Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [125]
Lenin decided to enter into an alliance with the government—against Kornilov—and Kerensky accepted this gift. But it was a gift he would soon regret.
“Only developing this war [with Kornilov] can lead us to power,” Lenin wrote. Power! Lenin exploited the fight against Kornilov and his contact with the government magnificently for the legal arming of his own supporters in Russia’s major cities.
Comrade Filipp in Ekaterinburg was indefatigable: workers’ detachments were armed and a Red Guard headquarters created. He made the Baltic sailor Pavel Khokhryakov, picture-perfect handsome draped in ammunition belts, chief of staff.
Neighboring Perm, too, was readied for the uprising. There Gploshchekin depended on two Bolsheviks, the Lukoyanov brothers: Mikhail, leader of the Perm Bolsheviks, and Feodor, who led the workers’ Red Guard.
By fall of 1917 the Provisional Government had become a fiction. All those brilliant intellectuals had expired in interparty struggle and were incapable of controlling the dark elements they had stirred up. “The government apparatus’s collapse was complete.… A wave of barbaric pogroms incurred by greedy, hungry muzhiks rolled over Russia.… The food situation was no better. In Petrograd we had crossed the line beyond which famine began.… All the industrial centers suffered constant strikes.… The situation on the railroad was becoming ominous.… The entire press … howled in the identically same way about imminent economic catastrophe.… Wherever bold military-revolutionary committees had appeared, there was no longer any question of legal authority,” N. Sukhanov wrote in Notes on the Revolution.
In early October Goloshchekin left for Petrograd as a delegate from the Urals to the Congress of Soviets. Soon after, an urgent telegram arrived in Ekaterinburg: on October 25 the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Provisional Government.
At that point the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, their “bold military-revolutionary committees,” and the Red Guard began taking over the town.
The same happened in neighboring Perm.
As soon as the Bolsheviks had won in the Urals, Red Ekaterinburg’s gaze turned on quiet Tobolsk. There, not so far away, were the tsar and his family. The revolutionaries’ holy dream—retribution visited upon Nicholas the Bloody! That was from the realm of ideas. Moreover, rumors about the incalculable Romanov treasures brought from Petersburg … that was already the prose of life: “Behind all ideas there is always a steak,” one of the Bolshevik leaders joked.
In Ekaterinburg, Goloshchekin was working on a plan.
COMRADE MARATOV
After my first article was printed in Ogonyok, I received a brief message in the mail: “Honored Comrade Radzinsky! I can tell you certain details on a topic of interest to you.” The signature: “Alexander Vasilievich.” His first name and patronymic, but no last name, just a phone number. I called.
An old man’s voice: “Only talk louder. Bad telephone.” (Old people do not complain about their hearing, they complain about the telephone. During my inquiries I would have dealings mostly with very old people—and I would hear this sentence many times.)
I: “I received your letter.… I would like to meet with you.”
He: “We can do that.… I’ll come to you myself.” (How many times would I hear all this! They had been through a good school—Stalin’s school of fear. He did not want me to come to his place and find out who he was. He was afraid.)
He came himself: a frail old man with a cloud of translucent white hair. Slats of medals on his jacket. He began.
“If you decide to use what I’m going to tell you … I don’t want my name used.”
I interrupted. I spoke very loudly. He was hard of hearing.
“Don’t worry. After all, I don’t know your last name.”
He knew that very well, but he wanted to hear it from me one more time. No one anywhere else in the world could understand what he was afraid of now, but for anyone born in this country it was understandable: just in case, he was afraid.
He: “It’s just that this story torments me for some reason. In those years … you