The People's Train (12 page)

On the day that we left prison, the pavement across from the gate was thronged with Australian workers holding banners about freedom of speech and assembly. We went out the gate unmolested by police. I saw Paddy Dykes waiting among the crowd, in his old checked suit and a sweat-stained hat. He nodded knowingly and doffed the hat, but as one who had done very little for us, whereas I knew he had done much. More obviously and more regally, Hope Mockridge had her car there and, within its ample seats and on her sideboards, gave us a ride back to Mrs Adler’s boarding house along avenues of cheering workers.

Of course I hungered to see Hope in a more private manner, but it would be hard to arrange anything that day.

Rybakov greeted me at Adler’s. The Russia House project seemed to be at the forefront of his mind. There were a number of donations, he told me, but this scheme I had felt so keenly about seemed very remote and bloodless today. Finding a house for our people, said Rybakov, was all the more urgent because now the immigration officials gave Russian arrivals only two days at the migrant dosshouse. The People’s Train had vanished from his imagination for a time.

I was more interested in my precious printing press, which had gone unconfiscated and which was now ready to be employed again in making a newspaper with a new title, just to confuse the authorities.
Izvestia Russkikh Emigrantov,
I suggested to Rybakov. I would write an editorial in favour of the new house, I promised him.

And a library, he said. I have already gathered some hundreds of books.

After dinner that night he took me to see a two-storey stone house in Stanley Street opposite Delaney’s Hotel and suddenly I was back to my former self. The property had stables converted into servants’ rooms out the back. It was going for three hundred and ten pounds. The front building, which Rybakov now inspected by twilight, was a sound structure, and the upper front rooms, including a former billiard room, eminently suitable for a library. Downstairs varnished doors could be opened between parlour and sitting room to create a space that nearly encompassed the whole lower floor and provided a suitable meeting room.

In the first edition of my
Izvestia,
for copies of which existing subscriptions to the
Ekho
were valid, I reminded our readers of the late
Ekho
that it had long been inevitable that we must have our own home in Brisbane. Why throw away disgraceful amounts of money in rent if the same amount could cover our own home? Above all, it was important to have a place where we could feel at home and be at home. Which we could treat however we chose, and from which we could not be evicted. The manager of the immigration dormitory had shown a hostility towards Russian immigrants based on the blood relationships between the British monarchy and that of Russia, and upon our obvious ingratitude to our kindly tsar. Our own house would override his prejudices.

Donations to be sent to members of the federation: Artem Samsurov, V.I. Rybakov, G.F. Suvarov.

Then I added the address of Adler’s boarding house, our humble but comfortable habitation in South Brisbane – an address that demonstrated that we were not ourselves living like
barins,
noblemen, in the city.

After our first needy reunion at the Stefanovs’, Hope and I somehow became lovers accustomed to each other’s company. Over months, when she came to help me with the subscription records for
Izvestia,
we would choose by subtle mutual signals, not always lacking in affection, as couples do when they have become sure of each other, not to do anything at all except work.

Had imprisonment for two months changed everything? I can’t say it had. I began to quibble inwardly about minor traits of her character that didn’t matter at all. I began to fret about one stupid thing: she utterly lacked the artful sideways glances, the sway of the hip, what people called coquetry – a welcoming lasciviousness other women were said to have. Though lovely beyond description, she did not have lightness. Though so abundantly beautiful, she was no seductress.

What sort of self-respecting man would bemoan such a fatuous lack in a woman? I am sad to confess I did. A man thinks he can hide such lesser disappointments from a woman. The taking of pleasure is to an extent a shared, animal act. But it is a total confession, too. All is communicated on either side – a slight reluctance in the slope of a woman’s shoulder, a slight begrudgery in the man’s plenteous seed.

So I did not deserve Hope Mockridge. But after Podnaksikov had loosened my tongue in prison, I saw her chiefly as my confessor. Where I’d been sparing with details of my past, now I could not stop talking about it. It was as if I were trying despite myself to prove to her how alien I was. And I feared, too, that if I did not continue to distract her with tales some inevitable quarrel which was already in the air would be triggered.

I started at the beginning and told her everything I had already told Podnaksikov, then more.

After my first six-month detention in Poltava, I told her, I was not permitted to return to the technical university in Moscow but went back to my Kharkov circle with the reputation of having at least tasted prison. The gendarmes and Okhrana watched me for a while though. Did they want to make me their agent? They never approached me. I liked to think they could sense I could not be turned. But they might have already recruited enough of our people anyhow.

Prison had made me more pragmatic and less deluded as I joined the strike committee of the organisation in Kharkov. There was a strong sense that a general strike was imminent. I and others argued that we needed to involve the troops. In a bar, I had got talking with a soldier of the Starobelsk regiment who turned out to be a well-read young fellow. He gave me the impression of a regiment disgruntled with its colonel and its officers over everything from their hauteur to the issue of rations and the concern that they’d be butchered under such incompetents if they were sent to fight the Japanese. He confided in me a little too easily that there was a secret revolutionary committee within the regiment and I told him I would dearly like to meet the members. A sergeant arrived to meet me one night, a handsome man with a big moustache who looked like a true soldier of the tsar, but once he had assured himself that I had not been got to by the secret police in prison, he proved a very bitter man. When he was a peasant conscript, he had believed all they told him, and when the priest blessed the soldiers he had felt fortified against the bullets of the Asiatic barbarians. Now he believed his officers to be liars and buffoons.

Through carefully extending my contacts, I found the soldiers’ committee proved to be broader than I had thought – it included all four regiments of the garrison brigade of Kharkov. I worked hard, meeting my fellows every day and every night, introducing factory workers and our bourgeois backers and new comrades from the army to each other. There arose that undeniable giddiness, warmth and brotherhood of conspiracy. Those who sought that and only that became easy targets for police. They became, in fact, so infatuated by the beauty of a plan they felt they possessed a talisman that made them immune to chance and risk. In the end they sought compliments from the greater world for being part of such an enterprise. They might tell brothers, sisters, parents who – in their concern – went and negotiated on their son’s or brother’s behalf with the Okhrana.

The events in Moscow in 1905 and Piter were well known to Hope. Our Kharkov strike committee, of which I was elected chairman in October, waited and planned. By November 1905, the waiters and printers, railway and engineering workers, and soldiers of the Starobelsk regiment and the Gabrielov machine-gun battalion joined in a great strike procession – the soldiers marching without their weapons. We addressed the masses of our fellow strikers at the marshalling point. It was a day when, after the strikes and civil war of Moscow, while working-class suburbs were being shelled by the tsar’s artillery, no careful words would do. I declared that all over Russia, in every city, this struggle was occurring, and the workers and peasants in the army were involved with their civil brothers and sisters in overturning the tyrant. Later, I would be accused of having said, Long live the armed uprising! Down with the autocracy! Down with the murdering cavalry and artillery! Down with the hangman!

Perhaps I did.

On the eve of the march, one General Nechayev arrived in the city with a regiment from Siberia, made up in considerable part by Siberian natives like the Yakuts – unlikely, so it was thought, to have sympathy with people so far from their home. The tsarist generals always had a preference for using the bulk of cathedrals or vast public buildings to deploy their cavalry behind. As our procession rallied, General Nechayev set up his Russian machine-gunners of the Okhotsky regiment at the head of the city square, one of the biggest in Europe, the town’s pride. The Siberians were obviously detailed to attack us from the flanks. As our march entered the square, I called through a megaphone to the men of the machine-gun regiment, and we had the pleasure of seeing them haul the machine-guns away as their officers – running about with revolvers – raged at them and screamed threats at their troops, who ignored them or, in some cases, yelled threats back. Similarly, some dragoons and the Cossacks waiting behind the machine-gunners were ordered to retreat because their officers could no longer be sure their orders would be followed and so did not give them.

This was a startling, heady moment. The workers and soldiers in our procession marched on carrying red flags and singing:

At the heart of the city, the overthrow of tsarism was proclaimed by a number of speakers. The marchers resolved on a strike, including the railway men of the great junction of Kharkov. After the meeting, we members of the strike committee were immediately hurried away with other committee members and hidden in a series of apartments, very opulent ones in many cases, in the city. We changed our addresses every twenty-four hours, sometimes – despite curfews – at night, and with the help of a sympathetic policeman.

At a secret meeting of our committee we set 12 December as a date for a further march, to which my brave sergeant from the Starobelsk regiment committed his soldiers again. The final committee meeting was to occur in the foreman’s office at the Polyakov railway ironworks the night before the march. Snow fell steadily on the city – it was an excellent night for the police to stay in barracks. But we became alarmed when no one arrived from the garrison committee even though we were expecting them. News arrived by a fourteen-year-old runner. The barracks had been surrounded by Cossacks, and the Starobelsk and Okhotsky machine-gun regiments had been disarmed and locked up within them.

Before we could break up and leave, we heard trucks and wagons in the street. An officer announced through a megaphone that the works were surrounded by Cossacks and artillery, and that we had a quarter of an hour to surrender before the factory would be shelled. Behind heavy equipment, we took up positions with our rifles, and at the close of fifteen minutes saw from snow-blurred factory windows the artillerymen load and pull the lanyards of their howitzers in the square.

It was my first experience of such bewildering noise, and the roof of the raw-materials shed came in on us, killing many union representatives. I found myself deafened and dazed on the floor with a bent and disembodied leg next to me. The Cossacks were storming the factory and found and arrested one hundred and forty of us from various unions and organisations. As the leg was swept away by the hands of Cossacks, I was roughly picked up, knocked down again, picked up and tethered, and felt I had become a tiny echo lost in a huge cave of skull.

I was taken to a police station. Even there the walls were lined by Cossacks, advising and yelling such things as, Teach the bastards a lesson or we will. I was tripped and kicked but otherwise got to my cell unharmed.

When I appeared before a judge, my sentence was five years’ imprisonment. With others of the strike committee, I was moved eastwards towards Kazan in a prison train with whitewashed windows. The Kazan prison had the reputation of being one of the most severe in the empire, supervised by a very ambitious and severe governor. He ordered us to be locked up in the same wing as the death cells. We could hear and see men and women led out late at night to be shot. From glimpses through the eyehole in my cell, I remember how they went, these people, many of them anarchists, some of them political assassins. Most were much older than me – late thirties to fifty years of age – and I saw one woman of about forty, square-faced, well-dressed, holding her glasses in her hand. What had they done that I had not? First, they all looked like people of incontrovertible intellect. I did not want to be shot, but at the same time it was as if the Okhrana refused to consider me serious enough to be executed. Second, they were old enough to have repented of their revolutionary fervour but had not. And third, they had done something enduringly dangerous to the tyrant, an objective in which I had so far failed. As these sacred souls, each of the faces a scar on the memory, marched out, the rest of us hammered on the walls, the plank beds and the bars. The guards in the yard were authorised to shoot at the windows and for ten seconds bullets would go zipping around the walls. Then those in the corridors broke into the cells, beat us with rifle butts, and dragged some of us away to black-walled punishment cells.

One young man, a member of the strike committee, Petya, was lining up in front of me one day as – chained – we were being readied for the austere exercise yard. For some reason, a hung-over guard hit him across the face with a bundle of keys. The young man stood still, his lips and nostrils bleeding.

Move, said the warder.

My friend would not move.