Unlike Alexei Balandin, whose background was remarkably similar to hers, Lepeshinskaya knew how to betray her social origins and shape a revolutionary biography. She traced her Bolshevism to an early disgust at her mother’s successful capitalism. Lepeshinskaya was born in Perm (one of the cities known in the years of her greatness as Molotov). Like Balandin’s, her mother was a businesswoman who made a fortune in coal mines and factories. Her mother took pride in the living quarters she had built for the miners, but Olga saw ‘caves dug into the hillsides like tombs, with dense clouds of smoke pouring out of their tiny bottle-glass windows, and doors so low one had to enter on all fours’. In her mother’s mines, ‘deep under the earth, in stifling gloom, half-naked men lay in the water and hacked at the coal face with picks’. She rejected the gilt and stucco world of home, and went to St Petersburg to study medicine. She read Darwin and Marx, mixing with the same revolutionary-democratic female students – kursistki – as Vera Balandina. For the Red Cross, she visited imprisoned revolutionaries in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and followed the Old Bolshevik Pantelaimon Lepeshinsky into exile as his wife, sharing the romance of the underground, a life of counterfeit passports, coded telegrams, riding in freight-cars with false-bottomed suitcases, arrests and searches, and the certainty of ideological rightness that lasted her lifetime.
At first Lutsino seemed clean to me, a refuge from the city filth. I loved the air, slept deeply. Women came up from the village at the end of summer to sell us good food: huge glass jars of brined cucumbers, marinated with oak and maple leaves and juniper berries; eggs from chickens fed on parsley, with dark yellow yolks and quivering whites. We sometimes met a goatherd on our walks, who hailed us as ‘little son’ and ‘little daughter’, and told us about the ruined collective farms in her native Mordovia and how it was better around Lutsino, where her goats ate so well they ‘gave four glasses and some’. (She had heard that goats in Western countries gave more, but she did not think she believed it.) The customers at the village shop seemed gentle and familiar: Tajik construction workers who came for dried fish, bread and soap, ‘the cheapest you have’; the drunkards with puffed-up faces who drank vodka all afternoon at the plastic table in the corner; the large gypsy family who tried to sell us tracksuits (‘best quality, very cheap’) from the back of a tiny old Zhiguli with blacked-out windows. The small church by the cemetery on the hill had recently been rebuilt, by a Zvenigorod mafia boss after the murder of his son. We watched the slow restoration, from dereliction to bright, orange-painted magnificence, of the larger church down in the village. In the early Soviet period, the church was used as a warehouse for a musical instrument factory; later it fell into ruin. On the day the cross was erected on its dome, Nina said, she was suddenly able to walk without her stick. The ringing of its bells came up the hill to the dacha, morning and evening, another of the day’s few sounds, like the freight train passing through in the valley, the running tap outside Nina’s house, the shout of a workman among the trees, the colony dogs on guard, birdsong and frogs in spring, teenagers from the village singing by their riverside bonfire on summer nights. I sensed the seasons again, whose rhythms of dormancy and exuberant vitality city life had blurred.
But later I began to be disturbed by Lutsino’s history, its garbage. One winter I found some Pravdas in the woodpile: speeches from the XXth Party Congress, February 1956. I pondered what might be hidden, living or dead, in the raised foundations of the dacha. There was an animal in the roofspace who ran back and forth at night above the bedroom. When I went to look, I found the attic was a clutter of old science books, Collected Lenin, dirty rugs, useless broken junk. Though she used nothing, Nina kept everything. When the snow melted, vodka bottles and faded plastic reared up in the village gulch. There was no organised refuse collection. Nina said she was at peace here; she wanted nothing else. In September she knew which mushrooms to pick. I can name only the mukhomor, the deathcap. Nina remembered the ‘Lutsino masquerades’, her mother riding a lady’s bicycle. She wrote poetry. In one poem she praised the Lutsino autumn. In another, she lamented that she could no longer see the world around her; her work as a computer programmer (a ‘demiurge, creator of fleeting lives’) had destroyed her eyes. She had a tic, an involuntary blink. In summer, mosquitoes settled on her big filmy face.
On Orthodox Christmas Eve in our last Lutsino winter, which was snowless and strange, I followed Nina to the church at midnight; out of the creaking back gate, over the foundations of the never-finished brick wall, through the scatter of pines under the pylon, along the edge of the cemetery, and down past the litter dump in the hollow. The graveyard at Lutsino, with its low iron boundaries, Orthodox crosses, communist stars and fluorescent plastic flowers, is the most tended part of the village. The frozen ground crunched, the melt patterns of ice on the slope were illuminated by the full moon and the electric glow from the village. There were car headlights on the road, torchbeams and voices on the paths on either side of the cemetery. Nina once told me that her spiritual guide, Father Alexander Men, said that sometimes, in graveyards, he could sense the ongoing dramas of the dead. I sensed them now, as though it were the graveyard in Dostoevsky’s short satirical masterpiece Bobok, where the dead – generals, scientists, court councillors and society ladies – quarrel, chatter, philosophise and play card games under the gravestones, still able to sense the moral smell of their own lives and the lives of those close by.