When the February Revolution broke out in Russia, Vladimir Lenin was trapped like a caged wolf in Switzerland. Unable to get papers to travel through France and England (and then by sea to Petrograd), the only option open to him was transit through Germany. But that posed its own difficulty, as Germany was the enemy Russia was still fighting on the Eastern Front. And, as Lenin knew, accepting the assistance of an enemy in a time of war was tantamount to treason.
Nonetheless, with Lenin, his ends always trumped the means, and so he agreed to travel through Germany to Denmark and Sweden on a sealed train, financed by Germany, which certainly had an interest in transporting the anti-war revolutionary back onto Russian soil. He and his fellow travelers also took German cash.
Despite the title, this book is about far more than Lenin’s rail ride back to Russia. Merridale expands the story to provide invaluable context on this turning point period in Russian history – between the February and October revolutions. It is an entertaining portrait of this pivotal time: “the memory of that first month [after the February Revolution] would float, like some chaotic seasick dream, on cheap tobacco fumes and unrequited longing for a good night’s rest.”
The central tension in Petrograd and the country throughout the eight month interregnum of 1917 was perhaps best summarized by War Minister Alexander Guchkov, just days after the February Revolution: “The Provisional Government does not possess any real power, and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands.”
Perhaps it was inevitable then that the paper tiger, “bourgeois” Provisional Government would be subsumed by the populist, well-armed Soviet. That, when workers and soldiers were hungry and uncertain, “Peace, Land and Bread” would resonate far better than defending democracy and manning the trenches. It is hard to say; history does not offer controlled experiments.
But what we do know is that the Bolsheviks wrested power from popularly elected bodies by force of a coup. And, as Merridale documents, we also know that the Germans not only injected the Lenin “bacillus” (Churchill’s term) back into Russia, but also provided significant funding, aimed, as German State Secretary Richard von Kuhlmann said, at “the promotion of separatist tendencies and support of the Bolsheviks.” In particular, they financed the high costs of printing and distributing Pravda.
States have long intervened in the affairs of their neighbors, and we cannot know if things would have turned out very differently, had Lenin not had German help. But we do know that he was instrumental in aborting Russia’s democratic revolution and setting the country on the rails toward tyranny, civil war, and terror. Which makes the story in this book all the more important.
As the novel opens, an adopted child has run off from his doting parents – a mismatched pair of post-Soviet Jewish expats (she from Ukraine, he from Belarus).
Max, the eight-year-old child, is the offspring of Montana teens, whose biological mother had offered a cryptic warning to Maya, the adoptive-Ukranian-radiologist of a mother (who wants to be a chef): “don’t let my baby do rodeo.” For his part, Alex, the adoptive-father-loyal-son (who wants a more safe, secure life), feels that “adopted children are second-class.”
Maya is emotional and ambitious, Alex is stoic and cautious, and the pair are penned up in New Jersey, doted over by Alex’s parents. For all four of them, Max, the gentile-child-interloper, is the unwitting object through which they must work out their insecurities, hopes and (most of all) fears.
When Max is found, he begins to act with a feral intensity that seems to offer his mystified parents just one option: a road trip to Montana to find the boy’s birth parents, who surely must have an explanation.
But road trips, as we know, often have consequences far beyond the often ill-advised food choices made along the way. Frequently they reveal the true characters of their participants, to say nothing of the fragility of the worlds they inhabit. “How little,” Alex summarizes, “it took to unravel things, compared to what it took to make them cohere.”
Without offering spoilers, suffice it to say that Max is not the only one who wants to explore where the wild things are, and the beginning and end of this road are very different places. As a pivotal character notes, in life “you get what you want, but not what you were planning.”
A beautiful novel about family and self-discovery by a gifted Russian-American author.
It is not long into Mother Tongue before sufficient hints are laid down that a tragedy is coming – one which we wish we could forget, and that here is not directly named, but which will forever loom darkly heavily at the edge of memory.
But the thing about mass tragedies, particularly those involving children, is that we grieve for the affected families but normally have little sense of what they must go through, how they continue living.
In this tight, powerfully affecting novel, Mayhew gives us a glimpse of such sadness and pain, yet swiftly lifts us out of the darkness and into the big heart of Darya, as she seeks a path toward the light, toward life.
Moorless after the tragedy, Darya scours the corners of her life for meaning, finally deciding that she must move to Moscow for a new start. And, unlike the sisters in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (a play that Darya carries with her), she attains her goal.
But of course the capital exists to chew up and spit out provincials like Darya, and, as she wisely notes near the book’s ending, “After you get the thing you wanted most in the world, what then?”
Mayhew is a wonderful storyteller and has done what few foreign authors can do successfully: she has crawled into and inhabited Russian reality. And she has crafted a character in Darya that gleams with hope and grit. A truly moving novel.
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