I was speechless.
He went on casually, ‘And the irony is, now it can only be good for the Revolutionary cause – the greater the war the better, because the result can only be chaos and the destabilisation of the regime. It’s bringing the Revolution closer every day.’
‘Pasha—’ I was so angry I shook all over. ‘I never thought I would hear you say such a disgraceful, cynical thing. If the Revolution depends on the death of innocent young men, it isn’t worth a jot.’
‘Oh Gerty, I’m sorry.’ He came towards me, but I rushed out of the room.
It was Nikita Slavkin who set things right, knocking on my door late at night. ‘Miss Gerty, may I talk to you? I think you misunderstood.’
‘Do you?’
‘Please, let me explain. We Socialists would abolish war entirely – we agree, the blood of a single human being is more valuable than any notions of patriotism.’ He sat down, not looking at me. ‘It’s primitive behaviour. My mother died just as stupidly, for no reason at all, of a minor infection after childbirth. My father would not take her to the hospital – he sat and prayed over her. If she had been treated she would still be alive…’
He said gently, ‘At least let your brother’s death mean something. Revolution will redeem all these sacrifices.’
Slavkin had grown in authority over the past couple of years; we often found ourselves turning to him for the final word. It struck me that his childhood in an Old Believer community, a type of strict Orthodox sect, had much in common with my own Chapel upbringing. We had both jettisoned a cruel, overweening god, yet against our will we were both left with a sense of loss – in my case intensely so after my brother’s death. We rejected the father, but we could not rid ourselves of the beauty of the son’s example, or a belief in the unity of all things. I loved hearing Nikita talk, not just for his encyclopaedic knowledge and flights of imagination, but for his almost mystical sense of the patterns of the universe.
Among my papers is this copy in my own hand of an article by Slavkin that impressed me deeply:
‘Behold the Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,’ said John the Baptist, when he first saw Jesus Christ. For he understood that Jesus was to be a sacrificial lamb in the pagan sense: an innocent creature condemned to death. In medieval Christianity the sacrifice of the Lamb of God was explained as redeeming Man’s original sin. Yet in John’s time, for both Romans and Jews, a sacrifice was a form of sorcery – an offering to the gods, or God – an arbitrary blood-letting that was capable of altering the course of events. A sacrifice may bring about dramatic change; although, as the myths show time and again, it may not be the change we wished for.
In modern times similar brutal sacrifices are still made, if less consciously: injustices occur that are so outrageous, so discordant, that the great kings and governments who carelessly order these vile acts are, to their astonishment and incomprehension, destroyed by them. The Pharisees sacrificed Jesus to shore up their earthly power, and this brutal and cynical act destroyed the Jewish people’s political status for thousands of years. In 1905, the Tsar ordered his Cossacks to carry out a massacre in front of the Winter Palace, and all of Russia rose up in protest.
Poor Jesus, the man, understood that only by dying could he bring about a Revolution. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ Alive, he was merely a Jewish prophet; dead, he was the agent of a change in human experience for centuries to come. In our unified world the smallest action can set off a reaction that reverberates throughout the galaxies. The bacterium kills the great Elephant, and after death the helpless Lamb rises up again as a mighty leader; the weakest becomes the most powerful; the peaceful one, who never retaliates, is the all-conquering King of many nations.
We Socialists, who dream of a great reformation of the human spirit, we are also helpless against the powers of the world. Yet we feel the great swell of hearts behind us – millions all over the world – the weak who shall become all-conquering. We are willing to make any sacrifice for them. We shall be the microscopic action that sets off a vast reaction, that creates the future.
Dear, kind Mr Kobelev, with his conviction that Russia must not let down her Allies and that elections were all that the country needed, now seemed to be speaking from some fast-receding shore. I signed up for a course in political education; my little exercise book of notes on Proudhon and Engels and owning the means of production has, for some reason, survived, complete with doodles in the margin. Yet politics always remained opaque to me, however hard I tried.
Revolution, on the other hand – or at least the revolution that Slavkin envisaged – was clearly visible. It was the longed-for precipice just downhill of us.
4
On 3 March Mr Kobelev arrived back from his club out of breath, his face scarlet, his eyes full of tears, with the news that the Tsar had abdicated. We embraced each other, cried and rushed out onto the streets, swept up on the general tide of euphoria. It all happened more or less just as a revolution should, with dozens of symbolic moments – the burning of Tsarist regalia, huge demonstrations in the streets, exultant groups of citizens drinking the contents of a few looted stores.
Over the years I have often been asked about my memories of the February Days; in fact I gave a talk once on the subject to the Hackney Women’s Reading Group, one of a number of Socialist organisations I’ve belonged to. They were appreciative of my talk, which they preferred to the one I gave on the Great October Revolution, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. My view of Lenin’s Revolution was flawed, they told me, too personal, lacking a proper sense of the collective or the heroic. The inconvenient truth was, of course, that October had none of the ingredients of a people’s revolution – no processions, and no symbolic removal of the tyrant’s flag, because there was no tyrant by then. There was street fighting in Moscow, but, thank goodness, not too close to Gagarinsky Lane.
In late October, I remember, snow threatened but did not come; the air was oppressive and the sky low and bulging, until one longed for the flakes to start falling. The first we knew of any disturbance was gunfire in the afternoon. Mr Kobelev telephoned friends of his in the City Council and learnt a few details: the Bolsheviks had announced they must act to defend the Congress of Soviets, they had driven out the Provisional Government, it was a coup. We were not overly excited by this information, for there had been rumours of coups several times already that year. We could hear heavy fighting in other parts of the city, however, so we settled in at Gagarinsky Lane and played card games with the children to pass the time.
After five days it finally began to snow and the city fell quiet. Pasha and Nikita were keen to find out news and I volunteered to go with them; I think Mr Kobelev felt that my presence would act as a brake on their spirit of adventure. As far as I was concerned, after so long cooped up inside the house, I was ready for anything.
We turned towards the centre of town; Pasha and Nikita were deep in conversation, and did not include me. The snow was still falling, those large, soft flakes that give one the impression that gravity is not holding things down quite as reliably as it should. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the streets were almost empty. On Mokhovaya Street Pasha said, ‘What’s that?’ and we saw the body of a man in the road. From the way he was lying, awkwardly, his leg bent beneath him, it was clear from a distance of fifty yards that he was dead. Snow had already settled on his face and his clothes. The three of us passed him on the other side of the road. We did not say another word about it, but after a few moments I realised we were on Vozdvizhenka.