Russka (127 page)

Nicolai Bobrov told himself he should not worry too much.

The message from his father had been disquieting, of course – there was no denying it. He also felt a pang of guilt. But I dare say when I get there, it won’t be so bad, he reasoned. Then he sighed.

It was a long way to be travelling alone. As the covered sled whisked him through the broad streets of St Petersburg towards the station, Nicolai gazed out comfortably. He loved the mighty
city. Even on a grey day like this, it seemed to have a dull, almost luminous glow. And, it had to be said, Nicolai was a comfortable fellow.

Like any other gentleman in the western world, he wore a frock coat, somewhat shorter than in earlier decades, with a single vent behind and two small cloth-covered buttons in the small of the back. His trousers were rather narrow, of a very thick cloth, and to a later generation might have seemed rather untidy, for the fashion of giving trousers a crease had scarcely come into use as yet. His shoes were polished and boned so that they twinkled and gleamed. Across his waistcoat hung a gold chain from his fob watch. His shirt was white with a stiff detachable collar; around this was a narrow silk cravat with polka dots, tied in a loose bow that gave him a faintly artistic appearance. The only parts of his clothing that were particularly Russian were the big greatcoat with a fur collar, which he had undone inside the enclosed sled, and the fur hat that lay on the seat beside him.

Nicolai Bobrov was thirty-seven. The hair on his head and the neat, pointed beard he favoured were prematurely greying. His nose seemed to have grown more hooked, giving his face something of the Turkish cast of his ancestors; but the face had few lines and still often wore the same, open look it had possessed in the days when he was a student trying to persuade his father’s peasants to usher in a new world.

How far away those days seemed. Nicolai was a family man now. He had a daughter; an elder son, named Mikhail after his grandfather; and this last year there had been a new baby, a boy they had called Alexander. In his pocket now he was proudly carrying a photograph, pasted on board, of the little boy. If asked his politics nowadays, he would certainly reply, in a general way: ‘I am a liberal.’

If the revolutionary fervour of his student days had not lasted, it was not surprising. Nicolai had never forgotten the humiliation of 1874. ‘The peasants weren’t even interested,’ he had soon confessed. He had felt cheated by Popov too. ‘He was just an opportunist who made a fool of me,’ he told his parents. And a few years later, when the terrorists killed the Tsar, he had only shaken his head sadly. ‘Even a Tsar is better than chaos,’ he nowadays declared. To which he would add: ‘Russia will be a free democracy one day; but the truth is, we aren’t ready yet. It’ll take
a generation, maybe two.’ Until then, thank God, Russia was quiet.

And quiet, nowadays, it certainly was. Immediately after the assassination of his reforming father, the new Tsar Alexander III had moved decisively. The murderous People’s Will inner circle had been discovered and smashed; that good old reactionary, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, had been brought back as Minister of the Interior and soon had a special police service of no less than a hundred thousand gendarmes. Most of the empire had been placed under martial law by the Tsar’s so-called Temporary Regulations. These had been in force for ten years now – but then, as Nicolai liked to say: ‘When our rulers do something good in Russia, they say it’s permanent and then revoke it; but when they do something bad, they say it’s temporary, and it stays for ever!’

There was censorship and internal passports; in the universities, all student bodies were forbidden; in the countryside, new officials called Land Captains had been appointed to deal out government justice to the peasants without benefit of independent law courts. And the most perfect expression of the official attitude came from the Procurator of the Holy Synod who, when asked the government’s role in education, replied: ‘To keep people from inventing things.’

It was a police state. And yet, Nicolai thought, perhaps it was for the best. At least there was order. True, there had been a few strikes; true, down in the south there had been some pogroms against the Jews. One could not approve of that. But there had been no more bombs. And as he looked out at the winter city a thought suddenly occurred to him, which made him smile.

For the truth is, he concluded, it’s as if the Russian empire has been under snow for the last ten years. Yes, that was it exactly. Winter was harsh and cold. Nothing could grow; the snow stifled everything. People might complain at this huge, Russian stasis, but the snow also protected the land; under it, delicate seeds could survive the howling winds above. Under the great snow-covering of tsarist rule, perhaps Russia could slowly prepare herself for her new and different future in the modern world. And when the time is right, he thought, our Russian spring will be beautiful. The idea pleased him.

Now the sled was crossing the frozen River Neva. On the embankment opposite lay the Winter Palace; to the left, the thin
spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral gleamed in the pale light. In the middle of the ice stood a remarkable construction: a towering wooden scaffolding, over fifty feet high, from which descended a steep runway covered with ice. This was one of the city’s favourite winter pastimes – an ice mountain, as the huge slide was called. As he watched, Nicolai saw two couples in tiny sleds go whirling down it with shouts of glee, and he smiled: police state or not, life in the Russian capital was not so bad.

A few minutes later they were on the south bank, past the palace, and turning into the broad, handsome vista of Nevsky Prospect. And here again, Nicolai smiled.

‘The Street of Toleration’ they affectionately called the Nevsky, these days. On it, almost side by side, could be found the churches of Dutch Calvinists, German Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Armenians, as well of course as the many Orthodox ones. Off the Prospect lay famous concert halls and theatres, and the fashionable English Club. The royal confectioner had a shop down here where one could buy chocolates that, very likely, had lain uneaten in the Winter Palace the night before.

Nicolai had been living in St Petersburg for nearly ten years now. He was not rich, but thanks to a sinecure at one of the ministries, where he appeared only once a week, his income was enough to get by on. He was a member of the Yacht Club, where there was an excellent French chef. Frequently he took his wife to one of the capital’s four opera houses where one could nowadays hear not only the masterpieces of Europe but also the new homegrown operas by those Russian geniuses who had suddenly burst upon the world in the last few decades: Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov. Or they would go to the Maryinsky theatre to see the finest ballet performances in the world. In the summer, the family would go to a pleasant summer house they rented, just a few miles away on the Gulf of Finland. And once a year, he bought his wife a present from Fabergé the jeweller – for while that master produced his fabulous Easter eggs for the Tsar, the Fabergé store also had hundreds of charming little items for more modest purses like that of Nicolai Bobrov.

Truly, in St Petersburg in 1891, a liberal-minded man like Bobrov had little apparent cause to worry about the future.

But the summons from his father had been worrying.

This last year, all over Russia, the harvest had failed. St
Petersburg was still supplied but reports were coming in from the central provinces of shortages in the countryside. ‘You needn’t worry though,’ a friend at the relevant ministry assured him. ‘We’re organizing relief. We’ve got everything in hand.’

Nicolai had been surprised therefore when, the previous week, he had received the letter from his father.

‘Frankly, my dear boy, the situation in the villages here is desperate and getting worse. We are doing what we can, but my health is not what it was and I can scarcely cope. If you possibly can, for the love of God, come.’

He had also realized, with a pang of guilt, that nearly two years had passed since he had last been to see his parents. He felt sure that his father must be exaggerating; but even so, it was with some misgivings that, on this grey December day, Nicolai Bobrov set off for Russka.

A hiss of steam, a whistle, a succession of puffs like a drum roll, and the train was gliding out through the suburbs towards the snowy wastes beyond.

The St Petersburg to Moscow express. In its beautifully panelled and richly upholstered coaches, one could dine and sleep in luxury unmatched on any other railway in the world. Or how delightful just to sit, hearing the soft hiss of the samovar that was ready in every carriage, and gaze out as the train rushed along the rails that crossed the endless plain.

For to Nicolai, the railway meant the future. The government of the Tsar might be reactionary, but this very year it had begun a vast and daring enterprise: a railway line that would eventually stretch all the way from Moscow across the huge Eurasian landmass to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, thousands of miles away. The Trans-Siberian Railway. There would be nothing quite like it in the world.

This was the new Russia, the world that was to come. The Russian peasant – the
muzhik
in his
izba
– might be a poor, ignorant fellow, still in the dark ages; the newly conquered tribesmen in the Asian deserts might still be living in the world of Genghis Khan and Tamerlaine; but over the surface of this huge, primitive empire, the modern world was running bands of steel. Huge coal reserves were being mined in the distant deserts and mountains above Mongolia; there was gold in the bleak wastes of
eastern Siberia. German and French capital was flowing in to finance huge government projects: the vast resources of the empire were only beginning to be tapped.

And this was the point. No one doubted Russia’s military might. She had put the humiliation of the Crimean War behind her. Though she had sold the huge, empty territory of Alaska to the United States two decades ago, her empire still covered most of the vast north Eurasian plain, from Poland to the Pacific. The Turkish empire trembled before her; the British empire watched her advance across Asia with cautious respect; in the Far East, the crumbling empire of China would give her whatever she wanted; Japan was anxious to cooperate and trade. And now, gradually, we shall bring our people into the modern world by exploiting this vast wealth we own. That was Nicolai Bobrov’s hope, and his joy in the railway.

He was sitting alone in the restaurant car. They had just brought him caviar and blinis, and a glass of vodka. The table was laid for four people, but the other chairs were unoccupied. It was a bore, having no one to talk to.

So when the waiter asked if he might seat two other gentlemen at the table, Nicolai nodded that he had no objection and looked up curiously to see what sort of companions he was getting.

The two men sat down quietly opposite him, scarcely looking at him. One was an odd-looking fellow he had never seen before.

And the other was Yevgeny Popov.

There was no mistaking him – the shock of carrot-red hair, the same greenish eyes. He had not changed much except that in his face there was now a certain maturity, a settled strength which suggested he might have suffered. Noticing that Nicolai was staring at him, he looked carefully into his face. And then, without smiling, he quietly remarked: ‘Well, Nicolai Mikhailovich, it’s been a long time.’

How strange. Though they had not met for seventeen years, Nicolai expected his former friend to look awkward. After all, Popov had used him cynically and then extorted money from his father. But Popov looked neither guilty nor defiant: he just gazed at Nicolai calmly, taking him in, asked him where he was going and on hearing said thoughtfully: ‘Ah, yes. Russka,’ before turning to his companion and remarking: ‘The big Suvorin factory is there, you know.’

And now Nicolai looked at the other man. He too was a curious-looking fellow. He might, Nicolai guessed, be in his early twenties, though his ginger hair was already receding fast. He had a small, reddish, pointed beard. His clothes and bearing suggested that he might belong to the minor provincial gentry and probably be destined for a career as a minor official of some kind.

But what a strange face.

‘This is Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov,’ Popov introduced him. ‘He’s just taken his legal exams in St Petersburg and now he’s going to be an attorney.’ The lawyer politely acknowledged Nicolai and gave him a slight, rather grim, smile.

Ulyanov? Where had Nicolai heard that name before? Though his hair was ginger, his appearance was definitely Asian. He had a stocky body, a dome-shaped head, high cheekbones, a rather broad nose and mouth and unmistakably Mongolian eyes. He didn’t look Russian at all. But that name … what was familiar about it?

Of course! Alexander Ulyanov. Four years ago a young student of that name had been mixed up with some half-baked plot to kill the Tsar. The business had been quite isolated – a madcap plan of some idiotic young people. But the unfortunate young man had refused even to apologize and had paid with his life. Nicolai remembered his own revolutionary career as a student and inwardly shuddered. Might he, in different circumstances, have done such a thing? Ulyanov. It had been a respectable family, he remembered: the father had been a schools inspector of humble origin, but had done well enough to reach the rank that gave the family hereditary nobility. He wondered if this young lawyer were anything to do with them.

For the first few minutes, the conversation was hesitant. Nicolai was curious about what his former friend had been doing but Popov gave him evasive answers, while Ulyanov seemed content to sit quietly watching them. Nicolai gathered that Popov had spent some time abroad, but that was all.

Yet it was a pity to let the opportunity go. He’s sure to be up to something, Nicolai thought. And then he’ll mysteriously disappear for another twenty years. So after a few more indirect passes he suddenly asked bluntly: ‘So tell me, Yevgeny Pavlovich, are you still working for the revolution – and when is it coming?’