May Day (3)
"Yasha! What are you doing? Come on!"
Gailis's voice snapped me back to myself. In the brief moment I had drifted into thought, the red tide had flowed on without me. Somehow I had slipped out of the column entirely.
Fortunately, a May Day march was more festival than parade. Had this been a military review… even imagining it was enough to make my blood run cold.
I quickened my pace and caught up with Gailis and Kuzmin.
A short while later, we stood in the square before the Winter Palace.
The red flood pouring out of every alley of Leningrad—from Nevsky Prospect and beyond—had one destination: the Winter Palace, the heart of the Romanov dynasty ever since Peter the Great had moved the capital here.
Until the February Revolution it had served as the official residence of the Russian Empire; afterward it became the seat of Kerensky's republican government, until the Bolsheviks stormed it and transformed it into a symbol of the revolution itself.
"…Are all of these people?"
Gailis's jaw hung open. He had every reason to stare. Everywhere the eye fell, there was nothing but brown coats. Tens of thousands of shoulders pressed together, and the entire square heaved with a single, slow, enormous swell. Overhead, red banners snapped in the wind; between them, slogans of the Communist Party streamed out like sails.
And then, from the very balcony where Nicholas II, the last Tsar of the Russian Empire, had once looked down upon his subjects, a man appeared.
A roar rose up at once.
The cheer began in the front ranks and rolled backward like a wave, gathering force as it went. The sea of brown coats turned as one toward that balcony, faces lifted, hands raised. Tens of thousands of people cheered for the lion-maned figure who had stepped into view.
He cut a remarkably plain figure. He wore nothing more than a worn brown overcoat no different from those of the crowd at his feet. His build was not imposing; his face was not handsome. On any ordinary street, one would have taken him for some aging shop-floor foreman and walked right past.
But when he raised his right hand toward the throng, the people fell silent.
"Ah…"
Tens of thousands of Leningrad citizens closed their mouths and stilled their bodies, waiting for his words.
"Honored people…!"
Without a megaphone, without a loudspeaker—by the sheer force of his voice alone—he seized the crowd. His name was Grigory Zinoviev: Chairman of the Leningrad Soviet, and head of the Communist International—the Comintern.
Zinoviev—the greatest demagogue in the history of the Soviets.
"We were slaves of the Tsar…!"
His opening words had the power to seize every ear in the square.
"Our backs bent in the fields of the kulaks! In the factories of the bourgeoisie we labored without rest—for them! We were dragged into wars whose purpose we never knew, and we lived and died as cannon fodder! And those who paid the price for all of it were we, the proletariat—people who could not even write our own three-syllable names!"
"We worked fourteen hours a day. For the kulaks. For the bourgeoisie. And for… the Tsar! And what did we hold in our hands at the end of it? A single crust of bread—just enough to keep us from dying."
Zinoviev paused. Silence, which had begun at the front, spread to the rear of the square until the whole place lay as still as if water had been poured over it.
"But…!"
He raised his arm slowly and pointed down at the sea of people at his feet.
"What of the people's comrades of today…!"
His voice climbed.
"The children of serfs who never knew their letters now learn to write in school—and write their own names with their own hands! Workers who once could not even cross the threshold of an art museum now take in art as freely as they please! Women once despised on the factory floor now draw the same wage as any man, and work the same eight hours!"
"Waaaah…!!!"
With every fresh line, the cheering thickened.
"Where else in the world is there a country like this!"
"Nowhere…!!!"
"That's right! We are the first, and we will be the last…!"
"Soviets, hurrah!!!"
"Uraaaaah!"
Tens of thousands shouted as one. The stone paving underfoot seemed to ring with the force of it. Red flags thrashed madly; the brown-coated tide rolled forward and back like a wave.
And still the crowd answered him, frenzy mounting with every word.
"Comrades."
"Waaah!!!"
"And…"
Zinoviev waited until the heat of the throng reached its peak. Then, in that final instant, he wrung his throat dry and drove the words into the sky like nails.
"Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
At those words, someone in the crowd began to cry out.
Arise, you who are branded by the curse—
All the world's hungry and enslaved!
It was the Internationale: the anthem of the Soviet Union, and the song of the Comintern. Once the first voice led, tens of thousands more layered themselves over it. The Internationale swallowed the Winter Palace square whole.
I stood in the thick of it and looked up at Zinoviev in silence. His oratory—the way he held tens of thousands of people in the palm of his hand and played them as he pleased—was genuinely formidable. Beside me, Gailis was shouting ura until his voice went hoarse, and even Kuzmin's eyes had gone red at the corners.
But through the entire speech I remained alone in the middle of that heat, circling it from the outside. Having become Stalin's son, I could not join my voice to the cheers for a man destined to be my enemy.
The May Day ceremony did not end until the sun was well past its zenith. The Internationale was sung through again and again until it finally subsided; when Zinoviev officially declared the proceedings closed, the Party cadres began to slip away one by one. The red tide, too, slowly dispersed in every direction. The people who had packed the square headed home or carried the day's heat into the taverns.
"Hoo… my legs…"
Gailis slapped his calves and sagged.
"We've been standing half a day solid. I think the feeling's gone out of my legs. Yasha, what now? Want to hit a tavern with us?"
I was about to answer when Kuzmin stepped in front of me.
"Sorry, but Svanidze already has somewhere to be."
"Huh…? What?"
Gailis blinked blankly. Instead of answering, Kuzmin flicked a glance at me—a look meant to recall the invitation he had handed over earlier. Of course I hadn't forgotten it.
"…What, just the two of you? Leaving me out?"
"Not even that. Svanidze is going alone."
Gailis's eyes narrowed. It was a pity, but the invitation Kuzmin had passed along was for a gathering of people so highly placed that even Kuzmin himself would have found it difficult to attend. Why Kuzmin's father had specifically invited me to such a place, I still didn't know.
"Then you'll just have to drink with me, Kuzmin!"
"…Me?"
"Of course! You stole Yasha from me—you've got to pay for that, don't you?"
"How is that my fault? I was only running an errand for my father."
Kuzmin answered with pure disbelief, but Gailis had already latched onto his arm.
"Never mind that. You expect me to sprawl alone in the barracks on a day like this? It's May Day! Come on. I spotted a place earlier!"
"…First, let go of me, Gailis."
"Not a chance. You give up."
Watching the two of them wrestle, I couldn't help smiling. Only days ago they had been snarling as if they meant to tear each other apart; looking at them now, it was almost impossible to believe.
"…Svanidze."
At last Kuzmin gave up, and as Gailis hauled him away by the arm he looked back over his shoulder.
"Every high-ranking cadre in Leningrad will be there. Do not draw attention to yourself. See my father, then leave. That's the healthiest thing for you."
"Understood."
"And…"
Kuzmin hesitated. His face looked as if he had meant to say something more and then swallowed it.
"…Never mind. You'll see when you get there."
With that, Kuzmin vanished into the crowd, half-dragged by Gailis.
Left alone, I drew the invitation from my coat and looked it over once more. On fine, high-grade paper, an elegant hand had set down an address and a time; at the bottom, a red seal bore the emblem of the hammer and sickle.
What had Kuzmin been about to say?
…I didn't like the way that sat with me.
The gathering was some distance away, so I returned to my quarters first.
"At your service, Comrade Yakov."
Instead of Katerina, an unfamiliar man in a leather coat stood waiting outside. He was quite tall, with solid shoulders, yet for all that bulk his movements were spare and precise, without a wasted motion.
Another of Mikoyan's people, I supposed.
He ushered me into the passenger seat as if it were the most natural thing in the world, then turned the crank on the front bumper and fired the engine.
"To the Smolny."
He stated the destination calmly and began to drive without another word. Like his heavy exterior, he was a man of few words. I didn't force conversation. With Kacha there would have been a gentle smile and a stream of questions; this man somehow put a wall between us.
Instead I turned my eyes to the window. Buildings hung with red cloth; workers linking arms three and four together, still half-drunk, belting out the Internationale; leaflets and the spent casings of fireworks littering the pavement… Outside, the afterglow of May Day had not yet faded. Crowds were still out, taking their holiday in the streets.
Not long after, we arrived.
At the Smolny Institute—the glorious place where Lenin had proclaimed the birth of the Bolshevik state.