—Respectfully yours N. Filatov. Village Shvartstal
NOTES
Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerensky became the Minister of War and Navy in the Russian Provisional Government a month prior to Filatov’s letter, in May 1917. That same year Kerensky became prime minister in July and commander-in-chief in September.
The November 1917 elections to the Constituent Assembly were the first and only free multiparty elections in Russia until the post-Soviet era. Each of Russia’s five wartime fronts constituted an electoral district. The remote Romanian front, on which Filatov fought, was largely insulated from Bolshevik agitation for immediate withdrawal from the war and confiscation of land and voted predominantly for the Socialist Revolutionaries. Of 1,128,000 votes cast by Russian soldiers on the Romanian front, 679,000 went to the Socialist Revolutionaries, while the Ukrainian Social Democrats received 181,000 votes to 167,000 for the Bolsheviks. Party lists were identified by numbers, and Filatov’s numbers correspond to these three parties. On the Western front, by contrast, where Bolshevik agitation was rife, these proportions were reversed: the Bolsheviks received 653,000 votes of 976,000 cast, to 181,000 for the Socialist Revolutionaries.
Chapter Thirteen
Konstantin Paustovskii, Save Your Strength
Please see note to the previous Paustovskii entry.
[. . .] But everyone was convinced that the war was not in vain, and that justice finally would be restored.
“Worst of all, there ain’t no truth or justice!” said a village shoemaker, a puny fellow with a sunken chest. “Travel around Russia, ask all of them people and you’ll see that each one’s got his own idea of truth. A local idea. And if you put them all together then you’d get the one and only, an all-Russian truth, so to speak.”
“Well, and what sort of local truth have you got?” I asked.
“Why, it’s standing over there, our truth!” answered the shoemaker and pointed at the hillock over the river. There a decrepit manor house was visible in the midst of a gnarled apple orchard. It was not very large, but it preserved all the features of the “Empire” style that had flourished on Russian estates during the reign Alexander the First: a pediment with peeling columns, narrow and tall windows rounded off at the top, two low semi-circular wings, and a broken cast-iron railing of rare beauty.
“Please explain to me,” I asked, “what does this old house have to do with your local truth?”
“Why don’t you go and visit the owner of this house, then you’ll understand. If we’re going to talk about truth, draw your own conclusions: who should this house, and this garden, and this land—the grounds around the house alone are two desiatinas—who should this belong to? But the owner over there is odd. The landowner Shuiskii, an unbelievable wretch. I doubt he would even invite you in. You better think up some sort of business to see him.”
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“What kind of business?”
“Well, something like you wish to settle in there for the summer, to rent a dacha. And you’ve come to make arrangements.”
I approached the house along a path barely visible in the snow. The windows were shuttered with old rotten boards. The front porch was swept with snow.
I walked around the house, saw a narrow door upholstered in torn felt, and knocked loudly. No one responded nor opened the door. I strained my ears. The house was silent as a crypt. “Who am I kidding,” I thought. “Surely no one lives here.”
All of a sudden, the door flew open. On the threshold stood a little old man in a threadbare, black quilted robe belted with a towel. On his head was a little silk cap. His whole face was wrapped in a dirty gauze bandage. Tufts of cotton, brown with iodine, stuck out from beneath the bandage. The little old man looked at me angrily with eyes that were absolutely blue, like a child’s, and asked in a high-pitched voice:
“What may I do for you, my dear sir?”
I answered as the shoemaker had told me to.
“You’re not of the Bunin clan, are you?” the little old man asked suspiciously.
“No, of course not!”
“Follow me, then.”
He led me into what appeared to be the only inhabited room in the house. It was crammed full of tattered rags and junk. A little iron stove was burning in the middle of the room. Trains of smoke belched out of it with every gust of wind.
In the corner I saw a magnificent round stove inlaid with decorative tiles. Almost half the tiles were missing; in their place were small niches filled with medicinal vials buried in dust, little yellowed paper bags, and shriveled worm-eaten apples.
Above a trestle-bed covered with a worn sheepskin there hung a portrait in a heavy golden frame; it was a portrait of a woman in an airy blue dress, with powdered hair combed up and the same blue eyes as the little old man’s.
It seemed as if all of a sudden I was back in the early nineteenth century, visiting Gogol’s Pliushkin. Prior to that I had never imagined that there still remained houses and people of this sort in Russia.
“Are you a nobleman?” the little old man asked me.
Just to be safe, I answered that I was.
“What you do professionally is of no interest to me,” said the little old man. “These days such new occupations have come into being that it would trip up even a policeman. Kindly imagine, there is now even something called a
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“taxator” [an agricultural and forestry assessor]. It is all nonsense! The Romanovs’ nonsense! I will let you the house for the summer, but under one absolute condition: you will not keep any goats. A certain Bunin lived here three years ago. A suspicious gentleman! A real Judas! Got himself goats, and sure—they were plenty happy to gnaw away on my apple trees.
“The writer Bunin?” I asked.
“No, his brother, the excise official. The writer came to visit. A somewhat more decent character than his bureaucratic brother but also, let me tell you, I don’t understand what’s there to boast about. Such petty gentry folk!”
I decided to stand up for Bunin, but on the old man’s terms.
“Come now,” said I, “The Bunins are old nobility.”
“Old?” the little old man mocked me. He looked at me as if I were a hopeless dimwit and shook his head. “Old! Well, I am a bit older! My name is listed in the Velvet Books.1—If you have properly studied the history of the Russian state, then you would know how ancient my family is.”
Only then did I recall that the shoemaker had given me the name of this little old man—Shuiskii. Could it really be that in front of me was standing the last descendant of the Tsar Shuiskii? What the hell!
“I’ll charge you,” continued the little old man meanwhile, “fifty rubles for the whole summer. This is, of course, no trifling sum. But my expenses are not trifling either. My spouse and I separated last year. The old witch now lives in Efremov, and from time to time I have to cough up five or ten rubles for her. But it’s useless. She spends the money on her lovers. She’s just asking to be hanged from the nearest tree.”
“But how old is she?” I asked.
“The hussy is past seventy,” answered Shuiskii crossly. “As to your residence here, we will write a point-by-point contract. I won’t have it any other way.”
I agreed. I felt as if the most extraordinary performance was being acted out in front of me.
From a tattered folder, Shuiskii pulled out a piece of yellowed stationery with a double-headed eagle embossed on it, picked up a quill, sharpened it with a little broken knife and dipped it into a vial of iodine.
“Damn it!” he said. “And why is it always like this? All because that damned fool Vasilisa never puts anything back in its place.”
From the ensuing conversation it became clear that an elderly woman, Vasilisa, who used to bake communion bread, came over to Shuiskii’s from Bogovo twice a week to clean up a bit, chop firewood, and make porridge for the old ma
n.
Shuiskii found a little jar that had once contained “Metamorphosis” face cream but now served as an ink-well, and began to write. As he wrote, he grumbled about the new times:
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“Nowadays everyone speaks and writes as if in Chinese. All around you see this nonsense of the Romanovs! Taxators, ameliorators! They say this good-for-nothing Nicholas dines at the same table with some debauched muzhik [an allusion to Rasputin]. And he calls himself tsar! He’s a whelp, and not a tsar!
“Why do you wrap your face in cotton!” I asked.
“I apply iodine to my face and then, naturally, cover it up with cotton.”
“What for?”
“For my nerves,” Shuiskii answered tersely. “Now then, read and sign it.”
He gave me the piece of paper written in precise old-fashioned handwriting. Listed there were all the conditions of my residence in the dilapidated house, point by point. One item I remember particularly well:
“I, the aforementioned Paustovskii, am bound not to avail myself of the fruit from the orchard, in consideration of the fact that the above-mentioned orchard has been rented to Gavriushka Sitnikov, the petty landholder from Efremov.”
I signed this strange and absolutely useless piece of paper and asked about the deposit. I understood that it was foolish to pay for a house where I was not going to live anyway. But one had to play the role to its end.
“For goodness sake, what deposit!” answered Shuiskii angrily. “If you are indeed a nobleman how dare you mention such things! When you come then we’ll settle up. It is my honor to bid you farewell. Cannot see you off—I have a cold. Shut the door tightly behind you.”
I walked back to Efremov and the further I got from Bogovo the more fantastic this whole encounter appeared to me.
In Efremov, Varvara Petrovna confirmed that the little old man was indeed the last prince Shuiskii. Truth be told, he had had a son, but some forty years ago Shuiskii sold him for 10,000 rubles to a childless Polish magnate. The latter needed an heir, so that after his death all of his enormous entailed estates would not be dispersed amongst his relatives but would remain in a single pair of hands. Some deft secretaries at the assembly of the nobility found a boy of noble blood, Shuiskii, and the magnate purchased and adopted him.
It was a quiet, snowy evening. Inside the hanging lamp something buzzed softly.
After dinner at Rachinskii’s I stayed behind—I was engrossed in Sergeev-Tsenskii’s “The Sorrow of the Fields.”
At the dinner table Rachinskii was composing pieces of advice for women. After having written a few words, he would lean back in his chair, read them over and smirk—obviously, he liked everything that he was writing very much.
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Varvara Petrovna was knitting. Having withdrawn to an armchair, the fortune-teller was thinking about something as she looked at her folded hands with their diamond rings.
Suddenly somebody knocked sharply on the window. It startled us. Judging by the sound, which was quick and anxious, I understood that something serious must have happened.
Rachinskii went to open the door. Varvara Petrovna crossed herself. Only the fortune-teller didn’t stir.
Osipenko burst into the dining room—with his coat and hat still on; he didn’t even take off his galoshes.
“Revolution in Petersburg!” he cried out, “The government’s been overthrown!”
His voice suddenly broke; he collapsed into a chair and burst out sobbing.
For a moment it was dead quiet. You could only hear Osipenko crying, like a child, gulping air convulsively.
My heart began to thump madly. I was short of breath and felt tears streaming down my cheeks. Rachinskii grabbed Osipenko by the shoulder and cried out:
“When? How? Say something!”
“Here . . . Here . . .” Osipenko muttered and pulled out of his coat pocket a long and narrow telegraph tape. “I’ve just come from the telegraph office . . . Here it is . . . everything.”
I took the tape from him and began reading aloud the appeal of the Provisional Government.
At long last! My hands were shaking. Although the whole country had expected these events for the last few months, still the blow was all too sudden.
Here in sleepy, manure-strewn Efremov, one felt especially cut off from the world. The Moscow newspapers arrived three days late, and even they were not very numerous. In the evenings, the dogs howled on the Slobodka, and the watchmen lazily beat their clappers. It seemed as if nothing had changed in this town since the sixteenth century, that there was no railroad, no telegraph, no war, no Moscow, and that nothing ever happened.
And now—the revolution! Everyone’s thoughts flew about in confusion, but only one thing was clear: something great had happened, something that could not be stopped by anyone or anything. It had happened just now, on this seemingly very ordinary day—precisely that which people had been anticipating for more than a century.
“What should we do?” Osipenko was asking frantically. “We must do something immediately.”
Then Rachinskii pronounced the words that instantly exculpated all his sins:
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“We must print this appeal. And post it around town. And get in touch with Moscow. Come on!”
The three of us took off: Osipenko, Rachinskii, and myself. Only Varvara Petrovna and the fortune-teller remained at home. Varvara Petrovna stood in front of the icon-case, rapidly crossing herself again and again while whispering: “Dear God, it’s come. Dear God, it’s come.” Just as before, the fortune-teller stayed motionless in her armchair.
Somebody ran towards us along the deserted street. Under the faint light of a street lamp I noticed that he had neither a hat nor coat and was barefoot. He carried a shoemaker’s last in his hand. The man dashed up to us.
“My dear friends!” he cried and grabbed me by the hand. “Have you heard? The tsar is no more! Only Russia is left.”
He kissed each of us heartily and rushed on, sobbing and muttering something under his breath.
“But why haven’t we congratulated each other?” said Osipenko.
We too stopped for a moment and kissed each other heartily.
Rachinskii went to the telegraph office to follow all the news from Petro-grad and Moscow, while Osipenko and I searched for a small, out-of-the-way printing shop, where they published notices, announcements, and decrees from the military commander.
The printing shop was closed. While we were trying to break off the lock, a fidgety man with a key appeared, opened the shop and turned on the lights. He turned out to be the only typesetter and printer in all of Efremov. We did not ask why or how he had turned up at the printing shop.
“Go over to the font case and start composing!” I said.
I began dictating the text of the appeal to the typesetter. He set type, pausing now and then to wipe with his sleeve the tears which were welling up in his eyes.
Soon another piece of news arrived: an order from Nekrasov, the transportation minister of the Provisional Government,—to everyone, everyone, everyone!—for the detention of the imperial train, wherever it might be found.
Events were bearing down on Russia like an avalanche.
As I read the first off-print of the appeal, the letters jumped and blurred before my eyes.
The printing shop was now full of people who had somehow found out that the announcement of the revolution was being printed here. They would take stacks of appeals, run out into the streets and glue them up on walls, fences, and lamp posts.
It was already 1:00 AM, a time when Efremov was usually fast asleep.
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Suddenly, at this unearthly hour, a short and vibrant clang of the cathedral bell rang out. Then a second and a third. The ringing gradually increased. A taut pealing was already audible all o
ver the little town, and soon the bells of all the surrounding churches joined in.
Lights came on in all the houses. The streets filled up with people. The doors of many houses stood flung open. Complete strangers embraced each other, weeping.
The solemn and joyous whistles of steam locomotives soared from the direction of the railroad station. Somewhere in the distance people began singing the Marseillaise.2 First their singing was barely audible but increasingly it grew in volume:
Let’s renounce the old world, Let’s stamp its dust off our feet.
Then the resounding notes of a brass band burst into the choir of voices:
We’ll go to our suffering brothers, To the starving people we’ll go!
On a table smeared with printer’s ink, Osipenko was writing the first decree of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the town of Efremov. No such committee had been organized. Nobody knew, or could know, who its members were because there were no members. Osipenko himself was improvising the decree.
“Until the government of liberated Russia appoints new authorities in the town of Efremov and in Efremov Township, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Efremov appeals to all citizens to maintain complete order and thus decrees:
The administration of the town and the township is to be entrusted to the local zemstvo administration and its chairman, citizen Kushelev.
Citizen Kushelev, until further special instructions, is appointed the commissar of the government.
All police and gendarmes are to turn in their weapons to the local zemstvo administration.
The Russian Century Page 20