Дональд Джеймс - The Fall of the Russian Empire

I suppose we had been watching the demonstration for about ten minutes when I saw the police cars screech to a halt downstairs.

“Get down and let them in,” my Committee chairman shouted at me. So down I raced again and I didn’t need any telling who it was waiting at the door with about a dozen guards all round him. Everybody in Leningrad knew Dora, and I doubt there was anyone who wasn’t terrified out of their wits at the thought of him. But then again that can’t be true. The demonstrators on the bridge weren’t afraid, obviously.

Up in the apartment the two fat men seemed to forget I was there for a moment. The one thing I remember before they noticed me and told me to clear out (of my own apartment!) is that Dora told Chairman Z that they had received a warning from something called the Release Committee of Leningrad Free Trade Union Movement: If the men on the bridge were arrested that night they would be replaced by double that number the next night, and so on and so on until half of Leningrad was in prison. Chairman Z said it was a bluff, but I could tell that Dora wasn’t at all sure. Then they bawled at me to get out…

The night of the second Blue Bridge demonstration is cut scalpel-sharp in my memory, Zoya wrote long afterward, mostly because I was on my way to see Anton again. As I had left the shoreline and started along the wrecked streets of Vasilyevsky Park I had seen a militia car, like some scavenger dog, nosing its way along the gutters toward me.

I turned quickly off the street, taking cover under the half-demolished walls of an old factory building. The thick spring mists clung like ivy to the old walls. I was sure they had not seen me, yet the car, creeping slowly forward, stopped almost opposite the place where I pressed myself back into the darkness. I could hear the music from their radio and from time to time the voices and laughter of the militiamen inside the car.

Perhaps half an hour passed. Perhaps more. Long enough certainly for me to feel for the first time in my life all the sensations of a hunted animal.

When the car at last moved away I crawled out of my hiding place savoring the feeling of triumph that I had something, some experience of my own, to recount to Anton Ovsenko when I arrived.

The alley between the warehouses was not far off. Beyond looming walls I could see the glow of firelight through the mist and the reeling figures of the drunks. Snatches of song began and ended abruptly. Women cackled and swore. But the militia car had disappeared.

I stood in the archway waiting for Anton to open the door. After a few moments I knocked again. This time the split timbers of the unlocked door swung away from my hand. In the room the ends of two candles still guttered in their empty vodka bottles. But there was no sign of Anton.

I was shaking with fear for myself and concern for him. I dropped the bag of food on the floor and unscrewed the top of the liter I had brought with me. This time I drank more slowly, taking the hot spirit into my mouth and swallowing carefully. Perhaps in all I drank four or five mouthfuls and when I stepped through the archway again I seemed already to be trembling less.

It was on the crowded trolley bus back to the Nevsky Prospekt that I first heard that the workers were demonstrating again at the Blue Bridge. As we crossed the Dvortsovy I could see the embankment was lined with militia trucks. The trolley bus itself was allowed to go no further. Militiamen ordered the passengers out. The area directly west of the Nevsky Prospekt (and this would include the Blue Bridge) was under curfew, they claimed. The nearest available Metro was the Chernyshevskaya station.

It was another hour before I arrived home. My mother was sitting unusually tense in the kitchen. When I told her that Anton had gone, she nodded. “He’s that sort of young man,” she said. “The Release Committee strongly advised him not to go to the Blue Bridge tonight.”

“You mean he’s at the demonstration.”

“He must be.”

“If he’s recognized by the militia he’ll be arrested immediately.”

“Of course. But then he knew that.”

I stood up. “We must go, too,” I said.

I saw the look of astonishment come over my mother’s face. “But you just said the militia had cordoned the area.”

“Then we’ll go and shout and scream and spit at them,” I said. “So that they know the women of Leningrad feel the same as their men.”

My mother was smiling at me as she got her coat. At the door she suddenly put her arm round me and kissed me. “What happened to the little girl I knew last week?” she said, hugging me.

Our fickle northern spring had retreated again. It was a bitterly cold night as we left the metro station and made for the Nevsky Prospekt. But we soon realized that we were not alone. Along the Nevsky Prospekt hundreds, thousands, of people, mostly women, were facing the line of militia. Of course we couldn’t see what was happening at the Blue Bridge itself, but in front of us women were openly jeering at the militiamen who stood behind their fixed bayonets with drawn, frightened faces.

The hours we stayed there, singing, shouting, taunting the militiamen! And all the time it seemed as if the crowds around us were getting thicker and thicker.

There was no violence, nothing harder than insults were hurled at the militiamen, but there was in the crowd a curious sense that somehow we were winning. Most of all it was obvious that the militia had no power to break up a crowd of this size unless they resorted to guns and tear gas. And whoever was in command clearly hesitated to take that step.

Then, perhaps about three o’clock in the morning, we heard a tremendous burst of cheering coming from the direction of the Blue Bridge. Our vast crowd answered it jubilantly. And before our astonished eyes we saw the lines of armed militia facing us begin to pull back. We surged forward and suddenly the gleaming bayonets were no longer pointing at us. Slinking away toward their armored vehicles the all-powerful Leningrad militia left the way open to the Blue Bridge.

We heard afterward what had happened. The confrontation at the Blue Bridge was even more tense than our own. The demonstrators with their placards detailing factory after factory throughout the Leningrad oblast had stood their ground before the lines of KGB guards with their riot guns, their long batons and their snarling dogs.

Of course everybody, guards and demonstrators, were thinking only of the week before. But however much the men in the long green topcoats and the polished black helmets itched to release the dogs and charge into the unarmed workers, hour after hour throughout that night the order still had not come.

Then, when dawn was only an hour or two away, a heavily escorted convoy of three black sedans had pushed its way through the crowd and driven forward to the Blue Bridge. It is said that when General Dora climbed out of the leading car he approached the demonstrators with all the joviality of a fat snake. A fuss about nothing, he insisted. One or two of his subordinates had overstepped the mark last week. They were already being brought up before their superiors, charged with excessive and un-Soviet zeal. The demonstrators cheered the phrase.

And the fifty men arrested last week?

Already on their way back home, Dora assured them. Except a few that still required hospitalization. There had been a lot of confusion last week, men slipping and sliding on the ice. There were a few broken limbs, but nothing serious. And for good measure, Dora added, he could assure the demonstrators that the Party was entirely on their side. The supply system of the whole Leningrad oblast was going to be radically overhauled. In a country as rich as ours, he insisted, it was nothing short of criminal that some of the outlying suburbs had seen no meat deliveries for weeks.