The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Mensheviks were holding up newspapers. Reports from Piter said that Kerensky had issued an order for Vladimir Ilich’s arrest and that he’d fled the city and was in hiding.

  Federev seemed less confused than Artem and was immediately on his feet, raging away. No doubt Kerensky would have Vladimir Ilich killed on the way to prison! So why wouldn’t he hide? He knows you fear him enough to kill him!

  On the platform Tasha leaned forward from her hips and both her fists were clenched. She sang out her own answer above the racket of the hall. But the debate was going to take a further slide still, because all at once a cry was raised. A man’s voice directed at Tasha. It yelled, Zhidy Bolsheviki! Bolsheviks in the audience, various soldiers, workers, Olya and Federev stood up at this and turned around to the crowd behind and screamed at the accuser. The cry Bolshevik Jew! was one I’d get used to. The interjector kept on shouting it and others took up the chant.

  Total pandemonium!

  The offender – who like the first speaker wore a suit halfway between that of a gent and a worker – made a further speech. He asked his fellow citizens of the Ukraine if they wanted to starve the way the Russians were doing in Petrograd. Would they want their children to starve because of Jew speculators and Jew Bolsheviks?

  I could tell now Tasha was getting to be less attractive to the crowd. I’ve never seen people hate a Jew like they did then. The family of Jewish drapers in Broken Hill, the Lendls, had snide things said about them. All the less so because young Lendl was a champion fast bowler – at least by Broken Hill standards. But all this was on a different scale. Tasha didn’t take a step back. In fact she took a step forward and in her anger looked more in charge. She moved without any concern from here to there as fists reached up and pounded the floor of the rostrum. It sounded like she might be eaten alive. They’d discovered a spy among them – someone who had deceived them by dressing herself up in a fashionable gown and Ukrainian or Russian hair. To a lot of them, it appeared, she was a witch in disguise and they couldn’t wait to have at her.

  We’ll have to get her out, Artem told me as people rushed into the aisles to charge the stage. There was already a crowd blocking the way to the stairs and we had to fight our way through it. I’m not using that word lightly: it was fighting. Artem was willing to push people to the ground – even women – to get onto the stage. Over his shoulder he was yelling, Come on, Paddy! as if he really needed me. I followed, kicking and pushing. The more I was blocked by this mass of human stupidity – who wanted to punish Tasha instead of Kerensky – the more my old state of barbarism started to come over me: I saw everyone in an extra-sharp way. I saw beforehand how I could break their jaws and grind their bones. It was a strange feeling – unfamiliar to me normally. But I more than enjoyed it. I was let loose and everything I did felt as if it was permitted – by who I don’t know. A gaping mouth full of hate presented itself and I smashed my forearm into it and wanted to hear the cartilage in the nose snap – though that would have been impossible over the noise of the crowd.

  When we made it onto the stage there were maybe thirty ot hers who were already there with unkind intent. I could see our host Federev on the far side of Tasha with a hold on her arm and trying to get her away. Tasha was still yelling some point she wanted to make. I kicked a man who was trying to drag her by her right arm towards the mob who wanted to devour her. I’ll beat the bloody lot of you, I was yelling. Bastards! Fuckers! I drove a flank of men and women away from Tasha to the back of the stage. It wasn’t one-sided. Someone slammed me in the ribs. But some fierce-looking moustached soldiers and some of Federev’s Red Guards – who often stood on the running boards of his car – came up around me and we held one side of the platform while Tasha and Federev and Artem made a retreat towards the wings. With the soldiers to help me I fought a rearguard down the steps leading to a stage door. I saw Tasha’s shy sister Olya in front of me. Somehow she’d fought her way out too without anyone caring for her in the same way they looked after her orator of a sister.

  Outside we ran for our host’s car and the Red Guards standing on the running boards had rifles in their hands. That made the crowd pause and think. We all tumbled in – our host and Tasha, Olya and Artem, his big hand reaching for me.

  Make way for the little tiger! Artem cried in English, hauling me aboard.

  Inside the car, everyone was laughing, even though people outside were pounding the windows and our host’s Ukrainian driver was yelling curses at the hundreds who stood in his way. We were suddenly all laughing like crazy and when some of the mob threw stones and horse manure at the back window of the car it made us laugh even more.

  That’s nationalism for you! our host told me – shaking his head. That’s idiots of all classes going for old nationalist fairy tales about Kiev the Golden and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the dreadful Rasputin’s favourite book by the way. And the tsar’s as well.

  But they tried to arrest Vladimir Ilich? asked Artem as all the jollity died down.

  I know, said Federev. Don’t worry. He’ll be hidden. They don’t have the whip-hand they did once.

  7

  I thought that we would now be heading down the long avenues to our lawyer’s house but instead we turned off into a side street – Botanical Street – and pulled up outside the shell of the two-storey building where the sisters lived. As we all got out an old lady in a scarf came from a room under the stairs that led up to nowhere as yet and stood scolding the lot of us. Tasha and Olya responded cheerfully and let us into their place. This looked to be pretty pleasant – and expensive even. However there was no electricity and the quieter sister Olya set out to get the place illumined – like some Queensland dairy farm – by a kerosene lamp. Tasha quickly got the samovar working on the tiled stove. But before any tea was served they settled down to hold – yes, a meeting. These were serious people.

  The people in the Abrasova sisters’ rooms – and me less than most – didn’t know anything about the turmoil going on in Vladimir Ilich’s closest circle. He had come back to Russia in April and straight away he had old friends from exile, like the intellectual engine-driver’s son Lev Kamenev – sniping at him but not wishing to shoot him – as no doubt Kerensky did. And now he was on the run anyhow. The internal arguments were things I and others would find out about from later reading. But here in Kharkov nobody wavered and the circle who sat in the Abrasova girls’ flat was a united one. First up of course they wanted to discuss Vladimir Ilich’s escape and whether he had managed it and whether it was complete yet. Would he try to get back to Western Europe by way of the Baltic? No, said Federev. He’ll never go that far again. He’ll hide maybe in Latvia. Or in Sweden or Finland.

  In the minds in that little apartment it was not the Jew-haters who believed the words Jew and Bolshevik to be the same thing who were the greater threat. To people like Federev or Tasha the Mensheviks were to be feared more than the Cadets and Golden Kievites. Because Mensheviks actually believed that by taking seats in the Duma – not to overthrow it, but to get on with everyone – they’d be able to talk everyone else round to their view.

  Our little meeting lasted three hours all up. Olya talked enough to show she was no cat’s paw either. Some time about two o’clock we drank the tea with some sausage and bread. Everyone was talkative still and very jolly about their escape. I found I was too. I had not yawned during their long confabulation. I was entranced. And I was learning – a word at a time.

  Over tea, Artem told them further stories about Australia. To them it was like hearing stories about Antarctica. And after that Tasha had her own story to tell – Artem would relate it to me later. It was about how she’d been a regular at Vladimir Ilich’s house in Geneva. If Bolsheviks were likely to be boastful about anything it was how close they were to Vladimir Ilich Lenin. It was clear Vladimir Ilich had the power to make them feel they played an essential part and that they were valued for it. Before her sister joined the party, Tasha had been already workin
g as a party agent in a city called Tver on the Volga – a city associated with Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Ostrovsky. She’d already written and dispatched two reports to Piter on the activities of the local cell and was writing another when she heard a knock on the door. It was the gendarmes. She threw her report into the fire, but when she let them in the police could smell the burning paper and from that point on there was a watch on her house.

  And so she was spirited away. The party machine had contacts with people smugglers and employed one to take her out of the country in return for ten roubles. Once she was in the tsarist part of Poland she was handed on from smuggler to smuggler so that it cost her a lot more than ten roubles in the end. Finally, dressed in peasant shawl and riding in a farm wagon, she was driven to the German border by a Polish Jew who kept on stopping every time he saw a haystack to steal fodder for his horse. Soon he had a huge load in the wagon, which groaned its way into East Prussia. Tasha found out when they crossed the border that far from being a poor man who needed all the straw he could find to feed his horse – he owned the inn she was to stay at.

  According to her new travel documents she was Akulina. As the smuggler and his wife argued about whether she ought to be fed or not, Tasha pretended she couldn’t understand Yiddish. And why would a golden-haired Slav such as her have any grasp of the Jewish dialect? In fact the girls’ granny had spoken it when they grew up in Kiev – that Jew-baiting city (so I was told) where their father had tried to protect them by giving them full-on Russian names like Natasha and Olya.

  Tasha admired Germany. I would find the Great Russians always admired Germany – even in those days when the German army was still inside the Western Ukrainian border. Tasha thought German farm people looked well fed. The theory was that because Germany was more industrial Western Europe would turn to revolution before Russia. But the good houses of the Prussian farmers made Tasha wonder about that. It wasn’t until she saw the slums of the cities and spoke with other members of the party there that she saw things were not right. In the meantime they looked after her and advised her how to carry herself when faced with policemen and officials. She got to Berlin – carrying herself as they’d advised her – and caught the train to Zurich.

  In that city Tasha stayed in the house of some exiled Russians who kept complaining that Vladimir Ilich was trying to split the party over clause 1 of the membership rules, which determined who was eligible and who wasn’t. Lenin didn’t want or respect anyone other than active full-time campaigners like Tasha. All the others were just useless tea-drinkers and merchants of palaver, he argued. By contrast the Mensheviks were quite happy to let in anyone who agreed with their program and who did an occasional service – such as giving out handbills or newspapers – when it suited them. Tasha believed with Vladimir Ilich that revolution wasn’t work for amateurs.

  Olya came to join her in Switzerland and the sisters started to meet up with other political escapees. The legendary old Julius Martov – now on the Menshevik side – was so kind even though he disagreed with Vladimir Ilich. Tasha and Olya lived in a pension in Zurich and Martov – the veteran their parents had known and respected – would visit her and her sister and offer them help with money and food. But when during one of Martov’s visits to the sisters Tasha told the old man what she really thought about the party issue, that she sided with Vladimir Ilich and his all-out revolutionaries known as the Bolsheviks, he became angry and yelled and screamed about fanatics. Afterwards the landlady of the pension called Tasha to the office and told her that if her Russian friends didn’t stop coming and creating mayhem she would have to leave.

  Tasha and Olya moved to Geneva. Even though Vladimir Ilich lived there she did not want to bother him. But the elder of the Marxists in Switzerland – Georgi Plekhanov – stepped forward and filled the fatherly gap left by Martov. When Tasha caught influenza, she was treated by Plekhanov’s wife and Plekhanov himself came round like a grandfather and brought her pastries and told her it would be better for now not to trouble her mind with talk about the party split and the arguments between him and Martov on the one side and Vladimir Ilich on the other. After all, he said, we are all brothers. Just the same, he was sad to hear that she’d lined up with Lenin’s battering rams. Some of them were bullies, he said.

  Despite his kindness Tasha thought, Yes, you don’t want me to discuss it but you’ll come around here using terms like battering rams.

  She first met Vladimir Ilich at a large social democrat meeting where he spoke on what party people called ‘the agrarian question’. He always preferred a box or something like that to speak from if he could find one because he wasn’t a tall man and the way he spoke would have been a bit flat unless you actually saw him and felt his presence.

  Afterwards Tasha and Olya were introduced to him for the first time. He didn’t put on airs, said Tasha. In fact he made ordinary people feel at one with him while he spoke and even more once he’d finished talking and came down and became one of the crowd. And though he was hard on such people as the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries from the platform, he was very polite to them on the floor. Tasha was surprised that he wanted to talk to her. (Maybe even Vladimir Ilich knew a good-looking woman when he saw one but Tasha seemed unaware of how beautiful she was.) Vladimir Ilich wanted to know all about the local committee of the Bolsheviks in Tver and how much it knew about splits in party theory that were happening in Switzerland. These things might be only a conflict of ideas now, said Vladimir Ilich, but when the revolution comes they could become clashes between armed men.

  Tasha told him not everyone understood as clearly as she did now she was in Geneva. They all read Iskra of course – but they needed meetings to have things explained.

  I have come to enlist with the Leninist Rams, Tasha told him, and Vladimir Ilich laughed a lot at this and called his wife Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya over so the story could be repeated. Krupskaya was known to work long days typing Vladimir Ilich’s endless string of speeches and pamphlets. Her face was lined and pinched but she smiled at the mention of Leninist Rams. She invited Tasha and her sister to come and visit them at home.

  The sisters caught a tram out to Secheron, the suburb of Geneva where Lenin lived with Krupskaya and Krupskaya’s mother Elizaveta Krupskaya in a two-storey rented house. The largest room was the kitchen – where Vladimir Ilich’s mother-in-law stood at a large stove. Vladimir’s study was up a trembly staircase. There was an iron bed in case he needed a rest and a few chairs and a white table heaped with writing and papers. All his books were packed into rough homemade bookshelves. All very primitive – a poor monk’s room as Tasha imagined a monk’s room to be. Nadezhda Krupskaya’s workroom wasn’t any more comfortable. It wasn’t unusual for Swiss houses to be as bare as this but Tasha was awed by the bareness.

  She found out that the old lady Elizaveta did all the housework because her daughter – apart from the other work – had to translate into code the letters being sent to all the cells inside Russia. It took hours to do that just for one letter.

  Tasha wanted to visit this Aladdin’s cave for revolutionaries every day – just so that when Vladimir Ilich came down from his office he could educate her ever more. But she and others restricted themselves to Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days set aside by Lenin for visits. Whenever they arrived Krupskaya’s old mother would call out, Go on, go upstairs. Drag them out of their caves. Dinner’s on. There’s enough left over for you.

  Sometimes Lenin would have been working in a shabby suit and sometimes in a blue cotton smock just like a Russian farmer. But he always came down laughing his famous laugh – people later would forget that laugh and judge him only by his photographs. Even though he was in a lot of ways ordinary looking – bald, a bit harried – his jocose manner would spread to the young visitors and they’d spend their time making political jokes. They were like the disciples listening to Christ, said Tasha, and they breathed easier with him. One night Tasha and Olya missed the last tram and V
ladimir Ilich offered to see them home – he said he needed the fresh air. For Tasha in particular it was a chance to talk to him further. She admitted she was scared – she didn’t think she had any of the qualities required to be numbered among the sort of party members Vladimir Ilich was looking for. She didn’t have any great skills for persuading others or explaining theory. Sometimes she felt so inadequate that she thought she was close to a nervous breakdown.

  He said not to worry. The important thing, he said, was that the revolutionary’s personal life and party life had to be one and the same – the way it was with him and Krupskaya. But it needed strong young people who were in touch with the masses. He said that just for now this was where they had to begin – out of these hard little circles – until the time came. As for talking to others in the groups back in Russia, it was only the science of being certain about what you were certain about.

  Under Vladimir Ilich’s spell, she reached her pension. Lenin twinkled by the light of a lamppost. You have to have more confidence in your abilities, he told Tasha and Olya.

  And so with her Bolshevik bishop’s blessing she and her sister went inside to bed while Lenin himself walked a long way home clearing his head for new ideas.

  Tasha said – that night in her flat in the basement when she was talking to us after barely surviving the Jew-haters – she was guilty about the time she’d taken from Vladimir Ilich. But no one ever made him leave his room.

  We knew that that night Vladimir Ilich was hiding somewhere. After returning from exile in April he and his Bolsheviks had set up their headquarters in a mansion named after a ballerina – Matilda Kshesinskaya – who had owned it once. It was near the Peter and Paul Fortress, the prison Vladimir Ilich would have landed in if he’d surrendered to Kerensky’s warrant and they hadn’t killed him in the car on the way there.