Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

His young prisoner turned his attention once more to the silver birch trees that lay on either side of the road. The forest seemed endless. Soon, he told himself, the driver of the leading carriage would have to signal for a halt in order to rest and feed the teams, and this would allow his mind to clear. But even then, the penetrating cold and the unnatural stillness of the landscape, unbroken even by a bird’s cry, would sustain the feeling of isolation. Yes, the convoy would stop, but not yet; not until it was well clear of the forest. Instead they would halt somewhere out in the open, as they had done every day since they had boarded the troikas at Tiumen.

Magnanimously, the authorities had dispensed with the use of handcuffs or shackles during the journey. A meaningless gesture; a prisoner would still be confined by the very openness of the vast tracts of land through which he was passing, where a running figure could be easily spotted from a distance of half a verst. The young man knew that even if he made a bid as soon as they slowed, flinging aside the two heavy rugs that covered him from chest to feet, leaning forward in his seat, twisting his body to the right so that he would fall clear of the runners when he jumped… what would happen? His escort could alert the rest of his platoon with a single rifle shot and then they would shuffle into the semblance of a line under the sergeant’s instruction. He wondered how far he would be able to run in that time. Fifty metres? A hundred? Would they shout to him to stop? He doubted it. A single ragged fusillade, a crackle of shots spinning his body round like an ungainly puppet; like a drunk pirouetting in the snow. That would be his epitaph.

The young man shut his eyes tight, his features locked in a grimace as he tried to blot the image out of his mind. The authorities wanted him dead; they wanted all the condemned Soviet Deputies dead. Like a giant slavering beast, the autocracy hungered after their deaths. Fear rose within him, and it wore the face of Ter-Mkrchtiants, a fellow Petersburg Soviet deputy who had been tricked into accepting bail before the trial had started. Released from prison he had been seized, bound and led to summary execution on the ramparts of the Kronstadt fortress. They, the so-called forces of ‘law and order’, cared little for either when they had found their power threatened by the threat of armed insurrection in the capital.

Was this why, he wondered, the escort had been changed at Tobolsk? The friendly major and the company of sympathetic soldiers that had accompanied them had been replaced by this brutish sergeant and his troop of hard unsmiling men. Was the autocracy guaranteeing that the kid gloves of the officer corps would remain spotless? The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that their stated destination of Obdorskoye was a ruse. Who would know if they were all butchered en route in the snow? Who would ever find the bodies out here in this desolation? Who would even dare look for them?

The young man gritted his teeth, balling his hands into tight fists beneath the heavy rugs. Taking a series of deep breaths, he began to intone his daily catechism, unconsciously rocking his body backwards and forwards in time to the rhythm of his thoughts.

This is the tenth day of sleigh travel. The twelfth since we left Tiumen and the train.

The seventeenth since we were taken to Nicolai Station. The twenty-fourth since I was moved from the transfer prison. It is eighty-five days since we were sentenced. One hundred and fourteen days since my speech in court. One hundred and thirty-three days since our trial began. Two hundred and ninety days since the arrest of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on the third of December nineteen hundred and five.

The numbers acted like blunt hooks, giving him something to hold onto as well as a record of his journey, and slowly he felt the panic begin to ebb away and his breath coming more easily. As the familiar faintness that threatened to overcome him in moments of high anxiety began to pass he opened his eyes and sighed, embarrassed at his weakness.

It is imperative that I keep alert, he told himself. At least if I was in a cell, I could carve a notch on the wall to mark the passage of time. Here, there is nothing.