Based on the true story of Artem Sergeiv, a Russian immigrant in Australia who would play a vital role in the Russian Revolution, The People’s Train explores the hearts of the men and women who fueled, compromised, and passionately fought for their ideals.
Based on the true story of Artem Sergeiv, a Russian immigrant in Australia who would play a vital role in the Russian Revolution, The People’s Train explores the hearts of the men and women who fueled, compromised, and passionately fought for their ideals.
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Overview
Based on the true story of Artem Sergeiv, a Russian immigrant in Australia who would play a vital role in the Russian Revolution, The People’s Train explores the hearts of the men and women who fueled, compromised, and passionately fought for their ideals.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504038713 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 11/14/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 406 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) is an Australian author of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, best known for his novel Schindler’s List. Inspired by the true story of Oskar Schindler’s courageous rescue of more than one thousand Jews during the Holocaust, the book was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture. Keneally was included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist three times—for his novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates—before winning the award for Schindler’s List in 1982. Keneally is active in Australian politics and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement, a group advocating for the nation to change its governance from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In 1983 he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his achievements.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
When I first came to Brisbane in the year 1911, I wrote often to my sister Zhenya Trofimova, as I had not done during my escape or while Suvarov and I were surviving in Shanghai. That I had not written earlier was not due to lack of affection, but to the fact I was so unsettled. But now I felt that for a time I had reached the end of journeying. I dedicate these pages, which were written in exile, to her.
Trofimov, my brother-in-law, was at that stage a Donetz coal miner, a noble soul and a reader, who – although I did not know it at the time – had recently been overcome by gases and dust clouds in the Verkhneye No. 3 mine. When they first opened those workings, the priest came down the shaft with holy water and incantations. But no blessing would prove equal to the unholy atmosphere of the mine.
I move ahead too fast. Exile is my story, not black lung.
I was amazed at first arrival in the city by the fact that even the poor did not eat horsemeat. Yes, they ate rabbits, of which there are too many. Did that mean it was a working man's paradise already, without a revolution? Well ... the men in the railway camp near Warwick, where I had worked early in my Australian experience, did not think so. The system remained the system. There were men I knew who fed their children a slice of bread and lard four evenings a week. Yet I remembered intelligent Russians who – having never been there – declared that Australia was a working man's paradise. But the reality, even in a new country, was that the old world had been imported there in one lump.
However, this was a good place for a tired old prisoner to rest in the sun and between battles. Brisbane ran up a hill in a bow of river and sat without any fuss under the humid sky. And Russia had come there. I went along to a meeting of the Association of Russian Emigrants on the south side of the river, Stanley Street. There were Russians of all shades there, vague liberals, Mensheviks, disappointed Agrarian Socialists (who once lived with peasants but found them mean and wanting), Revolutionary Socialists, anarchists and Wobblies. And also people who just wanted to take a rest from the tsar. The association was run by decent people, including an engineer, Rybukov. Old Rybukov had begun as a tally-clerk at Cannon Hill meatworks but, though always suffering bad asthma, was a figure of authority now that he had a good job as an engineer in the tramways.
My old friend from Shanghai, big lean A. I. 'Grisha' Suvarov was there, still a beanpole with freckles. Once he had walked two days from a place named Stanthorpe, through the bush to visit me at the railway camp. But now he had a job at the Cannon Hill meatworks and he had boasted he could get me a job too, as he did – lugging carcases of sheep and beef onto ships. The meatworks and the wharves were heavily Russian, apart from the Australians – there must have been two-fifths Russians there. After my sometimes exhausting adventures, I felt I needed to labour hard – the more carcases I hoisted the more my brain revived.
In any case, the trouble with this Association of Russian Emigrants was that, apart from wheezy old Rybukov, they seemed to be on a brain holiday too. They showed no consciousness and were purely social and charitable. They went on nature hikes to Mount Coot-tha and so on. I hated to see an organisation so wasted and wanted to make it into something more useful and active. The usual hikes and chess would be all very creditable if our political minds were engaged as well. But it was not so. As Suvarov said correctly, we needed a Russian league, one that looked after newcomers better, was not too scared or comfortable to greet them, and was a union of Russian workers as well. We needed a newspaper too, a political one, not a social flimsy. Where we could get Cyrillic type from in this city I just didn't know. But at least Rybukov had got hold of the association's constitution and was writing a new one.
After we'd discussed it, we all turned up – all we recent Russian arrivals – to the association's next meeting. In the extra business, after the old committee had decided on a Russian folk concert at the Buranda Hall – to which Australian trade unionists were to be invited and asked to contribute a silver coin to a Russian famine fund – I rose to move that all places on the committee be declared vacant, and that a new committee be elected that night and immediately present a new constitution to the membership, allowing them an hour to read and approve it. So the new Souz Russkikh Emigrantov came into existence, and I was elected president. I felt invigorated. I was just at the stage again – after my long escape and pilgrimage – to become active.
At the next meeting of the souz, I moved that we produce a political and social newspaper every two weeks. The old music teacher, Chernikov, who had been president of the association for ten years, was appalled by the idea of politics.
But we have never had any trouble from the authorities, Chernikov said, his voice trembling. You don't understand, he said. This is not a country for political philosophy.
I could hear Rybukov, in his alpaca suit, wheeze angrily. The climate here is bad for his breathing – it is humid and full of vivid flowering plants. One encounter with a frangipani, with its dolorous, opium-like scent, or a walk under a flowering jacaranda, can threaten Rybukov's health as the cold of Manchuria never did.
Chernikov went on, The police took an interest in us in the past, but when they discovered we were more a social body, they were happy to leave us alone. Look now, I was a narodnik when it was very dangerous to be. I knew the men of the Second First of June – we published a paper together. So it's not as if I haven't done my bit.
Rybukov kept wheezing angrily. I suppose you were hanged, he suggested. With Generalov and Ulyanov.
These were the names of men who had tried to kill Tsar Alexander.
It was important to soothe people who agreed with Chernikov, since we needed their support too. I was willing to edit the news-sheet, to get it printed and published, and put my name to it. I wanted a good relationship with the government too, but that does not mean we could not discuss ideas. We could give the paper a pleasant, unprovocative name. I suggested Ekho Avstralii. The old committee were half-consoled by that name.
As for setting the type, there was a Russian compositor who worked for a Polish printing company in Ernest Street. The owner already printed invitations to the union's (formerly association's) events. I said I would employ the compositor – I hoped on a voluntary basis. I would find a printing press – in the hope of having the sum needed to pay for it voted by the committee – and I would do the printing, distributing and posting of the thing.
And the enthusiasm of Rubinov, the tramways man, and of my friend Suvarov, a fellow member of the Australian Workers Union, clinched it. Both offered to contribute articles, as I knew they were dying to do. The motion was carried with excitement by the young men on the floor, and a frown from old Chernikov and his mates. It was further moved that some articles should be in Russian and some – social events, job advice for émigrés, that sort of thing – in English.
They have a saying at the abattoirs that busy people race around like blue-arsed flies. I was a blue-arsed fly in the next two weeks. It might have been easier to give ourselves a few months to get the first edition out, but that would have driven me mad with a sense that this great sunny place was howling for voices and I was not providing them.
I ran into problems. The Polish printer in Ernest Street was not an internationalist and told me he had no Cyrillic script and had come to Australia to get away from Cossacks and Russians. And the Russian alphabet, it seemed. Then I discovered that to begin a newspaper in Queensland you had to deposit a five-hundred-pound bond with the attorney-general of the state. So much for the freedom of the press in the sunny workers' paradise of Australia! I had received from my membership a budget of one hundred and fifty pounds and did not intend to go back to them for more. Besides, with five hundred pounds, we could do so much for the cane-cutters who came to Brisbane for Christmas, or we could create a Russian library.
I sent away to Melbourne for Cyrillic script and I was allowed to rent an old, stand-up, Boston-style hand-operated printing press for ten shillings a week from the People's Printery (the printery used by the Trades and Labour Hall). Our rented press and its printing frames had been rendered obsolete by newer, automatic machines, but when Suvarov and I and a few others dismantled ours in the lane behind the People's Printery, loaded it onto a dray and took it to the Stefanovs', where I'd rented a room for the press, I felt the old subversive exhilaration. I wanted our first edition of Ekho to be out by the time the Russian workers came in from the bush for the Russian Christmas, which came twelve days after the Western one, on 7 January.
It was pleasant to have a reason to write again. It was pleasant to ask my friends for material. My lanky friend Suvarov was self-taught but a genuine thinker. He had already written a piece on the shortcomings and sentimentalities of agrarian socialism, which saw the peasant commune, despite all its narrow-mindedness, cheating, lust for land and money-lending, as the structure out of which a revolution could be made. Suvarov and I, being peasants, we knew how crazy the whole thing was – as bad as Tolstoy's idea that by wearing a smock and helping bring in the harvest he was chasing more than a sentimental fantasy. Rybukov was in fact translating Suvarov's piece into English for the weekly Brisbane Worker, but now I wished to set it in Russian.
Altogether, our little group of comrades would make some noise in the great Australian torpor.
CHAPTER 2
It did not take much attendance at Australian Workers Union meetings and general events at Trades Hall for my friend Suvarov to sense there was a strike coming, and that it would grow out of the Queensland Tramways depot. Although the strike would look only to improvements in the always hard-up life of workers who would utter grievances about wages, health and compensation for injury, it was to be welcomed just the same. Every strike was an education and got us closer to the day when the great truth would break on the workers, and they'd no longer ask for crumbs but for the whole table. The more strikes, the more of an education in the futility and pain of wringing from bosses the right to wear a badge, the right to better hours and overtime pay. But this one was to be an education for Suvarov and me too, in how things worked in Queensland.
One of the triggers of this strike was a fellow named Joseph Freeman Bender, manager of the Brisbane Tramways, which belonged in turn to the great General Electric company of the United States. Mr Bender grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and had no time for unions, and had told the Brisbane Telegraph so. He was determined to keep union members out of his tramway sheds. Rybukov, who worked on a special project of some kind in Bender's engineering department, said at dinner at Adler's one night that he would come out with the strikers and to hell with Bender. That night his coughing woke us like artillery.
Kelly, our hulking, red-headed friend from the Australian Labour Federation, went to talk to Mr Bender about peaceably unionising the sheds, but the chat became bitter, and Bender told Kelly that in Pittsburgh men like him were regularly and properly shot dead by the forces of good order – that trainloads of troopers and Pinkerton men were brought in to do that job. I wish you a happy birthday too, said Kelly.
A nice man, Mr Bender, said Kelly ultimately; a credit to American civilisation and, of course, a good Freemason, but purely for business reasons.
In Russia the intelligentsia used the lodges to plot an end to the tsarist system, but overthrowing monarchs was not on Bender's slate.
I said to Kelly, He speaks of arms. We should have arms too!
Kelly threw up his hands. You've got to be kidding, Tom!
Kelly is a genial man who grew up in poverty, son of a waterside worker. He likes to drink, and he and his executive, called 'the Reds' by the respectable papers who have never seen a real Red, do half their organisational work and stumble on their best ideas at the Trades Hall Hotel.
I told him just a little – only a little – about Kharkov back in late 1905, the siege of the engineering workshop. The shelling and so on.
That could never happen here, he said. Though ... some years back the squatters talked of Nordenfeldt guns to be used on shearers ... No, that couldn't happen now. And anyhow, you didn't win the fight back there, where you came from. Did you?
Not yet, I told him. But it was a war. The Cossacks had the best of carbines and cannons and their horses to trample people. Are the Queensland police any less in power?
I told him that on the way home each day I passed the barracks in Roma Street where officers harangued the militia boys. One day an officer was caning a boy in front of the others. It looked pretty much like a tsarist situation to me, I said.
Chocos, he said.
I beg your pardon?
Chocolate soldiers, Tom. Chocolate officers like to throw their weight around.
I suggested that at the very least we could post armed workers on the upper floors or roofs of buildings to protect fleeing strikers if the police charged a march.
You're having me on, said Kelly. Look, we just don't do that sort of stuff here.
What about this Eureka Stockade of yours?
It was a different situation. That's sixty years back. Look, we'll do okay here with moral force. But for God's sake don't mention guns. The police will go crazy. Bloody hell!
The second figure of the triangle at one of whose points Mr Bender sat was the premier of the state, Digby Denham, another union-hater who might fall to Thomas Joseph Ryan at the next election, and the third was Police Commissioner Urquhart, who had killed hundreds of natives in the north of the state at a place named Kaldoon and was so proud of it that he left the bones as a public lesson. He would now have liked to make a similar set of marvels with the bones of militants.
At the Trades Hall Hotel, one of Kelly's men would always say, Thought you bloody Russians could drink, as they held their icy schooners and I stood with my seven-ounce glass of lemonade, which I barely sipped because it was too sugared, in the British manner. Didn't think you were a bloody wowser, Tom.
They would tell stories about Mr Joseph Freeman Bender, who was admired for extending the tracks out to Toowong. It wasn't an accident that they ran by his fine house, Endrim, in Woodstock Road. But then he did not deign to travel to his office in ordinary trams with the common people. He possessed his own personal tram, named 'the Palace', which picked him up in the mornings on the way through Auchenflower to town, and then collected sundry cronies, business giants, lawyers, Supreme Court judges and even politicians. Even when empty, the Palace ran back and forth to his home every ten to fifteen minutes during the day, and every twenty minutes during the evening. The Palace was fitted with a bar and a piano and armchairs and sofas.
One of Kelly's so-called Reds said, I'd like to see what a plug of dynamite might do to this palace on wheels. Let's see how that works one bloody morning when Digby Denham's chatting away on the sofa with Chief Justice bloody Cooper.
Justice Cooper was quick to charge trade unionists with contempt, and Kelly himself had served a month in Boggo Road jail for the sake of the dignity of Mr Cooper's court.
It was clear from the amount of time given to the subject of Mr Bender and his friends in the saloon bar of the Trades Hall Hotel that Kelly and the Trades Hall apparatus would dearly love to attack capital by way of the managing director of Brisbane Tramways.
Despite the heat in that end-of-year period, we would stage a series of lectures too. I would lecture on Marxist theory, my friend Grisha Suvarov on the strike he organised in Vyborg in 1907, and Professor Klushin on the war of 1905. An American Russian named Beladov would speak on American anarcho-syndicalism – otherwise known as the Wobblies. So when they came to town, an intellectual feast awaited our brothers from the Ipswich railways sheds, the Darling Downs camps, the dairy farms of the coast north of Brisbane, and the cane fields of Rockhampton.
(Continues…)
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