Lenins roller coaster, p.19
Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 19
“They’ll get that anyway.”
Brady shrugged. “But they’re stuck, and maybe that was the Allied plan all along. If there aren’t any ships to take them home, what else can they do but stay and fight?”
“I wonder if they’ll let a couple of neutrals through. I’ve got my press credentials, and if you say yours are lost, I can vouch for you.”
“Hm. Maybe. But we still need a train.”
Another week passed before that wish was granted, a week in which the city grew increasingly tense. The Bolsheviks paraded their troops at every opportunity, but the anxious looks on the soldiers’ faces subverted the intended message. The meetings of the city soviet were one long shouting match, and the hotel lobbies were full of intriguers, many speaking Russian with thick French accents. One in particular haunted the Metropole and insisted on saying hello to Caitlin whenever they met, his leer wrapped up in good manners.
When their train finally left, he was on it, along with several of his countrymen. “He’s a spy,” Brady said simply when Caitlin pointed him out. “Next place we reach where the party’s in full control, I’ll hand him over.”
He never got the chance. Three mornings out from Irkutsk, beyond Krasnoyarsk but a long way short of Omsk, their train drew into a wayside station. It was a cold, clear morning, and Caitlin was looking out the window when another train slid into view. It was standing in a parallel siding about twenty yards away, and the side of each car bore illustrations of one kind or another—paintings of long-ago battles, ornately crafted lists of names, childlike pictures of cottages with flower-filled gardens. Like a line of Gypsy caravans, she thought until she noticed the open doorways and the snouts of machine guns pointing her way.
A Czech colonel commanded the train and its soldiers, at least in theory. The passengers selected for interrogation in the command carriage saw a thin, gray-haired man in legion uniform sitting at his desk while two other men—a plump young Russian with a monocle and the Frenchman from the train—stood sentry at either shoulder.
Caitlin was one of the first.
“You’re an American,” the colonel declared after looking at her papers, his tone suggesting that was all he needed to know.
“What are you doing here?” the Russian asked accusingly.
His tone and the looks on all of their faces—the Czech uncomfortable, the others hostile—told her she had to be careful. “I’m a reporter, and I’m on my way to Moscow.”
“Who do you work for?”
“The New York Chronicle,” she said, feeling sure that news of her resignation hadn’t yet reached Siberia.
“And where do your sympathies lie?” the Frenchman asked her in Russian.
“What do you mean?” she asked, working on her answer.
“Do your sympathies lie with the Whites or the Reds?”
“With Russia and its people. And with people like yours who want to go home,” she added, addressing the colonel.
He gave her a thin smile.
“You talked to the Bolsheviks on the train,” the Frenchman insisted.
“I talk to everybody. As a journalist should.”
The Frenchman’s look was contemptuous, leaving Caitlin with a sudden, terrible feeling that her life was hanging by a thread. The hiss of the engine outside, the birdsong in the trees—was this where she would die?
The Czech seemed her only hope. “I would be interested in interviewing you,” she said. “On how your soldiers have been treated and what hopes they have for the future. With a history like ours, Americans are always interested in others who are fighting for independence.”
“Perhaps on some other day,” the colonel said, rising to his feet and offering his hand. “You may go now.”
She went, descending the veranda steps on decidedly shaky legs. Had he saved her, or had she only imagined the threat? She would never know.
Brady was next. She walked back to their carriage, not worried about him. The man could talk his way out of anything.
Sure enough, he was back within minutes.
“What do you think?” she asked him.
“I think we’ll be losing some comrades.”
He was right. In midafternoon she was just dozing off when the salvo was fired.
“Rifles, not a machine gun,” Brady said.
There was nothing visible from the window.
Another volley, and this time a hint of smoke above the roof of the parallel train.
And another.
She was reaching for the door when Brady placed a restraining hand on hers. “Don’t,” he said. “They won’t want any witnesses.”
She knew he was right. If it felt like cowardice, then so be it. Dead journalists didn’t file stories.
Their train jerked into motion. As it slowly gathered speed, she and Brady walked through the carriages checking for absentees. The party officials and Caitlin’s young “pilgrims”—all were gone.
10
The Price of Cabbage
The three-hundred-mile journey upriver took four days. The paddle steamer Kutuzov stopped at all the scheduled calling points and quite a few places besides; according to its captain, the aging engines needed frequent respites just to override the current.
McColl enjoyed it. The food was better than expected, and there was room to sleep on deck. The weather was beautiful, days clear and sunny, the nights just cool enough. If the views weren’t that interesting, neither were they hard on the eye: yellow-green grasslands and rickety jetties, occasional white churches with polished domes of blue and gold.
His fellow passengers were the usual hotchpotch. Rumor had it there were a couple of princes locked away in one of the cabins, and there was certainly no shortage of paupers lining the decks. According to Kerzhentsev, most of the crew were Bolsheviks, but they, unlike their brothers in Sevastopol, bore no great grudge against their officers and captain. McColl’s Russian companion spent much of the trip proselytizing among the other passengers, with, as he cheerfully admitted, precious little success.
When they reached Kiev early on the morning of May 13, Kerzhentsev suggested a place—a café in the Old Town—where both could leave messages under false names, should either need help in their anti-German ventures. McColl readily agreed. He had no idea what reputation the Russian might have among Cumming’s people in the city, but he’d seen for himself how effective the man could be. And truth be told, McColl rather liked him.
There were German soldiers hovering close by the gangplank, but no general inspection of papers, which suited McColl. The ones he’d been given in Ashkhabad were almost in shreds, and if Georgiy Kuskov was still on his way home to Moscow, he’d chosen a roundabout route.
The center of town was a couple of miles to the south, so he and Kerzhentsev clambered aboard one of the droshkies that were waiting outside the dock gates and sat back in the sunshine as the horse trotted briskly down the riverside road. McColl had never been to Kiev, and his first impressions were favorable—the city was built amid a clutch of wooded hills rising up from the river’s west bank. The distant slopes seemed thick with churches, and away to the south what looked like a statue was crowned by a huge white cross, ablaze in the morning sunlight.
At Tsarskaya Square they paid off the driver. So far they’d seen very few Germans, but here in the center several groups of officers were taking their morning stroll. There were also Ukrainian troops, the lower ranks standing sentry outside some of the bigger buildings, the officers parading in their many-colored comic-opera uniforms, complete with gaudy epaulets and ludicrous cockades.
“Independence!” Kerzhentsev muttered scornfully. “They have a hetman now, the first since 16-something. A man named Skoropadsky. A German puppet, but a willing one.” He broke into a laugh. “What times, eh? Well, I guess this is good-bye. For now at least. I wish you luck in your endeavors.”
“And you in yours,” McColl said, shaking the Russian’s hand and watching him walk away.
One thing he had noticed on the latter stages of their ride was the number of cafés and restaurants that seemed to be open. Unlike the cities he’d been to thus far, Kiev didn’t look as if someone had emptied it out, and he felt like indulging himself.
He found a suitable café almost instantly, and lo and behold, there was coffee and cake. Terrible coffee admittedly, and the cream on the cake was more than a little sour, but after four years of war and revolution the layers of flaky pastry might have been the fragmentary remains of some long-lost civilization.
And there were newspapers, too, in both Ukrainian and Russian. McColl took one of the latter, rifling through the pages for news of the Western Front. He couldn’t find any, which was probably a good sign. If the Germans had entered Paris, that would surely merit a line or two.
The lead story was the forming of a new Russian government in Peking, which seemed rather a long way off to actually influence matters. According to Manley-Pryce, the Japanese were itching to invade Siberia, so maybe they would take this government with them and drop it off at the Urals. Or maybe it was all just wishful thinking, like the stories heralding the imminent collapse of Lenin’s regime in Moscow.
Looking around, McColl took note of his fellow patrons, all dressed much better than he was and no doubt smelling a good deal sweeter. The empty tables around him were probably a comment on the number of days since he’d last had a bath. Sevastopol, he remembered. Two weeks ago.
It was too late to throw himself in the Dnieper. The address that Manley-Pryce had given him was a few streets away on the edge of the Old Town, and he found it easily enough. The pastel blue building, which butted up against a steep ridge, had five stories, the second of which contained the offices of the Zheltaya Luna film company—one of only two such companies in Kiev, according to Manley-Pryce. The local owners thought their chief accountant was a Muscovite named Andrei Golubev. To the better-informed McColl, he was an Englishman named Patrick Davidson.
The secretary on guard was blonde, young, and attractive. “I’m here to see Golubev,” McColl told her. “About an automobile he wants to borrow,” he added, following his instructions.
Davidson was around thirty and already losing his dark brown hair. His eyes were also brown and his body, when he rose from behind the desk, rather too plump for a fourth year of war. The smile was brief and harassed.
“How freely can we talk?” McColl asked quietly in Russian.
“Freely enough at this volume,” Davidson whispered back in the same language. “I was afraid you’d never arrive—the railways have almost ground to a halt.”
McColl offered a brief summary of his journey and mentioned Kerzhentsev’s willingness to consider joint action against the Germans.
Davidson scowled. “Perhaps,” he said. “Generally speaking, we give the Bolsheviks a wide berth. Of course we don’t want to burn any bridges, but . . . you understand. Anyway, I’m glad you got here in one piece. I’ve arranged a temporary billet with a Russian family who live not far away, the Drobolyubovs. They’re old friends of mine. The father’s dead, so the son’s the head of the family. And there’s the mother and two sisters. All three children are in their twenties. All pro-Allies. I’ll take you over there now and introduce you. And then you must stay indoors until your new papers are ready. It shouldn’t be long, and after the trip you’ve had, you’ll probably enjoy the rest. The girls are excellent company.”
As they walked on into the Old Town, Davidson gave McColl some personal background—he’d grown up in Russia as the son of an expatriate businessman—and a brief résumé of the situation in Kiev. “There are refugees pouring in from the north—the cafés and theaters are full of them. They all have their stories of Bolshevik cruelties, and they see the Germans as their protectors. The people working with us tend to be locals. Most see themselves as Russian patriots, and they wouldn’t dream of turning their guns on the Bolsheviks until after they’ve beaten the Germans.”
Their destination was a faded yellow house on a small street behind St. Sophia Cathedral. A diminutive servant girl answered the door and ushered them through to a lovely room at the back, where the family was sitting in a circle of chairs. The acacia visible through the French windows filled much of the tiny garden.
Golubev made the introductions. The mother, Evdokia Drobolyubova, was a handsome woman in her fifties, graying hair coiled in a bun at the nape of her neck. The son, Yakov, was a dark-haired, bespectacled, and mustachioed young man in his late twenties, with the air of someone who took himself very seriously. The daughters, Tanya and Alisa, were dark and pretty, with small teeth and big eyes. McColl shook hands and returned smiles. They all appeared delighted to see him, which, given the circumstances, seemed a trifle odd.
McColl stayed with the Drobolyubovs for four days and couldn’t fault the family’s hospitality. He was given a pleasant room overlooking the garden, with a comfortable bed and several shelves of books. The quality of the meals depended on what the servant girl, Irina—“She’s almost part of the family”—could scavenge on any given day, but there was always something worth eating.
The state of the house—the fine but threadbare carpets, the eclectic sets of expensive china—suggested a shortage of funds that no one seemed inclined to admit, let alone attempt to reverse. Both father and son had been soldiers. The former was killed at Tannenberg in 1914; the latter had resigned his commission the previous year when the socialist Rada declared Ukraine independent and now spent much of each day wondering whether he should join General Denikin’s army in the northern Caucasus. Neither mother nor daughters had ever earned a kopek and, though now obliged to do occasional household chores, insisted on dubbing such efforts “volunteer work.”
All the family members spent most of their days where McColl had first encountered them, in the still-splendid living room. The women read novels and sewed, Yakov perused the newspaper and various histories. They all enjoyed listening to music on their precious gramophone, which they played ever so quietly for fear of attracting a thief. They conversed a great deal on a surprisingly wide range of subjects and were clearly determined to make the most of their visitor. Yakov was keen to know McColl’s opinions on the war and how it was going, on Russia’s future and the other Allies’ role in helping to shape it. He was disappointed that McColl knew less about General Denikin than he did and was convinced that once the Germans were beaten, the Allies would sort his country out. The British troops in Murmansk, the Japanese in Vladivostok—these were just the beginning. “They’ll help us set up a proper democracy, one based on Russian values.”
Tania and Alisa were more interested in England and what life there was actually like. Neither ever talked about leaving their home and their country, but it was perhaps in the back of their minds—it certainly was in the back of their mother’s. “We raised them to live in a certain world,” she told McColl in the garden one day, “but that world is gone, and despite what Yakov says, it’s never coming back. A year from now, I fear that people like us will feel more at home in a foreign country than we do in our own.”
But on they read, on they sewed, reminding McColl of characters in a Jane Austen novel. He knew what Kerzhentsev would make of the Drobolyubovs—what Caitlin would, come to that—and the two of them wouldn’t be wrong. And yet. None of the four were unthinking or unkind, all had their hearts in more or less the right place. McColl felt sorry for them, probably more than he should.
They shared the outside world on only one occasion, when the older daughter, Tanya, asked him to accompany her on a shopping expedition. They were close to the café where he’d enjoyed his coffee and cake when local police began clearing the street, and a few minutes later a mounted German regiment came trotting through, all polished blades and helmets, stern eyes straight ahead. Tanya’s eyes were shining, but not, McColl thought, for the Germans. This was how her father and brother had gone to war; this was the past in all its glory.
Davidson arrived after dark on the fourth day and took his time getting around to the business at hand. He was clearly besotted with young Alisa and apparently oblivious to her lack of interest in him. McColl found himself wondering whether she might be the price of a future escape to the west.
After tea had been served in the mismatched cups, Davidson brought forth the fruits of his labors. McColl had two sets of new papers, each with a new name and history. One was for Arkady Vostyovich Belov, a Russian born in Kiev who had just returned to the city after several years in Petrograd and was staying with his Uncle Anton, a dispatcher at the goods yard. He was a teacher whose teachings the Bolsheviks had found objectionable. The other set was for Khristian Vissotsky, a photographer from Moscow, who was hoping to start a new studio here in Kiev.
“Why two?” McColl asked.
“The first is easier to prove, because you really will be staying with the uncle. But if you’re caught by the Germans, we’d prefer you use the latter and keep Belov out of it. Understood?”
“Yes,” McColl said, saving his doubts for later.
There were also new clothes—two whole sets—to add to the outfit that Yakov had lent him. And new digs. “Not so convivial, I’m afraid,” Davidson told him after they’d said their thanks and good-byes. As the droshky carried them southward, Davidson took frequent looks over his shoulder, just to make sure there was no one behind them.
After skirting the botanical gardens, they turned east, eventually diving under a railway bridge and entering a neighborhood of neat workers’ cottages. “This is Solomenka,” Davidson explained. “It was built in the 1890s for the railway workers. My father had a hand in the design.”
It was pleasant enough, McColl supposed, as they drew up outside one of a hundred identical dwellings. Belov’s, he noted, had the advantage of backing onto the railway line, and if McColl wasn’t mistaken, those clanking noises in the distance were the sounds of freight being shunted. A train watcher’s paradise.
