CHAPTER TEN

One day, I went to the old city villa of the ballerina and former lover of czar Nicholas II, Mathilde Kschessinska, for research for my book on the Russian Revolution.

It was pleasant, mild May Saint Petersburg weather. The blue minarets of the nineteenth-century mosque nearby glittered majestically in the sunlight. In the little park behind me, the birds capered and chirped in the fresh green. For a long while, I stood in front of the balcony of the house that had been built in 1906 in the modern style, from which the famous ballerina had fled right before the February Revolution (warned that her life was in danger), after which she’d ended up in Paris where she died in 1971, shortly after her hundredth birthday. Just like the provisional premier Alexander Kerensky, she too would have heard the Beatles and the Stones at the end of her life, and presumably, as a sprightly elderly lady, would have seen the TV pictures of the foul napalm war in Vietnam, having previously shared satin sheets with the czar for three years as a teenager. She was subsequently taken good care of in a variety of ways by his family (and after her affair with the czar, she had two more affairs with Romanov grand dukes).

Lenin moved into the sumptuous villa in April, immediately after he had arrived on the train from Switzerland. The place had been stormed and occupied shortly before this by his Bolshevik comrades with their red flags, and afterwards the vengeful ruination of the building began. The antique furniture was shoved aside roughly and the sub-tropical palms allowed to wither in their pots. The dancer’s legendary Roman bathroom degenerated into a rubbish tip for cigarette butts, paper, rags, and other junk while the vestibule was turned into a transit house for stinking soldiers who smoked the whole damned day and spat out sunflower seeds — as well as opportunists and other folk. The white grand piano from Berlin that adorned the private dance studio was scratched and stained with spilled tea, vodka, and other drinks, and the ballerina’s Eastern-furnished bedroom became the nerve centre for Pravda, the Truth, the paper that spoke the truth as infrequently in those early days as seventy years later when I read it as a student, my fingers blackened by the printer’s cheap ink.

Here on this balcony was where the victory march of evil began — the forces of darkness, of death. Lenin — with the strains of the Marseillaise and the Internationale still ringing in his ears after they’d welcomed him just before at the Finland Station — had extracted himself from the welcome dinner, gone out and began speaking in a shrill voice to a small crowd that was waiting expectantly on the street below. This was as a prelude to a speech that he would give indoors a few hours later, when — to the astonishment of most of those present — he rejected any collaboration with the Provisional Government, because it would amount to the betrayal of socialism. Continuing to screech, he made his first appeal for total destruction.

At that moment, the fate of Russia and many tens of millions was sealed. By one man.

I’d often visited this building. The former living quarters of the Russian ballet legend had been transformed into exhibition spaces, where the October Revolution and the other subsequent political upheavals were represented by artefacts such as firearms, propaganda posters, original documents, photos, and moving images. Naturally, this was with the seal of approval of the current authorities in the Kremlin. Virulent patriotism was the new ideology. I liked to look endlessly at the silent film clips of the last czar dressed as a simple Cossack, or Lenin orating to a crowd, but mostly Nevsky Prospect in February 1917, where people passed by in the snow on foot with an anxious, jerking gait.

Now I found myself back here briefly for my book. Non-fiction, my new métier, demanded the constant checking of reality.

I was about to go into the building when a cultivated man of around sixty, who had been photographing the architectural flourishes of the house with a professional-looking camera a little way off, addressed me in English with a thick French accent.

‘Mister, dzies is dze famous balcony?’

Beside him stood a girl of about sixteen. She had pitch-black punky hair, glamorously styled, as though she’d just come back from an expensive hairdresser, and a piercing in her lower lip. Her rebellious eyes were black smudges, and the rest of her clothes were pitch-black, just like the army boots on her feet.

‘Ma fille!’ the man said with relief in his voice, after I’d answered him back in French that this was indeed the balcony where Lenin had first spoken to the people in the spring of 1917, after an exile of almost sixteen years.

The man was a retired photo-journalist, and a year ago he’d swapped his Paris apartment for the family home in the Ardèche. He was already sixty-one, and rarely got into the city: the young should be given their opportunity now. When he said this, the girl rolled her mascaraed eyes, as a sign that she was embarrassed by her father’s words and was also bored out of her mind. For a Frenchman, this chap was uncommonly talkative. He hadn’t expected this nice weather here. At Charles de Gaulle, it had been raining. He’d done a lot of work in Asian, African, and Latin American countries. But strangely enough, he’d never got around to a trip to the former Soviet Union, although he’d been a supporter of the revolution in his youth: Lenin had been a hero to him for a long time.

‘I’m trying to protect my daughter from the same mistakes I made back then,’ the man continued, while the girl stared morosely at her iPhone. ‘Although, I think it may be too late.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

At that moment, the child suddenly came to life. With a tone that suggested she hadn’t said a word to her father since breakfast, she sighed the word ‘putain’, cast me a challenging look, drew aside a black rag from her upper body and showed me her left collarbone and shoulder, on which the head of Lenin was tattooed in blue-and-black tints.

His daughter, the man continued in a scornful tone, had taken on the burden of those oppressed in the world. Her boyfriend, who was ten years older, was one of the leaders of the extreme-leftist organisation in Nantes. Together with other anti-Fascist organisations, he’d gone into action at a number of Le Pen’s meetings. He’d smashed shop windows, but also carried out attacks on banks and law offices, in protest against capitalism.

‘Putain …’ his daughter muttered again.

I’d never heard a Frenchman speak with so much self-mockery. He’d invited his daughter and future-son-in-law to come to Russia with him, to the city where the Red Terror had begun. But his daughter’s boyfriend didn’t want to have anything to do with a cultural itinerary. He yawned at the idea of a visit to the Hermitage, and refused to go to that historical spot. Even before the second day had started, he was sitting in a cellar from early morning, drinking with a couple of Russian comrades who he’d fished up on the internet, who harboured the same extremist ideas as him.

The Frenchman’s monologue was interrupted again with a contemptuous ‘putain’, the stop-gap word used by the French youth these days, whether it was fitting or not. The pair began to bicker in such an unexpectedly aggressive way that the man quickly gave me a nod as a goodbye and dragged his daughter towards the park. At the same time, my telephone rang. It was Julia. Her brother had unexpectedly dropped by and wanted to speak to me.

‘Kschessinska’s house?’ my wife sniffed when I told her where I was. ‘Who’s interested in that outside Russia? Come home quickly … We’re already on the coffee … I’ve made a chocolate cake …’

When I got home fifteen minutes later, my brother-in-law was sitting at the round table with a smear of chocolate cake around his mouth, and the scrounger Peach was purring for attention on his lap.

Because of my stay in Moscow, I hadn’t seen Alexei for a long time. He looked just as youthful, fresh, and optimistic as always. He and his sister had just decided to go to their father’s grave the next day. It would soon be a year since his death, and they wanted to spruce up the headstone with a low fence around it.

‘Why don’t you come with us tomorrow?’ my brother-in-law asked.

I mumbled that I was too busy. I try to avoid cemeteries as much as possible; I’ve been to them too often. While Julia lay a second slice of cake on my plate, I quickly changed the subject and observed that my brother-in-law was looking very sun-bronzed.

‘The open sea,’ Alexei said. ‘A person doesn’t turn brown as quickly anywhere else as on the water. Last week, my partner and I took the Nautilus out of its shed, what a racehorse! We cleaned everything with chamois leather, checked the rigging … Do you know that we already have forty people for the course next summer? And we still haven’t started advertising. The sailing school is going to be a hit … And that’s the reason …’ Alexei cast a quick glance at his sister, took a sip of coffee and continued: ‘And that’s the reason I’ve popped by … I’ve started up the glycerine trade again, but it’s hand-to-mouth, hand-to-mouth … Because of the crisis, everyone is reluctant to pay up … Sometimes I have to wait two, three months for my money … And now something’s happened, something small, but I need to talk to you about it … It’s about the future of my new business.’

Three days before, my brother-in-law and his partner had gone out onto the Gulf of Finland for a trial run. Everything on board was gleaming, the sails were taut in the wind, the hydrofoil boats full of tourists on their way to the spurting fountains of the Peterhof, the Russian Versailles, were thudding past on the waves. Far out at sea, they drew their sails to test out the motor. It didn’t start. At first, they thought it was a leaky fuel pipe — when they thought about it, they both seemed to remember smelling something as they were leaving. But the pipe was intact, and the tank was full. Whatever they did — both were trained engineers — the bastard just wouldn’t start. They hoisted the sails again, but once they’d moored up, there was no way to get the motor going.

They brought in a specialist, and after fiddling around, he told them in an ominous tone that the suction system was buggered, that replacing it would cost just about as much as buying a brand-new car. Because of the collapse of the ruble, the import of components had become insanely expensive. ‘My partner can put up another two thousand of his own money,’ my brother-in-law continued. ‘That would mean me needing to borrow a little under three thousand euros extra from you. But given the enrolments we’ve already had, and the overwhelming interest, I think that I could already pay you back most of that money and all the rest in the autumn.’

Even without my wife’s imploring look, I would have agreed, naturally. My brother-in-law leapt up from the table in joy. After he’d left with the cash, I immediately felt like a pauper.

‘What are you so worried about?’ my wife asked. ‘I teach as many German lessons as I can. And you still earn enough, don’t you?’

I didn’t have any complaints for the time being, that was true. But the fear of unemployment had taken hold of me like poison.

‘You’re spooked, I think …’ My wife lifted Moesha onto her lap and began to stroke her furiously. ‘How many times have you risked your life for that newspaper? To say nothing of all the nights that I lay awake at home eaten up by nerves after you’d left for another rotten war. These guys aren’t ogres?’ She smiled and went on, ‘But thank you, bunny, for helping Alyosha. Since Papa died, he’s had a much tougher time than he shows … He’s so brave … I hope that everything goes well from now on …’

That evening, I got two emails from the Netherlands. The first made me happy. The second sank me deep in doubt.

The week before, I’d emailed a few excerpts of my Russia book to a friend, whose judgement I’d always trusted, and who combined erudition and a literary sense with a successful life in the world of e-commerce. It had made him a millionaire. He’d read the pages I’d sent him. They contained some pretty decent passages, but he felt I was missing out on a great opportunity by emphasising the wrong things, and by treating some things too summarily. The differences I’d sketched between the rich and poor in Petrograd at the time weren’t bad, but he wanted more of that: about the fortunate neighbourhoods of the well-off on one side of the Neva, with their neo-classical city palaces and billiard rooms, ballrooms and orangeries, where pineapples were harvested for desserts all through the year, and the theatres, cabaret restaurants, and the brothels; and on the other side of the river, the proletarian areas, the stinking factories and shipyards, the soup-kitchens and the slums where the workers lived, suffering from scurvy, lice and hunger. He’d never known that the exploited masses had literally crossed the ice en masse one day to mete out justice to the privileged. Didn’t I see the parallels with the present day? With the newly arisen meridian of injustice?

This time, it wasn’t a river but a sea. The Mediterranean, which legions of wretches had crossed over to Italy and Spain; thousands of them had drowned beneath the waves. This time, it wasn’t the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the rich merchants in Petrograd that people were revolting against, but there was an almost global uprising against the fleshpots of hedonistic Europe.

I’ve told you often: literature isn’t something elevated anymore. Everyone writes. And without engagement, you won’t get anywhere. In the arts too, it ultimately all comes down to what’s slick. You have to connect your work to what’s currently going on. To get on the talk-shows on TV. And if when you get there, you have to put on a bit of an elevated air every now and then, then so be it. Warmest regards, Felix.

He’d written the note from his roof garden in Cap d’Antibes, where he has a pied-à-terre among the aromatic parasol pines, with a view over the azure sea, and where he spends most of his time now. Growing rich from e-commerce is something you can do from any place on earth these days.

After the first strike in the Putilov Ironworks munitions factory in 1917, the workers also downed tools in the northerly Vyborg and Petrograd quarters of the city. Then the hungry hordes — men, women, and children, led by left-wing demagogues — again crossed the ice in the direction of the city, after they’d been blocked by police cordons and Cossacks on the bridge. The rage and hate of the populace, which had been stored up for centuries, was first focused on the members of the feared czarist police, who were known as ‘pharaohs’ because of their headgear, which looked like shaving-brushes, and who to the very last mercilessly hacked at the rebellious human mass with their sabres from atop their black stallions. Manhunts were organised for them. They were driven at bayonet-point from the frozen roofs, where they’d dug in and fired on the demonstrators. Many crashed to their deaths in the snow to resounding cheers. Others drowned like rats in holes in the ice of the channel. The heads of slaughtered pharaohs were borne on poles through the streets as trophies, amid cries of triumph. The rebels passed the façades of elegant shops (On parle français, Man spricht Deutsch, English spoken here), desirable places full of luxury imported wares, where just shortly before the members of the foreign community and the aristocracy had made their purchases, greeted by doormen in dresscoats who obligingly held the doors open, inviting the clientele with a bow of their heads to walk up the royal blue carpets and come in; but these shops were now barricaded with planks and boards. The crowd filed past the houses of the well-to-do citizens, most of whom had no real idea of the collective social downfall that would all too soon be awaiting them as representatives of the burzhuaziya.

The red-brick fort of the Kresty Prison is on the bank of the Neva (if you go halfway down Tchaikovsky Street and turn right, you’ll be walking straight towards it). There, the Bolsheviks freed the detainees, not only the political prisoners, but also the criminals — the thieves, rapists, and murderers. They almost immediately returned to marauding, plundering, murdering, and raping, sometimes disguising themselves as soldiers or revolutionaries, this time with the blessing of the socialist revolution that had been proclaimed in the name of humanity. In a flash, they’d sprung from the hell of prison into the heaven of total anarchy, in which the laws of the people no longer existed, nor those of God, and they could abandon themselves to the delightful pulsations of the blood, whipped up by alcohol, cocaine, and hormones, or all three at the same time. Those that belonged to the old imperial guard — the cadets who hadn’t surrendered after the Bolsheviks had seized the Winter Palace, or been grabbed by the runaway human herd — desperately tried to rip the czarist epaulettes from their shoulders while in their hideouts. They were ready to give away all their possessions in exchange for the simple jacket, the leaky shoes and the torn work pants of a proletarian. But generally, their pleas went unheard and they fell prey to the Red Guards. At the Hotel Astoria, the British officers stationed there had destroyed the liquor store in the famous wine cellars, emptying out the barrels of cognac and whisky, before it was stormed, to avert the worst of the looters. But eight months later, it turned out that hundreds of private wine cellars in the city were still intact, including the Romanovs’ in the Winter Palace. The Red Guards who were sent to destroy them, intending to prevent the total outflow of the Augean stables, didn’t have much success. Many couldn’t resist the temptation of the champagne and the wine that they’d never before drunk, having been born in the mud of their villages. With the popping of the first champagne corks, the large-scale plunder began. The catacombs of the Winter Palace were the scenes of tableaux worthy of Dante, in which men up to their ankles in wine shot at each other, the blood of the dead and the wounded mixing with the alcohol. Outside, on the street, sailors, soldiers, and random passers-by lay filthy drunk in the gutters, their craned heads licking and supping the wine that streamed from the bottles that had been lost and broken in the robbery.

Zinaida Gippius kept her diary a hundred metres from my house on Tchaikovsky Street; she was the chronicler of all human turpitude, but she barely complained about her own deprivations. On 26 October 1917, a day after the Bolsheviks had seized the Winter Palace, she predicted with prophetic vision: ‘The way this government does things will be seen by those that make it through this alive. Not many people who can read and write will be left, I think. The Saint Petersburgers are now in the hands of a disorderly gang of some 200,000 men: the garrison, under the leadership of a handful of villains.’

In the following months, her diary becomes a testimony of despair: an inky-black, meticulous account of the downfall.

In June 1919, the civil war in the country was raging. Everything in the city had already been nationalised, ‘Bolshevised’; the emporia, businesses, and factories expropriated. The bodies of those that were still alive were swollen with hunger, the activities of speculators and thieves flourished, floods of people were arrested, and even Gippius had her house searched twice because of communist snitches. She wrote, ‘We’ve already been living so long with a stream of (official) words like “crush”, “strangle”, “eradicate”, “devastate”, “destroy”, “choke in blood”, “beat down into the grave”, etc, etc; but the daily repetition in the press of these vulgarities, which actually shouldn’t even be printed, no longer has any effect on us; they remind us only of the kind of stammering of the elderly (…) This has never before been seen in history. An enormous city committing suicide. And doing it under the eyes of a Europe that doesn’t lift a finger.’ Then she intones charismatically at us from behind the lectern of the past, ‘I emphatically state that none of the things that the Bolsheviks have told Europe are true:

There is no revolution.

There is no dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is no socialism.

There are no Soviets, not even those.

The basis, the mainstay, the fundament on which the Bolshevik regime rests, and which is also its infallible weapon, is the lie … We are readying ourselves for the grave, in the icy cold, the complete darkness and the deathly silence … I’ve dreamt … About the Bolsheviks … That they are brought to a downfall … By who? By new, strange people … When? On the forty-seventh of February …’

From the very first minute of the tragedy, she’d figured it all out.

Ultimately, the forty-seventh of February became the 26 December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down as president of the Soviet Union, after the earlier August coup against him failed and he returned from his captivity in Crimea to Moscow. And so the USSR officially ceased to exist. The brand-new Russian president Boris Yeltsin announced that the possessions of the Communist Party, including the headquarters, the schools, and the hotels, would be nationalised.

The circle was complete.

For weeks, I’d wanted to visit Gippius’s house to find out who was living there now. But how could I get in? One warm, rainy June afternoon, I went to the immense building with the little towers and pressed a bell at random. A guard with repulsive, bulbous eyes immediately dashed out, with a pistol on his hip. Before I could properly ask my question, he began to bark that there was no Gipsus or whoever living here, and never had been, that this was a private house and the occupants were very attached to their privacy. He asked for my papers. When I refused to show him, he began to lambast me again. Blyat, all whores, I shouldn’t think as a foreigner that I had any special rights. On the contrary! He could report me to the police for hooliganism. There were video recordings of my attempt to get into this building illegally.

Back home, I settled behind my desk and resumed my writing. Two hours later, Julia came home from the college near Finland Station where she’d been teaching German for the last six months. She was worn out and collapsed into her bucket-seat, surrounded by our two remaining cats. As usual, she immersed herself in her pile of French cookery magazines. After a little while, she said, ‘I had such a lovely dream last night. Just lovely …’ Although I was of course happy that there was still dreaming going on in Tchaikovsky Street, a century after the nightmare recorded by Gippius, I did suspect that my wife was making things up. She’d dreamt that my book about the revolution was a success, that we had enough money to go on holiday for a whole month; she looked at me mischievously, with a barely concealed smile that swiftly froze. ‘Sometimes I’m so totally fed up of our life here. Someone at work was fired again today. Because she’s supposed to have said something critical about the Kremlin to her students. A couple of months ago, her nephew took part in the demonstrations in Moscow. The poor boy’s still locked up. Almost all my friends from my old German faculty want to leave … They’re sick to death of the corruption and arbitrariness of it all … Say, bunny, shouldn’t we, you know … Hey, Peach, you scoundrel, what are you up to?!’

Our tomcat had scampered up the curtains. He was just hanging there, making sure that everyone was watching. After he let himself drop, he dashed off with one swift motion to the bedroom, leaving my wife and me behind with tears in our eyes.

From laughter of course.