It was humiliating. Month after month, news came of Russian failure. Russian troops, fighting a distant war that neither they nor their families understood, were suffering appalling casualties. The cost of the war had caused economic chaos. There was a famine. And the government had not a friend. Even the Temporary Regulations – the martial law still in force since 1881! – were useless to contain the situation. The liberal gentry of zemstvos begged the Tsar to grant the people an assembly.
And then, in January of that year, had come Bloody Sunday.
This incident – the spark which, most believe, ignited the great Russian conflagration – was a strange and confused affair. The demonstration, led by a Ukrainian priest and demanding only the redress of grievances, wound its way in some confusion through the frozen streets of St Petersburg. The massacre did not, as always portrayed, take place in front of the Winter Palace. (The Tsar, in any case, was not in the city that day.) But in one of several incidents, frightened soldiers fired upon the crowd, causing the deaths of a number of people at the city’s Narva Gate.
And then all hell broke loose. The liberal zemstvos protested at the outrage. Strikes broke out. With consummate foolishness, the government closed the universities, leaving the student population on the streets with nothing to do. Every dissatisfied group in the empire, sensing a looming crisis, saw its chance to protest. There were riots in Finland, the Baltic states and Poland, as well as in Russia proper. By summer, police records detailed 492 significant disturbances. The huge textile mills at Ivanovo, north of Vladimir, were in an uproar. In journals and leaflets circulating in the cities, revolutionary articles began to appear under a pseudonym that until then had been known only in revolutionary circles: V. I. Lenin. During May and June came yet more crushing news from the east: the whole Russian fleet had been sunk. Soon after this, down at the Black Sea port of Odessa, the Russian battleship Potemkin had mutinied.
What was the government to do? The police could not cope; the army was mostly in the east, defeated and beyond recall. All Russia waited.
And now little Ivan was in a fever of excitement. What was happening at Russka?
Until that morning, the town and the Suvorin factory had remained quiet. But just before noon, a man returning from the town reported: ‘Something’s going on there in the weaving shops.’ By mid-afternoon word came: ‘It’s a strike.’ And soon afterwards three girls from the village who worked at the cotton mill appeared and reported: ‘They told us to go home.’ And by these signs little Ivan understood that the revolution had come to Russka.
It was late that afternoon, however, that his Uncle Boris began to behave strangely.
Alexander Bobrov was still brooding irritably as he entered the market place at Russka that day.
He was a handsome, fair-haired boy, just fourteen, with the first faint down of a moustache on his upper lip. He had hurried towards the town as soon as he heard about the trouble. But not before certain words had passed between him and his father – words that could not be unsaid. Which was why he was still frowning when he reached the town. Why couldn’t he control himself?
They were a strange couple, father and son: so alike in looks, yet mentally so different. I suppose, Nicolai had thought, as he gazed at the boy that morning, some people are just born conservative.
The sad death of Nicolai’s elder son some years before had left Alexander as his only heir now, and the boy took his position very seriously. A religious fellow, he liked to go to church with his grandmother Anna and was extremely proud of his family’s ancient connection with the monarchy. Above all, he was anxious to take over the estate: and this, for a long time, had been the source of the tension between them.
How well Nicolai remembered his own disgust with his father Misha’s handling of the estate; now it was his turn. Had he done any better? No. The Riazan estate, bit by bit, had gone; he had had numerous offers for pieces of the remaining woodlands and pastures at Russka – one from the village commune, and two, for small parcels, from Boris Romanov. But each time he had refused because of the protests of his mother Anna and young Alexander. Now, he knew, he could not hold out much longer. ‘The fact is,’ he would say, ‘since the Emancipation there hasn’t been enough land for the peasants or for me.’ His fate was not uncommon: half the landowners he knew had sold their estates in recent years, as the Russian nobility slipped into its final decline. But it was no use telling that to young Alexander.
And even this shortcoming was nothing compared to Nicolai’s latest crime. ‘For why,’ his son had accused, ‘are the workers making these wicked demands of the Tsar? It’s because of the zemstvos, Father – because of you.’
Nicolai knew that he should have chastised the boy for such impertinence. Yet as he looked at his son standing there with indignant tears in his eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to. For the fact was, the charge was perfectly true. It had been last year, even before the troubles broke out, that he and the other liberal men of the zemstvo councils had met in St Petersburg and drafted their proposal to the Tsar, asking for an elected assembly, a parliament, to help govern the nation. How heady and exciting those meetings had been. Some present had declared that it was like the meeting of the Estates General before the French Revolution; and Nicolai himself had suddenly felt the same wonderful exaltation he had briefly known as a student, during The Going to the People, thirty years ago. If my son’s a born conservative, I suppose I’m a born radical, he thought with a smile. And it was certainly true that when the troubles broke out after Bloody Sunday, the workers and revolutionaries, having no prepared political plan, had simply taken over the demands of the zemstvo men, and demanded an elected assembly. And how much it says about our backward Russia, Nicolai reflected, that even now, in the year 1905, for the people to demand a vote in their country’s affairs is seen by the government as little short of treason.
It was certainly treason to young Alexander. For that was what the boy, in a flood of tears, had called back at his father as he rushed out of the room: ‘Traitor!’
Alexander was halfway across the market square when he saw a familiar figure, and at once he smiled. It was Vladimir Suvorin.
The relationship between the young noble and the industrialist was very simple. The industrialist was Alexander’s hero. Suvorin had hardly changed with the years: he was slightly heavier; there was a just perceptible greying at the temples; but for as long as Alexander could remember, his robust and perfectly tended figure had always been the same. It was not only Suvorin’s extraordinary charm that captivated the boy; nor was it his great culture, of which Alexander was only dimly aware. The figure that the boy saw at Russka was the practical man of affairs: and above all, he was a conservative.
Though he took little interest in politics, it was almost inevitable that Vladimir Suvorin should be a conservative. Knowing young Alexander’s tsarist loyalties, he used to laugh and say: ‘You must not give me too much credit, my friend. It’s only self-interest that makes me love the Tsar.’
Sometimes Suvorin would try to enlighten the boy. ‘The Tsars have always seen the larger merchants as arms of the state, to make Russia strong,’ he would explain. ‘Peter the Great just taxed the great merchants into bankruptcy; but later administrations have been more intelligent, and nowadays they give us government contracts and protect us from outside competition with tariffs.’ Once or twice, trying to give the boy a better appreciation of the world as it really was, he would caution him: ‘Russian industry mostly prospers, Alexander, by exporting raw materials and by selling manufactured goods, usually of rather inferior quality, to our own huge empire and the poorer countries of the east. So the Tsar and his empire are good for me, that’s all.’ But even these blunt explanations did little to modify Alexander’s view of Russia or his hero. Suvorin supported the Tsar. That was all that mattered. And it amused the older man, in a bluff way, to rest a large hand on the boy’s shoulder and remark: ‘My grandfather was your grandfather’s serf, my friend. But I don’t mind if you don’t.’