So Guchkov could only speak more generally.
“One thing we rule out completely is the 23 March variant.” And, seeing raised eyebrows: “You know, when Paul I was strangled. The murder of the monarch is not to be contemplated whatever happens. The new regime must not be based on blood.”
No, indeed! Vorotyntsev had not yet weighed the implications fully. A coup? That still needed thinking about. Assassination? That was not even to be thought of.
“Besides, if his son or his brother is to succeed him, neither would wade through his blood. So what we must achieve—suddenly, quickly, with a small group—is simply abdication. In favor of his brother or his son. A manifesto is to be prepared in advance; all he has to do is sign it. The King of England will gladly give his cousin hospitality, to help ensure future victories …”
He had put his foot in it. Vorotyntsev turned cold: “To ensure future victories?” To go on laying down peasants’ lives? Was that what he called a “purely Russian coup”? Would it not after all be an Anglo-French coup?
Vorotyntsev had of course always known that Guchkov was all for the war, but look how devoted he was to Russia! Surely, to save her, he would come to think differently?
To come right out with it, speak of an armistice, of withdrawing from the war, was absolutely impossible. His uniform forbade it.
Guchkov’s brown eyes flashed behind his pince-nez. He was too excited to notice.
“As few casualties as possible among the bodyguard in the exchange of fire. If a coup of that sort took place tomorrow, all Russia would greet it with exultation. The whole army! The whole officer corps!”
He looked at Svechin reproachfully: come tomorrow you’ll be rejoicing too, you bashi-bazouk you! But join in? Not likely.
“Don’t overdo the rejoicing too soon,” Svechin said darkly. “What if he won’t abdicate?”
“I can’t imagine that. His character being what it is, he’ll go quietly. He’ll give in right away.”
“But what if, after all, he refuses to give way?”
Guchkov sighed. He swung his pince-nez on their ribbon. Yes, there was that one weak spot, others had pointed it out to him.
“No. No blood will be shed whatever happens.”
Svechin raised his great eyebrows. “So there’ll be nothing for it but to hang yourself.”
“He’ll give in immediately!” Guchkov pronounced firmly, looking through his pince-nez. “Really, gentlemen! You must try to understand his psychology. He dismisses a minister and is afraid to tell him to his face, he thanks him, makes a fuss over him, says see you tomorrow—and then comes a little note: ‘I am relieving you of your post.’ Look at his behavior throughout his reign! … And how afraid he is of that woman! Away from her he’ll sign whatever is put before him.”
He looked to Vorotyntsev for approval. What he liked about the colonel was his obvious lack of commitment to this particular occupant of the throne. No trace of awe. He could just see this colonel moving quickly along the train to post his men between carriages.
But Vorotyntsev’s eyes were for some reason evasive.
It would be good if Svechin had the tact to leave. But he stayed put. Smoking and sipping. (Liqueurs had been brought with the coffee.)
There was not much else that Guchkov could say explicitly. Just that the heir to the throne would not be despised by the public, as the present ruler was. Who would be regent? Mikhail? Or would there be a regency council? Guchkov delicately hinted that he did not seek power for himself.
“I fear that there is no unique, providential individual of the sort we need in Russia at present. We will need a regency council, a collective. We must bring back the good ministers—Krivoshein, Samarin, Shcherbatov …”
But why calculate a hundred moves ahead? First—the deed itself.
Action! That was always the factor that divided those close to Guchkov from the others, the windbags. But the deed itself was still vague even in his mind. He had traveled to the Caucasian Front recently, partly with the idea of talking to Nikolai Nikolaevich, sounding him out, finding out what he would do if … Earlier, Guchkov had made use of his work with the Red Cross to make contact with the military. Now that he was denied access to the main fronts he could catch officers only when they were on leave or on some mission behind the lines. He had talked as he had today in company on various occasions, and they all seemed more or less sympathetic, but when it came to joining in, the younger officers were still with him, but their seniors declined. Out of loyalty? Or fear? So far he had recruited no one above the rank of captain. The two men most firmly committed to the conspiracy, so it seemed, were one political intriguer, the Kadet Nekrasov, and one pampered millionaire, Tereshchenko, neither of them capable of any military action themselves. Was Russia really so short of people?
But perhaps he had not been wasting his time today. Perhaps he had found his man.
Meanwhile, he had to think of something to say. Ah, yes …
“I regret very much that when General Krymov visited Petersburg last winter it was at the height of my illness. He saw other people here, but not me. While he was fighting on the Northern Front, I was taking the waters down south. When I got back north he had been assigned to the south. Did you meet him there, Georgi Mikhalich?”
“I saw him. Only briefly, to tell the truth.”
“Is he near you down there?”
“Don’t you know what’s happened to him?”
Guchkov didn’t know. So Vorotyntsev started telling him, feeling relieved.
“Krymov was Chief of Staff of the 3rd Cavalry Corps, and its creator. Then he took command of the Ussuri Cavalry Division, in the same corps. The corps commander was wounded, and Röhrberg was put in his place. Röhrberg and Krymov got on badly from the start—not many people find Krymov easy … Krymov is no respecter of rank, he’s capable of telling an army commander to go to blazes. In July, Röhrberg packed off his Ussuri Division into the Carpathians, it was raining heavily, there were no roads, supply wagons could not get through, they weren’t part of any operation but could not get permission to withdraw. So Krymov pulled his division back twenty-five versts on his own authority and sent a dispatch asking ‘in view of my inability to carry out instructions, to be relieved of my divisional command.’ Then the fat was in the fire! But he still wasn’t sacked.”
Guchkov was delighted. “Tough nut!” he said with a chuckle.
Krymov? As he sat there cheerfully and sympathetically telling that stony-faced, awkward customer’s story, he remembered that day and night at Usdau … Krymov? A man full of surprises. Maybe … Who could tell? Perhaps we don’t always recognize our own kind.
But that last time in autumn Krymov had not looked to Vorotyntsev like the audacious hero of the Carpathian incident, the man who had served with Artamonov back there, the man whose will and intelligence had enabled the 4th Siberian Corps to hold out at Liaoyang when the others were collapsing. His impression had been that Krymov, though not finished, had worn badly. He had been a rock, but now the virtue had gone out of him. All living things have their breaking point. Failures mount up, until you can no longer heave your legs over the barriers. That autumn Vorotyntsev himself had almost reached the limit. Only his present journey had brought a postponement and a remedy.
Vorotyntsev’s busy hand had come to rest on the tablecloth, and Guchkov sympathetically laid his own soft palm on its weather-beaten roughness.
“Look, Georgi Mikhalich, you really must think about getting a transfer. To somewhere nearer. Up here … We need to talk.”
Svechin still refused to understand. And to go away. Very well, then …
“I live on Furstadt Street, corner of Voskresensky Prospect. Could you possibly come and see me? You’ll find … a few others there … The day after tomorrow. I would like you to meet them.”
Wasn’t that just what he had wanted from Guchkov? Wasn’t that what he’d come for?
But Vorotyntsev’s bright, expectant gaze seemed s
uddenly to switch off, to become different. His stubborn determination had flagged. It was as though he had just woken up, or been given a surprise.
“Sorry, Aleksandr Ivanych, I just can’t. I’ve overstayed already.”
His hand was still under Guchkov’s
“Come on, that doesn’t matter.” Guchkov thought about it. “We’ll wangle you an extension. Who’s your corps commander? It’s only for two days—and then you’re on your way. We can’t let you disappear into the distance quite so quickly.”
The Vorotyntsev whom Guchkov had imagined lifting himself lightly onto the step outside the Tsar’s carriage was suddenly no longer there. His frostbitten and weather-beaten face, his clean-shaven cheeks, his bare temples, and his brow, were invaded by a flush so deep that it almost matched the russet brown of his tunic.
He clumsily withdrew his hand from under Guchkov’s, searching for words as though he was about to tell a lie, or trying not to.
“I have to leave for Moscow this evening, without fail … And spend tomorrow and the next day there … I’ve got my ticket.”
He blurted it out haltingly, shamefacedly blushing deeply.
“Ticket, ticket—what does that matter? You can exchange it. Send a telegram, say you’ll be two days late.” Guchkov good-humoredly refused to understand the seriousness of the situation.
But serious it was.
“What if I come back in, say, four days’ time?” Vorotyntsev asked, miserably, hopefully.
“In three or four days’ time the people I was talking about won’t be here. And I will have left.”
His retreat was cut off. He couldn’t think of any more excuses. Would that the earth would open up and swallow him! “The truth is, it’s my wife’s birthday, and she’s angry with me already.” An impasse. Barrier breast high. Rope under chin.
No, he couldn’t lie his way out of it.
“You see, it’s …”
He would have been less ashamed parading naked in front of them. His lips parted in a grimace, he lowered his eyes, shrank.
“… my wife’s birthday. And she and I …”
She and I? Was he going to describe the whole ritual? The Chinese bell? All her grievances? It would all have been possible if he had been writing long, affectionate letters throughout that week, but as it was … he would have to say he had been ill.
“I promised faithfully … and now I’m in a desperate hurry.”
When there was only one woman, she was no hindrance, he could always get by. But now there were two, and it was a deadlock, there was no room to move.
He had not realized till this minute that he was tied hand and foot.
What a disgrace! One he could never get over, unlike anything he’d ever known. If only he could get the blush off his cheek, but it wouldn’t go away, and it betrayed him.
He looked up.
Svechin was grinning, but it was a cheerful and evidently friendly grin.
“Hey!” he cried, pulling out his watch. “I’m going to miss my train. Gentlemen, goodbye. Aleksandr Ivanych, I am most humbly grateful!” He stuffed his pipe into his pocket. Sword? In the cloakroom. He looked as happy getting ready as if he had been waiting for this all along. Why hadn’t he looked at his watch earlier? “Yegor? Isn’t it time you went?” A hug and a kiss for Vorotyntsev. A vigorous handshake for Guchkov.
Vorotyntsev felt less ashamed, but more unhappy, now that he was alone at last with Guchkov. He had looked forward so much to meeting him, had tried so hard to track him down, had finally found him and was now letting him escape. It was something he hadn’t felt in forty years: getting ready to jump, and then not jumping; walking up to the mark, and turning away.
It was so big a turn he had no name for it. He had not yet had time to understand it.
But how could the next two wretched days affect such a great design so seriously?
The clear-eyed colonel looked hard at the sick leader’s mournful features.
“Aleksandr Ivanych! It doesn’t matter. I can be wherever you like in as short a time as you please!”
Abandoning his place in the ranks of Russia’s defenders? All that mattered now was to be home by tomorrow for his wife’s birthday …
Guchkov took off his pince-nez, and examined them at a distance, then between the fingers of both hands …
He had found his man. They had been talking for two hours. A fighting colonel, full of energy, one who understood, no Blimp, someone eager to tackle Russia’s problems, to all appearances a fellow spirit, with his hand already on the hilt of his sword, ready to leap into action …
And then … his wife’s birthday?
In all those months while Guchkov was talking conspiracy, more clearly with some people, more vaguely with others (he himself still had only a vague picture of it, and was still not absolutely sure that he was fully committed, that he was beginning something he meant to carry through), this was one of the first officers in whom he had found a resolve set harder perhaps than his own. He had felt for almost the first time that here was someone in whom the idea had firmly taken root. And then, because of some woman’s whim …
Why, oh why, was Russia so short of serious people?
“Aleksandr Ivanych! I’m on the Southwestern Front. Do you want me to look up Krymov?”
Well, why not? This was a mission he wouldn’t entrust to anyone else.
“How much should I tell him? Where and how can the two of you meet?”
With Svechin gone they could speak openly. Fill in gaps, call things by their names. But something had snapped in Guchkov too. It wasn’t just that he was tired, and that it was almost time for his postponed guests and for another serious conversation. No—when you’re getting on for sixty you don’t get worked up, or calm down, quite so quickly.
Nonetheless, they went on talking for a while. Was it in principle feasible? Where should they look for recruits? They settled one or two things. Where to send letters, and how to word them. They parted feeling that they had not altogether wasted their time.
Guchkov’s other meetings had been no different.
When Vorotyntsev had left, he still had some time before his guests arrived. He took off his dinner jacket and lay on the sofa. Covering his face.
He had stumbled again—and his short-lived spurt of energy had drained away. It seemed so simple to intercept the imperial train at some small station, lay before the weak wearer of the crown a previously drafted manifesto—and the fate of Russia, the fate of the whole world, would follow a different course … But where did you find the five colonels capable of detaching themselves from all that was warm and live?
It was not—as the colonel had gone away thinking—contempt that Guchkov felt for Vorotyntsev. We are quick to despise others when we are young and have everything still to learn. But as our experience of life grows we realize that contempt is not something a wise person feels. For a long time Guchkov had gone forward surefootedly, chosen freely, been invulnerable and inflexible, and a succession of transient women had nourished his martial ardor without enfeebling or poisoning him.
But then he had tripped up. Clearheaded though he was, he had married badly, acting on someone else’s prompting. He had eyes, he had experience, he understood women—and yet he had married impulsively, foolishly. Now he knew, no one knew better, how a woman can drain and unnerve and suffocate the strongest of men. Guchkov had lived, not during his apprenticeship but in the years of his military maturity, with a woman spiritually alien to him, incapable of appreciating his activities or assisting him in them, so that over and over again he had wasted on her precious reserves of strength. Because his family life was ruined beyond repair Guchkov had flung himself all the more desperately into the political struggle, behaving indeed at times with excessive ferocity, simply to break loose.
It is a fact often hidden from history, and viewed with skepticism by historians, that great political decisions sometimes depend on trivial personal circumstances: had he not broken yet agai
n with Masha (it was always—and never—for the last time) Guchkov’s grievance against the Tsar might not by itself have so inflamed him that he slammed the doors on the Duma and dashed off to Manchuria, to help with another country’s epidemic. Which had meant that he was not close enough to Stolypin in his last harried months, had not been there to hold out a hand when, God knows, it might have helped. But his existence was so galling, so burdensome, so suffocating, that he had to pull up stakes in a hurry and get as far away as he could.
At other times his ill-starred marriage had so shackled him that he lacked the strength to move at all. But the most terrifying time was when he had been on his deathbed in January: his wife had sent all the nurses packing, asserted her incontestable rights for all Russian society to see, and taken possession of the dying man in an enjoyable frenzy of hysterical fussing.
So Guchkov did not judge Vorotyntsev too severely. Before you can disdain what may look like petty family problems you need to know the depth of the pit and how difficult it can sometimes be to climb its slippery sides.
Death had indeed struck a month back—not father or mother, but their oldest son, Lyova, lowering its black lid on their years of crippling tension. (If he had known that it was to be that one of his three children, how carefully he would have guarded him, how tenderly he would have cherished him, while there was still time!)
The death of a son is death for the father—but a living death. A son’s death is a hand placed on your shoulder from out there, to remind you!
He felt as though he was losing his balance: previously he had leaned too far forward, and begun to sway, now he was rocking backward.
This instability was dangerous. It had shown itself in Stolypin in the last year before his death.
What had hurt him most in Svechin’s reproaches that evening was the idea that he, Guchkov, himself was shaking the whole structure, threatening to burn it down. How could you strike a balance? If you courted publicity, the whole edifice was rocked. If you chose silence, the result was stagnation.
He was beginning to feel that his zenith was behind him. That his epoch was ending and another beginning. As when he himself had superseded Shipov. Russia’s perspective was long, that of any individual life short. You served your turn—and made yourself scarce. Shipov had been fifty-five. Guchkov was now fifty-five.
November 1916 Page 88