Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

I had been wise to take my precautions. In September 1917, when Kiev was at her golden best, Kerenski made himself premier and declared Russia a republic. Hubris! He had overstepped himself. He was obsessed with his own mission to ‘save Russia’. He underestimated Lenin. Almost at the very moment when we might have won the War, when the first American divisions were arriving to help us, Lenin and his gang became the rulers of Russia, ready to make a separate peace with Germany. This merely confirms my contempt for Comrade Bronstein as a strategist. There was no need for peace at all. We had almost won. It was a typical Bolshevik decision. It pretended to have anticipated and planned for the chaos it itself created. History? Men were deserting from the army faster than they could be sent to the Front. So the Bolsheviks said this was part of their scheme. They were to change their tune very shortly afterwards. Most of the population rose up against them. They had to create a Cheka and a Red Army to terrorise the people they claimed to be saving. On the day of the first important tank battle, at Cambrai, our Ukrainian Rada declared the province a republic. We were suddenly no longer Russian citizens. At least we were not subject to the Bolshevik madness. Although my links with Petrograd were almost completely cut off I felt we had gained breathing space. We still had a free enterprise system enabling me to continue working and saving.

The snows covered Kiev. The river began to freeze. The armistice was as good as made. It was signed officially by the Bolsheviks. This did not mean an immediate end to the fighting. It did not improve the lot of the ordinary people one jot. Such paper agreements rarely do; but soldiers came home and with them Esmé. I think the city was kept warm during that winter by the agitation of large crowds, by bodies pressing together in the squares, by the hot air issuing from every mouth. Esmé declined to stay at an hotel. I let her live with my mother while I went to The Yevropyaskaya, which was full of delegates of one sort or another, It was impossible to find peace there. Eventually I moved to the more expensive Savoy. Even here I was to be plagued by politicians. I gave up after a week or two and returned to Ulyanski’s. It had ceased to be The Hotel Arson and was now The Cube; the last word to describe a ramshackle building of imitation Gothic turrets and imitation Kremlin domes. Still, the mixture of architectural styles did not clash on the outside nearly so much as the mixture of artistic styles within. Acmeists, Futurists, Constructivists, Cubists; poets, musicians, painters and journalists drank quite as much as the politicians. They talked almost as much as the politicians. They certainly fornicated as much, if not more; but at least they left one alone. I had worn out a lifetime’s supply of different cockades during my couple of weeks at Kreshchatik hotels. The Cube stood near the site of the Château des Fleurs, not far from the Municipal Gardens. The Château (a pleasure garden and theatre) had perished before the War during a fire to rival London’s Crystal Palace. Once established at The Cube I began to feel as if I were back in Petrograd in the good old days. I had a small top-floor private suite looking out over snow-covered parks and bare trees to the Dnieper.