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The Quiet Revolutionary
WITH the outbreak of war, there were great changes at school. All our general subjects – maths, physics, chemistry, geography – were now taught in Russian instead of German. The girls’ school was confiscated by the army authorities and we had to move into the nearby new boys’ school, where tuition now took place in shifts: the girls in the morning as usual, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., the boys from 3 p.m. and into the evening. So there was Fräulein Röntgen, our ever-vigilant and stately headmistress, standing on the landing of the top floor at 2 p.m. watching over our departure and the arrival of any boys that may have come early, so that – God forbid – we should not meet each other.
We were not unhappy about the move and were looking forward to using the huge, well-equipped gymnasium. Our hopes were soon dashed, as that vast hall was confiscated and turned into a hospital for wounded officers. To my great relief there was now no more needlecraft, or crochet, or knitting lessons. Instead we were put behind sewing machines and assigned the patriotic duty of sewing undershirts and pants for the forces from some unbleached and rather rough cotton material. Unfortunately, I did not do much better than I had done previously at embroidery and always managed to get out two left legs, or two right sleeves. I had to undo almost as many seams as I had sewn. This workroom was in a gallery high above the gymnasium-hospital, now separated by a glass screen. We managed to scrape some of the whitewash off the glass, and no sooner was the teacher’s back turned than we dashed to the screen to peep down into the big hall with its rows of beds, the wounded men, and the nurses coining and going between them.
Then, in mid-September, my father died suddenly. My mother came dashing into our room early one morning, but I don’t think my father was aware of us any more. My mother was totally devastated and in despair. For fifteen years she had never taken any serious step without my father. Now she was alone with three growing children. All she could speak of on that first day was that she would take her own life and that we should follow her. There was a lot of coming and going: friends, undertakers, florists, the dressmaker. In those days the body remained in the house until the day of the funeral and by that time we were all fitted out with black dresses and crepe – which we had to wear for many months.
I somehow felt numb, but at the same time aware that something important had happened. Then came the day of the funeral; the slow walk behind the bier to the church and then to the cemetery. My mother was too weak for that and followed in a carriage. And afterwards, there were many, many Sunday afternoons all through the late autumn and into the winter, when my mother would take all three of us to the cemetery to tend the grave. But she rallied in the end and tried to cope as best she could.
The war proceeded and my initial childish enthusiasm and expectation of glorious victories evaporated as the horror and misery of war gradually became more apparent: when we received the touching, half-illiterate letters from soldiers at the front to whom we used to send parcels: or when we watched the wounded in our school gymnasium.
The deteriorating situation in 1915 led to violent anti-German pogroms. My mother was at that time working as a cashier with a large firm selling musical instruments in Kuznetski Most, one of the most fashionable streets in Moscow, the equivalent of London’s Bond Street. One day she came home pale, exhausted and frightened. The pogroms had started. Amongst the demolished shops was the one she had worked in. The owner was not German, but he had a German name and the mob made no distinction. Crowds from the street broke in, shouting and smashing everything they could lay their hands on. They dragged the grand pianos on the first floor to the French windows and pushed them out into the street. Other instruments and sheet music followed. Other shops suffered a similar fate. People were injured and some died. All this happened after the Russian army suffered a series of defeats and there were rumours that the pogroms were instigated by government agents and the ultra right-wing Tchornaya Sotnya (The Black Hundred) to divert people’s attention from such setbacks. Twenty years later the Nazis were to do the same in Germany, unleashing anti-Jewish riots and pogroms to divert the attention of the German workers from internal setbacks, unemployment and shortages.
Shortly after the Moscow pogroms a decree was issued banning all remaining Germans from certain streets in Moscow (and probably other large towns). Since most of them had been deported to Siberia, it affected mainly the old and the children. In some streets there may have been a factory or hospital or some other institution vulnerable to some sort of sabotage ‘by the enemy’, but in other instances there seemed to have been no rhyme nor reason for this decree. In any case, our street was exempt from this ban and my mother gave shelter to a number of Germans, not necessarily friends or even good acquaintances, accommodating them temporarily on makeshift beds in the corridor or wherever there was room. After a while the whole thing seemed to die down. However, to avoid any misunderstanding and possible unpleasantness, we changed our first names into more Russian-sounding ones: my name was international anyway, but my sister changed her Scandinavian name Helga to the Russian equivalent, Olga (or Olya), which she kept for the rest of her life. My brother Hardy was henceforth called by his second name, Andrei, or Andryusha. Our surname, Watz, was not German, but Latvian or Lithuanian.
When the German army laid siege to the Baltic states Aunt Mia, mother’s favourite sister, came to live with us with her three young children. She was terrified of the Zeppelin airships whenever they flew over Moscow. If she happened to be in the street, she screamed hysterically at the well-drilled children: ‘Lie down! Lie down!’, and they flung themselves on the pavement face down, in a flash. She was also excessively pious, unlike my mother who was simply conventionally religious. As long as Aunt Mia was with us, holidays were holy days and had to be strictly observed and no work was done. In fact, on Good Friday, I remember, I was not even allowed to practise the piano! She most certainly regarded this as a sin. And at parties when we, being older than her children, occasionally played games which imposed a penalty in the shape of a kiss from a boy, she thought it most immoral and vowed that her two daughters would never kiss a man before marriage. (The two girls, when grown-up, had different ideas.)
That summer I spent a few weeks with my Uncle Oskar, who was the garrison doctor at the Kronstadt fortress. It was pleasant enough, though somewhat boring. His young wife was busy with the household and their two-and-a-half-year-old, very independent daughter. So I was left on my own a great deal and got into trouble more than once. The first time I had wandered off on my own into the green and woody parts of the island where the garrison was stationed, not realising that it was out of bounds for civilians. I was stopped and my uncle was informed.
Another incident was rather more embarrassing. I had always been very keen on dancing, and particularly liked the free movements of Isadora Duncan, who discarded ballet shoes and strict classical ballet movements. (She visited Russia after the October Revolution, married the poet Sergei Yesenin, and died tragically in an open motorcar, strangled by her own long scarf which wound itself round the wheel. Yesenin, disappointed with the development of the Revolution, committed suicide in 1925.) My uncle’s drawing room had two large French windows looking out on to the street, and between them there was a huge mirror, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. We had never had such a mirror in our house. One night he and my aunt were out, the child was asleep and I was on my own. So the fancy took me to dance in front of the mirror – with no clothes on! I was thoroughly enjoying myself, turning, bending and stretching, until there was a noise in the entrance hall and my uncle and aunt entered. I had completely overlooked the fact that the curtains had not been drawn and that anybody passing the house could have looked through the ground-floor window and observe the niece of the respected garrison doctor, with his high military rank, performing in the nude. Uncle Oskar was rather annoyed and Aunt Alice somewhat embarrassed.
I also had a rather harrowing experience that summer. Some time before, I had become friendly with Erika Feldmann, also from our school, whose family were colourful and unconventional. The father worked in some office or other, but at heart he was an artist: he played the violin well and did not observe any hours for eating or sleeping. He had instilled his love for music into Erika. We both had a craze at that time for romantic operas, and over and over again we would play the piano transcript of La Traviata, Rigoletto and other operas together. Or listen to her father playing in his tiny room behind the kitchen. Together we visited the small local cinema, sitting on uncomfortable benches right through two performances, raving about the Italian actress Francesca Bertini – a tall, dark beauty with a snake-like mouth, who wore long pointed shoes and black dresses which showed off her slinky body. Erika, herself tall and slim, managed to imitate her quite well, right down to the twisting of Francesca’s thin lips.
Through Erika I had got to know good-natured Moosya, and her mother, Marya Ilyinishna, who also had a somewhat Bohemian lifestyle. Marya was a real Russian intellectual, a university graduate who worked as a librarian at an art gallery. Her unhappy marriage to a German, a drunkard, had long since broken up, and she had brought up Moosya and a younger handicapped son with difficulty, but with great love and freedom. She loved art, and music, and was also interested in politics; I believe she was a social-revolutionary.
She invited me to stay with them in Petrograd (St Petersburg was renamed in 1914) since I was spending that summer in Kronstadt. It was here that I was introduced to the dismal problem of prostitution. We were staying at a rather luxurious hotel on the Nevski Prospekt, the West End of Petrograd. Having returned very late from some show and a dinner at a restaurant, Moosya, her mother and I were relaxing and chatting, leaning out of the window to the street below and marvelling at the white night. Suddenly I noticed a number of women strolling, seemingly aimlessly, up and down the street. Every now and then a passing man would approach. Some words would be exchanged. Sometimes the man would continue on his way, sometimes a pair would go off together. It took me a while to realise what was going on, and when I tumbled to it, it made me quite sick. I knew about prostitution from literature of course, and perhaps from passing remarks by grown-ups, but I had never yet come across it in real life. I thought it was dreadful. I could not sleep that night, and the memory of what I had witnessed haunted me for a long time.
The war continued its unsuccessful course and the food situation was deteriorating. In mid-1916 bread was rationed to one pound a day, then to half a pound. By the end of the year sugar was rationed too. Bread and potatoes were the staple food of the Russian workers and peasants – now Russia, the granary of Europe, was unable to feed its population adequately as the working men of the villages were sent to fight and die at the front. The women in town took to demonstrating, while armament and other key workers began to strike. Rumours were rife: it was said that the Tsarist Court was pro-German, especially the Tsarina, who had been a German princess. There was talk about a separate peace with Germany.
Then in December 1916 Rasputin was assassinated. He was a crude and uneducated monk who had wormed his way to the Tsarina, who mistakenly believed that this ‘holy’ man would be able to cure the young Tsarevitch of his haemophilia. Rasputin exerted considerable influence over her and her circle at court, and indirectly over the Tsar. Politicians and members of the aristocracy were dismayed and decided to get rid of him, by poisoning him during a sumptuous supper. But the wily monk was tough and refused to die. So in the end he was thrown, totally drunk, into the Fontanka Canal, where he eventually drowned.
Although we knew what was happenings – defeats at the front, the strikes and demonstrations – we had little inkling of the impending momentous events. I remember demands for reforms and a more liberal constitution, made by the political parties and deputies in the Duma (the Russian parliament established in the wake of the first revolution in 1905), but only vaguely. Some limited concessions had been made to the Duma, and some limited reforms carried out, but by and large it remained an autocratic regime, not ready to grant more rights to the middle class and their representatives in the Duma, nor to heed the needs of the mass of the people.
Thinking back now to that pre-revolutionary period, I realise how little I and my contemporaries knew about the actual living and working conditions of the Russian workers and peasants, in spite of all our liberalism. When we spent the summers in the country, we caught glimpses of the primitive log houses of the peasants, their outdated tools and underfed horses with which they worked the land. We were fascinated and disgusted with some of their customs: when walking through a village towards evening, when the day’s work was done and the peasant women sat chatting on benches in front of their houses, you often saw a mother grab one of her offspring and start hunting for lice with a comb, squashing any she detected with a kitchen knife. But of how they really lived, what they ate and so on, we had little idea.
We knew even less of the living and working conditions of the industrial workers, or any other workers in the towns. The caretaker in one of the houses we lived in, for example, was on call day and night. His accommodation was a small room under the stairs. He was responsible for the maintenance of the front entrance of the block of flats. The janitor, who had to clean the back stairs and courtyard, lived with his family in one of the damp and dark basement flats. But his children could play in the courtyard, which we were not allowed to do – except occasionally to make a snowman in winter. So we had no contact with working- class children either. It was not deliberate, conscious, class distinction. It was just a feature of a class-based society.
The poverty in the villages and the abyss between the classes was beautifully expressed by Turgenev in one of his short blank-verse poems: a landlady visits (out of the goodness of her heart) a peasant widow on the day of the funeral of her only son, the best worker in the village. The widow stands erect by the table and mechanically, spoon by spoon, swallows her cabbage soup. her face sunken and her eyes swollen. The landlady is shocked: ‘How unfeeling these people are!’ And she turns to the peasant woman: ‘Tatyana, how can you eat at such a moment?’ ‘My son has died and I have nothing more to live for,’ she replies. ‘So it’s my end, too. But the cabbage soup has salt in it. Should it be wasted?’ The lady shrugged her shoulders and left. The price of salt meant nothing to her.
For me and my friends life continued its normal course. We went to school and were preoccupied with our personal interests: homework, reading, occasional visits to a theatre or concert. But by mid-February 1917 the situation had become critical: massive strikes broke out all over the country, in particular at the Putilov armaments plant in Petrograd, the Dynamo Works in Moscow, the oilfields of Baku. Hundreds of thousands of workers downed tools, sections of the army were in revolt. The women demonstrated and besieged the almost empty shops. There was pressure on the Tsar to abdicate in favour of his son, with his brother as Regent. The middle class was scared of a revolution, and even the Social-Democrats were desperately trying to come to terms with the monarchy. Finally mutiny broke out in some of the units of the Petrograd Guard regiments. While the Tsar was still dithering, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd set up their own soviet. Within a month 77 towns had followed their example.
For weeks there were rumours and speculation, but nobody knew anything for certain, and we 16-year-olds understood even less. We continued to go to school until one day – 27 or 28 February – we were told that the Tsar had abdicated, that the Revolution had taken place, and we were sent home.
Of course we could not sit at home! Instead we joined the milling crowds in the streets. It was a sunny day and all Moscow was on its feet, lifted on a wave of enthusiasm. Young and old – we were all ecstatic with joy and hope at the overthrow of the autocratic Tsarist regime. Kuznetski Most was thronged with happy people, every one adorned with a red flower: a tumult of talk, laughter, greetings, embraces and kisses, even between strangers. It was an incredible, elated atmosphere.
Then, after a few days, it was back to school. It was the last year for all those who did not want to continue their studies, and in May, as the school year finished, we organised a big farewell party jointly with the boys’ school and invited all our teachers. The girls all wore white dresses, and everybody had a red flower in celebration of the February Revolution. It was a wonderful party. We were young and gay and still in a state of euphoria, full of hopes for Russia and ourselves. Our teachers fell in with our mood, full of optimism too.
Yet right from the beginning things had been going wrong. The mass strike movement at the end of February, the massive demonstrations, the mutiny of the soldiers and in particular of the military units in Petrograd, were quite spontaneous. The workers’ and soldiers’ soviets were set up even before the Tsar was finally forced to abdicate. But there was no leadership to take the soviets and the masses a step further. On the contrary, even the Bolsheviks, whose most prominent leaders were in Siberia or in exile, were trying to hold the workers back from taking up arms. The Bolshevik papers, Izvestia and Pravda, did not start publication until a few days after the Revolution. Even then, such leaders as Stalin and Kamenev, who arrived from Siberia in mid-March, declared that they would support the Provisional Government, given some meaningless guarantees.
The middle class and their representatives in the Duma had been aware of the crisis, and the inability of the Tsar to deal with it, for months. After the failure of the Russian offensives at the front, even the high-ranking military felt something drastic should be done. The circumstances and the mood were ripe for a palace revolution. But the middle class were not united among themselves. When the workers acted they took fright and turned to the monarchy. The soviets themselves shied away from exercising the power which they already held, preferring to share it with the Provisional Government, which was dominated by the middle class. Alexander Kerensky became Minister of Justice, then Minister of War and eventually President. None of the demands and hopes of the people were met: there was no peace, though the soviets had sent an address ‘to the people of the world’, declaring themselves for peace without annexations and indemnities. Nor was there any bread.
To everybody around me, the events of that summer were very confusing. We heard that Lenin had arrived from exile in Switzerland at the beginning of April, having travelled through Germany in a sealed train (which soon gave rise to rumours and accusations). The name of Trotsky did not yet mean much to us, so we were hardly aware of his arrival from America a month later, and of his support for Lenin’s policy, which was opposed to that of Kamenev and Stalin.
All through the summer there were congresses and conferences of the Bolshevik Party, the Social-Revolutionary Party and the Soviets. A new Russian offensive in Galicia began which un-leashed more anti-government demonstrations. I remember marching with one of the demonstrations, presumably organised by the Mensheviks or Social-Revolutionaries. It must have been in the middle of the summer, when the feeling of the masses was high and more and more people were turning towards the Bolsheviks. The crowd I was with was marching along, singing the old traditional revolutionary songs, when it suddenly faced a Bolshevik demonstration shouting: ‘Down with the ministers-capitalists! We want peace and bread! All power to the soviets!’ There was angry shouting and almost a clash between the two processions. More than once it did come to clashes during those late summer months.
The government counters all this with orders to put the Bolshevik leaders under arrest. In July Lenin goes into hiding. Trotsky is arrested (but later released on bail). The death sentence is restored for those at the front. General Kornilov is appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army – and in the following month leads an unsuccessful coup against the Provisional Government. But the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets support the Bolshevik motions at their conferences, and Lenin writes: ‘The Bolsheviks must assume power’.
In October a Military Revolutionary Committee is formed by the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks declare themselves for an armed insurrection. Other organisations, trade unions, factory committees and railway workers agree. Finally the all-important Peter and Paul Fortress sides with the Petrograd Soviet. On 24 October the Provisional Government issues orders for the arrest of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the suppression of the Bolshevik papers, the replacement of troops who support the Bolsheviks. But it is too late. Lenin comes out of hiding and on 25 October, introduced by Trotsky, appears at a session of the Petrograd Soviet. The October Revolution has begun.
I cannot pretend to have been aware of all these events. We lived on rumours and tried to make out what we could. I used to visit Marya Ilyinishna, Moosya’s mother, as she seemed to understand a little more of the political goings-on than most people around me. In any case, I was not vitally interested in politics as such. I spent the summer of 1917 in a relatively leisurely way: reading, meeting friends, coaching two little boys – the sons of my mother’s colleagues. One of them was a budding mathematician and could explain multiplication and division to me better than I could explain it to him. I also devoted a great deal of time to practising the piano, a last Christmas present from my father.
After my father’s death we had moved to a larger flat so that my mother could take in lodgers and so survive financially. Since then we had moved to a still larger flat, of which two rooms were occupied by a very pleasant Jewish couple, war refugees from Poland, with a teenage son and a daughter in her early twenties. Raheel (how much more musical that sounds than the English Rachel) was an accomplished pianist and was probably suffering from my patient, but sometimes rather ineffective, efforts. One day she came into my room and offered me some advice and suggested regular coaching. I was delighted, especially as I had developed a real teenage crush on her.
As the autumn of 1917 approached I was faced with a problem rather important to a 16-year-old, although rather unimportant measured against impending events. I was starting my last year at school in roughly the equivalent of the English A-Level form. The outward sign of this achievement was a grey uniform, instead of brown. But where to obtain the material? Would my mother find anything on the black market? And would she be able to afford it? In the end a friend of my mother’s managed to get some and it was made up in no time. Alas! It was not woollen material and to look fresh and tidy it had to be ironed constantly. But no matter, it was the right colour.
This was the school year I probably enjoyed most. We had fewer subjects, but some interesting new ones – logic, psychology, hygiene – and we learnt well, not because we had to, but because we wanted to. We also practised teaching in the lower forms, or took over the duties of the form supervisors – good training for those who would become teachers after graduating. We were now practically grown up and were treated as such by our teachers. The whole atmosphere in the school had changed since February and the teachers felt more free. Events on the political scene receded into the background, though we were aware of the electioneering activities of the various political parties, which were preparing for the coming National Assembly. All the parties, including the Bolsheviks, were canvassing and distributing leaflets in the streets. But the election never took place. It was overtaken by the Bolshevik Revolution.
How different the two revolutions were. February had been a spontaneous uprising of workers and soldiers, culminating in massive strikes and demonstrations and the setting-up of the soviets. The Bolshevik Party, in the absence of its most important leaders Lenin and Zinoviev, was a restraining rather than an encouraging force. The mass of the population was jubilant at the fall of the monarchy. But their hopes were not met by the Provisional Government that followed – there were concessions but not radical changes. In October the takeover of power in Petrograd was swift and bloodless. In Moscow there was fighting and it took the Bolsheviks eight days to assert their power. We saw no exuberant demonstrations. Most non-political people were bewildered. Nobody had any idea what was happening.
An atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension set in. At night friends and neighbours sat huddled together listening to every sound of passing cars or motor trucks, fearing arrests, confiscation, enforced requisition of living space or the like. For several days nobody was allowed out into the street without a special permit. We soon learned that it was the Bolsheviks who had started the rising and taken over power, but what their aim was we still did not know. Then we learned that all private houses, including blocks of flats, were to be confiscated. A group of soldiers and civilians came to see our landlord, who lived in the flat just above ours. He was not arrested or harmed in any way, but a House Committee was set up and a meeting called, which my mother had to attend. It was decided to organise watches round the clock as the janitor and caretaker were no longer willing to be on 24-hour call. These two-hour watches were always in pairs and we young ones mostly volunteered for the evenings and nights. But what were we supposed to watch out for? We did not really know. Militia raids? Squads of soldiers passing through the streets at night in armoured cars? Or simply marauders? We were never molested by anybody, and only one person from the whole block of flats was ever taken away.
We actually had a very enjoyable time and often sat out more than one two-hour watch in the entrance hall for company. We got to know the other tenants and made friends with some of them, the young ones. We sat discussing politics or, more often, philosophised about life, art, our studies, or simply played games. I made friends with Kostya, a young student and the son of the now ex-landlord, and eventually became his confidant. He was very much in love with Marussya, a good-looking millinery apprentice from one of the flats in the courtyard. She had a beautiful voice and often entertained us with songs, accompanied by Kostya, who could imitate a whole orchestra with his voice.
During the watches in the courtyard we occasionally heard rifle shots in the distance or the rattle of a machine gun. Once my mother was given permission by the House Committee to go shopping. She returned as pale as death, trembling and breathless: as she had left the shop she had heard a rifle shot and a woman fell down at her feet. Another person was lying in the middle of the street.
We lived in a quiet side street. Even so, detachments of soldiers or civilians, all armed, would pass along it, shouting and occasionally shooting. Sometimes big black cars passed swiftly and silently, and somehow we knew that there were people in them being taken to prison. Or even to be shot? Nobody knew anything for certain, but the house, the street, the city were full of rumours that ‘these gangsters and robbers’, the Bolsheviks, had overthrown the Provisional Government and were now arresting all the wealthy people, depriving them of everything and even ‘nationalising’ women. But soon the ban on going out was lifted; offices, factories and shops re-opened; school began again. And we abandoned our amateur efforts to protect ourselves against some unknown danger.
There were marked changes at school. The most important was a decree abolishing tuition fees in all schools, universities and colleges, making them accessible to everybody who wanted to study and was capable of doing so. The main reforms were introduced a year later, when each school was taken under the wing of a particular factory, laboratory or other workplace and specific crafts and skills were introduced on top of the general education programme. In this way, permanent contact was established between workplace and school and children were introduced to the production process. Parents’ committees were set up and joint meetings organised with the teachers.
Our tuition became livelier and more relaxed, and our young teachers, replacing the ones called up in the course of the war, took the initiative to form various circles in after-school hours: for drama, literature, history, and the like. No direct efforts were made by the teachers to influence us politically, though some of them were clearly sympathetic to the new regime. And though I attended two or three of those circles, I was always too shy to take an active part in the discussions and the debates.
Within the first few days and weeks of the revolution the new government issued a number of decrees: for the eight-hour working day; banning women and very young people from nightwork; setting a ceiling for the remuneration of commissars and high-ranking employees and others, which was to be no higher than that of a skilled worker; establishing commissions for workers’ control over production and distribution. The people were also given the right to recall their deputies to the soviets, including the Supreme Soviet. Army ranks were abolished, the insignia of rank removed from uniforms, soldiers were henceforth to be addressed with the formal ‘you’ instead of the ‘thou’ which stressed their inferior status, and they were no longer required to salute their commanders in the street. The land was given to the peasants – who had been taking it anyway, without waiting for a decree, often burning the houses of the large estate owners. Another decree, a little later, made work for every able-bodied adult compulsory on the principle ‘he who does not work, neither does he eat’ – those who did not work were simply not issued with food ration cards.
True to their campaign slogan of that summer and autumn demanding ‘Peace, Land and Bread’, the Bolsheviks issued a decree the day after assuming power, declaring the new government’s desire for peace. Lenin called for talks with ‘friend and foe’, and at the same time declared that the Soviet government would make public all secret treaties concluded by previous Russian governments. Russia’s allies feared the propaganda effect on their own war- weary people and rejected any such peace talks. The German High Command, however, agreed to consider an armistice and negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk. Many Russian soldiers had left the front, and the Bolsheviks hoped for a revolution in Germany, which might spread to France and Britain.
But by January 1918, after demands and counter-demands, Trotsky decided to break off the negotiations without signing a treaty, advocating a policy of ‘neither war nor peace’, which he set out in a most powerful speech, made to the representatives of Germany and her allies but addressed to the German workers. Contrary to his expectations, the German government responded with a new offensive, rapidly advancing on the central front and taking the town of Dvinsk. This unleashed a fierce discussion among the Bolshevik leaders, splitting them half and half into those who were for a resumption of the war and those who, with Lenin, were prepared to accept the now even harsher terms of the German High Command. In the end the decision to sue for peace was carried by one vote – Trotsky now voting with Lenin.
The outcome was tragic for Russia, and for all the fighting men and women drawn into the war of intervention and civil war. Trotsky assumed the post of Commissar for War and rapidly and ruthlessly built up a disciplined Red Army. Fourteen armies closed in on Russia from various sides. When these eventually withdrew, three armies led by White-Russian Generals and anti-Bolshevik followers continued the offensive until the Red Army finally emerged victorious after three more years of war.
But at what a price. The country was ravaged. There was hunger and famine, with epidemics and economic near-collapse. There had been no time for the country to take a breather, for the returning soldiers to work in the neglected fields or build up industry. Instead of leaving the war behind, they were recruited again against the invading armies of the Allies, as well as against their own countrymen. All this required food and transport, and there was no respite for the old men, the women, and their young sons in the villages or wherever work was to be done.
Against this background ordinary people tried to carry on as best they could. In spite of the hardship, there was an enormous upsurge in intellectual and artistic life, and a real effort to improve educational and cultural standards (not always with success). Great efforts, for example, were made to reduce the enormous illiteracy. Courses were organised and individuals encouraged to teach people to read and write. The efforts were not always very successful, but it was an attempt and a beginning, and for the next few years it was a common sight to observe old men and women sitting side by side with young people at such elementary courses.
Some preferred private tuition. Some acquaintances of ours were anxious that their servant girl should be able to read and asked whether I would be willing to teach her. Marfusha herself was not over-anxious to be ‘educated’. She was a real peasant girl of the old type. Hard-working, loyal to her masters, and everything but bright as far as learning was concerned. She was trying hard to remember the letters, to grasp the secret of putting them together into words. It was hopeless. Marfusha’s brain simply refused to understand why ‘D-A-D’ should make ‘dad’, or ‘C-A-T’ ‘cat’. I realised much later that my method was wrong, but at the time only felt sorry for Marfusha, her broad, good-natured face looking quite embarrassed at my desperation. In my own way, I was as stupid as she appeared to be to me. Yet illiterate and uneducated Marfusha knew better than I did, in spite of all my education, what was going on in the country, and what the peasants needed.
We also managed to enjoy ourselves. Apart from attending theatres and concerts, we young people visited each other at home and held parties, playing charades and other games. I remember one fancy-dress party where I appeared as the Queen of the Night, in a long black dress covered with silver stars, and a half-moon stuck in my hair – a most unlikely mysterious queen with my figure and complexion!
In the spring of 1918 I was confirmed, according to the custom of the Protestant Church. My mother had gone to endless trouble to obtain all sorts of food for my party and in a bout of goodwill I offered to help with the preparations in the kitchen, where I rarely made an appearance because of my inefficiency. This time my mother accepted my offer and suggested that I pour the surplus soup into a larger saucepan standing on the hearth. I did it eagerly – only to hear my mother’s desperate exclamation: I had poured the clear soup into the dessert, some sort of custard containing milk, sugar, eggs, all precious and almost unobtainable ingredients. We were both very upset, but somehow she saved the day – or rather the supper – by producing something else for the party. But in the conditions prevailing then it was a near-tragedy.
Even so, we were relatively lucky. Soon after the anti-German pogroms in 1915 my mother had been offered a job as manageress of a home for some sixty Germans, old people and young children who had not been deported to Siberia. It was run under the auspices of the Swedish Consulate, which from time to time received food supplies for the home. Occasionally some of the items would be distributed among the employees, so my mother sometimes had a few tins of evaporated milk and a few pounds of sugar to bring home and keep in reserve. I sometimes felt so hungry that I would pinch a tin out of the cupboard, sometimes sharing it with my sister, just drinking the milk out of the tin. Or I would eat a few spoonfuls of sugar.
When the fire was no longer permanently lit in the kitchen, and the pantry got too cold in winter to keep any food there, my mother stored any left-overs for the next meal on a wide window ledge at the end of a long corridor. It was tempting – and many were the times when I could not resist, in passing, snatching up a bit of this or a slice of that. I can’t believe that my mother never noticed, but she never mentioned anything, realising that even if we were not starving we were certainly undernourished. Occasionally we visited her in the home where she worked. They had a very good cook there who was also very kind. She always treated us to delicious crisp potato chips (fat was already scarce at that time), or some special kind of potato pancakes.
It was at the home that my mother met Willy Schünemann. He had come to Russia in 1904 to work as an accountant for a German company, had married and had a little son. But his wife died, Willy was interned in Siberia and young Willy was looked after by a relative. He was six years old when his father returned from Siberia. The father had found life in Russia before the war very agreeable, and did not know much about the conditions of life after the revolution, so unlike many of the other Germans released from Siberia during the peace negotiations he did not leave for Germany itself but accepted a job as an accountant with the new German Consulate. His work involved checking the ledgers of the Home for the Elderly and Children. He and my mother met, got on well with each other and decided to get married – though not before my mother had consulted us, especially me as the eldest. She had clearly been lonely all those years and had had to work hard to keep us going, and she was still young enough to have a life of her own (she was only 38). And he seemed quite a pleasant person. So they got married and Willy and his son moved in with us. Whether it was a real attachment or more a matter of convenience, I cannot tell at this distance of time and then I was too young and inexperienced to know. Perhaps it was a little of both. He, too, had had a hard time.
I was busy, too, that summer, practising assiduously at my piano, with Raheel’s help. I had decided not to go to university, but to sit the exam for the Philharmonia School of Music. My mother was disappointed, but she did not protest. At the same time I got a temporary job in the office of the Swedish Consulate, which represented German interests during the war. It occupied a spacious house in the midst of a lovely garden. But I felt utterly miserable. Dull office work was the last thing I had ever thought of doing. Yet the people there were very pleasant and considerate, since I did not know the first thing about the work. The hours were not bad, and the consulate was quite near our flat. The first day or two I could hardly stop myself from crying. I simply could not resign myself to this kind of life when all my thoughts and desires were directed towards studying, learning, doing some interesting and useful work. But I realised that I had to help my mother at least a little. Food and clothing were becoming scarce and very expensive on the black market. It was there in that office that I taught myself to type, on a typewriter which today would seem quite antediluvian, with two separate keyboards, one for capital letters and the other for lower case.
Late that summer I sat my exam for the School of Music. I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was a glorious sunny day. I went through my scales and finger exercises; I played something by Bach and something by Mozart. The school stood in its own grounds surrounded by a garden. The windows were open, the sun was streaming in, I could hear the birds in the garden, and I was trying to make the sounds of Mozart as pearly and crystal clear as possible; I finished up with a piece by Schumann. When they told me I was accepted, I was overjoyed.
In the autumn the serious work started. For the first time I had a teacher who knew how to explain things: the touch on the keyboard, the phrasing, the different approaches to each piece of music. Valeria Vladimirovna appreciated my efforts and greatly helped me. She used to say that I came into the class ‘like a pink cloud on the pale blue sky’. I was indeed pink and plump, but she expressed it rather poetically. I still see her quite clearly: she was all round and soft, with her brown hair loosely and softly combed up into a bun, but ruffled and fluffed towards the end of the day; with plump, flexible fingers, extracting such a variety of sounds from the piano. I immersed myself in this new world with great zeal and delight.
I became very friendly with two of her students. One was a young woman in her mid-twenties, from Siberia. Tall, slim, with a sallow face, black hair, and rather spidery fingers, she had slaved and starved in order to come to Moscow to continue her musical studies. The abolition of tuition fees had at last made this possible, though there were of course still the living expenses. We often delighted in listening to her playing Tchaikovsky and Grieg concertos, or pieces by Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, much of which was still too difficult for me. My other friend was Lyolya, who became very close. She lived near us and we spent long hours together, practising and talking about music, going to concerts together, discussing what we had heard, and disagreeing on Scriabin, who at that time was rather too modem for my taste. Lyolya’s mother and sister ran a small dress-making business. As money began to lose its value, some of their clients were able to pay in kind – with food or other goods, which was a great advantage.
Lyolya and I enjoyed each other’s company and tried to ignore the material difficulties of life. We made it a rule never to discuss them. We both knew there was no bread, no meat, no tea, no fuel: we could do nothing about that, so what was the good of chewing it over again and again? And we kept to our vow for a year and a half, until we were forced to part. We were both desperate when my family finally decided to leave Russia, and promised to write to each other. But for some years there was no postal communication between Russia and the West. Nevertheless I faithfully kept a kind of diary in the form of letters, firmly hoping that one day I would return and we would exchange what we had written. When I did visit Moscow, years later, I did not try to find her again. I was no longer quite the same person. Nor would she have been.
In the meantime, food and fuel were the main topics of conversation, especially among women, on whom the burden of feeding their families lay. ‘Today such and such a shop is selling pickled herring. The comer greengrocer has received a barrel of pickled cabbage. Yesterday somebody managed to get horsemeat.’ When my mother first served horsemeat, she did it surreptitiously, without telling us what it was. Eventually we noticed it, and in the end she was quite proud at having managed to buy some. In time, horses that were collapsing in the street from weakness were surrounded by a crowd, killed and cut up there and then. We were terribly distressed when the last of our potatoes became frozen in the winter – but we had to eat them all the same. Oh, the vile taste of those sickly, sweetish potatoes! And what a treat when the scanty ration of heavy black bread, three or four thin slices a day, was supplemented by our inventive mother with pancakes made from carrots or potato peelings.
All through 1918 the situation deteriorated. It became still worse in the winter of 1919. For months we never saw any butter (margarine was unknown in Russia at that time). Fat was equally scarce and so was cooking oil. We finished up by using castor oil for frying, until the chemists, on government orders, stopped selling it without a doctor’s prescription. Luckily onions were plentiful, so we smeared the frying pan with onions to give the potatoes some flavour and stop them from burning. The worst thing was when, for weeks on end, there was no salt in the shops. A pound of salt could be bartered for a whole pood (an old Russian measure of 36 lbs) of flour in the villages.
And there was no tea, so we drank a substitute made from dried peel or rose leaves, dried blackberries, even birch bark, anything that was at hand and could be sweetened with saccharin, as sugar too was scarce. There was, however, usually a regular ration of dried, salted flounder. This fish had to be repeatedly soaked and tenderised with a wooden mallet to make it at all eatable. Even so, undernourished as we all were, the members of our family more often than not refused to eat their salted fish ration. I was either more hungry, or less discriminating than everybody else and benefited from their squeamishness.
Clothing and footwear had become a problem for most people. Olya reminded me recently how very pleased she was when our mother obtained a coupon for boots for her. Olya had to queue up half the night, and in the end it was a pair made of some coarse cloth on wooden soles! Nevertheless she was delighted and they kept her feet warm all through the winter. Demobbed soldiers continued to wear their old uniforms and greatcoats. It was difficult, but there was no alternative. People, houses, streets – everything looked drab, especially in winter.
Then another major problem arose: heating, especially if you had central heating as we had. It simply stopped – no joke in winter when the temperature in Moscow could drop to minus 25 degrees Centigrade. This intense cold, unbearable for any length of time, resulted in burst pipes, cracks in the walls, water freezing up overnight. But people with the old type of ovens were hardly better off, since neither wood nor coal was easily available, and those ovens consumed a fair amount of fuel. They usually stood in a comer of the room, reaching almost to the ceiling, shaped like a large box covered with tiles and with a small door near the floor where the fire was lit. The tiles gradually released the heat.
People resorted to all sorts of alternatives, installing oil stoves, small iron stoves, or anything they could get hold of. In my mother’s room, which also served as a dining and living room, we had a small hearth built from bricks. All of these still needed an outlet for the fumes; so a pipe from the stove had to be erected across the room, to give off as much heat as possible, with an outlet into the chimney of the original oven. For us, with our central heating, the only outlet was through the one small window pane which was not sealed off for the winter and which was the only means of airing the room. Of course the pipe had to be sealed off, making it impossible to air the room.
There was still the problem of obtaining fuel. Sometimes friends or neighbours tipped each other off that in a particular street a timber house was being pulled down. Then we would sneak up at night and steal a few planks of wood or logs from under the militia man’s nose. Sometimes he would be kind enough to look away. (The militia had replaced the police after the revolution, and instead of a uniform they only had armbands). Or people would bum any old pieces of furniture that could be spared. The last thing to go into my mother’s stove was a beautiful antique sideboard, with winding columns and polished a reddish golden colour. Inherited from my grandmother, it somehow had survived all our moves. It finally ended its existence by comforting us when we so badly needed it.
These small stoves were by no means always easy to light, and often enough the wind would blow the smoke back into the room, making us choke. Nevertheless they kept us going, and even served to heat up some simple food, when we could no longer keep up a fire in the kitchen hearth. It was then so cold that when the kitchen table was wiped with a damp cloth it immediately became covered with a thin crust of ice. The only advantage was that the cockroaches, common in Russian kitchens, disappeared.
There was no heating in my room, and how I practised the piano there, I do not know. Perhaps my zeal helped me, or perhaps we did not feel the cold so much during the day. At night, however, it was pretty awful, but also rather comic. I often came home late after a concert, a lecture, or a theatre performance, after a day of near fasting, when the family was already asleep. There was always some food left for me in a pot, kept hot wrapped up in newspapers and blankets. I always found it tasty, even when it wasn’t. Having eaten, still with my winter coat and hat on, I rapidly undressed, washed and went to bed, covered with several blankets and a thick, heavy sort of eiderdown. (In Russia they were usually put on top of the mattress rather than over you, and so were filled with feathers, rather than down, which made them rather heavy.) With my head wrapped up in a shawl, and with gloves on my hands I would settle down in bed and immerse myself in a book for an hour or two and then go happily to sleep full of impressions of the evenings outing and stuffed with philosophical problems or images and descriptions of works of art, or a classical novel. Fortunately, although the electricity was cut off for several hours every night, an exemption was made for streets with public buildings and important institutions. We were lucky to be living near a hospital.
The acute shortage of fuel for heating also hit the theatres and concert halls. But even that could not dampen people’s spirits. The audience simply sat with their coats on, and the performers shed theirs just before coming on to the stage. I remember concerts where the pianist took off his gloves at the last moment, while an attendant was warming the keyboard with an iron filled with glowing charcoal. Even when public transport stopped for a time, and cabs were no longer available or too expensive, audiences were not deterred, though it meant a walk home in bitterly cold weather with the glistening snow crunching under your feet. Nor did it stop the actors, musicians and writers, few of whom had as yet left the country.
It was a remarkable feature of those early post-revolutionary years, this upsurge of artistic and intellectual activity on the part of performers and other artists such as painters and sculptors, and interest on the part of the people, in spite of all the hardship. It seemed like the blossoming of all that had lain dormant, those years of proletcult – the culture of the proletariat.
Keeping clean was also a problem. As fat became extremely scarce, the manufacture of soap all but stopped. But people still found an ingenious solution: they began to get hold of any and every scrap of fat by legal and illegal means and make soap themselves, for their own use and for sale at enormously inflated prices or barter on the black market. Soap-making was soon declared illegal and a punishable offence, which by no means stopped people, only they tried to do it more secretly. That, however, was difficult, as the boiling of the inferior fat and other substances gave off a penetrating, vile smell, which gave the show away. Our Aunt Tori was engaged in this enterprise, but luckily was not caught – at any rate not while we were still in Moscow.
The ‘black’ market should have been called the ‘free’ market, since it functioned openly and was obviously tolerated by the authorities. I remember the black market that my mother used, on Sukharevski Square. Peasants from the countryside brought in their produce to exchange it for all kinds of things: household utensils, clothing, jewellery, even home-made soap. If money was accepted at all it was at astronomically inflated prices.
In these circumstances the physical resistance of the townspeople was extremely low: the smallest cut would fester and take days to heal; epidemics were rampant and hospitals were overcrowded, with patients lying on mattresses on the floor in the corridors. In the winter of 1918–19 it was Spanish ’flu, in 1919–20 typhus. Thousands upon thousands of people died during those two winters.
All these difficulties and hardships were not of the making of the Bolshevik Revolution as such. The renewed German offensive in the winter of 1918, against a country that had already experienced four years of war; the harsh conditions of the peace treaty eventually concluded with the German High command in March 1918; the Allied wars of intervention and the civil war which engulfed large parts of southern and western Russia – these devastated the young Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR) (with other Soviet Republics this later became the USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics). All the country’s reserves had to be directed towards the army which Trotsky, as Commissar for War and Commander-in-Chief, created out of men who had voted for peace in 1917 by leaving the trenches and battlefields and tramping home. But the further years of war added to the decimation of the industrial workforce. Though basically a peasant country, Russia before the First World War had a modern, developed industry with three million workers. By 1920 their number had shrunk to one and a half million.
But it was not only the renewed war that the young Soviet government had to deal with. Right from the beginning it faced insurmountable difficulties. The flight of the aristocracy and of hostile politicians was probably no great loss. (Some of the aristocracy finished as taxi drivers and waiters in Paris and other capitals of Europe; some of the women as chambermaids with the post-war nouveaux riches – the yuppies of those days, if we are to believe a witty comedy staged in Berlin in the 1920s.) Far more serious was the exodus of many intellectuals and experts in various branches of industry and commerce, civil servants, bank clerks, accountants and others. This was more than a calamity. There were also acts of sabotage by former government officials and those who ran the railways, the post and telegraphs, who refused to hand over documents, plans, ledgers and files to the largely unskilled Soviet representatives, leaving them high and dry. This made communication and the supply of goods to the towns at times impossible.
Faced with all these difficulties the government had to resort to arrests, imprisonment, even executions, in order to survive. Yet such drastic measures, it must be emphasised, are not part of a socialist revolutionary programme. They are the reaction to violent and obstructive actions on the part of a hostile minority opposed to any radical social change.
Lenin was fully aware that in backward, impoverished, peasant Russia, they could not embark on the road to socialism on their own (as no country in the world could have done then or could do today). Nevertheless the Bolsheviks struggled on, still hoping for a revolution in Germany. Eventually the Kaiser was toppled in November 1918 and revolutionary councils of soldiers and workers were set up in German towns. Soviets even took over some German consulates abroad, which had been re-opened after the peace treaty of March 1918. In Moscow the consulate became the German Welfare Commission for Prisoners of War, Internees and Repatriates, attached to the Central Revolutionary German Soldiers’ and Workers’ Soviet. I had to visit the Welfare Commission in connection with my mother’s work at the Home for the Elderly and Children. The offices struck me as very similar to those of Russian soviet institutions, where you went for ration cards, and vouchers for clothing or shoes. There were red flags and posters, slogans on the walls, instructions on a noticeboard, a rough and ready atmosphere full of activity and confidence, some muddle, and soldiers and civilians coming and going.
Meanwhile in Germany the Social Democrats were as scared of a full-blown workers’ revolution as their counterparts had been in Russia in February 1917. With their connivance the revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in January 1919 by the Frei Korps, which had been formed by the most reactionary army officers at the end of the First World War.
By and large I do not think that many people in Russia really understood the implications for Russia (or Germany itself for that matter) of the success or failure of the German Revolution, nor did we get much news of it. We were too busy trying to survive.
In 1918 I accepted a permanent job as a typist with the Commissariat of Finance, though as a student I was not liable to labour conscription. The salary was pitifully low measured against black-market prices: one loaf of bread for a month’s salary! (My stepfather, who eventually had to leave his job with the Welfare Commission, could afford two loaves a month on his new salary.) The perks attached to the Commissariat job induced me to accept it: the Commissariat was running a children’s home outside Moscow in an old converted monastery, for the children or young relatives of their employees. So my sister and brother, and in time little Willy, were able to go there. It was an enormous help: the children were well housed and well fed; they were taught by a number of teachers, and supervised by other staff, who organised games, competitions and outings to neighbouring children’s homes. They were happy there. I even managed to spend a fortnight’s holiday there myself in the summer of 1919.
The Commissariat of Finance occupied an enormous building in the style of London’s Kings Cross Station, right next to the gateway to Red Square. In the comer between the building and the gateway there was a tiny chapel with a famous icon of the Virgin of Iberia, where candles still burned. But over the chapel there was a large banner: ‘Religion is the Opium of the People’, and another referring to education and enlightenment. The chapel was eventually removed and the huge building became the Museum of the Revolution. It had three or four floors, with long wide corridors and very large rooms. The offices of the Commissariat, like any other offices or institutions, were supposed to work from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (after the Revolution working hours were reduced to seven hours a day for factory workers and six hours for office and other workers, including lunchtime). But in winter it was quite impossible to heat those rooms and corridors, and however thick the walls of those old, solid buildings, however wrapped up you were in your padded or fur-lined coat and boots, it was practically impossible to work efficiently, or even work at all for any length of time.
Our department manager was a mild man who used to walk through the vast unheated rooms with his army greatcoat hung over his shoulders, now without its epaulets, sadly and understandingly shaking his head when told that so-and-so had not come in yet or, at three o’clock, so-and-so had already left having felt half-frozen. We tried to warm ourselves with hot tea or a few brisk exercises in between. At 1 p.m. we were ready for lunch and as the Commissariat had no canteen, we had to go out to one of the public restaurants, or rather ‘food centres’.
The opening of such eating places was certainly one of the progressive measures introduced by the Government and it was the fault of neither the central nor the local administrators that they were far from satisfactory. I a.m. sure that the staff of these centres, the Commissariat of Food Supply, and the Co-operatives, did their utmost, but it was just not within the realms of possibility to get and cook decent food, decently served. This was the usual procedure: you queued up for between half an hour and an hour; when your turn finally came, you were given an enamel or tin plate, a tin spoon, fork and knife. (Later you had to bring your own plates and cutlery because, in spite of their poor quality, people were pinching them – hardly surprising when the towns were invaded by crowds of soldiers from the front who owned nothing, people from the provinces and peasants who now discovered that you ate food other than with wooden spoons out of a common bowl). Into these plates the usual Russian cabbage soup was dished up, then you had to look for a seat on a bench at one of the tables with soup or tea spilt all over the place.
After having thus strengthened (or exhausted) yourself, you went back to the office, and within an hour or so were again frozen and stiff. So by about 3.30 p.m. it was time to stroll home. In January 1920 a new decree was published making absenteeism, lateness and a similarly lax attitude to work a punishable offence. Though recognising that this decree was fully justified, I for one would have found it rather hard to comply, though the lax situation at work was imposed by conditions rather than unwillingness to work.
The Commissariat was right in the heart of Moscow, near the Bolshoi Theatre, the College of Music and the Trade Union House (formerly the House for the Assembly of the Nobility) which was also used for concerts. So in between working hours, foregoing the cabbage soup in the tin plates, I often spent some time in one of those establishments. My visits to the Bolshoi Theatre came about quite accidentally. Passing the stage door one day, I ventured to open it out of curiosity and went in. There was nobody around, so I explored the theatre, including the stage and the dressing rooms: the holiest of the holy for me. Nobody asked me who I was or what I wanted. There must have been so many new people going in and out in those days. In one dressing room I rummaged through a trunk containing all sorts of props and discovered a pair of worn ballet shoes that fitted me! I was so delighted that, I must confess to my shame, I could not resist ‘expropriating’ them to practise in at home – the dream of my childhood.
It was so simple to get into the theatre that, whenever time permitted, I started to go to rehearsals and even performances. Thus I got to know the workings on the other side of the curtain, the behaviour of the actors, and so on. Once I stood barely two yards from the great Shaliapin as he waited for his cue in the wings. He was already Tsar Boris Godunov, working himself into the part, with his eyes rolling, his heavy breath responding to the words spoken on the stage by his Boyars. Another time I watched Das Rheingold, in the days when I still used to go to Wagner performances. It has a beautiful scene, when you are sitting on the right side of the curtain, as three lovely mermaids swim in the Rhine, guarding the Nibelungen gold. The illusion of water and waves was produced by a green gauze curtain and lighting effects, behind which the mermaids were singing and swimming playfully. However, I was on the wrong side overlooking the entire stage and its machinery. My illusions were shattered: the mermaids, one of them pretty plump, were perching in cradles, which were moved up, down and sideways on pulleys operated by hefty men behind the stage backdrop; the waving of their arms and the movements of their tails looking pretty silly seen from that angle. Another eye-opener was a performance by the famous ballerina Geltzer. As the audience applauded she was all charming smiles; but behind the curtain she abruptly changed into a rather old hag, giving her young partner a vicious dressing-down, using the crudest Russian expressions, for having trodden on her toe; a minute later, more radiant smiles for the public.
I discovered a couple of chairs in two tiny boxes right behind the curtain. They were probably for members of the company – but I often made myself comfortable there. On one occasion I put my fur hat on top of some wooden balls in an opening in the wall by my side. The opera ended with a thunderstorm, skilfully imitated by the orchestra. Suddenly there was a terrific rumble and crash by my side; I thought the whole wall was coming down. Then I realised it was the balls, somehow set in motion to imitate the clap of thunder. But my hat! Where had it vanished to? I could not possibly afford to lose it. I descended into the lowest regions of the theatre and luckily found it in the basement, among the stage machinery and rubble.
There was one other unique incident. At the end of a performance, after a few curtain calls and what seemed the end of the applause, I took a short cut across the stage to the nearest exit. Suddenly there was a new burst of clapping. The curtain went up and there was I, right in the middle of the stage! Luckily, the actors all flocked in again, some of them already with their coats on, like me. They lined up once more and we all sang the Internationale. And nobody noticed a foreign body among the singers.
But soon I embarked on a very different, rather unusual but instructive activity. The black market had gradually dried up and food had to be sought, especially in winter, from much farther afield. In spite of the absence of the children, it was difficult to exist on our scanty rations. So with our young maid Katya I joined the stream of pilgrims to the villages. The peasants had, by that time, become rather choosy: some wanted, and received, pianos, gramophones, pictures and pieces of furniture. Our offerings were more modest: household goods, linen, clothing, trinkets – anything we could spare and could carry which had any barter value.
One fine autumn day Katya and I set out to explore the villages in the vicinity of Moscow. She returned with a sack of potatoes on her back and I had a sack of flour. The flour was easier to carry, as it did not cut into your back like the potatoes but, even so, it was quite a job for me to walk the several miles to the station and the short walk from the Moscow station home. At the start I fervently hoped not to meet any of my former schoolmates or teachers; later there came a time when I was looking out for somebody to show my success in coming home with the precious booty. It was not easy, this kind of barter, but having got over the initial embarrassment at so strange an activity on my part, I found it interesting and at times even romantic. And I really got to know the life and lot of the Russian peasantry at first hand.
Some of the peasants resented us ‘beggars from the town’ and did not hide their feeling of superiority. But most received us with kindness and even invited us to share their meal or to stay overnight. So there we sat with bearded men, worn-out women and a crowd of children with flaxen hair, all around a large table in the middle of which stood a big wooden bowl with cabbage or potato soup, and sometimes pieces of meat in it. In front of every one of us there was a chunk of bread and a wooden spoon. Katya, coming from a peasant family, felt quite at home of course. For me it was a new experience. After the father or grandfather had given the signal, everybody was allowed to fish out a piece of meat. Katya and I were always encouraged to eat as much as possible as they knew we would not get such food in town. Then there were endless glasses of tea from the samovar, which supplied the hot water to dilute the tea extract in the small teapot.
Occasionally I would talk to the younger people, some of whom had been prisoners of war in Germany. They spoke of the superior style of work and life of the German peasants or farmers and were determined to introduce their modem methods of farming as soon as it became possible. I do not remember any political talk about events in the country or the policy of the Bolsheviks. The peasants’ attitude seemed to me to be ‘wait and see’. Of course, the more politically conscious peasants were glad at the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the distribution of land to the peasants (the setting up of collective farms came much later), but for now they were taking advantage of the plight of the town population to improve their own standard of living. I once had a special request from the young daughter of a farmer to bring her some face powder, for which she would give me – unknown to her father – an extra half a pood of flour or buckwheat. I managed to get some powder but in my ignorance of cosmetics did not bring her French powder. She was very disappointed, but gave me the extra flour all the same.
The rough log houses, draught-proofed with hemp, were extremely primitive. You entered the house through some sort of shed, which on one side led into a cowshed; I am not sure, but perhaps the horse was kept in there as well; certainly the pigs; the hens were everywhere. Straight on, a door led to a shed for all kinds of equipment. The door on the other side led into the dwelling part of the house. All this was under one roof. The living quarters consisted of just one large room with a massive oven along one wall; part of this served as a bed for the old folks and perhaps one of the younger children. It was the warmest place in the house. From there the old ones could overlook the entire room and climbed down only for their meals. At one end of the high oven was a hearth for cooking the meals. This part could be screened off by a curtain. In the middle was a deep recess for baking bread or heating milk until it had a thick brown crust. This part opened up right into the room. Under it was a fair-sized open space, where chickens slept and clucked in winter; and sometimes even piglets, very young lambs or kids.
Along two walls of the room there were simple benches, a table and a few chairs. There was also a bed for the parents or the young married couple. Somewhere there was also a chest of drawers. The rest of the family slept on the benches, on sheepskins, which also served as blankets. If we stayed overnight, we joined them on the floor. Needless to say, the air in the room at night was pretty stuffy. In one comer of the room there hung, as in most Russian homes, an icon, with a small oil lamp in front, the flame of which was kept alight from one Easter mass to the next to keep away evil spirits. For washing there was a cylindrical container filled with water, and with a rod protruding from the bottom. As you pushed the rod upwards, into the container, the water would be released and you had to be quick to catch it and give your face, and with luck your ears and neck, a quick lick. In the summer everybody washed at the pump in the yard.
The most strenuous part of these expeditions were the journeys. Unless you have gone through a similar experience you cannot remotely imagine what it was like to travel in those days. First there was the queuing up for tickets, not for hours, but sometimes days. Everybody would get a number in the evening, entitling you to join the queue again the following morning without losing your place. Then you would try to find out when and from which platform the train would leave – although any train would do. No suburban train would deposit you more than ten or fifteen miles away and you would always find a village there. But time was the big problem. You sometimes sat in a train for hours in a tightly packed open carriage. A few times Katya and I even spent the night in the train, at the station in Moscow, a 15-minute walk from home and our comfortable beds. But we could not risk losing our space, or missing the train altogether.
Somehow or other the time would pass and eventually the train would leave. It often took two, three or four hours to cover the distance. In the middle of some woods the train would stop, puffing and panting. The doors of the carriage would be opened and Red Army or militia men would invite everybody, in a business-like or joking manner, to step out into the deep snow, the women to clear the track, the men to chop wood to feed the engine. As everybody was anxious to continue on the journey as quickly as possible, we all complied. And after all, wasn’t it only fair, since the engine and the engine driver were doing us a favour by carrying us to our destinations?
Eventually we did arrive. Then there might be a six or seven-mile walk to the village through knee-deep snow. This was even more difficult on the return journey when we might have to get up at 4.30 in the morning to catch the train, all the while carrying our heavy sacks on our shoulders. I was sometimes so tired that I literally fell asleep standing up in the train, supported from all sides by the people crowded around me. Sometimes we travelled throughout the night in a cattle truck with just a few benches, without backs, down the middle – one was lucky to get a seat at all. Often the trains stopped to let army trains through, taking soldiers to the civil war fronts or bringing back the wounded. These trains obviously had priority.
I vividly remember one of our trips. The train had stopped, the people were streaming out and setting off in a hurry for the lengthy walk ahead. It was a dark day, or dusk was already setting in. Suddenly I stumbled over something: a small bundle. Inspecting it, I found that it contained salt! About a pound of it, at a time when salt was more precious than gold! What was I to do? My first impulse was to find the person who had lost it, but how to go about it? Perhaps forty or fifty people were already ahead of us struggling through the snow. Had I called out whether anybody had lost something, half of them might have been upon us. And would our voices have reached them anyway? So in the end, with heavy hearts Katya and I decided to keep it and exchange the salt ourselves. I still have my doubts whether I did right. In the end it was a question of principle versus practicability.
On one journey, lucky to get a seat, I found myself next to a Red Army soldier with a big, filthy sheepskin hat on his head. He was obviously dead tired, and kept nodding off then jerking awake again, until sleep finally overtook him and his head dropped on to my shoulder. There was no room for me to move away, and in any case I would have been scared of offending him. At the same time I was just as scared of his hat, a sure breeding ground for the widespread typhus lice, the source of the epidemic spreading through Moscow. But I sat there all the same, stiff inside and out.
It was surprising that in spite of all those journeys, the walks in the bitter cold, the filth and the dirt, and insufficient food, neither Katya nor I ever caught any serious disease. On the contrary, I was as healthy as ever before and looked it, so that on a sunny summer day two young men in the street, apparently from the provinces, pointed at me, remarking much to my indignation: ‘Look how they starve in Moscow’.
In time it became more and more difficult to find things to barter. The peasants, or at any rate the wealthier ones who had the food the towns so badly needed, had accumulated everything possible. And we had less and less to offer. The last things I exchanged were my mother’s and father’s wedding rings.
All this bartering and trading went on illegally. There was often a Red Army control at the exits of the railway station and it was possible that after all the agony of getting a ticket, the journey, the walk through the snow, the haggling with the peasants, the sleeping in stuffy, unhygienic huts, the sack of flour or whatever you had brought back would be confiscated before you left the station. No crying or begging ever helped. It was done on the government’s instructions in an attempt to stop the illegal trade, though admittedly this was directed primarily against the speculators, who sold the products in town at enormously inflated prices. That this order was not carried out with 100 per cent strictness may have been sheer physical inability on the part of the Red Army guards; on the other hand, they may have been discriminating between the speculators and people like Katya and me, who, fortunately, never had to suffer such a loss.
Whatever the difficulties associated with these trips, I still had sufficient interest and strength left – much to Katya’s amazement – to rejoice at the landscape and nature around us: the beautiful autumn colouring of the fields and woods, or even the two-hour walks through the deep, soft snow through wide fields or thick, dark pine woods, their branches laden with glistening snow, with heavy, grey clouds in the sky. I used to call it a symphony in black and white. I do not know whether this meant anything to Katya, but she always listened attentively. Sometimes we sang folk songs together. Only when Katya began to sing Bolshevik songs did I walk on in silence. If somebody had asked me why I was apparently against the Bolsheviks, or what they stood for, I would not have really known. I had no opinion of my own on this matter. I seem to have disliked what I thought was pure politics, and simply accepted the opinion of the people around me. Yet our family or friends had never suffered any personal harassment from the Bolshevik government. And if you had asked Katya about the Bolsheviks, she would hardly have known much more than I did.
Katya was a good-natured, simple-minded, but by no means stupid young peasant woman. She had a brother, a Red Army Soldier and a Bolshevik, who occasionally came to visit her. She was unable to argue with him and therefore accepted everything he told her. She had been brought up in a patriarchal peasant family, where the father could dispose of the children as he pleased. Katya had been married for only six months when her busband was called up at the beginning of the war and shortly afterwards was reported missing. In Moscow she had no friends at all and I don’t remember her ever going out in the evening, except on one occasion when her brother took her out to a fairground together with some of his army friends. Months later Katya suddenly decided one evening to do some thorough cleaning: she scrubbed all the floors in the corridor, the kitchen and bathroom, dusted and wiped here and there, much to our surprise. The next morning Katya had disappeared and did not show up the whole day. We were at a loss, until we learned from the former caretaker’s wife that she was in hospital and that she had given birth to a little girl – the result of Katya’s one and only outing. We were dumbfounded. There was my mother, who had given birth to three children, and our lodgers, one of whom had two children, and nobody ever noticed a thing; though my mother had remarked once that Katya was getting fatter on the little food we had. Was it lack of interest in her on our part? I hope not.
When she came back from the hospital with the little baby, my mother naturally told her that the baby would be welcome, but Katya would not hear of it. She was so scared of her father in the faraway village and what he might do to her that she would rather give up the child. She could never have gone back home if it had become known that she had this child. Yet the Soviet government had abolished all legal distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children; young mothers received higher rations and there was every chance that, once the country had pulled through, there would be nurseries for babies, education facilities for children, and sufficient work for mothers. She was a nice little baby, and when she cried I used to take her into my room. She lay on my bed while I practised the piano, which usually stopped her crying. We talked and talked to Katya, but no, she could not overcome the age-old fear of her father.
One evening she took that little bundle – as unnoticed by us as when she went to the hospital – and came quietly back without the baby. She had left it lying on the steps of a pleasant-looking house, which, as she told us afterwards, she had carefully chosen for this purpose.
It seems to me now that it must have been a sign of the toughness of life and the hardship most people suffered that we did not protest more vigorously and force Katya to keep her child. She never expressed her feelings about it and never really confided in us. Were we all too occupied with ourselves? Katya stayed with us, willingly sharing all our troubles until we left for Germany. We would have dearly loved to take her with us, but she did not want to leave her country.
My stepfather had gradually become disillusioned with life in the new Russia, and was finding it rather inhospitable. He kept talking about Germany as the country of order and sufficiency, as he had known it before he came to Russia. But leaving was not easy. In the first place the repatriation transports to Germany had stopped towards the end of 1919, and to leave illegally, as emigrés, was out of the question as far as we were concerned. We saw no reason for it, in spite of the harshness of life at that time, as we had all grown up in Russia, and even to my mother, bom in Riga, Germany was a foreign country. We were non-political and had not suffered any more than anyone else under the Bolshevik government. So none of us, except my stepfather, was inclined to go.
Nevertheless, the question of leaving or staying had gradually become a permanent cause for discussion at home. I was particularly fierce against leaving. However difficult and complicated life had become, it was still running in the familiar groove, whereas a new life in Germany frightened me. Millions of other people had stuck to Russia and lived through it all, why not us as well? We were only three adults, surely we could manage to get through. The children were well looked after in the children’s home. Every time they came home on a short visit we were surprised how good an influence the home had had on them, especially on my barely twelve-year-old brother, who had become helpful, polite and considerate as never before. Olya, being rather quiet and shy, always got on well with everybody, and little Willy could hardly have missed parental care, of which the death of his mother and the internment of his father had deprived him earlier. So there the matter rested, until one day late in December 1919 or early January 1920.
Then my mother suddenly became ill and our family doctor diagnosed typhus. It is a terrible disease, which leaves the patient prostrate and delirious. It is also highly infectious. It was a notifiable disease and by law you were not allowed to keep a patient at home if there were people other than family living there. We were at a loss. To take my mother to hospital would have almost certainly meant death. The hospitals were overcrowded, patients were lying in the corridors on straw mattresses and dying like flies. There was not enough medicine or food to go round, and the doctors and nurses worked to the last ounce of their strength through day and night. Our doctor decided not to notify the authorities and we tried to keep it a secret from our lodgers. But they could not help guessing, and were all so decent that they never mentioned it and never insisted on my mother being taken to hospital despite the danger they themselves were in.
Our doctor, who had treated us for years, came round twice a day. He had grown terribly old and thin over the past year or two. He was one of the old people who were unable to reconcile themselves with the new regime, but he stayed on, treating patients as efficiently as ever in spite of the lack of medicines and the most elementary things, such as bandages. He was extremely kind to us in those days and helped us a lot, and we felt bad that we could not adequately express our gratitude to him, but money had lost its value and we had hardly anything left to offer him. In the end we gave him two Chinese vases, which he may have appreciated, being a cultured man, or found useful for barter.
My mother’s illness was a great trial for me. Her health had never been good, but she had never been really ill either, and I had no experience in nursing. Now I had everything on my hands: my mother, the household (small as it was), and providing meals, which was quite a job. The disease is transmitted by body lice, especially among large crowds. My mother may have been infected when visiting the markets in search of food. Or I might have given refuge to some lice that may have dropped on my shoulder from that Red Army soldier’s sheepskin hat.
Wherever the infection had come from, the results were devastating. After a few days of high temperature my mother became delirious, talking wildly for days and nights. It was agony to witness how her fantasies tormented her. She raved on incessantly, continually threatening to throw herself out of the window. She accused herself of having caused the outbreak of the war because she had taken some sheets out of the trunk of one of the lodgers to barter them for food. She had set the world ablaze and would now have to pay for all the destruction, the lost lives of the dead soldiers and sailors. (I never knew whether her story was true. It wasn’t as if she had young children to feed, and we had never actually starved. Besides, nobody would have left a trunk unlocked with so many people in the flat. I cannot imagine my mother ever having even thought of such a deed whilst of sound mind.) So while she was ill my stepfather and I took turns to sit by her during the night. The same room also served as a sitting and dining room, and we prepared our simple meals on the small brick stove. Even Katya preferred to sit with us and my sick mother, rather than in the freezing cold kitchen or her own small room, which had no window. Those were terrible days. Then the crisis came and she survived. But she was terribly weak, unable to walk properly for several weeks, and really needed plenty of milk and other quite unobtainable foods to build up her strength.
This was the state of things when my stepfather came home one night and announced that there would be one last train to Germany. Whatever we decided to do, he would be leaving with his little son. And we had to decide at once – the train would leave in three days. My mother was still so weak that she could hardly grasp the situation. The children were in the home. So the decision lay with me. My resistance was broken through my mother’s illness. I could not take the responsibility for her recovery and things in general all on my own. I was ready to go. But to leave everything and everybody within three days! That was the awful thing. I had so many friends to say goodbye to. I had, with the help of my stepfather, to wind up our household, such as it was, and pack.
I started that very night, clearing out my books, my notebooks, letters, numerous little tokens from friends, sheet music, photographs. How difficult it was to part from all that I had collected over years. But we were allowed to take with us only what we could carry, and were forbidden from taking out of the country any letters, photographs or other written or printed matter. I don’t remember whether that referred to books as well, but I took with me two library books that I had not finished reading, as a kind of parting gift – though I knew this was wrong. One was a book on astronomy, which I still have, now of course quite out of date, the other a biography of Tchaikovsky which I lost somewhere on my subsequent travels. I cried all night as I cleared out my things.
The following day I went to see Lyolya and my piano teacher Valeria Vladimirovna. Lyolya was as desperate as I was. Valeria was very sad but tried to console me by telling me about the excellent academies of music in Berlin. But somehow I felt that this was the end of my music studies, that in Germany everything would be different. Then I saw Aunt Tori, who had stayed with us for so many years and was now married to a fellow Latvian. She was terribly upset and came round immediately to help. I gave her my most cherished letters and photographs to look after.
In the meantime my stepfather was chasing around trying to obtain some Polish currency, later to be changed into Deutschmarks. It was extremely difficult to buy foreign currency on the black market and one had to pay a pretty high price for it. In order to get some cash in the first place, we had to sell our furniture, and whatever else we could find buyers for. The selling was a tricky business. After the revolution confiscation was the order of the day – meaning the expropriation of big business, the nationalisation of banks, the railway network, big estates, trusts and factories. But this order was carried so far as to declare every chair in a household, every bed, as national property, on loan to people for their own use. Normally there was no interference on the part of government officials; you continued to live in your rented flat, sit on your chairs, sleep in your beds as before – unless of course you belonged to the propertied classes, in which case your house was likely to be confiscated with everything in it. But the snag for people like us was that you were forbidden by law to sell anything, and as soon as you carried a piece of furniture, a carpet or anything across the street the authorities were liable to pounce and ask for bumagi – papers testifying that you were entitled to shift this object. Fortunately practically everything in our rooms was taken over by the various people who lived in the flat with us. My piano, my father’s last present to me, I could have sold for quite a lot of money, but sentimental reasons stopped me. So I left it with my friend Lyolya, convinced that I would return to Moscow within a short time. (I presume I must have given her a duly signed paper to enable her to move it into her home.)
The last thing was to fetch my sister and brother. This was Katya’s job and it turned out to be quite an odyssey. Early in the morning, on the last day before our departure, I went with Katya to the railway station, where we queued up for the ticket. Finally she got it and left for the platform. I turned towards the exit to hurry home to continue packing our essential clothing into one of those old-fashioned basket-trunks, which two of us could carry ... but the exit was closed. The crowd of people milled around, talking and dashing to and fro. I went to another exit. The same thing: closed and guarded by a militia man. The same at yet another exit. Nobody knew anything, only one thing was clear: nobody was allowed to leave the station.
I was in a panic. I simply had to get home, where my sick mother was expecting me and where I still had so many things to do. I ran from one militia man to another. I went to the commandant of the station. All efforts to get out were in vain. They had orders not to let anybody leave and there was absolutely no exemption from this order, whatever the reasons. I was in despair and fluttering around the station like a wild bird in a huge cage, when a young girl, an employee at the station, took pity on me and offered to show me a way out somewhere beyond the platforms, past some sidings with endless trains shunted on to them. At last I was free and ran home, still stunned by fear that I might have to stay there for I knew not how long.
But the excitement was not at an end yet. The day passed and no Katya and no children turned up. Of course there could always have been a delay, but it got later and later and still no children. I was getting more and more anxious. The train for Germany was supposed to leave in the morning! What could have happened? Finally, shortly before midnight, they arrived, upset, exhausted, hungry and sad. It was very hard for them to leave the happy children’s Home in that big old monastery and all the friends they had lived with for a year. But they were also a little curious about the future, at least the two boys were.
Now Katya told us her adventures. She had got on the train, which left fairly punctually, but after a while she noticed that it had taken a different route. She discovered that every man or woman who was at the station that morning, whether as a traveller or not, was being taken some miles out of town – the women to clear the tracks, the men to fell trees and chop wood. They would be safely back in Moscow in the evening. Katya realised that she would be unable to fetch the children. So she jumped off the slowly moving train, somehow managed to get another, then a peasant cart, then she had about an hour’s walk through fields and woods to the children’s home. It was early February, but the weather was pleasant and sunny and Katya knew she had a job to do.
The road from the station to the monastery was usually quite deserted, but on that day first one cartload with singing and chatting children came along, then another. She hardly glanced at them and continued on her way, until she heard the second cart stop and her name called out. It was the children from the home, on a visit to a neighbouring children’s home. My sister and brothers had recognised Katya and stopped the cart. Now they heard that in less than 24 hours they would be on their way to Germany! So the whole excursion sadly turned back to help them pack, exchange token gifts and take leave of friends and teachers.
The following morning – it must have been 7 or 8 February 1920 – we bade a final farewell to our friends and acquaintances and sat waiting for the transport to the station. When it was delayed, I decided to make a bonfire in my room of all my remaining papers. I made a neat pile on the parquet floor and set it alight, thinking the pile would bum to ashes in no time. But it went on and on burning, with the thick smoke filling the room and escaping into the street through the small open window. Luckily nobody in the street took any notice. When the flames and smoke finally subsided, I was aghast: I had burned a big black circle into the floor, leaving the House Committee and my successor in the room to deal with this rather disastrous damage.
Our train, like all the previous ones for those who wanted to return to Germany, had been provided by the Soviet authorities (presumably with the cooperation of the German authorities) and was equipped with an ambulance carriage with medical staff, and a kitchen. We deposited the little luggage we had in our compartment and, with Aunt Tori, waited for the train to leave. It was a long wait and a weary one, especially for my mother, and we were getting hungry. The kitchen did not start working until the train was on its way. Not till the afternoon did the whistle finally blow. A hasty embrace from Aunt Tori, a last desperate glance at Moscow, and we began our long journey into an uncertain future.
There must have been between five and six hundred people on that train, the vast majority former prisoners of war. Most of the others were the remains of German families who had tried, like my stepfather, to resume their pre-war life in Russia. But there was also a sprinkling of people like us, whose accidental link with Germany enabled them to leave Russia.
We settled down as comfortably as possible. There were two or three carriages, all of the third-class type with hard seats, for families. The majority of the ex-prisoners of war travelled in former goods trucks, fitted out with benches and a small stove for warmth. The compartments in our carriage did not quite reach to the ceiling and there were no doors to the corridor. Each compartment had two top and two bottom bunks, which could be extended to form a very big double bed at night. You could not fall off, but if you wanted to get down, you had to slip out at the foot end. We were given one or two blankets each, and also covered ourselves with our coats. I don’t remember it being cold in the carriage. At night, which fell early since it was mid-winter, a candle lantern dimly lit the corridor and the compartments. The train swayed gently, chugging along, slowly, painfully, with endless stops. It took us days to reach Borisov, the last town before the war zone between Russia and Poland, where at that time there was something of a truce.
The journey was a trying time for everybody, especially those with children, though the staff on the train did their best. Twice a day doctors and nurses would go the length of the train, examining the sick and the weak, distributing medicines, or whatever was required and available. Of course we kept it secret that my mother was only just recovering from typhus, and luckily nobody fell ill because of her during the journey. The food we received was simple but relatively good. Many of us had not had such substantial meals for weeks or months: at midday we had a thick soup, sometimes with bits of meat in it. Those who could afford it, supplemented this with food offered by the peasants all along the route. And at the stations there was always a rush to the cistern to get boiling water for tea.
Our greatest difficulty during the journey to Borisov was to keep clean. Often we just rubbed our faces, ears and necks with snow. At longer stops we managed to get some warm water which trickled down from an engine pipe. Every now and then we had a ‘spring-clean’ in our carriage: mattresses were carried out and brushed, blankets shaken out, the benches washed down with carbolic disinfectant supplied by the ambulance staff. It was surprising that with all this we did not get into hysterics or fall out with each other. On the contrary, everybody was friendly and tried to make life in the carriage as bearable as possible.
Of our fellow passengers I remember clearly only one, a Madame Belkina, an intelligent woman in her mid-thirties. In Moscow she had worked with a theatre and concert ticket agency, and knew all about artists, singers, dancers, musicians, about operas, ballets and music. I liked to talk, or rather listen to her. Or I immersed myself in the two books I had taken with me.
Finally we reached Borisov, a town in Byelorussia, which had been part of Lithuania, Poland and Russia and became one of the sixteen republics of the USSR in 1922. There we stopped, and it suddenly became doubtful whether the Polish authorities would let the train pass at all. The big spring offensive – when the reactionary Marshal Pilsudski marched his troops into the Ukraine and was turned back by General Tukhachevsky, a former Tsarist officer who had joined the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 – had not yet begun. But skirmishes between the two opposing armies had been going on for some time and we were caught up in them. There were daily negotiations about whether to let the train through to the Polish-German frontier. Early in the morning the train would move up quite close to the war zone, where we could hear rifle shooting and machine guns. In the evening we would be taken back again – only for the same thing to happen the next and every day for about a fortnight. It was a nerve-racking time. However reluctant we were to leave Moscow for Germany, now that we had packed our bags there was nowhere else for us to go. So the whole train hoped and waited.
In the meantime we made the best of a bad thing and used to go exploring the nearby villages to get some extra food and find proper washing facilities. They were wretched and poor Lithuanian villages, which had suffered badly during the war. The population was predominantly Jewish, the men wearing long black kaftans, skull caps and long locks (peisaks) dangling from their temples. The women used to bake a special kind of flan from coarse flour on flat baking tins in the old ovens, which we bought to supplement our monotonous train diet. At times the weather was gorgeous, the snow sparkling in the sun. It was February, the worst cold and frost was over, and we greatly enjoyed these excursions, stretching our limbs and breathing the fresh air.
And at last, one bright morning, we were told that we could proceed. We had to walk for six or seven miles though the snow to board a Polish train. Fortunately some sleighs were available for the old, the sick and the small children, and my stepfather had also managed to buy a child’s sleigh for our basket-trunk. We could never have carried it across. We entered an enclosure where our documents were checked by the Soviet and Polish military. Then we passed through a wooden gate.
Russia was behind us now and there was no way of getting back. I stopped and looked over the undulating snow-covered countryside, with a row of dark trees on the horizon. I will never forget the sight of that long line of people, winding their way across the bare white landscape. Most of them were returning ‘home’. Yet they all – at least to me – looked infinitely sad, forlorn, joyless. They were not refugees, yet seeing photographs of the many refugees through the years since then, people who have been, for one reason or another, driven from their homes and countries, has always reminded me of that melancholy picture at the Russian-Polish border. It seemed like a forerunner of the many and tragic migrations to come.
Having crossed the no-man’s land, we boarded the Polish train which took us to Warsaw. There we spent the night in a reception centre, where we were deloused, disinfected, and sent to the bath house for a good scrub. Our clothes were disinfected and returned to us smelling of cheap petrol. The following day we were free to walk around. We strolled along the Krakovska, the Bond Street of Warsaw, with our stepfather, marvelling at the window displays in the shops, eating the Polish national dish – flaky (tripe) – in a restaurant, and indulging ourselves eating chocolate cake and drinking coffee in a cafe.
After one more night we were finally put on another train which took us to a quarantine camp at Heilstadt, near Koenigsberg (today this is Kaliningrad, and part of the USSR). It was there, at the beginning of March 1920, that we started our new life in a land unknown to us, which turned out to be very different from the ‘land of milk and honey’ that my stepfather had visualised.
Margaret Dewar Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 18 February 2023