Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

If Nicolai Lenin was the strategist who was trying to stamp his image on the Party or, as his critics would have it, reanimate the Party’s corpus as his own creature like the fictional Victor Frankenstein, then his wife was the personal assistant he had chosen for his experiment. It was Nadezhda who encoded the messages from Iskra, oversaw the Party’s safe houses, arranged rendezvous and arranged for fall back procedures. It was Nadezhda who instructed the couriers, dictated their signs and countersigns and furnished them with false papers, detailed maps and amounts of currency in ten European currencies. She took charge of opening up access channels across distant frontiers, arranging the movement of persons, money and information in the most advanced amateur clandestine network the continent had ever seen. When one conduit was discovered by the authorities, she was prepared for the eventuality and had another open within seventy-two hours. It seemed that whenever a cell was penetrated and exposed by the Okhrana’s agent provocateurs she was able to bypass it, deftly operating the network like some gigantic switching machine. Another pogrom at Lodz… a successful strike in Toulon… the lines are down in Moscow… the text of Kautsky’s speech the previous day at Stuttgart. At any hour of the day or night she might receive reports from one of a hundred cities in Europe and would have them decoded, collated and memorised by the next morning’s eleven o’clock board meeting.

Above all, she was scrupulous on matters of security. The air in the small bedsitting room she shared with Nicolai shared smelled perpetually of burning papers. And although he spent days being debriefed by Nicolai on the structure, membership, development and beliefs of the now defunct South Russia Workers Union, it was to Nadezhda that he had had to account for its betrayal and collapse.

He had grown to admire and envy her. She had found peace through order and dedication. Although her clothes were sober to the point of drabness, she was always been neat. Perhaps it was something to do with her age, he wondered, or the years with Nicolai. At the same time there was nothing about her appearance that attracted him physically. She was plain, and if truth were told, quite shapeless; unless one could call ‘dumpy’ a shape. He would to try to imagine her and Nicolai in bed together, but no mental image resolved itself in his mind. One moment he could picture them both sitting up in bed – he, in a worn flannel nightshirt buttoned up to the neck, drafting an article for the paper; she next to him, shawled, her hair still tied in a bun, peering through her spectacles at the message she was encoding. They would work in silence, broken only by an occasional tut or sigh from Nicolai as he scratched out a word or phrase, until, at a pre-arranged point, the striking of a distant church clock perhaps, they would collect up their papers and put them in a neat stack: hers on one side of the bed, his on the other. The gas light would be extinguished, then… nothing. They would immediately fall asleep, lying at attention, sacrificing valuable hours so that their physical and mental strength could be replenished. The idea of perhaps a good night kiss or even an embrace was totally alien to them, he was sure. As for making love, what an atrocious squandering of energy that would be!

Nadezhda had given him the address of a house a few streets away and he had moved in the following day. Grumbling, his new landlord, who lived on the ground floor with his wife and three children, had escorted him up to the first floor, where Jules Martov was waiting to greet him. Happy to get back to his supper and pausing only to take a fortnight’s rent off the newcomer, the landlord had left Martov to show him around. There were five rooms, the smallest of which was vacant and was now his. Next to his bedroom was Martov’s room. Its occupant shyly held the door open for his inspection but Trotsky had only a few seconds to take in the unmade bed littered with papers and books before he heard the sound of a woman’s voice, rising in complaint, call out from the upper landing.

“Jules? You didn’t tell me that we had a new tenant?”

Turning in the doorway, Trotsky looked up to see a middle aged woman descending the stairs. She was dressed in a grey skirt and blouse and wore her hair long and undressed. A brown woollen jacket, showing distinct signs of wear, was carelessly draped around her shoulders. Drooping from her lip, a hand rolled cigarette rained a fine shower of ash onto the worn landing carpet as she spoke again.

“Come into our spacious drawing room and let me have a look at you,” she demanded, adding, “Our landlord keeps this landing in perpetual darkness as a memorial to his proletarian origins.”