The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  The sentries at the gate and in the garden of the Smolny wanted to know what the news was. Suvarov told them the Winter Palace had fallen and they cheered and embraced everyone in sight. Inside the Smolny – beyond open doors in the hallway – the congress was still in session despite last night’s walkout of some delegates. We could hear the little schoolmasterly Kamenev who a few weeks before had written articles saying revolution was impossible. He was reading a list of arrested ministers and declaring that Kerensky had fled and the provisional government had fallen. All organs of government were in Bolshevik hands. The Bolsheviks in Moscow and other provincial cities would both act and make the reality of revolution apparent to all in every part of Russia.

  From the stairs above us appeared Vladimir Ilich free of all disguises and walking into the ballroom to speak. Koba strode behind him – smiling like a cat and winking at us. The Alliluyevs would later tell me admiringly that Koba had been up for five days straight without so much as a doze. Slatkin attached himself smoothly and with an air of revolutionary responsibility to Vladimir Ilich. For that reason Suvarov and I didn’t go in to listen to Vladimir Ilich. When you’re tired out and disgusted it’s easy to miss history. We went upstairs to No. 36 – the door was open now. Artem was already there – reporting to Antonov-O. I could tell somehow – maybe from the pace of his delivery and the evenness of his tone – that he was not making a large issue of Slatkin. But I suppose that was understandable when it came to politics – one Russian girl balanced against the whole Winter Palace and its cabinet and garrison. I saw a dozen other notables in the room – including Madame Kollontai. Artem pointed us out to the others and some came over and embraced us in congratulation.

  Suvarov and I then wanly slouched next door and just slumped there. Artem came in where I sat idle at a typewriter and told me that Slatkin had made a complaint against us to Vladimir Ilich.

  Of course, Artem acknowledged, he’s a barbarian.

  The bastard tried to shoot us, I reminded them.

  Shades of Menschkin, said Artem, shaking his head. But listen. I spoke to them. Trotsky, Dybenko, Antonov-O. I didn’t leave them in any doubt as to what happened.

  And what will they do? asked Suvarov.

  They’re very tired, said Artem.

  And...?

  They think it’s bad to admit Bolsheviks were fighting with each other. So they’ll make Slatkin a Hero of the Winter Palace. He can’t say anything or do anything to us then. He’ll want that on his grave.

  I never told Artem how deeply disappointed I was.

  But he looked at me and I knew he understood my feelings. Paddy, he said, we can have a revolution. But it will take time to overthrow the squalor of the human soul.

  Already soldiers were rushing up the stairs to No. 36 with further weighty news. Telegrams that said yet one more time that Kerensky and Kornilov were sending soldiers against Petrograd. Artem left us and went downstairs to the great hall to call on all soldiers in Russia to refuse to board troop trains and to call on the railway men – Bolshevik and Menshevik – to refuse to drive them.

  I went downstairs and out under the archways where the bonfires blazed scarlet against grey. It wasn’t a great day for the beginning of history – if that’s what today was. A cloudy morning was just starting. Trams went rolling past the Smolny because no one had told them not to. I wondered if we had dreamed it all up – taking the palace. And the chocolate soldiers called Junkers. And even Slatkin shooting that girl. It seemed possible at that fantastic hour that it was all the vapours or hallucination. Because there was an emptiness out there. In the air and the sky.

  The girl lay under the blanket. Or had they moved her away? Had they been tender? I wanted to go back and see to it but I also felt a sudden need to write a letter to Trofimova if I could and make contact with her honesty. I could not forget my second of sympathy with Slatkin when I first saw him on the woman who was then murdered. I needed to be civilised by Trofimova.

  A brief letter full of the most simple and butchered words I could put together – Dykes’s first Russian note – was written. Hunger got to me in the end and I went downstairs for some acorn coffee and bread. There sat Rybakov – wide-eyed with exhaustion – drinking tea from a tuna can. He smiled and I felt consoled. I was the sort of man who would have laughed before now at the idea I needed consolation.

  It’s all done, I believe, he said.

  It’s all done.

  The People’s Train was rolling along in that steamy room and in the streets beyond. But for the first time I knew not just in my mind but in my blood that some travellers were the best of men and women.

  While others ... Artem had said it. Bastardry doesn’t die in a night.

  Author’s Note

  My central character, Artem (Tom) Samsurov, is based on an escaped Russian prisoner named Artem Sergeev (or Sergeiev, Sergeyev or Sergeyeff) who lived in Brisbane with other Russian escapees and exiles, and worked as a labourer, newspaper editor and activist there for between six and seven years in the second decade of the twentieth century. I encountered his story, by accident, in an article by Tom Poole and Eric Fried, Artem: A Bolshevik in Brisbane from the Australian Journal of Politics and History (see Acknowledgements). Like Samsurov, Sergeev was in regular trouble with the Queensland police and spent time in Boggo Road jail. Suvarov is his fictional fellow-escapee and friend, and Artem Sergeev in reality had many such friends. Like my character Samsurov, Sergeev returned to Russia in mid-1917, in time to be elected to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, and participate in the October revolution and the coming Russian Civil War.

  He attracted a number of Australian socialists to Russia, but none as early as 1917, so that Paddy Dykes is entirely my creation, though based on a characteristic Australian working-class radical of his time. On the same principle, all the characters we know on an intimate level in the Australian section of the book are fictional, but – I hope – not unlikely for that period of ferment in Brisbane, in Australia, in the world. The Australian politicians mentioned or met occasionally are real politicians.

  In the Russian section of the book, most characters are fictional, though again – one hopes – characteristic. But of course the major Bolshevik and other political figures are real, from Kerensky to Lenin to Zinoviev to Kollontai to Trotsky to Antonov-Ovseenko to Koba (Stalin) to Martov, and so on. The remarkable family of the Alliluyevs were also real people of the Bolshevik revolution. The American, Reed, encountered late in the book is obviously John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World. Slatkin is fictional but his story is based upon the real case of the Bolsheviks V. K. Taratula and A. M Andrikanis, who were ordered by Lenin to court and marry two heiresses to enlarge his party coffers. Trofimova, the Abrasova sisters, Federev, and other intimate associates are utterly fictional.

  Sergeev was buried beneath the wall of the Kremlin after a hero’s death, which occurred some years after the events of this novel, but I would like to keep my narrative powder dry on the details, since I hope that if a handful of people have enjoyed this story, I might continue it with the adventures of Artem, Tasha Abrasova, Suvarov and Paddy Dykes through the Civil War to the tormented Russia beyond, in which Sergeev perished.

  Acknowledgements

  Though they are not to be blamed for flaws in the text, I thank in most earnest terms the following enthusiastic collaborators in this book:

  Silvie Smetkova, who translated many documents concerning Artem Sergeiev, who was the model for Artem Samsurov;

  my agent, Fiona Inglis;

  the first reader of this book in manuscript, Judy Keneally;

  my publisher, Meredith Curnow;

  the editor of first recourse, Jo Jarrah;

  the copy-editors, Heather Curdie and Ali Lavau;

  Simon Sebag Montefiore, eminent historian of Russia, who read the book for obvious solecisms.

  May they all flourish. Works to which the author owes a debt include:

  V.I. Astakova, et
al., Tovarishck Artem, Vospomilia o Fedore Andreeviche Sergeive (Artem) (Kharkov 1975)

  Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891– 1924 (London 1996)

  Maxim Gorky, My Childhood (London 1966)

  V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (Moscow 1970)

  Stuart Macintyre, The Reds (Sydney 1998)

  Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London 2007)

  Vladimir Nasedkin, Fifteen Years a World Wanderer (Moscow 1960s)

  Tom Poole and Eric Fried, Artem: A Bolshevik in Brisbane, including a translation of Artem’s Australia the Lucky Country, from Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 31, no. 2 (1985)

  Poole and Fried research boxes relating to Australian radicalism at the time of Sergeiev and beyond, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, including the political memoirs of Tom Pikunov, another Tsarist escapee

  Christopher Read, Lenin (New York 2005)

  John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, e-book but also New York 1962 and other editions

  Robert Service, Lenin (London 2000)

  Robert Service, Stalin (London 2005)

  Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics (Melbourne 1965)