Slowly now Boris mounted the stairs. During the last three months he had examined the house and its contents with interest. There were certainly some strange-looking books and paintings there. The grand piano, however, he had much admired. One of his sons had played a tune on it.
Only today had it occurred to him that there was one part of the house he had never investigated. He would go to the attic.
Rather to his disappointment, however, he found that Suvorin had made no use of it. The long low room under the roof was almost empty, the floorboards bare. Only at one end did he notice, under a small round window, a few dusty old boxes.
With slow deliberation, but not much interest, he opened them, then made a grimace. Papers. Old letters, bills, and other nonsense of the Bobrovs. He shrugged. He couldn’t be bothered to look at them, and he was just about to turn away when he noticed one piece of paper that seemed to be sticking out slightly from the rest. Along the top, he noticed, was a heading: ‘Fire at Russka’.
He frowned and pulled it out, to find another slip of paper folded inside the first. It seemed to be a letter of some sort.
It was signed: Peter Suvorin.
1917, 2 November
It was one in the morning and they were alone.
The night before, when the Moscow Kremlin had still been holding out, there had been fighting in the streets; but now the city was quiet. In Petrograd and in Moscow, Lenin and his Bolsheviks were now in power.
Or were they?
Popov smiled at Mrs Suvorin, and despite all that was passing, she smiled back. She thought he looked younger.
‘So tell me,’ she said, ‘what really happened.’
And then he laughed.
The world-shattering event known as the October Revolution was, strictly speaking, nothing of the kind. It was a coup by a minority party, about which the majority of the population did not even know.
All through that year of 1917, since the abdication of the Tsar, Russia had staggered along under a strange duality: a Provisional Government, which had little real power, and a Congress of Soviets, which had a growing network of local bases in factory, town and village, but no real legitimacy. Elections were needed to form a democratic Constituent Assembly; but the government, even after its leadership fell upon the popular Socialist, Kerensky, was painfully slow. Meanwhile the economy was collapsing, there were food shortages, and the members of the government themselves were becoming weary.
It was while this government was wavering that the Bolshevik party began to make steady progress in the soviets. In July, foolishly, they had attempted an insurrection which was crushed; but this did not stop their political advance. By the start of September, Trotsky and his Bolsheviks had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. A few days later, the Bolsheviks also had a majority in Moscow. In the country as a whole, however, they remained in a minority. With time it seemed possible that the Bolsheviks would become the dominant leftist party: but then again they might not. And it was in this rather uncertain situation that, in the month of October 1917, Lenin with some difficulty persuaded his fellow Bolsheviks to gamble once more on a bid for instant power.
It began on the night of 24 October and it was orchestrated, chiefly by Trotsky, from the former convent and girls’ school, the Smolny Institute, which had become the home of the Petrograd Soviet.
‘And the amazing thing,’ Popov declared, ‘was how easy it all was.’ He grinned: ‘We did the main part by stealth.’
All through the evening the conspirators had done something so simple it was brilliant. They had just gone from one vital installation to another, picketing or taking over, and few of the workers they had relieved had bothered to oppose them. They had already done their best to win the military garrisons over, but they need not have worried, for the military was not much inclined to act, and poor Kerensky failed to make any proper defensive plans. By morning, almost all the city’s key points had been quietly taken over.
‘Kerensky went off to get military support from outside the city,’ Popov told her, ‘but had little luck. That just left the ministers of the Provisional Government sitting in the Winter Palace with a guard of some Cossacks and, if you please, the Women’s Death Battalion. There were forty war invalids too, God bless them!’
‘Then you stormed the Winter Palace?’
‘More or less. Actually, some of the women, I suppose, knew how to shoot, so our people wouldn’t go near the place. Then we got five thousand sailors. But when they saw there was shooting, they went away too!’
‘I heard the Winter Palace was bombarded.’
‘Correct. The heroic cruiser Aurora fired upon the palace. They hadn’t any live shells unfortunately, so they fired a single blank. Then the Peter and Paul Fortress had a go. But they missed.’
‘That’s impossible. The fortress is directly opposite the Palace.’
‘I was there. They missed.’
‘And then?’
‘Oh, in the end they gave up and our people went in and looted the place.’ He chuckled. ‘Though in the future, I’m sure we shall tell the story rather differently.’
Mrs Suvorin looked at Popov thoughtfully. She had seen little of him in the last year, but they still felt an attraction for each other. She could understand why, in his moment of triumph, he should have sent a message that he would call upon her that night.
Several thoughts went through her mind. What would this change mean politically? Some people, she knew, were outraged. The civil service, the banks, and a number of unions had resisted the usurpation of the Duma by going on strike. It was still possible that armed forces would be used against the Bolsheviks. Yet other people were taking things very calmly. The Petrograd stock exchange had not reacted at alclass="underline" prices were firm. As a businessman had remarked to her: ‘These Bolsheviks are just a party within the workers’ soviets: and it’s the soviets, not Kerensky, who’ve had the real power for months. I doubt it will make much difference.’
True, the first act of the new group had been to declare that all estates were now to be distributed to the peasants but that had been coming anyway, and she knew very well that the peasants had already occupied the estate at Russka. She had reconciled herself to that.
What about the men involved? What were they like? She had seen the list of ministers. Lenin she felt she knew about; also Trotsky. Them she feared. Yet Lunachazsky, the Minister of Culture, she had met and found to be a cultivated and sympathetic man. Other names meant less. And one, the Chairman for Nationalities, named Stalin, meant nothing at all.
Which brought her back to Popov. Even now, after a decade, she did not really know him. Sometimes, like that time in 1913, she had broken through and found a man of warmth; yet at other times the thick shell of the revolutionary had descended. She felt he would kill without caring. And, perhaps worse, he would lie without hesitation.
Somehow, she felt instinctively now, he represented them. If she could gauge him, she might have an insight into these men who were his colleagues.
And it was with this in her mind that she now asked him the question that had been troubling her more than any other.
‘What, then, are you going to do about the Constituent Assembly?’
All the parties, including the Bolsheviks, had been calling for it. Before being overthrown, the Kerensky Provisional Government had set the dates for elections in November. Now, with this coup, what would become of those?
He looked at her in surprise.
‘The elections are scheduled.’
‘Will they take place?’
‘Certainly.’