November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  “I want to try to get you into GHQ quickly while the old man’s away.” And as if he thought persuasion was necessary: “We can always find more regimental commanders. But you’re a strategist—where ought you to be?”

  As if he needed persuading that he was a strategist! That had been his nickname at the beginning of his career as a young officer. Only a few officers from his Military Academy days really knew Vorotyntsev’s capabilities. He would never drop the slightest hint of it, but he would not have considered even the post of army commander beyond his deserts. GHQ? Yes, he had need of GHQ, and GHQ needed him.

  But … “Isn’t there an order that only officers in category 3, the semi-disabled, are to be given staff jobs?”

  As the commander of a regiment in the field, Vorotyntsev thoroughly hated the grossly inflated staffs usual in the Russian Army. He would have been perfectly satisfied with a transfer to a regimental command on the Northern Front.

  “HQ staffs are one thing, GHQ another,” Svechin retorted, with friendly abruptness. “Anyway, there are perfectly fit officers on HQ staffs, you can’t throw them out. Don’t be so awkward, Yegor, don’t fight it. Just tell me where to send the orders and I’ll get them off in two or three days. Or maybe you can call in at GHQ now, on your way back.”

  “Good enough, Andreich,” Vorotyntsev said, thinking it over, “that’s just fine.”

  But if it had come to this, did he have the right, would it not be ignoble, to conceal from Svechin his present way of thinking, and those vague schemes which as yet could hardly be called a plan of action, but all the same …? Svechin ought to be aware of whom he was recommending. Putting it all into words was, however, very difficult, it still needed consideration. Yet those mutinous thoughts of his were a refusal to accept the state of mesmerized paralysis in which the Emperor conducted, or rather let himself be carried along by, the war. Mutinous thoughts, which some might think could help to save Russia—yet with a slight shift of accent they could perhaps be called treasonable.

  Vorotyntsev was, in any case, not the only one who thought that way. It was in the air, and others of course thought the same.

  But did Svechin?

  “It’s all very well, Andreich. But let me tell you that the condition of the state as a whole is ruinous. Which means that something more is required of us than service at GHQ.”

  He looked hard at the bashi-bazouk.

  Who went on eating his fish, watching out for the bones.

  Vorotyntsev bent forward, elbows on the table, concentrating on his big-eyed, big-eared obstinate friend all the pent-up mental energy which had catapulted him out of Romania. Just one or two sentences, correctly or incorrectly worded …

  But from somewhere over their heads …

  “Ah-hah! So this is where the Young Turks are meeting today!”

  They looked up with a start: Aleksandr Ivanovich Guchkov was standing by their table!!

  Dark gray frock coat, stiff stand-up collar, black tie. He was smiling, and there was even an endearing shyness in his smile. He blinked at them through his pince-nez with obvious pleasure.

  Vorotyntsev jumped up, overjoyed. “Aleksandr Ivanych! What a miracle!”

  Svechin rose less demonstratively.

  Guchkov’s handshake was rather limp. And in general he looked rather lifeless, though he tried to make up for it by holding his head high.

  “What is a miracle?”

  “That we’ve met you here!”

  “I come to Cubat’s quite often. It’s more of a miracle that you are here. And both together.”

  “I rang several times. I wanted to see you!”

  “So I was told.”

  The expression in his prominent eyes was grave and sad. There were bags under his eyes, his cheeks sagged, and there was a great tiredness in his puffy face.

  No need to ask, really, but … “How are you feeling now?”

  His shoulders were hunched. The lines of his body were slack and weary. There were gray hairs in his close-cropped tonsure, the hair combed back at his temples, his small, rounded beard, and his side whiskers.

  “How d’you expect me to feel? Illness doesn’t improve anybody.”

  Civilian dress. Sedate and handsome, unhurried, cautious even, in his movements. An average educated member of the merchant class, the sort who might spend his surplus money on building an art collection, or supporting a boarding school for gifted children. Physically somewhat underendowed, a bit pudgy, a sedentary type.

  But wasn’t he one of Russia’s greatest daredevils and most reckless duelists? The inspiration of the Young Turks? The organizer of a unique circle of Duma deputies and young army officers in the Third Duma?

  So much like the average educated businessman frequenting Cubat’s restaurant. Yet at the same time the soul of Moscow. A man feared by the Tsar! The object of the Tsaritsa’s unquenchable hatred! But himself crowned with glory, and so immune from punishment.

  “Gentlemen,” he said with a laugh, “from the way you’re talking anybody can see from the far end of the room that you’re hatching a plot. And what sort of supper are you getting here? If you’ve got time to spare I’ve ordered a private room. Shall we go upstairs? I am expecting guests, but I still have time to telephone and make it for later.”

  Svechin and Vorotyntsev exchanged a glance. Nothing could have suited them better. One of them had left at home a final note breaking off his marriage, and was only waiting until it was time for his train to leave, and the other had come to Petersburg to see this very man.

  Guchkov beckoned them toward the staircase to the second floor.

  He wasn’t exactly limping, but the foot wounded in the Boer War, and now concealed in a high shoe with a built-up heel, seemed heavier than the other.

  [40]

  In the private room it was just like home, there was the same freedom and ease, but you were also free from women, and could have a serious man-to-man conversation safe from unwanted eyes or ears. More surprising still, compared with the monotonous fare in the trenches, or that in the officers’ mess at GHQ, was the food on offer here. As they entered, they found a table laid for six, and on it smoked sturgeon, poached sturgeon, pink salmon in gleaming aspic, and Shustov’s rowanberry vodka—so it hadn’t yet vanished from the face of the earth. Nor was that all: on the stool in the corner stood a promising ice bucket with a napkin. The whole scene was simply unreal.

  While Guchkov went to the telephone Svechin gave his verdict: “I’ll say one thing—he’s no hypocrite. With his money and his business connections, why should he pretend?”

  They’d finished their fish soup downstairs, but now the true soldier’s appetite—it can wolf down three dinners—showed its teeth.

  Guchkov, returning, saw from their faces that the two friends had cheered up. He laughed.

  “You see, gentlemen, Russia isn’t down and out yet. Russia has everything, only not in the right places. The government can’t keep the goods moving but we are coping so far. What can I have the pleasure of offering you? No, never mind that, I’m an invalid and a slow mover, so let’s be informal, just help yourselves! Viktor Andreich! Georgi Mikhalich!”

  He hadn’t forgotten, though it was so long since they’d met.

  Svechin did not wait to be asked twice, but went over to the bucket, plucked a bottle of vodka from the ice, and grabbed a jar of caviar at the same time.

  “What’s all that about an explosion on the Maria?“ Guchkov suddenly asked Svechin.

  Svechin raised his eyebrows. “Why, was there something about it in the papers?”

  “Yes, in today’s.”

  The friends hadn’t seen it.

  “It happened a while ago, on 20 October,” Vorotyntsev volunteered. “I heard about it on the way here.”

  “There you are, you see, and we ordinary citizens only get to know these things from the newspapers,” Guchkov said with a disgruntled look, which was the perfect complement to his present appearance.

  Sve
chin’s look was truculent. “No explanation has been found. No one knows what caused it. We’ve lost a battleship. And five hundred sailors.”

  “It’s strange, though, that it coincided exactly with the German offensive against Constantsa,” Vorotyntsev pointed out.

  “There’s a sequel,” Svechin said darkly. “There’s just been a big explosion on a ship in Archangel harbor. Have the papers mentioned that yet? There’s an explosives warehouse there—it could have blown up the whole port.”

  “Whew!”

  “What is going on? Is it all the work of one gang? Are we really so helpless?” Vorotyntsev was horrified. He suddenly saw another wall confronting him, a wall of hidden dangers from secret enemies. Something you never think about at the front. How do you fight such people?

  Guchkov snorted. “With this government? Is there anything at all it can do?”

  He’s right, Vorotyntsev thought. Even if it were not so battered and bruised, a government like ours couldn’t deal with this.

  They were using only half of the table, Guchkov at the head, the two friends on either side of him, leaving three places for the guests due later.

  Svechin poured for Vorotyntsev and himself, and asked if their host would have some.

  “Just enough to wet my lips,” Guchkov answered sadly.

  “We’ve been following the doctor’s reports,” Vorotyntsev said sympathetically. “All Russia has, Aleksandr Ivanych. At New Year we were afraid for you. And you only fifty-four! But God was merciful.”

  Thanks to those bulletins on what looked like a fatal illness Guchkov had enjoyed an unusual display of affection. He had heard for once the voice of Russia, not that of the parties, and had received an avalanche of unexpected letters from every corner of the country, from people unknown to him, all saying, “Live, Guchkov! We need you!” (There was even a rumor that he had been poisoned by the Rasputin gang.) At the nadir of powerlessness he felt more powerful than ever before. In a country of meekly submissive subjects, without official status or authority or soldiers of his own, bombarded with anonymous hate letters from left and right (“Hang yourself, before we polish you off”), under police surveillance though chronically ill, he was the only person in all Russia who could strike fear into the royal couple and their rotating ministers.

  The instant flood of sympathy from all educated Russia may well have been what revived him on his deathbed. But when everybody you meet looks at you with pitying eyes and asks about your illness … sympathy from people in robust health, for whom illness is something outside their experience, and difficult to imagine, can become tiresome. And what if fate has mockingly burdened your indefatigable body not with one illness but with several, to be borne like penitential chains beneath your European dress, and while you smile sadly in reply to words of sympathy, they weigh more heavily, gall you more cruelly than the royal family’s hatred or your quarrels with the Kadets?

  “I spent last spring convalescing in the Crimea,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to give Alix the pleasure …”

  He obviously felt that he had played a dirty trick on the Empress, and was proud of it.

  In Vorotyntsev’s eyes Guchkov’s was a character of a kind seldom met in Russia. He combined two types of courage which are hardly ever found together in Russians: that martial courage which is natural to them and that civic courage which is so unusual. (Vorotyntsev, however, knew that he too possessed both.) Only this combination could shift Russia’s inert bulk. Moreover, Guchkov’s will was unshakable. His views were a little fuzzier: for all his clashes with the Kadets he had a tendency to merge with them. Still, it was a long time since Vorotyntsev had last seen him, and he could have changed greatly in those years.

  He studied Vorotyntsev closely through his pince-nez, and said calmly, casually, “Regimental commander, are you? Stationed where at present?”

  “In the worst place you can think of. On the extreme left of the 9th Army,” Vorotyntsev said gloomily. “I’ve got out of the habit of thinking of it while I’ve been moving around. It seems like the back of beyond now, nothing to do with anybody here.”

  Guchkov demurred, with a few cautious shakes of the head. “You shouldn’t say that. There are worse places.”

  “Where?”

  “The Caucasian Front. I’m on my way there. People write to me privately that typhus is rife. Medical services are inadequate. The food and fodder situation is bad. And the reason for all this?” he asked with heavy emphasis. “Why are they in particular experiencing these problems?”

  Only then did Vorotyntsev dimly understand what he was driving at. Somebody’s revenge on Nikolai Nikolaevich?! The Tsaritsa’s? Could it really depend so directly on her? Could you really imagine her or anyone else wreaking vengeance on the whole Caucasian Front because of a single Grand Duke? On every soldier there? No, it was a calumny, a gross exaggeration. In his hatred of the Empress, Guchkov too was losing all sense of proportion.

  It left a bad taste.

  But Guchkov persisted, with no trace of doubt in his expression. “I’ll be there shortly, and I’ll see for myself. I hope to God that people have exaggerated.”

  He took a pickled mushroom and nibbled it tentatively.

  Was he perhaps putting on weight? No, he was just rather puffy. Still unwell. His illness had sapped his strength. That he was still so far from being fit troubled Vorotyntsev. Perhaps the man no longer had the strength for anything?

  But his position was still unique. He was at the center of public life, and on easy terms with the commanders of Army Groups, as also with the Supreme Commander’s Chief of Staff. If anything was to be done, he, and no one else, was the one to do it! But if he was too ill? …

  “Ah, yes!” Vorotyntsev suddenly remembered, “as I came through Moscow there was a persistent rumor that you were under arrest.”

  Guchkov smiled, looking complacent.

  “For my letter to Alekseev? Have you read it?”

  Vorotyntsev said yes, without enthusiasm. Svechin simply nodded his hairless block of a head. He was busy serving himself, rising from time to time to visit the ice bucket, drinking rowanberry vodka, eating copiously, chomping vigorously.

  Vorotyntsev joined in. He felt his trench-cramped frame relaxing. The slowly melting saltiness of the salmon. How good it was.

  Another five days and he would be sloshing around in the trenches again, sending men into hopeless battle. Did Guchkov, or didn’t he, have something in mind?

  Guchkov interlaced his fingers on the slope of his prominent belly and resumed his grumbling.

  “That’s how things are nowadays. You draft a letter to an official personage, you show it to one or two people you know, ask them if you have the right to send it. … Rodzyanko, for instance—who could be more loyal to the throne? He’s so loyal he’d burn down Tsarskoye Selo if that was what it took to protect the Tsar’s honor. But then the secret got out, it took wing, first it went around the Duma, then all over Russia, people are reading it as far away as Samara and Nizhny. As for Moscow and Petersburg—it might as well be pasted up on the walls.” A faint, mischievous smile did nothing to modify the misery written all over his face, or to gladden his listeners.

  “That tirade of yours at GHQ—you should have written it down at the time and showed it to a few friends,” Guchkov said.

  Guchkov’s gratification that his outburst had become common knowledge jarred on Vorotyntsev. It still gave him a certain pleasure to hear his own exploit recalled, but he would never have dreamt of behaving as Guchkov suggested. He would leave that sort of thing to the sensational press.

  “What right would I have had to do that? It was a military secret.”

  “That secrecy of theirs is what’s stifling us.” Guchkov sighed, a shadow of what may have been physical pain passing over his face. “State secrets. At that time it was not yet too late to save the situation. People still believed implicitly, and Russia was ready to take the whole burden on one shoulder.”

  So w
as it now too late? … Whoever was crowned with the people’s trust should know the right time for action, know when the time had come to speak for all Russia to hear.

  “It was great the way you pitched into them. You spoke for all of us. You don’t regret it, do you?”

  “Not in the least. Never,” Vorotyntsev said, darting a glance at him.

  It was true. He had never regretted it.

  Svechin’s lips were set in a wry line.

  The maître d’hôtel came in to make sure that he had understood Guchkov’s instructions about wine: should he serve the Château Lafite with the foie gras and the Pichon-Longueville with the mouton nivernaise? These questions obviously related to the second dinner, not to theirs: such fare would be too recherché for a front-line soldier’s palate. Theirs would be a different class of dinner.

  The thrust of Guchkov’s utterances was vigorous, his tone weary. “It’s secrecy that’s landed us in this situation—left us without shells. I warned the Duma about it in ‘14, but they wouldn’t believe me. So Russia is right to want openness at last.”

  “If there isn’t enough openness for you in Russia,” Svechin retorted, “I don’t know what you mean by the word.”

  Guchkov was amazed. “You mean you think there is enough?”

  “You mean you think there isn’t?” Svechin rolled those enormous eyes, which would never need spectacles and would look ludicrous behind pince-nez. “The newspapers here are far more undisciplined than they could ever be in France or England in wartime. Completely irresponsible. Print grossly exaggerated news items, nobody ever checks, and they’re always subversive. According to their lying tales, we’re hopelessly behind, hopelessly short of arms. They ignore our industrial miracle completely. For the government they have only unrelieved abuse. On any subject, things couldn’t be worse anywhere than in our country, nobody could be more stupid than our ministers. All is lost, according to them, and the only hope of salvation is to transfer power to the Kadets and Zemgor. That isn’t freedom of speech—it’s verbal diarrhea. They get all Russia in an uproar, the army included. And all the papers are left-wing.”