In Europe (26 page)

Her voice trails off; she has fallen asleep again.

She went on directing plays all her life, Yuri whispers. Even now, she continues to do so. She talks in her sleep, giving instructions on the lighting, directing the actors. In her dreams she is always at work, in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, St Petersburg, everywhere.

We drive down Ulitsa Sovyetskaya. The façades are a brownish-grey, just like the clumps of snow still lying in the street. The only colour comes from the red traffic light. This street was where the idealistic sisters Anna and Nadezhda Alliluyeva once lived. Their house was a major nest of revolutionaries in 1917. A stern-looking woman opens the door. The apartment has been maintained as a revolutionary relic, completely intact, spacious and bright with sunny rooms, a cupboard full of books, a samovar for tea, a piano to sing songs to. Sergei Alliluyev, the girls’ father, was a worker who must have earned a decent salary: in the Soviet era he could never have afforded a house like this for his daughters.

The Alliluyevas, with their unadulterated working-class background, were an exception in the little world of the Bolsheviks. The interiors here speak of a desire for order and bourgeois comfort, something a ‘damned’ revolutionary did not strive for. Nevertheless, during the brief period he spent here hiding from the provisional government, Lenin was all too willing to put up with the girls’ bourgeois respectability. I gaze in awe at the plain zinc bathtub in which the great leader once scrubbed his back.

Stalin was a frequent guest here as well. He had his eye on the younger sister, Nadezhda. She was seventeen, he was thirty-nine, and she fairly swooned at the sight of his revolutionary moustache. Rumour had it that
Nadezhda was in fact Stalin's daughter; as a young man, he'd had an affair with Mother Alliluyeva. Five months after they married she bore him a son, Vasil, followed in 1927 by a daughter, Svetlana. In November 1932, Nadezhda, who contradicted her husband too often, was apparently driven to suicide. Her sister Anna was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1948, her brother-in-law was shot in 1938, her daughter Svetlana fled to the United States, her son Vasili joined the air force, ended up in prison for corruption and died a lonely alcoholic in Kazan. But the stern-looking housekeeper tells us none of that.

As we drive out of town, the tyres of our Lada are put through a living hell: the worn and mangled road to the island fortress of Kronstadt. Until only four years ago this area was off-limits, but this Sunday afternoon we can drive right in. Here lay the heart of Petrograd's Bolshevik revolution. This was home base for the sailors of the
Aurora
. Here is where the new future began. And here too, in February 1921, arose the first opposition to the Bolsheviks.

The dam we drive across took years to build, and has created considerable problems for the Neva Delta ecosystem. Along the way we pass dozens of petrified projects: half-completed locks, bridges that end somewhere in mid-air, viaducts with neither entrance nor exit. Everything here is in one great state of incompletion. The island itself houses two centuries of military architecture: red arsenals, yellow barracks and elegant nineteenth-century officers’ messes, bullet holes from the 1920s and the Second World War, stark, rectangular neighbourhoods full of living quarters from more recent decades. Beside the huge Seaman's Cathedral lies Anchor Square, now empty and bare, but once known as the ‘Free University’ because of the fiery speeches made there.

The sun is shining. Little groups of cadets stroll along the waterfront. With their black caps and gold clasps they look like fishermen from some Zuider Zee town. A little further along is a row of huge, grey warships, the remnants of a proud Soviet fleet. Encouraged by the sailors, I take a few pictures. Five years ago, that would have cost me a few months in jail. The rust and poverty aboard these ships are much greater enemies than any spy could ever be.

In the car, the talk turns to leaving and staying. Yuri and his wife Ira
have always dreamed of escaping the flat tyres and flaking concrete. Their son Sasha, a twenty-two-year-old law student, definitely wants to stay, as do his friends. ‘That's the striking thing about this generation,’ Ira says. ‘They love this city. They know that all kinds of things can happen, good and bad, from one day to the next, and they want to be around to see it.’

Sasha says his friends all have their own reasons for staying. ‘A lot of people simply
can't
leave. Others stay for the scams. They see so much murky water to fish in, so many opportunities to make some fast money, you'd never find that in the neat, orderly West. And then there are the students, people like me. We think it's more exciting here. We don't feel like listening to the biased viewpoints of the Americans and the Europeans, the kind of people who think they know everything about Russian literature.’

‘We never used to have the feeling that this country was our country,’ Yuri says. ‘But now we do, no matter how miserably things are going. Under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the general feeling was that it was “them against us”. Now we know that we're ruled by a clique of bandits, but somehow it's still our regime.’

Ira believes it's a bit more complicated than that. ‘Stalin and Brezhnev didn't cheat us. They didn't act as though they were anything but what they were. “Love us, or we'll have you shot,” they said. So we pretended we loved them. Now we have the right to respond. They cheat everyone, they buy people's favours, but you can still say: don't let yourself be bought. Now we truly have the government we deserve.’

At that point, the Lada finally comes down with a puncture. Yuri stops in the middle of the road to change the back tyre, the traffic goes racing by on both sides.

At last we arrive in the little village of Razliv, a group of wooden houses where Lenin, disguised as a worker, hid in a barn in 1917. A series of demonstrations had got out of hand, and the Bolsheviks could not avoid taking the blame. Lenin himself was on holiday at the time, and the ‘attempted revolution’ degenerated into a looting party. To make matters worse, the public's opinion of Lenin and his crew took a huge swing when the provisional government published evidence of German aid to the Bolshevik cause.

Lenin had no intention of standing trial. His life and work were too important to him to risk playing the martyr, and he was less courageous in practice than he was in theory. So he took to his heels, along with his old friend Grigori Zinovyev. They spent four days in a barn, until a worker, Nikolai Yemelyanov, rowed them across the lake at Razliv and hid them for a while in a straw hut. After that the great leader went to Finland until the affair blew over. That's the whole story.

The Bolsheviks, though, did have an excellent feeling for theatre, and knew that their ideology could only be made palatable to the Russian people by turning it into a new religion. As far as that went, Lenin's early hardships came as a godsend. In the Museum of Political History I had seen a huge painting of a room full of workers, right before the start of a strike. Their pose was that of the disciples in
The Last Supper
. At the Smolny Institute, Lenin's shirts are cherished as relics. And Lenin's official life story was moulded in the same way by Soviet writers to resemble that of Christ. Just as in the Gospels, Lenin's destiny was established at birth, and from that moment on everything went as it had been appointed. Never did he doubt, never did he make a mistake.

Every religion, of course, contains the same particular episode: the prophet's flight from evil. Marxist-Leninism needed something of the sort too. The days at Razliv were made to fit the bill. Not long after Lenin's death, a monument was erected next to the little straw hut. A museum was built as well; it contained, among other things, Lenin's pillow and his feather bed (today there is a little sign beside those objects saying ‘Replica’). And so Razliv became a prosperous place of pilgrimage to which crowds of visitors came each year, and where the legend was sold in the form of books and souvenirs.

Fifty years later, the original hut was absolutely rotten and worn out. In deepest secrecy, therefore, Lenin's hiding place was torn down in 1970. The whole thing was then rebuilt in the old style, but with new materials. In addition, a kind of glass box was erected around the hut, the kind one sees more often at sacred sites. Through it, we can view the interior: a table, a bed, a samovar, a chair at the window, a teacup with four dead flies in it, a stable with space for one cow. Lenin's stable at Bethlehem.

Yemelyanov, the only real worker in the whole story, came to rue the day he rowed Lenin to the other shore. He was dragged from one prison
camp to the next. ‘Stalin was in the rowing boat, too,’ the party chieftains maintained for years, but Yemelyanov knew that it had actually been Stalin's great rival, Grigori Zinovyev. That was enough to ruin the rest of the man's life. He died in 1958. Even after his death, he was still harassed. The workers from the nearby factory wanted to bear him to the graveyard on their shoulders, but for some reason the local party committee had decided he was to be buried in secret. A tug of war ensued, the police trying to shove his coffin into a truck, the workers pulling it out again.

‘Christ Almighty,’ says the neighbour who tells us the story. ‘It was no better than when Yemelyanov was still alive. Put him in prison, take him out again, put him back in. Good Lord, what a life!’

In the woods around the little hut in the glass box, children are playing in the snow. Smoke curls from the chimney. We take a short stroll. Yuri tells me of his discovery, when leafing through the latest edition of the
Great Encyclopaedia of Russian Philosophy
last week, that Karl Marx was no longer stuck between McLuhan and Marcuse. ‘What, is Marx suddenly not a philosopher any more?’ he said. ‘I went back and took a good look at the list of editors who worked on the encyclopaedia. They're exactly the same ones who did it back in the days of communism. And they're still just as trigger-happy with the red pencil!’

The parking lot is crowded with the Mercedes and American jeeps of the modern-day residents of Razliv. Until the 1980s, the little straw hut was taken down in winter and then set up again each spring. But after perestroika it was burned down so often that they stopped trying. Unbelief had become the order of the day.

The heart of the
ancien régime
was the Winter Palace. With its 1,057 crystal rooms and 117 golden stairways, it was a gigantic beehive where some 4,000 courtiers lived and schemed as they swarmed around the absolute centre of power, the czar. It was the stage of Russian power, and in 1917 it was, of course, the stage for the revolution.

For one whole summer the palace housed the provisional government led by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. The gilded chambers were the scene of endless meetings. Kerensky's secretary at the time. Pitirim Sorokin, described the prime minister as a man with ‘a terrible aversion to authority,
force and cruelty … He believes it is quite possible to govern by means of kind words and noble sentiment. A good man, but a weak leader. In essence, the very picture of the Russian intelligentsia.’ For the Bolsheviks, the Winter Palace was the grand prize,
the
symbol of everything that was wrong with Russia.

Today, more than eighty years later, Yuri Klejner shows me around the palace. For decades, his father worked here as head of the technical service. To him, the Winter Palace is like a second home. He shows me the sunny winter solarium with its view of the Neva, the hanging gardens on the roof (complete with trees), the immense marble throne room, the floors inlaid with dozens of types of wood, and the most ornate golden coach I had ever seen. The imperial eagles on the chandeliers survived the revolution, as did the iron coat hooks in the quarters of the czar's palace guards. ‘Very little has changed here since 1917,'Yuri tells me. ‘The palace was made into a museum almost at once.’ Picassos now hang in Nicholas II's private chambers. Some of the rooms have a splendid view of the square, the rest are low-ceilinged and plain.

In the hall is a huge block of marble bearing the text: ‘In memory of the storming of this palace by the revolutionary workers, soldiers and seamen on the evening of 26 October …’

Yuri takes me to a small set of stairs close to a side entrance. ‘If fighting went on anywhere, it was here. In all the Soviet films you see the soldiers running up the central stairway with lots of shooting and people taking cover behind the pillars. Those are the images that are burned into our collective memory. But in reality, none of that took place. There was no real storming of the palace. It all went very quickly. All of the central points in the city, the train stations, the electricity plant, the telephone switchboard, were already in the hands of the Bolsheviks. In the street, life went on as usual, the trams were running, the restaurants remained open. And there was no mass uproar. In the old pictures of the October Revolution you can see how few people were really involved.’

Yuri stresses it over and over: the only real revolution in 1917 was the February Revolution, the revolt by the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries, Western-oriented intellectuals who hoped gradually to mould Russia into a European democracy. The Bolsheviks’ October Revolution (for Westerners it was actually in November, because of the different calendars
used) was in every way a forced and unnatural happening. Their coup would ultimately clear the way for a brand of Eastern despotism of which Czar Nicholas II could only dream, but then behind a socialist façade.

‘Look how easy it must have been: if there had been one man with a machine gun on those stairs, and another one on the landing, the Winter Palace could never have been stormed. But it was complete chaos. Kerensky had already fled the city. The rest of the provisional government was in the Winter Palace, without lights, without a telephone, with no idea what to do. The building was defended by a battalion of women and cadets. A couple of Bolshevik commissioners simply forced their way in through a side entrance, a few soldiers followed them, and the initial looting was stopped. Then the commissioners came back outside through the big front doors and told the crowd: “Go home, it's all over.”’