Vorotyntsev stared and stared, admiring sights he had grown unused to, but no true Muscovite can be overawed, made to feel small: our Moscow has a soul, and this place does not. Our Moscow is always better.
Even the Petersburg trams are not like those in Moscow: back home strangers talk to each other on trams, here you talk only to your companion, quietly.
Cast a glance at the fortress over there. It always stands out against the sky unless it is pitch black—a black phantom, with the wall that is a warning to all future conspirators … Then the tram was gliding along the most modern, the glossiest avenue in the city, the Nevsky’s triumphant rival. And it was time to get off. They had not far to walk, turning right from Kamennoostrovsky Prospect.
As they went Vera told her brother a little more about Shingarev, so that he would know what to expect, and he was all ears. Shingarev had, willy-nilly, become a financial expert. The Duma was full of Kadet professors, but not one of them was especially interested in finance, so Shingarev had taken it on. His jousts with Kokovtsov in budget debates were famous. Ill-wishers in his own party called him a dilettante, said he ought to know his limitations. “No,” Georgi said approvingly, “there’s nothing wrong with that.”
He enjoyed listening to his sister’s quiet, persuasive voice—no magpie chattering, she weighed every word. Since the moment he first saw her, slim and pretty, on the station platform, he had found it hard to believe that for so many years he had rarely thought of her, had hardly been aware that he had such a sister, so modest, so unassuming, but with such an understanding smile, so comfortable to be with. He had admired her on the tram, not just because she was his sister … her face, so animated, yet so demure … the only wife for a man with a life of labor and self-denial before him. Silently, tirelessly, inconspicuously, she would level mountains for the man of her choice. Why, little sister, are you not married? Georgi felt more and more grateful to his sister, more and more in love with her even, as the day went by.
Vera was telling him that Shingarev was also a councillor in the Petrograd Duma and the Usman zemstvo, and that he had toured half Russia giving public lectures with remarkable success.
“He can even get people to listen spellbound to statistics. It’s not that his speeches are so highly polished, he sometimes expresses himself badly … it’s his sincerity, his commitment!”
Meanwhile, with one hand under her weightless elbow, Georgi was steering her along Bolshaya Monetnaya, and the house numbers were getting higher and higher. Just a little further on the houses would become less imposing, and they would reach the outer limits of that respectable quarter and the fringe of the far from respectable Vyborg district.
“He’s thoroughly Russian—only, like you, more energetic than Russians generally are, which is why I think you’ll get on together. He’s never so happy as when he has work to do, and nobody to hinder him.”
“Listen, though—we aren’t going to land in the middle of a Kadet get-together, are we?”
“You can never be altogether sure,” Vera said with a little laugh.
“You said that on Mondays …! So you’ve led me into a trap?”
“This is Petersburg! Life here means constantly calling on each other—to swap news and views, and nowadays what they call ‘copies’ … There has to be some substitute for civic freedoms. Besides, he’s a very popular deputy, and even strangers are eager to see him.”
At last—No. 22. The shiny tiles of its façade showed that it had been built recently. Into the hallway. No elevator, but the stairway was broader than usual, room and to spare for three abreast, and the steps were lit by wide triple windows.
“Fifth floor? That does surprise me. A man in his position, in the Duma and the party—why does he live as if he was hard up?”
Breathing easily, in spite of the steep climb, Vera explained. “Even an apartment like this costs half a deputy’s stipend. They’re paid quite modestly. And they all now contribute fifty rubles to the Duma hospital train. Besides—he’s got five children. And he sends something to his three nephews. Anyway, he’s frugal by nature, and he attaches no importance to comfort, he’s indifferent to food—doesn’t eat dessert at all. He’s one of six children himself.”
“You seem to have gotten to know each other well.”
The ceilings, however, were just as high on the third and fourth floors. There were wrought-iron numbers on the doors of the apartments.
“People have offered him literary work through me, but he won’t take just anything. Only things that are close to his heart. Even if they are unpaid. He earns a bit with his lectures. His family are hardworking and resourceful, they don’t make any great demands on him. But he’s now a sick man—and the doctors have tried to send him to a spa. He hasn’t had a vacation in years, and goes for months on end without a rest.”
Seen from afar, from a dugout, the major figures in the Duma were perched on some shining eminence, high above ordinary Russian citizens. But none of that squared with this modest Petersburg apartment and with all that Vera had told him. So that Vorotyntsev’s curiosity grew as he climbed the stairs.
Kadet leaders, just like famous stage personalities, were portrayed on picture postcards. Vorotyntsev had seen Milyukov, Maklakov, Rodichev, and Nabokov in that format, but not, for some reason, Shingarev.
Andrei Ivanovich himself flung open the door—and that movement, and his whole person, told you at first glance, before you could distinguish details, that here was a man without affectation, with no wish to play a part.
“Hello, hello! Quite a climb, isn’t it? Well, I’m a country bumpkin, and as such can’t stand people walking about over my head.”
He thrust out a large hand and took Vorotyntsev’s in a firm grip.
“Still,” said Vera laughingly, “you do live on Bolshaya Monetnaya*—as befits a shadow Finance Minister.”
“You mean you still consider yourself a rustic?”
“Well, I’ve spent thirty years in towns but I still can’t get used to town life.”
First impressions might prove right or wrong, but Vorotyntsev felt more and more attracted to the man. And now, as he unbuttoned his holster in the hallway, he was delighted to meet with such an open-hearted welcome, with no standing on ceremony, no artificial politeness.
“Well, some of us live in holes in the ground, and there’s always somebody tramping overhead.”
Shingarev seized Vera’s hands. “Marvelous! I’m so glad you’ve brought him.”
The apartment went a long way back. Someone could be heard walking around and a little girl peeped out from one of the rooms, but Andrei Ivanovich’s study was right there, first on the left. He opened the door with another vigorous push and invited Vera to join them.
“No, thank you, I’ll just go along to Evfrosinya Maksimovna.”
The room was narrow and made narrower by bookshelves on both sides and by several chairs, none of them, however, unoccupied—there were piles of newspapers, pamphlets, and documents on every one. The sagging sofa was not free either—it had a pile of its own. A desk drawn close to the single window at the end of the room was so cluttered and littered that only its owner could discern any principle of arrangement.
The owner himself, in his far from new second-best suit, was more unassuming even than his fifth-floor apartment. His manner said that to the chairman of the Duma’s Military Commission any intelligent man fresh from the front was an important fund of firsthand information and advice. What with his work in the Duma, as a party leader, and as a lecturer, he couldn’t often get away to visit the army in the field, and besides, he’d spent two months of the year trundling around Europe with a parliamentary delegation, doing his best to understand what was going on there. He’d rushed off to have a look at the Western Front—but what could an outsider on a flying visit hope to see? If you were a member of the Defense Conference or on Duma commissions you needed to gather, piece together, and condense other people’s experience if you were to have f
irm ground under your feet. He tried to see as many serving soldiers as he could. Up-to-date assessments were urgently needed.
So how soon could they start talking?
Well, an officer in the front line has only one dream—to be listened to. Back there, you’re knocking your head against a wall, there’s nobody to complain to.
His host sat him down on the ruptured sofa and pulled up a wicker chair for himself.
“So which army are you now serving in?”
“The 9th.”
“Lechitsky’s? I hear he’s a good general.”
Top marks. Knows what’s what.
“One of the best.”
“And you’re out on the left flank?”
“That was a standing joke till last autumn. We were the ‘extreme leftists,’ to the left of all the socialists. We were covered on one side, but now we’re exposed, thanks to the Romanians. And we’ve sprung a leak.”
Question and answer, question and answer, all very businesslike, he understands, he remembers things. Yes, yes, Romania—that’s all very worrisome, terribly hard to understand. Why did they surrender the Dobrudja? What was the Danubian Corps doing? What happened at Dorna-Vatra? (He could visualize it all without a map—good man.) Why are we retreating? Throughout the summer your 9th Army was advancing successfully. Is the fighting spirit still there?
Fighting spirit! So that was what interested him. Right, we’ll get there in a minute via the Romanian sectors. He’ll learn more than he’s asking for.
But Shingarev pulled him up there. Pavel Nikolaevich had rung to say that he was on the Petersburg side and would be looking in within the hour.
“Pavel Nikolaevich? Sorry … that would be …?”
“Milyukov. It would be a pity to waste an opportunity like this, he too very much needs to hear what you have to say! Mili Izmailovich will come along too—Minervin, that is. It will make more sense if all three of us listen together.”
So the artful Vera had lured him into a Kadet get-together after all. Oh, well, Petersburg has gotten off to an amusing start. A marvelous start in fact.
But what to do in the meantime? In the meantime, since Shingarev was responsible for the delay, he was ready to answer questions and explain things himself. He was frank and straightforward, he concealed nothing, he was quite unlike a Duma leader. He had, it was true, the sort of haircut fashionable among prominent public persons, almost but not quite a French crop. And streaks of gray were relentlessly annexing the dark hair on his head, his upper lip, and his chin. But in the light shed on the wall through the opaque shade of the table lamp a photograph showed a young man in a white blouse, worn outside his trousers, holding a rabbit in his lap, a young man of the half-Gypsy breed common along the old steppe frontier—and you were embarrassed to ask in case you were wrong, but couldn’t stop yourself …
“Is that you?”
He probably could hardly believe it himself. Where now was that wild shock of unruly black hair, those burning, darting eyes, that smile, that eagerness to jump up, to run, to gallop, to act!
Twenty years back he had been a doctor, not an employee of the zemstvo health service, nothing so grand, just a private practitioner treating patients for five kopecks a visit. Yet he remembered with much affection the bleak, poverty-stricken, ignorant countryside of which he had measured every inch.
“You might be told the cow had to be sold because its color didn’t please the house sprite … Then if there was a cattle plague the women would plow the fields around the village naked … Then there was what some call ‘folk medicine.’ If a woman was having a difficult delivery they’d hang her upside down from the stove and a runner would be sent to the church three versts away to ask the priests to open the royal gates so as to ease the birth …”
Was he finding fault with the people? Not contemptuously, anyway. Sadly, pityingly.
“In the Usman district, where my farm is now, they’re a bit more civilized, a bit cleaner and always were. But in Novozhivotinnoye, where we did that statistical survey, I’m afraid that even today … they’re shackled to the earth like condemned men. They’re landless, horseless, poverty-stricken, their yards are unfenced, their huts are slums, they get no part of their livelihood from the land, all from seasonal work elsewhere, but all the same—the land is what matters! They grub away in whatever bit of a plot is left.”
“When were you there last?”
“It must be seventeen years. It’s better everywhere now, incomparably better, the countryside is quite different, but I wasn’t making it up. In 1899 it was so bad that they didn’t even have pickled cabbage for the winter! Nothing to make cabbage soup with! Who had dared bring the village to that? I ask you.” His voice, deep and disarmingly sincere, was suddenly tearful.
“Novozhivotinnoye is on the Don. There are rich deposits of limestone along the riverbank. The limestone belongs to nobody, it’s God’s, as the saying goes, and it’s been quarried for ages for building materials. So along comes one shrewd son of a bitch, a local peasant himself, who doesn’t give a damn for the popular belief that it’s nobody’s. And officialdom gives him paternal assistance: he greases a few palms in Voronezh and is allowed to rent the quarries. Nobody dares take any limestone anymore—they all knuckle under. What else could they do? That’s how the soul of our people decays and is lost to us. How can anybody reconcile himself to that for five minutes, and refuse to fight it?”
Without even seeing Shingarev’s amiable face, just hearing the extraordinary timbre of his voice, it would be difficult not to like him. His voice seemed to come from the depths of his being, carrying with it all the warmth that was in him, lavishing it on his companion.
“Before that they used to quarry stone whenever they felt like it, take it to town, and sell it on their own account. But now they had to take whatever wage the leaseholder offered, thirty kopecks a day for the best workers. They burrowed into the ground down narrow shafts. It was damp and stuffy, they carried kerosene lamps and worked bent over double. Nobody bothered about props—they were in too much of a hurry to earn an extra kopeck—and the upper strata often caved in, especially in the spring. You’d be told every so often that one or another of them had been ‘crushed by the hill.’ One young man, his family’s breadwinner, wasn’t quick enough jumping out after his fellow worker, was hit in the back by a boulder, crippled, paralyzed in both legs, and worse than that the sphincter of his rectum gave out and he couldn’t retain his feces. He lay there on straw in a poky little hut with never a murmur, and his parents and his wife were just as resigned to what was obviously God’s will … The common Russian people, the meek, the martyred, the great Russian people …”
Vorotyntsev was chilled to the marrow. That bastard of a leaseholder, that crippled young man … A sound fellow, Shingarev … knows what needs to be done … Yes, he’ll understand the soldiers’ grievances just as well, and an officer need not be ashamed to tell him things he would ordinarily tell no one. We will understand each other! I’m in luck.
“You never cease to marvel at them. But you can’t keep putting your hopes on them. They’ll never change their lives by their own efforts. Only we can drag them out of the mire.”
Whether it was that quarry. Diphtheria on a bed of dirty straw. Or the hardships heaped on men in the trenches over twenty-seven months of war.
“How can anyone devote so much as five minutes of his life to anything else? … I went among the people to heal. But frankly I might as well have left them unhealed. What’s the good of slapping a poultice on someone who is hungry and illiterate? No—take the load off his back, let some light into his bowed head. Since my university days I have always been amazed by the gulf between the intelligentsia, with its impatient idealism, and the benighted and long-suffering people. The gulf is too great a danger to our country. That way it must come to grief.”
“The gulf is as wide as it ever was,” Vorotyntsev warned, his mind on his own experience.
“Of course,
that’s just the trouble, that makes it worse, it means that our task is still what it was at the end of the last century—to exert all our strength and make haste to draw those above and those below closer together. The answer to all Russia’s problems lies there. But we aren’t being given much time. Once before, war broke out and was followed by revolution, then by reaction. Now we have war again and we have very little time left. Bring them closer, yes—but how? I used to think that it came more naturally to a doctor than to anybody else: he’s accepted and made welcome in every peasant hut.”
That was how it had all begun for Shingarev in his early days. His initial concern was with health and hygiene in a rural area, but to understand such matters you had to know about the budgets of peasant households and also about the zemstvo’s budget. You began by organizing clinics, hot dinners in schools, day nurseries for working mothers at harvest time, then found yourself writing for publication, addressing public meetings, and at twenty-six a councillor in the Tambov provincial zemstvo, locked in a struggle with Prince Chelokaev, the leader of the Tambov conservatives.
But what could be done in the zemstvo if it was not allowed even to discuss things peaceably and its best draft proposals were returned with a reprimand? They themselves had given the public permission to think—and they themselves then vilified and ridiculed it for thinking. Conflict with the central authorities, with the government, became more and more obviously unavoidable.
Nobody should think that this was all in the past, it was the present reality, and this colonel must be made to see that clearly.
“In 1902 Witte summoned a congress of zemstvos—the first ever—to discuss ‘the needs of agriculture.’ Everybody was excited about it, the whole country responded. I myself made a speech at Voronezh on ‘what the public treasury takes from the population and what it gives in return.’ So who do you think arrived to snuff out sedition in our locality? The Vice-Minister of the Interior no less! He upbraided widely respected elderly people who had given their views not out of hotheaded obstreperousness but at Witte’s request, ridiculed them, sneered at them, showing no consideration for age or social position. With the boorish insolence so characteristic of the autocratic Russian bureaucracy! I was too insignificant an insect to be challenged, they simply put me under police surveillance. But that was just what I found most painful and embarrassing—being left unscathed when all around me decent people were being destroyed. Not until they arrived in the night to search my place was my mind at ease and my conscience clear.”
November 1916 Page 44