The Romanov Bride

Chapter 30 PAVEL

We finally got rid of this Mr. Minister Stolypin, but the truth, we soon realized, was that killing him really didn’t help the Organization or the cause. By then it was too late, and I have forever felt guilty for this, that I didn’t try to kill him with my own bare hands that day he survived the bombing of his dacha. Simply, by the time one of ours shot him at the Kiev Opera, Mr. Bloodsucking Minister had already killed too many of us, some said as many as two or three thousand revolutionaries strung up all across the country. In that way, by the year 1911 we had become an army with not enough soldiers.

But what was strange, what bothered me most, was how quiet things had got. In short, the anger of the people was not like it used to be. The strikes had stopped. There were no more marches. And the people were no longer screaming for food. It turned out that the so-called reforms of this Mr. Minister had begun to work. I heard more and more about peasants even way out there in the back of beyond who owned land for the very first time, and I even heard about a new kind of peasant, the kulak, who not only owned big tracts but could afford to hire people to work for him. In the cities, too, you could see the prosperity, and not just on the street where merchants were driving carriages with four horses, just like real nobles. No, you could see it in the air, too, smell it even, for the factories were belching smoke day and night. Sure, Russia was booming in a way no one had ever seen, which meant, much to our horror, Mr. Minister Stolypin had done it, defeated the oppressed and saved Russia for the capitalist hounds. He and he alone had relieved the pressure, for he had successfully let the steam out of that boiling cauldron which had been so ripe and ready to explode.

Poor Russian slobs, they were happy with so little. They had been thirsty and Stolypin had seen to it that they got a drop, and this single drop had been enough to satisfy them. Who would have guessed that in the end the beaten-down peasant could be so loyal to the Tsar?

I know my comrades had wanted to bypass capitalism altogether, to go straight from the chains of autocracy to the freedoms of socialism and even all the way to Communism in one single leap. That was the goal. Now, however, they licked their wounds by saying perhaps it would be necessary to pass first through the hellish fires of capitalism before true Communism could be built, such was the natural progression.

All I knew was that within a few short years my comrades were either dead, sent off to prison in Siberia, or packing their bags and heading abroad. One of my last comrades, an educated guy who had in his day killed seven or eight government officials and blown up three banks, packed up and took a boat all the way to America.

The last I heard he had changed his name and was teaching mathematics at a university in some northern city called Dakota.