Lenins roller coaster, p.26
Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 26
About ten minutes later, walking toward the front door of the Frantziya Hotel, she heard shots in the distance: a first, a second, a minor fusillade. What in God’s name was happening?
Inside the lobby one man was loudly telling another that Count Mirbach, the German ambassador, had been assassinated. He didn’t know by whom.
After getting a room—small, high up, with a view of the taller Kremlin cupolas—Caitlin rushed back downstairs and out onto the street. The Bolshoi Theater, where the congress was being held, was only a short walk away in Theater Square, and she hurried in that direction, eyes alert for signs of danger, ears pricked for the sound of gunfire.
The theater itself was ringed by Red Guards and Chekists, a machine-gun detachment facing the entrance. She walked toward the latter, press card in her hand, but the Chekist in charge simply waved her back. “The congress has been suspended,” he said, merely repeating the phrase when she asked him why.
There was no one else to ask, so she walked back across the square, thinking she would watch and wait. As she passed a line of three parked cars, she noticed Yakov Peters sitting in the front one, smoking a cigarette and staring across at the theater. He saw her a moment later, and the smile that broke across his face was almost an invitation.
He climbed out to shake her hand.
“So what’s happening?” she asked him in English, knowing how nostalgic he was for his years in London.
“The LSRs have gone mad,” he said simply. “They’ve killed Count Mirbach and taken my chief prisoner. Their people in the Vecheka—and don’t ask me why we didn’t get rid of them months ago—they’re holding Dzerzhinsky at Pokrovsky Barracks. But their leaders are all in there,” he said, pointing toward the theater. “So we’ve both got hostages,” he added dryly.
“Spiridonova?”
“Oh, yes. She’s spent the last few days calling for a new war against the Germans, and presumably killing Mirbach was how they hoped to start one.”
Caitlin hardly knew what to think. “Are they actually trying to seize power?”
“Only they know that.” He sighed. “They’ve always been more about gestures than anything else, and this feels like one more of those. If it is, they’ll be sorry. We can’t afford those sorts of games, not anymore.”
They both stared across at the theater. “I posted the letter to your wife when I got to America,” she told him.
“I know,” he said. “I had a reply last month. Thank you.”
Since he said nothing about her recent imprisonment, neither did she. “So what happens now?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “We wait. And now I must leave you,” he added as a subordinate walked toward them.
Caitlin lingered in the square for a while, but nothing more happened. She decided to visit the Pokrovsky Barracks. These were about a mile to the east, on the innermost of the boulevards ringing the city center. Drawing closer, she expected to find a cordon, but it was a single soldier who stopped her, shooing her away with his rifle. When she didn’t move, he lowered the weapon toward her and she had no choice but to retreat.
This time there was no Yakov Peters to explain the situation. She stood on the far side of the boulevard for several minutes, staring across at the mansionlike barracks and wondering in which of the rooms Dzerzhinsky was being held.
What were the LSRs doing? Peters’s judgment—that they’d simply gone mad—seemed as good as any, but whatever their motives had been, the behavior seemed incredibly reckless.
She retraced her steps, first to the Theatre Square, where nothing new had happened, then back to her hotel for some food. It was almost ten by the time she’d eaten, and her legs rebelled at the thought of going back out. With any luck at all, nothing would happen overnight, and after the latest appalling journey she desperately needed some sleep. She requested a 5:00 a.m. call, then went up to her room and bed.
She left the hotel just before six. The Bolshoi Theatre was still surrounded, the LSR delegates still inside. Walking on, she found another ring of troops around the Pokrovsky Barracks, where the LSR Chekists were holding Felix Dzerzhinsky. Several pieces of artillery were lined up opposite the building, Yakov Peters and several subordinates standing nearby.
He saw her and walked over.
“Any news?” she asked.
“We have demanded their surrender,” Peters told her.
“And if they refuse?”
He shrugged and gestured toward the waiting guns.
The besieged LSRs neither threw in the towel nor came out fighting. In midmorning the first shell was fired, chipping off a chunk of cornice. It didn’t kill anyone, but to the watching Caitlin it felt as if something had died. The two parties who had made the revolution, who had ruled in tandem for several intoxicating months, were fighting and killing each other. And Kollontai and Spiridonova, the women who had most inspired her, were now on opposite sides.
After surrendering later that morning, most of the LSR Chekists were shot. The political leaders corralled in the theater were told they were under arrest, then led single file to the Kremlin, for incarceration in one of the citadel’s barracks. Watching the procession of defiant Socialist Revolutionaries as it wound its way through the Nikolskaya Gate—the diminutive Spiridonova at its head—Caitlin felt nothing but sadness.
It took her three days to get an interview. Yakov Peters came through in the end, but only after making it clear what he didn’t want her to write. “I trust you not to fall for all this “martyr to the revolution” nonsense. It’s people like your friend Volodarsky who are the real martyrs.”
On the morning in question, she was led through several inner courtyards to a small office opposite one of the churches. Two Red Guards stood sentry outside while she sat alone in the mostly empty room, waiting for Spiridonova. Her friend, when she eventually arrived, was wearing the familiar dark dress with white-trimmed collar. Her face was pale, the eyes a little feverish, but she looked healthier than Caitlin expected. Which was, on reflection, hardly surprising. The Bolsheviks would want the world to believe that Spiridonova was being treated decently, and who better to bear witness than a known friend and foreign journalist?
“It is good to see you,” Spiridonova said after kissing Caitlin on both cheeks.
“And you.”
“How long do we have?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Then I will waste no time. I am writing an open letter to the Bolshevik leadership. I am telling them, and the world, that we in the LSR leadership take full responsibility for the killing of Mirbach and that if they wish to punish anyone, it should be us. I know they have already killed several of our people in the Cheka—these men were simply following our orders and should not have been punished for doing so.”
“What did the LSR leadership hope to gain from killing the German ambassador?” Caitlin asked.
“An end to their shameful peace. The people want to fight the Germans. In Ukraine they are doing so already. The Bolsheviks have betrayed us all with their wretched treaty—the Russian workers, the German workers. And that is only the half of it. They have betrayed the peasants, given them their freedom only to snatch it back.”
There was more of this, much more. Listening to the other woman, Caitlin had the sense that months of doubt and frustration had come to a cathartic head, that Spiridonova and her party had simply had enough of compromise. And perhaps, she thought but didn’t say, of responsibility. “But how are you?” she asked, hoping to separate the person from the politics.
“Me? I am ready for whatever comes. I could not have acted otherwise.” A slight smile. “And I am glad you have come back to us. Are you glad that you did?”
“Yes, of course. But . . .” Caitlin sighed. “It hurts me to see you in prison, to see allies turn on each other. I am a stranger here, but it seems to me that a revolution with so many enemies can ill afford to lose its friends.”
Spiridonova shook her head. “If a pot is broken, you cannot pretend it isn’t. You have to make another.”
That wasn’t what Caitlin wanted to hear. “Do you need anything?” she asked. “I mean, I don’t know if—”
“One thing,” Spiridonova said. “If you could take a message . . . No, nothing political,” she added, seeing Caitlin glance at the door behind her. “The people I live with—old friends—I would like them to know I’m all right.”
“Of course.”
Spiridonova provided the address of a house in the Arbat and then got to her feet. “I like to call time myself,” she said, giving Caitlin another kiss. “It wouldn’t do to let them think they’re in control.”
After a guard had escorted Caitlin back to the Nikolskaya Gate and her bag had been searched for contraband, she wandered around the huge Red Square, trying to shake off the sense of despondency. Would the Bolsheviks shoot Spiridonova? Surely they wouldn’t be so stupid. If only someone would take her and Lenin and bang their heads together. Trouble was, they were both so sure they were right.
Caitlin walked out past the history museum and found the tram stop for the Arbat district. It was another perfect summer day, and the city and its people showed no sign of having been unduly inconvenienced by the LSR revolt. As Jack Reed had once told her, everyone might be affected by political developments, but usually it was only 5 percent of the population that actually noticed. It hadn’t been true in 1917, but perhaps it was again. Perhaps there were only so many months of constant upheaval that any people could take.
The house in Arbat stood facing a little park, in which several children were playing under a watchful babushka’s eyes. The house was small by Moscow standards and badly in need of repainting—a surprising home for one of Russia’s most loved daughters. It took a while for someone to answer Caitlin’s knock, and when a man did, the look on his face was one of suspicion. All changed when she explained the reason for her presence. He invited her in, and the woman who seemed to be his wife hurried to bring her tea.
“Maria says to tell you that she’s fine,” Caitlin said. “And not to be sad, whatever happens. She has chosen her path and has no regrets.”
This was received with nods, as if such a message were to be expected. On a whim Caitlin asked if she could see Spiridonova’s room.
They were happy to oblige. “The Chekists took two of her books,” the man said as he opened the door.
“Is that all?” Caitlin asked, struck by the room’s emptiness. A shelf held fewer than a dozen books, the wardrobe a handful of dresses. A framed photograph of Spiridonova and several other women—probably out in Siberia—stood on the bedside table beside an iron candleholder.
A monastic cell, Caitlin thought.
A few minutes later, emerging onto the street, she noticed a man standing opposite. As she walked back to the tram stop, she could hear his footsteps behind her, and once aboard the crowded vehicle she could see him at the other end. When she alighted, he did the same, but when she entered her hotel lobby, she looked around in vain. Whoever he was, he knew where she was staying.
Should she worry? She told herself not much, that doing a friend a favor was hardly a crime, even if that friend was currently held by the Cheka.
So why did she not feel reassured?
Up in her room, she began sketching out a piece on Spiridonova. It wasn’t easy—she had no desire to malign her friend, but the more she thought about the LSR position, the more she believed it was wrong. Did that mean that the Bolsheviks were right? Not necessarily. Maybe they were both wrong. Six months ago things had seemed much clearer.
She had written only a couple hundred words when the peremptory knock sounded on her door.
She opened it with some trepidation.
“You will come with me,” the Chekist said, stepping into the room. Eyes lighting on the half-written article, he reached out a hand for the sheets of paper.
Their destination was the main headquarters on Bolshaya Lubyanka. Caitlin was kept waiting for almost an hour in a drab reception room, under the watchful eyes of a young Cheka duty officer. And if he wasn’t mentally undressing her, then she was the czar’s mother.
Finally summoned to someone’s presence, she was led down two corridors and up two flights of stairs to an office overlooking the large inner courtyard. The man in question was about thirty, with hair already graying and dark circles around his eyes. Her unfinished article was lying on his desk.
“You speak Russian, yes?” he asked in that language.
She nodded.
“My name is Yuri Komarov, and I am the Second Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Cheka. You—correct me if I’m wrong—are Caitlin Hanley, American journalist.”
“I am.” She felt nervous, but also more than a little annoyed, and she did her best to hide both.
“You visited Maria Spiridonova in the Kremlin this morning, and then you went to her lodgings.”
“I did. Your colleague Yakov Peters arranged the interview—he’s an old acquaintance from Petrograd.” Take that, she thought.
“I know,” he said, clearly unimpressed. “So why did you visit her home?”
“She asked me to. She wanted the people who live there to know she’s doing well. That’s all.”
He digested that, massaging the sides of his unshaven chin with thumb and forefinger, then picked up her scribbled pages and gave them a good long look. “You make her sound like a heroine,” he said at last.
“Isn’t she? Didn’t Lenin say the other day that no one could impugn her integrity? If you can believe Pravda, that is,” she added pointedly. She felt like scoring points, which was probably ill-advised.
He said nothing.
“She has been calling people to account for twenty years,” Caitlin went on. “If she disagrees with the government, she won’t remain silent.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No one expects her to. What we cannot tolerate is her and her colleagues seeking to undermine the government by ordering the murder of a foreign diplomat.”
Caitlin said nothing to that.
Komarov consulted another piece of paper. “You were here in the winter when restrictions were placed on the bourgeois press. Our opponents were using their money and their newspapers to spread lies about us, putting the whole revolution at risk. And you wrote that the restrictions, I quote, ‘though regrettable, are both understandable and necessary.’”
“As a temporary measure, yes.”
He sat back in his chair. “Well, I think we could agree that the revolution is in much greater danger now. We are surrounded by enemies, and they all want to kill us. The Germans are not our friends—of course they’re not—but at this particular moment in time they’re the only ones willing to let us be. And the LSRs want to provoke them into restarting the war. It cannot be allowed.”
“I can see that,” Caitlin said. And she did. If the Germans joined the Allied onslaught, then the revolution was doomed and the women of Balakhna could say good-bye to a better future. Why could Spiridonova not see it? For Caitlin’s friend it was all or nothing, and there was a certain glory in that, particularly when the person concerned was so willing to put her own life at risk. But glory wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, nor was staking one’s life on absolute victory—most people would settle for something less if the only alternative was complete defeat.
And she was one of them, Caitlin decided. Sometimes a broken pot could be mended. “Is that all?” she asked Komarov, eager despite herself to give him nothing more.
He nodded and shouted for someone to lead her back out of the labyrinth.
She wrote the piece that evening, taking care to explain the motives and aims of both LSRs and Bolsheviks. And if she came down largely on the latter’s side, it was not out of fear of the Cheka but because she felt they were mostly right. Power without principles was a thin gruel indeed, but there was always the hope of improving the diet; principles without power offered only a fleeting glow of self-righteousness before the beasts returned with their sharpened knives.
The Bolsheviks had not abandoned all their principles, and neither had Caitlin. She wouldn’t lie for them. If the time ever came when they wouldn’t allow her to write things she believed to be true, she would either quit the country or give up pretending to be a journalist. She had no objection to propaganda, but only if everyone understood that that was what it was.
Next morning at the Central Telegraph Office, she waited with some trepidation for the in-house Cheka verdict. Would they pass the article for export, or would there be another summons from Comrade Komarov? As it turned out, the acceptability of her views proved neither here nor there—the telegraph connections had been closed down, the one across Siberia by the Czechs, the one through Europe by the Bolsheviks, in retaliation for the latest British landings at Murmansk. There was no telling when either would reopen.
This was a blow to her sense of purpose and also to her pocket. As a correspondent she would still have received a salary; as a freelancer she was only paid by the piece. The money from Aunt Orla would last her a few more weeks, but she’d counted on staying longer than that.
Should she leave again? She already had sufficient material for a book—the trip across Siberia had provided enough on its own—but was that what she wanted to do? Sitting over newspapers in the hotel bar, she realized it would be like writing the first half of a novel, like recounting David’s war with Goliath before they got around to exchanging their missiles.
Only that morning, news of a major rebellion in Yaroslavl had reached Moscow. The Czech Legion was still tramping all over Siberia and the Urals, the RSRs had seized another major Volga town with the help of some Bolshevik turncoats, and the British landing at Murmansk had proved more substantial than expected. One of the papers provided a list of those known to have died in the White takeover of Vladivostok, and Caitlin recognized several of the people she’d met and shared an evening with only two months before. Zoya was not among them, which was something.
