In the house itself, Vladimir had provided a varied library and a grand piano. Mrs Suvorin, evidently rather bored by the country, usually sat reading on the verandah; but the house was efficiently run by Arina, whose young son Ivan was constantly hovering, hoping for a chance to play. He and Nadezhda were almost the same age, and it was amusing to see the sophisticated ten-year-old girl go whooping down the slope after the peasant boy or play hide and seek with him in the woods above the house.
In the afternoons, Vladimir would often take Nadezhda and the boys to bathe in the river. The big industrialist was surprisingly agile and a strong swimmer. Karpenko, it turned out, could hardly swim, but Vladimir personally held him in the water and coached him so that soon he could outstrip any of them. Afterwards, their bodies tingling from the cold water, they would sit on the bank and talk.
The industrialist was a wonderful talker. He would put his great arm round Nadezhda or one of the boys and discuss all manner of things with them, exactly as if they were adults. And it was on one of these afternoons that he gave them his view of Russia’s future. As usual, it was to the point.
‘It’s really quite simple,’ he told them. ‘Russia is now in a race against time. Stolypin, whom I personally support, knows he has to modernize Russia while he keeps the lid on the forces of revolution. If he succeeds, the Tsar will keep his throne; if not…’ He grimaced. ‘Chaos. Peasant and urban insurrection. Remember Pugachev, as they used to say.’
‘What must Stolypin do?’ Karpenko asked.
‘Three things, chiefly. Develop industry. Thanks to foreign capital that’s going well. Next, educate the masses. Sooner or later some kind of democracy will come, and the people aren’t ready for it. Stolypin is making progress there. Thirdly, he’s trying to reform the countryside.’ He sighed. ‘And that, I’m afraid, will be hard.’
The attempt to change the Russian peasant, Dimitri knew, lay at the heart of the great minister’s reforms. In the last two years, important changes had been made. The payments due to the former landowners, together with all arrears, had been entirely cancelled. The peasant had been given full civil liberties, the use of the same law courts as any other citizen, and an internal passport for travel without the permission of the commune, which he was now free to leave at any time. At last, half a century after the Emancipation, he was a free man in fact as well as theory. But there still remained one huge problem.
‘For what can be done about the commune?’ Vladimir wondered aloud.
Even now, the commune’s wasteful strip-farming of medieval times with its periodic redistributions had changed but little. Russian grain yield remained only a third of those in much of Western Europe. In his attempt to change this, Stolypin was trying to encourage peasants to withdraw from the commune, cultivate their own personal land, and be independent farmers. Laws were being passed; easy credit made available through the Peasant Bank. But progress so far was slow.
‘Isn’t Stolypin trying to make the peasant into a bourgeois, though – a capitalist?’ Dimitri objected.
‘Of course he is,’ Vladimir replied. ‘Unlike you, Dimitri, I’m a capitalist. But I do confess that it’s going to be very difficult to make it work.’
‘I’d have thought it would be easy,’ Karpenko remarked.
‘Yes, my friend.’ Vladimir tousled the boy’s head affectionately. ‘But that’s because you come from the Ukraine. Down there in the western provinces of White Russia there’s a tradition of independent farming. But in these central provinces, in Russia proper, the commune system is solid. And if you want to know why, just look at the village here. Look at Boris Romanov, the village elder.’
Dimitri and Karpenko had soon come to know Romanov. As village elder now, he was a figure of some power, which he clearly enjoyed. The family, with three strong sons, had the largest share of strips in the village now and Boris’s house had handsome carving round the eaves and painted shutters. Yet that spring, when Stolypin’s reforms had made some state land by the monastery available for purchase, and Vladimir had remarked to him – ‘Well, Boris Timofeevich, I dare say you’ll be buying some yourself’ – he had glowered and replied: ‘The commune’s buying it.’ And then, quietly but audibly: ‘And we’ll smoke you out too, one day.’
‘Nothing will persuade Romanov that the answer to everything isn’t to take this estate,’ Vladimir continued. ‘And do you know the irony? In many provinces there isn’t enough land – even if you dispossess every landowner – to do the peasants the slightest bit of good! Their best answer is to resettle to less populated provinces – which Stolypin’s also trying to encourage.’ He sighed. ‘So the peasants support the social revolutionaries – even the terrorists – because they promise to distribute all the land.’
The industrialist smiled grimly as he summed up.
‘So the communal peasant does little for himself but waits for a miracle that will solve everything in the twinkling of an eye. Passive, but angry. He’d prefer decades of unnecessary suffering, followed by a moment of useless violence.’
Though Dimitri, coming from the Socialist household of Peter and Rosa, naturally knew that in his conservative politics his Uncle Vladimir was mistaken, he had a great respect for his intelligence and recognized the truth of much of what he said. And thinking of the revolution he knew one day must come, he asked: ‘So do you think Stolypin will fail, and the Tsar lose his throne?’
‘It isn’t clear to me,’ his uncle replied frankly, ‘but remember this: in 1905 we had a war and a food shortage. That’s what actually caused the revolution. My guess, therefore, is that in order to win the race, Stolypin needs two things: peace, and good harvests. That is what will really decide the fate of Russia. Nothing much else.’
Yet it would have been hard, that peaceful summer, to think for long about such serious matters.
It was a happy time. In the mornings, Karpenko would often go out to explore the countryside, or sketch, or devise fantastic games to amuse young Ivan and Nadezhda, who both seemed to look upon him as a god. Meanwhile, for three hours, Dimitri would practise the piano. He had concentrated on the piano now, to the near exclusion of the violin, and though he might lack the driven technical virtuosity of the professional performer, his playing was of a remarkable musical sophistication.
In the afternoons, if they were not swimming with Vladimir, they sat on the verandah and read books or played cards with Mrs Suvorin.
One day Vladimir had taken them round the factories at Russka. It had been an impressive tour. Dimitri had studied the factory workers with interest as they quietly went about their tasks; but Karpenko had been fascinated by the mechanism of the plant itself. ‘Such raw power,’ he whispered to Dimitri afterwards. ‘Did you notice the incredible, harsh beauty of the place? And your uncle – he’s in charge of this machine. I admire him more every day.’
Several times they had visited the monastery. And in the second week of June, Arina took them across the river and along the little path to the old springs, which utterly delighted Karpenko. ‘How Slavic!’ he cried. And then: ‘How pagan.’
The evenings Dimitri especially enjoyed. For sometimes, while the others laughed and talked in the library, he would quietly sit at the piano and try out his own tentative compositions. It was on these occasions that he discovered a new and extraordinary feature of his uncle’s character. For sometimes, as he was playing, he would be aware of Vladimir softly entering the room and sitting in the shadows. But often as not, when he came to a pause, his uncle would come over, gaze thoughtfully at the keys, and then in his rich baritone suggest: ‘Why don’t you try it this way?’ Or: ‘If you changed the rhythm here…’ And – this was the remarkable thing – Dimitri nearly always found that, unknown to himself, it had been what he wanted to express all along. ‘How do you know my mind like that?’ he would ask. ‘Am I composing, or are you?’ To which his uncle would reply, with a touch of sadness: ‘To some, Dimitri, it is given to create. To others, only to understand the creative act.’ And Dimitri could only marvel at this man, with whom he felt he was developing an even closer bond.