Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “Did they shoot anybody?” the men called out.

  “Not yet. Over their heads,” she shouted back. “But they’ve got troops coming. Be careful, bratya!”

  That day, the Petrograd Soviet declared martial law. Proclamations were posted everywhere, on every wall, every door. No public meetings, strict nightly curfew, the workers ordered back to their factories on pain of losing their rations. They were going to starve the workers into submission. True to form, they placed the blame on anarchist, Menshevik, and SR counterrevolutionary plots. It couldn’t be the actual workers, with actual grievances and a right to voice them. After three years, you’d think they could have found something better.

  All night, I kept thinking of my Skorokhod women, keeping Anton awake as I tossed and turned. Would they go back to work? Would they ignore the prikazy? I couldn’t stop thinking about the soldiers crossing the bridge, and the terrified, determined faces of the kursanty, and of my little brother—how panicked he must have felt, facing the Red Guard in ’17. I longed to lie down on Iskra’s small grave. I wanted to talk to her. It was the one thing that would never change. She would always be there, just off Moskovsky Prospect, like a lodestone, my Polaris.

  In the morning, I wrapped my scarf up high on my face, squashed the hat down as low as I could, and with just those slits for my eyes, like a bedouin in a sandstorm, I headed out into the wild weather, south, toward the Obvodny Canal and the Novodevichy Convent. In my mind, I could see that big granite four-sided tomb, the side closest to the church where she rested, my redheaded child. I wanted to tuck her in, if only in my mind, to tell her I’m still here.

  But as I neared the canal, I saw troops stationed on the New Moscow Bridge—the exact spot where we’d built fortifications during the Yudenich advance. They looked cold and unhappy. One of the soldiers, bundled to the eyes, stepped forward as I neared the bridge. He pulled down his scarf. “It’s closed,” he said.

  “Has there been trouble?” Had the soldiers forced the workers back to the bench, the way Lobachevsky had described? Or had the workers held out? Then it occurred to me—obviously they’d held out, or the Bolsheviks wouldn’t have sealed off the district. “I’m going to the cemetery. My baby is buried there.”

  “You’ll have to visit some other time,” said the soldier, stamping his feet. “We’ve got our orders.”

  “Has there been shooting?” I asked.

  “Just the usual,” he said. “They go back to the bench and then pop out again, like a bad nail in your shoe. Wah wah, rations and boots, rations and boots. What if everybody did that? I’d like some boots too—who wouldn’t? They need to get back to work so we can all go home.” He replaced his scarf and waved his rifle, indicating I should clear off.

  So the workers were fighting regardless of the threat to withhold rations. What a brave thing. It was clear to anyone that the Bolsheviks weren’t listening. The Workers’ Opposition has been crushed. Not exactly. I gazed across the canal and prayed for my Skorokhod ladies, for Dinamo, the railwaymen, all of them. The workers’ government was preparing to starve the workers into submission. I remembered Anton, sitting at the Katzevs’ table all those years ago, saying, Whoever gets power will find a way to keep it. Sitting on a footstool at the end of the table, wedged between Dunya and Shusha, chain-smoking. Bolshevik, Menshevik, the Committee for the Preservation of Wigs—they’ll set up a nice system of privilege for themselves and their friends…Once you have a concentration of power, you’re screwed no matter who’s in charge.

  Anton had been more prescient than anyone.

  “Would you shoot them, if you were ordered to?” I asked the soldier, his unhappy hard eyes, the frost growing on his scarf from the dampness of his breath.

  “You want me to shoot you, just to see if I can? Get out of here before we both find out.”

  There was no other choice but to return the way I had come, up empty Moskovsky Prospect, passing the sniper’s nest I’d inhabited those days and nights after Iskra’s death. What if someone had told me back then that this was in our future, that after we’d fought back our enemies, there would be worker protests against the government in the very streets of Petrograd. Strikes and kursanty, sentries on the bridges. Would the mothers of those kursanty someday have to receive the kind of letter my parents had, notifying them that their boys had died in a mistaken cause?

  Three years now. I liked to think of Seryozha with Iskra, and Maxim, waiting for me on the other side of a fast, cold river full of ice. I never saw my father with them, though. I only pictured him as he’d been the last time I’d seen him—a corpse, dumped on my doorstep. Or a prisoner in the Troubetskoy Bastion—hungry, beaten. I wanted to remember him in a dinner jacket as he’d been that New Year’s Eve, laughing with his guests, the dimples underneath his beard. Or at home nights in his smoking jacket and Persian cap, pipe clamped between his teeth, consulting his enormous dictionary on its stand, or playing a masters’ chess game out of the paper, studying both sides.

  What a dream this life was. Perhaps Blok was right—we should just listen to the sounds, and write what we could still hear, let the world attend to the things of the world. Anton’s fatalism was his bulwark against the chaos. But my poetic spirit rose up against fate. Fatalism was ignoble. Blok wasn’t talking about fatalism—he said the poet must resonate with every sound, whether he liked it or not. He had to be free to hear it, to absorb it and express it. He was talking about freedom, not fate.

  It was hard work tramping through the uncleared snow, avoiding the holes in the wooden pavement, and I was so weak. Hunger was a paradox—the lighter I became physically, the heavier I felt. The snow whirled around me like a living being. What had been so clear the day of Blok’s speech now was lost in the swirling snow, like his mysterious Christ—tenderly treading through snow-swirls, / hung with threads of snow-pearls, / crowned with snowflake roses…Was caring about the outer world a waste of my consciousness as a poet? Did I hear the sounds? I stopped in the street and heard—nothing. The wind had stopped. I heard only my breath, coming short, and the pounding of my heart. Would Blok be disappointed in me, that I cared so much about the events taking place in our world?

  There had to be something between the rhythms and music of elemental poetry and following my soul’s inner freedom, the hell with stove pots—and being a self-serving careerist, a boor, a fashionable weathervane, to whom a stove pot would always be more important than the divine. I needed both the stove pot and the divine. I was a poet, but I was also a human being who lived the life of her time, a woman who had lost her child, her father, her family. A woman who loved men, who cared about the future of her country, who had to worry about stove pots. I needed both the inner and the outer life. Perhaps it was a muddle, no doubt it was—whereas Blok, the eagle, preferred the purity of the icy heights—but it was an authentic expression of my own being, as elemental to me as fog and mist and clods of dirt. I was my own bargeman-Keats, finding my own way.

  52 The Third Revolution

  We sat over tea in the House of Arts canteen. Viktor Shklovsky and Anton were talking very animatedly about something said in an Opoiaz meeting—the Society for the Study of Poetic Language—a formalist hotbed. I’d sat in on some of those events, where the newest criticism was being forged. But I couldn’t concentrate when at this very moment the workers in their forbidden districts—Narva, Moskovsky, Vasilievsky, Petrogradsky, Vyborg—were starving. For food, and shoes, and the right to speak for themselves. The ridiculousness of that anonymous Browning poem didn’t seem so ridiculous to me now.

  Anton did his best to include me in their conversation, speaking of Anvil and our Living Almanac coming around again, while Shklovsky spread out his amusing anecdotes, what he’d said to Punin at IZO, his agent provocateur role. My attention kept drifting. Power fought for its existence like a living creature, while there was nothing I could do besides control the terrain I had—the continent of a piece of paper, the country of one word after the ne
xt.

  I saw Anton’s eyes jerk, his face drain of color. “The Baltic Fleet’s in,” he said dryly, and went back to his conversation.

  Behind me, a face poked through the canteen doorway. A rugged face with a dimple in its chin, sailor’s cap with a ship’s name on the hatband, eyes the color of the sea. I downed the rest of my tea in two gulps, crammed my uneaten bread into my pocket, and ran into the hall. This was my inner freedom.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” Pasha whispered, holding my hands. “Can we go somewhere?”

  I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to kiss him, hold his ropelike form against me. I wanted to parade before him like the long line of daughters in the underwater kingdom of Sadko the Bogatyr. He could choose any one of me. I led him down to the Monkey House. My dark room smelled of mold, old paper, and pine needle tea. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

  He grinned his goofy little smile. “We sailors get around.”

  “Is that why you’re here, to take me sailing?” I wrapped myself around his neck like an Orenburg scarf, as soft as a cloud.

  Surprisingly, he gently unwrapped me. “Sit down.” He sat on my bed, and I next to him, and his face was still easy, a smile even behind the serious look he put on. “I don’t know if you heard,” he said. “The workers are rising against the Bolsheviks.”

  I told him about the demonstration on Vasilievsky Island, the kursanty, the troops on the bridge. The approach to the Moskovsky District was under guard. No rations until the workers went back to their factories. I told him about the Vikzhel club, and their poem. He reached up under his shirt and pulled out a tin, a wide brush like housepainters use, and a sheaf of papers. No, posters. Handbills.

  I took one and began reading, slowly.

  KRONSTADTSKIYE IZVESTIA 2 MARCH 1921

  PETROPAVLOVSK RESOLUTION

  Having heard the report of the representatives sent by the general meeting of ships’ crews to Petrograd to investigate the situation there,

  We resolve:

  1. In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants…

  It listed fifteen points, each more incendiary than the next. The sailors were demanding new elections by secret ballot, to be held immediately, with freedom to agitate among the workers beforehand. Freedom of assembly for trade unions and peasant organizations. A nonparty conference of workers, soldiers, and sailors to be held no later than March 10. In eight days! My head was swimming. “Can you possibly think they’ll agree to this?”

  “Keep going.”

  The liberation of political prisoners of socialist parties, and those imprisoned due to labor unrest and peasant resistance. A commission to review the cases of those held in prisons and camps. The abolishment of political departments since no party should be given special privileges in the propagation of its ideas…

  I bit my lip. “It’s a third revolution.”

  He rose from the bed and perched on my desk. “It’s the rest of the revolution.”

  Cultural commissions should be locally elected, financed by the state. It called for the removal of the roadblocks for food arriving into the city, and equal rations for all working people. Abolition of Communist detachments in the army, Communist guards in factories—or if they were found necessary, to be appointed from the ranks and factories at the discretion of the workers.

  The sailors had not forgotten the peasants, either. Their resolution demanded freedom of action on the land and the right to keep cattle, as long as the peasants didn’t hire labor.

  They requested that all branches of the army as well as cadets endorse their demands. It was signed, Petrichenko, chairman of the squadron meeting, and Perepelkin, secretary.

  My eyes went back to the top: In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants…“You agreed to this?”

  “We all did.”

  It was mutiny. “Are you going to present it to the Petro-Soviet?”

  He screwed up his face, exasperated that I would even think such a thing. “What, are we schoolboys? It’s already in force.” He sat down next to me, took my hand, pressed it to his chest. “We voted on it two days ago in Anchor Square.” Kronstadt’s central square, where its domed cathedral rose. “Sixteen thousand ayes, three nays, and no abstentions. We’re electing a new soviet.” His smile grew broad, his blue eyes turquoise again.

  “Who were the nays?”

  “The commissar of the Baltic Fleet, the chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, and Papa Kalinin of the Central Committee.”

  I tried to imagine the scene. The nerve in each of those nays, you had to admire it. The Petropavlovsk Resolution…like the MRC—the Military Revolutionary Committee—in February 1917. It had gone beyond the point of no return.

  “The Bolsheviks sent Kalinin up to try to change our minds,” Pavel said. “We let him leave, to carry our demands back to his masters. We put the other two under arrest, by order of the Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee.”

  His blue-green eyes held the question Do you understand? I did. I sat with the handbill in my lap, trying to breathe. They’d arrested the commissar of the Baltic Fleet! And the chairman of their own soviet. Two days ago. This was really happening. And not a word in the papers, not a squeak! How had the government managed to keep something like this quiet? How did we not know?

  He smiled, and touched my nose with his rough forefinger. “I too have stolen the golden fleece,” he recited. “And tasted the oxen of the sun.”

  Kronstadt had stolen the golden fleece. Sixteen thousand sailors, soldiers, and assorted citizens had voted to free their island from the Bolshevik yoke. The Free Republic of Kronstadt. And now they were inviting the country to join them. They had tasted the oxen of the sun, and now the sun was going to be very, very unhappy. Did the Bolsheviks know about this, I wondered, staring down at the paper. But of course they knew. They would have known when Kalinin returned. What were they doing about it? We hadn’t heard a thing, not from Pravda, not from Krasnaya Gazeta. “Who’s Petrichenko, he’s your leader? An SR?”

  “There is no leader. That’s the whole point. He’s just a sailor. We wrote it on the ship, voted on it, brought it to the people of Kronstadt. They approved it. No parties, no leaders.” His eyes were bright, his teeth flashed for a moment in the light from my little lamp, his lean face with its sandy brows. “We sent sailors to investigate what’s been going on here. They were on Vasilievsky Island. They went to the factories. We heard the demands of the people of Petrograd and seconded their motion.”

  I gazed at him for a long time. That good brave face. They would call him a traitor. A mutineer. This was how revolutions began. This was not a street protest. The Bolsheviks couldn’t put it down with a few truckloads of kursanty. Watch the soldiers, Kolya had once said. And these weren’t just any soldiers, this was Kronstadt, the pride of the revolution. They had escorted it in on the Aurora. They had been its very first support. They were our heroes—even Maxim had dreamed of becoming a Kronstadt sailor. And now the island had declared Russian independence from the Bolshevik straitjacket. They had raised their own red flag. My hands sweated, softening the paper of the declaration. No wonder the soviet had proclaimed martial law.

  “It’s not about us,” Pasha said earnestly. “This is the voice of the people. We’re just putting some teeth in it. The Bolsheviks might be able to ride over the workers, but let them try us.” This list—an end to the grain requisitioning, the thing the peasants had demanded for so long. An end to the roadblocks—preventing workers and peasants from bringing food into the starving cities. The end of Bolshevik privilege, the end of the suppression of speech and the press. “We get letters from our own parents asking why we’re supporting the oppressor. It stops here. The workers have been asking for these things, we’re demanding them. We’re claiming them.”

  Taking the revolution back to what it was supposed to be all along. Not to my father’s cronies get
ting ready to divide Russia up like a slab of beef. I couldn’t think of one thing they had missed. Freedom of parties. Freedom of the press.

  I was shaking like a braking tram. For him. For all of us. This had moved beyond factory stoppages and protests over rations and boots. Another revolution was beginning.

  Pasha leaned forward, taking my cold hands in his. “I’ve killed good men—better men than me probably—and for what? So Bolsheviks could climb to the top and stay there? We went along with what they said—it was war. But the war’s over. This”—he rested his hand on the page lying on my lap as a father rests his hand on his child’s pretty curls—“is the start of the peace.”

  I tried to look brave, but tears spilled down my cheeks. I thought of us at the House of Arts, our terror when Blok had spoken out. And all he had done was argue against bureaucratic vulgarity. Not against the whole Communist regime.

  “We’ve fought on ice. In sandals, because there were no boots,” he said, quietly. “I’ve fought on a quarter pound of rye and two moldy potatoes. There won’t be any more boots until the workers believe in their leaders again. Those skinny bastards aren’t going to repair the trains and grow food if they don’t believe. And they don’t. Not anymore.”

  He took the sheaf of posters and put them behind him on the chair.

  “They’re going to arrest you,” I said. “They’re going to paint you as counterrevolutionaries.” I wondered if Varvara knew—of course she did. They would be preparing their reprisal. And it would be terrifying when it came.