Yashka · Part IV · Chapter 17 (1/2)

XVII

Facing Lenin and Trotsky

Petrograd seemed populated by Red Guards. One could not make a step without encountering one. They kept a strict watch over the station and all the incoming and outgoing trains. My escorts left me on the station platform, as they were to return to the front immediately.

I had hardly emerged from the station, intending to look for a cabman, when a Red Guard Commissary, accompanied by a private with a naked sword, stopped me with the polite query:

“Madame Bochkareva?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come with me, please?” he suggested.

“Where?” I asked.

“To the Smolny Institute.”

“But why?”

“Because I have orders to detain all officers returning from the front,” he replied.

“But I am only going home!” I tried to argue.

“Yes, I understand. But as an officer you will also understand that I must obey orders. They will probably release you.”

He hailed a cabman and we drove to the Smolny Institute, the seat of the Bolshevik Government. It impressed me as a strongly garrisoned fortress. There were armed sentries everywhere. Accompanied by Red Guards I was led inside. There were Guards at every desk. I was taken before a sailor. He was very rough and brusque.

“Where are you going?” he demanded curtly.

“I am going home, to a village near Tomsk,” I replied.

“Then why are you armed?” he sneered.

“Because I am an officer, and this is my uniform,” I answered.

He blazed up.

“An officer, eh? You will be an officer no more. Give me that pistol and sword!” he ordered.

The arms were those given to me at the consecration of the flag of the Battalion. I prized them too much to hand them over to this rogue of a sailor, and I refused to comply with his demand. He grew furious. It would have been useless to resist as the room was full of Red Guards. I declared that if he wanted my arms he could take them, but I would never surrender them myself.

He violently tore the pistol and sword from me and pronounced me under arrest. There was a dark cellar in the Institute which was used as a place of detention, and I was sent down there and locked up. I was hungry, but received no answer to all my calls, and remained in the hole till the following morning. As soon as I was brought upstairs I began to demand my arms. The various officials, however, remained deaf to my pleas.

I was informed that I should be taken before Lenin and Trotsky, and was soon led into a large, light room where two men of contrasting appearance were seated, apparently expecting my entrance. One had a typical Russian face. The other looked Jewish. The first was Nikolai Lenin, the second Leon Trotsky. Both arose as I stepped in and walked toward me a few steps, stretching out their hands and greeting me courteously.

Lenin apologized for my arrest, explaining that he had learned of it only that morning. Inviting me to a seat, the two Bolshevik chiefs complimented me upon my record of service and courage, and began to sketch to me the era of happiness that they intended to procure for Russia. They talked simply, smoothly and very beautifully. It was for the common people, the toiling masses, the disinherited that they were fighting. They wanted justice for all. Wasn’t I of the working class myself? Yes, I was. Wouldn’t I join them and cooperate with their party in bringing happiness to the oppressed peasant and workman? They wanted peasant women like myself: they had the highest esteem for them.

“You will bring Russia not to happiness but to ruin,” I said.

“Why?” they asked. “We seek only what is good and right. The people are with us. You saw for yourself that the army is behind us.”

“I will tell you why,” I replied. “I have no objection to your beautiful plans for the future of Russia. But as for the immediate situation, if you take the soldiers away from the front, you are destroying the country.”

“But we do not want any more war. We are going to conclude peace,” the two leaders replied.

“How can you conclude peace without soldiers at the front? You are demobilizing the army already. You have got to make peace first and then let the men go home. I myself want peace, but if I were in the trenches I would never leave before peace had been signed. What you are doing will ruin Russia.”

“We are sending the soldiers away because the Germans will not advance against us, anyhow. They do not want to fight either,” was the reply.

It irritated me, this view of the Germans held by the men who now controlled the Government of my country.

“You don’t know the Germans!” I cried out. “We have lost so many lives in this war, and now you would give everything away without a struggle! You don’t know war! Take the soldiers away from the front and the Germans will come and seize upon everything they can lay hands on. This is war. I am a soldier and I know. But you don’t. Why did you take it upon yourselves to rule the country? You will ruin it!” I exclaimed in anguish.

Lenin and Trotsky laughed. I could see the irony in their eyes. They were learned and worldly. They had written books and travelled in foreign lands. And who was I? An illiterate Russian peasant woman. My lecture undoubtedly afforded them amusement. They smiled condescendingly at my suggestion that they did not know what war was in reality.

I rejected their proposal to cooperate with them and asked if I were free to leave. One of them rang a bell and a Red Guard entered. He was requested to accompany me out of the room and to provide me with a passport and a free ticket to Tomsk. Before leaving I asked for my arms, but was refused. I explained that they were partly of gold and given to me on an occasion that rendered them almost priceless to me. They answered that I would receive them back as soon as order was restored. Of course, I never got them back.

I left the room without saying goodbye. In the next room I was given a passport, and proceeded by tramcar to the station. I decided not to linger in Petrograd and to depart without even seeing any of my friends. On the way I was recognized everywhere, but was allowed to proceed unmolested. The same evening I boarded one of the three cars attached to a train that went to Irkutsk by way of Vologda and Chelyabinsk. I was going home. With me I had some two thousand roubles (about £211 2s. 3d.), saved during my command of the Battalion, when I had received a salary of four hundred roubles (about £42 4s. 5d.) a month.

The train was overcrowded with returning soldiers, almost all ardent Bolsheviks. I remained in the compartment for eight days, leaving it only occasionally at night. I sent out a companion passenger to buy food for me at the stations. As we neared Chelyabinsk, at the end of the eight days, the crowd had diminished in number, and I thought, I might safely go out on to the gangway and get off at the great station for a little walk. No sooner did I appear on the gangway than I was recognized by some soldiers.

“Oh, look who is here!” one exclaimed.

“It’s Bochkareva! The harlot!” a couple of others echoed.

“She ought to be killed!” shouted somebody.

“Why?” I turned on them. “What harm have I done to you? Oh, you fools, fools!”

The train slowed down, approaching the station. I had scarcely turned my head away from the insolent fellows, when I was suddenly lifted by two pairs of arms, swung to and fro once, twice, three times, and thrown off the moving train.

Fortunately the momentum of the swinging was so great that I was thrown across the parallel tracks and landed in a bank of snow piled along the railway. It was the end of November, 1917. It was all so sudden that the laughter of the brutes behind me still rang in my ears as I became conscious of pain in my right knee.

The train was halted before pulling into the station. In a few moments a big crowd collected round me, composed of passengers, railway officials and others. All were indignant at the brutality of the soldiers. The Commandant of the station and members of the local committee hurried to the spot. I was placed on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. It was found that I had a dislocated knee, and my leg was bandaged. I then declared that I desired to continue the journey, and I was given a berth in a hospital coach attached to a train going east. There were attendants and a medical assistant on the car.

My injured leg grew more and more painful as I proceeded homeward. It began to swell, and the medical assistant telegraphed to the stationmaster of Tutalsk, the village in which my family now lived, to provide a stretcher for me.

My sister, Arina, was employed at the station as attendant at the tea-urn, which is always kept boiling at Russian railway stations. It was this employment of hers that had caused the family to move to Tutalsk from Tomsk, where they had no means of livelihood whatever. When the message from the doctor in charge of the car reached my sister and through her my parents, there was an outburst of grief. It was three years since they had seen their Marusia and now she was apparently being brought to them on her deathbed!

On the fourth day of the journey from Chelyabinsk the train stopped at Tutalsk. My leg was badly swollen and was as heavy as a log. The pains were agonizing. My face was deadly pale.

A stretcher was prepared for me at the station. My sisters, my mother and father and the stationmaster were at the door of the coach when I was carried out. My mother shrieked in heartrending tones, “My Marusia! My Manka!” stretched her hands toward heaven and threw herself full length on me, mourning over me as if I were ready for burial.

Her prodigal daughter had returned, my mother sobbed, but in what a condition! She thought that I must have been wounded and have asked to be sent home to die. I could not speak, I could only grasp her bony arms, as my throat was choked with a tempest of tears and sobs. Everybody was crying, my sisters calling me by caressing names, my father standing over me bent and white, and even the strange stationmaster.⁠ ⁠…

I became hysterical and the doctor was sent for. He had me removed home immediately, promising in response to my mother’s entreaties to do everything in his power for me. I was ill for a month, passing Christmas and meeting the New Year, 1918, in bed.

The two thousand roubles I had saved I gave to my parents. But this sum, which would have been reckoned a fortune before the war, was barely sufficient to keep us for a few months. It cost nearly a hundred roubles (about £10 11s.) to buy a pair of shoes for my youngest sister, Nadia, who was going about barefoot! It cost almost twice as much to buy her a secondhand jacket at the Tomsk market. Manufactured goods sold at a premium when they were to be had, but it was much more difficult to find what one needed than to pay an exorbitant price for it. There was plenty of flour in the country. But the peasants would not sell it cheaply because they could get nothing in town for less than fifty or a hundred times its former price. The result was that flour sold at sixty roubles (about £6 6s. 8d.) a pood (thirty-two pounds)! It may be imagined how far two thousand roubles would carry one in Russia.

Tutalsk had also been swept by the hurricane of Bolshevism. There were many soldiers who had returned from the front imbued with Bolshevik teachings. Just before my arrival the newly-fledged heretics even burned the village church, to the great horror of the older inhabitants. It was not an unusual case; it was typical of the time. Hundreds of thousands of deluded young men had returned from the trenches with the passion to destroy, to tear down everything that had existed before: the old system of Government, the church, nay, God Himself⁠—all in preparation for the new order of life they were going to establish.

But one institution⁠—the scourge of the nation⁠—they failed to wipe out. Nay more, they restored it. The Tsar had abolished vodka. The prohibition was continued in force by the new regime, but only on paper. Nearly every returned soldier took to distilling vodka at home, and the old plague of the country recovered its power and took its part in the building of the Bolsheviks’ new world.

Every town and village had its committee or Soviet. They were supposed to carry out orders from the Central Government. An order was issued to confiscate all articles of gold and silver. Committees searched every house for such belongings. There was, also, or was supposed to be, an order taxing furniture and clothes. When the taxes arbitrarily demanded were not paid, the furniture and clothes were taken away.

In the towns it was the townsmen who suffered, in the villages the peasants, all under the pretext of confiscating the riches of the bourgeoisie. It was sufficient for a peasant to buy a new overcoat, perhaps with his last savings, for him to be branded as an exploiter and lose his precious garment. The peculiar thing about such cases was the fact that the confiscated article would almost invariably appear on the back of one of the Bolshevik ringleaders. It was merely looting, and the methods were pure terrorism, practised mostly by the returned soldiers.

I received some letters at Tutalsk. One was from my adjutant, Princess Tatuyeva, who had arrived safely in Tiflis, her native town.

One morning I went to the post office to ask for letters.

“There goes Bochkareva!” I heard a man cry out.

“Ah, Bochkareva! She is for the old regime!” another fellow replied, apparently one of the Bolshevik soldiers.

There were several of them and they shouted threats and insults at me. I did not reply but returned home with a heavy heart. Even in my own home I was not safe.

“My God,” I prayed, “what has come over the Russian people? Is this my reward for the sacrifices I have made for my country?”

I resolved not to leave the house again. Surely this madness would not last long, I thought. I spent most of the day reading the Bible and praying to Heaven for the awakening and enlightenment of my people.

On the 7th of January, 1918, I received a telegram from Petrograd, signed by General X. It read:

Come. You are needed.

The same day I bought a ticket for the capital, bade farewell to my family, and set out. I removed the epaulets from my uniform, thus appearing in the garb of a private.

About this time the Germans, to the profound shock of the revolutionary masses, began their sudden advance into Russia. It had an almost miraculous effect on the Bolshevik sympathizers. The train was as usual packed with soldiers, but there was a noticeable difference in their expression and conversation. All the braggadocio had been knocked out of them by the enemy’s action. They had been lulled into the sweet belief that peace had come and that a golden age was about to open for them. They could not reconcile that with the swift advance of the Kaiser’s soldiers toward Petrograd and Moscow.

It was refreshing, exhilarating to listen to some of the men.

“We have been sold!” one heard here and there.

“We were told that the German soldiers would not advance if we left the front,” was another frequent expression.

“It is not the common people, it is the German bourgeoisie that is fighting us now,” was an argument ordinarily given in answer to the first opinions, “and there is nothing to be afraid of. There will soon be a revolution in Germany.”

“Who knows,” some would doubtfully remark, “that Lenin and Trotsky have not delivered us into the hands of the accursed Germans?”