Red Dusk and the Morrow · Chapter 8 (2/2)

Completely bewildered, I limped along, my frostbitten feet giving me considerable pain. I wondered in my mind if people at home had any idea at what a cost the population of Petrograd secured the first necessities of life in the teeth of the “Communist” rulers. Still musing, I came out on the Znamenskaya Square in front of the Nicholas Station, the scene of many wild occurrences in the days of the Great Revolution.

You could still see the hole in the station roof whence in those days a machine-gun manned by Protopopov’s police had fired down on the crowds below. I had watched the scene from that little alcove just over there near the corner of the Nevsky. While I was watching, the people had discovered another policeman on the roof of the house just opposite. They threw him over the parapet. He fell on the pavement with a heavy thud, and lay there motionless. Everything, I remembered, had suddenly seemed very quiet as I looked across the road at his dead body, though the monotonous song of the machine-gun still sounded from the station roof.

But next day a new song was sung in the hearts of the people, a song of Hope and a song of Freedom. Justice shall now reign, said the people! For it was said, “The Tsarist ways and the Tsarist police are no more!”

Today, two years later, it was just such a glorious winter morning as in those days of March, 1917. The sun laughed to scorn the silly ways of men. But the song of Hope was dead, and the people’s faces bore the imprint of starvation, distress, and terror⁠—terror of those very same Tsarist police! For these others, who did not make the Revolution, but who were encouraged by Russia’s enemies to return to Russia to poison it⁠—these others copied the Tsarist ways, and, restoring the Tsarist police, made them their own. The men and women who made the Revolution, they said, were the enemies of the Revolution! So they put them back in prison, and hung up other flags. Here, stretched across the Nevsky Prospect, on this winter morning there still fluttered in the breeze the tattered shreds of their washed-out red flags, besmirched with the catchwords with which the Russian workers and the Russian peasants had been duped. There still stood unremoved in the middle of the square the shabby, dilapidated, four-months-old remains of the tribunes and stages which had been erected to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevist revolution. The inscriptions everywhere spoke not of the “bourgeois prejudices” of Liberty and Justice, but of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (sometimes hypocritically called the “brotherhood of workers”), of class war, of the sword, of blood, hatred, and worldwide revolution.

Looking up from my bitter reverie I saw Uncle Egor, from whom I had got separated in the scramble at the railway station. I wanted to thank and recompense him for the food and shelter he had given me.

“Uncle Egor,” I asked him, “how much do I owe you?”

But Uncle Egor shook his head. He would take no recompense.

“Nothing, my little son,” he replied, “nothing. And come back again when you like.” He looked round, and lowering his voice, added cautiously, “And if ever you need⁠ ⁠… to run away⁠ ⁠… or hide⁠ ⁠… or anything like that⁠ ⁠… you know, little son, who will help you.”