Ken Follett: The Man From St. Petersburg

Feliks nodded.

The shabby girl said: “And it won’t be the princes and counts who get killed-it will be the ordinary Russian people.”

She was right, Feliks thought. The war would be fought by the peasants. He had spent most of his life among these people. They were hard, surly and narrow-minded, but their foolish generosity and their occasional spontaneous outbursts of sheer fun gave a hint of how they might be in a decent society. Their concerns were the weather, animals, disease, childbirth and outwitting the landlord. For a few years, in their late teens, they were sturdy and straight, and could smile and run fast and flirt; but soon they became bowed and gray and slow and sullen. Now Prince Orlov would take those young men in the springtime of their lives and march them in front of a cannon to be shot to pieces or maimed forever, no doubt for the very best reasons of international diplomacy.

It was things like this that made Feliks an anarchist.

“What is to be done?” said Ulrich.

“We must blaze the news across the front pages of Mutiny!” said the shabby girl.

They began to discuss how the story should be handled. Feliks listened. Editorial matters interested him little. He distributed the magazine and wrote articles about how to make bombs, and he was deeply discontented. He had become terribly civilized in Geneva. He drank beer instead of vodka, wore a collar and a tie and went to concerts of orchestral music. He had a job in a bookshop. Meanwhile Russia was in turmoil. The oil workers were at war with the Cossacks, the parliament was impotent and a million workers were on strike. Czar Nicholas II was the most incompetent and asinine ruler a degenerate aristocracy could produce. The country was a powder barrel waiting for a spark, and Feliks wanted to be that spark. But it was fatal to go back. Joe Stalin had gone back, and no sooner had he set foot on Russian soil than he had been sent to Siberia. The secret police knew the exiled revolutionaries better than they knew those still at home. Feliks was chafed by his stiff collar, his leather shoes and his circumstances.

He looked around at the little group of anarchists: Ulrich, the printer, with white hair and an inky apron, an intellectual who loaned Feliks books by Proudhon and Kropotkin but also a man of action who had once helped Feliks rob a bank; Olga, the shabby girl, who had seemed to be falling in love with Feliks until, one day, she saw him break a policeman’s arm and became frightened of him; Vera, the promiscuous poetess; Yevno, the philosophy student who talked a lot about a cleansing wave of blood and fire; Hans, the watchmaker who saw into people’s souls as if he had them under his magnifying glass; and Pyotr, the dispossessed Count, writer of brilliant economic tracts and inspirational revolutionary editorials. They were sincere and hardworking people, and all very clever. Feliks knew their importance, for he had been inside Russia among the desperate people who waited impatiently for smuggled newspapers and pamphlets and passed them from hand to hand until they fell to pieces. Yet it was not enough, for economic tracts were no protection against police bullets, and fiery articles would not burn palaces.

Ulrich was saying: “This news deserves wider circulation than it will get in Mutiny. I want every peasant in Russia to know that Orlov would lead him into a useless and bloody war over something that concerns him not at all.”

Olga said: “The first problem is whether we will be believed.”

Feliks said: “The first problem is whether the story is true.”

“We can check,” Ulrich said. “The London comrades could find out whether Orlov arrives when he is supposed to arrive, and whether he meets the people he needs to meet.”

“It’s not enough to spread the news,” Yevno said excitedly. “We must put a stop to this!”

“How?” said Ulrich, looking at young Yevno over the top of his wire-rimmed spectacles.

“We should call for the assassination of Orlov-he is a traitor, betraying the people, and he should be executed.”

“Would that stop the talks?”

“It probably would,” said Count Pyotr. “Especially if the assassin were an anarchist. Remember, England gives political asylum to anarchists, and this infuriates the Czar. Now, if one of his princes were killed in England by one of our comrades, the Czar might well be angry enough to call off the whole negotiation.”

Yevno said: “What a story we would have then! We could say that Orlov had been assassinated by one of us for treason against the Russian people.”

“Every newspaper in the world would carry that report,” Ulrich mused.

“Think of the effect it would have at home. You know how Russian peasants feel about conscription-it’s a death sentence. They hold a funeral when a boy goes into the army. If they learned that the Czar was planning to make them fight a major European war, the rivers would run red with blood…”

He was right, Feliks thought. Yevno always talked like that, but this time he was right.

Ulrich said: “I think you’re in dreamland, Yevno. Orlov is on a secret mission-he won’t ride through London in an open carriage waving to the crowds. Besides, I know the London comrades-they’ve never assassinated anyone. I don’t see how it can be done.”

“I do,” Feliks said. They all looked at him. The shadows on their faces shifted in the flickering candlelight. “I know how it can be done.” His voice sounded strange to him, as if his throat were constricted. “I’ll go to London. I’ll kill Orlov.”

The room was suddenly quiet, as all the talk of death and destruction suddenly became real and concrete in their midst. They stared at him in surprise, all except Ulrich, who smiled knowingly, almost as if he had planned, all along, that it would turn out this way.

London was unbelievably rich. Feliks had seen extravagant wealth in Russia and much prosperity in Europe, but not on this scale. Here nobody was in rags. In fact, although the weather was warm, everyone was wearing several layers of heavy clothing. Feliks saw carters, street vendors, sweepers, laborers and delivery boys-all sporting fine factory-made coats without holes or patches. All the children wore boots. Every woman had a hat, and such hats! They were mostly enormous things, as broad across as the wheel of a dog cart, and decorated with ribbons, feathers, flowers and fruit. The streets were teeming. He saw more motor cars in the first five minutes than he had in all his life. There seemed to be as many cars as there were horse-drawn vehicles. On wheels or on foot, everyone was rushing.

In Piccadilly Circus all the vehicles were at a standstill, and the cause was one familiar in any city: a horse had fallen and its cart had overturned. A crowd of men struggled to get beast and wagon upright, while from the pavement flower girls and ladies with painted faces shouted encouragement and made jokes.

As he went farther east his initial impression of great wealth was somewhat modified. He passed a domed cathedral which was called St. Paul ’s, according to the map he had bought at Victoria Station, and thereafter he was in poorer districts. Abruptly, the magnificent facades of banks and office buildings gave place to small row houses in varying states of disrepair. There were fewer cars and more horses, and the horses were thinner. Most of the shops were street stalls. There were no more delivery boys. Now he saw plenty of barefoot children-not that it mattered, for in this climate, it seemed to him, they had no need of boots anyway.

Things got worse as he penetrated deeper into the East End. Here were crumbling tenements, squalid courtyards and stinking alleys, where human wrecks dressed in rags picked over piles of garbage, looking for food. Then Feliks entered Whitechapel High Street, and saw the familiar beards, long hair and traditional robes of assorted Orthodox Jews, and tiny shops selling smoked fish and kosher meat: it was like being in the Russian Pale, except that the Jews did not look frightened.