Peter stared at her. It was a question of such dazzling stupidity that, for a moment, he had not known what to say. Was she trying to be funny? No. As he gazed at her large, serious eyes and pale face, it was obvious that she was entirely sincere. What a striking-looking girl she was. He smiled.
‘I’m afraid you haven’t understood,’ he said kindly. ‘In a Socialist worker state, all men will be equal. The persecution of minorities is inconceivable.’ And seeing her looking doubtfuclass="underline" ‘Come to me after the meeting. I’ll recommend you some books to read.’
Rosa sat down. Someone was saying something, but she did not hear. Did she believe the professor? She had no idea. But one thing she did know. He was the most beautiful-looking man she had ever seen in her life.
The courtship of Peter Suvorin and Rosa Abramovich was not long, for from their first meeting it seemed as if they had known each other all their lives.
‘He’s almost twice your age,’ her brothers warned her.
‘He’s a revolutionary, and he’s not Jewish,’ her mother protested. And then, more hurtfully: ‘Remember your father, Rosa, before you do this thing.’
Rosa had loved three men in her life. One, she now understood, was the Cossack boy Ivan Karpenko. Of course, it was only a childhood affection, followed by a friendship conducted by letter. Yet as she grew older and wiser, this innocent childhood love came to seem more and not less important to her. The other man had been a conductor she had watched from afar when she was fifteen, and never spoken to. And now Peter Suvorin. None of them, as it happened, had been Jewish.
What was it that so moved her about Peter Suvorin? Was it his mind? His brilliant mastery of economic theory fascinated her, even if she could not always follow it. He seemed to possess a system that explained all the complex problems of the world. But there was also a purity about him, a passionate idealism that she loved. He was a pilgrim soul, an outsider, a sufferer. He was a bachelor who, in all these years, had never found a woman worthy to be his wife.
As for Peter, he was astounded to find himself with this magical, poetic creature who had somehow dropped from the sky into his life. True, she was Jewish; but she was one of a kind. And besides, he told himself, I really have no one in the world to please but myself.
If Peter felt he had begun his life again, to Rosa it seemed that her own existence had suddenly been resolved. She had a purpose now. Even her health started to improve dramatically. And though she loved her mother and revered the memory of her father, she found she could no longer think as they had. She had seen too much of the younger generation, her brother’s friends. Many of them scarcely went to the synagogue at all. ‘Why should I ruin my life, which has been unhappy, for the sake of religion, which has brought me no comfort?’ she once burst out to her mother who was berating her. ‘I won’t do it. I don’t care any more.’ She was in love. Nothing else seemed to matter.
‘You are leaving me,’ her mother told her bitterly. ‘I will have nothing to do with it.’
‘She’ll get over it,’ her brothers counselled.
It was in September that Rosa left with Peter for Moscow. But it was a short while later, just before they married, that she took one further step. She accepted baptism into the Russian Orthodox Church. ‘You know it means nothing,’ she wrote to her brothers. ‘But it makes things easier in Moscow, especially if there are children. I suppose we shall have to tell Mother,’ she added, doubtfully.
A month later, when she finally heard of it, Rosa’s mother quietly summoned her friends to sit Shivah with her. She herself had sat, only two weeks before, with an old couple whose son had become an atheist and a Socialist. ‘She is dead to me now,’ she announced sadly.
Her sons refused to take part, though they tried to comfort her. But her friends understood.
1905, July
Young Ivan worshipped his Uncle Boris. Uncle Boris knew everything.
He was head of the family now. Timofei and his wife had died in the plague of ’91; old Arina a year later. He had a large family, some of them already full grown; and to these he added his little sister Arina, whose husband had died young, and her six-year-old son, Ivan.
The news that his Uncle Boris had given the boy was certainly exciting. ‘This year, little Ivan, is the most important year in the history of Russia. And do you know why? Because the revolution has begun.’
The revolution. It was certainly an exciting word, but the boy was not certain what it meant. ‘It means,’ his uncle explained, ‘that we are going to kick the Bobrovs out and take all the land for ourselves. What do you think of that?’ And little Ivan had to agree that this sounded wonderful indeed.
He knew that his mother Arina liked the Bobrovs, and not everyone in the village spoke badly of them. But Uncle Boris was always right. ‘Long live the revolution!’ he cried, to please his uncle.
The extraordinary events of 1905 had been brewing for a long time. If the reign of Alexander III had been one of reaction, the last eleven years under his unimaginative son Nicholas II and his German wife had been a sorry continuation of almost everything that was dull and oppressive in the former regime. Indeed, sometimes it almost seemed as if the unfortunate Tsar Nicholas was deliberately looking for people to oppress. For nearly a century, the people of Finland had been an autonomous duchy within the empire; now, suddenly, the government had decided to Russify them, as it had the Ukraine, with the result that the Finns were rioting. In the Ukraine, meanwhile, there had been a peasant rising, and in 1903 a terrible pogrom. Meanwhile the government, frightened and determined to control everything, had become almost irrational. For no reason, there was a sudden clampdown on the universities; and when students protested they were treated like political agitators and sent into the army. It had even alienated the last supporters who might have helped them, by curtailing the work of the liberal gentry in the zemstvos.
Police spies were everywhere. So tangled had the government’s system of supervision become, that in order to prove himself to the terrorists he had infiltrated, a government agent had been forced to shoot the Minister of the Interior! Illegal political parties were forming.
True, there were bright spots. Under the brilliant Finance Minister, Sergei Witte, Russia’s railways and heavy industry had made great strides. The Trans-Siberian line reached as far as the Pacific now. Foreign capital was pouring in, especially from France. But these developments, important though they were, scarcely as yet meant a great deal to the ordinary people, and indeed in recent years there had even been a mild economic depression.
But the cause of the cataclysm, when it came, was the war.
It was the same story as before, when Russia had so disastrously become involved in the Crimea. This time it was in the Far East where the Trans-Siberian railway had caused Russia to extend her influence, bullying the Chinese and coming into conflict with Japanese interest in the region. Over-confident in her army and navy, the mighty land empire had allowed herself to get into a war with the little island nation. And now she had been catastrophically beaten.