Genya was ecstatic. “It would have just been the Provisional Government all over again—don’t you see?” he argued. “Talk, talk, talk. The war’s grinding us to dust, and the industrialists back running the country. It would only have been a matter of time until we had to get rid of them. No more kowtowing to retrograde classes. That’s over.”

I understood his argument but I couldn’t share it, not deep down in my bourgeois heart. This was a fairly elected body. Genya and I weren’t speaking by the time we drifted up to Znamenskaya Square, where speakers of all political stripes pleaded their causes, every lamppost resonating with hot oratory. Genya was the one who spotted Varvara exhorting a crowd from the base of the Alexander III statue. “Look. Your friend’s moving up in the world.”

I didn’t want to talk to Varvara. I didn’t even want to look at her, not after what she had done to me. It would have been one thing if my departure had been voluntary, but it was another to have my best friend rip my skin off for me and hand it back to me as if it were a cape.

“Only the workers can lead the workers!” she shouted. “We, the laboring classes, told the Constituent Assembly we demand it recognize the October Revolution, our revolution! And they refused!”

“Soviet power!” Genya shouted. “Down with the lackeys of the imperialists!”

Varvara saw me now, stumbled, but quickly recovered. “The majority of the Constituent Assembly rejected our demand for Soviet power, the highest democracy in the world. They refused to recognize our achievement—your achievement!”

“Down with the Bolshevik grab for power!” a solidly built man belted out. “The Constituent Assembly represents all of us!”

“Parliamentary democracy is a bourgeois throwback,” she shot back. “It ignores the leadership role of the revolutionary working class!” She held her hand high. “The Bolshevik revolution represents the triumph of the working class.”

“Urah!” shouted Genya along with other pro-Bolshevik elements of the crowd against the booing and furious heckling by Constituent Assembly advocates. Rhetoric flew back and forth. Varvara gave as good as she got, never folding, never tiring. I wondered where I would be now if she hadn’t pushed me into my new life. She’d been the violent midwife of my personal revolution, forcing me to do the very thing I’d been afraid of, to stand up for what I believed in, out in the open. I’d been happy to go behind people’s backs, but she forced me to take a side—exactly as the Bolsheviks had just done to the country.

They had flushed us out of our old cherished notions, our beloved dreams in sepia frames. Under the nose of the tsar and his bronze horse, Varvara argued that the Bolsheviks couldn’t take the chance that the other parties would chip away what the worker had wrought. Yet I couldn’t quite shake my regret that we never got the chance to see this thing, an elected assembly. To turn it over in our hands, marvel at it, and decide for ourselves what it was. To have February again, just for a little while—that’s all I wanted. Maybe I would have come around to her point of view eventually. But everything had happened so fast. The assembly had sat for just one night, and now it was gone, and we would never know it for itself. Just as Varvara had done that October night in my parents’ salon, the Bolsheviks had swept in and made up our minds for us. Fait accompli.

30 Former People

IT WAS A HARD WINTER. The only thing heating the flat was our own fevered talk. Our little tin stove was voracious, an idol, a Baal, a starving beast:

Gap-toothed, ravenous

Secret wolf, hushabye

For you we go a-hunting

For you we’ll tear this town to shreds

Feed you its savory bones.

We tore down fences to slake its hunger, stole siding from abandoned houses, broke off slats from stairway banisters. We burned whatever we could pry loose, though it was considered a serious crime now. The Bolsheviks were rightly afraid that the freezing citizens would consume the city like termites. But stoves must eat. Petrograd became ever more dilapidated—windows broken, boarded up, traces of bullets on the walls. Rent became a thing of the past—only the bourgeoisie had to pay it—and that was a blessing, as we had few sources of income. Anton was our main provider of cash, through a stipend from Okno’s patroness, Galina Krestovskaya, an actress with poetic aspirations. Genya and Sasha made money hauling junk, unloading carts, plastering walls with newspaper broadsides. Gigo disappeared from time to time, returning with packets of cash, evasive about their source. I continued to sing for loose change—not only the revolutionary songs, although my repertoire was expanding. Often people just wanted to hear something beautiful or nostalgic. Do not awaken my memories… you’ll not return… my soul does cry…

But it wasn’t enough. I had to find some real work. Factory work would be best, something with dignity that would confer proletarian credentials. But one needed a labor book to work, get housing, do anything now.

“Ask Varvara to help you,” Genya said. “She knows people.”

“I’m not talking to her.” How she would love that, for me to come a-begging.

That morning, I walked up the icy, unshoveled street to our local district soviet on Kazanskaya Street, my scarf tight around my neck, my hat drawn down, taking small mincing steps and trying not to fall. My route sent me past the familiar sad array of “Former People”—the previously well to do, now outmoded, terrorized, standing against buildings, silently offering bits and pieces of their former lives—silver spoons, a lace-edged towel. A new organ of the government had recently been formed to fight the hydra of counterrevolution, sabotage, and speculation. The Extraordinary Commission, Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, it was called. And it considered all private trade, even the necessary sale of petty personal goods, to be speculation, punishable with confiscation and arrest. In the spirit of the time, impatient and modern, it was known by its initials—Che-Ka. Cheka.

Despite the danger, a woman in a thin black coat held out something discreetly wrapped in paper. Her deadened face came to life as I passed. I supposed she smelled my own Formerness. Her voice was low and plaintive. “For God’s sake, child. It’s a brass clock. From Hamburg. A hundred rubles. Fifty.”

I didn’t have ten rubles, much less need of a clock. But that coat was too thin for the weather—she was blue as a Picasso. I tried to imagine my mother standing by a building in the shadows, trying to sell a clock, but I knew it was impossible, even if she were starving. I gave the woman the money from my pocket, around eighty kopeks. Most of the Formers had left by then, heading for the south, where there was more food and fewer Bolsheviks, or striking out for the West.

The Kazansky District Soviet, housed in an ugly building that was once a police station, gave the lie to the notion that the city had emptied out, however. There must have been a thousand souls packed inside, standing in queues that snaked down steamy, murky halls, then folded over and doubled back. Half of ambulatory Petrograd must have been there. It smelled of wet wood and wet coats and the ozone of terror.

“Labor books?” I asked a small woman wearing a man’s greatcoat.

She pointed to the next floor up.

The Bolsheviks turned out to be as fond of bureaucracy as the tsarists had been. If only one could eat red tape. I struggled through the closely packed bodies and found the right queue on a back stairway. People stood with their hands in their pockets, silent, each wrapped in his or her own private worries. No one felt like commiserating. The man in front of me had a cold. He sneezed in threes. I grew sleepy from the heat, my feet and ankles swelling as we moved forward by centimeters. I dozed and thought of the spacious Krestovsky flat where we held our poetry evenings—specifically, of the butter cookies Galina Krestovskaya served. Her husband owned seven snack bars in Petrograd theaters. Their flat had heat and hot water and a working telephone. I could taste those cookies melting in my mouth, good as anything Vaula ever made. Where did they get the sugar, the flour? Money could buy almost anything, even now. Except Anton’s respect. He was no more civil toward his patroness than he was toward anyone else, though she was supporting us all. His scorn only intrigued her. He didn’t even publish her poems in the journal she bankrolled.

Passing open office doors, I listened as bourgeois petitioners pleaded with rough, barely literate soldier “clerks” and worker “secretaries” to solve this or that problem, or let them off the rent. “The water isn’t even working!” The secretaries could barely write their own names. However, public service employees were still on strike, ever since the Bolshevik coup, so the local soviets had to find staff wherever they could. I considered joining the Bolsheviks—I could be working here instead of queuing like a penitent—but I wasn’t nearly fanatical enough. The Bolsheviks were more than a political party, they were a religious order.

I’d made it up the stairs now, close enough to see the front of the line, where a woman pleaded with the soldier-clerk, a weary-looking man with a big untrimmed moustache. “I am a proletarian,” she insisted, though she wore some stuffed bird atop her ancient hat that clearly identified her as a Former.

“Birth certificate,” the soldier said.