In Europe (27 page)

But what about the world-famous cannonade from the cruiser
Aurora
, which supposedly signalled the start of the revolution? ‘That was just a single blank shell, it didn't mean a thing. There's still a replica of the
Aurora
in the Neva, you can see it from here. All fake. The Bolsheviks never cared about the substance, it was always the theatrics.'Yuri Klejner tells me how, in recent years, guides at the palace tried to tell the real story. They had to stop, because they received too many complaints. ‘These days they're back at the Jordanian Stairs again, up to their knees in blood.’

He shows me the Malachite Room with its enormous green pillars and its view of the river. ‘This is where the provisional government met for the last time. The ministers were arrested afterwards in the private dining room next door. In the 1950s, an old man came to the palace and insisted on seeing this room. “You know, this is where they arrested me,” he said. “When was that?” “In 1917.” As it turned out, he had been the state secretary of railways in the provisional government, too insignificant a post to be killed.’ The clock in the side room has been stopped at the time the arrests were made, 1.40 a.m.

The cabinet ministers of the provisional government were carried off, like so many others, to the Peter and Paul Fortress. ‘The winter season at the Peter and Paul Fortress Health Spa got off to a roaring start,’ the satirical magazine the
Devil's Peppermill
wrote in early 1918. ‘Government ministers, statesmen, politicians, elected officials, writers and other prominent
figures from the czarist regime and the provisional government, members of the soviets and the constitutional assembly, social democrats and social revolutionaries all arrived at this well known holiday resort with its illustrious therapies: cold, starvation and mandatory rest, punctuated on occasion by surgical procedures, bloodbaths and other exciting activities.’

In the meantime, the old Russia was falling apart. On 3 March, 1918, the Bolsheviks and the Germans signed the ‘humiliating treaty’ of Brest-Litovsk. The Russian Empire lost Finland, Russian Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. Russia's ‘warm’ connections to Europe via the Caspian and the Black Sea were cut off. The country lost thirty-two per cent of its agricultural land, thirty-four per cent of its population, fifty-four per cent of its industry and eighty-nine per cent of its coal mines. The terms of the treaty were so humiliating that the party leadership almost decided to resume the war against Germany. Lenin was able to prevent that, but the motion was defeated by only a single vote. His German financiers had every reason to be satisfied. As a European power, Russia was finished.

A series of famines broke out, and at the same time two civil wars were fought: the first between the Reds and the Whites (the latter including countless social democrats), and the second between central Russia and the warlords of the Ukraine and Caucasus. In southern Russia and the Ukraine, the Whites murdered at least 100,000 Jews between 1918–19. Kiev changed regimes no fewer than sixteen times between the end of 1918 and summer 1920. By 1921, the entire Russian production of foodstuffs had shrunk to half the level of 1913. Between 1917–20, the population of Moscow decreased by a half, that of Petrograd by two thirds.

Lenin used the chaos to start immediately on a programme of agricultural reforms. ‘Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than a hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,’ he directed in a letter to the Bolsheviks in a distant, troubled province. ‘Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: They are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks … Find some truly hard people.’

As early as August 1918 he ordered the first forced-labour camps to be built, to accommodate ‘unreliable elements’. Four years later there were eighty-four of them, with more than 80,000 prisoners, more than had
ever been arrested under the czar. During his time in power, Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, was probably responsible for some 200,000 executions. In 1922 the Cheka was renamed, but during that brief period ‘those two syllables’ – as Ilya Ehrenburg wrote – ‘summoned up so much fear and emotion in every citizen who had lived through the revolution’ that they were never forgotten. During the chaotic period between 1917–22, an estimated three to five million people were killed. This was how Russia separated itself from Europe.

‘Now I'm going to tell you a story from my own life,’ Yuri says once we are standing outside, in the square before the Winter Palace. ‘In the early 1950s my father was responsible for all technical matters in the Hermitage. During popular demonstrations in this square, it was his job to make sure those statues up there did not fall off the roof. And that huge pillar was to remain standing as well, of course. An accident like that would have been an absurd coincidence, but whenever something like that did happen it was called “sabotage”, and someone had to bear the blame. That person was my father, a scapegoat from the word go. That's the way the Soviet system worked.

‘My father would therefore climb up onto this pillar and onto the roof with the other man responsible, the head municipal architect, they would look around, mumble to each other about what a load of nonsense it was, and have a little drink together. That's the way the Soviet system worked as well.

‘Every year on 1 May and 7 November, a huge parade and demonstration was held here. There was no television at the time, so everyone wanted to be there. Thanks to his remarkable responsibility for roof and pillar, my father was on good terms with the security service at the Winter Palace, and one day we received permission to view the parade from the palace itself. I was even allowed to bring a friend.

‘So there we stood on 7 November, 1952, at that window, with a few other families and the ever-present plainclothes policeman. I was six, my friend was seven. Below they were carrying around huge portraits. I loved Comrade Stalin, and that was the extent of my knowledge of politics. But my friend wanted to show how smart he was, and suddenly he asked my father: “Alexander Alexandrovitch, if Stalin dies, who will be his
successor?” Well, the very idea that Stalin would ever die was taboo, and talking about his successor was nothing less than a deadly sin. My father turned white as a sheet. Later he told me that the plainclothesman had clearly heard the comment, and that a whole range of emotions had crossed the man's face. Starting with: Should I arrest this man? Then: But he's only a child. And finally: Why not act as though I didn't hear?

‘My father didn't sleep for a week. When he told me about it, years later, you could still see the tension in his face.’

VARSHAVSKY STATION IN ST PETERSBURG CAN HARDLY BE CALLED A
station at all. It is more like a vague, open lot through which one picks one's way with difficulty, a place criss-crossed with tracks and here and there a long platform. The engines roar behind their snowploughs and the carriages reek as the coal heaters are fired up for a new journey, but inside the compartments it is the very picture of conviviality. The professional busybody assigned to our carriage has settled down in the last compartment. Why would she want to be anywhere else? Her whole life is laid out in her home on wheels, with coloured cushions, flowers, her own curtains, an icon on the wall and a singing kettle on the stove. Always on the road.

Our first-class compartment is also like a salon, with two velveteen pull-out beds, red draperies, white lace curtains and plastic flowers on the table. My only fellow passenger, Andrei Morozov, deals in ship's tackle. The train pulls away, outside there is nothing but white barrenness, here and there a chimney, from the speakers the soft sound of Russian songs, and quite soon the day begins to fade.

Together we polish off two bottles of vodka. First we talk about Andrei's thirteen-year-old daughter and her favourite magazine,
Callgirl
. Then we speak of the lightness of Pushkin. Then he informs me in detail about the peculiarities of the whores who work the trains in Lithuania.

In the next carriage everyone is sitting or lying on plank bunks: farmers with red faces, shy soldiers and wizened grandmothers. My bed shakes gently, the train couplings creak, from somewhere far down the corridor comes the sound of an accordion, outside the window the endless snow slides by, the lanterns of a sleeping village, above it the stars.

I get off at Vilnius at 4.30 a.m. It is quiet as the grave. Close to the
station, standing half on the tracks, four greyish-looking men are staring at the lights and the train, their faces tense from the cold, fishing equipment in hand. They do not speak a word. Then I walk down the city's main street and suddenly I see German houses, American advertising, Italian cafés and Swedish hotels, as though the city centre is cut off from the winter by an invisible glass dome.

My room is at the Hotel Neringa. I'm awakened by the groans of the man in the next room, and a few yelping cries from one of the working girls. It is quiet for a bit, and then together they sing a sweet melancholy song in an incomprehensible language. Meanwhile I lie there feeling a bit out of place in a Western bed, next to a shower that actually produces clean water. Just as my mattress springs easily back into shape, so has this entire city sprung back in a moment to European life, as though there had never been anything in between. Still, it was only ten years ago that people here first dared openly to celebrate Christmas. And ten years ago that they formed that human chain, right through three Baltic States, 650 kilometres long, with two million participants. And the bitter fighting with Soviet troops close to the television tower of Vilnius, that was only eight years ago. All the while, Lenin stood looking calmly out over Lukiškiû Square.

But all that was centuries ago. On the main street of Vilnius, Western vacuity has descended with a vengeance. The yellow walls are tidily plastered, the old ornaments look like new, and Adidas, Benetton and other familiar spirits smile down on you as you walk. Halfway down the street, a new wind is blowing: six boys, two girls and one guitar, short leather jackets covered in shiny studs, above them soft, blushing faces.

The inner city here has been converted, with much European funding, into a showcase, a beacon of Western welfare. Last year, in their enthusiasm, the Lithuanians even adopted Western European time, so that now their winter evenings begin around 4 p.m. But the city's Western European image feels a bit brittle. Cross a bridge and you will find yourself in the old Užzupis district, the Latin Quarter of Vilnius, full of mud, flaking walls, scenes straight out of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, right down to the rotting hay in the courtyards. Outside the city there are wooden houses everywhere, their roofs rusty corrugated iron, a few half-rotted balconies,
smoking chimneys, a horse and wagon, and crows in the bare fields, lots of crows, this is crow country. In some of the villages there are boarded-up sheds, the remains of an old wooden synagogue.

Meanwhile, the city's
jeunesse dorée
gather day after day at Café Afrika. They smoke in great earnest, drink coffee in silence, listen to French
chan-sons
. Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in Europe.

The spring thaw has begun. On this March day, the sunlight on the nineteenth-century walls is merciless and clear as glass. There are not many cars on the street, the few people out walking cast sharp shadows on the pavements. I pass a mercantile house built in 1902, with striking grill-work around the roof. The house must once have had a Jewish owner. The front of the one next to it is decorated with stylised, seven-armed candlesticks. Around the corner is a centre for social work, formerly a
heder
, a Jewish school.

Vilnius – ‘Wilna’ in both German and Yiddish – was once a thoroughly Jewish town, a centuries-old centre of Jewish learning and culture. There was a Jewish university, and the town had six Jewish daily newspapers. After 1945, the Jewish gravestones were used as steps for the new union hall. Today there is a little Jewish museum with two Torah scrolls, the skeleton of a lectern, a couple of portraits and a handful of commemorative plaques. That is pretty much all that remains.

Close to my hotel is a sombre government building, a solid chunk of stone with huge doors, massive thresholds, stairs and galleries. The pillars at the front of the building remind me vaguely of a Greek temple. It could once have been a college, or a government ministry, or the offices of the district administration. It is one of those nineteenth-century government buildings of which there are hundreds all over Europe. The front is spotted with blank patches, the places where the eagles, shields, swastikas and hammers and sickles followed each other in rapid succession. Otherwise little has changed throughout the years.

In 1899 it was built as a courthouse for Vilnius, as an administrative district of the Russian Empire. That was what it remained until 1915. Then it became a German courthouse: the inhabitants of Vilnius were subject to German martial law, and the Germans enjoyed all the privileges of the new coloniser. From January to April 1919, the building housed a Bolshevik
revolutionary tribunal. The Lithuanian flag flew above it for a while, then for more than fifteen years it was where justice was administered under the auspices of Poland. Between 1940–1, the courtrooms, halls and cells were used by the judges and executioners of the Soviet Union; more specifically, those of the secret police, the NKVD. In 1941 the building became the headquarters for the Gestapo, the
Sicherheitsdienst
and the notorious Lithuanian
Sonderkommandos
. After 1944 the NKVD, and later the KGB, resumed activities here. That lasted until August 1991. Today it is a museum.

The old courthouse has witnessed the entire historical drama of the Baltic States throughout the twentieth century. At this moment, Lithuania has 3.5 million inhabitants, Latvia 2.5 million (one third of whom, by the way, are Russians), Estonia only 1.5 million (also almost one-third Russians). Just like the Benelux countries, the three Baltic States are where the fault lines between a number of European cultural regions come together. Lithuania is the last remnant of a once powerful Central European empire that extended to the Black Sea. In the fifteenth century, Vilnius, Minsk and Kiev shared the same rulers. Estonia was more closely aligned with the Scandinavian world; it has been Danish, German, Swedish and Russian property, in that order.