David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘All the servants would stand in line when we arrived and offer us bread and salt in welcome. Remember?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Oh, Pasha,’ she suddenly said, ‘they burnt it. The house, they burned it to the ground. Why did they do that? What has happened? What did we do to deserve this?’

Paul munched his cucumber and chewed at the stale bread. He could have given her the ideological reasons, austere and arid as they were; justifications for violent action as he had heard them quoted by his mother’s circle of bourgeois leftists. Or he might even have repeated the political mantras of class hostility he had learned from Jacobs during the interminable hours they had spent together in the shell-hole — language he now knew had its roots more often in envy and jealousy than in any reasonable demand for social equality. But none of that dealt with individuals. None of that could explain or excuse what it must feel like to stand amid the ashes of your own house, or to have your home expropriated simply because fate had dictated you were the unwitting recipient of an unequal share of the product of an unjust system.

So he could say nothing to her to explain what had happened. And who was he to do so anyway? She knew more about the situation and the arguments than he did. What she was looking for was appeasement, something that might mollify the feeling of injustice she felt. Telling her that injustice was what the vast majority had always suffered was not good enough. Besides, what was Sofya other that one small person unfairly injured by an unstoppable cataclysm? If he looked out of the train window he would see dozens more at every stop. And really, was what had happened to her any less fair than what had happened to the downtrodden under the autocracy? He didn’t suppose so. But then neither did the one excuse the other.

He took her hand, half-expecting her to pull away. But she didn’t. She sighed and gazed out at the never-ending land that stretched to a seemingly limitless horizon. What were they in the infinity that was Russia? Two souls lost in its vast expanse. From that perspective what did they, or any of their fellow passengers come to that, really matter?

It was late in the morning when the train pulled into the station at Alatúir. They had been travelling for more than twenty-four hours and he was tired and hungry and numb from the hard seating. And it would be still another ten hours to Kazan, had the train been going that far. They would have to get off before that, sometime in the afternoon before they reached the front. At Sviyázhsk, Valentine had said. But it was still some eight hours away.

They climbed down from the train. Valentine was standing on the platform and walked towards them. Behind him, troops were spilling out of the front carriages.

‘Sofya Ivanovna,’ he said offering a mock bow. ‘I hardly expected to see you again so soon.’

‘Or at all?’ she asked tartly. ‘Am I still to call you Olyen this far from Petersburg, or are you known as something else in this region?’

Valentine merely smiled. ‘The restaurant is open,’ he said. ‘I suggest we get something to eat.’

They edged past a knot of soldiers standing outside the door arguing with each other about whether they could afford to eat, and found a table.

‘How far from the front are we?’

‘About two hundred versts,’ Valentine said. He glanced at the troops hovering outside the door. ‘I suppose they spent all their money in the station restaurant at Murom. They don’t look as keen to get to the front as they did in Moscow. Perhaps they’ve heard how Trotsky treats those not showing enough resolve.’

‘How does he treat them?’ Sofya asked, looking at the menu.

‘He shoots them.’

She shrugged. ‘My brother always said that’s what we should do when they wouldn’t fight, so nothing much has changed for them, has it?’

Paul could just picture his little cousin behind the conscripts, prodding them towards the front like cattle. That would have been Mikhail all over, keeping someone else between him and the guns. ‘I thought that’s what they did do,’ he said.

‘They tried,’ said Sofya, ‘and the soldiers deserted.’

‘The difference with Trotsky,’ said Valentine, ‘is that it’s not just those who won’t fight he executes. He shoots every tenth man in any unit not showing the requisite courage.’

‘Why don’t they mutiny here?’

‘He doesn’t rely on ordinary soldiers to do the shooting. He has political commissars and a Bolshevik core only too happy to do the job.’

A waitress came to the table. They asked her what was available and she pointed at the menu. They ordered everything.

‘No shortage of food here,’ said Sofya, eating fresh bread and wiping butter from her chin.

Paul worked his way through a plate of blinis , looking at the soldiers still debating whether or not they could eat.

‘Where are their officers?’

Valentine had a bowl of borsht. ‘They all wear the same uniform these days. The new Red Army has abolished signs of rank. Every man is a comrade now, equal in the sight of the state. As long as they do what the commissar says, that is.’

‘What rank is a commissar?’

‘He’s the political officer. He outranks everyone. No order is issued without his agreement and if he thinks the officers aren’t sufficiently revolutionary, he removes them. He gestured towards a thin bespectacled youth arguing with a man behind the counter. Despite being in uniform, he looked more like a student than a warrior. He was shouting and took his revolver from its holster and placed it on the counter.

‘That’ll be a commissar,’ Valentine said. ‘Negotiating free food for the men, no doubt.’

The man behind the counter looked down at the gun and then at the waitress who was waiting nervously at his shoulder. He nodded vigorously.

‘Of course,’ the man said to the commissar, ‘but of course, comrade.’

‘It was the same after the Revolution in Petersburg,’ Sofya said. ‘You couldn’t get on a tram for the crowds of soldiers and sailors riding for free. Everyone else had to pay, of course. They’re nothing but bandits.’

‘Lower your voice,’ Valentine warned.

She glared at him.

The commissar waved to the men at the door and they filed inside filling the empty tables.

They looked like conscripts to Paul. He had seen enough of their kind on the western front to recognise the type, close enough to the fighting now for all their initial bravado to leech away. They had the dull blank faces of village youths, still pliant enough to walk towards the guns when ordered to do so. That would make them the perfect soldiers from any commander’s point of view.

They ate until they were full, pooling their money to pay the bill. Valentine sorted through the assortment of coin and paper.

‘Start getting rid of your accounting tokens. Any Kerenski roubles, too. They may not take them in Kazan and they certainly won’t want the Bolshevik money.’

There may have been a revolution but Paul had noticed how most people still preferred to be paid in the old imperial rouble, no matter whose head was on the note.

The train steamed east again, out of Alatúir. After ten minutes Valentine excused himself, making his way towards the carriages that held the troops. He was gone some time and when he returned he gestured for Paul to sit beside him.

‘I’ve been talking to one of the officers. They’ve all got copies of this.’ He handed Paul a printed news sheet:

The Fifth Army has been assigned the task of taking Kazan. Our enemy is trying to break through from Kazan to Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Vyatka and Vologda, to link up with the Anglo-French troops, and to crush the heart of the workers’ revolution – Moscow. But before Kazan stand the workers’ and peasants’ regiments of the Red Army. They know what their task is: to prevent the enemy from taking a single step forward: to wrest Kazan from his grasp: to throw back the Czech mercenaries and the officer-thugs, drown them in the Volga, and crush their criminal mutiny against the workers’ revolution. In this conflict we are using not only rifles, cannon and machine guns, but also newspapers. For the newspaper is also a weapon. The newspaper binds together all units of the Fifth Army in one thought, one aspiration, one will. Forward to Kazan!