Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Osip pushed him away. “Hush! Don’t give us away.”

5

In the morning, the old man went to the fields—so he had a horse—and the woman gave Osip and his men milk and stale bread. Osip gazed around the house. It wasn’t as large as he had thought. However, the backyard was covered with an awning, and there were apple trees in the orchard.

Osip was at a loss as to how to begin the requisition process.

He started a conversation about the hungry workers in the cities. The woman listened to him in silence, spinning wool, her spindle humming quietly on the floor. Her little son, a handsome, fair-haired boy, was mending a fishing net and casting sidelong glances at Fedunya’s rifle. He had already tried to touch it once, but his mother had shooed him away.

“My husband is missing at the front,” the woman said. “I think the Germans have taken him prisoner. Our neighbors’ son was missing too. Then they got a letter from him, and he came back home on Palm Sunday. But he’s no worker now that he’s lost his left arm.”

It was time to get down to business. Osip rose from his seat, and Andreika and Fedunya followed him. But the next moment, they heard women’s screams outside. Apparently, Osip’s men had begun throwing their weight around without waiting for his order.

As they all ran outside, Andreika without a thought shot down a man trying to raise the alarm by banging on a piece of metal rail hanging from a tree.

“Just do what you’ve been instructed to do,” Osip ordered his assistants.

When Fedunya tried to drag a goat out of the yard, the woman who had sheltered them stabbed him in the side with a pitchfork. Osip pulled out his pistol and fired.

“Mama!” shouted the fair-haired boy.

Osip’s men pulled out sacks of grain from the granaries, grabbed chickens, and seized jars of preserved goods from cellars.

The villagers howled in terror, “Have mercy on us, master!”

Osip didn’t know how it all happened. He had come here with a clear aim in mind to commandeer surplus food, uphold the honor of the proletariat, and be stern but fair. But everything had gone completely wrong.

“There’s no law that allows you to take the grain I planted and harvested with my own hands,” yelled a black-bearded man, trying to push his way through to Osip.

Osip’s men held him back by the elbows to stop him clawing at the commissar’s throat. Osip gave him a hard blow in the jaw.

They found several sacks of grain stashed away at the man’s house. Then Osip found a bigger store of grain in a pit in the garden. It was covered with turf, but the grass over it had turned yellow, indicating the hiding place.

A hunched old woman in a black shawl watched as members of the brigade dragged struggling geese along by their necks.

“Stinking thieves!” she cried, pointing at Osip with a gnarled finger.

“Shut up, or I’ll burn your house down, you old witch!” he yelled in reply.

They didn’t leave a single house untouched. It seemed to them that Utechino must be full of hiding places, yet the amount of food they managed to collect was pitiful.

They needed to justify their behavior to themselves. They weren’t shooting and beating the villagers for nothing but for a great cause—to feed the hungry. The only way they could feed the people of Sormovo was by pillaging Utechino and the nearby villages. But they found little or nothing there. The locals had been warned and had escaped to the forest along with their stocks and supplies.

Osip had become a Bolshevik to deliver the working class from slavery, yet now the peasants were calling him a “master” and a “thief.”

It was clear that these people had no idea how serious the situation was. If they refused to feed the starving cities, there would be nobody to stand up for them. The landlords and factory owners would come back, and the Tsar’s regime would be restored with all its injustice. The poor would remain as miserable as they had always been.

Yet now that the revolution had delivered the peasants from their former oppressors, they felt they had no obligations to the new government. Mired in primitive ignorance, they gave no thought to the cities. As soon as they lost the right to trade their grain there, they began to use the grain to distill raw vodka. Osip was under orders from Moscow to execute anyone who made illicit spirits on the spot, but the men of Utechino had pooled their money together to buy their hooch still and consequently were all as guilty as each other. What was Osip supposed to do? Shoot every man in the village?

Seeing red, Osip ordered a meeting.

“If I find out that you’re speculating in grain or making vodka instead of giving your surpluses to the state, I’ll blow up your mill. Got it?”

“What?” the villagers were shocked. “But how will we mill our flour?”

Osip told them to bury their dead without ceremony and to get the carts ready to take the food to the railroad station.

6

All the way to the station the one-eyed cart-driver tried to curry favor with Osip, feigning sympathy.

“The folks around here are a feckless lot,” he sighed. “They get orders from the city and use them to make cigarette papers.”

Osip strode in silence beside the cart. He was deliberately letting Fedunya’s rifle strap rub the bare skin of his neck at his open collar. He hoped it would rub his skin raw. He felt an overwhelming urge to mortify himself.

“Hey, boss, are you from Penza city?” the cart-driver asked.

“No. I’m from Nizhny Novgorod,” Osip said.

“My son told me that over in Penza, there’s a train full of Chacks, former prisoners of war.”

“You mean Czechs, not Chacks,” Osip muttered. “The Austrians mobilized them to fight against Russia, but they said they didn’t want to fight their fellow Slavs. So, they gave themselves up.”

The cart-driver was delighted that this stern Bolshevik had deigned to join him in conversation.

“I saw them on the way back from the front,” the cart-driver said. “Our generals issued them with rifles and rations so that they would fight on our side against the Germans.”

Osip had heard about these Czechs before. The Provisional Government had divided the Czech and Slovak prisoners of war into three divisions and had intended to send them to the Western Front via the Pacific to North America and then to Europe. But due to the usual Russian red tape, the matter had dragged on, and the Czechoslovak trains were stuck at various railroad stations all the way from the Volga River to the Sea of Japan. After the Bolshevik coup, no one knew what to do with this armed legion of forty thousand men. One thing was obvious—they posed a serious threat.

“So, what else did this son of yours happen to let slip?” Osip asked the cart-driver.

“The new government wanted to disarm the Czechs, but instead, they mutinied. They were afraid that under the peace treaty, the Bolsheviks would hand them over to the Germans. Then the Germans would shoot them on the spot as traitors.”

7

When Osip arrived in Nizhny Novgorod, he found that the cart-driver’s story was true, and the Military Commissariat needed to hastily muster troops to suppress the rebellion.

Osip’s homecoming caused quite a stir. The local newspaper published a long article about his heroic deeds, and he was awarded a cigarette case with an engraved inscription on the lid.

However, all he could think about was the woman he had shot, the old hag who had cursed him, and the previously docile peasants who now hated him and all the Bolsheviks with a passion.

8

Three days later, Lubochka found Osip in the cloakroom of the former seminary surrounded by stacks of broken desks. He was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands and a bottle of vodka beside him.

“Come on,” Lubochka said. “Let’s get you back on your feet.”

Osip looked at her with his bloodshot eyes. “I killed a woman.”

“Let’s go. You need to sleep. Don’t blame yourself—it’s war.”

“We weren’t up against soldiers,” Osip persisted. “We shot unarmed people.”

Lubochka fell silent and took a step back.

“Listen to me, Osip Drugov, and listen carefully. No more vodka, do you understand? I’m not going to waste my life on a drunkard. You have to stand up and be a man.”

Osip wiped his face with his sleeve. “Sorry… I’ll pull myself together. I promise.”

She took him downstairs, called for a cab driver, and told him to take them to her father’s house.

“The authorities have listed it as a cultural heritage site,” she said. “The revolutionary widows who were quartered there made such a mess of it that the Culture Commission threw them out and appointed me curator. From now on, it’s going to be our home.”

1

Klim had no choice but to renounce his Argentine citizenship and apply for a Soviet passport.

By now, anyone wanting to leave Russia had to pay bribes running into thousands of rubles. Becoming a Soviet citizen, on the other hand, cost next to nothing and usually went smoothly except for the tiring delays and queues.

The door to the Bureau for the Registration of Foreign Citizens opened once every thirty minutes or so. Former prisoners of war sat on the floor in front of the door with their legs stretched out. Next to them stood dozens of Chinese men dressed in ragged oriental robes belted with hemp cords.

“Where are you from?” Klim asked the men in Shanghainese.

The Chinese gawped at him in disbelief. They had never seen a white person who spoke their language before.

A shock-headed, thick-lipped young man bowed to Klim. “My name is Ho,” he said. “My mother is from the province of Jiangsu, and I know some Shanghainese. My friends don’t speak it though. They are from the northern provinces.”

Somehow, the two of them managed to make themselves understood. Ho told Klim that two years earlier, he and his fellow countrymen had come as laborers to work on the construction of the Murmansk Railroad. To compensate for the shortage of labor during wartime, Russian merchants who had settled in China had recruited teams of Chinese workers from the villages and sent them to construction sites across Russia, mostly the railroads. After the Bolshevik coup, the government had stopped paying the Chinese, and they had made the long journey to Petrograd in the hope that the state would pay for their passage back to China.

The door of the Bureau for the Registration opened again, and a scrawny man stuck his head around it. He was narrow-shouldered and dark and looked like a young gypsy. Shifting from one foot to another, he scrutinized the silent queue for a moment and then spoke, “Oppressed workers of China, follow me please!”

Nobody moved, so the young man went up to one of the Chinese and tried to take his hand. The man recoiled in fear.

“He wants you to go with him,” Klim explained in Shanghainese.

“Do you understand their language?” exclaimed the scrawny young man, staring at Klim. “Listen, I could do with someone like you.”

“But I have my own business here in the Bureau for the Registration,” Klim protested.

The young man paid no attention. “Don’t worry. I can get you to the front of the queue once you’ve helped me. Do you need bread? I can arrange for you to get a loaf. And some tallow and tea.” He thrust out a skinny hand. “I’m Lyosha Pukhov. I’ve been charged with creating a detachment of proletarians from the yellow races.”

2

Pukhov ushered the awed cluster of Chinese men into a huge hall with crystal chandeliers.

“Ask them to take a seat,” he told Klim. “We’ll have a political meeting first, and then we’ll move onto practical arrangements.”

Pukhov took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Dear Chinese comrades!” he began to read. “Those of you who support the liberation of the oppressed and the protection of the power of the workers and peasants come and join us in the ranks of the Red Armyd. Come and join its Chinese battalion.”

Klim had no idea how to say words like “comrade,” “oppressed,” and in particular “battalion” in Shanghainese, so he just provided a basic translation: Pukhov would give the Chinese food and money if they followed his orders. Ho listened to Klim and then interpreted Pukhov’s speech into the northern dialect.

“Our revolution is working miracles,” Pukhov called out. “We all are brothers. The same red blood runs under yours and our skin. The same stout hearts beat in all our chests, at one with those of the world’s proletariat. Please step up one at a time and fill in a form for us with your details.”