In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  In 1905, the Russian Army was called in to crush a total of 720 major and minor revolts. An estimated 15,000 ‘politicals’ were executed, 45,000 sent into exile or to prison. Tens of thousands of farmers were flogged, hundreds of thousands of huts were put to the torch.

  A Russian friend of mine knew a very old woman who spent time in prison in those days. Her family sent her books, wrapped in white bread. ‘The guards brought them to her, watched as she unpacked the books – she pounced on them right away – and were all too happy to receive the bread in return.’

  In due course the czar announced a few reforms, but retracted them just as quickly. A new sense of uncertainty took hold of the moneyed classes. For the first time, the bourgeoisie had witnessed the destructive rage of millions of poverty-stricken Russians. And, after the violent repression of the revolts, the bitterness only increased. More than ever the farmers became aware of their own utter powerlessness and poverty, the strikes in the cities grew in frequency and intensity, the intellectuals began taking part as well, and a growing number of key administrators became disgusted with the rigid czarist court.

  Around the courtyards of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the citadel built by Peter the Great in 1703, one can still visit the dungeons in which revolutionaries were held in those days. A survey of those imprisoned here reads like a roll of honour: there were Decabrists, nihilists, populists, Marxists, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and, later, more Menshevik prisoners of the Bolsheviks, along with priests and royalists. By 1917 the average Bolshevik activist had spent four years in prison, an active Menshevik five. The rest of Europe had long embraced the liberal motto of ‘that which is not forbidden is allowed’, but in Russia it was just the opposite: ‘all that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.’

  For many years, the final souvenir of that famous April night in 1917 stood before the Lenin Musuem: the antique armoured car in which Lenin was driven from Finland Station to Kshesinskaya Palace. Today both museum and armoured car have disappeared. In their stead, pride of place has now been given to the old equestrian statue of Czar Alexander III, an implacable bronze giant on a horse with legs like pillars, a caricature of the ponderous rigour of the czarist autocracy. The statue was so preposterous that the Bolsheviks only bothered to have it removed in the 1930s. The saying had it that the sculptor, Pavel Trubetskov, was not at all interested in politics, but had merely wished to portray ‘one animal atop another’. The citizens of Petrograd laughed about that.

  St Petersburg was obviously not the ideal capital for the last of the Romanovs. Their hearts lay further to the east and south; Moscow was the city of the Russian past, of devout farmers who bowed to church and czar. The ministries and palaces of St Petersburg were reminiscent of Paris or Rome, the city itself had European leanings, and no Orthodox Church could compete with that.

  The two cities reacted quite differently to the czar's power base. Inspired by the West, the aristocracy of St Petersburg tried to limit the power of the regime with legislative rules and bureaucratic models. In this way, despite all obstructions, a number of aristocrats were able to play a major role in the initial modernisation of Russia.

  And then one had the Muscovite model, based on the premise of a ‘spiritual communion’ between the czar and the common Russian folk. Power here was not an expression of law or popular will; it was, first and foremost, a matter of faith.

  The last czar saw himself as God's representative on earth.‘I regard Russia as one big estate, with the czar as its owner, the nobility as overseers and the working people as its farmers,’ he said in 1902. With the support of the common people – embodied by the farmyard stench of court clergy like Rasputin – he believed he could stand up to the power of the bureaucrats, the merchants, the intellectuals and revolutionaries. There was, in his eyes, no ‘social question’: peasants were no different from farmers.

  In the longer term, this dream vision collided so forcefully with reality that what the czar achieved was the very opposite of what he was aiming for: no power, but a black hole at the centre of the ruling system, a vacuum that would one day be filled by whatever revolutionary movement came along.

  The idea that Russia ‘groaned eternally under the czarist yoke’ is therefore incorrect. There was, of course, an active secret police and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people were killed during the suppression of popular uprisings, but the prime characteristic of the czarist regime was its general want of sufficient administrative power to rule the Russian vastness effectively. Around the turn of the century there were only four civil servants to every thousand Russians. In Germany, it was one in twelve; in France, one in seventeen. A little over 8,000 policemen were employed for a total rural population of more than a hundred million souls. In other words, in addition to an enormous void at the centre of power, the Russian Empire in 1917 had almost no administrative infrastructure. Here too lay the fallow ground that the Bolsheviks would later cultivate in their own fashion.

  The countryside was rife with backward potentates. The village hovels, the medieval customs, the superstition, the barbaric punishments, the low value attached to human life, all this was largely due to that same lack of effective administration. So too the poverty in the cities: living conditions in St Petersburg under the czars were even more deplorable than those in Berlin or London. Between 1860–1900, the population tripled. According to the 1904 census, an average of sixteen people lived in each apartment, at least six in each room, twice as many as in Paris or Vienna. The drinking water supply was so inadequate that a cholera epidemic in 1908 killed 30,000 city dwellers. By 1917, the planned improvements had still never made it past the drawing board.

  Lured by government support, foreigners brought modern industry to St Petersburg. In Vyborg, Ludwig Nobel set up the giant Phoenix engineering works. The Russian-American ‘Triangle’ rubber firm had more than 11,000 employees. At least 5,000 workers were employed at the Nevsky docks. Vast, red-brick factory complexes were squeezed in everywhere amid the slums: no worker could permit himself the time or expense involved in moving to another neighbourhood. At the same time, this metropolis – just as in Moscow – retained something rural. The countryside was a palpable presence, on the markets, in the characters one saw on the street, in the way neighbours and colleagues interacted. It was something London and Paris had lost long before, the old mir, which was preserved even in St Petersburg.

  My friend Yuri Klejner takes me to the Museum of the October Revolution, now rechristened the Museum for Political History. The museum is housed in the same Kshesinskaya Palace at which Lenin arrived that first evening before delivering his fire-and-brimstone speech. Here, too, is where the first offices of Pravda were located. The old newspaper-office atmosphere of the lovely art nouveau villa has been minutely reconstructed, right down to the desks, typewriters, oil lamps and antique telephones. In the middle of the hall is a huge model of the emblem of the former Soviet Union, in shiny red and gold plastic. On the wall is a big map of Russia as it was in the year 1912.

  Yuri is a historian and a professor of English literature, and above all a fantastic storyteller. But here he is given no chance. The matron who suddenly appears before us is seething with rage: we are not even allowed to whisper as long as the official guide is speaking. She wears her grey hair pulled back in a bun, in accordance with former Party fashion. When we refuse to be silent, she all but throws us out of the building.

  During those first few months, Lenin spoke to the masses from the balcony here on any number of occasions. His exact words are no longer known, but the scene itself was repeated later in countless Soviet films, played by actors who looked a little like Lenin. The action is always the same: Lenin walks out onto the balcony, and the crowd falls silent.

  ‘I always thought that was the way it went, too,’ Yuri whispers, ‘until I ran into an old woman in Estonia who told me she had worked as a governess in Petrograd in 1917. “Where did you live?” I asked her. “Beside the pa
lace,” she said. “Did you see Lenin there?” “Of course I did.” “Did you ever see him speak from the balcony?” “Oh yes, I was standing on the next balcony.” This woman was in deadly earnest, the way all those Baltic people are. So I asked her: “How did that go?” “During those first few weeks there were usually a few hundred people in the crowd,” she told me, “and they were all shouting. And Lenin would start to speak and they would just keep shouting. Angry, approving, everything at the same time.” “Did they really shout that loudly?” “Oh yes, we were standing almost beside him and we could barely hear a word he said.”’

  On display here are the famous photographs of the massacre in front of the Winter Palace in January 1905, on Bloody Sunday. And the petition the crowd was trying to hand over: ‘We, the workers and citizens of St Petersburg, of the various estates, our wives, our children and our old, helpless parents, we come to you, Sire, looking for assistance and protection …’

  ‘1905 was a crucial year,’ Yuri says. ‘The Russians wanted to win a fast war in order to boost morale. They saw Japan as an odd little country they could knock over just like that. But the Japanese were definitely no backward orientals any more, and the Russians lost. Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed, famine swept the country. The movement that arose among the people then was, above all, a symbolic revolution. It was organised by a priest, Georgi Gapon, and meshed perfectly with the philosophy of the czar himself, of the father caring for his children. All the czar would have had to say was: “My children, I love you.” But he had his soldiers fire on the praying crowd. No one forgave him for that. The czar himself laid the foundation for the communist revolution.’

  In the museum, as one would expect, there are dozens of portraits of famous and less famous revolutionaries. The striking thing is almost all of them have a particular look in their eyes.

  ‘Burning,’ I say.

  ‘Fiery,’ Yuri says.

  ‘Something mad,’ I say.

  Just as in Paris, London and Vienna, the cafés and salons of St Petersburg had witnessed one philosophical fashion after another. In 1840 it was Hegel, in 1860 it was Darwin, and in 1880 it was ‘almost indecent’ for a student not to be a Marxist. And the Russians dealt with the phenomenon of philosophy in an unusual way. Every doctrine was embraced as the absolute truth, a religion that allowed no room for even the slightest doubt. These religiously tinted feelings were, without exception, mingled with a sense of guilt. Almost all the radical intellectuals, after all, came from wealthy families; even Lenin lived for years from the proceeds from his grandfather's estate in Kazan, the whole time damning the practices of ‘rural capitalism’.

  The primal Russian revolutionary was more an anchorite than he was an intellectual, Yuri feels. Take Rakhmetov, the gruesome hero of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, which influenced whole generations. Rakhmetov allowed nothing to distract him from his political objectives, not even a beautiful widow who fell in love with him. He lived like a puritan, ate only raw beef and even slept on a bed of nails when his sexual urges threatened to get out of hand.

  Yuri tells me about one of his grandmother's friends, another of these early revolutionaries. ‘He was arrested, but refused to talk. Then the secret police played a nasty trick on him: they just let him go. His revolutionary comrades of course thought he had told them everything. They lured him to a remote place, had him sit down, poured a bottle of acid over his head and ran away. He was blinded, and wore a mask for the rest of his life. But the worst thing, he wrote later, was that his comrades never asked him a thing, they simply assumed that he had betrayed them, the truth did not interest them at all.’

  On Sunday evening, 17 September, 1916, the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue was present, as was his custom, at the opening of Petrograd's new theatre season. In his journal he describes his impressions of that evening. In the Marunsky theatre one saw the loveliest of jewels and gorgeous wardrobes, and everywhere there were young beauties, ‘their bright eyes … sparkling with merriment’. The enormous hall with its blue and gold tapestries was filled to the rafters. ‘From the stalls to the back row of the highest circle I could see nothing but a crowd of cheery, smiling faces.’ Still, the ambassador also felt the approach of something ominous. ‘There was something blithe and unreal to it all,’ he wrote.

  That applied to the whole city. Everyone was talking about the ‘German’ Czarina Alexandra – Alice of Hesse – and her protégé Rasputin, who had reportedly committed treason. A palace coup had failed – on 16 December, Rasputin was murdered (albeit with great difficulty) and his body thrown into the Neva by the clique surrounding Prince Yusopov. The czar only grew more recalcitrant. The town was buzzing with the word ‘revolution’. The wealthy gambled away their fortunes, drank their cellars dry and threw one wild party after another. ‘More and more people are behaving like animals and madmen,’ Maxim Gorky wrote to a friend in November 1915. And, in that same month, to his wife: ‘We will soon have a famine. I advise you to buy ten pounds of bread and hide it. In the suburbs of Petrograd you can see well-dressed women begging on the streets. It is very cold.’

  The Great World Revolution finally began on Thursday morning, 23 February, 1917, in Petrograd's Vyborg district. A group of housewives had been waiting in vain to buy bread. It was the first mild day after three months of bitter cold. The women grew unruly. There were a few minor disturbances, and then the workers from the nearby factories joined in. That same afternoon, 100,000 workers, women and children marched on Nevsky Prospect, chanting slogans such as ‘Bread!’ and ‘Down with the czar!'Two days later, on Saturday, 25 February, the city was shut down by a general strike.

  The Cossacks were called in against the strikers. When the cavalrymen had assembled for the charge on Nevsky Prospect, a young girl left the crowd, walked up to the commanding officer and, amid a breathless silence, handed him a bouquet of red roses. The man smiled, accepted the roses and bowed. A thundering cheer went up from both demonstrators and soldiers. ‘Our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers are crying for bread,’ a young sergeant shouted. ‘Are we going to kill them?’ This would not be another 1905. Czar Nicholas II's fate was sealed. On 2 March, he abdicated, leaving the throne to his younger brother, Grand Duke Michael. The next day, Michael decided not to accept. That was the end of the Romanov dynasty, which had been in power for more than three centuries.

  Six months after the opening of the theatre season, on 7 April, 1917, Paléologue went to the Marunsky again. ‘All of the imperial coats of arms and the golden eagles have been removed. The box attendants have exchanged their sumptuous court liveries for miserable grey jackets. The theatre was filled with an audience of bourgeois, students and soldiers.’ The stately dukes had been arrested, the aides-de-camp in their gaudy uniforms had been shot, the rest were fleeing for their lives. In the box formerly reserved for the czar there were now deportees, just back from exile in Siberia. They stared at the crowd in wonder and awe. That was the end of the 1916–17 season.

  The Marunsky still stands. The ‘Mari’, as the people call it, is a classic Eastern European theatre. One Saturday evening I go there and watch a performance of Boris Gudonov, from the gallery. In my row are two old ladies in floral dresses and five schoolgirls wearing starched white blouses, there are twenty sailors in the row in front of me. Nothing seems to have changed since the days of the czar. The Marunsky is a temple; ballet and theatre are its perfectly performed rituals.

  The next morning I leave for a day trip with Yuri's family, all packed into his long-suffering Lada. The stamina of this country, even of its objects of daily use, is impressive. The poor tyres bash constantly through holes in the asphalt, the shock absorbers, frame and differential groan, and it all keeps working.

  First we stop in to see Grandma, Yuri's great-grandmother. Alexandra Vasilyeva, a retired theatre director, is lying under a red chequered blanket, her little face white amid the fluffy pillows. She is 102.

  Alexandra wa
s once one of those young beauties the French ambassador saw at the Marunsky, ‘sparkling with excitement’. ‘Oh, were you there last night?’ she warbles from her bed. ‘I used to go there all the time, I got free tickets from a merchant friend.’ She giggles. ‘I would sit there in all my plainness, amid all that gold and jewellery. And then came the revolution. Those were exciting days! And dangerous! My husband was a very fussy dresser, and whenever we were stopped somewhere we always trembled in fear at the thought that we might look too neat and capitalist. He could have been shot right there on the spot, in those natty clothes of his! Fortunately he worked in the movies, and he always carried a letter from the film company. Those soldiers and bandits thought a film star was fantastic, they wouldn't shoot someone like that.’

  Her voice trails off; she has fallen asleep again.

  She went on directing plays all her life, Yuri whispers. Even now, she continues to do so. She talks in her sleep, giving instructions on the lighting, directing the actors. In her dreams she is always at work, in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, St Petersburg, everywhere.

  We drive down Ulitsa Sovyetskaya. The façades are a brownish-grey, just like the clumps of snow still lying in the street. The only colour comes from the red traffic light. This street was where the idealistic sisters Anna and Nadezhda Alliluyeva once lived. Their house was a major nest of revolutionaries in 1917. A stern-looking woman opens the door. The apartment has been maintained as a revolutionary relic, completely intact, spacious and bright with sunny rooms, a cupboard full of books, a samovar for tea, a piano to sing songs to. Sergei Alliluyev, the girls’ father, was a worker who must have earned a decent salary: in the Soviet era he could never have afforded a house like this for his daughters.

  The Alliluyevas, with their unadulterated working-class background, were an exception in the little world of the Bolsheviks. The interiors here speak of a desire for order and bourgeois comfort, something a ‘damned’ revolutionary did not strive for. Nevertheless, during the brief period he spent here hiding from the provisional government, Lenin was all too willing to put up with the girls’ bourgeois respectability. I gaze in awe at the plain zinc bathtub in which the great leader once scrubbed his back.