The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Paddy, he said, if I declared you were a friend of Kerensky – what would you reply? In Russian, I mean.

  Inpravda! I said.

  Bravo!

  He turned back to the sailors and spread his hands like a reasonable merchant making a sale. Then he turned back to me. I’m telling them that if you could come all the way from Australia for the revolution, they can bring all their men across from Kronstadt and at least open fire on the Winter Palace from their cruiser in the river.

  I didn’t know why they should be at all unwilling. Maybe they couldn’t guarantee the movements of their men.

  Then Slatkin and the sailors started talking again. I had served my role – as the sort of statue you saw in churches acting as a spur to the faithful. Except for my one word.

  When we were leaving there were handshakes all round. The sailors smiled at me and clapped my back again and again. Then Slatkin and I left through the door to the street where Slatkin’s four soldiers guarded us on our way into the armoured car.

  Slatkin beamed at me as the engine roared. That went very well, he told me. You impressed them, Paddy.

  22

  22

  I was taken back to the Smolny and vouched for again. Out of curiosity I went through the lobby into the grand hall which just now was serving as a bivouac for soldiers and Red Guards.

  The Smolny stink was still very sharp where tomorrow night– apparently – the All-Russia Soviet Congress was to gather where all the delegates of all the factions would meet and argue on the one great issue – to destroy Kerensky and his government or not.

  I climbed the stairs to the office in which I’d been working what seemed like an age ago. Three typists were still typing flat out in there. Reed wasn’t around and I felt sorry about that. Because I thought he clearly had a nose for where and what things were happening. I sat down at a table. I had another incident of the would-be revolution to write up but I found it was hard to settle to anything. The building itself seemed restless. A lot of people rushed down to the lobby to hear that a Bolshevik agent had been out to the Twelfth Army on the northern front and its regimental soviets had all voted to follow the orders of the Military Revolutionary Committee. The earth was shifting under the Smolny but none of us knew how far it would slide.

  Then I saw Artem amongst the press of people listening to the tidings. He didn’t look exhausted at all as I made my way to him. He turned to me with his bright face. I couldn’t believe he could still look so fresh – but that was one of Artem’s gifts.

  Paddy, he yelled. But where’s Suvarov? I sent one of our people looking for him.

  We looked around the room ourselves but he did not seem to be there.

  It was time for the reunion of the two old campaigners – to hell with everything else! We went searching for Suvarov all through the Smolny and in the end found him in the garden smoking a cigarette by a bonfire. Artem was approaching him with arms thrown wide and calling his name before Suvarov even saw him. Suvarov stood, hiccoughed a laugh and brought both his hands up to his forehead under the rim of his cap. They embraced like bears wrestling. Watching the two of them I got a feeling that all the right people were now in place and in touch. And now anything at all could happen. The world could after all turn itself upside down. It could be taken from the men in flash uniforms and frock coats and given to a fellow like Suvarov.

  I’ve told him, Artem yelled at me, he’s got to come to Kharkov and work with us. No Don coal, no bloody revolution!

  Artem soon had to excuse himself but Suvarov and I stayed by the fire. He kept saying, Imagine that, eh? Imagine Artem! Central Committee. Well, blow me down!

  Appreciating it all, he stared at the flames and spat into them with utter happiness.

  Did you know, he asked me, I nearly got trapped into marriage with a girl in Sydney?

  I’d heard something, I admitted.

  Imagine that. What would I be doing now? Probably washing up.

  He threw his arm up at the dark sky the sparks from the flames disappeared into. Then what would have happened to all this?

  We waited there for two hours and Artem at last came back to join us for a while. He told us an anecdote about Vladimir Ilich. In disguise he’d come across to the Smolny that morning on a local train from the flat he’d sheltered in and he’d had a choice of seats – no one else dared travel in case Kerensky’s troops or the gendarmes boarded the thing. So there came Lenin – to deliberate on great schemes – all alone on a little neighbourhood rattler.

  There’d been a lot of vacillating and even fright in room No. 36. Our old friend the moving-picture enthusiast Grigorii Zinoviev and his comrade Kamenev didn’t think things were ready yet. Maybe the stars weren’t in alignment. Vladmir Ilich had said to them something like, In two years you’ll still be saying that. Artem had voted to go ahead without hesitation – which maybe explained his air of repressed excitement as he talked with Suvarov and me.

  So if we actually win – someone at the meeting had asked – what will we call our ministers of state?

  Trotsky suggested commissars – that was the term the Jacobins used in the French revolution. That’s how casually and how fatefully things happened in No. 36 – with the rest of the building and the soldiers in the garden and the people of the city and country and world itself none the wiser.

  Artem disappeared again and Suvarov and I remained at the fire – excited innocents. In Room No. 36 Antonov-O – former engineering officer – was working on the plans for the next day and sending out messengers to the barracks around the city. The telegraph office had to be occupied. Then the telephone exchange, the Marinsky and any of the bridges held now by the Junkers. The sailors from Kronstadt were expected to be in place with the soldiers by the middle of the morning. Ready to do all! The Winter Palace and Kerensky inside it would be assaulted in good time for its capture to be proclaimed before the Congress of Soviets met downstairs tomorrow evening. And if not, we’d all be looking for places to hide.

  We rattled on at the fire while upstairs Vladmir Ilich was stretched out on the floor resting his back. He was a man who’d settled everything in his mind and the great stone set rolling! Within thirty-six hours he could be dead – but he didn’t want to go down with backache.

  Artem returned and announced we could go to the Alliluyevs’ apartment now. All three of us would have to fit into the sewing room since Suvarov couldn’t possibly get back to the Vyborg side because government troops held the two bridges.

  Don’t worry, Artem assured him with a yawn. We’ll clear them out tomorrow.

  You’d think he’d just been to another normal small-beer union meeting. Happily he found a car and we were driven across the city to our Piter home where Alliluyev and his wife were still up, fully dressed and very excited. We were offered tea but refused with thanks. As the most junior rebel in the sewing room I insisted I would sleep on my overcoat on the floor. In fact it looked inviting. But Artem said, I must be up early. And over our protests took the floor himself. I saw Suvarov was still asleep when I woke three or four hours later. But Artem was already gone.

  23

  After drinking a rushed tea with the flushed and excited Alliluyeva women, Suvarov and I took to the street. I was used now to the weight of my rifle and even felt it was comforting on this strange militant morning. On the main avenues there were the usual breadlines and prostitutes but also knots of people standing on the pavements as if they were waiting on some procession.

  We hiked all the way to the Smolny. We had this idea that while we’d been gone something crucial that we didn’t want to miss was happening there.

  But when we got there – into the normal crowd in the lobby – we were uncertain what to do. People there were brimming with even more news than yesterday and every rumour had the power to delay us. The opening bridges over the Neva had been cranked upwards into the air by Junkers working the controls in the gatehouse. No, someone said, the gatehouses had now been captured by th
e Kronstadt sailors and the bridges opened up again for traffic to and from Vyborg. Workers were milling south over them.

  Reed fought his way across the lobby. He called out to me that Kerensky had fled town in a car he’d stolen from the American embassy and was out in the country looking for soldiers who’d fight for him. I wish him well, Reed called and then vanished.

  For a while Artem appeared like an apparition on the steps – looking a bit more sallow this morning. We fought our way up to join him. I did not like the particular kind of insomnia in his eyes now. For the first time he looked like a man who could lose.

  The railway workers have jumped, he told Suvarov and me. In spite of all the letters and proclamations and so on they’re staying with the Mensheviks and Kerensky. Some will come with us. Enough to slow Kerensky’s troops I hope. By the way, did you know the mongrels cut off our telephones? We’ve taken the exchange back again. So now it’s no telephones for them.

  He was yawning and I saw now he was reeling with tiredness. And the railway men – his railway men – had let him down.

  Paddy, he said, Grisha. You ought to take a spell. You look buggered. Everyone’s tired.

  He shook his head. He went on down the stairs to see someone in an office on the ground floor – very likely the delegates of the railway soviet.

  Suvarov headed to his office on the off-chance there was something to occupy him. I returned to the typing room where I sat and wrote some notes.

  I found a woman typist making transcripts of what had been said and decreed in No. 36. I asked her in broken Russian could she take a note in to Artem? Artem, it said, do you need me this afternoon? I am ready to do whatever you need. Paddy.

  An edgy forty minutes passed and I looked up and saw someone familiar to me from Brisbane. In the corridor – sitting on a suitcase and catching his breath – was Rybakov the engineer. I bounded out to the corridor and there he was – corporeal as buggery, as they say in Broken Hill. His face lit up. He struggled up and we shook hands.

  You look in better health than you did in Brisbane, I told him.

  The British fed me well, he agreed. But I escaped. On a counterfeit passport too. So I am a criminal again.

  We’re all criminals, I assured him – proud I’d been party to the stealing of weapons in Kharkov and the incitement of sailors to violence in Piter.

  They had me designing tanks, he told me, but I couldn’t escape till things were chaos here. Otherwise they would have got the tsar’s government to hunt me down and send me back again. I had to wait till anarchy struck. And it has.

  It was easy to see he was pleased with himself for managing to get here.

  It’s just that I can’t get to see Artem.

  He’s been in No. 36 for days, I explained. With just a few breaks. I don’t see much of him. I reckon he slept for about twenty minutes last night.

  It doesn’t matter, Rybakov told me. I’m going to wait. Do you know what he always said? Come the revolution he’d make sure Vladimir Ilich allowed me to build the People’s Train. The same one I was going to build for my dear friend Mr Bender. It doesn’t matter if I have to wait all afternoon and all night – I’ll see him. And then we’ll amaze the world.

  I think we might be doing that already, I told him. We’re on a sort of train right now. We’re certainly moving anyhow.

  He wouldn’t leave his place even to go and eat a meal, so I brought him a pannikin of soup and a lump of black bread from the canteen. He seemed to drink and eat it more out of politeness than because he needed it. The same hollow eyes I had known in Brisbane kept veering towards that door – the one the Central Committee sat behind.

  While we were talking a young secretary in a white blouse and a long skirt brought me out a note. It said, Plenty to do later, Paddy. For the moment the Winter Palace is going to be the place. But make sure you keep out of harm’s way.

  I grew restless and after a while I asked Rybakov to excuse me and went downstairs carrying my notebook and my rifle. In the crowded hall I saw Suvarov talking to some soldiers. The first miracle was finding him in that berserk building at all. The second was what he next suggested.

  Paddy, I was looking for you. I’m just waiting for a car or something to take me down to the Winter Palace. Want to come?

  It was said like a man inviting a friend to the beach.

  I’m on for it, I said. Suddenly I was as bright as a schoolboy guaranteed some mischief. Suvarov took a rifle from a stack near the door then we went out into the yard and stood beside a machine-gun crew. Suvarov smoked and they smoked. The fumes of their tobacco reached up to a low steely sky. One of them told Suvarov that the cloud was to hide what we did from the eye of God. It had to be done but God might not be onside yet. So the soldiers weren’t atheists, not by any stretch.

  We piled into an armoured car bound for Palace Square and were jammed in among the brotherly stench of about a dozen men. Fortunately it was a short journey of barely two or three miles.

  We pulled in behind some unlimbered cannon in the corner of the square by St Isaac’s Cathedral. They were our guns and were aimed at the massive pile of the Winter Palace. The cannon of the Junkers were arrayed in front of it. A fairly impressive line of Cossacks – maybe brought in to stiffen the Junkers and the Death Battalion – was drawn up at the bottom of the palace steps. If the two sets of cannon started firing at each other ... it’d be bloody murder here.

  Our gunners wore red on their sleeves and caps and all had rifles in their hands. It turned out they’d been shot at from a place high up near the cathedral’s dome. It seemed the rifleman had given it up as a bad job, though, for Suvarov and I stood there a time but nothing happened. Still, I couldn’t help clenching my brow as if to keep a bullet out. Of course the jovial Suvarov got talking to some of our artillerymen. I noticed on an occasional collar the red insignia of an officer – and on others patches of paler fabric where their tabs had been. These were former tsarist officers who’d been reliable enough to be elected by their regimental soviets and who’d been considered humane enough not to be shot by their soldiers.

  They’re very confident, Suvarov told me after interviewing one of the gun crews.

  Behind us more of our troops were still arriving – a truckload or armoured carload at a time. But not enough sailors yet – as one of the gunners had told Suvarov. From where we stood I could see some of the streets beyond St Isaac’s were blocked off with barricades made of timber, barrels, baskets, a wagon with its wheels off, even a disused bathtub. I asked Suvarov if he knew which side put it all there. He confessed he didn’t know and grinned at his own ignorance. It’s a pretty confused picture all right, he said.

  As if to add to the confusion we now saw a black figure come down the stairs from the Winter Palace and cross the open ground between the opposing sets of cannon. We imagined it might be a minister of Kerensky’s coming to try to make a deal with us. But when he got close I could see it was Slatkin – all properly shaven. He was wearing a clean shirt and pressed coat and trousers and was as neat as a pin. His face was split as always with that know-all grin.

  He and Suvarov greeted each other and Suvarov turned to me. They let him in because he looks like one of Kerensky’s ministers.

  Again Slatkin smiled his smug smile. I said I was from the Ministry of War, he told us. But anyone can get in there. I mean, in ones or twos. As long as you’re not armed.

  What did you learn? asked Suvarov.

  Well, said Slatkin, they aren’t armed so badly. But their hearts and their minds can’t be predicted.

  Slatkin went to speak to our gunners. I could see his car waiting behind the guns.

  Now Suvarov could hardly contain himself. He shook his right hand up and down with excitement. Do you want to try it, Paddy? We could leave our rifles with these boys.

  The idea excited me as an individual and a would-be journalist as well – to walk into the palace where the tsar had lived and where the cabinet of the provisional governme
nt was hiding. And where the Junkers and the women of the Death Battalions – supposed A mazons – had sworn to die to protect Kerensky and the rest.

  We dumped our rifles with the artillerymen and set off across the square. Our boots were noisy on the paving stones but it was a matter of pride that they should be. I wondered if the sniper at St Isaac’s was really gone – though that did not worry me half as much as it would have normally. Ahead of us stood that wonderful building – the palace whose architecture on its own made you think that it would bring ordinary people like us to a halt just by its own authority. But not today. I felt very much alive today – a gent entering his inheritance.

  Just let me talk to them, said Suvarov who strode in a commanding manner. I certainly wasn’t going to try to do the talking in my bits and pieces of Russian. Soon we walked through the line of guns and up to the moustached Cossacks standing behind barrels set at the bottom of the steps. It made me a little awed to face them – their reputation did that to a person. But Suvarov began to talk his way past them, telling an officer that we had an intelligence report from Smolny for the ministers of state. It took a few minutes. Of course he had no formal paperwork on him, he said. If the Bolsheviks at Smolny had found anything like that on him they would have shot him! I could see the officer respected Suvarov’s haughty manner enough not to pester me. We were suddenly through the fringe of guards and mounting the vast steps built to make men feel like insects.

  You see, hissed Suvarov, they let us in so easily. That wouldn’t happen at the Smolny. They’re indifferent – that’s why. Indifferent.

  In the giant’s doorway at the head of the steps stood an old official in a blue uniform with gold braid all over it. He held up a hand to stop us going in. Suvarov repeated his story with plenty of gesturing. At last the old man – probably influenced by the fact we’d been let past by the guards below – sighed and gestured that we were free to enter. His visage told me he thought the whole place was going to the dogs.