Gradually the meetings in the various parts of Moscow assumed each its specific character. At the Skobelev Monument, the speakers were usually representatives of the various parties, from Cadets and Populist - Socialists to Bolsheviks. Here the speeches were violent, but to the point. No one was allowed to talk hot air in front of Skobelev. The moment anyone began, the crowd shouted in unison: 'Off with you to the Taganka! Out you go!'

In Taganka Square you could indeed say anything you liked - for instance that Kerensky was an apostate from the village of Shpola, or that the monks at the Donskoy Monastery had been caught red-handed hiding ten thousand gold rubles in the cores of pickled apples.

One day in spring (by then it was May, but I don't believe anyone had noticed that the ice on the Moscow River had broken, or that the wild cherries were in flower) I was standing in the crowd at the foot of the Skobelev Monument. A scuffle had broken out between Bolsheviks and SRs.

Suddenly I saw Rachinsky climbing up the steps of the monument. I had never come across him in Moscow before.

He took off his wide-brimmed velours hat, raised his stick with its silver mermaid knob, called for silence, and declaimed:

'Black clouds threaten to obscure the radiant sun of our freedom. Permit me, a poor and humble poet living in an attic, to raise my indignant voice. . . .'

'Chuck him out!' came a coarse but dear and determined voice from the crowd.

'Off to the Taganka!' the crowd cheerfully took up. 'You, up there, whoever is nearest, haul him off the monument.'

'. . . usurpation of authority!' Rachinsky shouted despairingly. 'The voice of the senseless rabble!'

It was no good, he was not allowed to go on. Raising tragic eyes to heaven, he shrugged his shoulders, climbed with dignity off the pedestal and disappeared into the crowd.

The meetings at the Pushkin Monument dealt with a variety of themes but, as they say now, always kept 'to a high level'. Most of the speakers were students.

I was working for a newspaper, and it was part of my job to attend the meetings. They reflected every change of mood in Moscow. They were also places where reporters could pick up a lot of news.

The paper appeared under the curious title Moscow Municipality Bulletin. The Moscow Municipality had long ceased to exist, and it certainly had no bulletin. Perhaps the paper derived its name from the fact that the building in Tverskoy Boulevard, which housed its office, had been the residence of the Municipal Governor.

It was a small paper, edited by the flippant poet-journalist 'Don Aminado'. No one knew his real name.

It published shattering news from all over the country, kept a chronicle of Moscow life, and occasionally printed a couple of decrees issued by Dr Kishkin, Commissar of the Provisional Government. As it never entered anyone's mind to carry out his orders, the Doctor's function was chiefly ornamental. He was a dry stick of a man, with a greying beard and the eyes of a martyr, who went about in an elegant frock-coat with silk lapels and wore a red rosette in his buttonhole.

Every day, the speeches at the meetings became more forthright, and from the welter of slogans and demands was beginning to emerge the pattern of the two camps into which the country was already divided: that of the Bolsheviks and workers, and that of the well-intentioned but distraught and spineless intellectuals who backed the government. Though not, of course, the whole of the intelligentsia, they represented a good part of it.

The State was falling apart like a lump of drying clay. The provinces, the country districts, refused obedience to Petrograd. They lived their own life, no one knew how, seething with unknown currents. The army was quickly melting away from the front.

Kerensky dashed about the country, trying to hold it together by his feverish eloquence. What he lacked in strength of ideas and conviction, he tried to make up for by pompous phrases, dramatic postures, grandiloquent but ill-timed gestures. Thus, standing on the parapets of trenches, he harangued the soldiers at the front, an incongruous figure but wholly unaware of it.

One day, ripping off the epaulettes of an elderly, sick soldier, who refused to fight, he pointed imperiously to the east: 'Coward! Back to the rear! We will not shoot you - we leave that to your conscience!' He shouted in a tragic voice, he had tears in his eyes, the soldiers turned away, muttering and cursing.

I saw him many times, with his puffy, sallow face, red eyelids, and sparse, greying crew-cut. He walked with headlong speed, making his A.D.C.s run to keep up with him. He turned swiftly, suddenly, startling his companions, his wounded arm in a black sling, the hand tucked into the breast of his crumpled coat, shiny brown leggings creaking on his long thin legs.

In a barking, staccato voice, he flung short sentences at the crowd and gasped. He believed in ringing words, he loved them. They seemed to him a tocsin ringing out over the turmoil, rousing men to sacrifice and valour.

After a speech, he collapsed, sobbing, in his armchair and his A.D.C.s revived him with essence of valerian-he reeked of it like a nervous woman.

This smell-it called to mind the fusty air of an old-fashioned flat-seemed to me a give-away. In those days I believed that the smell of medicine was incompatible with the high calling of a popular tribune.

I soon realised that he was merely a sick man with a strong streak of Dostoevskyism in his make-up, an actor who believed in his high messianic vocation, and who was rushing headlong to disaster.

A light-weight carried on the crest of the first revolutionary wave, he was clearly honest in his convictions and his devotion to Russia.

Ever since the Middle Ages, Russia had had her share of holy simpletons. There was something of the same holy simplicity in Kerensky.

At various times, I saw most of the current leaders of the February revolution. Muddled though I was by the situation, I was struck by their disparity.

What, for instance, had Kerensky in common with his Foreign Minister, the aristocratic professor of history, Milyukov?

His blue-grey hair looked sterilised and icy, as did the whole of him, including his every measured, correct word. In those turbulent times, he was like a visitor from some other, well-ordered, academic planet.

A crop of soap-box orators appeared overnight. They sprouted like mushrooms.

What mattered to each was to out-bellow his rivals. Cheap demagogy flourished.

Orators were even imported from abroad. Albert Thomas, French Minister of War-Supplies, arrived from Paris. He came to persuade the 'gallant Russian people' to stick to their allies and continue the war.

A stumpy man with a red beard and an elegant frock-coat, he proved a master of the art of shrillness and of pantomime. I once heard him speak from the balcony of what is now the Moscow Soviet (then the headquarters of the Commissar of the Provisional Government).

Thomas spoke in French. The listeners were mostly soldiers or workers from the suburbs-hardly a dozen of them could have known the language, yet he made himself perfectly clear to all.

Prancing up and down the balcony, he demonstrated what, he believed, awaited Russia if she withdrew from the war. Twisting his moustache into the shape of the Kaiser's, he glared savagely, leapt high into the air and seized an imaginary Russia by the throat. He gripped her in a stranglehold, spat, hurled her to the ground, kicked and trampled her with his polished boots, uttering war whoops and snarling like an enraged tiger.

For several minutes the crowd, fascinated, holding its breath, watched the Kaiser's terrifying war-dance over Russia's prostrate body.

Then it growled. Wiping his flushed face with a scented handkerchief, Thomas put on his glossy topper at its usual slight angle, and smiled: he thought that the rumbling was one of approval.

But it grew ever louder and more threatening. Finally individual words could be made out: 'Shame! Clowning! Chuck him out!' The crowd broke into shrill whistles.

Someone charitably took Thomas by the elbow and propelled him inside. His place on the balcony was taken by the Belgian Socialist Vanderwelde, a man with a painfully ascetic face and a clerical coat buttoned to the neck.

Chewing his dry, thin lips, he began quietly, in a flat voice. He seemed to want to put the crowd to sleep. It quickly dispersed except for a handful of people listening out of politeness.

Vanderwelde took the same line as Thomas. In his despondent way, he pleaded for loyalty to the 'holy military alliance'.

The sound of singing came from the direction of the Strastnoy Monastery. It grew louder, it thundered:

We are sons of the people, Children of toil.

Fraternal alliance and freedom Our rallying call.

Columns of workers were approaching from the direction of Presnya, marching down the Tverskoy Boulevard. Red banners fluttered past Vanderwelde. They were inscribed with slogans:

'Peace to the poor, war on the richi' 'All power to the Soviets!' 'Down with the war!'

Vanderwelde chewed his lips for a few more minutes, then folded up his notes and walked slowly away, leaning on his tightly rolled and sheathed umbrella.

None of the workers had looked up. They sang:

All that holds up thrones Is made bj workers^ hands. Our hands will cast our bullets And fix bayonets to our guns.

Looking back on those first months of the revolution, it is easy to see today how charged they were with a sense of unavoidable, impending change.

The old order had been destroyed. But hardly anyone in his heart of hearts believed that the revolution had achieved its aim. The February regime was, in fact, no more than a short interlude in Russia's history.

Perhaps the rulers were themselves aware of it, and therefore the less able to resist the future, hostile to them but inevitable- that future announced by Lenin from the armoured train at Finland Station: 'The dawn of the world socialist revolution has already begun.'

All that had been so easily achieved and so hurriedly put together since February was, after all, only the first glimmer of dawn!

It was only later that the majority understood this clearly. At the time it was only vaguely felt. We were too keyed up, too stunned by each day's fantastic happenings. We had no strength, no leisure to keep up with the lightning flight of history. The thunder of the collapsing structure of our past was a continuous roar in our ears.

The kindly, idyllic mood of the first days of the revolution was overcast. Worlds were being rent apart and dashed to dust.

The majority of the intellectuals-heirs of the great humanistic tradition of Pushkin and Herzan, Chekhov and Tolstoy-were utterly confused. Capable of creating high spiritual values, they had proved themselves, with few exceptions, powerless to lay the foundations of a state.

Their ideas had been defined, their aspirations and their civic courage trained in the struggle for freedom against autocracy, in which Russian culture had largely grown up.

Now that the old regime had collapsed, their task was no longer to sow the seeds of textbook 'reason, goodness and light' among the people, but at once, with their own hands, to create a new social order, to govern efficiently a vast and hopelessly neglected country.

The country's mood of vague euphoria could not go on. Its life depended on a clear purpose and a sense of priorities. The establishment of justice and freedom, it now appeared, required hard work, and even ruthlessness. The millennium would not come of itself, in response to the clashing of cymbals and the cheers of the citizens.

This was the first lesson of the revolution. For the first time, the Russian intellectuals were brought face to face with their own ideals.

It was a bitter cup to swallow. No one could avoid it. The strong drained it and stayed on the side of the people, the weak degenerated or were destroyed.

Thus began the long, stern era of creating a new civic order. But, as I have already said, few people thought the issues out to the end-they were only vaguely aware of them. Many drifted with the current, wishing only to survive, to see the course history would take, the haven which awaited Russia in the end.

As for me, I had welcomed the February revolution with a schoolboy's delight, though by then I was twenty-five. I believed naively that, overnight, everyone would change, be better, even the bitterest enemies make friends. To me, the new values were indisputable. For their sake, it would surely not be difficult for man to break with his unworthy past, with cupidity, national enmity, and the oppression of man by man.

I had always been convinced that there was an innate goodness in everyone-all it needed was to be called forth from the depth of his being.

But I soon discovered that half these splendid hopes were dust and ashes. Every day brought me new and cruel evidence that men are not so easily changed, that the revolution had not abolished hatred or distrust.

I drove the unpleasant thought away, but it insisted on coming back. I felt angrier and angrier. I began positively to hate the smooth liberal intellectuals who seemed to me to get more and more stupid through their dislike of the simple people over whom they had so recently been in ecstacies. Not that I was ready to accept the October revolution as a whole. I agreed with much, but some things shocked me-particularly what seemed to me its contempt for the culture of the past.

Prevented from wholehearted acceptance by my idealistic upbringing, I lived through the first two or three years as a deeply interested onlooker, but without taking an active part in the events.

Not till 1920 did I realise that the nation's choice was inevitably mine. At once, I felt relieved. There followed a period of faith and of great hope. My life became less casual, more considered, and on the whole devoted to the country's service in the field in which I felt that I could give of my best-writing.

Whether it is better to come to recognition through doubt or never to have doubted, no one can tell.

What seems to me required of a man of our time is honesty towards oneself, no less than devotion to justice, freedom and humanity.

The cold spring of 1917 was followed by a sweltering summer. A hot wind blew armfuls of torn and crumpled newspapers along the pavements. Every day new papers appeared in Moscow, sometimes with the most unusual trends, such as those of the theosophists or the anarchists movement whose slogan was:

'Anarchy breeds order'. Noisy and mostly illiterate, few survived for more than a week.

The wind ruffled dozens of posters-accusing, denouncing, or calling for restraint. The air was thick with the smell of printers' ink and of rye bread. The village smell of bread was brought by the army. In spite of Kerensky's shrill orders, the city filled with soldiers pouring in from the front.

Moscow had become a rest camp. Whole regiments parked round the stations, where the squares smoked like the ruins of a conquered city-but only with cigarette smoke-and grey flurries of sunflower seeds swirled in the wind.

A red flag, tied to the martially raised sword of Skobelev's statue, had faded in the sun but flapped triumphantly in the wind.

The city lay under a pall of dust. Yellow lights burned drowsily night and day. No one could remember to put them out.

For the sake of economy, summer-time was introduced: the sun set at four o'clock.

The whole town was on its feet. Houses stood empty. All night long, people talked themselves hoarse at meetings, argued, wandering sleeplessly about the streets, sitting in the squares or squatting on the pavements. Strangers, thrown together at a meeting, immediately became staunch friends or fierce enemies. The revolution was four months old, but the excitement was as tense as ever, people were as anxious, as troubled at heart.

Early that autumn, I decided to go to stay with Mama. Moscow had exhausted me. In all this time I had read nothing but the mass of hastily run-off pamphlets, which reflected the bitter party-political strife. I longed to re-read War and 'Peace-it seemed an impossible dream! The novel itself seemed to me to have been written a couple of centuries ago.

Mama and my sister Galya were living in the Polesye near the little town of Chernobyl. There, my Aunt Vera, who lived in Kiev, owned a small estate, Kopan, which Mama had undertaken to run. Anything to do with the land delighted her. She had even once hoped to make me study scientific farming.

I passed through Kiev. Like Moscow, it was one solid, seething, endless public meeting. The only difference was that 'hurrah' and 'chuck him out' were shouted in Ukrainian, and 'the Ukraine will never die' by Shevchenko replaced the Marseillaise.

I sailed along the Dnieper and the Pripet to Chernobyl, in a scruffy little paddle steamer, the Volodya. It was a conscientious little boat. Every now and then the Captain, a Ukrainian with a grey moustache and a red ribbon on his chest, climbed onto the bridge, and, grinning, shouted through to the engine room:

'Step on it, Volodya! Do your bit for the revolution!'

And the Volodya did its best. Puffing steam with all its might and hurriedly slapping the water with its paddles, it put on a spurt. But this never lasted long. Soon, the paddles were splashing sleepily as before while the contented passengers snoozed on deck, the bitter smell of marsh marigolds drifted from the bank and the shrill rattle of crickets merged into a soothing whirr.

I, too, lay on deck, making up for lost sleep. Moscow seemed a tangled dream.

It was thirty miles by horse and cart, through forest and wasteland, from Chernobyl to Kopan. The horses plodded on at a walk. The wheels creaked, the ancient harness smelled of tar. The driver, a little old man in a threadbare brown Ukrainian cloak, kept asking me:

'Begging you pardon to be sure, isn't there any news in Moscow about when the general permit will come through?'

'What permit?'

'For us peasants to take the land and be the masters, and to stick all the big and little masters in the backside with our pitch-forks and send them to the devil's mother.'

Kopan turned out to be no more than a neglected farm. In a clearing in the forest stood an old farmhouse with a rotting thatched roof, a few derelict outhouses and no fence. The woods hemmed it in on all sides. After the commotion in Moscow, the soughing of the pines struck me as particularly peaceful and majestic.

Mama managed not to cry when she saw me, although her lips trembled and her voice choked. She threw her arms round me, pressed her head into my shoulder, and for a long time stood silent, holding back her tears. She had never dung to me like this before, as though I were the older, her protector and her only comfort in all her misfortunes.

Galya squeezed my arm, tears dripping from under her thick spectacles. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

I tried clumsily to comfort Mama. I often thought other when I was away, but it only now occurred to me that life had robbed her of everything except her sour, deeply hidden love for Galya and myself, the only two people left to her. These were the last crumbs of love which kept her alive. For its sake she put up without a murmur with being snubbed by her rich relations and with living and drudging, utterly deserted, in these lonely woods.

When dusk fell. Mama mentioned apologetically that it was quite impossible to get kerosene-there wasn't any even in Chernobyl-so she and Galya spent their evenings by the light of a pine torch. It was the first I had ever seen, and I rather liked its bright, crimson light.

Her dry, roughened fingers picking at the fringe of her shawl, Mama said diffidently:

'I wish you could stay with us for good, Kostik. It's so dangerous to be apart nowadays. We'd manage all right. We'd live on potatoes and lard, but at least we'd be together. What do you think, Kostik?'

Not daring to look at me, she kept her eyes lowered.

I said nothing.

The torch had burned down, and she fixed a new one in the iron clamp. Her hands were shaking.

'We were talking about it with Galya,' she said without turning. 'If you haven't given up your idea of writing, it can't make much difference where you work. It's very quiet here. And nobody would disturb you!'

I had to say something.

'I'll think it over,' I replied.

She came up to me and stroked my head.

'That's good, Kostik.' She smiled sadly. 'That's wonderful. Do that, Kostik, think it over.'

However long you live in Russia, it never ceases to astonish you by its contrasts.

I felt this more than ever in Kopan.

The day after I arrived, I was telling Galya and Mama about Moscow and the revolution, when I looked out of the window and saw an old, hunchbacked litde monk, in a dusty habit and pointed hat, trudging from the woods towards the house.

He came in, crossed himself in front of the empty ikon corner, turned to us, bowed from the waist, and asked Mama if she would take some dried mushrooms in exchange for salt for the brethren. He might have stepped down from a picture of Russia before Peter the Great.

As it happened. Mama did have some salt. She poured out a quarter of a bag for the monk but refused the mushrooms. Living in the woods, she already had more than she knew what to do with.

Mama offered the monk tea. He sat down at the table without taking off his hat and sipped his tea through a lump of sugar; a few tears trickled down his cheeks as yellow as candle wax. He wiped them carefully and said:

'So the Lord has granted me to drink tea with sugar once again before I die. Truly, the Lord is merciful. He has taken pity on my poor cold bones.'

Mama went to fetch something from the other room. I followed her and asked where the monk had turned up from. She told me there had always been a small community about six miles away in the woods, on the bank of the River Uzh. Now, since the revolution, most of the able-bodied monks had scattered, only a few ailing old men remained.

'You ought to go and see it,' she suggested. 'Have a talk with them. It would interest you.'

A few days later, I walked over to the monastery. The woods were dark and cluttered up with fallen trees. There was no clearing; right in the thick of the forest, I stumbled upon a tall, blackened, wooden fence. I had seen such fences in Roerich's and Nesterov's paintings of old monastic settlements.

I followed it to the gate. The gate was barred. I knocked several times before it was opened by the same monk who had come to us for salt.

Walking into the small courtyard overgrown with grass, and seeing the crooked little church built of rough pine logs, was like walking into the Middle Ages.

Old men's voices chanted in the church. Now and then a muffled tinkle came from the belfry.

'We don't rightly know whether to ring the bell or not,' said the monk. 'It's risky. We wouldn't want to give offence to the authorities. So we just give it a twitch very sofdy-it wouldn't frighten a crow off the roof. Please to come inside.'

We went into the church. Only three or four candles were burning. The old men, in black habits with white cloth patches in the shape of crosses and skulls, never stirred. Their narrow faces gleamed like darkened gold in the shadows. There was a bitter smell of burned juniper berries-they burned them instead of incense.

Everything was jumbled in my mind-the ancient community, the mournful singing, the wind in the forest outside, the skulls on the monks' robes, Moscow, the cross on Lyolya's grave, the soldiers crawling with lice in the trenches, the synagogue in Kobrin, the lighthouse in Taganrog, revolution, meetings, Marseillaise, Kerensky, 'Peace to the poor, war on the rich'. My whole life seemed a patchwork, a vivid dream, my only settled habit-the expectation of change.

How could I take it all in, make sense of it, clear my mind so that I could in the end do something worth doing? And how explain to myself that I could, at one and the same time, be on the side of the revolution, of progress, love Heine, and yet feel myself a contemporary of this ancient Russia, its voice quavering on about man's eternal predestination to happiness, 'as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be'? And why did these words remind me of the poem, 'My grief is a necklace of matchless pearls, locked in a casket of wrought steel'? The poem seemed an echo of the chant.

I went home, still in a muddle.

Afterwards, whenever I went to fish the River Uzh, I called on the monks. They offered me cold water and old mead.

Newspapers never reached us. To get them, I had to ride our limping horse to Chernobyl.

I did this once, and brought back the news of Kornilov's rebellion, the German offensive, and the fall of Riga.

Mama wouldn't let me go a second time. A mysterious gang had appeared in the woods-perhaps escaped Austrian prisoners or convicts released from jail. No one had seen them, but everyone was alarmed.

Time passed. Nothing more was heard of the gang. People quietened down. At the end of autumn, I went back to Moscow. Mama made me promise to return in spring. By the time I left, the leaves had shrivelled and turned yellow, and the woods were wreathed in mist.

A week later, bandits raided the monastery, searched it for silver, shot all the monks, and set fire to the church. But age had petrified its timber, so the church was charred, but not burned down.

In Moscow I found lodgings in a three-storeyed house near Nikitsky Gate. It looked out on Tverskoy Boulevard, Great Nikitskaya Street and Leontyevsky Lane. Its fourth side abutted onto the safety wall of a six-storeyed block of flats.

Across the road, at the corner of Tverskoy Boulevard (where the Timiryazev Monument stands now) a long, dull building housed a chemist's shop which kept part of its stock in the basement. My room was on the first floor and its windows faced the chemist's.

I give all these details because they help to explain the unusual events described below.

One autumn night, grey with mist and frost, I woke up feeling as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. For a moment I thought I had gone deaf.

I leapt out of bed. The floor was littered with glass from the shattered windows. The splinters shone by the light of the misty moon drifting high above the sleeping city.

There was deep silence, then a sound like a thunder-clap. Something screeched past the windows, and immediately the corner of the house opposite collapsed with a slow rumble. Children started crying in my landlord's flat.

Nikitsky Gate was being shelled from the Pushkin Monument - but we only learned this later.

Again there was silence. As attentively as before, the moon looked down from the misty sky at the litter of glass on the floor.

A few minutes later came a long burst of machine-gun fire from Nikitsky Gate.

The October fighting-the 'October upheaval' as we called it then-had begun. It went on for several days.

Rifles answered the machine-gun. A bullet went through Chekhov's portrait, smack into the wall. I found the portrait later, buried under a heap of plaster. The bullet had hit Chekhov in the chest, tearing a hole in his white pique waistcoat.

The crossfire crackled like burning brushwood. Bullets rattled on the metal roofs.

My landlord, a widowed, middle-aged architect, called me to his flat. It was at the back of the house, facing the yard.

Two little girls were sitting on the floor with their old Nanny. The old woman had wrapped them up, head and all, in a thick woollen shawl.

'We're safe here,' said the landlord. 'The bullets won't go through the house.'

'Are the Germans shooting at us. Papa?' asked the older of the two girls.

'Don't be silly. They're nowhere near.' 'Who, then?' 'Be quiet!' snapped her father.

I went back to my room and looked through the window from the shelter of the wall. Black clouds had blotted out the moon. The buildings, their windows dark, barely showed against the dark sky. Gunfire flashed without a break and bullets sang in various keys, screeching, whistling, or oddly clacking, as though turning somersaults in the air.

I tried to make out people in the street, but the flashes were not bright enough. Judging from the gunfire, the Red Guards had advanced from Strastnaya Square to where the ornate timbered pavilion of a summer restaurant stood halfway up the Boulevard. The Junkers held their ground in the square beside Nikitsky Gate.

Suddenly a tall blue tongue of flame shot up under my windows, hissing and swaying in the wind. It looked like a torch. By its ghostly light, I could at last see people running and taking cover behind trees.

Soon a second torch flared up across the road. Bullets had shattered the burners of the gaslights and the burning gas poured straight from the pipes.

By its wavering light the gunfire immediately increased.

I went back to my landlord's.

'Well?' he asked.

'We must get the children away.'

'Where to? The Boulevard is under fire.

'To Great Nikitskaya. Through the shops.

'The Red Guards are shelling it from Lesser Nikitskaya. The Junkers' H.Q. is at the Union Cinema.

'That leaves only Leontyevsky Lane.'

'Let's go and see.'

We went down the back stairs, into the square courtyard. Here the bullets sang high overhead and only now and then dislodged a piece of the cornice. A few men stood outside the porter's lodge at the back of the yard.

The gunfire in Leontyevsky Lane was even fiercer than in Tverskoy Boulevard. On the fourth side of the yard loomed the wall of the neighbouring house. It had not a single window.

The architect looked at it and cursed.

'It's a trap,' he said. 'We are cut off on all four sides. There's no way out. We're in no-man's-land.'

Dawn was breaking. The men outside the porter's lodge were bakers from Bartel's bakery on the ground floor.

White with flour from head to foot, a bearded baker-a veteran of Port Arthur-suggested moving all the tenants to the porter's lodge as the safest place. The tenants were very few. The whole of the ground floor was occupied by shops and storage premises.

Thus began the first of many days we spent in the lodge.

One of the bakers, a young lad, made up his mind to join the Red Guards. Bent double, he ran out of the gate and was immediately mown down by machine-gun fire from Nikitsky Gate.

Sitting in the lodge, we talked over the events of the past few days and were amazed by our own stupidity. The fighting had taken us all by surprise. Yet we knew about the rising in Petrograd, the storming of the Winter Palace, the gunshot from the Aurora;

we knew that martial law had been proclaimed in Moscow, that well-armed units of soldiers and Red Guards were massing on the Khodynka, that the Alexeyev and Alexandrov Military Academies had been alerted for duty.

The Port Arthur veteran took command of the building.

There was still a thin trickle of water from the tap in the porter's lodge. The baker made us collect and fill every bucket and jug we could find: the water could give out at any moment.

Next we collected all the food we could lay our hands on: it wasn't very much.

We had no news but felt sure that fighting must be going on all over Moscow. One thing was clear-we were in a state of siege, as though living in a fortress ringed by fire. Unfortunately our fortress was unsafe. Already by the end of the first day, stray bullets were falling in the yard.

All that night we sat on the front-door steps of the lodge, trying to guess from the intensity of the gunfire which side was getting the upper hand.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the shooting stopped. We strained our ears. The silence seemed more dangerous than an artillery barrage. But it was soon over. Distant, long-drawn shouts came from the pitch-darkness: 'Message for the Commander! The Junkers are manning the roofs!'

The shouts, hurriedly repeated, sounded more and more urgent: 'Message for Commander! Junkers manning roofs!' Then the gunfire broke out as suddenly as it had stopped, and again bullets drummed on rain pipes and shop signs.

On the second evening, a fire broke out in the chemist's shop opposite. As the various chemicals caught fire, it burned yellow, green, or blue. Muffled explosions boomed in the basement and very soon the whole building caved in. The fire gradually died down, but pungent, rainbow-coloured clouds of smoke rose from the ruins for days on end.

Our metal roof buckled and the window frames smoked, but luckily did not catch.

We coughed and our eyes watered from the smoke; we tied wet handkerchiefs over our faces, but it made little difference.

On the third night, there was another lull in the fighting and we heard a strained, uncertain voice shouting in the Boulevard:

'Vikzhel' (The Railway Workers Union as it was known then) 'calls on both sides to cease fire and send delegates! To negotiate a truce! Don't shoot! The go-between-a representative of Vikzhel-will wait ten minutes. Don't shoot!'

Now the silence was so deep that we could hear the bullet-torn shop signs groaning in the wind.

By the dying glow of the chemist's shop, I could just see my watch. The others looked at me in silence. The seconds seemed to race. Five minutes . . . Seven . . . Would the Junkers really hold out? . . . Ten.

A single shot rang out, then another, and at once the crossfire rose like a squall.

A field-gun boomed from Arbat Square, and something crashed, echoing, beyond the blank wall of the next-door house. A shaft of flame slowly rose and spiralled into the sky.

As we learned later, the Junkers had shelled the building and set it on fire to prevent its capture by the Red Guards. In military language, the building commanded the neighbourhood.

This second fire was much more dangerous for us than the one across the road. Burning timber and clanging, twisted sheets of roof-iron were already flying into our yard. We doused them with the little water we had stored.

The old baker assured us that the danger would be over once the top floor had collapsed-provided of course that the safety wall held. We agreed although we knew that our situation was fairly desperate.

That same night, a man in spectacles with a red beard, an army belt on his civilian jacket, and an automatic in his hand, managed, by some miracle, to climb through a broken window in Tverskoy Boulevard and appeared in our yard which was so brightly lit that every speck on the flagstones showed. He looked like Dobrolyubov.

'Silence!' he shouted. 'All residents over here! A cease-fire has been agreed-it will begin in one minute from now-to enable the women and children to evacuate this building. Women and children only. They won't let the men leave. But the house will go up in flames at any moment. You couldn't be much worse off so, if I were in your shoes, I'd chance it-only of course after all the women and children have gone. You'll cross the Boulevard to Bronnaya Street. In single file. Line up at the gate.'

The man vanished as suddenly as he had come.

We lined up at the gate. The gunfire died down and the old Nanny with the two little girls scuttled across. The other women followed.

While the women were crossing the Boulevard, a slanging match broke out between the Junkers and the Red Guards.

'Hi, you snivellers!' shouted the Red Guards. 'Stop fooling! Drop your rifles!'

'We've sworn allegiance!' the Junkers shouted back.

'To whom? To Kerensky? He's buzzed off! He's joined the Germans, the son-of-a-bitch!'

'We're pledged to Russia, not to Kerensky.'

'Aren't we Russia? Use your brains!'

As soon as all the women had gone, the baker dashed through the gate. I was to go next. But instantly, a burst of machine-gun fire from the Junkers' side ripped off a corner of the gatepost. The baker leapt back. The crossfire started up again, and splintered wood, brick and glass showered the pavement. We returned to the porter's lodge.

The baker cursed. 'If only we'd got throughl You and I would have joined the Red Guards. With me there, they'd have taken you on for sure, even though you're a student. You can say what you like, there's only one Russia, ours-theirs stinks of the coffin.' I thought of the Red Guards shouting 'Aren't we Russia?' and suddenly, with extraordinary clarity and freshness, understood the meaning of the hackneyed words 'the mass of the people'. I belonged to that 'mass'. I felt at home among those craftsmen, peasants, workers, soldiers, and the Gorkys, the Leskovs, all the writers, poets, artists who had come from among them.

'Oh, well,' I said. 'I can't live apart from Russia. I know that.'

'Well, there you are,' the baker grinned. 'You stick to us. Don't get left behind.'

On the fifth day we ran out of food. We stuck it out until the evening, famished. Behind the wall of the porter's lodge the neighbouring house was burning itself out.

There was a small food shop in our building. We decided to raid it-there was nothing else to do. The back door led into our yard. The baker snapped off the lock with an axe and we took it in turn to dash in at night and grab as much salami, tinned food and cheese as we could carry.

The glow was so bright that we had to hide behind the counters or the Junkers at the cinema would see us through the broken window.

All went well the first night, but by the second, a Red Guard sniper had settled in the turret of the corner building in Bronnaya Street. From there, he could see into our yard by the light of the fire; he sat, puffing at a cigarette and taking pot shots at whoever showed up.

It was my turn to go. I dashed across. The sniper can't have seen me or else he was too slow.

I still remember that shop. Sausages in silver paper hung from a stretched wire. Round red cheeses lay on the counter, generously splattered with horseraddish from bullet-shattered jars. A sharp smell came up from puddles of vinegar mixed with brandy and liqueurs on the floor. Swimming in the pools were hard pickled mushrooms covered with a reddish film, their big earthenware container smashed.

I pulled down some sausages, stacked them like logs and put a thick Dutch cheese as round as a wheel and several tins on top.

Running back across the yard, I heard something ping against the bundle in my arms, but I took no notice.

As I came into the lodge, the only woman among us-the porter's ailing wife-let out a terrified screech.

I dropped the bundle and saw my hands were dripping with blood.

Next moment, despite the inappropriate circumstances, we were all in fits of laughter and everyone was helping me to scrape tomato puree off my hands and clothes.

As I was running back, the sniper had found his target, and the bullet pierced a tin drencing me with blood-red puree.

We had not a crust of bread between us. Cheese, salami, pickles, all had to be eaten without bread and washed down with water from the tap.

My landlord remembered a bag of rusks he had left in his kitchen: I went to fetch it.

I climbed cautiously up the back stairs, piled high with rubble and broken bricks. In the kitchen, water poured from a bullet hole in the pipe and the floor was deep in sodden plaster.

I was groping in the sideboard, looking for the rusks, when shouts and the sound of running feet came from the Boulevard. I went to my room to see what had happened. Red Guards with tilted rifles were running abreast along the Boulevard; the Junkers were falling back without firing.

I had never yet seen fighting at such close quarters-right under my window. I was struck by the men's faces-livid and hollow-eyed. Deafened by their own shouts, they seemed to me blind and dazed as well.

Boots clattered up the main stairs. The door from the landing flew open and crashed into the wall. Plaster showered from the ceiling. An excited voice yelled from the hall: 'Mityukha! Bring the machine-gun!'

I turned. An elderly man in a fur hat with ear flaps, a machine-gun ammunition belt slung across his shoulder and a rifle in his hands, stood in the doorway. He gave me a fixed, wild look, pointed his rifle at me and shouted: 'Don't move! Hands up!'

I held up my hands.

'What've you got there. Dad?' a young voice asked from the corridor.

'We've caught one! He was shooting. From the window. Shooting us in the back, son-of-a-bitch.'

Only now did it occur to me that I was wearing my shabby student uniform and that, according to the baker, there was a squad of students at Nikitsky Gate, fighting on the side of the Provisional Government.

A young worker, his cloth cap pulled down over his ears, walked into the room. He strolled across to me, casually took hold of my right hand and carefully examined the palm.

'He wasn't shooting. Dad,' he said cheerfully. 'No marks from the bolt. His hand's clean.'

'Blockhead!' shouted the man with the ear flaps. 'What if he was shooting with a pistol, not a rifle? And then chucked it away? Take him to the yard.'

'Everything's possible,' the young man slapped me on the shoulder. 'Come on, then, forward march. And don't try anything on.'

All this time I hadn't said a word. I suppose because appearances were so hopelessly against me that there seemed no point in trying to explain. I had been caught standing by the broken window of a first-floor room in a house just captured by the Red Guards. I was wearing a student uniform streaked with plaster and suspiciously stained brown by the tomato juice. Whatever I had said, no one would have believed me.

So I said nothing, though I realised that my silence was another damning piece of evidence against me.

'Obstinate devil!' said the man with ear flaps. 'You can see he's a real fanatic.'

I was taken out into the yard, the young man prodding me in the back with his rifle.

The yard was full of Red Guards. They had broken into a store room and were dragging out crates to build a barricade across the Boulevard.

'What's all this? Who's that?' They surrounded us shouting.

The man with ear flaps said I had been shooting them in the back from a window.

'Off with him to the Lord God's headquarters,' a young man with a tipsy face shouted merrily.

•Where's the Commander?'

'He's not here.'

'Where's he got to?'

'Prisoners are not to be harmed-that's the order.'

'Prisoners? He was shooting us in the back.'

'There's only one answer to that-shoot him on the spot.'

'Wait for the Commander, Comrades.'

'There's a legalist for you! Put him up against the walll'

They dragged me over to the wall. The porter's wife, dishevelled, rushed out of the lodge. She clutched their arms.

'Children! Comrades! I know him! That's our lodger. He never shot at you. I'm an old woman, shoot me instead.'

'Now, now, Mother,' the man with ear flaps said reasonably. 'Don't you start feeling sorry for people regardless. We're not murderers. You leave us alone.'

I still don't understand why, as I stood against the wall and heard the click of the rifle bolts, I felt nothing. Whether I was too numbed or my mind suddenly blacked out, I don't know. I stared at the gate-post, chipped by the machine-gun fire, and thought of nothing at all. But for some reason I remember that gate-post in the minutest detail.

I remember that there were seven bullet holes. They were white outside (where the bullets had gone through plaster) and red in the middle (where the brick was exposed). I remember the broken, white-painted, metal bracket of the porter's bell, and the piece of flex attached to it, and the ugly face with a huge nose and bristly hair, drawn with a piece of charcoal on the wall and the scrawl underneath: 'Cheat the fool.'

It seemed to me that time had stopped and the whole world was sunk in silence. In actual fact, it must only have been a few seconds before I heard a strange, yet somehow familiar voice:

'What the hell are you doing? Forgotten your orders? Put down those rifles.'

I tore myself with difficulty from the gate-post-my neck was so stiff that it hurt horribly-and saw the man with the Mauser, who looked like Dobrolyubov-the one who had come to us in the night to get the women and children out of the house. He was pale and didn't look at me.

'Stop it,' he said sharply. 'I know this man. He was not in the student squad. The Junkers are attacking, while you're fooling about with this nonsense.'

The man with the ear flaps grabbed the front of my tunic and shook me till my teeth rattled:

'Damn your mother's eyes! I nearly had you on my conscience, you bloody fool. Why didn't you speak up? And you a student!'

The young worker grinned and winked:

'Get out while the going's good.'

A Junker hand grenade burst in the street. Sheltering behind the barricade, the Red Guards ran out into the Boulevard. The house emptied. Once again, machine-guns chattered.

I never discovered who the young commander was, who had rescued the women and children, and now me. I would certainly have known him among thousands, but I never met him again.

On the sixth night of our 'siege' we were sitting as usual, unshaven, our voices hoarse from the cold, on the steps of the lodge, wondering when at last the fighting would stop. It seemed to be marking time.

There was not much bitterness as yet. This came later, during the Civil War. The Red Guards were fighting a 'war of attrition', confident of victory, knowing that the Junkers would soon crack up.

The new Soviet regime had established itself in Petrograd.

Like layer after layer of soil, the country was dropping away from the Provisional Government. The Moscow Junkers knew that theil cause was lost. The bullets whistling past the building at Nikitsky Gate had been their last.

We sat talking. It was late at night. The air smelled of the smoke of burning houses. Their glow was fading. Only in the direction of Kiev Station was the sky still a dull crimson.

Then, from the north, from the side of Khodynka, came the whining of a shell. It crossed Moscow and the explosion thudded somewhere near the Kremlin. The crossfire ceased suddenly. Evidently both Red Guards and Junkers were waiting for the next shot, to know what the target was.

At last it came-the same aloof, high-pitched whine followed by the flash of the explosion. Once again, it was near the Kremlin.

'They can't be shelling the Kremlin!' the old baker said softly.

The architect jumped up. 'I don't believe it!' he shouted. 'It can't be! No one would dare!'

'Of course not,' the baker agreed in a low voice. 'It's just a warning. Wait. Let's listen.'

We sat, rigid, waiting for more shots. An hour went by, but there were none. Two hours passed. There was deep silence.

Grey light-the first chilly light of dawn-seeped from the east. Moscow was unusually still, so still that we could hear the gas jets hissing in the Boulevard.

'Seems to be over,' the old baker said quietly. 'Let's go and see!'

We stepped cautiously out into the Boulevard.

The lime trees with their broken branches stood in the grey hoar frost and smoke. All along the Boulevard, as far as the Pushkin Monument, the gas jets blazed like funeral torches. The street was a tangle of torn cables. They twanged plaintively, swaying and catching against the cobbles. A dead horse, its yellow teeth bared, lay across the tramlines.

A thin trickle of frozen blood led from our gate. The houses, riddled with machine-gun bullets, kept dropping sharp splinters of glass and we heard it tinkling all around us.

Filling the street from pavement to pavement, columns of Red Guards, exhausted, silent, their red armbands twisted into string, were marching to Nikitsky Gate. Nearly all were smoking and the flashes of their cigarettes in the darkness were like silent crossfire.

A white flag on a pole was tied to a lamp post near the Union Qnema.

Near the flag, a row of Junkers, in crumpled forage caps and greatcoats grey with plaster, stood drawn up against the wall. Many looked half asleep as they leaned on their rifles.

An unarmed man in a leather jacket walked up to them. Several Red Guards halted behind him.

The man in the leather jacket raised his hand and said something in a low voice to the Junkers.

A tall officer stepped out from the row. He removed his sword and his revolver, threw them down at the feet of the man in the leather jacket, saluted, turned about, and with slow, unsteady steps walked in the direction of Arbat Square.

Following him, all the Junkers in turn went up to the man in the leather jacket, piled their rifles and cartridges at his feet, then, as slowly and wearily as their officer, walked away along Nikitsky Boulevard towards Arbat. Some ripped off their shoulder straps as they went.

The Red Guards watched silently, frowning, their faces strained. There was not an exclamation, not a word.

It was all over. From Tverskaya, through the chilly darkness, came the sound of singing and of several brass bands playing the 'International'.

The paper was published by the Populist Socialists. Not even all its contributors had more than a vague idea of its highly indefinite programme. All we knew was that the people at the top were liberal intellectuals, full of good ideas but without the qualities to make them work.

The paper was run by a handsome and masterful middle-aged woman, Ekaterina Kuskova. She spoke in a deep gypsy voice, chain smoked, and disapproved of the reporters, especially after a scribble in indelible pencil was found on her door:

Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Little cuckoo bird,

Do stop cuckooing in vain.

Dead and buried is the past,

Madame Kuskova-that's plain.

As reporters, our writing was not expected to be tendentious- the political slant was provided by the feature articles and leaders. I was utterly and sleeplessly absorbed in my life as a journalist, in the major and minor happenings, sensations, arguments, revolutionary meetings in the squares, marches and streets battles.

The sharp air of that revolutionary winter went to our heads. We were full of woolly romanticism. I neither could nor wished to resist it. Our burning faith in universal happiness shone like an unfading light over the chaos of our lives. That happiness was sure to come. Our very longing to see it, to be its organisers, seemed to us an earnest of its coming.

In everything we read, we looked for universal values. In all we heard we listened to the dialogue between the centuries. The French Revolution, the Decembrist Rising, the Paris Commune and the Revolution of 1905 cast their distant glow on current events, making them still more vivid and exciting.

Despite its inner contradictions, even the poetry of Verhaeren which fascinated me at the time, burned with an old revolutionary fire:

To where the guillotine blade is poised over the square,

To where the savage tocsin quests,

We fly in our insensate dreams.

Our state of fever and confusion was only to be expected of our age and our impatience. Such maturity as I had slowly gained, chiefly through the war, I lost completely. I seemed to be ten years younger, and more stupid with every day. I felt no ground under my feet. It embarrassed and occasionally maddened me to realise that I had no consistent attitude.

What was happening around me seemed to me now wonderful, now wrong, now great, now faking greatness by unnecessary cruelty, now bright with promise, now as lowering as a stormy sky.

Only one thing was clear-life had settled its accounts with the past and was groping towards new standards. These, of course, must be justice and freedom, the opportunity for each man to rise to undreamed heights, to fulfil himself in every way. I believed that the revolution must open up an equal chance for everything that could enrich man's inner life.

To me, the chief point of the revolution was that, of all the manifestations of life and culture, it would encourage those which helped the human spirit to grow. I was told that this was not the aim but the result. But I firmly believed that the result must be the aim-anything else was absurd.

Of all the Populist Socialists who worked on the paper, we youngsters made friends only with the Mikhail Osorgin.

A writer returned from abroad, he was trying desperately hard to make sense of what was going on and was obviously all at sea. It even showed in the expression of his pale-grey eyes, wide open and too bright.

He was charming to everyone and believed everything he was told. His weary voice and his whole appearance suggested a controlled sadness. He was homesick for Italy where he had spent many years. In Russia he seemed always to be only half awake.

We sometimes urged him to go back abroad, telling him that there was nothing for him to do here, whereas out there he could at least write his artless novellas.

'But don't you understand?' he replied in a guilty voice. 'I am a Russian and I love Russia so that it breaks my heart. It's just that I don't recognise her now. Sometimes I wonder if I really am in Russia-I can't believe it. I listen to people talking-even the intonation has changed. So I long for Italy, but if I were there I'd be longing for Russia. There really is no hope for me.'

His bewilderment reached its height when old Gilyarovsky, the ubiquitous 'king of reporters' made one of his periodic irruptions, filling the office with the noise of his raucous rumble and smoker's cough.

'Milksops!' he roared at us young reporters. 'Populist Socialists! What do you know of the Russian people, you moth-eaten liberals? About as much as that fool, Madame Kurdyukova:

'Je ne vais pas, je ne sais pas, je ne mange pas Ie repas,' ' he declaimed with an atrocious accent. 'A newspaper ought to breathe fire. It ought to be too hot to hold in your hand. It ought to make the reader gasp. And what does your rag do? It mumbles. All you are fit for is to write novellas about anaemic young women. Now I do know my Russians. You wait-they'll show you where you get off.'

Osorgin smiled guiltily. Kuskova crossly banged the door of her office. Gilyarovsky winked and went on in a penetrating whisper:

'Of course, a lady can do what she likes-she can sit at her spider-legged desk and play politics and shed tears over her own articles about the Russian peasant. But just one word from a real peasant and you'd all have fits. Goodbye. I'll come back some other time. I don't feel like passing the time of day with you at present.'

He went, but a tense silence reigned over the office for some time, in fear of his return.

All the younger journalists loved this desperate old character with his rumbustiousness, brilliance and inexhaustible imagination, and he, in his own mocking way, loved us in return.

From Government by the People he would wander off to some other newspaper office in the neighbourhood. There, according to the circumstances, he would launch another offensive, or collect news, or sit reminiscing about Chekhov, Kuprin, Shaly-apin and General Skobelev.

Running into me, he would stare at me with round, indignant eyes and say:

'Time you switched from six to ten-point type, young man, and from that to bold. Journalism is six-point, poetry-ten-point, prose-bold. Strap yourself to your chair and work.'

With his grey moustache, cossack jacket and sheepskin hat, he was Russian common sense, good nature, cunning and imagination personified. Journalist, poet, prose writer, he was also a connoisseur of painting and a well-known Moscow host. He was always full of stories, jokes, improvisations; he was always putting on an act. Without it, he would probably have pined away.

This tempestuous old man was at bottom a child. He loved, for instance, sending letters to non-existent addresses in exotic countries he liked the sound of-Australia or the Republic of Costa Rica. Inevitably undelivered, they returned to Moscow, covered with foreign writing and coloured labels.

He looked and even sniffed them all over, as though hoping that they smelled of tropical fruit. But the only smell was that of leather and of sealing wax.

Who knows, perhaps the letters were a pathetic substitute for

his own dream of travelling round the world-clowning all the way, slapping backs, offering snuff to cab-drivers in Paris and Negro kings on the banks of the Zambesi - and returning to Moscow with such traveller's tales as would really make the old lady sit up.

The revolution struck him as a tremendous news story and a manifestation of the Russian spirit of revolt. He sought its origins in Stenka Razin, Pugachev the old peasant risings and tales of arson.

He knew Moscow like the back of his hand, especially that hidden part of it which kept well out of the way of the Soviet authorities-the Moscow of gypsy nightclubs at Pokrovsk-Streshnev, sectarian chapels at Rogozhsky Gate, gambling dens in Brest Street, and the howling mobs of aesthetes who met at Persov's, near St Saviour's Church. Here the leader was a poet with a lisp, a fringe, a smoking jacket and a monocle, who looked so frail that you dared not shake his hand-you felt the pale, transparent fingers might be left in yours as a relic.

Life hadn't settled down yet. The most unlikely people rubbed shoulders. They were more noticeable than before. The revolution had brought them to the surface and shaken them up-as when you shake a barrel of standing water, and all the grains of sand, leaves, twigs, beetles and grubs swim up and rush round and round on the eddy, meeting and colliding, until once again they sink and settle down on the bottom.

In those early days of the revolution, a lot of interesting people used to gather every evening at the Journalists' Cafe in Stolesh-nikov Lane. Pooling their resources, the journalists had rented an empty second-floor flat, furnished it with cafe tables and chairs, and a cheerful all-night meeting was held regularly in its smoke-filled rooms.

There you could run into Andrey Bely and the Menshevik Martov, Bryusov and Balmont, the blind leader of the Moscow Anarchists, Cherny and the writer Shmelev, the actress Roxa-nova,-the first of the Chekhov many 'Sea-gulls', Maximilian Voloshin, Potapenko, Agnivtsev, and many other journalists, •writers and artists of all ages, characters and views.

Agnivtsev, in wide, checked trousers covered with cigarette burns, an enormous yellow tie swathed like a bandage round his long, thin neck and ending in a bow, used obligingly to sing his artless songs.

Coffee, bitter as quinine, steamed in enamel mugs. Even saccharine couldn't sweeten it. Now here, now there, a furious argument broke out, occasionally interrupted by the sound of a loud smack.

The one whose cheeks were most often smacked was a handsome journalist with a dyed beard and a poisonous tongue. Hissing like a snake, he poured his venom over everyone and everything.

Slapping his face was dangerous because he never took his pipe out of his mouth and, every time he was hit, it shot over our heads, spinning like a Catherine-wheel and showering us with burning tobacco. The room smelled of scorched wool. The smouldering table-cloths, coats and trousers were hurriedly doused. The journalist calmly picked up his pipe, filled it, lit it and went off, promising to report the outrage to the Comrades' Court, and followed by shouts of 'Go to the Revolutionary Tribunal if you like. Get out! Go to hell! We've had enough! Provocateur!'

One day, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, red-bearded and shortsighted, dropped in and asked us to his lecture on poetry at the Hermitage Garden Theatre.

Only a few went. The others were too busy arguing to move.

I went to the Hermitage. It was the end of March. The garden was dark and silent. The trees were shedding melted snow.

I caught the smell of rotting leaves, like the faint bouquet of a wine, as though the acrid vegetable smell of last year's thawed-out flowers were seeping through the damp, comfortless, long-unturned and untended soil.

Nature was forgotten in those days. Words rang out across the country-calling to arms, threatening, accusing, denouncing or rejoicing. Millions were drawn by them, as though by a magnetic field. They were called upon simultaneously to destroy and to construct.

It was a time of sudden decisions and of turmoil-not a time to think of nature. Yet the wind rustled as before in the deserted woods, and the frozen rivers turned from white to blue, filling with water. On grey mornings, the lime trees in the boulevards sulked as usual, shaggy with frost. And the sunsets faded as meekly, and the stars shivered apprehensively at night, as though realising that people-even poets and astronomers-had quite other things to think about.

Everyone was at the mercy of his private mental storm. No one looked at rivers or trees or, if he ever did, it was with fixed, unseeing eyes.

Men were swayed by other joys and passions. Even love, simple and unconditional as air and sunshine, at times gave way before the torrent of events. It was experienced as an emotional disease.

Dangerous or misplaced affections were denied in the name of duty. They were relegated to some distant future. The titanic upheaval and reconstruction claimed all our strength. Not an ounce of it could be wasted. Wasted? The sacrifice of love was of course immense and heroic-especially when those who made it knew what they were giving up.

Love, poetry, political events-whatever I stopped to think about, I realised how muddled I was. I longed for a clear sense of values. It was difficult to live without-for me as for everyone. But it was evidently too soon. Things were too unsettled, and we had to wait for the outlines of the new order to emerge from the chaos.

Voloshin's lecture only added to the confusion.

The theatre was almost empty. The cold numbed my hands. A few dusty electric bulbs flickered on and off. Brown fog hung in the air.

Voloshin seemed to be talking to himself, oblivious of the audience. He spoke of the war, of our iron age in the history of the world, and asked, his eyes searching the back of the empty hall, his voice hollow and tragic, what use were poets and artists in such pitiless times.

The best of the Irish poets had been hanged in England. Three hundred poets had been killed in the very first days of the war in France. A French general, who regarded himself as a lover and connoisseur of poetry, had said:

'Let these dedicated youths lead the attack. They will inspire the men to follow.'

Verhaeren, making nonsense of his whole life, had been forced to learn to hate. Jules Lemaltre, shocked by the absurdities of war, had fallen sick and forgotten how to read. He no longer knew what the letters stood for and had to be taught from the beginning like a child.

The terrible list of war crimes against art grew and grew. Voloshin's voice was more and more hollow.

But what was the solution? On this he had nothing to say.

There were many striking people among the regular patrons of the cafe. Each was cut to his own pattern; together, they made up the jeering, ruthless tribe of journalists.

Only Alexander Yakovlev, a young writer from the Volga town of Volsk, kept his distance from the rest.

Yakovlev was an expert on peasant life and wrote excellent articles about it. Shy and reserved, he was treated with respect. Apart from his writing, he earned it by his rare gift for travelling to the remotest parts of Russia and, in spite of the chaotic conditions, returning unharmed. His journeys were feats of daring and endurance. He risked his life almost every time.

A horde of demobilised soldiers poured along the railways, leaving ruin and destruction in its wake. Carriages were stripped of everything that could be broken or torn off. Even the rusty sheet-iron was wrenched off the roofs. There was a lively trade at the Sukharevka Market, in wash-basins, looking-glasses, and strips of bald red plush upholstery from the trains.

Thieves and hooligans, dressed up as soldiers, egged on the demobilised men. At the stations, windows were smashed, fences and sometimes even railway-workers' huts pulled down for timber to stoke the engines. As for the graveyards near the tracks- the crosses went to feed the boilers while the rusty tin lilies and roses festooned the carriage walls, whistling mournfully in the draught.

The station staff scattered long before a train full of demobbed men shook the rails and burst into the stations to the noise of bandit hoots, accordions, gramophones and chattering machine-guns. The slightest hold-up brought savage retribution to those in charge. The engine drivers blenched at the sound of the chorus 'Get cracking, Gavrila!' roared by hundreds of voices.

If a civilian by some miracle managed to get on board, he was normally flung off the moving train. Yakovlev had been thrown out three times but was still alive.

The oddest thing was that, after brushing death, he came back refreshed, excited, full of the amazing things he had seen and heard, and swearing that no price was too high to pay for such copy.

He discovered the strangest, ancient, moth-eaten little towns- Khvalynsk, Sarapul, Serdobsk-so remote and so cut off from Moscow that it was hard to believe in their existence except as a myth.

Russia seemed once more to be split up into small fiefs, separated by the lack of roads, the break-down of the post and telegraph, by forests, swamps and demolished bridges, by distance grown immeasurably longer.

In these God-forsaken corners of the country, autonomous republics were proclaimed and banknotes printed by the local printers (though more often postage stamps were used for money).

It was all mixed up with remnants of the past-balsam in the window-boxes, bell-chimes, wedding feasts with drunken salvoes from sawn-off shotguns, and weed-choked fields of straggly corn, and talk about the end of the world when nothing would be left of Russia but 'black night and three pillars of smoke'.

All this, Yakovlev described unhurriedly, with taste, enjoyment and the skill of a saddler stitching a saddle girth with tough, coloured twine.

Since then, I have run across him a few times. He always struck me by the sweetness of his nature and his devotion to peasant Russia. Characteristically, his dying wish was to be buried, not in Moscow, but on the Volga, in his native town of Volsk.

Very occasionally, a short, nondescript man, in a hat with a drooping brim, would drop in at the cafe. He had, I believe, at one time worked on a paper in Tula or Orel.

Prishvin was once involved in a fantastic incident with this man.

He was moving from Yelets to Moscow at a time when spot-check patrols of sailors from the Baltic fleet were throwing their weight about at the railway junctions.

Prishvin had packed all his things, including books and manuscripts, into several sacks which he kept with him in his compartment. At a small junction near Orel, the sailors took them away, in spite of all his protests and appeals.

Prishvin dashed into the station building in search of the officer commanding the patrol. This turned out to be a sailor with high cheekbones, one pewter ear-ring and an automatic rifle. Holding a wooden spoon and shovelling salted fish, like porridge, into his mouth, he refused to listen to Prishvin.

'That's enough, you long-haired intellectual. One squeak out of you and I arrest you for sabotage. Who knows what a revolutionary tribunal might dig up! Clear out while you're still in one piece.'

The little man in the wide-brimmed hat had followed Prishvin. He stopped at the door of the commander's office and said in a low but distinct voice:

'Give the citizen his luggage back at once.'

'And who might you be?' asked the sailor. 'Who d'you think you are to order me about?'

I am Megalif,' said the stranger in the same low dear voice, fixing the sailor with his small, grey, piercing eyes.

The sailor choked on his salted fish and stood up.

'I beg your pardon,' he said ingratiatingly. 'My lads must have slipped up. Got too excited, I expect. Lobov!' he yelled in a voice of thunder. 'Give the citizen his things! That's an order from the plenipotentiary of Megalif himself! Understand? Take them back to his compartment. And look sharp about it. Swabs! You might look who you're grabbing from.'

When they were outside and Prishvin was thanking him, his nondescript rescuer merely advised him to mark his sacks clearly, in indelible pencil, with the word 'folklore'.

'A Russian is always impressed by a word he doesn't understand,' he explained, 'especially if it's foreign. You do that and no one will bother you. You'll see.'

'I'm sorry to be so ignorant,' said Prishvin, 'but what is this powerful organisation you represent-Megalif? Why does the mere mention of it have this galvanising effect on the security patrol?'

The wispy man smiled guiltily.

'It's not an organisation-it's my surname,' he said. 'Sometimes it works.'

Prishvin roared with laughter.

He followed Megalif's advice and marked his sacks with the mysterious word 'folklore'. No one laid a finger on them after that.

This was the time when many new, strange words, made up of abbreviations, were coined. A few years later, their number assumed the proportions of a catastrophe and threatened to reduce the language to an absurd international jargon.

Every evening, the well-known Moscow bibliophile and journalist, Shchelkunov, walked into the cafe, wiping the steam off his bulging spectacles and stumbling blindly into the tables. He invariably carried heavy batches of dusty books tied together with telephone flex.

Taking off his shabby, old-fashioned overcoat with its velvet collar, he carefully hung it on a peg-and the room filled with the sound of furious miaowing.

Shchelkunov had a habit of picking up stray kittens in the street and carrying them about in his overcoat pockets until late at night when he took them home to be fed by his wife.

He looked like a country doctor. His damp beard was unkempt and his jacket, its pockets stuffed with books and manuscripts, hung on him like a sack.

It was before the days of fountain pens, so he also had on him a bottle of ink and several goose quills. He could never write in pencil-and I think I was the only one who sympathised and never made fun of this oddity. A pencilled text always looked to me unfinished and messy. It seemed to me that if an idea had been properly thought out, it deserved to be properly put down. If I could have my way, I would always have used good thick paper and Indian ink.

Shchelkunov would sit down at a table, carefully sharpen a quill with a razor blade and, puffing and grunting, write up his notes in a hand which looked like mediaeval script.

He wrote about rare books, rediscoveries of famous paintings, exhibitions, bibliographical news and other recondite matters.

He was out hunting for books and news from early morning on, and he turned up in the most unexpected places.

His address book was filled with the addresses of pious widows, retired booksellers and binders, book-hawkers and receivers of stolen goods. These were his suppliers. Most of them lived on the outskirts of the city, in Izmailovo, Cherkizovo, Kotly or beyond Presnya. He went where possible by tram, but very often had to walk.

Shchelkunov had a sixth sense for anything to do with books. He would sniff out a rare edition and track it down with the patience of a retriever. He was not the only bibliophile in Moscow. Knowing his uncanny gift, dealers and collectors kept an eye on him and often tried to intercept his prey. He was always having to confuse his tracks and put his rivals off the scent. As a result he had developed a conspiratorial manner.

He spoke in a muffled whisper, his narrow Tartar eyes glinting suspiciously.

'I believe,' he muttered, having forced me to edge round the table and sit close up to him, 'I believe I'm at last on the track of the library of Ivan the Terrible. I think I know where they've hidden it. In a few days I'll know. God forbid that Lunacharsky should hear of it! Don't breathe a word.'

If anyone brought him a rare book for valuation, he leafed through it, almost seemed to sniff at it, gave a twisted smile and said:

'It's a well-known edition. You can pick it up any day on the stalls by the China Town Wall. You've been had. It's a pity. Still, I'll give you a first edition of Chekhov's Collected Stories in exchange. All right? What d'you mean it's not all right? In a year you'll be sorry. Oh well! I'll make it an Italian edition of Marco Polo. You'll have it tomorrow.'

Without waiting for the misguided owner's consent, he stuffed the rare edition into his fat briefcase, snapped the lock and, glancing suspiciously round him, waited for the chance to slip away. Not once, so far as I remember, did anyone manage to get his property back once it had been engulfed in Shchelkunov's briefcase.

It was useless to make a scene. At the first sign, Shchelkunov silently wriggled into his coat, put down his head and charged out of the cafe like a bull. No power on earth could stop him. Breathing loudly through his nose, he was obstinately silent and deaf to the most blistering insults.

One day, he asked me to go with him to a doss-house near Vindava Station. There, according to his information, lived a self-taught poet from Tula, run to seed but still the owner of some rare books and manuscripts. Shchelkunov hoped to wheedle them out of him.

We took a tram but prudently got out a stop before our destination. Shchelkunov had reason to believe that his eternal enemies, the dealers, were on to him and would try to reach the poet before him.

Suddenly, he grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a hoarding.

'There,' he muttered breathlessly. 'See him? Opposite the doss-house. That old man with the tattered panama and the billy-goat beard. I've brought you along because I need your help.'

'How can I help you?'

'I'll slip into the chemist's shop, there's a good view of the doss-house through the window. Meanwhile you get rid of him. I'll wait at the chemist's. If he sees me going into the house, it's all up. I've been after this wretched poet for two months.'

'But how am I going to get rid of him?'

'Pretend you're a detective. That'll scare him off. I know all about him. I've myself bought books from him which he knew were stolen from the History Museum.'

Before I could come to, Shchelkunov had dived into the chemist's shop. There was nothing for it but to play the detective.

Cap pulled down over my eyes, hands deep in my pockets, I slouched towards the doss-house. A few feet short of the old man, I stopped, leaned back against the railings and looked at the house with studied concentiation. It was an old, four-storeyed building with a crack from top to bottom in the facade. A notice, in alternate letters of blue and red, was pinned to the door:

'Callers! Silence on all floors!'

The old man darted a glance at me. My expression was impassive, perhaps even a little impudent. After a moment, I looked down into my cupped hand, as though surreptitiously comparing his face with a photograph.

He turned sharply and began to shuffle away. But he made an unforgivable mistake: pulling out his cigarette case, he lit a cigarette.

I followed him. By the frightening tension of his spindly back, I could see that the old man was making a supreme effort not to break into a run. Catching up with him, I asked politely:

'Could I have a light, please. Citizen?'

What happened next was incredible and terrifying. The old man screamed, leapt high into the air, and, knees bent, scutded away like a crab to vanish without a trace through an open gateway.

Shchelkunov rubbed his podgy hands.

He had beaten the dealers and managed to buy a letter of Leo Tolstoy's from the poet. But I was disgusted with the whole stupid business and swore never to have anything to do with him again.

I assumed that, like the majority of book collectors, Shchelkunov never had time to read and was only interested in books as collector's items. But I was proved wrong.

One day at the cafe, Shchelkunov gave a lecture on the history of books-it was a poem, a poem of praise.

Books, he said, are the sole repository of human thought, its only vehicle of transmission from century to century, from generation to generation. They preserve it through all time in its primordial freshness, in all its variety and gradation of tone, just as though it were newly born.

Made by human hands, they are yet a category of the eternal. Mortals have created an immortal value. But in the bustle of our daily lives, we are always forgetting this.

Listening to Homer, we watch a miracle. Homer's petrified, fhousand-year-old shepherd's staff blossoms with living poetry.

An idea may reach us across an unthinkable distance and yet our first encounter with it may be as immediate, as stimulating, it may give us the same shock of novelty as it gave our ancestors twenty centuries ago.

The centuries have gone by, only human thought persists, as sharply brilliant as Vega, shining as though its pale blue radiance had absorbed the light of all the spaces of the universe. And just as the 'black pits' of space cannot put out this purest of stars, so none of the destruction and ruin, none of the dark spaces of time have power to extinguish an idea embodied and kept safe in all the hundreds, thousands, millions of books and manuscripts.

Shchelkunov was convinced that there were manuscripts still to be unearthed, especially in the ancient lands of the Bible. A city built by the Ptolemies had been discovered in the mountains of Sinai. It was hidden in the hot canyons of the desert. And if dries could be discovered, why not manuscripts and scrolls as well?

After hearing from Shchelkunov about the hidden cities of Arabia, I conceived a passion for the East. I wanted to study its poetry and Shchelkunov gladly found me books by Saadi, Omar Khayam and Hafiz.

It may seem strange that at a time of revolution, of the breakdown of all familiar ways and notions, anyone should have been interested in anything so remote from his daily revolutionary life as the East or as poetry. But the human mind is more capacious than might be thought.

The rough freshness of the early revolutionary climate was so stimulating that it affected all our thinking. It seemed to me obvious that a man of our time, a child of the revolution, must be endowed not only with the lofty moral qualities which had so far been the attribute of an elite, but also with the spiritual riches of the past and of all the countries of the world. I looked for this enrichment in everything, including Eastern poetry.

I was encouraged in my infatuation with the East by Rozovsky, a lazy, elderly journalist with a wavy chestnut beard. He went about all through the winter in a long and once magnificent but now bedraggled episcopal fur-coat and, in general, despite his Jewish origin, looked very like an Orthodox priest.

He spent all his leisure in his room, on a broken-down ottoman covered with a Turkish rug, reading about the East.

He knew a lot about Islam, especially the various Moslem sects. One of them-the Persian Bahais founded by El Baba - he regarded as 'revolutionary': he prophesied that it would bring about the downfall of Islam and the spiritual regeneration of the Middle East.

Before the revolution, Rozovsky had been to Persia and Turkey to pursue his studies at first hand. He was an independent, solitary man who 'could always get away and who travelled light.

He had spent close on a year in Asia Minor, staying in the ancient Turkish town of Brussa. He had much to tell us about Turkey, and his way of telling it was all his own.

He never started with the point-he began with something marginal, often a trifling detail. But little by little, the details would build up into a fascinating story. Had it been taken down word by word, it could easily have been published as it stood.

But Rozovksy's monstrous laziness kept him from ever writing anything. As soon as lie sat down at his desk, he felt bored to death and, throwing aside his pen, would go off to his newspaper or to the journalists' ca.fe, to look for someone to talk to.

I remember Rozovsky telling us about the old timbered Turkish house he stayed at in Brussa. He began with an elaborate description of the smeLl of timbered Turkish houses in general.

They smelled, he said, of the warm dust of rotting wood and of honey, especially on hot still afternoons when, if you touched the verandah railing, it blistered your hand.

The smell of dust was mixed with a faint smell of dry roses. The reason why the houses smelled of honey was that the surrounding olive groves were overgrown with wild roses and swarming with bees. The bees hived in the attics and this was why the houses smelled so sweetly of honey.

Rozovsky was first s;truck by the cloying smell of honey and roses in Constantinople, when he was shown the casket, studded with rough gems, in wlhich the green banner of the Prophet was kept. The banner was enveloped in layers of old, threadbare silk, and dry rose petals had been scattered over it.

Rozovsky made me -understand some of the obscure oriental imagery in Bunin's poems about the East. Ever since reading them, I had thought of Islam as a religion of dreams, indolence and patience, like the mood induced in Bunin by reading the Koran:

In the sultry hour when all creation,

self-mirrored, becomes a dream, my soul

is carried by the mirage

to the eternal glitter of the gardens

of the Djinns, beyond the edge of the sad world.

There, beyond the mists, flows the stream of streams, promising rest to all the earth with all its tribes and lands. Be ever-patient, pray, believe.

But when I mentioned my idea of the sloth and passivity of Islam to Rozovsky he said it was rubbish. No religion was more aggressive or fanatical. Were the green banner of the Prophet raised in a new Holy War, Islam would swoop upon the world like a black, devastating storm from the desert. I clearly pictured to myself that desert storm-the low, scudding, whirling darkness, the yells of the mounted warriors and the thousand lightning flashes of their naked swords.

I cannot, of course, describe all the patrons of the cafe, though they all deserve to be described. But neither can I leave out that chip of old Moscow, journalist and worst liar in the profession, Savelyev. A giggling, gossiping old man, he was our chief supplier of political mares' nests. The only reason he got away with his hide was that he had a cleft palate and spoke in an indistinguishable mumble. It needed the greatest effort of concentration to guess what he was talking about.

Savelyev kept the pockets of his shapeless jacket stuffed with sticky sweets which he pressed on anyone among us who smoked. Smothered as they were in fluff from his grubby pockets, he positively thrust them down our throats. The moment he appeared, every cigarette in the office was put out.

Savelyev was nicknamed 'de Mortuis'; his only job on the paper was obituaries. Every obituary started with either 'Death has tragically deprived us', or 'Society has suffered a cruel blow' So inevitably boring were they that, to liven things up, a young sub-editor once inserted the words 'At long last' before the usual 'Death has depiived us'.

Next morning there was a storm in the office. The sub-editor was sacked. We all felt terrible about it, though the obituary had only been that of some disagreeable old professor. All day Savelyev sat at his desk, blowing his nose.

'I've seen hundreds of them off into the next world,' he muttered, 'and never once did I sin against their memory-I am not their judge. If they were scoundrels, I refused to write a word about them.'

When he finished crying, he went to see the editor-in-chief and told him, hiccupping, that it was impossible for him to work for a paper which allowed such shameful things to happen. Nothing could persuade him to change his mind. He left, and all at once we realised how much we would miss Savelyev's giggling, mumbling, even the sticky fruit drops covered with grit and fluff.

Soon afterwards, he died. His obituary was indistinguishable from all the other boring and unfeeling newspaper obituaries:

'Death has depleted our ranks. A humble journalist . . .'

Savelyev had no family. All he left in his stuffy little room was an old parrot. The parrot hung head down from its perch, giggled like its master, and screeched nastily: 'Have a lollipopi'

It was adopted by the janitor of the block of flats-thus were all Savelyev's accounts with life squared.

Always the last to burst into the journalists' cafe was a polite, but noisy man with pitiless eyes, Oleg Leonidov, known as the King of Scoops. He deliberately arrived after everyone else, just at the moment when the papers, damp with printers' ink, were rolling off the presses.

By then, he could safely tell his rivals about all the scoops he had made that day. They listened, helpless and green with envy.

It was impossible to keep track of Leonidov. He was too elusive. No one knew when or by what means he managed to penetrate into the innermost recesses of the newly founded Soviet institutions and kindly, gently, with a winning smile, worm their most sensational stories out of them.

Nor was he a man who could be deceived or stalled. He was a past master at this himself. Only once, while the war was still on, did a Kiev journalist rashly plant a story on him. Leonidov nearly lost his job, but so cruel was his revenge that no one ever tried to play a trick or even a joke on him again.

Leonidov merely sent the Kiev journalist a telegram: 'Feed turkeys in Kharkov, Archangel and Minsk exclusively on oatmeal.'

It was wartime. The telegram was stopped by the military censor and pronounced to be in code. The journalist was arrested. There was talk of espionage.

No one knows how long he would have spent in prison if it had not occurred to the examining magistrate to put together the initial letters in the text; they made up the words: 'Insolent fool'. In the end, the journalist got off with nothing worse than a fright, while Leonidov swaggered in Moscow, his reputation established as a dangerous wit.

The journalists' cafe dosed down for lack of funds at the end of summer, 1918. It was sadly missed, not only by the journalists, whatever paper they belonged to, but by many writers and artists for whom the first-floor flat, with its low ceilings and absurd pink wallpaper, had become a comfortable, informal club where they could say what they liked.

I was particularly fond of it at twilight. Outside, beyond the bell tower of the fire station and the stone pedestal from which Skobelev's statue had been removed, the warm glow of sunset faded in the golden dusk. The noises of the city-or rather its conversation (there was very little traffic in those days)-gradually died away; only the Varshavyanka could be heard in the distance.

More and more often at this hour, I remembered with nostalgia that out there, beyond Brest Station, beyond Khodynka, where the sun had slowly set, the birch woods were already covered with dew, and the river, escaped from the city, rustled, winding past the trees. The river had a chilly smell of mud and rotting timber piles. The deserted houses were dark, and the peonies, planted in their gardens long ago, blossomed in solitude. The dew dripped from the roofs to the glass tops of the boarded-up verandahs, and its even tinkling was the only sound in the gathering dusk.

Left for the time being in peace, the parks, woods and fields around the stirred-up city listened drowsily to its excited rumbling.

Unhurriedly, he explained the meaning of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He spoke about the treachery of the Left SRs, about the need for the workers' and peasants' alliance, and about bread. The way to get it was not by holding rowdy meetings and generally raising hell in Moscow, or by waiting for someone to do something, without knowing what, but by getting down to ploughing their fields, and by trusting the Government and the Party.

I could only hear the odd word, but I knew the rest from the altered breathing of the crowd, the hats pushed to the back of the heads, the gaping mouths, and the sudden, unexpected sighs, more like a woman's than a man's.

Now the hand on my shoulder lay heavy but relaxed. Its weight seemed friendly. It was the hand the soldier would rest on the cropped heads of his children, back in his village, as he sighed with relief: 'Well, at last we've got the land. Now all we have to do is plough and harrow and sow, and raise these brats to do the same after us.'

I looked round at him. He was a young recruit with a broad, pale, almost bloodless face bristling with fair stubble. He smiled shyly and said:

'The Chairman himself, eh?'

•What about him?'

'He's the Chairman of the People's Commissars! And he's promised we'll have peace and land! Didn't you hear?'

'Yes, I heard.'

'Well, there you are! My hands are itching for the land. And I've been too long away from my family.'

'Quiet!' hissed our neighbour, a wispy soldier in a forage cap too big for him.

'Quiet, yourself,' the recruit snapped back, hurriedly undoing his faded tunic.

'Wait, wait, I'll show you . . .' he muttered, fumbling inside his collar and finally pulling out the cord of a sweat stained little canvas bag and, from it, a creased snapshot.

He blew on it and handed it to me. I could see nothing by the light of the dim bulb protected by a wire mesh high up under the ceiling.

The recruit lit a match between his cupped hands. It had burned down to his fingers before he blew it out.

I only looked at the snapshot out of politeness. I was sure it was the usual photograph of a peasant family, such as I had often seen next to the ikons on the wall of a peasant house.

A gnarled old woman, the mother, always sat in front. Whatever she was really like-kind and patient or shrill and bossy- she was always photographed with the same tight lips and stony face. For that one instant, when the shutter clicked, she became the embodiment of the tribal spirit-the stem, relentless matriarch-while around her stood or sat her wooden, goggle-eyed children and grandchildren.

You had to look long and hard at the picture before you recognised your old friends: the taciturn, consumptive son-in-law-the village cobbler; his wife-a shrewish, big-bosomed woman in a frilly blouse, with strap boots and bare calves; the shock-headed boy with the vacant stare of a hooligan, and that other, dark and grinning, whom you knew as a blacksmith famous throughout the district; and the timid grandchildren with their tragic eyes-children who had never known kindness or affection. Only perhaps their uncle, the cobbler, secredy pitied them and gave them his old lasts as toys.

But there was none of these family waxworks in the picture I was looking at. It showed an open carriage with a fine black pair; the recruit sat on the box, young and handsome in a sleeveless velvet vest, hands straining at the wide reins, while sitting sideways inside the carriage was a remarkably attractive peasant girl. 'Will you strike another match?' I asked him.

He hurriedly struck one and I noticed that he was looking at the photo as attentively as I was and almost with the same surprise.

... Sitting in the carriage was a girl in a long, flounced, printed dress, and a white kerchief, like a nun's coif, low over her forehead.

Her lips faintly parted, she was smiling. There was so much tenderness in her smile that it went straight to my heart. Her large, probably grey eyes, were thoughtful and gentle.

'I was coachman to the landowner Velyaminov for a couple of years,' the recruit was whispering hurriedly. 'We had our photo taken in his carriage on the quiet. Before our wedding.' He fell silent.

'Well, say something, can't you?' he suddenly burst out in a rough, challenging voice. 'Have you seen many of them like that?'

'No,'I said. 'Never.'

'There you are,' he calmed down. 'She died just before the war. In childbirth. Our daughter is just like her. Come and see us-you'll be welcome. We're near Orel. . .'

The crowd suddenly surged forward and we were separated. Sheepskin hats and caps flew into the air. Frenzied cheering exploded near the platform, echoing through the hall and out into the street. I saw Lenin walking quickly towards the door, surrounded by soldiers. One hand over his ear, not to be deafened by the hurrahs, he was laughing and saying something to the little soldier whose cap kept slipping down over his eyes.

I looked for my recruit but couldn't find him in the milling crowd, and made my way out. Hurrahs were still ringing out in the side-street. Lenin was evidently being cheered as he drove away.

I walked home through the long dark streets. The rain had stopped. A rain-drenched moon showed among the clouds. I thought of Lenin-the huge mass movement he led, and the astonishingly simple man I had just seen walking through the crowd. I thought of the recruit, and of the young peasant girl- half in love with her across the years, as though she were a part of my love for Russia-and the same sudden happiness and excitement gripped me at the thought of all three. Perhaps it was partly the excitement of the times we lived in, the future we hoped for, and the country in which all this was happening.

Just below the roof, the facade of the Hotel Metropole was decorated with a reproduction in mosaic of Vrubel's 'Princesse Lointaine'. The mosaic was badly chipped by bullets.

Inside the hotel were held the sessions of TZIK (Central Executive Committee)-the Parliament of that time.

It met in what had been the restaurant. A grey, waterless, cement fountain rose from the floor. A little to the left of it and in the centre of the hall as seen from the Dais, sat the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The few but noisy Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Internationalists sat on the right.

I often came to the sessions. I liked to arrive early and sit reading in a recess not far from the platform, I enjoyed the dimness and the echoing emptiness of the hall, the few solitary bulbs shining in their crystal bowls in the corners; I even liked the characteristically hotel-room smell of carpets, of which no amount of airing could ever rid the Metropole.

But what I enjoyed most was waiting in the empty, silent hall for the moment when, echoing to merciless debates and brilliant oratory, it would become the arena of stormy historical events.

Among the other journalists who came regularly, were Rozovsky and Shchelkunov. Rozovsky seemed always able to predict exactly the amount of heat which the debate would generate. 'Hold tight. There are going to be fireworks,' he would warn us one day. At other times he would yawn and say: 'There's tea in the canteen, let's go. They're all set for splitting legislative hairs.'

Shchelkunov for some reason was afraid of Sverdlov, Chairman of the Central Committee of TZIK. Sverdlov's calm yet piercing gaze petrified him, and every time Sverdlov turned in our direction, Shchelkunov looked away or ducked behind his neighbour's back.

A short, pale man in a shabby leather jerkin, every word and gesture of Sverdlov's-above all his deep, powerful voice, so out of keeping with his sickly appearance, conveyed an impression of inexorable will. His voice subdued even his most resolute and fearless opponents, such as the Mensheviks, Martov and Dan.

Martov sat nearest to the journalists, so we had every opportunity of studying him. Tall, thin and fierce, a ragged scarf wound round and round his sinewy neck, he was always jumping up, interrupting the speaker, shouting indignantly in his hoarse, staccato voice. The instigator of every storm, he could not be suppressed except by being deprived of the right to speak or suspended for several sessions.

Very rarely, he happened to be in a peaceful mood. Then he would join us, sit down, borrow a book and bury himself in it, apparently oblivious of time, space and whatever was going on around him.

One day, he borrowed a History of Islam from Rozovsky and sat immersed in it, sinking deeper and deeper in his armchair, his long, spindly legs stretched out in front of him.

The subject of the debate was the proposed decree enabling workers' squads to be sent out to the villages to requisition food. A storm of protest had been expected. But neither Martov nor Dan looked like making trouble and, little by little, everyone relaxed. Newspapers rustled, pencils scratched. Sverdlov took his hand away from the bell and smiled as he listened to the speeches. This, perhaps more than anything else, reassured the deputies:

Sverdlov seldom smiled.

Nearly all the scheduled speakers had had their turn when Martov came to life and, in a half-hearted voice, asked for the floor. The audience pricked up its ears. A premonitory mutter ran through the hall.

Martov slouched towards the platform, climbed the steps, swept the hall with vacant eyes and began to speak slowly, reluctantly. The decree concerning the despatch of workers' squads needed, he said, closer legal and stylistic definition. Such and such a clause could be put more simply and briefly-'for the purpose of was unnecessary when 'in order to' would do- while another clause repeated what had already been said in the one before . . .

He spent minutes digging among his notes, couldn't find the one he wanted and shrugged his shoulders in annoyance. The audience convinced itself that there would be no outburst. Newspapers began to rustle again. Rokovsky, who had forecast an explosion, whispered: 'Gone flat like a botde of old smelling-salts. Let's go to the canteen.'

Suddenly everyone sat up. It took me a moment to realise what had happened. Martov's voice was thundering from the platform. It seethed with rage. His dull notes, torn to fragments and flung away, fluttered in the air like snowflakes and settled on the front row chairs.

Choking and shaking his fist, Martov roared:

'Traitors! The reason you've thought this up is to get all the discontented workers out of Moscow and Petrograd! To rid the cities of the finest flower of the proletariat! To stifle the healthy opposition of the working-class!'

There was a moment's silence, then everyone was on his feet shouting: 'Get down!' 'Traitor!' 'Bravo, Martov!' 'How dare he!' 'The truth hurts!'

Sverdlov clanged the bell, calling Martov to order, but Martov shouted more furiously than before. He had lulled his listeners by his assumed indifference-now he was making the most of their surprise.

Sverdlov ordered him to stop, but Martov went on. Sverdlov suspended him for the next three sessions. Martov shrugged his shoulders and continued to pile accusation upon accusation, each more bitter than the last.

Finally, Sverdlov summoned the guard. Only then did Martov leave the platform and, passing through the gale of whistling, stamping, shouting, clapping, slowly and deliberately walked out of the hall.

Some such commotion shook the walls of the Metropole at almost every session. Often it was provoked by Mensheviks and SRs on the flimsiest pretexts, such as a speaker's clumsy word or his manner of speech. Sometimes, instead of shouting indignantly, they burst into sardonic laughter or, at a speaker's first words, stood up in a body and left, talking at the top of their voices among themselves.

They behaved in this way from a mixture of impotence and childish bravado. They turned debates into schoolboy squabbles.

The whole life of the country had been shaken to its thousand-year-old roots. The times were threatening, full of vague forebodings, expectations, ruthless passions and conflicts. It was all the harder to see the point of this fruitless strife.

Their party doctrines seemed to matter more to these men than the fate of the country or the happiness of ordinary people. There was something synthetic and abstract about their theories, devised in smoke-filled board-rooms, far away from Russia and her day-to-day life. Their belief that the future could be tailored to fit their back-room emigre systems was itself a sign of their ignorance of Russia and of life.

There was one meeting of TZIK at which the deepest silence reigned. It was during the week of the murder of Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador.

Ostensibly for the protection of its Embassy, the German government had sent an ultimatum demanding the admission of German military units to Moscow and German control of the whole Denezhny district surrounding the Embassy. It would be hard to imagine a more brazenly cynical demand.

As soon as the ultimatum was received, TZIK was summoned for a special meeting.

How well I remember that sultry summer day declining towards sunset! Moscow was full of the pale gleams of the sun reflected in its windows and of the yellowish shadows of late afternoon.

I came into the hall with the fountain and was struck by how silent it was in spite of being packed. There was not even that faint murmur which comes of many people whispering.

The wall clock ticked away the time. But for me, as I think for everyone else, time had stopped and only this soft, as though dying, sound was left.

Sverdlov came in, rang the bell and in a toneless voice called upon the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, to make an urgent and important communication.

The audience gasped. We knew that Lenin was ill and his doctors had forbidden him to speak in public.

Lenin walked quickly up to the platform. He was pale and thin, a gauze bandage white against his neck. He gripped the sides of the table and slowly swept the room with his eyes. We could hear his fitful breathing.

Slowly, in a low voice, now and then pressing his hand to his throat, he said that the Council of People's Commissars had categorically rejected the ultimatum presented by Germany and decided to mobilise all the armed forces of the Russian Federation.

In utter silence, arms were raised and lowered, voting the assembly's approval.

Still shaken by what we had heard, we came out into Theatre Square. Dusk had fallen over the city. Bristling with bayonets, a Red Army unit came swinging past the Metropole.