Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [517]
What about the men involved? What were they like? She had seen the list of ministers. Lenin she felt she knew about; also Trotsky. Them she feared. Yet Lunachazsky, the Minister of Culture, she had met and found to be a cultivated and sympathetic man. Other names meant less. And one, the Chairman for Nationalities, named Stalin, meant nothing at all.
Which brought her back to Popov. Even now, after a decade, she did not really know him. Sometimes, like that time in 1913, she had broken through and found a man of warmth; yet at other times the thick shell of the revolutionary had descended. She felt he would kill without caring. And, perhaps worse, he would lie without hesitation.
Somehow, she felt instinctively now, he represented them. If she could gauge him, she might have an insight into these men who were his colleagues.
And it was with this in her mind that she now asked him the question that had been troubling her more than any other.
‘What, then, are you going to do about the Constituent Assembly?’
All the parties, including the Bolsheviks, had been calling for it. Before being overthrown, the Kerensky Provisional Government had set the dates for elections in November. Now, with this coup, what would become of those?
He looked at her in surprise.
‘The elections are scheduled.’
‘Will they take place?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Nothing is certain. How do I know that your Lenin isn’t a dictator.’
‘You have my word he isn’t.’ Popov gazed at her earnestly. ‘I assure you the Constituent Assembly will be called. It’s part of our programme. Not only that, all the decisions of this government – the distribution of the land, everything – are only provisional, and subject to ratification by the Assembly.’
His eyes looked straight into hers. She supposed she must believe him.
‘Do you promise me that?’
‘I do.’
1918, January
On 5 January, 1918, the Constituent Assembly met in Petrograd. Since the elections had taken place well after the Bolshevik coup, it would be hard to deny that the results reflected the people’s will under present conditions. Of the 707 members, the largest group – 370 – belonged to the peasants’ party, the Socialist Revolutionaries. Of the lesser parties, the Bolsheviks had 170 members. Other parties included the Mensheviks, and there were over a hundred members with marginal or no party affiliations. The ruling Bolsheviks, therefore, were in a definite minority, with only 24 per cent of the vote.
The Constituent Assembly met for one day. Lenin watched the proceedings from a balcony. The Assembly refused to agree that the Bolshevik Government was the supreme power or to bow to the decisions of the soviets. That same night, Lenin, with a show of military force, disbanded it.
Thus, after centuries of tsarist rule, and after its February and October revolutions, Russia enjoyed its one and only day of democracy. ‘It’s a pity,’ one of the sailors who disbanded it remarked, ‘but,’ using the tsarist term of affection which many soldiers then applied to Lenin, ‘the Little Father doesn’t like it.’
The following day, Mrs Suvorin sent a note to Yevgeny Popov.
You lied. You must have known.
It was all planned.
Do not come to see me again.
1918, February
The fate of Alexander Bobrov was decided in an icy Moscow street. It was foolish of him to have lost concentration – and all the more so since it was the very eve of his departure.
For it was clear that, for the two Bobrovs, it was time to leave. ‘It seems,’ Alexander said wryly, ‘that we shall not be required in the modern age.’
And the new age had, indeed, begun. Officially it started on 31 January. For on that day, by government decree, Russia moved to the western, Gregorian calendar, and ceased to be thirteen days behind the rest of the world. Whatever the date, however, the Russia that Alexander knew was dissolving in