November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Both her husband and her eighteen-year-old son, a law student, were at home with her, and Susanna’s family life was scarcely affected by the war. They lived a life of ease and plenty. Her husband was a success in his profession, they had their own car, their own country villa, a reserved box at the Bolshoi Theater. Susanna confessed her superstitious anxiety: “You know the legend of Polycrates’s ring? When things are going too well you must make a sacrifice to fate, conciliate it so that it will not get angry with you.”

  Discussion of their welfare work for the troops, and even their artistic interests, was silenced by the conversation at the Korzners’ table. Here political passion ran high. Many of the guests played a central role in the main events in Moscow, they arrived flushed from a session of the Moscow City Duma, or one of its sections, or the Moscow branch of the Kadet Party, or some other committee—there were so many of them now—and reported the latest news fresh and hot, before it was known anywhere else.

  They, like the whole of progressive society in Moscow and throughout Russia, wanted, expected, and demanded victories, although they had met with so many disappointments. At the Korzners’ they analyzed the situation and looked for reasons. For defeat in the field. For the unprecedented rise in the prices of foodstuffs (so steep in recent weeks that even the fairly well-off urban middle class was beginning to feel it). The growers, with their intransigent greed, were to blame, they were making their pile, and the government refused to curb them, the peasants were skinning the towns alive, carting home money by the sackful, putting it under the mattress. And the cause of all causes was the paralytic inefficiency of the government and its blind and pigheaded refusal to cede power to the trusted representatives of the intelligentsia.

  Then they would give rein to their anger at the tragicomic restrictions on the press, or with the British democrats and French socialists who, in their enthusiastic loyalty to the alliance with the Tsar, were driving nails into the coffin of liberty in Russia. They indulged in witticisms, especially about the venality of officials and the embezzlement of government funds: “I didn’t see the notice ‘I receive from three to five’ in time and, like an idiot, gave him ten!” Or: “How to interpret the language of secretaries and junior officials: ‘not enough to act upon,’ ‘have to give my superiors a bit more to go on,’ ‘it takes time’ (‘it’s take time’).”

  Practical plans were also discussed. For instance, how to develop the nongovernmental organizations for aiding the war effort and the victims of war, so that they could play a part in political campaigns. Not one of the “copies” circulating in Moscow bypassed the Korzners’ apartment: whether it was Kerensky’s letter to Rodzyanko saying that the “nest of traitors” was in the Foreign Ministry, not among the Social Democratic deputies, or a speech in the Duma’s Budget Commission which did not find its way into the press, or the spicy pages about Rasputin in the book by Iliodor. In the space of a few years a whole library of such material had accumulated—from Alix’s old letter to Rasputin, which Guchkov had once circulated, to a recent letter written by the same Guchkov to General Alekseev. It may even have been from this apartment that the “copies” began their journey. The Korzners had a typewriter, so they would not have to copy things by hand.

  Those who had seen something of Milyukov during his last visit that October passed on the interesting conclusions he had reached about Moscow. According to Pavel Nikolaevich, the city had got over the trivial cares and petty illusions with which Petrograd was still largely preoccupied. Moscow was now Russia’s leading city, the advance post of free thought! If the elections to the Fifth Duma, due next year, took place, the Kadets might find themselves too far to the right for it. It was now difficult to believe that not so long ago Moscow was a bulwark of the monarchy, and as recently as last year people had dissociated the guilty Sukhomlinov from the innocent Tsar. But no reasonable person could still be a monarchist. Ministerial leapfrog had done more to enlighten minds than decades of revolutionary propaganda. Moscow had been the first to see the light, and realize that the whole imperial family was guilty, and that the Tsar was no cleaner than his Alix, whether you were talking about Rasputin, or the Stürmer-Protopopov affair, or negotiations for a separate peace with the Germans. In Moscow circles the language now was that of implacable revolutionaries, spoken before 1905 only among the émigrés in Switzerland!

  Igelson, however, sounded an alarmist note: “The Black Bloc has a lot of power nowadays, gentlemen! It’s like a storm cloud hanging over us, and its efforts to bring about an ignominious peace are horrifying. I can give you the facts to prove it.”

  Which made it all the more obvious! They all agreed, it was clear now to everybody, present or not, that the men in power in Russia were absolutely hopeless! We were faced with an obtuse government, impervious to the language of logic.

  David Korzner had a favorite gesture and a favorite formula for such occasions. “The fist!” he said, holding out his own at the full extent of his short arm, not really a very menacing fist, rather small, its smooth skin taut over the knuckles of four fingers, with a sprinkling of little black hairs on the back of his hand, protruding from a starched cuff. The fist was not menacing in itself, but the voice was, and the expression on his face, and the implicit meaning. “The fist—the only thing they understand, the only language in which we can and must and will address them!”

  He had once found himself uttering these words impromptu at a conference of left-wingers. They had gone down well, and Korzner now loved repeating them and drilling them into his listeners.

  “There’s no other language! They will understand nothing else! All these negotiations between pale pink liberals and the government only lead society into a blind alley. The fist! One good punch on the nose! And they will give way!”

  * Reference to a story by Aleksandr Kuprin in which a lover destined to remain unknown sends a garnet bracelet to his beloved.

  [9]

  It amused David that his Susanna had signed up with the Black Hundreds concert party. The ear, of course, still had difficulty in distinguishing the “patriot” from the “Black Hundreder.” They always used to mean the same thing.

  And their concert party really was not irresistibly attractive, you would need some very good reason to go on tour with it. It was enough to look at that piano player with the stone jaw—an obvious scoundrel, the very image of a Jew beater. These concerts, arranged by the Union of Towns, were obviously his way of evading military service. And that went for the singer of Ukrainian folk songs too. The supply officer was an insufferable martinet, the soprano with shoulders like bolsters was an earsplitting vulgarian, the vaudeville dancer was just what you’d expect … that left Alina Vladimirovna, who was the most decent member of the troupe, and socially altogether acceptable. Besides, the troupe’s bookings depended entirely on her and her inexhaustible enthusiasm and determination. Some small-town humorist had remarked in her schoolgirl album—quite correctly—that there was something of the goddess Diana, that proud toss of the head, the swift upswing of the arm, the imperious wave of the hand, all well suited to her present role. But Susanna gently warned her not to dress too brightly and to avoid excessive show when she appeared onstage.

  They spent a great deal of time together, traveling to concerts, rehearsing, sharing problems, and the more Susanna shunned the rest of the troupe, the closer she became to Alina. She was cheerful and good-natured, never put out by awkward moments, indeed always helpful at such times. People were won over by her straightforwardness and lack of guile. She took a childish pleasure in applause, and made no attempt to hide it: her gray eyes shone, and she would remind people of her triumphs long afterward. But her candid nature made occasional emotional effusions unavoidable.

  There are as many special relationships as there are people, or married couples: life is lavish with combinations. Alina and her husband, for instance, were a childless but uncomplaining couple, bonded by ten years together. There seemed to be no hint of a
rift, but from Alina’s ingenuous account, insofar as you could see into the depths of other people’s lives, it would seem that their union was perhaps less than perfect. Alina insisted on reading his letters aloud—and they were not the letters of a battle-hardened colonel, but more like skillful exercises in the amorous epistolary game by a young schoolboy with his head in the clouds, and full of the set phrases of chivalrous devotion to womanhood, but with no imprint of the Alina of flesh and blood. This was especially true of the letters written in their early years together, overemotional, elaborately poetical effusions that jarred on the ear and aroused a sneaking suspicion of pastiche.

  “You’ll introduce him to me one of these days, won’t you?” Susanna said noncommittally.

  Alina could be a little tiresome, but never really exasperating. People liked her. One of the likable things about her was that though she was not overburdened with education she felt too much of an affinity with educated people to be potentially hostile in contentious matters. True, in a different social circle, under different influences, she might just as readily accept the opposite viewpoint. But—and this always makes itself felt—the urge to contradict was not in her nature. If, for instance, an argument flared up in the troupe about the pogrom against the Moscow Germans in May last year, Susanna could be sure that Alina would stand by without contradicting her.

  They had all had a good view of those painful scenes in Moscow. The first stone through the plate-glass window of a German shop had sealed its fate. Everything in the shop was ruthlessly flung outside—boxes of millinery, lengths of velvet, worsted, and linen, underclothes and outer garments, guitars, toys, kitchen stoves, sewing machines. A Zimmermann piano crashed onto the pavement from the second story and hammers completed its destruction. There was a blizzard of feathers from mattresses and pillows of German manufacture. Shops that were locked and shuttered were set ablaze. Some German establishment was set alight and nearby Russian property caught fire. Lathes were smashed, machinery was wrenched out of shape and trampled in the roadway. Warehouses, workshops, and Keller’s pharmaceutical factory were torched. Nobody knows how much property was destroyed. Braun’s rubber factory, Stritter’s distillery, and Ding’s confectionery went up in flames. Fires blazed in Kitaigorod, on Sheremetiev, in Middle and Upper City Rows, on Ilinka, Varvarka, Nikolskaya, on Kuznetsky Most, on Lubyanka Square, on Myasnitskaya, Maroseika, Petrovka, and Sretenka streets, Tverskoy Boulevard, and in Cherkassky Lane. Enormous clouds of smoke, like those from a forest fire, enveloped Moscow, the smell of burning was everywhere, fire engines, motorized and horse-drawn, and ambulances hurtled to and fro. The air was troubled with fumes, shots, wild cries, cheering, curses, the crash of vandalized property, sobs, laughter, the shrilling of whistles and honking of horns, the clatter of hooves, tram bells, and on top of it all groups of noisy demonstrators carrying patriotic portraits. When the liquor stores were fired the drunkenness that had been in abeyance for a year returned, and men lay around on the streets, overcome by drink. Outside Tilmans’s office innumerable bills, memoranda, invoices, and letters blew around all over Myasnitskaya Street—treasure lost to the bookkeepers, and useless to anyone else. In all, the damage was said to be as much as 40 million. Schröder, the factory owner, and his family—wife and two daughters—were badly beaten, then drowned, naked, in a ditch.

  “The people expressed its feelings!” This from the thickheaded oaf of a piano player, arms defiantly akimbo. It was hard to imagine him meekly crouched over his instrument in the darkened cinema. “It was an explosion of wounded national pride, because the government had failed to deliver us from German domination earlier, at the beginning of the war. It was revenge for the gas! The Germans had used poison gas.”

  So they had—but at the front and against troops. But were these the culprits, and was this the place to take revenge? And was revenge the right word anyway? There was more looting than wrecking. Bundle after bundle of goods was carried off, with no one trying to stop it, and transported by tram from the city center to Sokolniki. Any town can produce an ugly mob, of course. There were many workers among the looters—the uptown districts all joined in sacking the center. Still—of the two persons seen tossing frippery out of a top-floor window on Myasnitskaya Street—one was a student and the other a pupil in a Modern School. Wolf’s bookshop on Kuznetsky Most was looted by students—male and female! In Zamoskvorechie an officer (not himself the looter) was seen poking about with his sword in a pile of looted goods and taking his pick. On Tverskoy Boulevard, fine ladies wearing hats sorted through silk dress lengths! Students of the university and the Commercial Institute were spotted among the looters.

  The mustachioed quartermaster: “If there’d been that many Russian shopkeepers in Berlin d’you think they wouldn’t have been attacked? They would—and much sooner!”

  The startling thing was not the behavior of the mob, but that of the respectable, civilized public who went to watch and refused to interfere.

  Susanna had drawn her own conclusion from what she had seen: “The terrible thing is that it was no isolated incident, no freak event! You can see the essential character of Russian history coming to the surface. The itchy hand is typically Russian. Russians are no good at defending their interests systematically, they put up with everything, slavishly submit—then suddenly there’s a pogrom. The pogrom last May is a reminder of many things in the past and a portent of still worse to come. We have a savage elemental force below us. It may erupt at any moment and scald us all with white-hot lava!”

  “Oh, come on, Susanna Iosifovna,” the lawyer’s clerk protested. “That’s not how it was! It wasn’t elemental and spontaneous! It was all planned in advance!”

  Planned in advance! Why had the newspapers been so eager to publicize German atrocities? If some philanthropic group or other helped wounded German soldiers—this was called “criminal charity.” Lists of those expelled from the city were published. Governor-General Yusupov had pronounced himself, in his princely way, “on the side of the working people!” Action groups of some sort met in teahouses on the eve of the pogrom. Some people were given money, and leaflets with the names and addresses of German firms were passed around.

  The quartermaster would have none of it. “There was no advance plan. A rumor went around that the Germans had poisoned thirty people, some said three hundred, at the Prokhorov plant. And at the Zeidel factory it was the manager’s own fault. He drew a revolver on the crowd, and that started it!”

  “Never mind that, the main question is where were the police? Why was it that right through the first day they didn’t simply refrain from firing on the crowd, they didn’t even use their whips, they just tried to talk them into dispersing? Sometimes they just kept out of sight—why? It was only on the second day, after the night fires … But by then things had gone too far in some places, people had started tearing up pictures of the Empress.”

  Still, Moscow was not Kishinev! There was a public collection and meals were provided for firemen who fell asleep on the street. The City Duma held an emergency meeting and the stenographic report was circulated. And its own volunteer militia was sent out on the streets.

  All the same: “If there’s no subterranean lava, volcanoes don’t erupt—plan away, bore all the holes you like, you still won’t make them. The cry now is ‘Bash the Germans for using gas!’ But ‘Germans’ is just a temporary excuse because, after a series of accidents, Russia is at war with them.”

  Notices were displayed in prominent places: “This shop was damaged by mistake: the firm and all its employees are Russian.” People with other foreign names suffered more than the Germans. Paradoxically, there were signs saying, “Do not touch! This firm is Jewish!” Russia’s allies would find Jew bashing unforgivable nowadays. But, in their mind’s eye, those who attacked the Germans saw themselves attacking Jews! Wait just a bit, when the time comes we’ll settle accounts with you! The whole war could end in an epidemic of pogroms! Many people are thinking of closing down
their businesses right now—the next wave of pogroms might hit them! This conversation among the members of the concert party touched a raw nerve in Susanna, and when she and Alina were getting ready for bed in their poky hotel room, she still had something to add.

  “One winter when I was a little girl my mother took me to buy toys. I was well fed and warmly dressed. Right in front of the shop a little boy with no winter clothes held out his bare hand and said, ‘Please give me something, miss.’ His shivering made me shiver in my fur coat. Suddenly I didn’t want any toys, and I said, ‘Give him the money, Mama!’ So try to imagine, and don’t ever forget that the Jews feel out in the cold, that they are forever shivering, that they feel helpless and hopeless in this country. Our situation is humiliating. All roads are closed to us! We are denied the right to reside in respectable civilized towns. My brother wasn’t allowed to study in Kiev—he had to go all the way to Irkutsk! Then the Jewish community sent him on to Switzerland, he got a doctorate in philosophy at Bern, came back to Russia, and—guess what? Now he’s a dentist! That’s the sort of career open to us. Equality of rights—that’s all we dream of! It’s been my passion from my earliest days.”

  Alina was sincerely sympathetic. “Equal rights? Of course! Certainly you should have equal rights!”

  “If you’d ever seen a pogrom when you were only a child—the crowd pouring down the street with banners and a calvary—how d’you think you’d feel for the rest of your life every time you saw a religious procession or so much as a crucifix? Or went past a church? You’d naturally feel hatred. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not prejudiced, I’m not one of those who feel that the Jews are a superior people. I revere German music. I adore French painting. And Russian literature is my spiritual home. Whereas singing Jewish songs and doing Jewish dances I don’t like one little bit. But I’ve never bent the knee, and I never will. I’ll never consent to be a second-rate person, accept that Jewish feeling of being a defenseless chicken.”