Надежда Лохвицкая - Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me - The Best of Teffi

But K.P. was not easily put off. First he introduced me to a mysterious character called Valeria Ivanovna—though I soon discovered that this was an alias. She appeared to be in her thirties, she had a tired-looking face and she wore a pince-nez. She would often ask if she could bring along some interesting acquaintance. Among those she then brought along were Lev Kamenev, Alexander Bogdanov, Martyn Mandelstam, Alexander Finn-Yenotaevsky and Alexandra Kollontai.

Her friends paid me little attention. For the most part, they talked among themselves about things like congresses, resolutions and “co-optations”, of which I was entirely ignorant. They liked to repeat the phrase “iron resolve”, and they liked to abuse some people they called “Mensheviks” and to quote Engels, who had argued that armed revolt on the streets of a modern city was inconceivable. [13] In his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggle in France (1895), Engels describes barricade battles and armed insurrections as “obsolete” and all too likely to end in failure. They were evidently on a very friendly footing with one another—they all addressed one another as “comrade”.

Once they brought along an absolutely ordinary working-class man. They called him “comrade” too. Comrade Yefim. He said very little—and then, after a few visits, he disappeared. I heard somebody mention, in passing, that he had been arrested.

A few months later Yefim came back, completely transformed, in a new, pale suit and bright yellow gloves. He sat with his hands raised and his fingers spread.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“I don’t want to get my gloves dirty. I’ve been dressed as a bourgeois , so as not to attract attention.”

It was a most unfortunate camouflage. Now his appearance was so picturesque that it was impossible not to look at him.

“So you’ve been in prison?” I asked. “Was it hard?”

“No, not particularly.” And then, with a sudden, good-natured smile: “At Christmas they gave us roast gooses.”

But I should not have been surprised by Yefim’s fancy dress. Very soon, events were to convince me that it was not as silly as it had seemed to my inexperienced eye.

Valeria Ivanovna left the country for a couple of months. She came back dressed in a bright red blouse.

“Why are you got up like that?” I asked.

It turned out that she had entered the country on a false passport made out in the name of a sixteen-year-old girl with no education. The comrades had decided that by putting a bright red blouse on a middle-aged woman with a pince-nez and the weary face of an intellectual, they would transform her into an illiterate young teenager. And they had been right. The border guards had believed the story, and Valeria Ivanovna had arrived safely in Petersburg in her red blouse.

Later, at the time when the newspaper New Life was being published, [14] New Life ( Novaya Zhizn’ ), the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, was published in St Petersburg from 27th October until 3rd December 1905. Lenin would hide from the police using a still more artful method. Every time he left the editorial office he would simply turn up the collar of his coat. And not once was he recognized by the agents of the secret police, even though he was, of course, under surveillance.

People began to arrive from abroad. Mainly from Switzerland. There were more of the same conversations. They all criticized the Mensheviks, and they often spoke of Plekhanov, though for some reason they always called him “Plekanov”.

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s how you say it in Switzerland.”

Many of them would tell me proudly that Plekhanov was from an old aristocratic family. For some reason they all found this very gratifying. I had the impression that Plekhanov had got under their skin in some way, that they were very anxious to convince him of something and that they were afraid he would abandon them.

The one member of the group who stood out was Alexandra Kollontai. She was a young, very beautiful society lady, always elegantly dressed, with a coquettish habit of wrinkling her nose. I recall how she once began a speech to a women’s congress with the words, “I don’t know what language to use in order to make myself understood to the bourgeois women here.”

And there she was on the platform, wearing a magnificent velvet dress with a mirror pendant on a golden chain that hung to her knees.

I noticed that all the comrades were very proud of Kollontai’s elegance. At one point she was arrested, I don’t remember exactly when or why, and the newspapers reported that she had taken fourteen pairs of shoes with her to prison. The comrades would repeat this number with reverence, lowering their voices. In exactly the same way as when they were speaking of “Plekanov’s” aristocratic lineage.

Once Kollontai invited us to her house. Valeria Ivanovna led us up the back staircase. This took us straight into the kitchen, where the astonished cook asked:

“Who are you looking for?”

“We’ve come to see Comr… to see Kollontai.”

“But what made you use the back stairs? Please go through to her study.”

Valeria Ivanovna appeared to have taken it entirely for granted that comrade Kollontai’s room was in the servants’ quarters.

When we entered the spacious, beautifully furnished study, we were greeted by Kollontai’s friend, Finn-Yenotaevsky, a tall dark man with a pointed face and hair like a bush of Austrian broom. Each of the curly dark hairs on his head grew in a distinct spiral, and one half-expected these spirals to chime together in the wind.

We were served tea and biscuits, just as you might expect in any well-to-do household, but then it was back to the same old conversations: the Mensheviks… as Engels said… iron resolve… Plekanov… Plekanov… Plekanov… Mensheviks… co-optation.

It was all extraordinarily dull. They were always picking over some trivial bone of contention: perhaps someone had been abroad and brought back some senseless Party gossip; or someone had drawn caricatures of the Mensheviks, which provoked childish amusement among the bearded Marxists with their “iron resolve”. And all the while, hardened agents provocateurs, whose role only came to light many years later, were strolling about happily in their midst. [15] The tsarist security service, the Okhrana, made extensive use of secret agents, both to gather information and to subvert revolutionary groups from within.

They talked about how the Mensheviks were accusing Lenin of having “pocketed ten francs intended for Menshevik use” (“pocketed”—that was the word the Mensheviks were using). Abroad, the Mensheviks were interrupting speeches by the Bolsheviks, caterwauling when Lunacharsky appeared in public, and had even tried to run off with a cash box full of admission money, which the Bolsheviks had defended with their fists.

All these conversations were of no interest to anyone not directly involved, and did nothing to inspire respect. There was no talk of Russia’s fate—of her past or future. These people seemed entirely unconcerned by everything that had aroused the indignation of earlier generations of revolutionaries; they had no interest in the principles for which earlier generations had been willing to pay with their lives. Life simply passed them by. Often some important event, a strike in a big factory or some other major disturbance, would take them completely unawares. They would quickly send their men to the scene, but of course, their men would arrive too late. In this way they failed to anticipate the importance of Father Gapon’s movement, [16] A Russian Orthodox workers’ organization. In January 1905 a peaceful workers’ demonstration led by Father Gapon ended with the Imperial Guard firing on demonstrators, killing about 200 people and wounding about 800. The day went down in history as “Bloody Sunday”. and remained blind to much else besides—failures that would later be a source of embarrassment to them.