Stepanovna and I stood on a doorstep at the corner of the Zabalkansky Prospect, where we could see well, and whence, if need be, we could also make good our escape.
The market place was transformed in the twinkling of an eye. A moment before it had been bristling with life and the crowded streetcars had stopped to let their passengers scramble laboriously out. But now the whole square was suddenly as still as death, and, but for a few onlookers who watched the scene from a distance, the roadway was deserted.
From fifty to sixty soldiers filed slowly into the shed and a few others, with rifles ready, hurried now and again round the outside of the building. A fiendish din arose with the entry of the soldiers. The shrieking, howling, booing, cursing, and moaning sounded as if hell itself had been let loose! It was an uncanny contrast—the silent square, and the ghastly noise within the shed!
Stepanovna muttered something, but the only word I caught was “devils.” Sacks and bundles were being dragged out by the guards and hoisted on to trucks and lorries. At one door people were let out one by one after examination of their clothes and papers. The women were set at liberty, but the men, except the old and quite young boys, were marched off to the nearest Commissariat.
“What does it all mean?” I exclaimed, as we moved off along the Zabalkansky Prospect.
“Mean, Ivan Pavlovitch? Don’t you see? ‘Let’s grab!’ ‘Down with free-trading!’ ‘Away with speculators!’ That is what they say. ‘Speculation’ they call it. I am a ‘speculator,’ too,” she chuckled. “Do you think I ever got any work from the labour bureau, where I have been registered these three months? Or Varia, either, though we both want jobs. The money Ivan Sergeievitch left us is running out, but we must live somehow, mustn’t we?”
Stepanovna lowered her voice.
“So we have sold a sideboard. … Yes,” she chuckled, “we sold it to some people downstairs. ‘Speculators,’ too, I expect. They came up early in the morning and took it away quietly, and our house committee never heard anything about it!”
Stepanovna laughed outright. She thought it a huge joke.
For all your furniture, you see, was supposed to be registered and belonged not to yourself but to the community. Superfluous furniture was to be confiscated in favour of the workingman, but generally went to decorate the rooms of members of the committee or groups of Communists in whose charge the houses were placed. Sailor Communists seemed to make the largest demands. “Good morning,” they would say on entering your home. “Allow us, please, to look around and see how much furniture you have.” Some things, they would tell you, were required by the house committee. Or a new “worker” had taken rooms downstairs. He was a “party man,” that is, he belonged to the Communist Party and was therefore entitled to preference, and he required a bed, a couch, and some easy-chairs.
It was useless to argue, as some people did and got themselves into trouble by telling the “comrades” what they thought of them. The wise and thoughtful submitted, remembering that while many of these men were out just to pocket as much as they could, there were others who really believed they were thus distributing property in the interests of equality and fraternity.
But the wily and clever would exclaim: “My dear comrades, I am delighted! Your comrade is a ‘party man’? That is most interesting, for I am intending to sign on myself. Only yesterday I put some furniture by for you. As for this couch you ask for, it is really indispensable, but in another room there is a settee you can have. And that picture, of course, I would willingly give you, only I assure you it is an heirloom. Besides, it is a very bad painting, an artist told me so last week. Would you not rather have this one, which he said was really good?”
And you showed them any rotten old thing, preferably something big. Then you would offer them tea and apologize for giving them nothing but crusts with it. You explained you wished to be an “idealist” Communist, and your scruples would not permit you to purchase delicacies from “speculators.”
Your visitors were not likely to linger long over your crusts, but if you succeeded in impressing them with your devotion to the Soviet regime they would be less inclined to molest a promising candidate for comradeship.
But Stepanovna possessed no such subtlety. She was, on the contrary, unreasonably outspoken and I wondered that she did not get into difficulties.
Stepanovna and Varia often used to go to the opera, and when they came home they would discuss intelligently and with enthusiasm the merits and demerits of respective singers.
“I did not like the man who sang Lensky tonight,” one of them would say. “He baaed like a sheep and his acting was poor.”
Or, “So-and-so’s voice is really almost as good as Chaliapin’s, except in the lowest notes, but of course Chaliapin’s acting is much more powerful.”
“Stepanovna,” I once said, “used you to go to the opera before the revolution?”
“Why, yes,” she replied, “we used to go to the Narodny Dom.” The Narodny Dom was a big theatre built for the people by the Tsar.
“But to the state theatres, the Marinsky opera or ballet?”
“No, that was difficult.”
“Well, then, why do you abuse the Bolsheviks who make it easy for you to go to what used to be the Imperial theatres and see the very best plays and actors?”
Stepanovna was stooping over the samovar. She raised herself and looked at me, considering my question.
“H’m, yes,” she admitted, “I enjoy it, it is true. But who is the theatre full of? Only schoolchildren and our ‘comrades’ Communists. The schoolchildren ought to be doing home-lessons and
