1918
* I *
Thrice wrung out in water, thrice bathed in blood, thrice boiled in caustic.
Who so clean , as we?
All was over.
A chill wind was blowing rubbish—fragments of military orders, of theatre posters, of appeals to the "conscience and patriotism" of the Russian people—about the silent, deserted streets of Petersburg.
Motley scraps of posters, with traces of paste on their backs, rustled ominously, fleeing before the wind, which drove the snow zigzagging over the pavement.
This was all that was left of the noisy and drunken hurly-burly which had so recently shaken the capital.
The idle crowds had gone from the streets and squares.
The Winter Palace stood empty, its roof shattered by a shell from the cruiser Aurora. The members of the Provisional Government, the influential bankers, the famous generals, had all vanished into thin air. The dashing carriages, the elegant women, the officers, the officials, the statesmen with their exalted ideas—all, all had gone from the streets, and the streets were shabby and grimy.
The sound of hammers nailing boards over shop windows was heard ever more frequently in the night.
Some windows still displayed pitiful relics—a bit of cheese here, a stale cake there.
But this merely increased the yearnings for the vanished life.
The timid pedestrian kept close to the wall, glancing furtively at the patrols— groups of resolute individuals striding along with red stars on their caps, their rifles slung over their shoulders, with the muzzles pointing downwards.
The north wind sent chill draughts through the darkened windows of houses, and forced its way into deserted porticoes, scattering the wraiths of past luxuries.
Petersburg was a ghastly city in the end of 1917.
Ghastly, incomprehensible, unfathomable.
All was over.
The past was cancelled.
A man in a torn coat, carrying a pail and a paint-brush, was running backwards and forwards across the wind-swept street.
He kept pasting up ever new decrees on bills which made white patches on the ancient walls.
Rank, distinctions, pensions, epaulettes, God, private property, the very right to live as one liked—all were gone.
Cancelled!
The bill poster shot ferocious glances from beneath the brim of his hat through plate-glass windows, behind which the inmates, in felt boots and fur coats, still paced the cold rooms, wringing their hands, and saying over and over again:
"What's it all about?
What's going to happen?
The ruin of Russia, the end of all.... Death."
When they went to the windows they saw a long furniture van drawn up in front of the house opposite, where His Excellency lived and where there had always been a policeman standing at attention, his eyes fixed on the grey facade; and they could see armed men carrying tables and chairs, carpets and pictures out of the wide-open doors of the house into this van.
A flag of red bunting hung over the entrance, and there stood His Excellency, stamping about in a thin coat, his whiskers streaming, his grey head shaking.
They were evicting him.
Where was he to go in this cold?
Wherever he liked.... And this was His Excellency—an essential cog in the mechanism of State!
And when night fell... pitch-dark, not a damp, not a light from a window.
No coal, and yet they say the Smolny is flooded with light, and they have light in the factory districts.
The wind howls over the tortured, bullet-ridden city, whistling through holes in the roofs:
"Woe! Woe!"
And shots ring out in the darkness.
Who is shooting, what for, and at whom?
Isn't it over there, where a flickering glow is staining the snowy clouds?
No, that's the wine cellars burning.... People are drowning in wine from broken barrels in basements.... To hell with them, let them burn alive!
Oh, Russian people, Russian people!
The Russian people, crammed into an endless stream of troop trains, were surging back in their millions from the front, to their homes, to the villages, the steppes, the swamps, the forests.... To the land, to their women.... They stood motionless in railway carriages with broken windows, so closely packed that a corpse could not be dragged through their ranks and thrown out.
They travelled on the buffers, on the roofs.
They froze stiff, fell beneath the wheels, got their heads broken against low-hanging bridges.
Anything that had come to their hands was stuffed into chests and bundles and carried away— you never know what'll come in handy: a machine gun, a rifle lock, odds and ends taken from a corpse, hand grenades, rifles, a gramophone, a bit of leather cut from the seat of a railway carriage.
The only thing not taken was money—you couldn't even use it for rolling cigarettes.
The trains crawled slowly over the plains of Russia.
They halted from sheer exhaustion at stations with broken windows and doors torn from their hinges.
Every station was greeted with streams of obscenity.
Men in long grey coats, clicking the locks of their rifles, leaped from the roofs of the carriages and rushed off to look for the' stationmaster, to finish off this minion of the world bourgeoisie.