Petrograd by William Owen Roberts

Author:William Owen Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2015-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

23

Stanislav and Tamara tried to keep the puppet theatre going, but as the Red Army approached, their audiences dwindled to nothing. There was sporadic fighting on the outskirts of Kiev and occasional artillery fire. During one such attack, the house where Stanislav and Tamara had lodgings was destroyed and the landlord was killed outright, leaving his wife to discover his mutilated remains.

The Red Army finally marched into the city, past the City Hall and the Exchange: Kiev was in the hands of the Communists once more. Stanislav only now admitted to Tamara that, before leaving Moscow, he had published an article criticising the Communists for shutting down the Constituent Assembly, and thus killing off the first shoots of democracy in Russia. On reflection, it had been a brave but foolish thing to have written. Even worse, he had sold the same article to the editor of the Kievylian,who had published it on the front page, and it was so warmly received that it had been reproduced in the Kievshaya Zhizu. He feared things would not go well for him under the Reds: it would only be a matter of time before the Cheka came to read it. Then they would make their enquiries as to his whereabouts, followed by the inevitable banging on the door in the middle of the night, the arrest, interrogation… and then they would shoot him.

But they had a little time. Marching down the main street did not mean the Reds had secured the city for good. The Whites had regrouped, and for the rest of the winter fighting continued around Kiev. The tide appeared to turn at the beginning of March, when news reached the city that the Whites had won a battle to the south of Chernigov and the Reds would soon be in retreat again.

When this came to pass, and Denikin’s soldiers crossed the Dnieper, the sound of their boots tramping over the Nikolaevski Bridge echoing around the ancient walls of the citadel, nobody greeted them with more enthusiasm than Stanislav and Tamara. They threw flowers, along with many others, which were trampled under the horses’ hooves and great wheels of the artillery carts.

From the procession, a smartly-uniformed soldier on horseback gazed down at them unsmilingly. When Stanislav and Tamara realised that it was Yury Kashivin, Stanislav knew at once he would be sure to want revenge for the theft of his fiancée.

Soon the shops were open for business once more, and a gust of fresh air seemed to sweep through Kiev’s streets after the fear and uncertainty of the previous months. A thanksgiving service was held in the Church of Saint Sophia. During the months when Kiev had been under the governance of the Reds, Stanislav had not dared look for work with the Bolshevik papers in case somebody recognised him. So when the Kievshaya Zhizu went into print again, he was the first to knock on the door and, perhaps because of the lack of material, he was welcomed and commissioned to write a weekly column.

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