He did not want to hurt his family; but in the last few months since his marriage, life had become impossible. The arrival of his wife – a lively, golden-haired young girl – in the household had produced a new pecking order. While Arina and Varya had previously expected obedience from his sister Natalia, they rather ignored her now and concentrated their attention on Boris’s wife. ‘They think they own me,’ she would furiously complain.
But it was his mother’s unexpected pregnancy which really brought about the crisis. ‘We shall be starting a family also,’ the girl protested to Boris. ‘And where will that leave us, when it’s her new child who’ll be the important one?’ His father Timofei, too, always moody and feeling the strain of the new situation, had taken to shouting at him on the slightest pretext. ‘Call that a way to stack wood, you Mordvinian?’ he would bellow; and to Boris’s wife he had promised: ‘I may have failed with my son, but I’ll thrash some sense into my grandchild when you give me one – you can be sure of that!’ By the time the spring thaw came, Boris had decided it could go on no longer.
And this was why, that very morning, he had made the fateful announcement that he was moving out.
He had several friends who had done the same thing in recent years. ‘It’s hard when you start with your own izba,’ they had warned him. ‘But then it gets easier. And it’s better really once you’ve done it, because you don’t quarrel with your family so much.’ He was sure it was a good idea.
Indeed, he would have made the break sooner but for one consideration: his sister Natalia. For what would become of her? What would the family do to the fifteen-year-old girl with the pouting mouth and the air of secret defiance? ‘They’ll break her,’ he told his wife ruefully. ‘They’ll work her into the ground to make up for us.’ He had suggested taking Natalia into their house, but his wife had refused. Natalia, too, had been adamant. ‘Go, Boris,’ she told him. ‘Don’t worry about me.’ And when he asked her how she would manage: ‘I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ She grinned: ‘I have a plan.’ He wondered what it was.
It was an hour later that Timofei Romanov, rather pale, stood staring across an open field. Beside him was the man who would now decide his fate.
The village elder was a small, grey-bearded peasant with a loud voice and a decisive manner, whom Timofei respectfully addressed in the old-fashioned way, by his patronymic only, as ‘Ilych’.
Nervously Timofei explained the situation, scarcely daring to look at the elder; but when he had done, unable to bear the suspense, he turned to him abruptly and asked: ‘Well, Ilych, am I ruined?’ Whatever the other said, he knew it would be final; and there would be nothing in the world he could do about it.
Timofei Romanov was free: and yet he was not. In this he resembled most of the former serfs in Russia. For when the Tsar’s advisers had given the serfs their land, they had encountered one other, most difficult problem: what if these peasants, no longer owned by their masters, started wandering about doing what they liked? ‘How will we control them? How can we ensure that the land is tilled and taxes collected?’ Freedom was all very well, but one couldn’t have chaos. And so, in their wisdom, the authorities had devised a simple solution. The peasant, though legally free, would still be tied to his place. The land taken from the landlord was not given to the peasant individually, but to the village commune, which was made responsible for taxes and everything else. If, for instance, Timofei wanted to travel to Moscow, he would have to apply to the village elder for a passport, just as he had formerly applied to Bobrov. Even minor matters of justice rested with the commune. And above all, it was the village elder who periodically redistributed the scattered strips of land – so many good, medium and poor for each family. In short Timofei Romanov was now, in effect, a member of a medieval village without a feudal lord, or, to use a modern term, a compulsory peasant cooperative. The terms do not matter for, in reality, they are one and the same.
And this was the problem: if Boris left home and set up on his own, the land would be repartitioned. Timofei’s share would probably be reduced. The land he had now was not enough to support the family and its obligations. How would he manage?
‘I’ll have to cut your holding,’ Ilych said brusquely.
‘How much?’
The elder considered. ‘By half.’ It was even worse than Timofei had feared. ‘I’m sorry,’ the elder went on, ‘but there are more young people in the village now. There isn’t enough land for them all as things are.’ Then he shrugged irritably, and left.
Yet whatever his troubles that morning, Timofei Romanov would have been dismayed had he known what was passing through his mother-in-law’s mind.
Arina was sixty-three. She was the senior woman in the family, and she let no one forget it. And above all, she loved her daughter Varya. ‘I didn’t nearly kill myself for her in thirty-nine,’ she would say, ‘to see harm come to her now.’ As the years went by, it became clear that the mark left by that terrible time was never going to leave her. And she herself would often remark: ‘I lived on one turnip for a month that year and my stomach’s never been the same. That’s why I’m older than I should be.’ And it was true that though she was still at first glance a comfortable, round little babushka like any other, there was an inner hardness concealed within a ruthless instinct for survival that made her formidable.
And now her daughter was going to have another child. She had watched quietly as the little family drama began to unfold. Several times, poor Varya had turned to her miserably and said: ‘God knows, it’d be a blessing if I lost the baby before it was born.’ And now, as she saw how events were shaping, Arina came to her own private conclusion.
If things don’t improve, she decided, the child will have to die. Such things were not uncommon. She had known a woman who had drowned her child; exposing them was easier and less obvious. If it has to be, then I shall do it, she thought. That’s what grandmothers are for.
But she kept this decision to herself. And when he returned gloomily from his talk with the village elder and told them the news, Timofei had no idea of the meaning of his mother-in-law’s grim look. Instead he remarked to his wife: ‘We may have to put Natalia in the factory. Send her to me.’
As Peter Suvorin followed in the wake of his grandfather Savva, a new idea took shape in his mind: Perhaps I should kill myself.
For some reason the thought had an extraordinary beauty. How would he do it though? That was something else to ponder. Whatever he did, one thing was certain: he must escape from this terrible trap.
If only his father had not died. Remembering his own harsh upbringing by Savva – and also because, when Peter was only ten, he had lost his wife – Ivan Suvorin had been a kindly father with the wisdom to let his two sons be themselves. Vladimir, five years the older, was a born businessman and Ivan had let him manage one of the Moscow plants when he was only seventeen. But Peter had intellectual leanings and – to old Savva’s disgust – had even been allowed to go to university.
Then, six months ago, Ivan had suffered a massive stroke, and Peter’s sunlit world had abruptly come to an end.
I’m completely in his power, he realized. For old Savva had asserted himself with extraordinary force. Within a week, he had taken personal control of everything. Peter’s studies were cancelled at once; and while young Vladimir was left to manage the factories in Moscow, Savva had curtly ordered Peter to accompany him back to Russka. ‘For it’s time,’ the old man told his wife, ‘that we took this one in hand.’
To Peter, it had been a revelation. As a child in the comfortable Moscow house, his grandparents had been distant figures whose occasional visits were treated with a kind of religious respect. His grandfather was the tallest man he had ever seen: with his thick shock of hair, his huge grey beard and piercing black eyes he was as terrifying as he was silent. Ever since he had gained his freedom, Savva had dressed in a long black coat and an immensely tall top hat: so that once, as a little boy, Peter had dreamed that the great tower in the Mos
cow Kremlin had turned into his grandfather and gone stalking across the city like an avenging fury. Many times, with a wry smile, Ivan had told his sons how Savva had broken a violin over his head. Peter avoided the old man as much as possible.
But now that he had been forced to live in his grandparents’ house, Peter’s feelings had changed. The childhood fear still remained, but it was accompanied now by something else: and this was awe.
Savva Suvorin was something more than a mere mortal. He was a law unto himself and unto God: fixed, immutable, and merciless. He was eighty-two and stood as straight as he had at thirty. He strode everywhere, on foot. The Theodosian community to which he had belonged had been broken up by the authorities in the 1850s and, like many other merchants, he had found it necessary to subscribe, nominally, to the Orthodox Church. But he remained an Old Believer in private and still ate alone out of a wooden bowl, with a little cedarwood spoon with a cross on it. The break-up of the Theodosians also removed any last chains that community might have had upon the Suvorin enterprises. Now they belonged entirely to Savva and his family. And they were huge.
Peter knew the holdings at Moscow: the dye factory by the river; the plant for printing calico; the glue factory; the starch factory; and the little printing press his brother Vladimir had set up. But never, until now, had he really understood what had taken place at Russka.
Russka had never been beautiful, but now it was hideous. On the steep slope down to the river, the huddled huts, lean-tos and straggling fences seemed to topple into the water as though they had been tipped out of the town like so much refuse. Inside the walls, the huge brick cotton mill with its rows of blank windows dwarfed the church, and its belching octagonal chimney out-matched even the ancient watchtower by the town gate. The cloth mill was nearly as big; there were long, barn-like buildings containing the linen factory. People were drawn there from miles around and old Savva Suvorin ruled it all.
The force of will that had built this place up was frightening to contemplate. And it’s all there, in his face, Peter thought. The great square head, the smouldering eyes, the heavy brows, and that mighty, shapeless promontory of a nose. Did they still make noses like that? His father’s had been large, his own inclined to heaviness; but history itself might have paused, he thought, before Savva’s features, like a sculptor before a stubborn granite rockface. My God, he realized, he’s like one of those elders of ancient times, from beyond the Volga – only turned into a merchant. Such was Savva Suvorin.
At first, life had not been too unpleasant. His grandparents lived in a simple stone house, not a tenth the size of the big Moscow house. It was furnished simply, with heavy, rather ugly furniture, which was impressive for being solid and highly polished. But what did the old people want with him? When he took Peter with him on his rounds, Savva gave no indication of what he expected; and after a few weeks Peter supposed the old man was bored with his company and would soon send him back to Moscow.
It was his grandmother, soon after Christmas, who had actually dealt the blow.
‘We’ve decided you should start work in the linen factory,’ she calmly announced. ‘You’ll get to know the village too, that way.’
Maria Suvorin’s face was still, in old age, perfectly round; her nose, if anything, even more pointed; her compressed mouth, despite her huge riches, never smiled. And behind narrow slit lids resided the same pair of hard grey eyes. Like most simple Russian women, her white hair was parted in the middle, drawn tightly round her head and fixed at the back. The only luxuries she allowed herself were the rich silk brocade dresses which ballooned out to the ground like a bell. Over her head she liked to wear a big shawl that spread over her shoulders and upper arms and was pinned under her chin so that she exactly resembled one of those brightly painted little Russian dolls – a comfortable image which was quite contradicted by her ruthless character.
‘But I’m quite unsuited to this kind of work,’ he protested.
‘We think it’s best,’ she calmly replied.
‘But what about my studies?’
‘That’s all over now,’ she said placidly. And then, not unkindly: ‘You surely can’t expect your eighty-year-old grandfather to do all your work for you, can you?’
And now, on this cold, damp spring morning, as the starlings wheeled over the rooftops, it seemed to Peter that he could bear it no more.
He had tried to take an interest and find something to excite his imagination. When Savva told him, ‘The American Civil War hit our cotton supplies for a while’ or: ‘We can get cotton from Asia now’, Peter conjured up images of distant ships from the New World, or caravans across the desert, and told himself that the Suvorin enterprises were part of some larger, exciting adventure. But each day as he was faced with the same grim chimneys, the endless lines of spinning machines, and the monotonous, grinding work of the factories, he knew in his heart: Russka was a prison.
That morning they were doing what he hated most of all: they were inspecting the workers’ living quarters.
Life was not so bad out in the villages, where the flax for the linen was grown and every peasant izba produced its own handicrafts. But the living quarters in Russka were completely different. There were three long rows of wooden houses for worker families, which might not have been so bad except that three to five families were crammed into each house. ‘We are all one family,’ Savva would remind these people as he moved amongst them like a grim Old Testament patriarch. ‘We live together.’
And then there were the dormitories. Why was it that, as the two men entered one of these, Peter’s heart sank?
It was not that the place was squalid. It was spotlessly clean, light, airy and well heated. The long room was painted white, with a line of wooden pillars running down its centre and beds on each side. The beds consisted of a wide, shallow wooden tray divided in two so that in each half there was room for a narrow mattress and a few other possessions. Two people therefore, separated by a low partition, slept on each bed, and there were thirty people on each side of the dormitory. Under the bed was a wooden box that could be locked; and above, hanging from the wooden ceiling, was a rack over which the rest of the worker’s clothes could be hung. Men slept in one dormitory, women in another. It was all very orderly.
And yet depressing: and Peter knew exactly why. It was the people.
There was, as yet, no urban working class outside Moscow and St Petersburg – and scarcely there. The people who lived in the dormitories mainly belonged to two types. There were the children of peasant families from distant villages, who returned periodically to their families to give them their modest wages; and there were the former household serfs who had been given their freedom at the Emancipation but who, having no land to claim in any village, were cast loose and were entirely homeless. These were the wretched creatures who now cringed as he and his grandfather passed. They are just peasants, he thought, who are lost. And the very tidiness of the place made it seem even more inhumane.
And I am supposed to live here, he considered, and continue this terrible system. These people and these hideous factories, will feed my family. It was all so terrible. He did not know quite what he wanted out of life, but with a kind of desperate urgency he muttered under his breath: ‘Anything, anything – I’d even haul barges up the Volga, but not this.’
It was just as they were leaving the dormitory that Peter Suvorin chanced to glance back, and caught sight of something he was not meant to see.
At the far end of the dormitory, with his back to Peter, a youth of about his own age was doing an imitation of Savva Suvorin for his friends. Considering that he was small and pinched in appearance, it wasn’t bad. Seeing Peter watching, however, the others made warning signs, and the young fellow stopped and turned.
It was a shock to Peter. He had seen most kinds of expression on men’s faces, but he had never seen naked hate before. The youth either did not know it showed, or didn’t bother to conceal it: either way, it was unnerving.
My God, he thought, this fellow thinks I’m like Grandfather. If only he knew the truth! And then, even worse, he realized: But why would he even care that I sympathize with him, when I’m a Suvorin? And he fled.
He knew the young man slightly. He seemed harmless enough. His name was Grigory.
Natalia walked briskly along the path towards Russka. As soon as she had seen her father returning glumly from his interview with the village elder, she had slipped away. No doubt he would be looking for her by now.
She knew exactly what was in store for her. She would be sent to the Suvorin factory, and expected to stay there as long as the family needed her wages to make ends meet. She dreaded it. I’ll be a spinster and a slave all my life, she calculated.
She was determined to do better than that. When she was a little girl, because Misha Bobrov had always been friendly towards her father, both she and Boris had been sent to the little school in Russka for three years, where they had learned to read. Poor though she was, this unusual accomplishment had given her a secret pride, a belief that somehow – she had no idea how – she would amount to something.
But although she had guessed what it would mean for her, she had encouraged Boris to go. She loved him. She knew it had to be. At least he may be happy, she thought. And her plan – the plan of which she had spoken to Boris?
There was no plan. She had no idea what to do.
She pushed her scarf more tightly round her head as the damp air made her face smart. She could only think of one possible way out.
She was going to see Grigory.
Misha Bobrov and his wife Anna were beaming with pleasure.
It was just as dusk was falling that day that the little carriage arrived at the Bobrovo estate; and to their amazement, Nicolai jumped out, ran to embrace them, and announced: ‘I got leave from the university to come home early – so here I am.’ And when he added that he had brought a friend, Misha happily replied: ‘The more the merrier, my dear boy.’ And, taking his son by the arm with that gentle Bobrov gesture, he led the way inside.