The People's Train (24 page)

I’m an accidental Russian, led here from a far-off place and by a famous man. This is the tale of my travels with Artem Samsurov, well known enough to have a stamp dedicated to him in the 1930s when others were being shot and removed from the record. This is also the story of myself – in the year 1917. Many still think of it as the year of years! Many write about it. Here I’m adding my voice to the
many.
Anyone who was there in the summer and autumn of 1917 and could read and write but still doesn’t take up his pen and put something to paper about those times – he’d be rightly judged a failure.

On the ship I spent every morning studying Russian grammar with Artem. I think by the time the first part of the journey ended in Japan I could speak the language like an eighteen-month-old and read it like a three-year-old. I’ll give little time to Japan. For a little while, though, Artem and I found ourselves among these lovely fish-and rice-eating people who had thrashed the Russians in 1905. The skin of Japanese women, I saw, was silken after all. Artem thought me a dry old fish myself – good only for stoushes and reporting. Indeed I’m a desert man, coming from Broken Hill. Hunger and the sun hollowed me out. But if I’d been on my own instead of with Artem, I might have been delayed a bit longer among those people in Japan, and grabbed any job, as an inland sea fisherman, say, or even mining.

Enough of that. I’ve got my path in life, and I’m writing about my Russian education, which began, as I say, when I was still a child even though I was thirty-five years old. Innocent as one of those kids presented in a long embroidered gown at the baptismal font. Like most children, I was a witness instead of an actor on life’s stage. But others were active, and when it came to activity, you couldn’t beat Artem Samsurov.

To get to Siberia we caught the ferry across from Fukura on Honshu, and we watched the great mountains disappear behind us. I loved the look of snow as a novelty. But Artem told me I’d get enough of it next winter and come to curse it.

We came up Golden Horn Bay towards the great terraced streets of Vladivostok. They shone in a bright mid-summer sun that would stay up for most of the day. The ferry landing was right next door to the big white palace of a railway station, and I’d find as I travelled that the Russians put a lot of work into their railway stations. Standing in front of that one, I thought I’d finally arrived in Russia. The fact is I’ve been arriving every day since.

The last time I was here, Tom told me, we were running away up the coast to Nikolayevsk. Suvarov and me.

There were soldiers in their grey uniforms everywhere in the streets and around the railway. Many of them had Asian faces from the tribes of Siberia. They’d been stationed here, Artem told me, because the tsar had feared the Japanese might attack Russia while its main army was in the west. A lot of the soldiers I saw had tuberculosis and stopped in the street to spit into bloody rags. They looked ragged, restless and dangerous – men who were fed up and might have shot their officers. At intersections we also saw the rifle-bearing civilians, factory workers in bits of uniform but mainly their poor old clothes– their red armbands were what really identified them. These were a new militia and called themselves Red Guards. They took themselves more seriously than the soldiers, and didn’t look any more war-weary than me.

I’d got a geography lesson from Artem – along the lines that to get to Petrograd from Vladivostok is three times Sydney to Perth. I’d always thought there was nothing bigger than Australia. But there in Vladivostok we were facing three Australias. I thought Europe was all small, I told him. It was what Australians consoled themselves with. Europe is small and every ten miles there is someone that hates someone else, and Australia is large and we love each other – or so the story goes.

At the railway station, Artem didn’t go anywhere near the ticket counter. It was as if he knew the geography of the place. We went down some steps, crossed some rails and Artem knocked on the door of the railway workers’ barracks. A young man with grease-stained overalls opened the door and listened to Artem. Then he opened the door further and we went into the dimness of a sort of laundry room. On this clear humid day the smell of wet Russian socks from the barracks was just like the smell of wet miners’ socks at Broken Hill. Beyond was a common room and the young railway man pointed us towards it. There was a crowd of drivers, firemen, guards and fettlers sitting and talking and smoking rough tobacco in pipes. A cheap samovar of tea steamed away. Almost straight off Artem was recognised by an engine driver.

Now a lot of what was said to us in Russia early on I didn’t understand. At first I asked Artem to explain and later – after maybe three months – began to understand it a bit. So I’ll do my best to say – or sometimes take a stab at – what talk took place. This engine driver said something like, Comrade Samsurov, I was with you in the Perm railway yards. Have you been all this time in prison?

Artem was straight away treated with respect. I don’t pretend they all knew him, but a number had heard enough about him, his arrest, work in Perm, his escape, to want to wring his hand. They invited us to sit. Artem sat down and began to talk with them, now and then turning to tell me what they were saying to him, and what he was saying to them. I’m letting them know Australia is a wonderful place, he informed me as if he’d become a Brisbane patriot. But the workers have no proper class consciousness – except for you.

Indeed all eyes were on me as if I was a strange and special creature. I would get used to this.

From the railway barracks – where we were fed soup and rye bread – we were taken that evening out into the streets past grand stone buildings and decrepit wooden houses to the municipal offices, a building like so many Russian buildings that tried to look French. Here the Vladivostok Soviet of Workers and Soldiers met. There was a stove giving off heat in the middle of the hall – even in June – and I was too close to it not to sweat buckets. Some hundreds of people gradually gathered. But with the warmth I drowsed off among the speechifying of the Russian workers, and I missed half of Artem’s speech, in which I believe he said that the thousands of people the tsar had driven out were returning from over the seas to work in the new republic.

At the end of Artem’s speech, an executive member of the soviet presented Artem with a signed pass that would allow us to travel on the Eastern Railway free of charge. So the next day we got on a real bone-rattler train and travelled in fair comfort on black padded seats. At every railway works and junction they had got word Artem was coming and we were treated to the hospitality of the rail crews. We got to the big town of Khabarovsk, and the same happened there. Artem told me we were only a walk away from the Manchurian b order. But why would a person go there now? A lot had though, in the tsar’s day.

When I see these towns again, Artem told me, I get the idea I’m still on the run.

Even in Khabarovsk our journey was just starting. I began to get depressed, thinking we’d be on trains or waiting for them for a year, but I didn’t say anything to put a dent in Artem’s spirits. Our next train was ready to steam due west at last and this time we were put in a red velvet first-class compartment – welcome because we could sleep. The one businessman who also sat in the compartment read his newspaper and tried to ignore us. And so we went on via fir forests and the frozen swamps they call the taiga and across great open plains and with a view of mountains streaked with snow. We stopped at a medium-sized town, and a peasant even more husky than Artem entered the compartment. He was large and strong but greeted us in a quiet voice. The Russian good morning, or whatever he said, sounded endless to me – lots of vowels in there. He smelled of sweat and though he had a good smock, his shoes were made of bast fibre, a sort of straw stuck together with pressure. He quickly latched on to the
burzhooi –
the middle-class man – hiding behind his paper and deliberately walked across to him, hauled the paper down, and said in a basso voice what was probably, Good morning, comrade. Then he sat down. As the train left he pulled out a knife and began to cut the velvet backing out of a vacant seat. He called something friendly to Artem as he did it. Artem began to laugh.

He wants it to make shoes, Artem told me. He says red velvet’ll look good in the mud.

Artem thought a while, with the smile dying on his lips. Then he said, There’s a time for ripping out velvet and a time to stop. This is a time to rip.

The peasant nodded to us as if he understood Artem, folded the velvet on his lap and began to sleep noisily. The gentleman traveller sighed to whatever gods were still on his side.

We’d see a lot of scenes like that as we crossed Siberia and southern Russia on our journey to Chelyabinsk. Locomotives were changed over but we stayed with our plush compartment because, said Artem, we were going further than anyone and would need the rest it provided.

Sometimes soldiers with a bugger-you attitude came into our compartment and sat down and frequently Artem got into conversation with them and they rumbled away about hopeless campaigns and idiot generals and how in the end they had walked home to see to the family farm or visit girlfriends or both. Why they were travelling west again now I didn’t quite understand. Maybe they were going to make trouble in Moscow or Petrograd. As in Vladivostok, some of these men were stocky members of the Asiatic tribes – the children of Kublai Khan, said Artem.

We made occasional excursions to the harsh wooden third-class carriages where men in caps and smocks and women in shawls were jolted around by every fault of the track. Grain was scarce, they told him. Requisitioners from the army and the government came round to grab the harvest. The cities must be very hungry, one woman said. Some told us how the landlords’ barns had been burned – with the horses blindfolded and led out by young men and returned peasant soldiers. All the women we met in these carriages were like those we passed in towns along the way – those who stopped in their tracks, looking up and frowning at the passing trains from under the shadow of their shawls. And the men in the streets too in their black or red or grey smocks and hats and shoes made out of straw.

We would get out at watering places to wash ourselves at the pump. Bare-chested men crowded around, waiting to throw water over their stale bodies.

It took only twelve days even with some waiting in sidings to get to Chelyabinsk, two-thirds of the way, where our train with the velvet seats terminated. Now everyone Artem met told him what a quick trip we’d had. They said sometimes soldiers formed gangs, lived in camps in the forests and raided and delayed trains. But it hadn’t happened to us.

Like Omsk – a town we’d already been through – Chelyabinsk was a real city. Rolling in towards the main station I could see great homes of white and reddish stone and then at the station itself soldiers begging, a lot of them on crutches or missing a limb. The Red Guards paraded around in their bits of uniform, and as we left the train I saw men who looked like bandits, in round hats and tight-waisted coats decorated with storage holes for bullets and a dagger at the waist. These coats were called
dokhas,
and were favoured by men from Georgia. In the station lobby you could buy postcards of Kerensky and other leaders inspecting troops in grand opera uniforms.

Artem reacted to the postcards with rare bile. Look at the pompous bugger, he said. His father was an honest headmaster and taught Vladimir Ilich. Kerensky must get all this rubbish of his – wanting to fight on in the war and so on – from his mother.

There was to be a day’s delay before we could catch the train north-west. We went to an unpainted cranky-looking teahouse. As we walked, Artem relished the smell of coal and metal in the air. He was used to this sort of city.

That night we were guests of a Bolshevik journalist and his young wife – their address had been given to us by a Bolshevik engine driver in Omsk. The journalist had been shot through a lung serving under General Brusilov in 1915 and a sort of shade of future widowhood hung over the young wife and gave her face a bruised look.

And again I was like the unwitting child in this group. The couple sat at this dinner table with Artem and me over a plain meal of cabbage soup with a bit of onion and horsemeat and talked by the hour. I had had my first encounter with horsemeat when I ate it one night from a café near a railway station in one of the towns along our way. It tasted strange enough but I was eating it in such good company it didn’t matter.

Artem was – as always – a great talker – though he wasn’t alone. The whole country seemed to me to be yapping and arguing. And because I didn’t really know what they were saying, everything I heard sounded just as important as the last thing.

The journalist with the bad lung made his wife cry by saying he wouldn’t end up seeing what became of it all – of this wild and woolly time. But I got a sense that to them everything – absolutely everything – seemed to be just around the corner. These were people with a light inside them.

Before we went to sleep in the room that we shared Artem and I talked. Artem’s conversation was all about the mess the railway system was in. He had an old railway man’s eye for that sort of thing. Should the trains serve the army? Or should they take food to Petrograd and Moscow? And if they did that, how did you stop speculators getting hold of it?

The next morning the young journalist – with a lot of ceremony – presented a telegram to Artem. Apparently it was from the party leadership. Even though we had been headed for Moscow and Petrograd, this telegram instructed him to go to Kharkov and the coalmines of the Don. That’s where he was to get going – in country he knew.

That day I wrote a report of what I’d seen for the
Australian Worker
and left it with the journalist’s wife for posting. Soon we were rolling along on wooden seats among a big crowd of peasants and mine workers across the Don basin. There were lots of coal towns and they looked grim. Smoke blocked the sky and the slag heaps were higher than mountains and spread their black grit over everything. But it was possible now to believe that the coal was the people’s coal. No one dared to say anything different these days.