The People's Train (27 page)

I thought that we would now be heading down the long avenues to our lawyer’s house but instead we turned off into a side street – Botanical Street – and pulled up outside the shell of the two-storey building where the sisters lived. As we all got out an old lady in a scarf came from a room under the stairs that led up to nowhere as yet and stood scolding the lot of us. Tasha and Olya responded cheerfully and let us into their place. This looked to be pretty pleasant – and expensive even. However there was no electricity and the quieter sister Olya set out to get the place illumined – like some Queensland dairy farm – by a kerosene lamp. Tasha quickly got the samovar working on the tiled stove. But before any tea was served they settled down to hold – yes, a meeting. These were serious people.

The people in the Abrasova sisters’ rooms – and me less than most – didn’t know anything about the turmoil going on in Vladimir Ilich’s closest circle. He had come back to Russia in April and straight away he had old friends from exile, like the intellectual engine-driver’s son Lev Kamenev – sniping at him but not wishing to shoot him – as no doubt Kerensky did. And now he was on the run anyhow. The internal arguments were things I and others would find out about from later reading. But here in Kharkov nobody wavered and the circle who sat in the Abrasova girls’ flat was a united one. First up of course they wanted to discuss Vladimir Ilich’s escape and whether he had managed it and whether it was complete yet. Would he try to get back to Western Europe by way of the Baltic? No, said Federev. He’ll never go that far again. He’ll hide maybe in Latvia. Or in Sweden or Finland.

In the minds in that little apartment it was not the Jew-haters who believed the words Jew and Bolshevik to be the same thing who were the greater threat. To people like Federev or Tasha the Mensheviks were to be feared more than the Cadets and Golden Kievites. Because Mensheviks actually believed that by taking seats in the Duma – not to overthrow it, but to get on with everyone – they’d be able to talk everyone else round to their view.

Our little meeting lasted three hours all up. Olya talked enough to show she was no cat’s paw either. Some time about two o’clock we drank the tea with some sausage and bread. Everyone was talkative still and very jolly about their escape. I found I was too. I had not yawned during their long confabulation. I was entranced. And I was learning – a word at a time.

Over tea, Artem told them further stories about Australia. To them it was like hearing stories about Antarctica. And after that Tasha had her own story to tell – Artem would relate it to me later. It was about how she’d been a regular at Vladimir Ilich’s house in Geneva. If Bolsheviks were likely to be boastful about anything it was how close they were to Vladimir Ilich Lenin. It was clear Vladimir Ilich had the power to make them feel they played an essential part and that they were valued for it. Before her sister joined the party, Tasha had been already working as a party agent in a city called Tver on the Volga – a city associated with Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Ostrovsky. She’d already written and dispatched two reports to Piter on the activities of the local cell and was writing another when she heard a knock on the door. It was the gendarmes. She threw her report into the fire, but when she let them in the police could smell the burning paper and from that point on there was a watch on her house.

And so she was spirited away. The party machine had contacts with people smugglers and employed one to take her out of the country in return for ten roubles. Once she was in the tsarist part of Poland she was handed on from smuggler to smuggler so that it cost her a lot more than ten roubles in the end. Finally, dressed in peasant shawl and riding in a farm wagon, she was driven to the German border by a Polish Jew who kept on stopping every time he saw a haystack to steal fodder for his horse. Soon he had a huge load in the wagon, which groaned its way into East Prussia. Tasha found out when they crossed the border that far from being a poor man who needed all the straw he could find to feed his horse – he owned the inn she was to stay at.

According to her new travel documents she was Akulina. As the smuggler and his wife argued about whether she ought to be fed or not, Tasha pretended she couldn’t understand Yiddish. And why would a golden-haired Slav such as her have any grasp of the Jewish dialect? In fact the girls’ granny had spoken it when they grew up in Kiev – that Jew-baiting city (so I was told) where their father had tried to protect them by giving them full-on Russian names like Natasha and Olya.

Tasha admired Germany. I would find the Great Russians always admired Germany – even in those days when the German army was still inside the Western Ukrainian border. Tasha thought German farm people looked well fed. The theory was that because Germany was more industrial Western Europe would turn to revolution before Russia. But the good houses of the Prussian farmers made Tasha wonder about that. It wasn’t until she saw the slums of the cities and spoke with other members of the party there that she saw things were not right. In the meantime they looked after her and advised her how to carry herself when faced with policemen and officials. She got to Berlin – carrying herself as they’d advised her – and caught the train to Zurich.

In that city Tasha stayed in the house of some exiled Russians who kept complaining that Vladimir Ilich was trying to split the party over clause 1 of the membership rules, which determined who was eligible and who wasn’t. Lenin didn’t want or respect anyone other than active full-time campaigners like Tasha. All the others were just useless tea-drinkers and merchants of palaver, he argued. By contrast the Mensheviks were quite happy to let in anyone who agreed with their program and who did an occasional service – such as giving out handbills or newspapers – when it suited them. Tasha believed with Vladimir Ilich that revolution wasn’t work for amateurs.

Olya came to join her in Switzerland and the sisters started to meet up with other political escapees. The legendary old Julius Martov – now on the Menshevik side – was so kind even though he disagreed with Vladimir Ilich. Tasha and Olya lived in a pension in Zurich and Martov – the veteran their parents had known and respected – would visit her and her sister and offer them help with money and food. But when during one of Martov’s visits to the sisters Tasha told the old man what she really thought about the party issue, that she sided with Vladimir Ilich and his all-out revolutionaries known as the Bolsheviks, he became angry and yelled and screamed about fanatics. Afterwards the landlady of the pension called Tasha to the office and told her that if her Russian friends didn’t stop coming and creating mayhem she would have to leave.

Tasha and Olya moved to Geneva. Even though Vladimir Ilich lived there she did not want to bother him. But the elder of the Marxists in Switzerland – Georgi Plekhanov – stepped forward and filled the fatherly gap left by Martov. When Tasha caught influenza, she was treated by Plekhanov’s wife and Plekhanov himself came round like a grandfather and brought her pastries and told her it would be better for now not to trouble her mind with talk about the party split and the arguments between him and Martov on the one side and Vladimir Ilich on the other. After all, he said, we are all brothers. Just the same, he was sad to hear that she’d lined up with Lenin’s battering rams. Some of them were bullies, he said.

Despite his kindness Tasha thought, Yes, you don’t want me to discuss it but you’ll come around here using terms like
battering rams.

She first met Vladimir Ilich at a large social democrat meeting where he spoke on what party people called ‘the agrarian question’. He always preferred a box or something like that to speak from if he could find one because he wasn’t a tall man and the way he spoke would have been a bit flat unless you actually saw him and felt his presence.

Afterwards Tasha and Olya were introduced to him for the first time. He didn’t put on airs, said Tasha. In fact he made ordinary people feel at one with him while he spoke and even more once he’d finished talking and came down and became one of the crowd. And though he was hard on such people as the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries from the platform, he was very polite to them on the floor. Tasha was surprised that he wanted to talk to her. (Maybe even Vladimir Ilich knew a good-looking woman when he saw one but Tasha seemed unaware of how beautiful she was.) Vladimir Ilich wanted to know all about the local committee of the Bolsheviks in Tver and how much it knew about splits in party theory that were happening in Switzerland. These things might be only a conflict of ideas now, said Vladimir Ilich, but when the revolution comes they could become clashes between armed men.

Tasha told him not everyone understood as clearly as she did now she was in Geneva. They all read
Iskra
of course – but they needed meetings to have things explained.

I have come to enlist with the Leninist Rams, Tasha told him, and Vladimir Ilich laughed a lot at this and called his wife Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya over so the story could be repeated. Krupskaya was known to work long days typing Vladimir Ilich’s endless string of speeches and pamphlets. Her face was lined and pinched but she smiled at the mention of Leninist Rams. She invited Tasha and her sister to come and visit them at home.

The sisters caught a tram out to Secheron, the suburb of Geneva where Lenin lived with Krupskaya and Krupskaya’s mother Elizaveta Krupskaya in a two-storey rented house. The largest room was the kitchen – where Vladimir Ilich’s mother-in-law stood at a large stove. Vladimir’s study was up a trembly staircase. There was an iron bed in case he needed a rest and a few chairs and a white table heaped with writing and papers. All his books were packed into rough homemade bookshelves. All very primitive – a poor monk’s room as Tasha imagined a monk’s room to be. Nadezhda Krupskaya’s workroom wasn’t any more comfortable. It wasn’t unusual for Swiss houses to be as bare as this but Tasha was awed by the bareness.

She found out that the old lady Elizaveta did all the housework because her daughter – apart from the other work – had to translate into code the letters being sent to all the cells inside Russia. It took hours to do that just for one letter.

Tasha wanted to visit this Aladdin’s cave for revolutionaries every day – just so that when Vladimir Ilich came down from his office he could educate her ever more. But she and others restricted themselves to Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days set aside by Lenin for visits. Whenever they arrived Krupskaya’s old mother would call out, Go on, go upstairs. Drag them out of their caves. Dinner’s on. There’s enough left over for you.

Sometimes Lenin would have been working in a shabby suit and sometimes in a blue cotton smock just like a Russian farmer. But he always came down laughing his famous laugh – people later would forget that laugh and judge him only by his photographs. Even though he was in a lot of ways ordinary looking – bald, a bit harried – his jocose manner would spread to the young visitors and they’d spend their time making political jokes. They were like the disciples listening to Christ, said Tasha, and they breathed easier with him. One night Tasha and Olya missed the last tram and Vladimir Ilich offered to see them home – he said he needed the fresh air. For Tasha in particular it was a chance to talk to him further. She admitted she was scared – she didn’t think she had any of the qualities required to be numbered among the sort of party members Vladimir Ilich was looking for. She didn’t have any great skills for persuading others or explaining theory. Sometimes she felt so inadequate that she thought she was close to a nervous breakdown.

He said not to worry. The important thing, he said, was that the revolutionary’s personal life and party life had to be one and the same – the way it was with him and Krupskaya. But it needed strong young people who were in touch with the masses. He said that just for now this was where they had to begin – out of these hard little circles – until the time came. As for talking to others in the groups back in Russia, it was only the science of being certain about what you were certain about.

Under Vladimir Ilich’s spell, she reached her pension. Lenin twinkled by the light of a lamppost. You have to have more confidence in your abilities, he told Tasha and Olya.

And so with her Bolshevik bishop’s blessing she and her sister went inside to bed while Lenin himself walked a long way home clearing his head for new ideas.

Tasha said – that night in her flat in the basement when she was talking to us after barely surviving the Jew-haters – she was guilty about the time she’d taken from Vladimir Ilich. But no one ever
made
him leave his room.

We knew that that night Vladimir Ilich was hiding somewhere. After returning from exile in April he and his Bolsheviks had set up their headquarters in a mansion named after a ballerina – Matilda Kshesinskaya – who had owned it once. It was near the Peter and Paul Fortress, the prison Vladimir Ilich would have landed in if he’d surrendered to Kerensky’s warrant and they hadn’t killed him in the car on the way there.

Olya said, There’s a rumour that a subterranean passage runs from the mansion to the Winter Palace.

Federev laughed. I doubt that’s the truth, he said.

But it didn’t matter. Now Lenin and some of his Bolsheviks were on the run – blamed for the big march by the soldiers and sailors that July which had wanted the Supreme Council of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Soviets in Petrograd to do away with the parliament. Or if the master and his disciples weren’t in hiding in the city, then they were in more far-off quarters.

On the way home that night in Federev’s automobile Artem said with a wink, No need to mention my friendship with Hope Mockridge to Tasha. She might be fussy about these things.

With that he started whistling. They were Russian songs I didn’t know. They made me homesick – I couldn’t work out why. I’ve got to learn this bloody language, I told myself. Then I’ll be at home.

Good night, dear Kangaroo, Tasha had said to me in English when we were leaving. Gradually that became my party name – not that I’d signed up to join anything. Since it came from beautiful Tasha even Federev started calling me that. I didn’t like it – Tovarishch Kangaroo – but didn’t have much say in the matter.

There was a letter waiting for us at Federev’s. It was addressed simply to F.S. Samsurov, Kharkov Municipal Soviet, Kharkov. The people at the soviet had obviously forwarded it.

It’s my sister’s hand, said Artem. He tore the letter open and scanned it.

Ah, he announced, and looked at me as if he was weighing me up. Poor Trofimov is dead. Zhenya says it’s a mercy. No more gasping like a landed fish.

I looked away. I had this weird idea that my adventures with Trofimova might have hastened Trofimov’s death.

Well, said Artem. A good man ... a good man.

I’m very sorry, I told him in confusion.

I’ll pass on your condolences, he assured me.

Poor Trofimov – a fellow miner, and I’d betrayed him. Yet I found it hard to think like that – like a man with a conscience. I thought: Here now is Trofimova! And she had already put down a claim on a future with me – or so I hoped.

I thought of how Trofimov’s passing would have been treated had he died of black lung in Broken Hill. The other miners would go to the widow’s house and parade by their brother’s coffin and pat the heads of the dead man’s kids – and mutter something to the bowed widow and slip her a few bob ... That’s where the comparison broke down. I couldn’t imagine Trofimova as the despairing widow.

Artem yawned now and moved on from the memory of Trofimov. His sister had said that when Artem was young he almost saw Trofimov as a rival for possession of his sister. If it were true then that rivalry was at an end.

He yawned again. If I can jot my speeches down in English, he said, I wouldn’t mind if you could edit them and send them back to the
Australian Worker.
Not that I think I’m the last word when it comes to oratory. And why stop at the
Australian Worker?
Let’s send the message everywhere – the
Weekly World
in New York,
Daily Worker
in London. Few people are in your position, Paddy. To be able to spread our particular news.

I thought, As long as I can understand it.

In the following days we were often at the basement flat in Botanical Street – or else the girls were often at Federev’s apartment. At a meeting in a railway workshop attended by soldiers and workers, Tasha’s name and Artem’s were voted on to attend a regional conference of the Donbass area. Artem came in first in the vote, a little ahead of Tasha. According to the party there was supposed to be no prejudice against women. But there was. And especially against pretty women and maybe especially against pretty young women who were Jewish.

When delegates were elected, an engine driver who was a Menshevik got up from the floor and moved that no one get a free ride down to the congress. That was his way of trying to stop some of us getting there. He accused Bolshevik guards and drivers of giving everyone free rides here and there. That just helped the railways go to hell, he said. They needed the fares and no one should travel free. If you or your party can’t afford the fare, he said (with reasoning that would have gone down well in Queensland), then you can’t afford to be a party and you can’t afford to send delegates.

There was a lot of clapping from the floor. But Artem said, Are we really going to argue over train fares? Does my comrade believe that my fare will rebuild the whole rail system? Is this what the people’s revolution has come to? That it can’t afford to carry us?

Then he lifted his voice. As for me, he roared, I will damn well walk there. I have the shoe leather, I have the legs and they are good Bolshevik legs.

Instead of cheers, everyone was falling out of their chairs laughing with him. It seemed to be funnier in Russian than in Federev’s whispered English translation.

There was a time I walked from the banks of the Aldan all the way to the suburbs of Irkutsk, he told them. I did not do it legally either. But I’ll go to Ekaterinoslav legally. Ekaterinoslav does not scare me as a destination. I have come back from Australia to be with my brothers and sisters. And now my good Menshevik here wants to stop me being among them by waffling about fares. If he decides to put this branch meeting at the South Pole, he will find me there. If he puts it in the Arctic – there I’ll be. If he puts it in Rome, he will find me there. If he puts it in London, he will find me there. Voting for my party, for the power of the people.

It was obvious that a lot of the soldiers and workers – if not the railway men – were on our side. Because they could grasp the message. An end to the war, land for the peasants, factories for the workers.

Nevertheless the Mensheviks did win their point and it was our host Federev who paid for our tickets – even mine – and we set off with the girls to Ekaterinoslav in early August. The weather was sweltering in our compartment, but the sisters in their summer dresses looked as if they carried their own shade with them. All Artem’s conversations with Tasha and her sister seemed simply political. In argument his eye moved from one to the other. He did not behave as if he were lovesick for either of them.

The outer suburbs of Ekaterinoslav – a city Artem and the girls had praised – was like outer Kharkov at first with coal dust on everything. But it was beautiful at the centre where all the delegates were put up in a hotel called the Europa. The organisers of the congress had arranged a ride down the river. From a pier set on a lake in parkland we boarded a little steam ferry and Artem sat with Tasha and Olya inside by an open window to catch the breeze from the water. I went walking the deck – this was new country to me and I had the bushie’s habit of dashing around trying to see new things from every possible angle. A few people stood near the open prow where I thought I recognised from behind a particular sturdy-looking woman in a long dress. She wore a peasant shawl a bit like the way some of the soldiers wore their uniforms – to show where they had been and also to show their hope about where they were going. The woman’s dress was white but with a sash over her shoulder that was tied at her hip. She was looking at the shell of a rickety white mansion on top of a cliff on one side of the river. It was Artem’s sister. I skirted her to the front as if she were a dangerous creature.

It is Australia, she said when she saw me.

Zhenya, I said, forgetting I was to call her Trofimova. Are you a delegate? I asked in Russian, amazing myself (though
delegate
was easy to say – it was
delegat
). Nevertheless I had to say it twice.

No, she said, shaking her head.

Later I’d find Artem had asked her to come here as an observer and in the belief it would help her with her grief by giving her a sense of a new dawn.

Artem tells me, come! she announced in English.

Trofimov? I said. I’m sorry.

I had to go back to English for this, and I blushed as I said it. I saw the sash she wore over her right shoulder did not carry a political slogan but was pure black – the sign of her widowhood. The rough map of the Ukraine I carried in my head told me she had not had far to come. Europa Hotel? I asked her.

She nodded. Tasha, she said. Olya.

Then she smiled at me – it was an innocent smile but it seemed to know everything about me. She looked away at the shore but then smiled again at me and nodded. She touched her black sash. Trofimov, she told me. And then more softly, Trofimov, and raised both her hands. But it wasn’t in prayer and it wasn’t asking for any mercy. Once more I was reassured to see a woman no man could make into a victim. This was a full-bodied woman with her brother Artem’s lion heart – that’s how it seemed to me. We stood on the prow together – silent. We watched the way the ferry broke up the reflection of trees and buildings in the water.

The congress of the various wings of the Social Democratic Party was held in a theatre that still had the scenery of a living room painted on canvas at the back of the stage. There were more peasant delegates than I’d seen at the Kharkov meetings – they wore boots and smocks cinched at the waist with big belts and were probably yelling that the land belonged to them. A chairman was elected – he was a Menshevik. He read out an agenda. He was booed a few times and it was clear that our side – though maybe outnumbered as delegates – had a lot of support. I made notes in a little notebook I’d acquired.
Social Democratic Party very divided,
I wrote.
Mensheviks would fit into Holman’s Labor government in New South Wales or Ryan’s in Queensland.

After a while everyone settled down and the speeches seemed fairly polished. It was the fumbling Duma in Petrograd – and Kerensky – who wanted to be another Napoleon and dressed as if he was – who got most of the abuse.

At the hotel that evening Trofimova kept very close to the sisters, Tasha and Olya. I passed her once in the corridor on the way to dinner. She smiled and opened up her arms – just as a gesture though. It said no instead of yes. I found myself doing something I’d never done before – I tapped my left chest twice with the first two fingers of my right hand. Where had that come from?

Meanwhile I made myself busy writing about the congress for the
Worker.

Comrade Artem Samsurov formerly of Brisbane was welcomed on the stage. After a brief charming speech was elected by acclamation a member of the Regional Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party.

Later in the day there was a side meeting of the Bolshevik delegates in a little concert hall. This was a very ornate room and made a mockery of our ordinary clothing. Here Artem was elected secretary of the Donbass Central Committee of the Bolsheviks – one of the tasks for which he’d been sent to Kharkov by the people in Piter.

Among the others elected was Tasha.

At the railway station that night, Trofimova – who was going east while we were all going north – pecked me first on one cheek then on the other and looked me in the eye with what seemed to an uninformed man like something close to affection. I wanted to say her name, Zhenya, as she left for another platform.

I was what I never expected to be – a disappointed admirer – as I watched her make her way over a connecting bridge.

Our train steamed in and I boarded, then pretended to write in my notebook through all the happy conversation of the others. I fell asleep with the jolting of the train and had some sad dreams about my mother. I woke in the first light of morning and found Artem still flirting with the Abrasova sisters as if he hadn’t let up all night. I was pleased when we pulled into the grim vaulted old station in Kharkov. The Abrasova girls looked tired and so we took a hackney coach to their place.

From there Artem and I walked to Federev’s – we didn’t have unlimited funds for hackneys. I want to dictate something to you right now, he said. For English readers. You’re not tired are you, Paddy?

Federev was not at home, so we sat in the living room while Artem gave me his English notes for his Russian lecture of the following evening at the technical university. As well as Australia, the Second International occupied his speech. The Germans and the Belgians had got together in 1889 and started it. Its last meeting had taken place in Brussels just before the war started – around the time Menschkin killed himself during Hope Mockridge’s picnic. Then war was declared and Kautsky of the German Social Democratic Party caved in to the hysteria the way T.J. Ryan and Fisher and Hughes had done. Therefore the Second International had failed from pole to pole. What had failed in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane had also failed on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Universal brotherhood was killed off in the trenches and the swamps on the Galician border or the forests of the north-east as surely as it was killed off at Gallipoli.

Artem left me to make what I could out of his notes and then we slept a while. Then – writing on my own. Nothing kept me awake better. I finished the piece and posted it to the
Australian Worker
that afternoon at the Central Kharkov post office. It was strange to think the lower end of government still worked – the mail and the lamp lighting and the trams.