Russka (150 page)

Karpenko was elated. Firstly, the business was an adventure; secondly, he was going to see his family for the first time in a year; and thirdly, he was returning to his beloved Ukraine.

It was time to go home. The revolution was all very well, of course. He had supported it like everyone else. ‘And who knows?’ he had remarked that spring to Dimitri. ‘If I were a Russian, I might still be a Bolshevik.’ But how could he tolerate the way they were treating his homeland? The Bolsheviks had no love of the Ukrainian nation or its language. Earlier in the year, the Cheka chief in Kiev had shot people in the street if he heard them speaking Ukrainian. How could a Karpenko stand for that? Since the Germans had come in, the Ukrainians had been allowed to elect a Cossack Hetman, just as in the old days. And already, he had heard, Ukrainian texts were coming back into the schools, and the poet Karpenko was occupying a place of honour again. Yes, this Russian revolution had been exciting; but it was time to go home.

He noticed that Nadezhda seemed tense and preoccupied, but thought little of it. Nor did it disturb him when, as he went forward from their carriage to let Vladimir know they were safely aboard, she asked him to remain up front with her father. ‘I just want to be alone tonight,’ she said. As she liked.

He was entirely unaware, therefore, that a few minutes before it was due to leave, Nadezhda stepped off the train.

Popov was in a hurry. He had commandeered a military car to take him to the Suvorin house; now he drove swiftly away again.

How could he have been so stupid? He should have guessed. Why would Nadezhda take the risk of insulting him, unless she knew very well that she would not be seeing him again? As he drove, his face set. There were only two obvious ways for the Suvorins to try to leave the city. He tossed a coin, and headed for one of them.

As she went down the platform, Nadezhda could no longer see through her tears.

Since last evening, she had kept herself under rigid control. She had kissed her father when he came back, exactly as usual. She had made him supper. The following morning she had shown some factory workers round the museum, then in the evening, just as planned, she had locked the great house, dressed as a peasant, and slipped out to join Karpenko.

But she was not going with them, her father and his lover. She
was not going to share that secret shame and betrayal, that opened like a deep, dark and terrible abyss before her.

It was a horror – worse by far than the financial ruin that had befallen them. Everything that she had believed in was shattered.

If Karpenko stayed with Vladimir in his carriage, they would not realize she had gone until they were at the Ukrainian border in the morning. Then it would be too late.

What would become of her? Perhaps she would be kept at the museum. Or Uncle Peter and Dimitri would help her. Or Popov might have her shot, for all she knew. She hardly cared.

She had reached the end of the platform. Dully, she heard whistles blowing. Then someone bumped into her, holding her. She looked up.

It was Popov.

Never, in after years, did she fully comprehend what happened next. Popov, the hateful Popov, with his arms firmly around her. Popov, surprisingly gentle, yet firm, turning her round, forcing her to walk, numb and uncomprehending, back up the platform. His voice in her ear.

‘Were you running away from them, pretty one? Because of what I told you, eh? Was that it? I think so. Don’t say a word. What else would you be doing?’ A squeeze on her arm.

‘Believe me – please believe me – there are many worse things. He’s not so bad, your father. Not so bad at all. Here we are.’

He was walking her up the train. He was walking up to the front, gazing in at the windows. He was going to discover them. Dear God! What had she done? She struggled to get away. He held her with ease.

‘Don’t fly, little bird. Don’t fly. Ah, there they are.’

He was pulling open the carriage door. She could see, as through a haze, her father and Karpenko. Popov was murmuring something now. What was he saying? Whispering something about her mother. Tell her … tell her what? That he loved her?

Then suddenly she was pushed inside the carriage, into her father’s arms, and the door slammed. For a second everything seemed oddly still. Then there was a jolt as the train began to move.

As it did, Popov watched with a wry smile.

For months now, he had been visiting the house to make sure
the girl was safe and well. It was foolish of him to have been angry with her. When he realized that the Suvorins were making a run for it, he had certainly meant to stop them. When he entered Bemsky station, he had intended to arrest Vladimir.

But then he had changed his mind. Why not admit it? It was the sight of that foolish weeping girl. Moscow was no place for her. Let her go. Let her father take her away to where she belonged. To Mrs Suvorin.

Mrs Suvorin – the solitary island of love, the only one he had encountered in many years upon the great stream which carried him inexorably, now, high in its mighty flow.

Popov seldom allowed himself to be weak. Perhaps never again, he thought, would he step out from the tough, protective shell which grew, like a carapace, upon him. He turned. Mrs Suvorin and his last connection with her was gone. There was only the revolution now. It was, after all, what he had lived for for so long.

It was a strange business that no one could ever explain.

On a day at the end of July, Peter Suvorin had been seen at the town of Russka. From there he had gone to the village and asked the village elder if he might be let into the big house.

A few villagers, standing nearby, noticed that when he told Boris Romanov his name, the elder stared at him in complete astonishment. But then it was odd, perhaps, to realize this trim professor was the brother of the heavy-set Vladimir.

The elder couldn’t have been more helpful. He took Peter up to the house and found the package he was looking for. Some music, it seemed, locked in a cupboard. Then he had personally escorted him back through the wood towards Russka.

No one knew what had happened to him. No trace was ever found. It was just one of those mysteries.

And young Dimitri Suvorin completed the splendid slow movement of his Revolution Symphony from memory. It was dedicated, naturally, to his father.

Young Ivan watched tensely as the troops approached. Red Army. They had been busy in the town of Russka that morning; they had
a commissar with them, a man of some importance; and to Ivan’s amazement he had just heard the commissar was coming to the village in person.

The commissar and his Uncle Boris. He wondered who would win.

The village had prepared carefully. A week before, on a moonless night, the entire village, men and women, had turned out and moved all the grain to new hiding places. Because he and his mother lived up at the big house, and because his uncle hated Arina, they had not been asked to take part. But Ivan had sneaked down and watched them. Two stores were underground, at the edge of the wood. More ingenious, some fifty sealed containers had been lowered into the river a short way upstream. Some grain, however, had been left in plain view, in a large storehouse at the end of the village. ‘Let the thieves take that,’ Uncle Boris had said. And then, with disgust: ‘Even when my father was a serf, they never came and took away his grain.’

All over Russia, the countryside was in a state of seething revolt. To the south, a week before, the people in one hamlet had chased two Bolshevik officials away with pitchforks and killed one of them.

The problem had begun last year when the Provisional Government had directed that all surplus grain must be sold to the government at set prices. Naturally since the prices were low, most of the peasants had ignored this; besides, every peasant had been accustomed to sell his produce at market since time began. But now the Bolsheviks – or Communists, as they nowadays called themselves – said this was speculation and the Cheka officers had been shooting people they caught. ‘But have you seen what these fools want to pay?’ Boris had thundered. ‘They’ll pay sixteen roubles for a pud of rye. And you know what that’s worth if I can sell it in Moscow? Almost three hundred roubles! So let them come,’ he said grimly, ‘and see what they can find.’

They were coming now: thirty armed men in rather dirty uniforms. At their head walked two figures, both wearing leather coats: one young, the other perhaps sixty, with greying hair that had a reddish, sandy look. And it was only as they drew close that Ivan heard his uncle mutter.

‘I’ll be damned. It’s that accursed red-head.’

Popov approached the village without particular emotion.
Indeed, he had only come to this region because Lenin had personally asked him to do so.

He had never known Vladimir Ilich so angry. Of course, they both knew, the fact that most of the old officials from the agriculture ministry had gone didn’t help. Someone on the Central Committee had even suggested allowing grain to be freely sold for a while. ‘But if we’re going to allow a free market, then what are we Communists doing here at all?’ Lenin had countered. Meanwhile, the cities were so short of food that they were emptying. It was absurd.

The object of the exercise today was two-fold. Firstly, to obtain grain. Secondly, to discipline the villagers. Lenin had been very explicit.

‘The trouble, Yevgeny Pavlovich, is the capitalist class amongst the peasants – the
kulaks
. They’re profiteers, bloodsuckers! If necessary the entire class should be liquidated. We’ve got to take the revolution to the countryside,’ he had added grimly. ‘We have to find the rural proletariat.’

Popov smiled thinly as he remembered his experiences down here in the past. Who was a
kulak
? A selfish peasant? A successful one? In his own view, all peasants were petit bourgeois, but then he had never liked them. It was time to sort them out.

‘If only,’ he remarked to the young commissar who was accompanying him, ‘it was as easy to organize these cursed villagers as it is to sort out a factory.’

The morning in the factory had gone very well. There was a soviet there, led by a young Bolshevik he could trust. One of the factory managers had been kept on for the last few months to ensure that the plants functioned smoothly. This morning, however, in conversation with the committee, he had satisfied himself that they could operate without the manager now.

‘So you’re to be taken to a concentration camp,’ he had told the astonished manager at noon. Lenin and Trotsky were both very keen to see these camps used more. ‘A new camp is just being set up at Murom,’ he informed the manager. ‘I hope you enjoy it.’

‘But for what crime?’ the fellow had asked.

‘That will be decided in due course,’ the young commissar at Popov’s side had snapped and, grimly amused, Popov had left it at that.

And now the commissar and the village elder faced each other. If either recognized the other, neither gave any sign.

‘Where’s the grain?’ Popov asked quietly.

‘Grain? Over there, Comrade Commissar.’ And he indicated the storehouse.

Popov did not even bother to glance at it. ‘Search the village,’ he ordered the troops peremptorily.

It was a strange little comedy, Ivan thought, as he watched the two men. The two commissars strolled round the village, inspecting the huts, accompanied by Boris who, it seemed, was anxious to show them everything. Indeed, Ivan had never seen his burly, overbearing uncle put on an act like this. He bowed and scraped like an innkeeper from the old days, calling Popov: ‘Comrade Commissar’, ‘Sir’, and even once, in an apparent fit of absent-mindedness, addressing him like a tsarist official: ‘Your Highly Wellborn’.

But Popov’s face remained a mask.

‘Nothing, Commissar,’ the sergeant reported.

To which Popov only replied: ‘No, I didn’t think there would be.’

Turning suddenly to Boris he demanded: ‘What’s up at the big house?’

‘Nothing much, esteemed Comrade Commissar. Just his mother, now.’ Boris indicated Ivan.

‘Good. We’ll see it.’

As they went up the slope, the young commissar asked Popov quietly: ‘You think they have grain?’ Popov nodded. ‘What will you do?’

‘Find it and take it all.’

‘All? Won’t the village itself go hungry then?’

‘Yes.’ Popov glanced at him. ‘You should know, comrade, that hunger is sometimes very useful. It makes the people turn on each other at first – they’ll attack the
kulaks
who have food. And then they become submissive. These things are well studied, and useful.’

They reached the house. Popov made a brief tour of inspection, insisting on seeing the attic as well as all the outbuildings and the workshops. Having satisfied himself that the place contained no stores, he came back outside. Then he called the people there to come to him in front of the verandah.

There were half a dozen villagers, who had followed out of curiosity, Boris, Ivan and Arina, and three Red soldiers. Popov gave them all a faint smile. Then he turned to Boris.

‘You are the elder. Do you swear you have no grain?’

‘I do, Comrade Commissar.’ Boris nodded vigorously.

‘Very well then.’ He beckoned one of the soldiers. ‘Take aim at her.’ He pointed to Arina. Then he turned to young Ivan. ‘Now tell me where it’s hidden,’ he said gently.

The Red soldier shot Boris by the river, as soon as the last of the containers of grain had been pulled out.

‘And now,’ Popov announced, ‘it’s time to set up a proper village committee.’

Bringing the revolution to the countryside – it wasn’t easy. But the new plan which the leadership had hit upon had a certain brutal logic. The
kulaks
, the swindlers, the rich peasants, must be hounded out: and who better to do this than the poor peasants – the majority? Committees of the Poor must be set up at once, therefore, to seize control of the villages.

Privately this was one of the few ideas of Lenin’s that Popov did not agree with. ‘For the simple fact is,’ he would argue, ‘that the majority of peasants aren’t poor: they’re middling. They can’t employ labour usually, but they have a modest surplus of their own. The poor peasant half the time is just an ordinary peasant who’s become a drunkard.’