We went down the Depaldo steps to sit on the beach and feel the wind from the sea meet the wind from the steppe. Far out, the water was flat grey, lightless and filmy. Close to shore there were low white breakers, and the gulls wheeled and screamed. I threw my knapsack gratefully down on the sand; it was weighted now with books and journals that I had picked up in the museums of the town. Wherever I go, I buy as many local publications as I can fit in my bags. The random nature of this kind of dilettante collecting is the essence of its pleasure. This time, I had found several books on Chekhov and two issues of the ‘literary-historical almanac’ Landmarks of Taganrog: June and December 2001.
The first almanac was a special issue on the history and culture of the Armenians who settled in Taganrog and the Don at the invitation of Catherine the Great. It contained an enchanting short article called ‘Chekhov’s Beauties’, which identified the Armenian girl from the steppe. The real woman, whom Chekhov had encountered as a schoolboy, had lived to the age of fifty-six, her life taken up with children and domestic work. Her descendants still live in Rostov and Novocherkassk and in the village of Bolshye Saly (the Russian name for Bakhchi-Sala); to this day they celebrate Chekhov, the writer from Taganrog who hymned the extraordinary beauty of their babushka.
In the second almanac, besides essays on the history of the local library and bibliographical lists detailing Chekhov’s close and generous interest in its acquisitions, was a set of recently disclosed archival documents about events in Taganrog and the Don during the Civil War. These dead, whose names and words, once lost like chaff or sheep’s droppings, had been so recently disinterred in the archives, are not indifferent yet to what Budyonny called ‘history’s mirror’. Values have been revalued again, historical facts are collected and remembered, their ‘uses and disadvantages for life’ suddenly transformed. Full of blood and vengeance and competing claims of honour, the archival section included the memoirs of the anarchist Nestor Makhno, and the memoirs of the White General Anton Denikin and the Ataman of the Don Cossacks about their ill-fated attempt to create a free Cossack state in the Russian south, with aid from the British, in 1918. There were documents on the Red Terror – massacres of the local aristocracy and bourgeoisie – and the atrocities of the Whites, with grainy black-and-white photographs of the dismembered bodies of Red factory workers, twisted, mutilated, history’s nameless dead, open-mouthed and heaped like broken dolls, eyes staring.
The wind ruched the white sand and flapped the pages of my almanac. I would have lost it had I let it go. I held down the corners and began to read when I came upon Budyonny’s name in an open letter by a historian called Polikarpov. (I am always curious about the neighbours in No. 3.) Polikarpov’s letter, which revised the official history of the Civil War in the south, had been published at the very end of the Soviet period in response to an open letter by Budyonny. Polikarpov challenged Budyonny’s account of the trial and execution of the Red Cavalry commander Boris Dumenko, once Budyonny’s military superior, who was accused of organising an anti-Soviet mutiny in Rostov at a critical moment in the war during the spring of 1920. Polikarpov’s historical argument had profound implications for Budyonny’s reputation; the mirror was beginning to reflect a different image of the Marshal.
Dumenko’s demise was an ominous sign of what was to come, of the nature and momentum of Party purge that would soon take down so many. (‘We had nothing to do with the shooting of Dumenko,’ Molotov said later, when he heard that in the Central Committee someone had alleged that he and Stalin had acted not through the power of persuasion but with a revolver, with ‘Trotskyite’ methods.) Like Budyonny, Boris Dumenko was a George Cross cavalryman who joined the Reds at the Revolution. In a brilliant victory, he took Novocherkassk for the Bolsheviks in January 1920. Within a few months, however, he had been shot by his own side. In essence, Polikarpov alleged, Dumenko was sentenced without any evidence of treachery against the Bolsheviks. His trial turned on Budyonny’s interpretation of the word ‘storm clouds’ (tuchi), which Dumenko had used in a tête-à-tête in Budyonny’s apartment. ‘I did have a conversation about storm clouds,’ Dumenko admitted, explaining that all he had meant was that there were stormclouds gathering for the Bolsheviks that should be smashed. After Dumenko’s arrest, Budyonny decided that his comrade had been inviting him, in hinting metaphors, to change sides and join him in some treacherous anti-Soviet adventure. The trial was a pure example of revolutionary justice, a model for the show trials of the 1930s. When challenged about the lack of any real evidence against Dumenko, the prosecutor Beloborodov replied:
If we begin to sift through separate facts, then perhaps it will be possible to refute them … the defence invokes conscience. I would like, comrade judges, to draw your attention to the fact that now, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, in an epoch in which all values have been seen to be dethroned, the appeal to conscience is useless.
This was Beloborodov, the man who had passed down the order to murder the dethroned Tsar and his wife and children, who would play host to Trotsky in No. 3, and who, as Molotov remembered, was heard not long afterwards crying out to the conscience of his comrades in the Kremlin from the corridors of the Lubyanka: ‘I am Beloborodov. Pass the word to the Central Committee that I am being tortured.’
*
By the time he wrote The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov was no longer using gunshots to turn the action in his plays, breaking the scene instead with the ‘dying away, sad’ sound of a bucket breaking off in a distant coal mine, a distantly remembered note of the steppe. He mastered the art of the ending. He learned about the horizon of time from looking into the lilac steppe distance. When sight is keen, the end is revealed as just another beginning. Future time is aways a question, not an answer. I think of the endings of his stories: wind outside the door; the small-town station conductor lighting candles; sheep thinking; rain beating on the windows unheard; the question ‘what would life be like?’; Likharyov’s eyes searching for something in the clouds, snow covering him as though he is a rock.
Then there is that perfect ending, set in a Moscow hotel room: Chekhov’s reply to the tragic picture of adultery in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. ‘The end was still a long way off’, runs the last sentence of ‘Lady with a Little Dog’, ‘and the most complex and difficult part was only just beginning.’
TEN
Vologda
‘The best defence for a person, just like an insect, is the ability to take on the colour of his surroundings.’
SENTENCE PENCIL-MARKED IN MOLOTOV’S EDITION OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S SHORT STORIES, ANONYMOUSLY INSCRIBED ‘To Molotov, 1925’
There has been a revolution – now we never need another revolution. Yeltsin’s words had sedated the only other customer in the all-night bar, one of the men in pointy shoes who traditionally furnish the marble-clad lobbies of Soviet-era provincial hotels like the Spasskaya. His shaved head dropped on to the back of the sofa, his jaw fell open and his girth relaxed with sleep, pulling taut the leather of his jacket. It would be another twenty minutes before the restaurant opened for breakfast, and my companion, the painter, was out in the street smoking her second cigarette of the day. The state television Farewell to Yeltsin continued on its tense loop. Mourners stood in line outside the Church of Christ the Saviour to file past the open coffin of the man who had put an end to the rule of the Communist Party. The Channel One presenters wore black ties and grave expressions. Studio guests spoke of Yeltsin’s human qualities. He was close to the people, he rode on buses, he was a real muzhik. ‘We never need another revolution’ were the only words the dead man was allowed to say, on a sixteen-year-old fragment of archival footage reeled over and over again. Yeltsin gave us freedom, everyone repeated. And now we are free.