Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“How about ‘Do Not Awaken My Memories’?”

A song about a seduced and abandoned girl. “Very funny.”

But I thought of those women at the pump, their blue faces, their ragged clothes, and Kolya’s callous statements, and took my place under the streetlamp to keep watch, my eyes stinging in the cold, my nerves thinner than a violin E string. At five o’clock, a whistle blew, signaling the shift change. Women began to file out of the factory through the big gates. Varvara stood at the gate, holding out a leaflet. Some eyed her and shouldered past, while others were too beaten down even to look. But several accepted Varvara’s pamphlet. Each time felt like a triumph. One woman took half the stack and put them under her coat, scurrying away into the dark, reminding me that other women took far bigger risks than we did.

The city was on the boil. Strikes and bigger strikes, on the Vyborg side, on Vasilievsky, on the Okhta side, and in the south at the big plants—Putilov, Nobel, Arsenal. There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss. Yet Mother insisted on a party. “I can’t,” I told Father. “It seems so hard-hearted. When people have so little.”

“I know,” he said. “You’re a good girl. But we still have to live our lives. We can’t go about in horsehair and ashes. Leave this to the politicians. You should have your party.”

“It makes me sick,” I said.

He stroked my hair, smiled. “How many times will you turn seventeen? Enjoy it. The country will still be here to worry about the day after.”

I felt like an absolute fool, standing among well-dressed schoolchildren with my hair done up like a fancy cake, eating Vaula’s “larks”—crispy pastries that looked like small birds—and talking about a skating party in the Tauride Gardens. This was no longer me. I’d had my first love affair. I’d waited in the cold at the Belhausen factory gate, braving arrest, agitating on the Vyborg side. Right now, soldiers’ wives were freezing in their corners, their children were drinking watered-down milk, workers were being forced to labor despite horrendous conditions, bread was being rationed. What was I doing playing children’s games and drinking hot chocolate? Mina stayed with me, trying to make me laugh, while my hapless brother fended off the forays of flirtatious girls. Varvara ate four pastries and got into an argument with Sasha Trigorsky. I missed Kolya like fire. Did he even remember my birthday? Although it shouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t know who I was, didn’t know what to feel. It took everything I had not to throw a tantrum, as if I were seven and not seventeen.

Afterward, in my bedroom, I felt just like the wind blowing from all four directions, every possible emotion, one minute coldly furious, weeping the next. I wrote a poem.

IN THE MIDST OF that terrible winter of 1917, after weeks of twenty, thirty below zero, the weather suddenly turned fair. Overnight, thermometers soared from four below to forty degrees, just in time for the International Women’s Day march. Had the weather not cooperated, who knows whether events would have unfolded as they did? That short warm spell changed the world.

What is history? Is it the trace of a footstep in wet cement? Is it the story of important men in smoky rooms and on battlefields? The inevitable outcome of great impersonal forces? Or is it a collision of chance events—like the sudden rise of the mercury on February 23, 1917, in the midst of a hungry midwinter and a ruinous war? The day before, Putilov locked out its thousands of workers—the owners claiming there wasn’t enough materiel to keep the factory running, though it was more likely in retaliation for striking. So the essential ingredients happened to come together on that one day—thousands of unemployed and striking workers, warm weather, and the Women’s Day march.

I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.

But up on Furshtatskaya Street, it could have been any Thursday morning. An old woman walked her dog, which trotted ahead, visiting huge piles of snow. A wagon clattered by. Dvorniks’ brooms swept passages and pavements in front of chic apartment buildings. Father, leaving for the Duma that springlike morning, briefcase in hand, had a swing in his step. He wore his fedora instead of a fur shapka. When he was gone, I shook Seryozha awake. They’d closed school in anticipation of huge crowds turning out for the march, hoping to keep the children off the streets—though of course the opposite was likely. My sleepyheaded brother slunk further under the covers, his tangled blond hair on the pillow. I shook him again. He rubbed his eyes, stretched, peered at the clock, groaned. “You go. I hate crowds. Anyway Papa said to stay in.”

“We’re not staying in. Get dressed.” I threw his clothes at him. Father had warned us last night, “There’s likely to be trouble,” but what were the chances I’d stay home with eighty thousand women, strikers, and soldiers’ wives coming out to demonstrate? I fetched the water pitcher from my brother’s dresser and prepared to anoint him with it. A half hour later, we emerged onto Liteiny Prospect, already teeming with people marveling at the mild weather—shopkeepers chatting with customers, the florist with the greengrocer. The air vibrated with life. Of course Seryozha dawdled, having to admire every window display—the antiques shop, the stationer’s. Like a cop, I took his arm and marched him forward to Mina’s flat on Nevsky Prospect.

The Katzevs’ apartment at the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky smelled of kasha. Mina was still finishing breakfast, but Varvara already had her coat on and she paced like a caged leopard. Mina’s mother, Sofia Yakovlevna, poured us glasses of tea and insisted Seryozha sit down and try a savory cheburek. Everyone there petted Seryozha. It was a boyless family, and how they spoiled him—Mina’s two younger sisters vied for his attention, her mother plied him with snacks and praise. Then Mina’s father, Solomon Moiseivich, a bearish, jovial man, appeared from the photography studio off the sitting room carrying a big box camera, tripod, and case. He squeezed my brother’s skinny shoulder. “Ah, my young assistant’s arrived. I can use the help today, believe me.”

A rapturous look replaced Seryozha’s former sulkiness. He loved this old man—a real artist who praised my brother’s sketches and silhouettes and brought him into the darkroom whenever he could. Seryozha picked up the heavy camera case in which Papa Katzev kept his film, though I’m sure it weighed thirty pounds. But he would walk through hell to protect Katzev’s film, even if his arms fell off.

“You children stay with Papa,” Sofia Yakovlevna called after us. “If anything happens, come right back up.”

Solomon Moiseivich kissed his wife on her plump cheek. “They’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

A skeptical smile edged along her maternal face. It was highly unlikely that the photographer, under a black cloth, could keep an eye on anyone, let alone four young people. The younger girls clamored to be brought along, wheedled and protested at being kept inside, but she would not be budged.

In the street, the sun splashed the storefronts, gilding churches and washing the faces of apartment houses all down Nevsky Prospect to the Admiralty needle. It poured over idle office workers and sleepy clerks, haulers and porters. It felt like a holiday. Carrying the big camera, Solomon Moiseivich shouldered and Excuse me’d his way to the curb, and we four filled in right behind him, Seryozha guarding the camera case as if bandits would come and rob him of it.

Around us, the crowd thickened—well-heeled ladies, gentlemen smelling of cedar chips, pale shopgirls and carters, carpenters and doormen, schoolkids on their day off, laughing and shoving. Even a few drunks came out to soak up the sun. A vendor moved among us selling sunflower seeds. “Watch your purse,” a young man told his pretty wife.

A sudden whiff of cigar smoke made me think of Kolya. “Look, here they come.” A man who looked like a poolroom sharp in his checkered coat and flat cap pointed toward the Admiralty.

At first I saw nothing. Then, way up at the end of Nevsky, a black dot appeared. A bit of red. As I watched, the dot grew into a bobbing mass, adorned with small smears of scarlet. Now a noise, faint, like the whispering of waves on a pebbly beach, a low gravelly chatter, arose and soon echoed off the buildings and rolled down the boulevard. The marchers were chanting but we weren’t close enough to hear the words.