Varvara sighed, as if Alla had woken up in the third act of a play and asked for a précis. “First, he’s not new,” she replied. “And second, he’s not against the Republic. He’s against a parliamentary republic, a bourgeois republic. Your papas, thinking they speak for the people. He wants a soviet republic—by direct representation.”

“What we need are free communes,” said another Herzen boy, Markus, an anarchist. “Lenin talks about the ‘withering away of the state,’ but the essence of the state is that there’s never a good time to wither.”

“The Bolsheviks will do it,” Varvara said, sticking her chin out.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Markus said.

They were two of a kind. They stopped to light cigarettes together, sharing a match. I thought he would be perfect for her, but she’d scoffed when I suggested it. “Anarchist utopian.”

We crossed at the Trinity Bridge over the black water of the Neva, passed the brooding bulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the art nouveau Kschessinska Mansion, now the headquarters of the Bolshevik Party. The ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska had received it as a gift from her lover Nikolas II. I wondered where she’d gone. Paris? The tsar himself was under arrest, somewhere in the Urals with his family. Oddly, since his abdication he’d quickly become irrelevant. Nobody clamored for his head on a pike. Aside from a few aristocrats who might secretly dream of restoration, no one thought about him anymore. Varvara examined the windows of the mansion, probably hoping to catch sight of Lenin’s big bald head.

Our destination loomed into view—the vast, rickety hall of the Cirque Moderne, the radical venue for speakers of all left-leaning political stripes that spring, and a magnet for students from all over the city. Where once the Stray Dog had been Mecca, now it was this old wooden hall on the Petrograd side of the river. Pressing inside, we joined the thousands already listening to the orators in the cavernous smoky gloom. It smelled like bodies, wet wood and cheap tobacco, old boots. About five dim bulbs lit our way as we clambered up into the rickety tiered benches surrounding the stage on all sides. We had to climb nearly to the ceiling. I imagined what the woman who’d worried about the loges at the Mariinsky would think of this. I could tell that Seryozha was nervous as we squeezed in among the university students, workers, soldiers, retirees, and wounded veterans. Pavlik climbed in next to me.

Down in the very center of the hall, a common soldier, stocky, square-shouldered, was addressing the crowd, speaking about the war in the name of his comrades. “Show us what we’re fighting for,” he shouted up to us all. “Is it Constantinople? Or a free Russia? Or the people on top? They’re always asking us for more sacrifices, but where is their sacrifice?”

If only my father could hear this. If only he’d listen more to the Russian people and less to his friends in the British embassy and the Kadets and industrialists. Where are you getting your ideas, Marina? Pavlik handed me a chocolate, smiled. He really was very sweet. How infinitely better this was than wandering the lengthening evenings thinking of how little Kolya cared for me. He never responded to my letters. My brother took out his notebook and sketched the soldier, and the next one who ventured to speak.

The best speaker was a small fiery man with wild black hair and a pince-nez named Leon Trotsky. They all had something to say, but I had waited for this one. What a speaker! He’d been the leader of the Soviet of 1905 and had just returned from exile. Trotsky made us understand that this moment was a fuse and that we held the match, that the whole world was on the brink of revolution. All we had to do was light it. He was a cauldron melting the crowd into a single substance, and we threw ourselves in.

“Russia has opened a new epoch,” he called to us, “an epoch of blood and iron. A struggle no longer of nation against nation but of the suffering oppressed classes against their rulers.” The roar of applause in that barn left no confusion as to what it meant to believe in revolution. He talked about the achievement of the revolution, our impact on the world.

I’d always thought that once the tsar was gone, the wheel would stop, or at least pause, giving us a chance to get used to things, but now I could see that the revolution was just beginning. It would become a way of life as people clarified and changed their perceptions of what they thought could and must be done. Already, between February and May, my father’s superior in the foreign office, Paul Miliukov—a constitutional monarchist and one of the leading lights of the Kadet party—had been run out, replaced by Mikhail Tereshchenko, a nonparty beet-sugar magnate from the Ukraine. Now there was a new coalition of ten capitalist and six socialist ministers. The socialists, still trying to find common ground, had committed to continuing the war and calming the masses. But like Lenin, the man onstage had another idea. “Only a single power can save Russia—the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! All power to the Soviet!”

What was the government waiting for? Here was a clear message, impossible to misunderstand: end this war, redistribute the land, feed the people, and achieve peace.

After Trotsky, another man took the stage, a pro-war Defensist, but he didn’t stand a chance—it was like having to sing after Chaliapin. “The war is Russia’s face to the world,” he argued to the enormous crowd. “If we retreat, we’ll be putting out the welcome mat! With the tsar we were subjects, but with the kaiser we’ll be slaves. The worker will be back under the lash. The only way to establish ourselves in the world as a true power is to continue the war and uphold our alliances.”

I had heard this argument before and had never been able to counter it. People booed and hissed, but others shouted, “Let him talk!”

Up in our section, something was happening behind us. “The poet!” “Go on, kid.” A big young worker stood on his bench and began to speak—no, he was reciting a poem! Lucky for him he had a deep actor’s voice and was able to create a pool of attention around himself. His poem likened a burning police station to a garbage incinerator, then to the blast furnace of a great factory, and finally to the gaping mouth of a lying old man. His shock of tawny blond hair looked familiar. Suddenly I recognized him—the boy from the Stray Dog Café! The one who wanted to show his work to Mayakovsky. Tonight he wore a carrot in the buttonhole of his jacket, the long green ends dangling, and he signaled the end of his poem by unthreading the carrot and biting off the end. Had I imagined it, or had he grinned right at me as he sat down? I felt it all the way through my coat, my layers of clothes, directly into my body. I quickly turned and faced front, my heart thumping around in my chest like a bird in a hallway, looking for an exit.

Onstage, an older woman now addressed the hall. I tried to concentrate and not to check if the poet was still looking at me, but when I managed to see past all the heads, he was gone.

The soft deep voice in my ear startled me. “Not her again.” The boy had moved down to a seat right behind us. I could hardly hear through the thunder in my ears, my freckles were on fire. “She looks like a teacher I once had. I keep thinking she’s going to give me a whipping.”

It would hardly do to let him see how thrilled I was. “Maybe you need one,” I replied, not turning.

Seryozha laughed over the drawing in his lap. Pavlik glanced back over his shoulder, annoyed with this interloper. The Tagantsev girls watched the whole thing closely, storing up gossip for the next day.

“If it was you, who knows? I might let you.”

Varvara made her black eyes bulge with exasperation. Can’t you leave off for a moment?

He held out the feathery end of his carrot, tickling my nose. “Here’s the whip.”

I laughed, brushing the leaves away.

“Kuriakin. Gennady Yurievich.” The poet held out a giant hand. My hand vanished in it, and yet we shook. It was a softer hand than I had expected, more flexible. “Call me Genya.” Genya. I shivered.

“Do you mind?” Pavlik said.

Genya stuck his big face between Seryozha and me and ignored every signal from Pavlik that he was unwelcome.

“Makarova. Marina.” Then I added, “This is my brother Seryozha.” Surely I couldn’t be accused of flirting if I introduced my brother.

Down on the stage, the woman argued not only for the end of the war but also for the end of state power and for worker control of the factories. Markus shouted his approval, pounding on his knee. “Yes! Exactly!”

Genya eyed the sketch my brother was working up. Now I saw that it was of the poet reciting over the heads of the crowd. He cocked his head for a better angle. “I even look halfway intelligent. Most appreciated.” How heroic he was in Seryozha’s eyes, broad-shouldered, chin tilted up, soldiers and sailors gathered around him. “Look, let’s get out of here, Makarova Marina,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot in here, and I’ve had enough of the sermons.”

Pavlik crossed his arms peevishly as I left with the boy from the Stray Dog Café. “I’ll be back,” I whispered to Seryozha as I climbed over him. “If not, go home with the others.” His face was still red from being caught admiring the handsome young poet.


Outside, the air was fresh and the night finally dark, splashed with stars like flour slung into the sky. In the absence of police, all sorts of sinister people scuttled in the shadows, but who would bother me with this giant, this Genya Kuriakin? He was like a figure from a folktale, an indomitable Ilya Muromets. And the way he’d chosen me, plucked me from the crowd as a boy picks a flower from a meadow—it was so easy. As simple as destiny. Genya, a name like grain on the tongue, like a gift in the hand. That hard G grabbed you, the ya declared itself again. Ya, I.