‘This is treason! You came up with this decree just so you could clear Moscow and Petrograd of every last discontented worker – the finest flowers of the proletariat! Your aim is nothing less than to use this decree to squash the healthy protest of the working class!’
There was a moment’s silence, and then everyone leapt out of their seats. A storm of cries filled the hall. Some of them rose above the din: ‘Sit down!’ ‘Traitor!’ ‘Bravo, Martov!’ ‘How dare he!’ ‘The truth hurts!’ Sverdlov rang his bell furiously, calling Martov to order, but he kept on shouting, more vehemently than before. He had lulled the hall to sleep with his feigned indifference and was now revelling in their dismay. Sverdlov ordered Martov to stop, but he kept on going. Sverdlov suspended Martov for three sessions, but he ignored him and kept on making accusations, each one more wicked than the last. Finally, Sverdlov summoned the guard. Only then did Martov descend from the dais and slowly, deliberately exit the hall to the accompaniment of a raucous chorus of whistling, stamping, clapping and shouting.
Practically every session of the TsIK caused the walls at the Metropole to shake. Fights were often picked by the Mensheviks and SRs for the silliest of reasons – a speaker’s ill-chosen word or his manner of speech. Sometimes instead of indignant shouts, they greeted a speaker with sardonic laughter or, at a speaker’s first words, all stood up at once and walked out together, conversing in loud voices as they left. Their behaviour reflected a mixture of impotence and childish bravado. They turned protest into playground tussles.
The whole life of the country had been shaken to its thousand-year-old roots. These were threatening times, full of vague forebodings, expectations, ruthless passions and contradictions. This made it all the more difficult to understand such behaviour, this loud and pointless nonsense. Apparently, their party doctrines were more important to them than the fate of the country or the happiness of the ordinary people. There was something artificial and speculative in these doctrines that had been formulated in smoky cafés and meeting rooms far from Russia and its day-to-day life. Their intent on forcing the future to fit their abstract émigré theories proved both their contempt for people’s actual lives and their ignorance of Russian reality.
One session of the TsIK stood out for its deep solemnity. That was just days after the murder of Count Mirbach, the German ambassador. The German government issued an ultimatum demanding that German military units be allowed into the country for the ostensible purpose of protecting their embassy on Denezhny Lane and that the entire area be ceded to German authority. A more brazen and cynical ultimatum would be difficult to imagine. A special session of the TsIK was called immediately after the receipt of the ultimatum.
I remember well that muggy summer day declining towards sunset. The whole city was bathed in the pale gleams of the sun reflected in its windows and the yellowish shadows of the late afternoon. I entered the hall with the fountain and was struck by the silence despite the large gathering. I didn’t even notice a faint murmur of whispers. The pendulum of the wall clock ticked its regular beat. But for me and, I think, for everyone else, time had stopped and only this soft, dying sound remained. Sverdlov came in, rang the bell and in an emotionless voice said that the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, would be making a statement. A shudder swept through the audience. Everyone knew that Lenin was ill and his doctors had forbidden him from speaking in public.
Lenin walked quickly up to the dais. He looked pale and thin. A stark white gauze bandage around his neck stood out against the colour of his skin. He gripped the edge of the rostrum firmly and held the room in his stare for quite some time. We could hear his laboured breathing. Softly and slowly, one hand now pressed against his throat, Lenin said that the Council of People’s Commissars had categorically rejected the impudent ultimatum of the German government and decided to mobilise immediately all the armed forces of the Russian Federation. In utter silence, arms were raised and then lowered in favour of the government’s actions.
Shaken by what we had heard, we walked out of the Metropole onto Teatralnaya Square. Dusk had fallen over Moscow by now, and a Red Army unit, bristling with bayonets at the ready, went marching past the hotel.
74
The Zone of Silence
Every once in a while, I had the day off. I liked to walk to Noevsky Gardens on the other side of the city or wander about the outskirts, usually beyond Presnya and Devichee Field. Those were hungry times. An eighth of a pound of black bread was the daily ration. I took my eighth, two or three apples (my neighbour Lipochka supplied me with them) and a book, and headed out for the whole day until dark.
The outskirts of Moscow differed little from what were then called Russia’s ‘downgraded’ towns, places that had lost their status as administrative centres. A ring of these quiet suburbs circled the enormous, agitated capital, whose hum did not impinge on them. Only rarely did a gust of wind from Moscow carry all the way out here, along with a swirl of dust, the distant notes of ‘The Internationale’ or the crackle of gunfire. Brief gun battles in the streets were rather common then. They erupted suddenly and ended just as suddenly. The suburbs were empty. This was what attracted me to them the most. I don’t know what I liked better – the short break from these stressful days in the city or the search for some peace and quiet, a place where I might relax, calm myself and take a look at what was happening around me from a different angle, and so, perhaps, make some sense of it all.
These visits always filled me with the conviction that before me lay the most varied and diverse kind of life, perhaps even too much so. Why it was I felt this so strongly here, on the outskirts of Moscow, I still don’t know. I would look around at the neglected back alleys overgrown with weedy grass, some faded laundry drying on a line, and think how I would surely come back in a few years to understand how much I had changed while in the meantime this same spot was still just as forgotten and unchanged as before. The peeling church domes would have the same dull sheen and the bone-dry washing would flap in the wind as before, while I, perhaps, would have travelled, written books and, best of all, fallen in love. It was as though I were calling on this back alley to bear witness to my life. I wanted to use this corner of Moscow to mark my passage through time.
But I was wrong, of course. When I returned to Moscow five years later and went back to one of these little spots, I saw a new white building surrounded by young lime trees and a sign in front identifying it as such-and-such district school of music.
The outskirts had their charm – the crooked old wooden houses being held up by heavy beams blackened with age, the long-abandoned little manufactories, their boilers red with rust and lying on their sides among the weeds, the timber sheds smelling of birch bark. There was charm in the little benches, buffed to a bright gloss over the years, standing at gateways where so many sunflower shells had been trodden into the ground that it had turned as hard as asphalt. There was charm in the roads soft with goosegrass, and in the raised barriers at the crossings of disused railway lines. Black locomotives with gaping funnels, most likely from the time of Stephenson, stood on the tracks, their fires extinguished for good. Swallows nested in the drivers’ cabs. There was also charm in the dark, ancient elms, weak from age and almost devoid of leaves even at the height of summer, in the slag heaps overgrown with dandelions, in the nest boxes and in the fences made of broken iron bedsteads and church railings, all entwined with bittersweet morning glory. Geraniums in old tins blazed on the windowsills, looking as exotic as birds of paradise. In one yard I came upon a strange sight – a kennel and inside it a carmine, black-tailed cock (taking the place of the missing dog), chained by the foot, apparently to correct its insolent and aggressive manner.