‘Yaroslavl Station. The noise … of the city that was dearer to me than any city in the world,’ Shalamov writes in the final sentences of his story ‘The Train’. ‘A ticket to Moscow … a ticket to Moscow …’; it seems an impossible thing. In Irkutsk, as he waits for the t rain, he sees books on sale for the first time in years: ‘I wouldn’t buy books until I got to Moscow. But to hold books, to stand next to the counter of a bookstore was like a dish of hot meaty soup … a glass of the water of life.’ ‘Prison car, prison car,’ he repeats to himself as he jams himself into a narrow space between the middle and upper berths of the train. But by the end of the writer’s long journey from Siberia, shared with a sad prostitute with bright painted lips, a grubby two-year-old sharing a bliss of love with his tender father, and a drunken vomiting lieutenant, the train car has become the ‘unending happiness of freedom’. On the Yaroslavl Station platform he sees, at last, the dear face of his wife, come to meet him as she has many times before. ‘This trip, however, had been a long one, almost seventeen years,’ he writes in the last sentence; ‘most important, I was not returning from a business trip. I was returning from hell.’
*
Very few passengers left the train at Vologda. We walked its length under the latticework of overhead wires strung between high metal towers, away from the pearly morning sky over the northern plain, towards the town. Workmen checked the heavy rusted wheels of the train with hammers, the deep sound ringing out like muted bells. When he was in exile here in 1910, Molotov would often come to the sidings and repair shops at the Vologda station to spend time with the local railwaymen, who, as poorly paid proletarians with terrible working conditions and no insurance or representation, were particularly receptive to his Marxist revolutionary message. Radicalised railwaymen were to play an important role in the drama of 1917.
After the Revolution, in 1918, platform five on the Vologda railway station was briefly the ‘diplomatic capital of Russia’. The Embassy of the United States (followed by other nations of the Entente) had evacuated the capital for Vologda after breaking off diplomatic relations with Russia. They chose Vologda because it connected the Moscow–Archangel line with the Trans-Siberian. It was a crucial point on the map of anti-Bolshevik military intervention. Until the accommodating mayor found the Americans a residence in town, the Embassy was a train carriage. ‘The railway station restaurant was … the favourite haunt,’ the Secretary of the Embassy recalled; ‘there was a fair assortment of food to offer: big jars of dill pickles, black bread, kvass and hard-boiled eggs.’
In front of the station was a scruffy park, to one side a bus depot, and on the other a high building blazoned with the words GLORY TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION in faded mosaic, crusted now with dust. There was no trace of any station restaurant. Eight years before the Western diplomats fled from the revolution he and his comrades had made, Molotov, dressed as a minstrel, played the violin in the station restaurant for a rouble a night. The place was reputedly popular with travellers as well as heavy-drinking local merchants and their beauties. The most popular song in his repertoire was ‘Ah, why was this night so good?’ During the two-year sentence of exile he served in the Vologda region, Molotov had met a troupe of musicians on one of the town boulevards and hired himself out for the summer. After he had performed, his friend Nikolai Maltsev would meet him at the restaurant and the two revolutionaries would stroll through the empty streets of Vologda, pasting slogans on the walls of buildings, sharing their dreams of humanity’s radiant future. (Later Stalin enjoyed humiliating Molotov about his moonlighting in exile. ‘You played for drunken merchants, and they smeared your mug with mustard,’ he would mock in front of the Politburo.)
We left our rucksacks in a cage in a concrete cellar (the station’s luggage store) under the tall building guarded by an old man with satirical eyes and, hoping for breakfast, made our way down the broken pavements of Peace Avenue, turning left down Chekhov Street and up Maltsev Street, then left again on October Street towards the Spasskaya Hotel. Overnight train journeys make one hungry and in the large restaurant of the hotel, among hefty cooks in white coats and a mass of silent guests, we found a breakfast that outclassed our hopes: strong tea, black bread with curls of pale butter, kefir, boiled eggs and slices of cheese and ham. Vologda, Shalamov tells us, is renowned for three things: its lace, its prison guards (‘The Vologda prison guard does not like to joke,’ the saying goes) and its dairy products. The first of the four Vologdas that he identifies is the town of full-cream milk and grasping, godly peasants, with their own pronunciation, who will serve any regime with the same loyalty, and will not thin their milk even if the world is being destroyed around them.
The aged Molotov had wistful memories of his time in Vologda: vivid years of youth and hope, friendship, music and books. Though he admitted he had never experienced real hunger in all his long life, he remembered periods in exile when he had to go hungry: ‘My friend Arosev, a writer, who was there with me would tell me, “Well, we have nothing left. Let’s eat up the sugar! What’s left of it …”’ Molotov prided himself on his lack of bourgeois philistinism, his dislike of luxury. (‘I am against the tranquil life! If I craved a tranquil life, it would mean I had been “philistinised.”’) Yet there is a distinctly bourgeois fastidiousness about his description of the domestic circumstances of his exile in a letter to Maltsev. He tells his friend how pleasant it was drinking tea on the journey, how his rented accommodation was ‘cosy and bright with a mass of nice things and pictures’, an icon and a lamp, and a separate guest room with a ‘pleasant table’. A pitcher of milk was delivered every day for six kopecks, and their landlady made them dinners of cabbage soup with meat, and sometimes kasha. The beds were full of fleas, he noted, and there were no mattresses, so he slept on his coat, but he visited the local banya as often as he could and enjoyed free facilities in the local library, where he could read all the current journals and the local and national press. Molotov writes warmly of the contentments and satisfactions of exile, how it gives him time to read all the many books he longs to read. The government gave him a stipend of eleven gold roubles a month, and only three things were forbidden: to leave his place of exile, to serve in any official position, and to teach (the last of these rules he disobeyed). All he really missed was the chance to hear serious music: Beethoven performed in a real palatial concert hall.
As for so many revolutionaries in tsarist Russia, prison and exile were an educational opportunity. Stolypin, the Tsar’s Minister of Internal Affairs, is said to have declared that if the young trouble-makers had been workers he would have let them go abroad, ‘because it is hopeless to try to reform workers’, but these students, ‘members of the intelligentsia’, he had sent into exile in the hope that the pure air of the ‘quiet North’ would cure them and they might still be of use to the state. In Vologda, besides minstrelling and cultivating the revolutionary sentiments of the railwaymen, Molotov devoted himself to his studies. He enrolled for Latin examinations in the local gymnasium. Like Stalin, who read dozens of books during his weeks of exile in Vologda, Molotov made good use of the local library. As we know, Molotov was an active, passionate and eclectic reader, a true bibliophile. He told Maltsev that he was always on the look-out for good editions, that books filled his nights and days. He read Darwin and the ‘Russian Darwin’, Kliment Timiryazev. He read Sidney Webb’s Trade Unions and sat diligently over the volumes of Marx’s Capital (not wanting to hurry, he said, over the ‘theory of value’), and all the latest and best publications on literature, the social sciences and philosophy, littering his letters to friends with references to Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (in Vologda, he finished Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured), as well as numerous lesser-known literary critics, short-story writers and Symbolist philosophers like Dmitri Merezhkovsky and the future Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharsky. ‘They are all mystics. I don’t understand how Lunacharsky compares his four steps of art and socialism and what kind of “god-building” he wants,’ Molotov complained in a letter.