The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  But the growl and detonations we began to hear two mornings later seemed to show how unreliable the Cossack delegation Artem met had been. There was a period of brief questioning – men and women looking at each other. Is that thunder or what I know it is?

  With a group of Red Guards – some of them looking a little paler than they had when parading the streets – Federev, Artem, Sergeant-Major Brevda, Ismaylov and I drove. We were all armed – or nearly so. I’d given my rifle to a soldier in the back of the truck to mind. Those 352 men in the back were clutching their rifles with intent. Listening to the guns of the anti-revolution, carrying a rifle still seemed more fantastical to me than carrying a cane.

  From a headquarters tent near the village on the road to Chuguyev we could hear some of our own light guns returning the fire from hilltops around. The southern forces of General Kornilov were moving on us. Artem and Federev studied a map in an impromptu staff tent. It was marked with the names and numbers of our infantry and mounted regiments spread out north and south of the road behind breastworks of various heights and quality.

  The noise from both sides’ cannons continued. The officers were discontented because as yet – until we captured bigger ones – our guns were of lighter bore than theirs. Everyone seemed to think this was a considerable problem. But both sets of artillery seemed to rock the earth we stood on and make the canvas of the tent shudder. I had never been so close to the firing of such huge machines before. As the shells left the mouths of our nearby inferior cannon they took my breath streaming out behind them.

  After a while one of our intelligence officers came into the tent and shouted to Artem that their artillery was strangely disorganised – no concerted barrages, he said. No damage to human beings on our side. Some damage surely? asked Artem. Some scratches and wounds surely. The expert shrugged.

  Within an hour and a half all firing had ceased. From the tent flaps we could see that our soldiers still stood by their barricades of timber.

  Artem looked at me and jerked his head towards the tent opening. We went outside and got into the front seat of a lorry and Artem told the driver to drive down the road. We drove for forty minutes and then found ourselves in a crowd of wagons carrying soldiers eastwards. Since the Cossack army wore uniforms of the same colour as us, it took me a while to understand we were among a Cossack rearguard and that they were going back the way they’d come. Their generals had brought them to water but they had refused to drink. We stopped and let them all pass us by. Then we turned and rolled back towards our lines and Kharkov.

  It was a most astounding journey and it taught me that all military operations have more in common with the ridiculous than newspapers ever say.

  19

  Trofimova was soon at work in Kharkov’s new season of peace. She came into Artem’s office where I was working alone on my piece about the Cossack retreat and urged me towards the corridor. Downstairs – at the door of the mansion – she had gathered a squad of about ten attentive Red Guards who seemed flattered to be her helpers. These days she looked a little like an eccentric Red Guard herself, because over her green dress she wore a grey army jacket.

  Beyond the gate of the mansion a truck waited for us and Trofimova’s Red Guards hauled themselves into the back while we took the seats beside the driver. When the truck began to roll across the city towards the west, she took from her pocket a sheet of paper. I knew she’d been milking Federev’s boys for the names of grain and flour hoarders – they seemed to be always on her mind. Now she had her list of possible targets.

  She pointed to one name in particular: I. M. Krakowski. She jabbed the name with her finger as if she were crushing a fly.

  We pulled up outside an ordinary-looking warehouse among engineering works. Trofimova and I got out of the front seat and her Red Guards had already clambered out and were waiting with a hound-like eagerness. A watchman carrying an ancient rifle emerged from the building. He quickly judged himself outnumbered and pointed to the door of the warehouse as if he was willing to make a gift of it.

  We were then inside a vast room stacked beyond the rafters with flour bags marked with the number of puds – the Russian unit of measurement – in them. Two of the Red Guards minded the rifles while the rest of us carried out the half-pud bags – about sixteen pounds in weight – on our shoulders under Trofimova’s loud and cheery orders. So we filled the truck. At least four-fifths of the flour in the place was still there by the time the truck was full. Trofimova left two Red Guards to guard the place and tell Mr Krakowski – if he turned up – the flour was no longer his.

  Together we now travelled with the truckload across the city to the soviet warehouse a half-mile from the Gubin mansion. In the truck Trofimova grinned at me. She was tickled pink with herself. She had at last become active.

  In days to come she would burst out of the Abrasova sisters’ office like a high wind. She was bringing bread to ordinary mouths. She was trampling on the profit desires of a bastard named Krakowski and of other bastards as well. She just needed more trucks and guards in order to finish the job. She charmed Artem into allocating them. And if Artem was missing with Tasha – then she charmed Federev’s aides. Later Artem said to me, Have you seen Federev scowling? It’s because Trofimova’s stolen his thunder.

  Federev’s jealousy – which we had seen hardly at all in the old days – grew by the day. Every day when Trofimova arrived in the yard a group of Red Guards and soldiers would present themselves to her like a mob of kids looking for an outing with a favourite teacher. They loved the idea of relieving merchants of their secret flour stashes. I thought Trofimova moved among these men like a light. She was like the angel of bread.

  Kharkov was safe. But it seemed the revolution wasn’t. The week after the Cossack withdrawal Kerensky named a new government made up of people he liked: Cadets and old-fashioned Trudoviks – soft Laborites in the style of T.J. Ryan – and smock-wearing Socialist Revolutionaries from the provinces. Kerensky hoped his new coalition might hold out until – in the style of the French Revolution – a constituent assembly was convened. What might bring it down was General Kornilov on one hand or us on the other.

  Vladimir Ilich had by now crept back into Piter again. His presence there was an open secret but he was protected by army units who’d turned Red. Every night he was sheltered in a different supporter’s flat. As for Krupskaya – well, at the time I had first met Vladimir Ilich in the little hut near the Baltic she was still hiding in Piter. But she ended up joining her husband for a period in Finland and had now returned with him and was also moving from flat to flat.

  A thin ill-dressed emissary arrived at the Gubin mansion with a summons from Vladimir Ilich. Artem was to come to Piter. Vladimir Ilich needed his vote in the Central Committee. Artem took it for granted I would join him and write my version of what happened – whether it was a triumph or a bloody disaster. I was to be witness for the English-speaking world. I was not yet aware there were other and better writers in Piter.

  Everything was on a knife-edge in Piter. Kharkov would be a safer place for the womenfolk who in any case had their own work to do. The news of our departure sent Tasha into one of her slumps and I felt genuinely sad for her. A woman carrying a child deserved to give off an air of blame and fear at such a time as this – uncertain and dangerous – but there was no open argument between them and no question at all whether Artem should go or not. They were both obedient revolutionaries. Artem had promised to bring Tasha and Olya and his sister on to Piter anyhow – just as soon as things settled down there.

  Trofimova accepted the separation as a matter of course. She had her list of profiteers and her gang of Red Guards to occupy her. Federev was too busy to be jealous these days. He had bought a house three doors from the Gubin mansion and he moved half his people there. This was to be a prison for the party’s enemies. I hoped that this meant the end of cordite but I was not so sure. And – given I’d heard the Cossack army’s cannon – I found I didn’t ca
re that much if it didn’t.

  Artem reminded me to fetch my rifle as the time came to catch the train. Taking a rifle on a train – from my point of view – was a bit like inviting a stranger to travel with you. But I obeyed him.

  I slept through the journey to Piter in our corner of a crowded compartment. But I was wide awake as we came into Vitebsk station. If I’d thought it was a shambles earlier in the year you should have seen it now – crowded to the very edge of platforms by sallow women who looked as if they did not care if someone tipped them onto the track and into the path of a locomotive. Whole families were camped here permanently. Women were folding blankets while grannies sat on chests full of clothing and family treasures. Small girls were skipping and men stretched their necks to dry-shave themselves. Over the crush and stench came the desperate twang of balalaikas. The players knew they weren’t going to get much out of this crowd for their trouble. Winter was coming and people didn’t have a spare kopek. Kerensky was feeding only his army – dreaming it would take up the war again and end the ceasefire and rout the Germans at last. And – on the way – give him a reputation as a saviour general.

  No one met us at Vitebsk station. The days of receptions had ended – and properly so. Outside, we waited for a tram which did not come, and were approached by a man who offered to take us in his coal wagon – he was operating it as a rough hackney cab. It was with him that we travelled across the canal. The boards of the thing were ingrained with coal dust. But we didn’t mind that. There was too much else to look at. It seemed like the old Piter but all the activity on the streets was more hectic than it had been. In fact it looked as if three-quarters of the population or more were on the streets. Soldiers and sailors were promenading with girls who carried rifles. Some citizens were hawking family jewellery or furniture. Men and women orators by the hundred harangued small crowds which – if you clumped them together – made up thousands of people. The prostitutes on the corners were advertising themselves by now and then leaning against a wall with one leg thrust in front of another. And they were better dressed than the full-time women of the night who’d been so common last time we were here. In the coal man’s cranky old cart it took us nearly an hour to reach the outskirts of the crowd outside the gates of the Smolny Institute.

  The Smolny was guarded by even more soldiers and Red Guards than before. Not only was the gate patrolled and the garden full of soldiers but now there was a system of sandbagged redoubts that ringed the building. Machine-gun nests behind sandbags were positioned to cover the approaches to the fine arches of the ground floor. There was still a lot of milling of civilians and soldiers going on outside the gate and inside the garden. Everyone was challenged a number of times before being let inside – first at the gate and then at the steps and the doors. Then – in the lobby – the Red Guards wanted to see a person’s papers. Someone in the line told Artem that so many government spies had got into the place early on that they were now starting to be very strict.

  We got past the gate through the power of the authorising letter Artem carried. At the door though we were held up and he kept turning around and smiling at me with a frustrated look. He kept telling the soldiers at the door he was a member of the Central Committee.

  They can’t read my pass, Artem complained in English. To hell with it!

  The soldier in front of him wasn’t impressed at all by this foreign language and gave Artem back his pass and waved him away. But just then another soldier arrived who seemed to be the commander of the sentries though he wore no badges of rank. Artem presented him with his letter of summons signed by Sverdlov, the secretary of the Central Committee. The chief guardian of the door finally let him past. But then he stood in my way and Artem had to argue further with him – I was an aide from a far country and a friend of Comrade Koba of the Central Committee who called me Tovarishch Wah-Wah.

  Wah-Wah? asked the officer. Koba?

  Then he looked at me and laughed and made room for me to pass. So we were inside the front door but there were further queues. A clerk at a table was filling in new passes with a date on them. Every one was talking at the same time and at such a pace that I wondered if my simple vocabulary would ever keep up. Everyone was smoking their filthy tobacco at the same time – even some of the women who had little clay pipes in their mouths. Sweat and sour breath rounded out the awful fug of the place.

  Here rumour had reached its boiling point and was bubbling on fantastically. Many of them were like old songs heard before. Kornilov had given up trying to take Piter. But Kerensky was going to send all the Bolshevik troops to the front and replace them with army regiments and Cossacks loyal to his government. Some rumours were absolutely fresh. The priests were going to bring out an old icon – the Krestny Khot. It showed Christ on the cross and had been used to bless the Russian armies that defeated Napoleon in 1812. Now – in 1917 – its clients wanted it to crush the revolution and those in the lobby who were still believers were disturbed by its magic power.

  We were waiting for the clerk to fix us – or refuse to fix us – with a pass when out of the blue Slatkin appeared at Artem’s side. Even he smelled of sweat but he also gave off a scent of cologne. Slatkin kissed us both on the cheek joyously and brought us forward and spoke to the clerk at the table. Soon we were free of the scrum and going up the broad stairs to the upper floor.

  Slatkin said to Artem, It’d be a tragedy not to let you in, Artem. Vladimir Ilich wants your vote. There are some lily-livered people around here and one of them is our friend Zinoviev. He’d rather be at the moving pictures than grabbing the moment by its balls.

  He took us up to the first floor and along the corridor to a classroom marked by an enamel plate identifying it as No. 36. What a No. 36 it was! Not No. 18 where ordinary delegates had met last time. No. 18 had been absorbed by some other faction. Inside No. 36 were clustered the men and women of the Central Committee – wan-looking people in a lot of cases in need of a fresh shirt. I could see the thin Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky and his staring eyes. From photographs I could recognise Trotsky – his masses of hair and his narrow little glasses – writing calmly at a table in spite of all the noise. Other members of his Military Revolutionary Committee – the same sort of body we’d had in Kharkov – had the whole end of one table to do their work and make their plans on. The wild-haired and exhausted-looking Antonov-Ovseenko wore an undertaker’s black tie – crooked. He had been an engineering officer in the tsarist army but was expelled from the army engineering college for baulking at taking the oath of loyalty to Nicholas the Second. Everyone called him Antonov-O. Then there was big tall Dybenko the sailor. His lover Alexandra Kollontai was in the room too. In a spotless blouse and pleated skirt Kollontai looked as if she came from a different planet to the frazzled men.

  Seated at one of the two tables was Vladimir Ilich himself. It turned out that indeed he did work here most days – and often well into the evening. Krupskaya was not in No. 36 as it turned out but attended to Vladimir Ilich’s normal work while she herself hid in the city.

  As Artem arrived in this company some of those at the tables rose from their seats and briefly greeted him and even me. If it was true that there were backsliders here in the room then Artem must have appeared to Vladimir Ilich like reinforcements at a siege.

  20

  I didn’t stay in that august No. 36 for long but went into the room next door where the task of typing up the Central Committee’s paperwork was left to a contingent of white-bloused young women. The typists’ fingers flew over the keys – their typewriter carriages clanging like street trolleys at a rate that would have impressed dear old Amelia. There I found an edge of a table where I began to write a few notes covering our arrival in Piter and what was happening at the Smolny. Sometimes through an open door I would see Slatkin pass in the corridor. His broad and florid face reminded me of some bush bookmaker. But he seemed to have access to every office.

  A tall man in a good suit came into the office where I w
as working and borrowed a Roman-script typewriter from a corner table and began typing from notes. When he paused he must have heard me muttering over my work in English.

  You American? he asked.

  Australian, I said.

  What in the name of God are you doing here?

  I didn’t bother going into it. I knew now from his accent that he was American.

  Did you know Kerensky’s talking this afternoon? he asked me. At the Marinsky Palace. Two o’clock. Remember the old Supreme Council of Soviets? Used to meet in the Tauride? Well, now they’re at the Marinsky. I mean, you ought to be there if you can, sport. It’ll be quite a circus. Kerensky’s last chance I’d say. Did you know that his father was a high school headmaster and taught Vladimir Ilich Lenin? In Simbirsk this was. In a huge country like this! Bit of a coincidence...

  I told him I had heard something about that. And I thanked him for tipping me off. But where’s the Marinsky Palace? I asked him.

  Come with me if you like. We can catch a tram together.

  Now the American introduced himself. His name was Reed. Just in case Artem came out of No. 36 I wrote a note explaining why I wouldn’t be in the Smolny for the next few hours and left it with a typist. On the way out of the building Reed suggested we had time to get lunch down in the basement – as long as you called cabbage soup a lunch, he said.

  We lined up for the soup and bread and ate it at a soup-spattered table. Reed talked all the time. He was writing for an American newspaper called The Masses. He asked me where I was from in Australia and I described Broken Hill and Brisbane.

  And I thought Portland was a hick town! he said.

  Outside in the fresh afternoon I wore the military tunic I’d got in Kharkov. I was still a little sheepish about it – I knew I wasn’t a soldier’s bootlace. But at least I’d left my rifle behind in the office. But no one laughed at me as we caught the tram across to St Isaac’s Cathedral. It was only when we were rattling along that I realised I didn’t have any means of getting back into the Smolny again. I mentioned that to Reed. Don’t worry, he said, I can fix it.