Charlotte Hobson - The Vanishing Futurist

‘Well, you see, your brother comes to Mikhailovka,’ Golubukhin began. He sat and accepted a cup of our brackish tea. ‘He and Yakov’s boy arrive in the night, oh, must have been four weeks ago – before All Souls’, about the day of Our Lady in October – waking up half the village with their shouting and joking around, they haven’t changed. So by the next morning the local Soviet hears that a former landlord is in the village and they’re planning to come up and get him, and of course my wife’s sister, you remember her, miss? Paulina, her name is, that helped in the nursery—’

‘Yes, yes, of course…’

‘Her man Alyosha Gumiltsev is a commissar now, Paulina goes in mortal fear of him, but anyway she ran up to us and told us, she was always fond of all of you, and so I went over to Yakov’s to tell the boys to make themselves scarce. But I was too late, see, and I was just passing the church when Commissars Debryakov and Gumiltsev come riding in (they took Star and Rowan for their own use, miss, you remember them? Beautiful beasts they were, it breaks my heart to see them now) and another Bolshevik with them, and so I stood back in the porch and I saw them dragging the boys out and taking them off. Paulina tried to find out what had become of them and it seems Gumiltsev said they were mixed up in some kind of counter-revolution.’ He hesitated, glancing at the slack faces around him. ‘Well—’ He cleared his throat. ‘Your family were good to me, your excellencies, I had nothing to complain of from your father and mother, so I thought I’d better come and let you know. It’s not easy to travel these days as you know, took me several weeks to get away, but they can just throw you in prison and forget about you, this lot…’

Sonya was trembling. ‘ Bozhe moi . How do we find them?’

Nikita went over to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘This will be a simple matter,’ he said slowly, looking her in the eye. ‘Tomorrow morning we go to Lunacharsky, and tell him that a worker in his own department and his colleague have been mistakenly placed under arrest. We’ll get them out all right.’

‘But… counter-revolution!’ she blurted out, starting to cry.

I said nothing, but lay in bed fuming at her. Really, didn’t she understand anything? These confusions were unfortunate, but there was no need to panic. Sonya was physically weak, and, I thought to myself, mentally unreliable as well. After some time I got up and went out into the dark hall, hoping some air would clear my head.

A rustle from the corner… I jumped aside.

‘Vera, what are you doing there?’

She was slumped on the floor, hugging her knees. When she looked up I saw her face was red and swollen with tears. Of course… in all the drama I had not thought of Vera.

‘Oh Vera, don’t cry,’ I murmured, placing my hand awkwardly on her back. ‘We’ll get Volodya back—’

‘But I haven’t even told him.’

‘What?’

Her face crumpled and she wailed, ‘Don’t you see, I’m having his baby…’

Suddenly I could see, quite clearly – the greasy plumpness of her face, her breathless, saggy bosoms. ‘What have you done?’ I heard my voice as though it were someone else’s. ‘You deceived us, didn’t you? You carried on with your… your entanglement. Oh Vera, how could you?’

That night in the dark dormitory, lit only by a smoky flicker from our stove, we listened as Golubukhin told us in his hoarse voice about affairs in Mikhailovka since the October Revolution. The last time I visited was in August 1917, with the little children and the usual entourage of staff. In my mind Mikhailovka was still white-columned, still standing in a haze of sunshine and green shade, the buzz of bluebottles and frogs croaking in the evening light.

‘It was summer, a warm night with a big moon,’ Golubukhin began diffidently. ‘Word had been going round and there was a fair old crowd, led by the boys back from the Army, but they came from all over – everyone felt they had to join in, you see. Frielen, the steward, saw them coming and tried to run away with his family but he left it too late, they caught him and began to beat him, he screamed like a girl. He’d squeezed them for twenty years, after all. Anyway he wasn’t too hot but his wife got him and the children away, he’s in Moscow now, I hear. And then they carted out the furniture and passed it around, and the pictures and objects and that, “loot the looters”, you know – some people have got all sorts in their huts now, carpets and china, but most of it was broken straight away – the pictures got a boot through them and the furniture was smashed up. They were drunk of course – the first place they went was the cellar – and crazy too. They were prancing around dressed up in the fine clothes, and shooting out the fireplaces and the windows. And then we smelt smoke and someone shouted ‘ Krasny Petukh! ’ – the red cockerel, you know, fire – and I and my boys ran to let the horses out – I wasn’t leaving them to be burnt. Most of them got rounded up later and sent off to the front. I told you already about Star and Rowan and, miss, your mare was grabbed by that fat old Pryanishnikov and he’s beaten her half to death already. I tell you, it breaks my heart to think of the animals. But the fire fairly ripped through the house, I’ve never seen anything like it, the flames must have been fifty arshin high…’ There was a ghost of a smile in his voice. ‘We were drunk on it all for three days, like a wedding.’

In order to build the new, we must dismantle the old. So we believed. We must clear the wide world of this bourgeois clutter. We must throw Tsarist culture out of the steamer of modernism. We must smash, destroy, sweep away… until we are left with the pure white rooms of the future. The world around us was emptying. Possessions were lost to the four winds, and the Russian people themselves were cleared away. They were scattered by fear or need, abroad or to the countryside.

At the same time people disappeared within Moscow too. Typhus and dysentery and hunger gathered up many. But many vanished quietly into Cheka buildings: the garage on the Varsonofievsky, the sheds near the Church of the Resurrection and, most of all, the cellar of the Yakov company building on the Lubyanka, which became known as the ‘Ship of Death’. Since the end of August, when the Red Terror was announced, these places had started to fill up and overflow. Shooting could be heard all night long in Petrovsky Park, and the labour brigades of former people who had previously been put to work clearing rubble from the streets or feeding the furnaces at the electricity station were now given the job of digging graves.

Many prisoners were genuine opponents of the regime, of course, and there were always rumours of plots. At the Bolshoi Theatre someone took advantage of a power cut to scatter anti-Bolshevik leaflets from the balcony onto the stalls… there was pandemonium. The Civil War was still pressing in on us from five sides – in Siberia and the north, on the Volga, in the south, and just outside the gates of Petrograd – and there was a view that many of these prisoners were hostages of war. But we also knew that others crowded into the cellar on the Lubyanka were just the flotsam and jetsam of events. We knew that many of the secret police officers were thugs, perhaps even insane, and they fuelled their nights with cocaine.

We knew these things, but we did not discuss them as we did every other aspect of the Revolution. When you are carrying a huge, delicate and precious thing between you – when your future, all your hopes depend on it – a certain concentration is needed. ‘Don’t be distracted,’ Slavkin told us. Stray doubts, or too much emphasis on the problems of the Revolution, could distort the whole project. Unhelpful questions about the victims of the Cheka, for example, or the over-zealous actions of the Red Army in the villages, or the Bolsheviks’ ban on workers’ strikes, could poison the atmosphere and be fatal to the work of the commune. Self-control is a vital element in any communal activity; and although we failed in many areas to control ourselves sufficiently, on this topic, that of the Revolution’s dark side, we were rather successful.