A young worker with elfin ears wedged himself between me and Varvara, draping his arms heavily over our necks. “What are you girlies here for? Bit of fun?” He smelled sharp and bitter—he’d been drinking. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be a bourgeois missy. He was “the people,” after all. But Varvara had no compunctions. She shoved him off, sent him staggering into the men behind us, shouting at him, “Where’s your discipline? This is a strike, not a social hour!”
The Ericsson men laughed. “That’s the way, little sister,” said the blond man with the moustache, while our would-be Romeo shrugged, wiped his nose on his coat sleeve, and spit—not quite at us, but close enough.
A wave of song reached us from up ahead. We followed with our own wave, hearing the same melody from various sections of the boulevard like a rolling echo. Soldiers leaned out the window of a military hospital, waving handkerchiefs—my soldiers! Businesses were mostly closed, the streetcars abandoned. Some of the strikers were trying to turn one of the trams over. People stared at us from the cafés. No one had told them that the revolution had arrived. Arise, arise, working people…
As we approached the intersection at Sadovaya Street, cracking sounds echoed off the buildings. I stopped, confused, but people around us began to turn, break off. They were shooting at us! Or someone was shooting, it was hard to tell who. We followed the Ericssons, dodging behind Gostinny Dvor, the great department store, zigzagging past the Assignation Bank and around to the Chernyshevsky Bridge, then back onto Nevsky. The excitement! Our blood was up and I could understand how soldiers were able to run into the gunfire of enemy troops. When we rejoined the demonstration, there were more strikers than ever. Workers in an upper-story tailor shop waved red flags.
At last we poured into Znamenskaya Square, the plaza before the Nikolaevsky train station. And I saw that we were just one of many streams flooding in from all four directions to meet in the grand circle surrounding the statue of Alexander III, the emperor’s father, on his flat-footed horse, the tsar’s expression equal parts indigestion and disgust.
So many people, and they kept coming, pressing us farther into the square. No one could scare us away now—we were too many. How glad I was that Seryozha and Mina hadn’t come after all. They would have been apoplectic at the gunfire and panicky at the size of the crowd, whereas Varvara was thrilled and singing at the top of her lungs. And I was at one with these brave people, ready to change the fate of a nation.
Speakers climbed onto boxes to address the demonstration. “The old order has led the country to ruin!” shouted a gray-haired woman, hatless in a simple coat and dark skirt, pointing up at the statue. Her voice would have been the envy of a regimental sergeant major. “This is not the war to end all wars. It guarantees there will be more! It strengthens the autocracies! Forced annexations cause hatred among the peoples! Only socialism can guarantee a lasting peace.”
“Russia out of the war!” responded a handsome bearded student who had appeared at my side. He flashed a brilliant smile at me.
“Up with the people’s socialism!” Varvara shouted.
The gray-haired woman ceded the soapbox to a younger man. “We call for the return of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! We call for the arrest of the tsar’s ministers.” He pointed back up Nevsky, the way we’d come. “They’re huddling right now in the Mariinsky Palace. They’re rolling down the shades, they’re putting out ‘for rent’ signs!”
“Down with the autocracy!” “Arrest the ministers!” We cheered him on. “We demand abdication!”
I could taste it. It was so close, the new world. It was right at my lips like a red, red apple. We would make a new life for Russia with our own hands. What a day! Just to express such thoughts in broad daylight! Surely the revolution had arrived.
Then something happened in the crowd. I stood on tiptoe trying to understand. The blond Ericsson man pointed. Mounted Cossacks had arrived on their excited horses. We all stood as still and silent as Alexander III above us, waiting for what would come. I was afraid to breathe. “Steady,” said the Ericsson next to Varvara. “We’ve been here before.” My skin prickled under my coat. I clung to my friend as the horsemen rode by in double file, stitching their way through the crowd like thread through black cloth. I could smell the horses, hear the jingling of their spurs so close, the horses’ metal shoes scraping the pavement.
As at the Women’s Day march, they did not strike us. They had not given in. Shouts rose up from the crowd—“Comrade Cossacks!” “Urah!” And the sky seemed flung over us like a bright bolt of silk on a seamstress’s table, like a banner of heaven.
The speakers resumed their exhortations, the crowd more excited and confident than before. The student and I and Varvara exchanged quick bursts of conversation between speakers, praising this orator or that for a turn of phrase or a bit of information. What a day! I thought about this handsome student, just the kind of boy I really should be going with, instead of the opportunistic Kolya. He was at the university, studying law. I didn’t ask if he knew my father.
Now the crowd lurched forward again, sending me crashing into a striker. I clutched his belt to avoid falling. “Volynskys!” someone shouted. One of the elite Life Guard regiments, the tsar’s most loyal troops. Oh God. A bespectacled Volynsky officer on a nervous chestnut horse pointed his saber and sent a detachment of mounted guards into the crowd. “If they come close, put your coat over your head,” said the striker ahead of us. He took off his cap and showed us the metal sheet he’d put inside. “We’ve learned a few things. You’ll be fine.”
Then they came, riding at a slow trot. People shrieked and tried to move away. “Brother soldiers!” the striker called toward the horsemen. “We’re on the same side!” They unsheathed their swords, but after a moment it was clear they didn’t want to use them.
“Disperse!” a mounted Volynsky called out. “All you people! Please! We don’t want to use force! Please leave.”
“Hold your ground!” demonstrators cried out all around us. Varvara took my arm. She linked her other arm to that of the Ericsson man next to her, and the bearded student took mine. “Brother soldiers!” The strikers were calling to the mounted Volynskys. “Join us!” The tinny taste of panic settled in my throat. The crowd lurched again and I stumbled, cried out, falling, skinning my knees, then was grabbed back to my feet by Varvara and the student. The officer on his wheeling horse called again for the demonstrators to disperse. “You have two minutes to clear this square!”
An orator still on his soapbox called out, “We’re not clearing out! You clear out!” He turned to the line of soldiers, reaching his arms out to them, and shouted, “Brothers, we’re your comrades! We’re your brothers, your wives and fathers. Soldiers, don’t fire on your family! We’re hungry—we’re not your enemies!”
“One minute!”
There was no chance of clearing this enormous demonstration. I couldn’t have taken a half step to the left or right. It would be now. Either they would let us go as the Cossacks had, or we would die today in Znamenskaya Square. I held my ground among the Ericssons, gripping Varvara and the bearded student until my arms were numb. I could see a few of the Volynskys’ faces, hard, thin-lipped, pale.
The officer let his horse turn and raised his saber. “Fire!” he shouted.
I closed my eyes as the first shots were fired. They sounded like crackling wood in a hearth. Screams. But everyone held fast. Then a cheer rang out. “Urah!”
“They’re firing into the air,” shouted the bearded student.
We loosened our grip on one another and shouted out, “Brother soldiers!”
People were throwing things at the officer. “Go back to your tsar!” “Here’s a warning!” “Your day is over!”
A bugle sounded. I felt like a warhorse, my nostrils flared with excitement. Was this it? Had the revolution really come? The man on the box shouted, “Up with the Republic!” and another wave of shots rang out. This time he
crumpled, fell to one side, disappeared. “Hold your ground!” “Run!” “Don’t panic!” shouted voices all around me, barely audible over the screaming. People were pushing and pulling. I held on to the student, but where was Varvara?
“Sons of whores!” “Here they come.” “Hold your ground!” The crowd lurched again and I stumbled, falling, grabbing at people who were also falling. The student’s shoulder caught my jaw. Then we saw the horsemen, charging. I couldn’t hear my own screaming in the roar around me. How enormous were those steel-shod tons as they knocked people to the ground. A demon bay with a nasty wide stripe down its nose and blue eyes charged us. A woman in its path tried to run, but somebody pushed her down in his own terror, and she fell under the horse’s hooves. She curled into a ball trying to protect herself, her hands up around her head. The soldier did nothing to turn the horse away but let it rear and trample her. I screamed. People tore at the rider’s stirrups, but he wheeled around for another charge. With outstretched sword, he rode at us—those blue eyes, that blaze, the thunder. The saber entered the chest of the bearded student at my side, piercing him through like an olive. The soldier lowered his sword so that the student fell off by his own weight, then spurred his mount forward to the next victim.
I knelt by the young man who had stood by me for the previous hour. His dark eyes held all the surprise and anguish in the world. Blood guttered in his mouth as he tried to speak. It gurgled from his chest and pooled into the snow around him. “Shh…” I kept saying. “Tishe…” I held his hand between my own as my dress soaked up his blood, and watched his face grow paler. I couldn’t breathe. My mind simply could not comprehend what was happening.
“Marina!” Varvara jerked me up by the arm. “Let’s go!” But I didn’t want to leave him. What if he was trampled? “He’s dead, Marina,” she said. “They’re coming back!” She dragged me away, and we ran, slipping and staggering toward the north side of the square, away from the train station. Another assembly of soldiers at Suvorovsky Prospect picked people off as they fled.
We stumbled into a café that was filling with fleeing demonstrators, and huddled with the startled customers—travelers and tarts with their finery and cheap jewelry. The waiters had closed the curtains, but I peered between them out at the street. A worker held a cloth to his neck while blood poured through his fingers. All through the vast square, people scattered, leaving behind bodies in the snow like so many bundles fallen off a cart.
Varvara wrapped her arm around my waist, her head pressed to mine. Through the parted curtains, we watched men—workers and students with red crosses on armbands—dart back into the square to retrieve the wounded, slinging them over their shoulders and carrying them away. How naive I’d been, thinking I knew what a revolution was. Thinking that we could demand change and it would be given to us because we asked. I shivered, seeing the student’s blood on my dress, my coat, my shoes. His face, the way the sword impaled him. The blue eyes of the horse, the rider. I couldn’t stop shaking.
“You’re all right.” Varvara held me by the shoulders. “Look at me, Marina.” Her face swam into view. “We’ll get those bastards back. This isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.”
But it seemed like the end to me.
13 The Autocracy Has Spoken
I DIDN’T REMEMBER COMING home, whether people stared at me, covered in blood. Avdokia was there, her soft wrinkled face gray with worry. She laced her arm around my waist and walked me to the bathroom. She got me out of my things, though I was shaking, shaking…took off my coat, my dress, my shoes, soaked in his blood, sticky. I lay in the deep white tub, hot and pink. My lungs ached, my body ached. How could I have thought we could win our freedom? That things could be different? I should have known the weight of what held us down. How thick the walls. How final, how useless.
My old nanny wrapped me in thick towels, put me into a nightgown and a robe. She sat me at my vanity table and combed out my wet hair. Framed in the mirror’s reflection, a perfect fool. No heroine, no revolutionary. Only a pale, frightened girl, so much younger than I thought I was. The picture of Kolya and Volodya smiled up at me from under the glass. It meant nothing to me. Like something from another world.
She tsked and tugged at my wet hair, her little gnome face gazing at me in the mirror over my shoulder. Questions struck me like hard bits of snow, like sand. Wheres and whys, hows. I didn’t want to talk, only to be cared for like a child. She led me into the nursery, where we knelt together in front of the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin, who knew everything. The lamp flickered in the dimness. My nanny prayed for me, thanking the Virgin for bringing me home safely. I didn’t have to pray. The Virgin knew what had happened. It was too late to pray for the student. Time flowed but one way. I only thanked her that Seryozha had not been there. Then she put me to bed.
Later, I heard my parents come in, speak to the servants. I heard Avdokia telling them I wasn’t feeling well and had fallen asleep. After a while, Seryozha slipped in, sat on my bed, held my hands. He knew what had happened at Znamenskaya Square. “Forgive me,” he kept saying. I could tell he felt cowardly, as though he’d abandoned me. But there was nothing to say. I squeezed his hand. I missed him, I missed the way it had been when it was just the two of us in our beautiful child’s world. Games in the bushes and trees in the Tauride Gardens, our secret language, Rakuku. I missed my own life as if it were already over.
Mother opened the door, dressed for a party, smelling of Après l’Ondée. Her gown rattled with crystal beads like hail on pavement. And here was Father, in tailcoat and brilliant white shirt, threading cufflinks into his cuffs. Soldiers had fired on starving workers and they were going out to a party. What kind of a world was this? I thought of the way the young speaker had fallen from his box, shot like a duck on the wing. I remembered how the soldiers prevented people from leaving the square by forming two lines, the front on one knee, the back standing, and picking us off as we fled. After they were gone, Avdokia came and sat by my bed and stroked my hair. “Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Don’t you know if anything happened to you, I couldn’t live one day?” I held her hand pressed next to my face and wept.
I dreamed of horses, of being crushed, of falling under a carriage, my leg caught in the traces, being dragged along the ground. I dreamed I was riding a horse over a jump and it caught a hoof, threw me, then fell on me. I wept because I had died and hadn’t even had time to live yet.
Gunfire awakened me. I thought I had dreamed it, but no, there it was, the now familiar crackling. Whom could they be shooting now? Surely the workers had gone to bed long ago. Was it people they’d arrested—could they be executing them? I sat up, turned on the small lamp. Three a.m. How I wished that Kolya were here, someone I could really talk to. But he would never understand me. He would never understand what it felt like to take another’s cause as his own—or, rather, to see his own in another’s. Volodya would understand, but he was far away, in the snows of Galicia.
Instead, I padded to my bookcase and picked out an anthology of poetry, to see if anyone had something to say to me tonight. I kept thinking of Akhmatova’s poem, the one she read that night at the Stray Dog. What would I give now for the people to have their wish? Yes, my happiness, yes my laurel wreath. What a child I’d been.
I sat up in bed, reading, seeking consolation from poets to whom none of this would have been a surprise—Pushkin, Lermontov—when I noticed my door silently opening, as if pushed by a ghost. Was it the student? “Hello?” I whispered.
“It’s me.” Varvara slipped in, carrying an old portmanteau bag. She dropped it onto my bed. “She kicked me out, the witch.”
The high prattling of gunfire still rang out. She’d come all the way from Vasilievsky in this? She sat on my bed, sniffed the lavender cloth with which Avdokia had wiped my face, threw it back in its bowl. I didn’t want to see her. Her being here brought it all back—the stifling crowd, the horses, the woman curled on the ground. “W
ho let you in?”
She grinned, bouncing on the bed. “I bribed Basya to leave your back entrance open. Don’t be angry. Of all nights, we should be dancing for joy!”
She had lost her mind. We’d been in a massacre. It could have been us. I’d seen a beautiful young man bleed his life out on the stones of the square. I turned over and put the pillow over my head.
She pulled it away from me and threw it on the floor. “The soldiers are in mutiny, Marina. It’s moving among the barracks like a grass fire. Can’t you hear it? They’re rising up. They won’t do it anymore.”
The soldiers who had shot at us today? Please, Holy Mother…
“After the attack today, the strikers went to the barracks and talked to the soldiers. The Pavlovskys broke out to see for themselves. They clashed with the police. We’re not talking strikers now. There’s no going back. It’s mutiny.” The Pavlovsky regiment. The soldiers were fighting with the police. Watch the soldiers, Kolya had always said. I found myself shaking again. Varvara reached into her boot and pulled out a bent papirosa, the cheap cigarettes comprising an inch of bad tobacco and three of cardboard holder. She opened the fortochka and smoked, blowing the fumes out into the night. I could hear the gunfire louder on the clear air. “They’re all coming out. The Volynskys, the Pavlovskys, even the Preobrazhenskys.” The most prestigious Life Guard units. She exhaled a stream of smoke. “Just think, Marina—a quarter of a million soldiers are stationed right here in Petrograd. Add that to a city full of striking workers. That’s storing your powder next to your kindling.”