Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

A loud belch escaped his lips, and he looked accusingly at the bottle. With an effort, he leaned forward and nudged the driver’s back. Without turning his head, the driver took the bottle and stowed it under the driving board. There it stayed as he wrestled with the reins, slowing the team of horses down as they entered the forest.

The passing trees blurred Trotsky’s vision, making him feel slightly sick. He tried closing his eyes but that only made it worse, so he sat up straighter in the high backed seat and contented himself with staring up at the narrow corridor of the dull leaden sky framed by the tree tops. His clothing seemed to restrict him; he felt hot and flushed. A terrible fear – that he would vomit up the vodka in front of the guard and driver, that they would laugh at him – filled him with horror. Everybody in the train of sleighs trailing behind them would know. Blinking rapidly, he tried to concentrate, loosening the lapels of his thick greatcoat and opening the collar of his prison blouse, allowing the freezing air to refresh him. But the feeling, while it did not increase, still remained.

It was partly due to the alcohol, he reasoned, and partly due to his own organism’s revulsion and disgust at the decadent characters of his two companions in the sleigh. The idea of rape, especially ‘official’ rape, had always scared him, making him feel uncomfortable with his own sex. It was, if not the ultimate weapon of the Autocracy, then its ultimate blasphemy: the arrogant flouting of power over its helpless victims. Inbuilt into the brutal code of conduct of the armed forces and the Cossacks was their belief that those who were against them forfeited any humane consideration. And since sex, as much as money, and physical force were a part of human relationships – tools that could be used to apply pressure – then it too formed part of the armoury of oppression; just as much as the noose and the knout. The violation of the body was the ultimate physical sacrilege and it could be applied to either gender. The male member could become in turn a skin-covered lever, a crowbar, a bludgeon.

In his mind’s eye he could see the group of soldiers running through the field, closing in on the young Chinese girl and dragging her down; tearing the clothes off her twisting body. Pinning her arms and legs to the ground and gagging her mouth so that her terrified screams could no longer soar in jagged lines above the waving ears of corn up to the deep blue skies. Gagging her tear-stained mouth with perhaps a hastily snatched off military cap…

There was no difference between those soldiers (which had, he did not doubt, included his own guard), who represented all that the bourgeoisie thought decent and upright in Russia, and those swine whose repeated nocturnal assaults had driven poor Liebovich to pour kerosene onto his bed in the jail at Odessa then fling himself upon it with a lighted match. Or had forced that strangely named sailor, one of the Kronstadt mutineers (what was his name? Arnold? Yes, Arnold), to hang himself in the Kruze Prison. No man who had lain awake at night in a prison cell, listening to the blows and coarse laughter of the night visitors in the adjoining cell next door and the victim’s hoarse shouts for help in his agony, could ever be untouched by the stories of rape that followed a visit of the Cossacks or the Black Hundred gangs. No man could, unless he had become a beast himself, and he, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, had not yet become that.

Slowly, he closed his eyes.

So few women fought back, he thought miserably.

It was understandable, of course. Physically weaker; subject to millennia of repression and conditioning; forever divorced from the control of the means of production and prey to opportunists within their own ranks. They needed a leader.

Perhaps I should write something, he thought.

Why shouldn’t he? The book on Freemasonry was already finished – he had been about to correct the final draft when the news had come from Petersburg – and the manuscript of his book on Rent he had worked on in prison was safe with his lawyer. It might be over a year before he could get free from Obdorskoye. At least he should start making some notes. Nothing too theoretical; something along the lines of a primer perhaps, with a selection of brief biographies of famous women revolutionaries, starting with Mariya Vetrova who had burned herself to death in her cell in the Peter and Paul fortress in ’97.