, Blok had had to keep his inner freedom and pursue his inward task.

  He did his best to explain. The rabble didn’t mean the common people, who simply didn’t have the education—that wasn’t what Pushkin was referring to—but those who claimed to serve culture. Critics, censors, boors who believed poetry could be used for some outer purpose, who tried to insert themselves between the poet and his inner freedom.

  I clapped my hand to my mouth so I would not cry out. I must not gasp. He was putting his head in the guillotine.

  Luckily, he began to elucidate his theories of poetry in a labyrinthine way, which lost many of the journalists, for who besides the poets could follow what Blok meant about chaos and cosmos and sound? They were all waiting for more comments on Pushkin and his relationship to the bureaucrats who censored his work and played such havoc with his life, with the thinly veiled comparison to our own increasing unfreedom.

  I could hear the old wall clock tick whenever he paused in that crowded room. No one so much as shifted; though his voice wasn’t loud, no one even exhaled for the twenty minutes during which he spoke. I believed Blok didn’t think he was talking about politics but about vulgarity, and the poet’s inner freedom, which had nothing to do with politics. But he was not a naive man. Be careful where you read that. He had been dealing with the Soviet bureaucracy for years, and had been pummeled by the ignorant reactions on both the right and the left to “The Twelve,” his poem about the Red Guardsmen patrolling the snowy streets of revolutionary Petrograd—with the invisible Christ leading the way.