Free The Mystery of Olga Chekhova by Antony Beevor Page B

the hope of a small bag of flour or a fragment of a loaf of sugar. Within a year or so, when the civil war further disrupted the food supply, well-brought-up young ladies were reduced to prostituting themselves. A couple of years later it was estimated that 42 per cent of Moscow’s prostitutes came from wealthy families ‘ruined by the revolution’, a social category defined in a revealing Soviet euphemism as ‘former people’. Several of these young women became the mistresses of leather-jacketed leaders of the new Bolshevik order. The moral disintegration became almost total.
    Privilege had not been abolished. A new form had appeared, as Aunt Olya described in another letter to her sister-in-law. ‘I was playing patience late into the night, looking up from time to time at the row of brightly lit confiscated mansions on the opposite side of the bulvar and the reflection of brightly lit windows in the liquid mud. It was rather like being in Venice.’ The young commissars had wasted little time in expropriating the grand houses of those they had dispossessed in a show of high moral outrage. ‘I have received violets in a letter from Gurzuf [the little house in the Crimea given to her by Anton Chekhov],’ she went on. ‘Such a touching impression in this time of devastation and chaos and hopelessness and dirt in which we are now living.’
     
    The flight of the upper and middle classes from Moscow encouraged the local Bolshevik ‘building committees’ to reallocate accommodation. Since most of their members came from the former servant class, they relegated property owners to cellars or attics, and took the best rooms for themselves and their friends. Revolution in their view meant literally turning the social order upside down. They were now the new masters.
    Olga and Ada soon found more and more strangers billeted on them, with four or five people to a room. The house was also used as a billet for soldiers and the sisters seem to have narrowly escaped rape at the hands of two sailors. ‘Every day, my sister Ada and I,’ wrote Olga later, ‘were prepared for the worst.’
    The following winter of 191 8-19 was also cruel. There was no fuel for heating inside the houses, so the water pipes froze. The two sisters cleaned their faces with wood ash and cooked frozen potatoes on a small wood-burning stove, known as a burzhuika because it was supposed to be like a fat-bellied bourgeois. People chopped up the last of their furniture to provide fuel for their stoves. Very few books were left and hardly a tree remained standing in the city. Not only was there no water available from taps, but the sewerage system had frozen solid, producing unimaginably squalid conditions. The courtyards behind houses had to be used as open-air lavatories. Not long afterwards, Moscow suffered a cholera epidemic.
    That winter was a time of even greater famine in the cities than the previous one. So many horses had been slaughtered for meat that carts and drozhkys were hauled by women and children. ‘Sugar is seventy-five roubles per pound,’ Aunt Olya wrote to Aunt Masha in the Crimea. ‘Butter is 100 to 120 roubles per pound. They are eating horsemeat everywhere and sell dogmeat as well.’ Hardly anybody could afford such prices.
    Her niece, Olga Chekhova, bundled in old clothes and a headscarf to keep warm and to avoid looking like a bourgeois, set off by train for Kostroma on the Volga to barter valuables in exchange for potatoes and flour. Hundreds of thousands from the city were attempting to do the same. It was known as ‘bagging’, from all the bags they carried to fill with food.
    Olga suffered the usual squalor of travel at that time in cattle wagons, with only a hole in the floor for a lavatory and insect-infested straw to sleep on. Once they reached Kostroma, she had to evade patrols of Red Guards, and when she finally made a deal with a local peasant, he fell through the ice with the sledge bearing all the provisions she