David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul heard little of the resulting political furore. Lubas’s train had been sent up the line to outflank a unit of Reds. Paul, cut off from any news of events, tried to make himself as useful as possible, although this generally meant traipsing after Lieutenant Capek on various patrols. When not doing this, Paul had found it best just keep out of other peoples’ way.

Paul ate in the mess wagon before returning to the teplushka he shared with a dozen others. The tiers of bunks were curtained off for privacy and windows cut into the boxcars for light. The sliding door was double-insulated against the cold. A burhzuika — a wood-burning stove — in the centre of the teplushka warmed the wagon, its leaking chimney adding to the general fug in the air.

‘Still alive,’ Karel Romanek noted as Paul slid open the door. Romanek was one of the Czech lieutenants with whom Paul shared one end of the teplushka and at that moment was lying on his bunk, next to Paul’s own, reading a torn copy of Českoslovensýk densk . ‘I was beginning to think the Reds had got you this time.’

‘Not yet, Karel,’ Paul assured him. ‘Although some partisans tried.’ He eased himself out of his Kirgis coat, suspending it on a peg where it hung bulkily with ursine disinterest.

‘And you have a fine new coat,’ Romanek added. ‘Surely the previous owner didn’t give that up willingly?’

‘He was past caring,’ Paul said.

‘Ah. In the midst of life…’

Paul climbed onto his bunk, pulling off the valenki boots and wriggling his toes to get some feeling back into them. Romanek returned to his paper. They conversed in Russian. Romanek spoke the language well having come from the western Ukraine district of Volhynia — one of the Czech enclaves in the former tsarist empire. Paul had learned a few words of Czech although the majority of the language still remained a mystery to him. Nevertheless he leaned across to look at the newspaper despite the fact it was printed in Czech and he could make neither head nor tail of it.

‘Where did you get that?’

Karel didn’t look up. ‘It’s an old edition.’

‘And by the look of it, everyone else on the train has read it before you.’

‘Except you,’ said Karel pertinently. ‘But then, you don’t read Czech.’

‘I’m learning,’ Paul said. ‘As a matter of fact I picked up a new phrase just this morning, one of Lieutenant Capek’s.’

‘Oh, what was that?’

‘ Shoot him ,’ Paul said in Czech.

Romanek smiled sourly.

Paul stretched out on his bunk. ‘So what’s the old news?’

‘Only politics,’ Karel replied. ‘Of no interest to a burzhui like you.’

‘Czech politics or Russian? Red, White or Green?’

‘Green?’

‘Haven’t you heard, Karel? Green is what they’re calling the SRs now, the partisans anyway.’

‘Partisans on which side?’

‘I don’t think it matters. They probably thought they needed a colour, to distinguish them from the Red and the Whites.’

‘Politics do that,’ said Karel.

Romanek had been a member of the SR party before the war, but had joined a Czech Družina in the tsarist army specifically raised to fight Austria-Hungary.

‘I’ve always found it something of a paradox,’ Paul observed, trying to get a rise out of Romanek, ‘how the Social-Revolutionaries always maintained they were democrats while happily assassinating tsarist ministers. Assassination never struck me as very democratic.’

‘A legitimate political tactic,’ Karel said evenly. ‘In certain situations. Although I doubt many did it “happily” as you put it. After all, both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks weren’t adverse to assassination before the Revolution. They call themselves Social-Democrats.’

‘True,’ said Paul. ‘And it has to be admitted that the Bolsheviks have taken to the practise like ducks to water. I suppose assassinating workers is one way of saving them from tsarist oppression.’

Karel said nothing, by now used to Paul’s sarcasm when it came to political rhetoric and the use of semantics to justify the twists and turns of an ideology. And Paul knew Romanek was aware he only resorted to sarcasm because Romanek was guilty of the practise himself.

A case in point was Karel’s argument for having served in the tsarist army. While Karel believed he hadn’t compromised his revolutionary credentials fighting against Austria-Hungary, as opposed to for the tsar, Paul merely thought it to be a fine distinction; another example of the revolutionary’s propensity for semantic manipulation. The slightest of examples, granted, but for Paul it represented the thin end of a wedge. A wedge that would eventually lead to any fact and all logic being nothing more than fodder for verbal gymnastics; a demonstration of the revolutionary’s practise of redefining their beliefs to match their actions.

Although in Karel’s case, Paul was prepared to allow that the Czech had a point. Karel was a Czech nationalist first and foremost.

‘Even so,’ Paul couldn’t stop himself from suggesting, ‘if you hadn’t tried to assassinate Lenin, the SRs might still be in coalition with the Bolsheviks.’

Romanek swung his legs over the side of his bunk and wagged his finger at Paul.

‘ I didn’t shoot Lenin. Kaplan’s action was not SR policy.’

Paul smiled. Romanek would always bite in the end; the Czech’s convictions lay under the thinnest veneer of restraint, ready to snap back like a bad-tempered dog at the slightest provocation.

‘I didn’t mean you personally , Karel,’ he said. ‘I was speaking representatively. But if the assassination wasn’t SR policy, what was the attempted coup at the congress in Moscow about?’

‘About restoring the legitimacy of the Soviets and repealing Brest-Litovsk,’ Karel replied heatedly. ‘About not colluding with Germany and Austria-Hungary.’

Like most radical SRs, Romanek had supported the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. But the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been the parting of the ways. To the SR party — and to Karel in particular — Lenin had begun to look pro-German, an assertion that oddly evoked the tenor of Paul’s meeting with Cumming in London. For Romanek, as a Czech, a treaty with the Austro-Hungarian empire was no way to establish a Czech nation. He still supported the Revolution but now espoused the line — along with most SRs — that the Bolsheviks had betrayed it. Not only by making a treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but by seizing all power for themselves. They had ignored the wishes of the other socialist parties and ridden roughshod over the Soviets themselves. And these were not the only bones of contention. The question of land, in particular, had split the parties. Paul had learned all about it since bunking with Romanek. It had been Bolshevik policies regarding land and the peasants that had sparked the previous summer’s uprisings and given Komuch their legitimacy.

The poor peasants’ committees — village councils imposed by the Bolsheviks — were one of Karel’s favourite hobby-horses. These were a rural equivalent of the housing committees Paul had encountered in Petersburg.

‘Shiftless drunks and idle loafers, for the most part,’ Romanek habitually grumbled. ‘Backed up by the Cheka and ideologues from the cities… The Bolsheviks are no different from the Whites. To them a peasant is an animal, there to do his bidding. If he won’t, he’s given what the landlord gave him — the lash and the butt of a gun.’

This, Karel maintained, was the reason why the People’s Army of Komuch — under Kappel and spearheaded by the Legion — had made so much progress the previous July and August. Dispossessed peasants and those outraged by Bolshevik policy had flocked to the SR army.