Abandoned by God

By Elizabeth Guy

Abandoned by God is a love story.

 

It is a tale of passion and desperation during the Russian Revolution - where the Captain of the Guards and the Tsar's eldes

• Language: English
• Publisher: FirstRider Publishing
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645111385

Elizabeth Guy

Elizabeth Guy was born in Australia and currently lives part of the week in Sydney's inner city and the rest, in the Blue Mountains. She is a full-time writer and a part-time tutor and an education consultant. Abandoned by God, is her second historical fiction set in the tumultuous year of the Russian Revolution. Elizabeth's first historical fiction, Take Ink and Weep (2021), is set in Russia in 1915. Elizabeth's doctorate was awarded by the University of Sydney (The Poetics of the Nation-State). Elizabeth is also the author of The Alchemy of Poetry: A Reader's Guide to Understanding Poetry (2020). She has worked and traveled extensively throughout a number of places, including Russia and South America.

Book preview

Abandoned by God

Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Guy

IBSN: 9780645111378

First Published in Australia by First Rider Publisher in 2021.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover designed by The Social Designer Australasia Pty Ltd.

Printed in Australia.

Contact:

www.elizabeth-guy.com

Keep up to date with what Elizabeth is doing:

Instagram @elizabeth_guy | Facebook @elizabethguy01

To

To

Roger:

I loved you

The first moment I met you.

About the Author

Elizabeth Guy is a full-time writer. She was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney (The Poetics of the Nation-State) and for the past 30 years has taught Literature in Australia (Sydney and Kalgoorlie) as well as Scotland, Fiji, and Chile. Before working and trekking in South America, Elizabeth travelled extensively throughout the USA and Canada, writing, reading, and learning Spanish. Abandoned by God is her third book. Her first was a non-fiction, The Alchemy of Poetry: A Reader’s Guide to Poetry and is now in its second edition. Her second book, Take Ink & Weep, is a fictional account of the poetic lives of the great Silver Age poets during Russia’s engagement in World War 1. Outside of writing, Elizabeth is an accomplished long-distance walker. She has passionate interests in the Arts and ongoing travels in Russia. For part of the week, she lives in Sydney’s inner-city with Mithridates, a little grey tabby found under a house in Dubbo, and her good-looking husband. For the rest of the time, she writes in a family home in the Blue Mountains where her daughter and son-in-law often stay.

Chapter 1: The Abdication

Tsarskoye Selo, 30 km south of Petrograd. April, 1917.

He stands on the steps in the icy gloaming. With his back to the doors, the man looks over the garden, its covered statues and boxed-up fountains seem strange sentries. Far away in the distance, the silhouette of trees dips and nods solemnly. He thinks to himself that it hardly feels like spring, despite being early April.

The man knows he should move indoors but remains facing his garden as it disappears into the rush of evening. He watches as the sky spirals inwards in a thick contorted roll of darkened grey and brittle white, indicating the day’s end.

The man’s long woollen greatcoat, undecorated and utilitarian, is a protection of sorts against the hard cold that he has known all his life. He realises, without emotion, that in one month he will be 49 but, now that he is a man without purpose or destiny, a birthday seems pointless.

All of a sudden, the honk of geese sweeps up and wheels above the man, who is still standing on the steps with his back to his home. They rise effortlessly to become a swirling mess of early evening and then soar eastward in a cacophony of homecoming. The man cranes his head back and hears the creak and flap and gaggle leave him far, far behind.

He knows the longing he feels is ridiculous — to be free, to escape. Lines from Pushkin fly through his mind, like the last goose of the skein:

I let a captive bird go winging,

To greet the radiant spring’s rebirth

I was free to set aflutter

One poor captive from his cage!

The man is unaware of irony, whether it is here in the recitation of the Golden Age poet or in the everyday tasks assigned him before he was made redundant.

Well, that’s not it exactly, he thinks to himself as he shuffles about to face the double doors to his home. Before he was made to resign.

He mounts the last two steps and registers the grunt of pain in his knee. The man pauses and wonders why he struggles. He loves his family and yearns for their chatter and touch but at the same time, he wants to be rid of it all. This story that is his, and by default theirs, this shame, this inexplicable loss of faith.

And there before the double doors, with one gloved hand on the doorknob, he utters a truth that lurks like a heretic in the crypt of his soul, ‘God has abandoned me …’

He senses something is amiss when he enters the home and stands momentarily in the hallway, listening. The dim pools of light before him offer no clues. He glances up to his right and there stands his wife.

A heaviness descends on the man as he moves slowly up the winding staircase. He is still not used to the cavernous space of his home that is filled with the spectres of a life now finished.

The man reaches the top of the staircase and says by way of a beginning, ‘My knee is still giving me a little trouble.’

She stands quite still. If she could swim, people might have said she had the shoulders and deportment of a swimmer. Her remarkable shoulders still reveal their architecture of clavicle, scapular, and even the beautifully moulded humerus. She walks tall, straight-backed, and fluid but on this occasion, she stands motionless, in a wine-red Japanese kimono, beneath which is a flurry of floor-length silk petticoat. She is waiting for her husband to reach, not only the top of the staircase but some awareness of their situation.

‘Yes, my love.’ The man says quietly, with no expectation. ‘What is it?’

Her grey-green eyes search her husband’s tired face.

‘It’s Derevenko,’ she whispers which is what she has been doing lately. ‘He has left us.’

The man looks past his wife to the small room directly behind her and, probably because it contains bookcases, he finds himself wondering what will become of the collection of verse that he inherited long ago and loves so dearly.

‘Derevenko,’ she repeats insistently but he just cannot place a face to the name. They look at each other, he blankly and she expectantly.

‘Of course!’ the man blurts. ‘Derevenko!’ And he looks about as if to confront his son’s bodyguard, there and then, on top of the staircase, ‘Where is he? I’ll have a word. I’ll …’ But they both realise he cannot fix this. He cannot stop what is happening to them — to his wife and family and himself.

She rests her hand on his arm momentarily. These days her voice sounds more and more like her mother once did, ‘Derevenko,’ she repeats and looks away from her husband. His sad blue eyes and greying whiskers make it nearly impossible for her to continue. ‘Derevenko was heard taunting … and jeering our son …’ And her face screws up like a tight handkerchief and she begins to sob.

The man lays his head into the cave of her shoulder and neck, feeling the shudder and gulp of her grief.

They stand like this for some time.

It seems cooler here than when he stood outside and watched the geese fly east into the eternal night sky. He wonders whether the internal oil heaters have been lit or whether it is something more uncertain than a simple task not completed.

She mumbles into his coat collar and he pulls away with, ‘What was that?’

His wife says, ‘Everyone is leaving us …’ He pats her strong back as she continues, ‘It is hardly three months … since we buried …’

He wonders if she will say the name and after a moment he offers, ‘Father Grigori Rasputin.’

There is a fresh flood of tears but she is nodding into the comfort of her husband’s coat. And the man thinks about the priest who, for years, managed to give his family all that he could not. He wonders how they will finish up. When will the ignobility stop? And he even finds himself contemplating the blasphemy — that in his beginning must have been, and most probably is his end.

The man is brought back to the present by something she is saying to him, ‘… But without Derevenko …’ And the woman’s palms open upward in a gesture of desperation.

Before he can stop himself, he sighs and almost imperceptibly he senses his wife stiffen. How could she understand? He thinks to himself. How could she possibly understand? He has fallen so far from God’s grace that he knows, buried in the dry soil of his dead hope, that there will be no redemption.

But instead, he says, ‘Derevenko can go. It is my job now to care for my son … and to care for you … and all my family.’ He brushes wisps of thin dark hair away from her face and adds quietly, ‘All will be well.’

The man smiles carefully at his wife and she, quite unexpectedly, kisses him on the side of his face, where his beard ends and his pale skin appears.

Together they turn to walk through the small room behind, from there they will make their way, slowly, to the hall beyond and then eventually to their son’s room, where a 12 year old boy, one leg contorted in a strange angle perpendicular to the rest of him, lies on his cot next to his mother’s day bed. His wasted body is taut with pain, his handsome face searching the icon-strewn wall — in an attempt to manage the bloody mess of his holy disease, not to mention the bewildering loss of his beloved bodyguard.

2

For the past two hours, Captain Pavel Mikhailovich Konoplev has been leaning against the low wall that separates the man’s home from his garden. Pavel should have made himself known and hurried the man back inside when the sun went down but something is intoxicating about the shift of power, that has, somehow, strangely, come into his own hands.

Pavel hunches over the butt end of his cigarette, the one he has been keeping, and relights it. His greatcoat is unbuttoned revealing the olive-green khaki of his single-breasted woollen tunic, and dark green breeches that tuck comfortably into black knee-length boots. Pinned to his coat are his detachable shoulder boards, faced with bright metallic lace. Once they were a potent symbol of privilege and status but recently they have become a little more worrisome.

He looks up because he hears the approach of a vehicle and so he slowly picks up his Mosin-Nagant rifle and sucks up the last hit of his cigarette then stubs it out before the vehicle sweeps around the long driveway.

Pavel has been assigned to the Sharpshooter Guards, 4th Regiment, and is more or less glad to be guarding the family under house arrest. Glad because he occasionally takes leave to visit his father, an ex-colonel, out on his forested estate halfway between Gatchina and Luga. Pavel thinks to himself that he has nothing to complain about. He has an older sister living in Petrograd. She’s a teacher and very active in politics, who is always looking out for him — despite him surviving the Battle of Tannenberg.

The shrapnel wound in his left thigh resulted in a noticeable limp. Consequently, Pavel remains a great shot who prefers not to run after his target. Not that there seems any likelihood that the prisoners he is guarding could attempt an escape.

The roar of the motor cuts through the night and the gravel driveway spits and splutters beneath its heft. Some of the soldiers are mooching out of the guardhouse and sentry boxes adjoining the large entrance gate. Pavel moves into position, directly beneath the steps of the man’s home, and squints across at the sound of car doors slamming, voices barking and footsteps crunching in approach.

He scoops his rifle under his arm.

‘At ease, Captain,’ he hears an unfamiliar voice and then a government minister stands before him. It is still early days so Pavel fumbles with his salute that more or less becomes a tug of his cap.

‘Any trouble?’

Pavel thinks the government minister looks familiar and wonders what sort of trouble a middle-aged man with a wife, a sick son, and too many daughters, could actually pose and then he remembers, ‘Just to report, sir … comrade, that the sailor who acts as a bodyguard for the boy has gone.’

The government minister seems uninterested but Pavel wants to register his distaste for the greasy lard-arse who has avoided fighting at the Front by spending his days carrying about an invalid kid. Besides, one moment the sailor-bodyguard is thick with the prisoners, and the next minute he’s strolling out the gates.

‘Thank you, Captain. I will take that under advisement. Nothing else to report?’

Pavel scratches about inside his memory but can come up with nothing. These days it is better to watch and keep quiet unless of course, you have a weasel in your sights that needs routing before he turns on you.

‘No, comrade.’

The government minister hesitates for a moment and then says, ‘I need a good man like yourself, here, to keep an eye on things for me.’ The minister is clean-shaven and although it is obvious he has never been a soldier he seems genuinely concerned that Pavel realises his importance in the scheme of things, whatever that is.

Pavel nods.

‘Thank you, Captain,’ adds the minister and then shoves a half packet of cigarettes into Pavel’s hand before striding up to the double doors.

Pavel watches him disappear. He has been guarding the family for about a month now and it is definitely preferable to the ongoing mayhem, street speeches, and rabble-rousing of Petrograd.

At first, like every other poor hungry sod who had limped back from the Front, he was euphoric when the garrison rebelled alongside the Putilov workers back in February. They had joined the women’s protest, which of course became a tidal wave of workers and soldiers marching down the Nevsky Prospect and into the Palace Square. His sister, Lidia, was there with him and had even called it a revolution! And there he was shoulder to shoulder with her and all of Russia, or so it seemed, in the very thick of it. Not that he got anywhere near the square — he had never seen so many people. He, like every other Russian, knew theirs was the biggest nation in the world but he sure had no idea how so many of them had squeezed into the city. But there he was — a true part of something remarkable, something joyful and unstoppable. It was as if the madness of the past had ended that day they took to the streets.

Pavel takes a bent cigarette from the packet the minister gave him, straightens it, lights it, and inhales deeply.

He had tried explaining what it had been like to his father. But it was no good. His father had grunted something about the country’s determination to kill each other and that the younger generation should be more cautious. But Pavel had been there and his lungs had burst in song.

Stand, rise up, working people!

Arise against the enemies, hungry brother!

Let be heard the people's cry for vengeance

Forward! Forward! Forward! Forward! Forward!

It was impossible to describe the power he felt as he marched headlong into a new Russia chanting End the War! His sister Lidia shouting The Tsar must Go! His countrywomen demanding Food for the People! His countrymen roaring Power to the Soviets!

All bridges behind them were burned, so to speak, because there was no going back.

Workers and soldiers and peasants and businessmen and students and teachers and mothers and grandmothers and children and priests and poets and railwaymen. The unimaginable was happening. Russian people everywhere, saw, for the first time, that what they had dreamed of before the war — before 1917 — was now a reality.

Pavel looks up into the windows and watches a figure move unhurriedly along the long corridor. He inhales deeply and can’t help but feel, probably for the first time in his life, utterly significant. Pavel exhales in the knowledge that, now, Russia will be righted.

3

Inside the house, the broad-chested Head Footman leans over the balustrade at the top of the staircase and looks down on the minister who has just announced himself with Good Evening! Sour-faced, the Footman responds with ‘The family is at supper.’

Not a person to ever falter in his mission, the minister bounds up the impressive staircase in his grey suit, coat over one arm, and, a little surprisingly, a Homburg hat in the other saying to the 60 year old servant, ‘Then I shall be their guest.’

The footman recognises the face of the minister and without further ado leads the way to where the family is enjoying hot blinis with jam and the never-ending strong sweet tea, topped up from the large samovar.

As they move toward the east wing, a door at the end of a long corridor suddenly opens.

The Footman comes to an abrupt halt, as does the minister treading close behind, but unlike the minister, the aged footman bows deeply.

Before him is the man dressed simply, as an officer might, with his dark-green trousers tucked into long black boots and a loose woollen khaki tunic.

‘Your Imperial Majesty. The Minister for …’ The footman’s pause is, almost, indiscernible, ‘Justice.’

The minister moves past the servant and walks toward the man, who had once been Tsar of all the Russias but now seems unsure of what to say or do next.

The silence between them grows, uncomfortably.

Then the minister shoots out his hand and says, ‘Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky.’

‘Yes. Kerensky,’ repeats the man and they shake hands, both somewhat relieved.

‘That will be all, Trupp.’ The sexagenarian, with his wide Finnish forehead and thinning pale hair, retreats quietly.

‘Comrade Romanov,’ begins Kerensky who can see it will have to be him who takes control of the situation. ‘I am here to give you an update on your house arrest and what the plans are for you and your family, as agreed by the Russian Provisional Government and in consultation with the Petrograd Soviet.’

Once again, the door at the end of the corridor flies open, and stepping toward Kerensky comes the man’s wife and a shaggy black and white spaniel that skids along the polished timber floors just ahead of the kick and sweep of her long silken ensemble.

It is getting late, thinks Kerensky to himself and exhales audibly through his large daunting nose. Kerensky has promised Milyukov, the Foreign Affairs Minister, that he will swing by after he meets with Romanov. There is so much to do and he doesn’t want to be caught up in the German woman’s polemic.

The wife stands quietly by her husband’s side.

Again, the minister takes the lead and introduces himself, ‘Kerensky, Minister for Justice.’

She says nothing but watches him with those grey-green eyes.

‘Are you married, Minister Kerensky?’

He is startled by the man’s question but quickly regains his composure, ‘Yes. Two sons. Ten and nine.’

The man seems genuinely pleased and is about to ask something more, when his wife speaks, ‘Are you here to bring us some good news? Our children are distressed by this situation —which must be brought to a close, one way or another.’ Her last phrase hangs in the air between them and Kerensky wonders if they have any idea of what has been openly discussed by ministers like himself.

‘Minister Milyukov has been reaching out to Prime Minister Lloyd George,’ says Kerensky and he thinks about the Welshman and his churlish response to Milyukov, which is quite unfathomable considering Romanov’s cousin is the throne of England. ‘And to President Poincaré.’ Kerensky decides not to mention that while France is under siege it has no interest in offering the Romanov’s refuge. ‘So there are a few lines of enquiry that are very positive …’

Kerensky watches as Romanov turns slowly to his wife and it occurs to him that maybe the man has no faith.

‘The Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet for Workers and Soldiers are not interested in revenge or taking any punitive action against —’

‘Revenge? Punitive Action!’ Her Teutonic vowels sit heavily about them like immovable furniture.

‘Indeed,’ Kerensky looks at the man who seems to be unable to follow the conversation thus far. ‘As discussed previously, we must move the Romanovs … the family to a place where you can … live your lives …’

Husband and wife look at him. Bewildered, confused, and disorientated.

‘Minister Kerensky.’ The man speaks with infinite patience as if he is talking to a child who has somehow got caught up in the wrong crowd, ‘Russians have always shown restraint … they have shown … devotion, deference, and duty.’ The man seems delighted with his rhetorical tricolon, although Kerensky is unconvinced the man knows where he is headed, but the man heads off there nonetheless, ‘Russians need God’s appointee to rule, do you see? To lead this magnificent country, that has nurtured and loved us since time immemorial, into our destiny.’

Kerensky hopes that is the end of it but he can see the man thinks his audience wants more and then notices the wife is completely transfixed by her husband, a divine vision, a saintly protector.

‘Comrade Romanov —’

‘Our job,’ the man continues because interruption is not something to which he is familiar. ‘Is to continue the Divine Right and infallible rule of the Imperial Romanovs to bring peace and prosperity to Russia.’

The spaniel leaves the three people and trots back down the corridor and begins scratching the door. The aroma of blinis is far more tempting than waiting for someone to take him out into the dark scent of rabbit.

Kerensky realises the man has stopped speaking and that his wife has her eyes closed, as if in supplication and, not for the first time, Kerensky feels a great weariness come upon him.

Last November the Duma had warned the man of the impending disaster if he continued to spurn the people’s demand for civil liberties and democratic representation. The man had no idea. When confronted with the people’s loss of confidence in him, his only retort was that the people should simply value his confidence in himself.

What did that even mean, thinks Kerensky. Regardless, it is all too late.

The only reason he is still talking to this man is that the success of the revolution, internationally, is contingent on how the world sees them manage the exit of an ex-Imperial Emperor.

What the world really should be looking at, thinks Kerensky, and not for the first time, is that the Russian Provisional Government has hoisted its petard on the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion as well as universal suffrage and equal rights for women!

Indeed, beyond these walls of the Alexander Palace, everyone knows that it was he, Kerensky, who lobbied hard and long for this great turn in Russian history. So, what this man has to say about the needs of the Russian people is completely and utterly inchoate.

‘I am hoping, when I return this time next week, I might be able to offer definitive plans for your future. The Russian Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet —’

‘May I make myself perfectly clear,’ interrupts the man. ‘As I have said the day I was forced to abdicate …’ His wife’s shoulders straighten and she looks unflinchingly at Kerensky as her husband continues, ‘Peace and prosperity is my only goal for Russia and I will not accept any plan unless it includes my wife and children. We will not be separated under any condition.’

And that is all you have, thinks Kerensky, but he says to the man, ‘As the great-grandson of a serf and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, I give you my word — that peace and prosperity will come to Russia.’

The man simply looks at the minister.

Kerensky realises that forming a Constituent Assembly with a representative government, negotiating a peaceful settlement with Germany, fulfilling the desperate needs of the people, and hauling Russia into the modern world — is nothing in comparison to re-educating the man who stands before him.

A man without skills, knowledge, or any awareness, whatsoever, of the country to which he claims an unbreakable devotion.

He clings to an illusion, Kerensky thinks, as he takes his leave, promising to return next week with an update.

There is no fanfare of departure, no bowing or kissing of rings, or the exchange of obsequious witticisms. Just the cold hard fact of Kerensky leaving the man and his family, alone, with a few intransient servants and guarded by an ever-growing hostility.

A man entombed in his own making.

4

A few days later, out in the garden, the man leans back on the chair and reads the out-of-date newspaper. The chair originally stood in the hallway of the man’s home, its gilded thin legs, and soft crème silk seat has never seen the light of day but here it now stands, under the budding wisteria, planted during the reign of Catherine the Great.

Someone, thinks the man, perhaps one of the guards, must have dragged it out to enjoy the heady scent of a spring morning with its buzz of bees. Indeed, the man found the newspaper, sprawled on the chair, as if the reader had dashed off to catch a train or attend to a minor task.

The man’s wife and children are indoors at the moment because the girls have measles. It’s a sorry mess, he had said to them this morning, as he moved swiftly to be outdoors.

The sun is gradually warming up the April day, as the man sits there cradling the newspaper and smoking his cigarette. He is wearing his usual garb: an infantry regiment uniform. With his eyes shut he pretends, for a moment, that life is as it has always been — with the scents of crocuses and lilacs in bloom, the rustle of the breeze in the birches, and the coo of shy wood pigeons.

The man opens his eyes.

It’s a cruel game.

The truth is he doesn’t believe his life will ever return. Of course, this is not what he says to his wife or to the children, who seem in constant need of reassurance. To them, he speaks of the comfort of their future life in England or Paris or even Japan — until the war ends and this business of socialism blows over.

He rustles the newspaper to drown out the memory of that wretched day … the scratch of his pen inking his signature across the abdication papers, across the Romanov dynasty, across his son’s future, and across his days until he dies.

The man knows his life is already over. The slow, gentle life that was once so bountiful, so laden with the promise of joy everlasting. Meanwhile, the weekly visits from Kerensky to discuss the plans for their evacuation do nothing but make the man realise that a life without his Russia is not a life worth living.

He reads the headline of the newspaper he holds: The Foreign Minister’s Telegram! The Tsar’s war to continue!

The man remembers the Muscovite historian who scrambled his way, somehow, into parliament and became the Foreign Minister. Milyukov. The man remembers the relentless criticism this politician levelled at him for getting in the way of economic and social advancement in Russia. Milyukov was one of the those who bayed for the man’s abdication during all that Rasputin business, back in November last year.

The man reads on.

Despite the Provisional Government conceding that the Tsarist war with Germany must come to an end and that to achieve peace Russia will no longer pursue the original plan to conquer foreign people or territories — despite this — the Provisional Government has telegrammed the Allies to indicate the Tsarist war WILL continue! A sympathetic friend, within the Foreign Minister’s office, has shared this telegram with the Pravda …

The man sighs. Unlike its nominative determinism, the Pravda seeks neither truth nor justice. It is a hysterical rumour mongering chronicle. A Bolshevik rag! How it got into the grounds of the man’s house is easy to guess, considering it is the guards who can freely come and go, bringing with them such scuttlebutt.

He scans the Foreign Minister’s telegram that has been reproduced for the Pravda readership.

Russia will stay in the war until its completion … treasonable to think otherwise … Russia will readily enforce the seizure of Constantinople and the Dardanelles …

The man knows, with no uncertainty, that this is the right decision. He has to admit that Milyukov’s telegram comes as a surprise to him, not because it was leaked — there are always spies jeopardising national security — but because the Provisional Government is standing by his commitment to the allies. The rest of the article is hardly worth reading, with its ire and exhaustive finger-pointing.

After a few more phrases the man gets the gist.

The Russian people are united in their stance against the Tsarist war … they are also united against the Provisional Government … most of whom slouched across from the infamous Duma … We demand the resignation of the Prime Minister Lvov, the War Minister Guchkov, and the witless Minister Milyukov for Foreign Affairs!

The man lets the paper skid to his feet and leans back in the chair. He ignores the last phrase he glimpsed: There are no progressive capitalists — only socialists or barbarians!

More and more these days, the man feels he is slipping away from all that matters. He looks down the long walk of the garden and wonders who he is. Who he once was has disappeared … somehow, somewhere. His wife and children look to him to be husband and father, but if he cannot protect his family, how is he worthy of either title?

The man can no longer see himself. The portraits of all his forebears hang heavily in his home, including Zubov’s famous etching of Peter the Great, and yet the man sees himself as faceless. Indeed, he can barely look at his image in the mirror.

He closes his eyes.

Captain Pavel Konoplev is returning to retrieve his newspaper when he realises that the man slumped beneath the wisteria with his copy of the Pravda at his feet — is the prisoner, himself. Pavel pauses. He knows the prisoner is just a man and yet he feels unsure of how to go about this moment. Pavel coughs. The man doesn’t move.

Pavel delivers his words sharply, ‘Comrade Romanov.’

The man looks up startled as if he has found himself in a play without a script but then he seems to find it, ‘Good morning.’

For a moment, Pavel is thrown, he has never needed to speak to the man until now, despite seeing him each day taking a short walk in the garden or appearing from time to time at the window.

Pavel clears his throat, not because it needs clearing, but because he feels he must assert some sort of authority, ‘Comrade Romanov, that is my newspaper.’

Both the men look down at the tousle of printed media at the foot of the chair and that is when Pavel realises, he isn’t going to bow down in front of the man to get it.

The man must have had a similar thought because he moves out of his chair and steps away from Pavel, ‘Forgive me, I have taken your post.’ He gestures to the chair as if it is a fortified redoubt from which the guard keeps watch.

Pavel looks closely at him and, in return, the man smiles. It is a strange smile. Or perhaps it is simply strange that the man thinks it is right to smile at Pavel who is one of many detaining the man from his liberty.

‘I admit …’ The man speaks softly and with no hurry, ‘I was catching up on the news from Petrograd.’

‘It is world news now.’ Pavel’s sharp rejoinder comes out before he can stop himself but rather than feel elated, he feels uncomfortable.

‘Quite right,’ the man replies and then looks to the farthest endpoint of the garden. ‘Quite right.’

For a moment they are set in their places and neither of them seems to know what happens next until the man turns back to the guard and says, ‘I see you sustained injuries while fighting.’

Pavel replies slowly, ‘Tannenberg.’ And then adds with unveiled acrimony, ‘August ’14.’ The entire Russian 2nd Army was just about decimated in this battle and he was one of the sole survivors of his company. He doesn’t know why and he no longer cares.

‘Well I thank you for doing your duty for —’ The man stops himself speaking and looks about as if something or someone will make it clear what it is he must say. Then, ‘Very good,’ the man says as he shuffles awkwardly past Pavel. ‘Must be getting back ...’ And there is that smile, once again.

Pavel watches the man move back to the house and thinks to himself that when he writes his next letter to his sister Lidia, he’ll be sure to mention this incident. It’ll make her see why the Bolshevik’s decisiveness is critical to resolving the problem of this prisoner.

Chapter 2: Socialist Revolutionaries

Petrograd. May 1917.

Lidia Mikhailovna Konopleva is irritated by her colleagues and no matter how fast she makes her way home, plunging in and out of the traffic on the streets and footpaths of Petrograd’s Vyborgskaya District, she cannot outrun their feeblemindedness.

Her day at the City Public School, teaching 11 year olds, started well enough. Penmanship, Old Slavonic texts, Arithmetic, Writing and she replaced their Bible studies with the song, Jonah and the Whale, thinking to herself, at least they can benefit from the cadence and pitch of singing in harmony.

It was the close of day that brought about the contretemps between colleagues, which isn’t unexpected considering the Dual Powers — made up of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies — is all anyone ever talks about.

It is so frustrating because people are still thinking in the old ways, she thinks to herself as she waits for a tram to pass.

Someone had mentioned the war and the new posters flying about calling for recruits for Bochkareva’s battalion. It was rubbish! Couldn’t they see that Maria Bochkareva is refusing to recognise the soviet and is denying her female troops democratic discussion of all decisions before battle? This isn’t liberation — this is retrograde!

Lidia runs across the busy road with the end of daily commuters.

Whatever their sources, and considering every political party prints several newspapers not to mention pamphlets and leaflets per week, each member of the teaching faculty is compelled to present their point of view, regardless of it being ill-informed and underdeveloped. Like herself, some on staff are Socialist Revolutionaries but the rest are reactionaries, without any philosophical framework.

Lidia weaves her way in and out of the evening foot traffic.

Indeed, some of her fellow teachers are even reiterating the views of that Bolshevik who had merely arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station just a few short weeks ago. A Johnny-come-lately.

Lidia crosses the tram line to Smolyachkova Ulitsa Tram Station. Her long calf-length dark blue skirt, thick beige shirt, and thin overcoat mark her as a semi-professional in the working-class district of Petrograd.

The early May evening is setting and the thin pale light reaches out in the last attempt to catch Lidia’s white-blonde fringe protruding from her woollen scarf. She moves her bag to her other shoulder and looks toward the coming of the tram. She is a tall woman in her early 30s with a quiet face, as long as she keeps her eyes downcast. She has partial heterochromia, which means nothing in the scheme of things, but Lidia smudges a fraction of blue shadow on each eyelid every morning before she leaves her apartment. She can’t remember when she started doing this but the eyeshadow seems to reduce the startling fact that her left eye is not light blue, like its mate, but rather a tarnished gold.

Lidia hears the rickety rickety ding ding of the approaching tram. And once again she sights evidence of deficiency in thinking as a man slouches beside a news vendor, reading the Pravda with the headline, Lenin’s Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution. Only a Bolshevik with that much ego could arrive, after years of being totally out of the picture, and announce that he, and only he, had the map to an authentic socialist revolution!

It makes her want to scream.

She takes her seat on the tram and thinks how easy it might be for an unscrupulous political wrangler to take advantage of the frustrations, that are, inevitably, felt by the proletariat at this point. She, herself, has no faith in Prime Minister Lvov but it is her fellow Socialist Revolutionary, Minister Kerensky, in whom she, and most of the nation, places trust.

She had received a few days ago a scrawled note from her brother detailing, in spiky script, how he had met Kerensky in person. According to her brother, the Minister had singled him out and seen in him someone who could be trusted. Her heart flooded with love. She was proud of her brother and the way he survived the war, embraced the revolution, and was now guarding the nation’s most notorious criminal.

Lidia watches people moving out into the late spring evening, from factories, shops, and schools. There is still a buzz in the air — a tremendous excitement everywhere. It is as if all of Russia believes that anything is possible and, for the first time, there is hope for the future. Her father thought it would never come in his lifetime and if it did, there would be bloodshed — but here it is right now and without violence.

The tram crawls past the Post Office Square and Lidia watches a soldier, standing on a flimsy wooden platform in a sea of furashkas on the heads of fellow soldiers and white cotton scarves on women workers, waving a paper document or newspaper — she can’t quite see — and speaking with passionate belief.

The tram shoves on with its insistent ding ding ding signalling to pedestrians they should scuttle away or face the consequences.

Lidia knows that how they manage the next few months is crucial. The meeting she attended last night, at the local branch of the Socialist Revolutionaries, discussed the return of political prisoners as mandated by the Dual Powers of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. As this means the return of many Socialist Revolutionary dissidents it was met with rousing applause but the Chair made it very clear to all attendees that the new Russia, the 20th century Russia, is still in its infancy. We must be vigilant that nothing is lost — as we, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the true revolutionaries, consolidate power and make it our own!

This was followed by some members of the local Socialist Revolutionary Party calling for a terrorist cell. Not just men, but women, some even younger than herself, arguing that assassination and murder were utterly necessary to secure the goals of the revolution.

Lidia thinks of the long, long road to arrive at this point in history.

‘There can be no turning back,’ she says quietly to herself as she sits up straight and tall on the wooden tram bench that hauls her homeward.

Already, there have been so many changes. The City Public School, where she has worked since she graduated, now extends its intake to girls because the Dual Powers has mandated that all Russians aged from 8 to 11 will receive compulsory education.

What an extraordinary time, she thinks to herself, a new Russia is rising and nothing can stop it!

The tram shunts to her stop and she alights, traipsing through a rabbit warren of side streets until she turns into Lanskoe Ulitsa. She moves aside as an old woman with a large barrow lumbers past. She almost doesn’t hear the babushka mumble cabbage, or at least that’s what she thinks she has said.

‘You have something to sell?’ Lidia asks, hardly daring to hope.

In reply, the old woman pulls back three wooden planks that she has managed to purloin, and there in the dirty bottom of the barrow lies a few cabbage leaves. Lidia leans in and touches their thick waxy skin and espies scraps of mushrooms and some spongy onions.

‘Yes. How much?’

The old woman looks up, sees Lidia’s mismatched eyes, and with the cracked spring sky fading behind, furtively makes the sign of the cross over her bowed head and chest.

By the time Lidia climbs the last stairs to the top floor of her apartment block and sees the sprawling angularity of Grishka up against her front door, labouring through something he is reading, she knows her day is going to get better.

She leans down and says, ‘Hello, my love.’

His kiss is long and full. The taste of tobacco and fanaticism is on his lips as he pulls her down on top of him, right there, in the hallway.

Laughingly, Lidia disentangles herself and says, ‘I am cooking my father’s soup tonight.’ She then reveals her earlier purchases. As he scrambles up to his full height, his army uniform dishevelled, he shows her his contributions to their evening. Vodka and cigarettes.

One of the perquisites of being elected by his regiment to the Army Committee of the Petrograd Soviet is that Grishka is always finding someone willing to part with a few items for a favour or a task that needs doing. Everyone loves Grigory Ivanovich Semyonov, known as Grishka to all. Although he never talks to Lidia about the last few years, he survived his time with the Russian 12th Army at the Northwest Front, and now works tirelessly, except when he is with Lidia, for Petrograd Soviet. This large city council is made up of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks with over 3,000 members.

Once inside, Lidia scoops water from a covered bucket in the corner of the kitchenette and begins chopping cabbage leaves then mushrooms, and finally onions. She takes the half loaf of dried black bread from the cupboard and breaks it into clumps. Grishka moves beside her lighting the small gas ring, opening the bottle of vodka, and collecting two glass teacups and wide-open bowls all of which he places on the table along with a thick old church candle he requisitioned from she doesn’t know where and doesn’t ask.

Theirs is a tight and determined love affair. He loves her more than she loves him but that is how she has always survived. It was the mess of dark thick hair, and the way he seemed so at ease within his own body, that drew her to him one night at the local party meeting. He said he had come to the meeting out of curiosity rather than roaring self-assured zeal. That’s how he discovered the Socialist Revolutionaries,