I turned to watch Genya solemnly stirring the soup as if the future of mankind depended upon it. “Very happy,” I said.
Worry argued with hope across her face as she washed a dish, a knife. “Will you marry?”
“Marriage isn’t revolutionary,” I said.
She sighed and wiped her hands on a towel. I could tell she was about to say something, but she just shook her head and smiled.
Six Transrationalists and seven Katzevs gathered around the big table, passing bread and garlicky pickles as Sofia Yakovlevna ladled up the borscht. All here, all together, everyone I loved. Except for Seryozha. I’d been writing to him faithfully, telling him what was going on here, but all I had to go on was the name of the institution, the Bagration Military School, and the address in Moscow. Maybe they’d censored my letters. Maybe the postal system had broken down, but I never received a response. The papers said there’d been fighting in Moscow, where the anti-Bolshevik forces were more organized, but after a week, their cadets, too, surrendered, and now the city was coming around to the new way of life.
Looking around the table, I was amazed at how we’d all grown up this year—Shusha, Dunya…Mina was wearing lipstick, her hair in a soignée chignon. Genya sat beside me, and Solomon Moiseivich beside him. They’d fallen into conversation about the elections. Genya was furious about the Bolshevik loss. He attributed it to the fact that the lists, drawn up months earlier by the Provisional Government, didn’t properly represent the new coalition between leftist SRs and the Bolsheviks, which he was convinced would have won. But the Bolsheviks still didn’t have the numbers. “They’ll have to restage the election,” he insisted. “We didn’t get rid of landlords to be ruled by ignoramuses in bast shoes genuflecting to painted boards.”
“The SRs got the majority,” Mina’s father said. “It’s the will of the nation.”
“The Bolsheviks have to reach the villages if they want to win in Russia,” said Aunt Fanya.
“The hell with the villages. I’m sick of the villages. I’m so sick of them I could scream.” Genya’s deep-seated hatred of peasants, stemming from his childhood on the Volga, always caught me off guard. He was otherwise such a loving, enthusiastic man, so his hatreds seemed all the more shocking.
Zina, seated across the table, was quick to jump into the fray, pointing her spoon at Solomon Moiseivich. “The advanced proletariat is the revolutionary class,” she said. I hated the way she spouted stock phrases, like a child reciting her lesson. I could take that behavior from Varvara—she’d actually read Lenin and Plekhanov and Kropotkin, Das Kapital in German. Zina just memorized slogans.
“If it wasn’t for the Petrograd worker, there wouldn’t have been a revolution at all.” Genya swept his arm in a gesture that barely missed his water glass. “The worker made this happen. Without the proletariat, the peasant would still be asleep in the haystack scratching at his lice.”
Just the mention of lice made me itch. Gigo ignored all the fulminations. He was doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his napkin for Shusha.
“It’s a peasant country,” said Solomon Moiseivich thoughtfully. “You can’t make a revolution without them.”
“But who should lead?” Genya said, letting his heavy hand fall to the table, making our dishes jump. “It’s got to be the most advanced. The head has to lead.” He poked himself in the forehead, hard enough to drive a nail. “The revolution’s the future, and there aren’t any plows in it.” He rested his arm across the back of my chair, and I saw how Mina blanched to see this familiar gesture. So each of us had something the other had missed.
Mina’s father sipped his tea with an indulgent smile. “There will always be plows, sinok.” Little son. “Someone has to bring in a crop. Unless you’re going to eat Bolshevik handbills.”
“Now there’s a field of plenty,” Mina said.
“I’ve lived out there.” Genya’s voice rising, his former good-fellow expression gone. “None of you have lived like that. The peasant doesn’t care about socialism. Land and Freedom? Once the peasant gets his land, he’ll consider himself free, and the hell with you. Just you watch.”
I waited for the echo of his voice to die down before I said, “You have to agree that the peasants should have the land. Without the soldiers, there would have been no revolution, and they’re all peasants. God knows they’ve waited long enough.”
He turned to me, hurt and surprised. “They only want to be the next landlord, don’t you see?” He backed away from the table to give his gestures more room. “They all have capitalist aspirations. The workers are the only ones who will protect the revolution.”
Sofia Yakovlevna watched me, and the expression on her face had nothing to do with the revolution and everything to do with my new life—to wit, Genya. Is he always like this?
“Whoever gets power will find a way to keep it,” Anton said from the foot of the table, where he perched on a footstool between Dunya and Shusha, enveloping them in a haze of cigarette smoke. “Bolshevik, Menshevik, the Committee for the Preservation of Wigs—they’ll set up a nice system of privilege for themselves and their friends.”
“Finally, a man to make some sense,” said Uncle Aaron, the old-time anarchist. “I’m with Mephistopheles over there.”
“The workers are no geniuses,” Anton continued, dropping ashes into his soup. The younger Katzev girls watched, horrified and fascinated.
Dunya stole shy glances down the table at Sasha. He smiled at her, wiping his moustache on the back of his hand. Gigo pulled a walnut out of Shusha’s ear, then a spoon out of his nose, making her laugh.
Now Genya couldn’t sit still anymore, he was up and pacing behind Anton, who turned around to speak to him. “You’re all mistaken if you think the worker is going to create a utopia,” Anton said. “Once you have a concentration of power, you’re screwed no matter who’s in charge.”
Uncle Aaron picked up the black flag of anarchism where he sat at the corner of the table. “The state’s a flawed tool. But I have more confidence in the people than you do, my smoky friend.”
“The people are a monster,” said Anton. “Individually bad enough, but once there’s a committee, you’re sunk.”
“I for one will take whoever clears the garbage.” Sofia Yakovlevna surprised us by the sharpness of her tone. She ladled a bit more soup into her husband’s bowl. “The SRs knew how to keep the streets clean.” It was true. Municipal services had almost ceased since the Bolshevik takeover, and the city was rapidly becoming a rotting trash heap. Everyone prayed for a good heavy snow. “And we could use some police protection while they’re at it. It’s one thing to take the Palais de Justice, but to fire the police? These Red Guards are hopeless. I’m afraid to leave the apartment.”
The common sense of this was undebatable. It’s what they talked about in the bathhouse as well—not the future but the present, the one outside the door. Where was that in the Bolshevik schema? Yet it was almost counterrevolutionary to mention it.
“They can only do so much,” Zina explained. “If we wanted just clean streets and police, we could have kept the tsar.”
Luckily for us, we lived in revolutionary times, which meant that the trash and the police would have to wait for bigger things. Jam tomorrow, as Alice would have said.
The Constituent Assembly walked into the Tauride Palace for the first time on an ice-covered January day. The snow glittered pink and lilac. We had turned out with thousands of others to watch the delegates arrive. I wondered if Father was here. I bet he was, hiding somewhere in the crowd. He wouldn’t want to miss this historic moment, a freely elected democratic body to rule Russia. Genya was still angry about the Bolshevik loss. Like many of the spectators, he and Zina shouted, “Soviet power!” and “We demand new elections!” but I felt tears welling up, seeing the solemn representatives of the Constituent Assembly move into the palace, preparing to sit for the first time in history.
I hadn’t paid much attention to the presence of the Red Gu
ards that day. I assumed they were part of the grand occasion. But the next morning, I read on a wall poster that the Red Guards had taken over the first session of the Constituent Assembly and that it would remain closed thereafter. The workers’ militia hadn’t been there to protect the assembly but to close it down, lock it out. The Bolsheviks had never intended to give up power, whether the transition was legitimate or not.
Genya was ecstatic. “It would have just been the Provisional Government all over again—don’t you see?” he argued. “Talk, talk, talk. The war’s grinding us to dust, and the industrialists back running the country. It would only have been a matter of time until we had to get rid of them. No more kowtowing to retrograde classes. That’s over.”
I understood his argument but I couldn’t share it, not deep down in my bourgeois heart. This was a fairly elected body. Genya and I weren’t speaking by the time we drifted up to Znamenskaya Square, where speakers of all political stripes pleaded their causes, every lamppost resonating with hot oratory. Genya was the one who spotted Varvara exhorting a crowd from the base of the Alexander III statue. “Look. Your friend’s moving up in the world.”
I didn’t want to talk to Varvara. I didn’t even want to look at her, not after what she had done to me. It would have been one thing if my departure had been voluntary, but it was another to have my best friend rip my skin off for me and hand it back to me as if it were a cape.
“Only the workers can lead the workers!” she shouted. “We, the laboring classes, told the Constituent Assembly we demand it recognize the October Revolution, our revolution! And they refused!”
“Soviet power!” Genya shouted. “Down with the lackeys of the imperialists!”
Varvara saw me now, stumbled, but quickly recovered. “The majority of the Constituent Assembly rejected our demand for Soviet power, the highest democracy in the world. They refused to recognize our achievement—your achievement!”
“Down with the Bolshevik grab for power!” a solidly built man belted out. “The Constituent Assembly represents all of us!”
“Parliamentary democracy is a bourgeois throwback,” she shot back. “It ignores the leadership role of the revolutionary working class!” She held her hand high. “The Bolshevik revolution represents the triumph of the working class.”
“Urah!” shouted Genya along with other pro-Bolshevik elements of the crowd against the booing and furious heckling by Constituent Assembly advocates. Rhetoric flew back and forth. Varvara gave as good as she got, never folding, never tiring. I wondered where I would be now if she hadn’t pushed me into my new life. She’d been the violent midwife of my personal revolution, forcing me to do the very thing I’d been afraid of, to stand up for what I believed in, out in the open. I’d been happy to go behind people’s backs, but she forced me to take a side—exactly as the Bolsheviks had just done to the country.
They had flushed us out of our old cherished notions, our beloved dreams in sepia frames. Under the nose of the tsar and his bronze horse, Varvara argued that the Bolsheviks couldn’t take the chance that the other parties would chip away what the worker had wrought. Yet I couldn’t quite shake my regret that we never got the chance to see this thing, an elected assembly. To turn it over in our hands, marvel at it, and decide for ourselves what it was. To have February again, just for a little while—that’s all I wanted. Maybe I would have come around to her point of view eventually. But everything had happened so fast. The assembly had sat for just one night, and now it was gone, and we would never know it for itself. Just as Varvara had done that October night in my parents’ salon, the Bolsheviks had swept in and made up our minds for us. Fait accompli.
30 Former People
IT WAS A HARD WINTER. The only thing heating the flat was our own fevered talk. Our little tin stove was voracious, an idol, a Baal, a starving beast:
Gap-toothed, ravenous
Secret wolf, hushabye
For you we go a-hunting
For you we’ll tear this town to shreds
Feed you its savory bones.
We tore down fences to slake its hunger, stole siding from abandoned houses, broke off slats from stairway banisters. We burned whatever we could pry loose, though it was considered a serious crime now. The Bolsheviks were rightly afraid that the freezing citizens would consume the city like termites. But stoves must eat. Petrograd became ever more dilapidated—windows broken, boarded up, traces of bullets on the walls. Rent became a thing of the past—only the bourgeoisie had to pay it—and that was a blessing, as we had few sources of income. Anton was our main provider of cash, through a stipend from Okno’s patroness, Galina Krestovskaya, an actress with poetic aspirations. Genya and Sasha made money hauling junk, unloading carts, plastering walls with newspaper broadsides. Gigo disappeared from time to time, returning with packets of cash, evasive about their source. I continued to sing for loose change—not only the revolutionary songs, although my repertoire was expanding. Often people just wanted to hear something beautiful or nostalgic. Do not awaken my memories…you’ll not return…my soul does cry…
But it wasn’t enough. I had to find some real work. Factory work would be best, something with dignity that would confer proletarian credentials. But one needed a labor book to work, get housing, do anything now.
“Ask Varvara to help you,” Genya said. “She knows people.”
“I’m not talking to her.” How she would love that, for me to come a-begging.
That morning, I walked up the icy, unshoveled street to our local district soviet on Kazanskaya Street, my scarf tight around my neck, my hat drawn down, taking small mincing steps and trying not to fall. My route sent me past the familiar sad array of “Former People”—the previously well to do, now outmoded, terrorized, standing against buildings, silently offering bits and pieces of their former lives—silver spoons, a lace-edged towel. A new organ of the government had recently been formed to fight the hydra of counterrevolution, sabotage, and speculation. The Extraordinary Commission, Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, it was called. And it considered all private trade, even the necessary sale of petty personal goods, to be speculation, punishable with confiscation and arrest. In the spirit of the time, impatient and modern, it was known by its initials—Che-Ka. Cheka.
Despite the danger, a woman in a thin black coat held out something discreetly wrapped in paper. Her deadened face came to life as I passed. I supposed she smelled my own Formerness. Her voice was low and plaintive. “For God’s sake, child. It’s a brass clock. From Hamburg. A hundred rubles. Fifty.”
I didn’t have ten rubles, much less need of a clock. But that coat was too thin for the weather—she was blue as a Picasso. I tried to imagine my mother standing by a building in the shadows, trying to sell a clock, but I knew it was impossible, even if she were starving. I gave the woman the money from my pocket, around eighty kopeks. Most of the Formers had left by then, heading for the south, where there was more food and fewer Bolsheviks, or striking out for the West.
The Kazansky District Soviet, housed in an ugly building that was once a police station, gave the lie to the notion that the city had emptied out, however. There must have been a thousand souls packed inside, standing in queues that snaked down steamy, murky halls, then folded over and doubled back. Half of ambulatory Petrograd must have been there. It smelled of wet wood and wet coats and the ozone of terror.
“Labor books?” I asked a small woman wearing a man’s greatcoat.
She pointed to the next floor up.
The Bolsheviks turned out to be as fond of bureaucracy as the tsarists had been. If only one could eat red tape. I struggled through the closely packed bodies and found the right queue on a back stairway. People stood with their hands in their pockets, silent, each wrapped in his or her own private worries. No one felt like commiserating. The man in front of me had a cold. He sneezed in threes. I grew sleepy from the heat, my feet and ankles swelling as we moved forward by centimeters. I dozed and thought of the spacious Krestovsky
flat where we held our poetry evenings—specifically, of the butter cookies Galina Krestovskaya served. Her husband owned seven snack bars in Petrograd theaters. Their flat had heat and hot water and a working telephone. I could taste those cookies melting in my mouth, good as anything Vaula ever made. Where did they get the sugar, the flour? Money could buy almost anything, even now. Except Anton’s respect. He was no more civil toward his patroness than he was toward anyone else, though she was supporting us all. His scorn only intrigued her. He didn’t even publish her poems in the journal she bankrolled.
Passing open office doors, I listened as bourgeois petitioners pleaded with rough, barely literate soldier “clerks” and worker “secretaries” to solve this or that problem, or let them off the rent. “The water isn’t even working!” The secretaries could barely write their own names. However, public service employees were still on strike, ever since the Bolshevik coup, so the local soviets had to find staff wherever they could. I considered joining the Bolsheviks—I could be working here instead of queuing like a penitent—but I wasn’t nearly fanatical enough. The Bolsheviks were more than a political party, they were a religious order.
I’d made it up the stairs now, close enough to see the front of the line, where a woman pleaded with the soldier-clerk, a weary-looking man with a big untrimmed moustache. “I am a proletarian,” she insisted, though she wore some stuffed bird atop her ancient hat that clearly identified her as a Former.
“Birth certificate,” the soldier said.
They needed a birth certificate?
“It’s been lost,” said the woman with a tremulous voice. “There was a house fire. My father was a carpenter. Mother—laundress.”