And quiet, nowadays, it certainly was. Immediately after the assassination of his reforming father, the new Tsar Alexander III had moved decisively. The murderous People’s Will inner circle had been discovered and smashed; that good old reactionary, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, had been brought back as Minister of the Interior and soon had a special police service of no less than a hundred thousand gendarmes. Most of the empire had been placed under martial law by the Tsar’s so-called Temporary Regulations. These had been in force for ten years now – but then, as Nicolai liked to say: ‘When our rulers do something good in Russia, they say it’s permanent and then revoke it; but when they do something bad, they say it’s temporary, and it stays for ever!’
There was censorship and internal passports; in the universities, all student bodies were forbidden; in the countryside, new officials called Land Captains had been appointed to deal out government justice to the peasants without benefit of independent law courts. And the most perfect expression of the official attitude came from the Procurator of the Holy Synod who, when asked the government’s role in education, replied: ‘To keep people from inventing things.’
It was a police state. And yet, Nicolai thought, perhaps it was for the best. At least there was order. True, there had been a few strikes; true, down in the south there had been some pogroms against the Jews. One could not approve of that. But there had been no more bombs. And as he looked out at the winter city a thought suddenly occurred to him, which made him smile.
For the truth is, he concluded, it’s as if the Russian empire has been under snow for the last ten years. Yes, that was it exactly. Winter was harsh and cold. Nothing could grow; the snow stifled everything. People might complain at this huge, Russian stasis, but the snow also protected the land; under it, delicate seeds could survive the howling winds above. Under the great snow-covering of tsarist rule, perhaps Russia could slowly prepare herself for her new and different future in the modern world. And when the time is right, he thought, our Russian spring will be beautiful. The idea pleased him.
Now the sled was crossing the frozen River Neva. On the embankment opposite lay the Winter Palace; to the left, the thin spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral gleamed in the pale light. In the middle of the ice stood a remarkable construction: a towering wooden scaffolding, over fifty feet high, from which descended a steep runway covered with ice. This was one of the city’s favourite winter pastimes – an ice mountain, as the huge slide was called. As he watched, Nicolai saw two couples in tiny sleds go whirling down it with shouts of glee, and he smiled: police state or not, life in the Russian capital was not so bad.
A few minutes later they were on the south bank, past the palace, and turning into the broad, handsome vista of Nevsky Prospect. And here again, Nicolai smiled.
‘The Street of Toleration’ they affectionately called the Nevsky, these days. On it, almost side by side, could be found the churches of Dutch Calvinists, German Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Armenians, as well of course as the many Orthodox ones. Off the Prospect lay famous concert halls and theatres, and the fashionable English Club. The royal confectioner had a shop down here where one could buy chocolates that, very likely, had lain uneaten in the Winter Palace the night before.
Nicolai had been living in St Petersburg for nearly ten years now. He was not rich, but thanks to a sinecure at one of the ministries, where he appeared only once a week, his income was enough to get by on. He was a member of the Yacht Club, where there was an excellent French chef. Frequently he took his wife to one of the capital’s four opera houses where one could nowadays hear not only the masterpieces of Europe but also the new homegrown operas by those Russian geniuses who had suddenly burst upon the world in the last few decades: Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov. Or they would go to the Maryinsky theatre to see the finest ballet performances in the world. In the summer, the family would go to a pleasant summer house they rented, just a few miles away on the Gulf of Finland. And once a year, he bought his wife a present from Fabergé the jeweller – for while that master produced his fabulous Easter eggs for the Tsar, the Fabergé store also had hundreds of charming little items for more modest purses like that of Nicolai Bobrov.
Truly, in St Petersburg in 1891, a liberal-minded man like Bobrov had little apparent cause to worry about the future.
But the summons from his father had been worrying.
This last year, all over Russia, the harvest had failed. St Petersburg was still supplied but reports were coming in from the central provinces of shortages in the countryside. ‘You needn’t worry though,’ a friend at the relevant ministry assured him. ‘We’re organizing relief. We’ve got everything in hand.’
Nicolai had been surprised therefore when, the previous week, he had received the letter from his father.
‘Frankly, my dear boy, the situation in the villages here is desperate and getting worse. We are doing what we can, but my health is not what it was and I can scarcely cope. If you possibly can, for the love of God, come.’
He had also realized, with a pang of guilt, that nearly two years had passed since he had last been to see his parents. He felt sure that his father must be exaggerating; but even so, it was with some misgivings that, on this grey December day, Nicolai Bobrov set off for Russka.
A hiss of steam, a whistle, a succession of puffs like a drum roll, and the train was gliding out through the suburbs towards the snowy wastes beyond.
The St Petersburg to Moscow express. In its beautifully panelled and richly upholstered coaches, one could dine and sleep in luxury unmatched on any other railway in the world. Or how delightful just to sit, hearing the soft hiss of the samovar that was ready in every carriage, and gaze out as the train rushed along the rails that crossed the endless plain.
For to Nicolai, the railway meant the future. The government of the Tsar might be reactionary, but this very year it had begun a vast and daring enterprise: a railway line that would eventually stretch all the way from Moscow across the huge Eurasian landmass to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, thousands of miles away. The Trans-Siberian Railway. There would be nothing quite like it in the world.
This was the new Russia, the world that was to come. The Russian peasant – the muzhik in his izba – might be a poor, ignorant fellow, still in the dark ages; the newly conquered tribesmen in the Asian deserts might still be living in the world of Genghis Khan and Tamerlaine; but over the surface of this huge, primitive empire, the modern world was running bands of steel. Huge coal reserves were being mined in the distant deserts and mountains above Mongolia; there was gold in the bleak wastes of eastern Siberia. German and French capital was flowing in to finance huge government projects: the vast resources of the empire were only beginning to be tapped.
And this was the point. No one doubted Russia’s military might. She had put the humiliation of the Crimean War behind her. Though she had sold the huge, empty territory of Alaska to the United States two decades ago, her empire still covered most of the vast north Eurasian plain, from Poland to the Pacific. The Turkish empire trembled before her; the British empire watched her advance across Asia with cautious respect; in the Far East, the crumbling empire of China would give her whatever she wanted; Japan was anxious to cooperate and trade. And now, gradually, we shall bring our people into the modern world by exploiting this vast wealth we own. That was Nicolai Bobrov’s hope, and his joy in the railway.