“They said there might be a hundred thousand out today,” said the man in the checkered coat, chewing a handful of sunflower seeds and spitting the shells on the ground.

Varvara squeezed my arm. I squeezed back. We felt the shimmering possibility that things could be different. No—they were already different. This column of black coming toward us felt like history itself. Mina chewed her chapped lips and eyed the policemen shifting nervously from foot to foot, holding their truncheons behind them. If her father hadn’t been three feet away, she would have bolted. The presence of the police made my stomach hurt. What if they went wild, as they did the day the women stormed the bakery?

Closer the marchers came. So many women… my eye had only beheld such numbers on the parade ground of the Field of Mars. But these weren’t soldiers. They were simple workers, mouths open, chanting, We want bread. Bread! Was that too much to ask? Now we could read the banners: DOWN WITH HUNGER. BREAD AND JUSTICE! WE WANT BREAD AND THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY. There would be no more pretending that the city didn’t see them. Their footsteps resounded on the wooden paving blocks, their high voices begging for justice. I was too young to have witnessed the Revolution of 1905, when the poor had come to petition the tsar and were slaughtered. Their reward? Twelve more years of hunger and oppression, and a few crumbs of concession to the middle class, like the powerless Duma. I prayed this time would be different.

Now they were upon us.

Such faces! Bathed in morning light, on this miraculous day, it was as if God himself had blessed the procession, had dipped in gold their banners, their shabby coats and worn scarves. Shy women marched arm in arm, in fours and fives, tens and twenties, unused to such boldness, following behind their more determined sisters holding the banners. What desperate bravery at a time when it had been declared that any two people assembling in public could be arrested. How must this feel to them—to emerge from their dark airless slums, hidden away in the shadows of the factories on the outskirts of the city, to walk in the sunshine down the most glittering street of them all? To bear witness to all they had suffered and demand that justice be done?

I wished Mother could be here, Father, too, so that they could see this woman. This one, with the white scarf pulled low on her forehead marching along with her friend with the large bruised eyes. They smiled, awed by their own audacity. These women stitched our boots, wove the cloth we wore, cut our coats, fashioned the buttons, knit our underwear and our hose. These women—and men, too—wouldn’t stay hidden with their suffering one more day. Meanwhile, Seryozha expertly handed frames of unexposed film to Solomon Moiseivich and stacked the exposed ones into the case, his fears forgotten. If Kolya could only see all this, surely he wouldn’t be able to maintain his cynicism about the people’s cause.

Now a group of stylish women passed by under the banner: SOCIALIST WOMEN STAND FOR NEW LIVES. I could well imagine myself among them. A young woman in a tricorn hat and bobbed hair could be me in a year or two. It was their march to begin with, but their movement had been joined not just by a phalanx but by an army.

A tram running alongside the marchers braked to a stop, its female driver getting out and leaving her tramload stranded. Her car blocked the one behind it, and soon the smell of static electricity and the screech of hot metal stained the air. How comical the passengers looked, peering out the windows, confused to be so at the mercy of the working class. Varvara laughed. “You’re not going to make that appointment,” she called to the bewildered passengers still in their seats.

OKHTA TEXTILE ON STRIKE! WE WANT BREAD AND THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY!

Then came the families of the soldiers, solemn as a religious procession. FEED THE CHILDREN OF THE DEFENDERS OF PEACE IN THE HOMELAND begged a banner held by a woman in a blue scarf, surrounded by soldiers’ wives with their half-grown children, old people, mothers and fathers. They seemed even more unsure of themselves than the workers did, unpracticed in the art of public protest, driven by desperation. INCREASE THE FOOD RATION FOR SOLDIERS’ FAMILIES! FOR THE DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM AND THE NATIONAL PEACE!

We all felt the sea change, even Mina. “Feed the children!” we shouted. “Feed the soldiers’ families! Urah!”

“Look, Marina!” Varvara nudged me. “It’s Belhausen.”

Belhausen knitwear! I even recognized the woman who had taken the stack of flyers from Varvara that night. Their banner proclaimed: IF A WOMAN IS A SLAVE, THERE WILL BE NO FREEDOM. LONG LIVE EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN! We waved and called out, and perhaps they recognized us, but in any event, the woman raised a hand in salute.

A song began among the textile women. Varvara knew the words:

Arise, arise, working people.

Arise against the enemies, hungry brother!

Forward! Forward!

Let the cry of vengeance

Sound out from the people!

Mina took a step back. She caught my eye—vengeance?

The rich, the exploiters, deprive you of your work,

Tear your last piece of bread as the stock market rises,

As they sell conscience and honor, as they mock you.

The tsar drinks the blood of the people.

He needs soldiers, so give him your sons!

The police, so vastly outnumbered, could do nothing but bounce on the balls of their feet.

“They said it wasn’t time,” shouted a sharp-chinned woman holding a banner on a pole that seemed too large for her hands. PUTILOV WORKERS SUPPORT WOMEN’S RIGHTS! “Our brothers told us it wasn’t time. But when the women say it’s time, it’s time! A pregnancy only lasts nine months, brother—the baby comes whether you say so or not.”

The women cheered, and we joined them. Suddenly, a well-dressed couple stepped back from the curb. Then other onlookers began pressing back toward the buildings. Mina instinctively took my arm. “What’s happening?” A buzz of anxiety arose from the crowd, and then someone shouted “Cossacks!” “Seryozha!” I called, but my brother remained at Katzev’s side, handing him another frame of film. Mina pulled me toward their door as the Cossacks—the knout of the tsar—emerged from Liteiny Prospect mounted on flared-nostriled horses.

Mina stood on tiptoe. “Papa!” she shrieked.

I dug my nails into Mina’s arm. Solomon Katzev didn’t move and Seryozha remained steadfast beside him. The mounted men gathered at the edge of the march, and their officer urged his horse into the mass as you would urge it into a river. Whip raised, the bayonet of his rifle gleaming, saber at his side. I clung to Mina. We could smell the sweat of their horses as they passed, heard the creak of their saddles, their black capes flung behind them. One by one, the Cossacks waded into the frightened column. Poor women, little boys, old men, all edged backward to give these fierce men passage. But the whips stayed on their shoulders, rifles on saddles, savage sabers at their sides. Not one Cossack lifted a hand against the demonstrators. They simply rode through.

Urah! It was a miracle. Everyone—protestors, onlookers—threw their arms in the air and cheered, wept. The sound made the horses wheel, white-eyed, necks lathered from fear, but the Cossacks kept them well in hand. Sobbing, shouting, I embraced Mina, Varvara, and a woman in a sealskin coat standing behind me. One of the riders nodded at the crowd, touching his shaggy hat in the flick of a salute. Solomon Moiseivich came out from under the cloth, and I saw him squeeze the bulb of the shutter.


“You should have been there, Mama,” said Mina, slurping up the golden broth swimming with noodles as steam coated her glasses. “They didn’t fire. I couldn’t believe it.”

“We saw it all from the window,” said her sister Dunya.

“Nothing happened anyway,” said their little sister, Shusha. “You should have let us go.”

Sofia Yakovlevna shook her head. “You could all be murdered.”

We drank our rich, fragrant soup while Varvara imitated the woman from Putilov. “A pregnancy only lasts nine months, brother—the baby comes whether you say so or not.”

“Well, this pregnancy’s lasted twelve years,” said Mina’s old uncle Aaron. “The baby’s going to be huge.” Like everyone today, he was thinking of the failed Revolution of 1905.

“Three hundred years, if you ask me,” said Aunt Fanya, a tiny hunchbacked lady with Mina’s sharp sense of humor.

After the meal, Papa Katzev and my brother retreated to the darkroom. While we waited to see what they had captured of the day, Mina’s aunt taught us to play American poker using buttons from the sewing box as chips. I loved the names—her aunt used the American words: hold, call. Aces and eights. Of course Mina, our mathematician, won handily, but gradually the rest of us caught on. As we played, Uncle Aaron talked about his days in New York organizing garment workers before being deported. I had no idea that Mina’s family was so political.

I was raking in my first pot when Seryozha appeared in the studio doorway, his hair damp and hanging over his eyes, accompanied by a strong draught of vinegary chemicals. “We’re ready.”

We pressed into the close confines of the darkroom—like a little theater—arranging ourselves around the wooden sinks with their enamel trays. I never tired of seeing an empty sheet of paper become a scene, a portrait, that magic, although my eyes smarted from the fumes. “Everybody in?” said Solomon Moiseivich, then he turned out all the lights but one, coated in red paint. He placed a large negative onto a square of white, shut the frame, and turned on the light. “One,” he slowly counted, “two, three,” then turned it off again and slid the paper into the first tray of chemicals.