Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

It was unlikely, even in the afternoon’s fading sunlight, that the convoy of forty sleighs he had been told to look out for would be guided by only the lights of the leading sleigh. For a moment he wavered, uncertain what to do.

If only I had Ivan Nikiforivich here to ask, he thought, or even Sergeant Grednyin. Anyone, just as long as they could give me my orders.

The light appeared again, coming out of the bend, moving at breakneck speed.

What if the convoy has been ambushed, he wondered, and I do nothing?

Taking a deep breath, he raised his rifle and, pointing it safely at the western horizon, pulled the trigger.

Illya Moiseyevich Kuibyshev, fur merchant of Berezovo, rummaged between the heavy folds of his malitsa travelling coat, searching for his watch. Through the window of his carriage the sun was low on the horizon. He could hazard a guess that it was nearing four in the afternoon, but he preferred certainty. Effort and attention to detail were, he maintained, the chief prerequisites for a secure and well-ordered life. His elegant fingers closed upon the engraved cover of the watch case and he extracted it from his waist coat pocket. It was a beautiful timepiece, the relic of an Austrian barine of impeccable taste with whom he had once been intimate. After the young man’s suicide, his family had sent every one of his personal effects to the Dorotheum in Vienna for auction, whence Kuibyshev had retrieved the watch. It had been a characteristically heartless gesture by the young man’s relatives; a deliberate riddance of the evidence of genuine love and deep affection that he had aroused in his friends.

He pressed the catch release and held the watch face up close to his eyes in the fading light. Its gold tipped hands told him that it was approaching a quarter to four. Frowning, he snapped the watch shut. The demonstration they had encountered by the roadside a few moments before had unnerved him. For all its drawbacks he was now impatient to reach Berezovo. He leant forward and, lowering the carriage window, called up to his driver.

“Osip! How long before we reach home?”

“Only another ten minutes or so now, your Excellency, don’t you worry,” his driver assured him, adding, “We shall soon see the town’s lights.”

He cracked his whip for emphasis above the heads of the straining team of ponies.

Closing the window Kuibyshev settled back against the carriage’s comfortable upholstery, and began to compose himself. It was time, once again, to slip on the mask of small town living and adopt the role of being a married man, successful merchant, town councillor and public benefactor; all of which he was in law, if not in spirit. But his sense of unease at the recent interruption would not leave him. He had had, he told himself, a lucky escape. The gang of ruffians gathered around a brazier had tried to flag down his carriage and for a moment Osip had even begun to rein in his team. One glance at the crudely printed scarlet banners that lay spread out against the drifts of snow beside the road had been sufficient to reveal their sinister purpose and Kuibyshev had ordered his man to use his horsewhip on the ragged band. How very different from how one travelled in Europe, with its well-run, and well-guarded, railways. Why, there one could travel to even the smallest towns and villages, mere flyspecks on the map, with ease and comfort but never, it seems, within the Russian Empire or in what the young English diplomat in Paris had sneeringly referred to as “North Asia”.