Lenins roller coaster, p.25
Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 25
The boy was soon asleep, but anxiety kept McColl awake. After staring up at the stars for an hour, he reckoned his fellow inmates were making enough noise with their snoring to cloak the noise of a passing buffalo stampede, let alone some surreptitious digging. With only his hands for tools, he started a trial excavation by the adjacent fence and, once through the sunburned surface, found virtually no resistance. Ostrov had overestimated the difficulties, he thought. They could be under and out in less than ten minutes.
Two nights later they were. It had been dark a couple of hours, and the light supplied by the crescent moon was just what the doctor ordered—bright enough to see by, dim enough to cloak their movements. Any inmates still awake showed no inclination to interfere, and the long silences that punctuated the gate guards’ conversation suggested both were dozing off.
As already agreed, McColl and Fedya walked a decent distance away from the stockade before turning back toward the trees that stood behind the command post. A single kerosene lamp was burning outside the barn, but there were no lights showing in the cottage. Off to the left, the roofs of the town were silhouetted against a star-strewn sky.
McColl kept watch as Fedya retrieved the food from its hiding place. Once they’d stuffed the hunks of bread into their pockets, the two of them started walking, first across a succession of open fields, then down any track that kept the polestar on their left. An occasional bird flew over, cawing at the moon, but otherwise the silence was almost complete, and it took a while before they dared to talk. When it finally felt safe, McColl decided to share what he knew of the stars and constellations. It wasn’t much, but Fedya seemed pleased to learn the names, which McColl had first heard on his ship out to South Africa, from a kindly old sergeant who loved astronomy. The man had died on Spion Kop, probably staring up at his favorite stars.
There was little to hinder their passage: the land was mostly flat, and those streams that had to be crossed were either bridged or easy to wade. They passed through several sleeping villages, but only one dog came out to confront them, and he beat a fast retreat when McColl reached down for an imaginary stone. Mile followed mile, and when dawn found them facing a fair-size river McColl thought they must have walked twenty.
There was no obvious way across—McColl felt too tired to risk the current with Fedya on his back—so he tossed a mental coin and headed north along the bank. After an hour a column of smoke appeared; another fifteen minutes and there were a dozen cottages, clustered on either end of a rickety wooden bridge.
It looked bucolic enough for safety.
As they approached the nearest cottage, a woman emerged in the doorway, saw them, and ducked back inside. The man who took her place stood there watching for a moment, then, perhaps reassured by the sight of the boy, walked forward to his gate.
After exchanging good-mornings, McColl asked how far they were from the border.
“Ten versts. Maybe more.”
“Which way is it?”
“Behind you,” the man said, nodding in that direction.
“We’re out of Ukraine?”
The man laughed. “I hope so.”
“What’s the nearest town?”
“Korop. Six versts up the river.”
Korop was small, the local soviet eager to help the Bolshevik photographer and his son who had escaped from German captivity. Despite an obvious shortage of food, a decent meal was provided. After eating this in front of an admiring audience, they were taken to makeshift beds in the local school and allowed to get some sleep. When morning arrived, a driver, horse, and cart were waiting to take them to Krolevets and the nearest available station.
The journey went slower thereafter, but the worst was clearly over. The committee in Krolevets was as happy to feed them as the one in Korop had been, which was just as well, given their subsequent three-day wait for a train and the much-interrupted ride to Konotop that followed, most of which they spent clinging to a carriage roof.
The next train was almost empty by current Russian standards, only eight to a compartment rather than the usual fourteen. Things got back to normal at Bryansk, and for the better part of two days and nights McColl had the boy on his lap. It was all extremely exhausting, but exhilarating, too. He remembered Caitlin saying how eager ordinary Russians were to discuss all the changes convulsing their country. In his visits home since 1914, the only real conversations about the war that McColl had overheard had all been started by bitter soldiers. But here on this train, inching its way toward Moscow, almost everyone had something to say. And perhaps even more surprisingly, most seemed ready to listen. And argue. Sometimes with a smile, sometimes not. Sometimes without much intelligence, sometimes with an almost heartbreaking natural wisdom. For the moment at least, the only thing lacking was cynicism.
Watching Fedya’s eyes dart this way and that as the debates raged on, McColl had the feeling he was watching one child’s education condensed into just a few days. He knew that the boy was clever—all Fedya needed was access to knowledge, and his uncle sounded like someone who would make sure he got it. The imminent prospect of their parting was more upsetting than McColl cared to admit, but it looked like he’d get the boy to Moscow, which had to be some consolation. In truth, it was the only thing he’d done in Russia that had left him feeling good about himself.
In that respect the next few weeks and months did not bode well. Only God knew exactly what Cumming had in store for him, but it was more than likely to be something that Caitlin would find reprehensible.
He wondered again if she was in Moscow. He wouldn’t seek her out, but they might just run into each other. Half of him hoped they would, while the other half hoped she wasn’t there, that she was safe in Brooklyn or London, waiting for the war to end, waiting for him to come home.
But that didn’t sound like the woman he loved.
13
The Broken Pot
The basement of the Cheka headquarters in Yekaterinburg was not where Caitlin had planned to spend the summer, but she had to admit that things could have been worse. The cell itself compared favorably with Colm’s description of his in the Tower of London: it wasn’t damp, there weren’t any rats, and the bed was almost comfortable. The meals, though boring, were no worse than those she’d eaten in cafés the previous winter. It was surprising how quickly she got used to the smell of her own waste, and whatever it was that had bitten her all over during the first few days suddenly seemed to lose its appetite. The sky had never seemed more interesting than it did in her solitary ten-minute walks around the tiny inner courtyard.
She told herself she wasn’t frightened, and most of the time she believed it. A misunderstanding, that was all. What had she actually done? They couldn’t shoot her for being curious. Her friends would come through before long.
There was lots of time for thinking. She took mental walks around Brooklyn and Manhattan, conjured up memories of times with Jack, tried to get her thoughts about the revolution into some sort of order. On good days she understood why many of the revolutionaries she’d interviewed had looked back on their years of prison or exile with something approaching affection.
Caitlin knew she’d blundered on this occasion but overall saw no cause for regrets. She had tried—was still trying—to follow both her heart and her mind and try not to let either one trample all over the other.
She didn’t blame the Cheka for her current predicament. With the czar in their care, of course they’d be jumpy. Who wouldn’t? She had to be patient, had to wait. Sooner or later her friends would convince the men upstairs that their suspicions, though wholly understandable, were completely unfounded.
It took ten days. First she was brought to a bathroom, then given back her suitcase and allowed to change her clothes. Upstairs in the familiar office, her interrogator told her that references had arrived from both Kollontai and Volodarsky and that she was being released. He apologized for her incarceration, but only, she suspected, because a failure to do so might bring repercussions.
She thanked him anyway and accepted his offer of a ride to her hotel, where a new room had already been booked. On arrival she was informed by an overly obsequious manager that hot water was available should madam desire a bath. Madam did. Pushing her luck, she asked that copies of all the latest newspapers be brought to her room.
These did something to deflate her euphoria. When she read between the lines, trying to make sense of the often contradictory reports, one thing was certain—the Bolsheviks were losing ground. The Czechs had taken control of most of the Trans-Siberian east of the Urals and were now advancing up the Volga, having seized most of the larger towns downstream and formed an alliance with the local Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries. In the south, General Denikin was building and training an army, and all around the Russian perimeter the country’s erstwhile allies were stepping up the scale of their interventions.
It made for depressing reading.
After the last ten days, the temptation was to make the most of the local Cheka’s anxiety and give herself a few days to recover. But the Czechs weren’t that far from Yekaterinburg, and she needed to resume her journey while she still could. Kollontai had included a letter for the Cheka to pass on, telling Caitlin that she was currently on a propaganda tour, sailing down the Volga toward Nizhny Novgorod, addressing crowds at almost every town and village. Assuming that Caitlin was on her way to Moscow, would she like to break her journey and bear witness to the revolution in action?
After Vladivostok and the fraught journey across Siberia, after ten days in a cell and the woe-filled newspapers that lay across her bed, she rather thought she would.
The news got no better on the three-day journey to Nizhny Novgorod. During a twelve-hour delay at Perm, she heard that the Czechs, Whites, and Allies had together overthrown the Vladivostok Bolsheviks. Many of the latter had been summarily executed, and it seemed probable that many of those she had met would be among the dead. Caitlin found it hard to imagine that someone as vital as Zoya was gone, but how many young deaths had evoked that thought over the last few years? The graveyards were filling up with children.
Zoya might have escaped, but there were no grounds for hope where her friend Volodarsky was concerned. By the dim light of a lantern on the Vyatka station platform, Caitlin read the news of his assassination, the tears rolling down her cheeks as she stared blankly up at a star-filled summer sky. He had been gunned down in Petrograd by an RSR, presumably for political reasons. She could only hope that his “months of joy” had ended in only a moment of anguish.
She was still thinking about him when her train rumbled across the bridge over the Volga and into Nizhny Novgorod. Around the station and on the droshky ride into the center, she noticed a lot of military activity, but ordinary people were also going about their business, and there was none of that palpable tension that had afflicted most of the towns on her journey. In Nizhny Novgorod the enemy was still some distance away, which was certainly cause for relief. If he ever got this close to Moscow, the game would most likely be up.
Caitlin had telegraphed Kollontai from Perm, and a reply was waiting at the city soviet offices. The message, which was only a few hours old, informed Caitlin that her friend’s boat would be arriving in Balakhna, some thirty versts upstream, the day after tomorrow. How she was supposed to get there wasn’t mentioned, but she had all the next day to figure that out, and after finding a hotel room and eating a better-than-usual meal, she took herself off to bed.
It was a hot night, so she opened her windows wide, undressed, and let the incoming breeze cool her down. She could hear people talking in the street below, the occasional clatter of a droshky going by. The whistle in the distance was probably a train, the mournful horn a boat on the river. It might have been the Brooklyn of her childhood, and the commonplace nature of the sounds seemed to emphasize the distance.
She was a day away from Moscow, from the heart of a revolution that might well end in failure but could transform the world. Victorious or lost, it would change the lives of all who came within its compass. How it would change her own was still a mystery, but not one she felt in any hurry to solve.
There was no train to Balakhna and no boats heading upstream in the next few days, but a rough road ran close to the river and the local soviet found someone willing to take her. The driver was clearly annoyed at having been given the task, and after receiving monosyllabic replies to several cheerful queries, Caitlin stuck her tongue out at his back and settled down to watch the countryside go by.
The ride took six hours. Balakhna sat on the right bank of the wide river, backing onto flat, wooded countryside. The small town boasted a large paper mill and several beautiful churches, all of which had so far survived the change in political temperature. Since most of the buildings were painted in white or pastel shades, Kollontai’s bright red agit-ship, moored at one end of the long jetty, offered a stark contrast. The paddle steamer was adorned with slogans and propagandist paintings, many on the theme of women learning to read and write.
Kollontai was in a meeting on board but hurried out to embrace her friend the moment it was over. Although there was a film screening in town that evening, she had time to show Caitlin around the ship, which had everything a modern propagandist could possibly need. Apart from the projectors and film reels, there were stacks of leaflets, a press for printing more, and a radio for keeping the ship in touch with party headquarters in Moscow. Plus, of course, around a dozen agitators, most of them female and young.
On their walk to the town hall, Kollontai gave Caitlin her take on the current state of the revolution. Despite Brest-Litovsk and her other differences with the party leadership, despite the strength of the opposition now rearing its hydra-like head across the country, Caitlin’s friend was still full of optimism, and as the evening unfolded, Caitlin could clearly see why. The women who filled the hall, who sat enrapt as the film explaining the new approach to women’s rights was shown—they were the reason. Watching the audience rather than the film, Caitlin saw few signs of dissent. The younger women’s obvious enthusiasm was striking, the nervous optimism of their middle-aged mothers even more touching. And if most of the old seemed slightly more grudging, some were obviously won over. “If only the revolution had happened fifty years ago,” one said, shaking her head with regret.
The questions afterward were mostly of a practical nature. What exactly were the rights of a wife under the new marriage law? In the case of divorce, who decided the fate of the children? Would the party make husbands do some of the cleaning?
It was more than an exchange of views. Committees were formed to deal with a number of issues, from setting up classes in literacy and women’s health matters to the current lighting of streets and the future coming of electrification. This was revolution in action, Caitlin thought as they walked back through the darkened town. Making lives better. Making women’s lives easier.
Kollontai had also been energized by the evening, but when their late-night conversation turned to personal matters, a different picture emerged. She missed Dybenko, whom she’d hardly seen since their wedding. Caitlin had heard one version of the story—how, ignoring the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he’d gone off to fight the Germans in his native Ukraine, refused party orders to desist, and eventually been arrested—and now she heard his wife’s. Kollontai’s was more subjective, a mixture of the anger, exasperation, and sadness that only a lover would feel. “I know he sometimes behaves like a willful child,” she said, “but I miss his body next to mine.”
As usual, talking about her friend’s romantic partner caused Caitlin to reflect on her own. At least Kollontai knew where her man was, she thought, lying awake in her narrow bunk. Jack could be anywhere—in the few years she’d known him, he’d been to at least a dozen countries that she knew of, and probably some that she didn’t. She missed him. She missed sex. And doubtless she would go on missing them both. As Kollontai had noted almost wistfully, “I know that everyone thinks I’m an advocate of free love, but in fact I’m remarkably faithful.”
As am I, Caitlin thought. As am I.
She was in Balakhna for almost two weeks, accompanying Kollontai and a few of the other agitators on their visits to a string of nearby villages. The farther they got from the river, the more dubious the response, but the sense of doing something truly worthwhile was always present. This was a story that Caitlin hoped would resonate back home, a message of hope for a world that seemed sorely in need of it, some positive press for the revolution when all seemed ranged against it. Who could argue against women learning to read and write? Who could deny that only the revolution had made such progress possible?
She took a boat downstream on the first day of July, sitting out on deck in the bright summer sunshine and watching the fields go by. She was hoping to reach Moscow for the final days of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, but there was no train from Nizhny Novgorod that evening or on the following day. While she was at the station, several trains rumbled through in the opposite direction, carrying units of the newly formed Red Army toward the battle fronts farther down the Volga.
A departure for Moscow was finally announced. Overcrowded and lacking a restaurant car, the train took more than three days to cover the two hundred miles, arriving at the capital’s Kursk Station in the late afternoon of July 6. All the droshkies were gone by the time Caitlin reached their rank, but at least the trams were running—on her last trip to Moscow they’d been stuck in snowdrifts. As she rode into the center, the first thing that struck her was how normal the city looked. Seen from the Urals, the revolution had seemed close to collapse; seen from a tram on Pokrovka Street, it carried an air of rude health.
Or so she thought. As the tram waited to cross Pokrovsky Boulevard, she saw a couple dozen uniformed Chekists jogging northward, rifles in hand. They looked serious, some of them a little frightened, and she wondered where they might be going.
