Ego

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ego

  1

  Even before he reached his thirties, even before the German War, Pavel Vasilyevich Ektov realized that he was a confirmed and perhaps even a natural-born activist in the rural cooperative movement, and so he never took up any of the grandiose, earth-shaking causes of the time. In order to keep true to his beliefs, he had to engage in some bitter debates on how best to remake the life around him and to resist the temptations and withstand the rebukes of the revolutionary democrats: devoting himself to social change by promoting only “small deeds” was something trivial; he was not merely squandering his energy on useless work, he was betraying the whole of humanity for the sake of a few people around him; it was cheap philanthropy that would lead to no great end. Now, they said, we have found the path to the universal salvation of humanity; now we have the actual key to achieving the ideal of happiness for all the people. And what can your petty notions of one person helping another and the simple easing of day-to-day tribulations achieve in comparison with that?

  Many activists like Ektov were shamed and wounded by such reproaches and tried to justify themselves by arguing that their work was “also useful” for the general progress of humanity. But Ektov ever more stubbornly maintained that he needed no justification for helping the peasants meet their day-to-day and urgent needs and for easing their destitution by any practicable means, prosaic though such things might seem. His activities, he insisted, had nothing in common with the abstract sermonizing of village priests and the pieties drilled in by the parish schools.

  Ektov had experience with all types of cooperatives and was wholeheartedly committed to them. He had spent some time in Siberia and was amazed to find butter-making cooperatives that, without any large plants, managed to feed the whole of Europe on their fragrant and delectable butter. Back in Tambov Province he spent some years energetically working in a cooperative savings bank and continued this work during the war. (At the same time, he took part in the City and Rural Zemstvo system, though he felt squeamish about its partisan politics and the personal exemption from army service that it offered.) He ran the cooperative all through the revolutionary year of 1917, and only in January of 1918, on the eve of what now was the clearly inevitable confiscation of all cooperative funds, did he insist that his credit union secretly return all deposits to the depositors.

  For this Ektov would certainly have been put away had they made a close check on him, but the energetic Bolsheviks had their hands full. Once they did bring Ektov in to the Kazan Monastery, where the “Extraordinary Commission,” the Cheka, had set themselves up, but he got by with just one hasty interrogation and managed to evade their questions. They had plenty of bigger fish to fry. One day, on the main square near this monastery, five age groups being called up to the army had assembled. Suddenly a dashing rider with a Cossack forelock galloped up on a gray horse and shouted: “Comrades! What did Lenin promise? That we wouldn’t go to war anymore! So go back to your homes! We’ve just finished one war. Do you want to be shipped off to another? Go on back to your homes!” And the cry of this young fellow in dark gray peasant clothes was like a spark on tinder: everyone scattered this way and that, some fled the town, some went to the forests to hide as deserters, others rushed through the town to raise the revolt there—and the bosses themselves ran off. They came back a day later with Kikvidze’s cavalry.

  Ektov lived through the Civil War years utterly bewildered. After the cruel slaughter of some of his countrymen by other countrymen and under the iron heel of the Bolshevik dictatorship, he could find no sense of purpose in Russian life or in his own. Nothing remotely similar had ever happened in his homeland. Human life in general had lost its normal, reasoned flow: it was no longer the activity of reasonable beings; under the Bolsheviks it had become diminished and disfigured, something that moved in mysterious, roundabout ways or by cunning and ingenuity. The staunch democrat Ektov, however, never believed that a White victory and the return of the Cossack whip could be the solution either. And for two days in August 1919, when Mamontov’s cavalry broke through to Tambov, he felt no sense of inner liberation or satisfaction—even though the Cheka had fled from the Kazan Monastery. (In any case, it was obvious that Mamontov’s horsemen had never planned to stay for long.) Indeed, the whole of the Tambov intelligentsia thought the Bolshevik regime would be short-lived: Give them a few years and they’ll collapse; Russia will come back, now as a democratic state. And even the Bolsheviks’ most extreme actions stemmed not only from malice or ignorance but from the accumulated problems of three years of foreign war and the Civil War that came in its wake.

  Tambov, lying in the middle of a grain-growing province, never experienced real famine in those years, but in the winters it was gripped by critical shortages, shortages that demanded its residents summon up all their bodily strength and resourcefulness in order to survive. The happy and prosperous existence of the Tambov peasantry began to break down under the onslaught of merciless incursions made into it, first by blocking detachments—units stationed here to prevent front-line troops from deserting. They simply confiscated grain and food from peasants taking it to market by road. Then came food requisitioning detachments and more troops sent to hunt down deserters. The coming of one such detachment into an utterly terrified village meant the inevitable execution of a handful of peasants or at least one or two for the edification of all the villagers. (They might also fire off a few random machine gun bursts from the steps of the district administrative office.) These detachments would always indulge in wide-scale robbery. A food requisitioning detachment would be stationed in a village for a time and would first of all demand that it be fed: “Hand over a sheep! Hand over some geese! Eggs, butter, milk, bread!” (And then it was towels, bedsheets, and boots.) The peasants would have been relieved to get off with merely that, but after a day or two of feasting and pillaging, the detachment would force a melancholy train of carts driven by those same villagers to haul away their own grain, meat, butter, honey, and sackcloth—gifts for proletarian power that never shared its salt, soap, or iron with the peasants. (A few village shops would suddenly get a shipment of ladies’ silk stockings, kid gloves, or kerosene lamps without burners and without kerosene.) And so they cleaned out the granaries, one after the other, often leaving nothing for food or seed. The peasants called them “The Black Ones,” whether because they came from the Devil or because there were many non-Russians among them. The provincial Commissar of Food, Goldin, raged across the whole of Tambov Province, neither sparing human lives nor caring for human misery and women’s tears, things that shook even the food requisitioning detachments. The Borisoglebsk County Food Commissar, Alperovich, was not much gentler than he. (The Bolsheviks themselves chose some appropriate titles for their own: there was even the Nachpogub Veydner, and it took even Ektov a long time to comprehend what this word meant: Head of the Provincial Political Section, or Nacbalnik politicheskogo otdela gubernii.)

  At first the peasants couldn’t believe it: What on earth was going on? Soldiers returning from the German front, from reserve regiments, or from prisoner of war camps (where they’d been given a good dose of Bolshevik propaganda) came to their villages with the news that now, at last, the time of peasant rule had come and a revolution had been made for the sake of the peasants: peasants would now be masters over the land. But what happened? The city folk sent out mobs of heathens to abuse the working peasants. They didn’t sow any of their own grain, so they hanker after ours? Yet Lenin said, he who does not plow or sow, neither shall he eat!

  There was another rumor that ran through the villages: They’ve betrayed us! They’ve slipped a false Lenin into the Kremlin!

  For his whole life, Pavel Vasilyevich’s heart had been at one with the peasants and their troubles, with their sense of life and their well-reasoned thrift (boots for going to church, bast shoes for the village, and bare feet for plowing), and now that heart ached over the devastation of the countryside: the Bolsheviks were stripping the villages bare (and every featherbrained inspector or instructor who stopped by made sure to scoop up whatever he could as well). There was a time when one could watch the leisurely return of a fine herd of several hundred cows to the village in the evening. Here and there, children with switches are separating their own cattle; a steady cloud of translucent dust, glowing in the rays of the setting sun, hangs over them; the well sweeps groan, heralding the watering that will come before the abundant milking. Such scenes of the prosperous and peaceful life in the villages were nowhere to be seen now, however. These days there were no brightly lit windows in the peasants’ huts: kerosene lamps stood dark, and within there was only the faint glow from the mutton fat burning in saucers.

  Meanwhile, the Civil War had ended, and the opportunity for the Tambov peasants to join the Whites had passed. Now, however, their patience had reached its limit and they were seething. In the autumn of 1919, the peasants killed the chairman of the provincial executive committee, Chichkanov, while he was making a trip around the province. The authorities responded by sending in a powerful punishment detachment (Hungarians, Latvians, Finns, Chinese—you could find all sorts in the punishment detachments); and again there were many executions.

  Peasant anger continued to mount and accumulate through that winter of pillaging. In the spring, as the snow was melting, Pavel Ektov made a trip in the wagon of a peasant friend to lay in some supplies: he went from Karavaynovo to a spot he knew well, where the Mokraya Panda and the Sukhaya Panda join and then go on to flow into the Vorona. He knew the villages in that region: Grushevka, Gvozdyovka, Treskino, Kurgan, Kalugino. Grushevka, with its lush hayfields that lay right outside the village and filled it each June with the aromas of meadow grass, brome, and clover; Treskino and its peculiar church, a three-story cube, and the grand church in Nikitino, faced in bluish brown tiles and a roof of fish-scale pattern shingles; Kurgan, where there was a burial mound from Tatar times; and Kalugino, laid out in a curved line with its disorderly row of huts scattered along the bare gully of the Sukhaya Panda. And the bottomland along the winding Mokraya Panda, covered in lush grass, with the quails singing their hearts out. This was a glorious spot for village kids, for fishermen, geese and ducks—the children would play in the water, only as deep as their waists, though the cows would climb out of the same river for their daily milking. Beyond Grushevka and Gvozdyovka was a large forest, and near Nikitino, with its many orchards, there were a few wooded gullies.

  That spring the peasants waited and worried, and many didn’t even want to begin seeding: It’s all for naught, they’ll just come and take it. But how can we get by with nothing to eat? They began gathering in gangs in the woods and ravines, talking of how they might defend themselves.

  It was no easy matter, though, for peasants from different villages to agree to join forces, make the decision, and then to find the right moment to cross the line into full-scale war.

  Meanwhile, Goldin’s food detachments kept up their pillaging of the villages, and they continued their lavish feasting when they took up quarters. (There were instances when they ordered a certain number of women be sent to them for the night, and the village would comply—what else could they do? It was better than being shot.) The detachments hunting down deserters would still make examples of those they caught by executing them. (They had called up three age groups at once, the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds. But if you joined the party, you were exempted.)

  In August 1920 there was a spontaneous uprising in Kamenka, in Tambov Region: the peasants massacred the food detachment that had arrived and seized their weapons. About the same time, something similar happened in Treskino: a food detachment had called together a group of local communists outside the district administration office when suddenly a band of peasants armed with pitchforks, spades, and axes came running down the street. The detachment fired at them, but the peasants rushed over them like a wave and cut down two dozen along with some communist wives. (They also killed a small boy from the crowd. He recognized one of the rebels: “Uncle Petya, remember me?” And the man killed him so that the boy would not later give him up.) And in Grushevka they were so enraged by all the pillaging that they knocked down one of the men in the detachment and sawed through his neck as if it were a log.

  It’s a long and difficult task to get the Russian peasant to move, but once the pressure from the people’s ferment bursts forth, it cannot be contained by the limits of reason. A crowd in bast shoes, armed with axes, oven forks, and pitchforks and driven by a righteous quest for justice, set off from Knyazhe-Bogoroditskoe in Tambov Region to “take Tambov.” They were “men with pitchforks” such as had risen up in the time of the Tatars. They marched to the sound of church bells in the villages along the way, their numbers growing as they went. They advanced toward the provincial capital until, at Kuzmina Gat, the helpless crowd was cut down by machine gun fire from the outposts guarding the town. The survivors scattered.

  Like fire along a line of thatched roofs, the rebellion immediately spread across the whole district; the Kirsanov and Borisoglebsk districts were ignited as well. Local communists were massacred everywhere (and the women attacked them with sickles), village soviets were destroyed, state farms and communes were broken up. Those communists and activists who survived fled into Tambov itself.

  The communists from outside—well, you could understand where they came from. But how did we come to have our own homegrown ones? Pavel Vasilych had figured this out from things he picked up in the villages, and there were other facts he had known already. In the first regional and local soviet elections, the peasants still didn’t realize the all-embracing power this new system would have. They imagined it would be a small thing, since now that everybody had got their freedom, what mattered was taking over the landowners’ land, not the elections. And what proper peasant would drop all his farmwork to take up some elected post? So the ones who got these posts were peasants only by birth, not by the work they did. They were the troublemakers, the reckless, the lazy, the beggars, and the ones who had moved from one unskilled job to another in towns and on building sites, managing to pick up a few revolutionary slogans along the way. And then there were all those who had deserted from the army in 1917, the ones who were quick to take up pillaging. Such were the people who became village communists and activists, the ones who held the power.

  All of Pavel Ektov’s education and the humanitarian tradition he came from made him absolutely opposed to bloodshed. But now, particularly after this righteous march of the people at Kuzmina Gat, the relationship between those who were powerless but right and those who relentlessly wielded brute force was as obvious as the naked truth itself: the peasants could do nothing other than take up arms. (And there were still many rifles, cartridges, sabers, and grenades available, brought home from the German War or left behind after Mamontov’s breakthrough. Some had been hidden, some buried.)

As a Russian populist and lover of the people, Ektov saw no alternative but to join them and do as they were doing. Still: The great Civil War had ended, and what chances were there now for a peasant uprising? There was no doubt, though, that the peasants would have few competent leaders who could guide their movement. Granted, he was just a worker for the co-op and no soldier, but he was competent and clever. He could be very useful to them in some capacity.

  But then there was his wife, Polina, an inseparable part of his heart. And Marina, the little five-year-old with cornflower eyes. How could he abandon them? What trials and dangers would they face? He might well be leaving them to starve. Yes, indeed, family was the greatest worry—the source of our happiness and our weakness.

  Polina was deeply alarmed, but she forced herself to be strong and blessed him on his decision: You’re right. . . Yes, right. . . Go.

  He left her and their daughter in their city apartment with a small supply of food and firewood for the coming winter; and she, a teacher, was earning something.

  Pavel Vasilych left Tambov and set off to find what he supposed was the headquarters of the uprising.

  And he found it, a small, mobile group around Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov. He was a Kirsanov townsman by origin and, in 1905, had been an “expropriator” (meaning he robbed banks) for the SR party. (You couldn’t close your eyes to that: So now you’re mixed up with criminals?) He’d come back from Siberian exile in 1917, and before the Bolshevik coup was the head of the Kirsanov militia that later collected a large stock of weapons during the disarming of the Czech Legions passing through Kirsanov. In the summer of 1919, with a small body of troops, he was raiding and destroying local communist cells here and there at a time when the SRs themselves could not resolve to stand up to the Bolsheviks for fear of aiding the Whites. Now Antonov was not acting for the SRs, he was acting on his own. The provincial Cheka searched for him all through the winter of 1919—20, but they couldn’t catch him. Antonov had no education to speak of and hadn’t even finished the district school, but he was bold, decisive, and sharp.

  In the headquarters that Antonov was forming—which could hardly be called a headquarters—there wasn’t a single officer with staff experience. There was a local fellow with a good deal of natural talent, Pyotr Mikhailovich Tokmakov, from the peasant village of Inokovka-1. He had been an NCO in the tsarist army, and on the German front had risen to the rank of warrant officer and then to second lieutenant. He was a first-class soldier, but had no more than three years of parish school. There was also a wild, combative warrant officer, another former NCO, bursting with energy: this was Terenty Chernega, who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and served with them for two years, even in their special forces; but after he had seen the things that were happening he went back to the side of the peasants. Another NCO and artillery man, Arseny Blagodaryov, came from the same village of Kamenka where it had all begun; he was one of the people who had begun the revolt. Later, each of these three took command of a partisan regiment. Tokmakov would eventually command a brigade of four regiments, but not one of them was even close to being able to do staff work. Antonov’s adjutant wasn’t a soldier at all but a teacher named Starykh who came from Kalugino on the Sukhaya Panda.

  When Ektov reported to Antonov, it turned out that he was just the man to be his “chief of staff,” if only because he was a competent and smart fellow who could also read a topographical map. Antonov asked his name. Strangely enough, Ektov didn’t reveal himself. He began saying “Ek …” and then caught himself: he mustn’t give his name! What came from his throat was only, “a . . . ga . . .”

  Antonov heard it as “Egov.”

  Why not? It wasn’t bad as a pseudonym. He answered clearly: “Ego. Let’s keep it at that.”

  Well, so be it. Antonov didn’t ask any more questions.

  And soon everyone knew him as “Ego,” and also as Pavel, only it was Pavel Timofeevich. Before long they accepted his authority as “chief of staff” (he himself was amazed), but he was barely able to establish some communications and coordinate their joint actions, while Antonov himself and his partisan leaders more often ran their detachments by their own sudden impulses, asking no one’s approval and responding to the sudden changes in circumstances.

  Tambov Region was not well suited for a partisan war. Like much of the province, it had little forest; it was a plain with some low hills, though there were a lot of deep gullies and ravines (yarugi, as called locally) that gave cover for cavalry. There was a network of dirt roads rutted by cart tracks, but the cavalry could move at speed across the plain.

  And what a cavalry it was! Stirrups made of rope, saddles most often just pillows (feathers would drift out from beneath the rider as he trotted along). Some had military uniforms, some kept their peasant dress (they wore red ribbons across their hats: they were for revolution and were Reds, too, and called each other “comrade” when they didn’t use their village nicknames). On the other hand, the rebels always had fresh horses since they could easily change them in the villages (though not without a lot of grumbling from the peasants: Our lads may be ours, but that horse is mine . . .) They collected Berdanka rifles here and there, along with shotguns, sawn-off rifles (they were easier to hide and almost as accurate at close range), and some Mannlicher and Gras rifles brought back from the war. At the beginning they had no more than five cartridges per rifle, but then they captured some ammunition from the food detachments and special forces and even captured a few entire arms depots. Once Antonov carried out a daring operation: he seized a whole trainload of military supplies from the Reds and hastily carried them off in wagons to the villages well back from the railway, which couldn’t be secured for long.

  Because there were so many rebels, however, they were still very short of weapons, even sabers, and when an alarm was given, they still came running from the villages with pitchforks. (The rebels would signal the arrival of a Bolshevik detachment by stopping the arms of the village windmill or by sending a messenger galloping out from the far end of the village to warn the neighbors.)

  The joy of successful raids, and of successful withdrawals as well, amazed Ektov and greatly raised his spirits: How could they manage to do these things? They had begun with nothing, after all!

  And so they lived—first for weeks, then for months: by day they would work like peasants; by night, or when the alarm was given, they would mount their horses and go off on a raid. Rebel and Soviet detachments pursued one another through the deep gullies. When the rebels were routed, they would disperse and hide their weapons—not in their own yards but in some gully.

  ... And after a battle a dead man lies, his head in the water of a brook. For hours his horse stands sadly next to its dead master ... A wagtail bird flutters over the grasses . . .

  A favorite refuge of the Antonov cavalry was the lowland along the Vorona River. There was a broad circle of clearings among the oaks, elms, aspens, and willows that seemed to have been carefully arranged there. The exhausted riders would drop from their horses to lie in the clearings grown over with meadow grass and horse sorrel; the horses would nip at the grass as they slowly wandered nearby. Only a few abandoned tracks led to the place, and beyond it lay dense and impassable woodland—low thickets of entangled bushes and dry grass in which lurked five-foot-long vipers with darkly hatchmarked backs. (One of the most inaccessible spots was in fact called Snake Bog.)

  In September the rebellion broke out in Pakhotny Ugol as well, a place well north of Tambov, toward Morshansk. The year before, the communists had cobbled together a “model commune” there, but now the commune people had come to their senses and become a separate but powerful ally of the rebels.

  The numbers of rebels were multiplying and, emboldened, at the beginning of October they launched an attack from the south on Kamenka to free it from the Red garrison quartered there. The Reds replied with artillery, and in their counterattack they sent in infantry along with their cavalry. The rebels dismounted and—for the first and only time—dug trenches, something that had become second nature in the German War. But this was their mistake: they could not sustain a two-day, pitched battle. They abandoned their trenches and withdrew to Tugolukovo, where there was a plentiful supply of horses. Many peasants from Tugolukovo mounted their horses and, leading another horse behind them, went off with the partisans.

  The area of rebellion was dangerously restricted within a triangle of the rail lines between Tambov, Balashov, and Rtishchevo, and troops were garrisoned at the major stations. These rail lines had to be sabotaged at every opportunity. Antonov’s forces did dash in several times to cut the lines and then use their horses to bend the rails into a bow.

  The mass of the railway workers, particularly the telephone and telegraph operators, sympathized with the rebels, and some of them would hold up the transmission of instructions to the Reds, or they would lose or garble them and even pass them on to the partisans, so that the Bolsheviks could not fully rely on their lines of communication. The railway workers in Rtishchevo District even elected a delegation to go to the rebels and show their support, but the Chekists managed to arrest the delegates and declared a state of emergency for the whole area.

  The rebel forces continued to grow, and new partisan regiments of 1500 or 2000 men were formed one after another. There were now more than ten regiments, and they had their own banners and Maxim and Lewis machine guns. Former sergeants and warrant officers, veterans of the German War, assumed command; there were also some simple peasants who came straight from the plow. And they were good commanders.

  In November, Antonov’s main force advanced on Tambov itself, creating great confusion among the authorities there (they felled ancient oak trees to block the roads into the city and sited machine guns in church bell towers). Ektov couldn’t believe it: Was it possible that he could dash into Tambov to rescue his family? (He would take them to Serdobsk, where Polina had a cousin. They would be safe with her.)

  But no, twenty versts from Tambov, at Podoskley-Rozhdestvensky, the rebels had to withdraw after a major battle.

  A new Vendée? But there was one obvious difference: our Orthodox clergy, living in some other world, did not join forces with the rebels; they did nothing to inspire them, as the militant Catholic clergy of France had done, but remained cautiously in their parishes and in their houses, though they surely knew that when the Reds came they would be slaughtered just the same. (As happened in Kamenka, where the priest Mikhail Molchanov was shot just like that, while sitting on the steps of his own home.)

  A Vendée? A forced one, at times. A Red Army soldier would come home to his village on leave, and his fellow villagers would destroy all his documents—and now what could he do? All that was left were the partisans. And there was no way he could desert from a partisan detachment, even though he might want to: his own folk wouldn’t let him live in the village with his family. Or people found out that some old woman had let slip to the Reds something about the movements of the rebels; and in the square in front of the church, she was given a public whipping across her bare backside.

  The peaceful peasants of Tambov were now catching it from all sides: if you did something wrong, it might be the Reds who punished you later or it might be the rebels. They were even afraid to talk to their neighbors in case they might say the wrong thing. Once one of the “men with pitchforks” joined a band of others in raiding some nearby spot and was captured; though he was released, in the eyes of the authorities he remained guilty for the rest of his life.

  A knock comes at the door: “Who’s there?” “Friends.” Just in case, so as not to fall into a trap: “The whole lot of you are no better than devils. You may be friends, but you make our life a misery.”

  The Reds questioned one woman about the whereabouts of her son. “I don’t have a son!” she told them. And then when they captured him, he said he was the son of so-and-so. So they shot him: he must have been lying.

  Pavel Vasilych often put himself in the position of the peasants. The family: man’s eternal joy, and his eternal weak spot! Who could have a heart so ironclad that it would not agonize over the fate of his dear ones who might be torn to pieces at any moment by someone’s devilish claws?

  Things like this also happened: A requisitioning detachment had been badly mauled in one village, but two of its members, a Chinese and a Finn, managed to hide themselves behind some old peasant’s house. The Chinese was found and executed, but the old peasant felt sorry for the Finn and, risking his own neck, hid him in a haystack. He let him go at night, and the Finn took to his heels, back to his garrison in Chokino. (Ready for the next expedition . . . ?)

  A Vendée? The SRs of Tambov Province couldn’t make up their minds: they couldn’t support a rebellion against the revolution, and they had missed the chance to head it; no one would follow them now. And yet, now that the Civil War was over, how could they not take advantage of the people’s resistance to the communists? They joined with the Unions of Working Peasantry that were now springing up and wrote some leaflets claiming the whole rebellion for the SR Party.

  The rebels, in any case, had their own slogans: “Down with the Soviets!” (that certainly wasn’t from the SRs—they supported the Soviets); “We will not pay the assessments!”; “Long live the deserters from the Red Army!”

  Ektov had a typewriter that had been taken from a central executive committee office, so he himself wrote and painstakingly printed some proclamations: “To those conscripted into the Red Army! We are not bandits! We are the same peasants as you. But we have been forced to stop our peaceful work and rise up against our brothers. Are your families not in the same situation as ours? Everything has been crushed by the Soviets; at every step the communists are running wild, taking away the last of the grain and executing innocent people. They smash our heads like clay pots and break our bones—is this how they promise to build a new world? Throw off the communist yoke and go home with your rifle in your hands! Long live the Constituent Assembly! Long live the Unions of the Working Peasantry!”

  The partisans themselves, those who were able, would write proclamations on scraps of paper they came across: “Pay no more heed to these brazen communists, parasites on the backs of the working people!”; “We have come to cry out to you that the power of the wrongdoers and bandits must be ended!” And for those who had not yet made up their minds: “Peasants! They steal your bread and your livestock! Will you not awaken?”

  The communists replied with a mass of printed leaflets reflecting their usual narrow-minded class viewpoint or satirical cartoons: Antonov wearing a bloodstained cap, carrying a bloody knife, and on his chest, looking like medals, were drawings of Wrangel and Kerensky. “We, Antonov the First, Incendiary and Destroyer of Tambov, Autocrat of all Thieves and Bandits ...”

  This had been put together by Eidman, head of propaganda in the province, someone no one here in Tambov had heard of before. And the ominous series of directives being issued were more often signed by the provincial committee secretaries, Pinson, Meshcheryakov, Rayvid, and Meyer; the chairmen of the provincial executive committee, Zaguzov or Shlikhter; the chairman of the provincial Cheka, Traskovich; and the head of the political section, Galuzo. These names were also completely unknown in Tambov and also belonged to people sent here from elsewhere. There were others among the staff of the provincial administration who did not sign ominous orders but made all the decisions jointly: Smolensky, Zarin, Nemtsov, Lopato, and even some women—Kollegaeva, Shestakova... Ektov had never heard of them either, but there was one among them who truly was local, the vicious and unrestrained Bolshevik Vasilyev, a man known to everyone from his crude behavior in the city in 1917, when he had stamped his feet and whistled down speakers at formal meetings in the Naryshkin Reading Room. Ektov had never heard of any of the others, and yet this whole pack must have come from the same intelligentsia opposition that he had. And if they had met somewhere just a few years earlier, before the revolution, would he not have shaken their hands...?

  But propaganda is only propaganda, and the Bolsheviks had to call in reinforcements. Antonov’s intelligence determined that a Cheka special forces regiment had arrived from Moscow along with another squadron from the Tula Cheka, 250 more cavalry from Kazan, and about a hundred from Saratov. From Kozlov had come a “communist detachment,” and two more of them had been mobilized in Tambov. Even the “Sverdlov Mechanized Detachment” appeared among them, as well as a separate railway battalion. (The risky business of intelligence was carried out by a faithful peasant woman who went about with a milk pot, and by a reliable peasant who hauled firewood into the city. It was through such a woman that Pavel once sent an oral message to Polina and got a reply that she and their daughter were unharmed and still undiscovered by the Cheka; they had little to live on, but their hopes were high . . .)

  No longer fearing for the safety of Tambov city, the Red leaders began stationing their expanded forces through the three rebellious districts, in particular the Tambov District, aiming at systematically occupying it. (In a large village of some 10,000 inhabitants, they took eighty hostages and announced to the residents that if they did not turn in all their firearms by noon the next day, all eighty would be shot. The threat seemed far too extreme to be true, and the village did not believe it. No one turned in any weapons, and at noon the next day, before the villagers, all eighty were shot.)

Bolshevik airplanes (some painted in boastful red) began making flights to observe and sometimes even drop bombs, terrifying the villagers.

  In the autumn, to avoid the growing pressure from these new forces, Antonov began temporarily withdrawing his main forces to neighboring Saratov or Penza Province. (The Saratov peasants, in revenge for the horses that were requisitioned or exchanged, began capturing the Tambov rebels and dealing out their own crude reprisals. Such is the fate of peasant uprisings . . .)

  Ego took part in these raids along with the rest of the staff. He had grown accustomed to a life on horseback, always on the move and with no roof over his head, often cold and often terrified as he fled before pursuers. Did be become a soldier? No, that he could not do. He found it too difficult and had never been trained for it. It was a matter of simply enduring. He shared the pain of the peasants, and that filled the empty places in his soul: he was where he should be. (And had he not come here, he would be sitting and trembling in some little hideaway in Tambov, despising himself.)

  Still the rebellious land refused to be pacified! Though it became much more difficult in late autumn and early winter to find cover and bivouacs for the night, the ranks of the partisans continued to swell. The requisitions made by the Red detachments, their brazen robberies in which they divided up the peasants’ belongings right before the eyes of their owners, their vicious beatings of old men, and the villages like Afanasyevka and Babino that they burned to the ground, driving the old and the young out into the snow—all this gave new impetus to the partisan resistance. (But the partisans also had to feed themselves. Formerly, they had taken food from the families of the militant Reds, then from the families of Red Army soldiers; but eventually, this was not enough, and they had to take from the peasants. Some gave willingly, others became bitterly resentful.)

  By midwinter, two partisan armies had been formed, each having ten regiments. The first army was commanded by Tokmakov, the second by Antonov. Now there were some genuine soldiers among the staff and they set things in order, beginning with uniforms: private soldiers were to wear a red patch above the elbow on their left sleeve; commanders also wore a ribbon and a triangular patch, top down or up; brigade commanders wore a diamond patch. Commanders were elected at regimental meetings (they also chose political commissars and even members of the regimental tribunal). Clear orders were issued: there was a complete ban on entering villages to confiscate clothes and goods and search for food; partisans were instructed to exchange horses with the peasants as rarely as possible and only with permission of their medical assistant, and they were to take better care of their horses. The partisans were granted leave just as in the regular army, but they also had their own militia in the villages to check each partisan’s pass.

  That winter the hatred of each side for the other grew even more bitter. Red detachments would execute their proven and their suspected enemies, shooting them without trial and without consequences. Within these punitive detachments were people who had become so accustomed to executions that they would raise their weapons unthinkingly, as if to wave off a fly, and their pistols seemed to fire themselves. The partisans had to ration their ammunition and more often hacked their prisoners to pieces or smashed their heads with some heavy object. Commissars were hanged.

  On both sides the fury for revenge grew to the point that they would put out a captive’s eyes before killing him.

  Children from devastated villages would go out with sleds to get horse-meat from the dead animals. Many wolves, grown very bold, appeared that winter. Dogs also ate the corpses scattered across the steppe and in the gullies and dug up bodies from shallow graves.

  A tribunal from the provincial Cheka made a circuit through the occupied villages. Its members, Ramoshat, Rakuts, and Sharov, issued a stream of death sentences and began sending those suspected but never proved to be rebels to “concentration camps.” In January the Antonov staff learned of a secret letter: the central camp administration of the Russian republic had given the Tambov Provincial Cheka an additional 5000 places in camps for those it had arrested. The guards in the nearby camps amused themselves with the women and girls sent there or simply raped them; rumors spread across the land.

  The villages grew barren. Even in the once prosperous Kamenka there remained only about two dozen horses. People fastened wooden soles to worn-out boots; peasant women went about without stockings in the freezing cold. More voices could be heard complaining: “When we lived under the tsar you could go to the market and buy whatever you wanted: boots, calico, pretzels.” One thing that could be found was paper for rolling cigarettes—from the books of former landowners and from the “Red Corners” in village reading rooms.

  Once Ektov was speaking to an aged peasant from Semyonovsky Hamlet about the general breakdown of everything around them. Life, it seemed, was reaching the point where it could get no worse, and what would be left of it after all this?

  “Never mind,” said the silver-haired old fellow, “the grass lives on beneath the scythe.”

  A few Tambov peasants, though, did manage to get to the Kremlin. In mid-February there were announcements that grain assessments in Tambov Province were being ended. No one believed it. Then the newspapers reported that Lenin had suddenly “received a delegation of Tambov peasants.” (Could that be true? Later, Antonov’s staff found out that a few peasants working with the Tambov Cheka had indeed been hauled off, terrified, to the Moscow Kremlin.)

  The Bolsheviks, obviously, were rushing to put down the rebellion by spring so that a new crop could be planted (and confiscated again in the autumn).

  The fury of the battles did not subside, however. In March two regiments of the Antonov army made a lightning attack on the factory town of Rasskazovo, very close to Tambov. They routed the garrison and took a whole Soviet battalion prisoner. Half of them willingly joined the partisans.

  Since autumn, Pavel Vasilych had lost hope of escaping the many perils that lay ahead and surviving the winter. But now, here he was: it was March and he was still alive. Now his military expertise was recognized by his appointment as assistant to the regimental commander of the special forces regiment attached to the staff of the first army.

  He also read the two orders issued in March by the brutal head of the Bolshevik punishment detachment: “Every inhabitant of every village is bound by the same surety: if anyone in a village provides assistance in any form to the bandits, all inhabitants of the village will be regarded as responsible,” while “bandits are to be hunted down and exterminated like beasts of prey.” And the harshest measure of all: “The entire healthy male population between seventeen and fifty years of age is to be arrested and confined in concentration camps!” And one addressed directly to the rebels: “Keep in mind that your muster rolls are, for the most part, in the hands of the Cheka. If you report to us voluntarily with your weapons, you will be pardoned.”

  But the rebels, hotly pursued through the frozen, snowed-in gullies and copses, paid no heed to attempts at persuasion or brutal threats. Spring was beckoning, and then they’ll never take us!

  It was then, in March, that Ektov, having survived the winter, caught a severe chill; he fell ill and had to remain behind his regiment, bedridden in the warmth of a village.

  On his second night a neighbor woman betrayed him to the Cheka.

  He was arrested.

  But he was not shot on the spot, though they knew his role in Tokmakov’s staff.

  Instead they took him to Tambov.

  The city looked like a military camp. Many houses had been boarded up, and the sidewalks were covered with dirty snow. (He could not see his house, which lay on a side street.)

  They took him through Tambov and put him in a railway car with barred windows, bound for Moscow.

  Though he was not going to a meeting with Lenin.

  2

  He was in the Cheka’s Lubyanka Prison, alone in a cell in a semi-basement, with one tiny window at the level of the prison yard.

  From the very first, he saw his greatest challenge would be to ensure that he not reveal his identity. It was the same challenge faced by every second Tambov peasant, and with the same options: If you tell them who you are, you’re finished. And if you don’t tell them, you’re still finished, though by some other means.

  He invented a biography for himself: he would still be a worker in the cooperative, but from the Trans-Baikal area, one of the places he knew well. Given the conditions these days, it would be difficult for them to check.

  The interrogations took place three stories above, always in the same office with two large, high windows, filled with the old, expensive furniture of the Rossiya Insurance Company once housed here and with a shoddy paper portrait of Lenin set in an expensive frame on the wall above the interrogator’s desk. But there were three interrogators working in shifts.

  One, Maragaev, looked Caucasian and worked only at night and so gave Ektov no chance to sleep. His interrogation technique had little subtlety: he shouted and raged, striking Ektov’s face and body and leaving blue bruises.

  Another, Oboyansky, had a gentle manner that betrayed his blue blood. He did not interrogate as much as try to instill a feeling of hopelessness in the prisoner, even seeming to sympathize with him on one point: Those people were going to win in any case, and in fact they already had won everywhere. Tambov Province was the last. No one could stand up to them, either in Russia or anywhere else in the world; they were a force that humanity had not yet reckoned with, and the most sensible thing to do was to give in before they passed sentence. Then, perhaps, they might lighten his punishment.

  The third, the fat-cheeked, black-haired Libin, cheerful and lively, never laid a finger on the prisoner and never shouted. He always spoke with cheerful and exultant confidence, and it was obvious that this was quite genuine. He tried to awaken the prisoner’s democratic conscience: How could he betray the glorious ideals of the intelligentsia? How could a democrat turn his back on the inexorable march of History, marred as it might be by cruelty and violence?

  Ektov could say a good deal more about cruelty and violence than his interrogator imagined. He could, but he did not dare. And his interrogator had picked the wrong approach: in this area Ektov felt on solid ground. He was a democrat, a populist whose heart had been moved by the tribulations of the peasantry, and there was not a trace of the White Guard in anything he had done. (In fact, this was quite true.)

  Libin, as if taking up this same cause of liberating the peasants, met him head on: “In days to come, school textbooks will tell of more than one episode of the heroism of the Red forces and communists in putting down this kulak rebellion. The battle against the kulaks will have a place of honor in Soviet history.”

  It was hopeless to argue with him. And what was the point? The main thing was whether they would find out just who he was. It was good they had taken him to Moscow. In Tambov they could bring in witnesses to identify him. Yet there was one dark premonition that kept nagging at him: he had been photographed head on and in profile. They could make copies of the photo and sent them to Tambov, Kirsanov, and Borisoglebsk. On the other hand, after six months of campaigning, Ektov’s appearance had greatly altered: he now looked severe and tough; his skin had darkened from sun and wind; he scarcely recognized the man he had seen in the mirror of some peasant hut, though the mirrors there were rather shoddy.

  So long as they did not find out who he was, his family was safe. As for himself, well, they could go ahead and shoot him: over these months of merciless war, Ektov had learned to live with the idea of death, and he had been a mere hair’s breadth away from it many times.

  Indeed, they could simply have shot him when he was captured. He did not understand why they found it necessary to identify him. Why take him to Moscow? Why waste so much time trying to change his convictions?

  The weeks passed—in hunger, with only a bit of watery soup and a scrap of bread. His body itched; there was no change of underwear, and he tried to wash as best he could on the rare trips to the bath.

  He was moved from his solitary cell to another, first with just one cellmate, then with several. Now, with neighbors, there was no avoiding the questions: Who are you? How did you get mixed up in the rebellion? And what did you do? It was impossible to answer these questions, but equally impossible not to answer. Both his cellmates were shady characters, and his heart told him to take care. He concocted some stories for them.

  April passed, and they still hadn’t identified him! But they did take more pictures.

  The pincers were closing.

  Then he was back in a single cell in the basement.

  May also passed.

  The days dragged on, but the nights were even more painful: at night, flat on his back, a man weakens along with his vital force of resistance. A little more of this, it seemed, and he would be unable to summon the strength to go on.

  Oboyansky would nod with a pained smile: “No one can resist. A powerful new breed of people whose like we’ve never seen has now arrived. Remember that.”

  Libin told vivid tales of the Reds’ military victories: the number of troops run to ground in Tambov Province and—it was no secret here, in this place—even the numbers of their regiments. Cadets from several military academies had been stationed in the villages across the province to reinforce the occupation.

  Yes, Antonov’s forces were finished! They were finished, and now there were only a few remnants to be mopped up. Hordes of them are coming to the Red headquarters and turning in their weapons. They’re also helping to locate and disarm the rest. In fact, a whole regiment of bandits came over to the Reds.

  “Which one?” Ektov couldn’t help but ask.

  Libin had a ready and precise answer: “The Fourteenth Arkhangel Regiment from the Fifth Tokay Brigade.”

  Ektov knew them well. But believing Libin—that was another matter ...

  Libin even brought in some Tambov newspapers to back up his statement. Judging by them, the Bolsheviks really had been victorious.

  But then, how could it have ended otherwise? Even when he joined the rebellion he realized how hopeless it was.

  Then there was Order No. 130: the families of the rebels are to be arrested (and Libin emphasized the word families when he read it aloud), their property confiscated, and they are to be moved to concentration camps and then exiled to some distant region.

  Then Order No. 171, also on punishing families.

  There was no surprise here; Ektov knew it would happen.

  Libin assured him that these orders were having a huge effect. So as not to fall victim to these measures, peasants were coming in and revealing who was in hiding and where.

  This might well be so. The Bolsheviks were applying a huge lever by taking families hostage.

  Who could hold out against this? Who does not love his children more than his own self?

  “And now,” Libin assured him, “there’s a great purge beginning in the villages. We’re picking people up one by one, and no one can hide from us.”

  More than a few peasants knew Pavel Vasilych Ektov from peacetime and might betray him.

  Ektov, however, was in his third month of prison and was still concocting stories and telling lies. But now—had they seen through them?

  Meanwhile, Libin carried on with his happy smile, even seeming well disposed toward this hopeless democrat and populist—though he had seated him under a much more powerful light. His moist, rapacious mouth formed a smile: “So, Pavel Vasylich, we didn’t finish our conversation last time ...”

  And then everything came crashing down.

  It was all over.

  He was already slipping down the steep slope, clinging to a few shreds of hope with his fingernails: Surely this didn’t mean they had his family as well? Polina and his little girl might have taken precautions, found a different place to live, moved away somewhere . . . ?

  But Libin, his black eyes gleaming with the enjoyment of watching his distraught prisoner making pointless denials, now tightened the noose around his neck: “Polina Mikhailovna doesn’t approve of your stubbornness. Now that she knows the facts, she’s amazed that you still haven’t broken ranks with the bandits.”

  Ektov sat on the stool for a few minutes, utterly stunned. His thoughts danced away in every direction, then slowed their whirl and became frozen.

  Libin continued to look at him. But he was silent and did not urge him on.

  That was something Polina would never have thought and never have said.

  But could she have reached the end of her rope?

  Yet, this might also be his chance: Let me meet with her! Let me talk to her myself!

  Libin gave a hesitant “No”: “You have to earn a meeting, first of all by your repentance.”

  Two or three days passed in this way, Ektov insisting on a meeting, Libin insisting first on complete repentance.

  But Ektov could not trample into the mud all the things he had seen with his own eyes and absolutely knew to be true. And he was incapable of pretending.

  Libin, however, was also unwilling to give an inch. (And his stubbornness proved that what he had said about Polina was untrue! That was not her at all!)

  Then Libin abruptly ended the duel, and in a way that took Ektov’s breath away: To hell with you, don’t repent! To hell with you, you can keep your brainless populism! But if you don’t cooperate with us, I’ll hand over your Polina to the Hungarians in the special forces and make you watch. And we’ll put your little brat in an orphanage. And after you’ve seen the show, you’ll get a bullet in the back of the neck. That’s less than you deserve, and we should have done it sooner.

  Icy fingers seemed to grip his chest. These people certainly were capable of doing all that Libin had said. Such things had happened more than once. Their power rested on such things, in fact.

  Polina . . . !

  They gave Ektov a day and then another day to think.

  And how could one think inside this torture chamber where you’re surrounded by threats and have no way out? His thoughts simply passed through his head, disconnected, as if he were only half awake.

  How could he do it—sacrifice his wife and Marinka and simply step over them? Was there anyone else on earth, anything else on earth, to which he felt more responsible? Everything that made his life meaningful lay in these two people.

  And was he to be the one to give them up? What kind of person could do such a thing . . . ? And afterwards they would shoot Polina. And they wouldn’t spare Marinka either. He knew these people.

  What if he could save some peasants by doing that? But the rebels had already lost, that was clear. They’ve lost in any case.

  As for his cooperation, what did that mean these days? How could it tip the scales of an uprising that has already been put down? The only question was the sacrifice of his family. Nothing else could be changed.

  How he hated that swarthy face of Libin with its insolent, triumphant expression and those eyes with their predatory gleam! Giving up would bring a kind of relief. It was probably the same feeling a woman has when she ceases to struggle. All right, you’re stronger than I am. I’ll throw myself on your mercy. It’s a way to make dying a little easier.

  What use could he now be to the Reds, though?

  He gave in. But there was a condition: he wanted a meeting with Polina.

  Libin confidently accepted his surrender. As for the meeting with his wife, that will only happen when you carry out our assignment. Then, of course—we’ll simply let you go back to your family.

  What else could he do?

  You would have to have an incredibly stony heart to trample in the mud all that was dearest to you. And now, for what cause?

  Oboyansky’s melodious incantations also left their trace on him. He was right, they were a powerful generation! The new Huns, but armed with a socialist ideology. A strange mixture . . .

  And perhaps it was also true that we, the old school intelligentsia, had failed to understand something. The paths to the future don’t easily reveal themselves to the human eye.

  ~ * ~

  Ektov’s assignment was this: He was to be a guide for the cavalry brigade of the famous Grigory Kotovsky, the Civil War hero. (The brigade had just moved through the rebellious Pakhotny Ugol and slaughtered 500 rebels.) Ektov was not to invent any new identity for himself, he was to go as the famous Ego from Antonov’s staff. (Antonov’s forces had been utterly routed and his army had ceased to exist. He had fled and was still in hiding. But Antonov was not their concern.)

  And what was his job to be?

  That would be explained on the way.

  (Still, somehow, he might be able to wriggle out of it.)

  It was a short trip from Tambov to Kobylinka, a place that bordered on one of the areas the partisans favored.

  They went on horseback. (And the Chekists, in civilian clothes, rode beside him, never leaving him for a minute. They had half a squadron of Red Army troops with them.)

  Once again he was in the open air, under the open sky. It was early June, and the lindens were in blossom. Just fill your lungs with that air!

  So many of our poets and writers had told us the same thing: How beautiful the world is, and how people debase and poison it with their endless antagonisms. Will this strife never end? Will people ever be able to create a life freed from such afflictions, a splendid, sensible life of abundance? That was the dream of generations.

  A few versts before Kobylinka, they met Kotovsky himself. He was a huge, powerful man with a shaven head and the savage face of a convict. Kotovsky’s squadron was in peasant garb, not Red Army uniforms, though they all wore riding boots and sheepskin hats or astrakhans. A few of them had the red Cossack stripe on their trousers. Were they supposed to be Cossacks?

  Indeed, they were. They had been told to call each other “neighbor,” in Cossack fashion, and not “comrade.”

  The senior Chekist accompanying Ektov now explained his task: This night they were to meet with the representative of a band of some 500 rebels. Ego was to confirm that we were Cossacks from the Kuban and Don insurgent army and had broken through Voronezh Province to link up with Antonov.

  As night fell, Ego was given an unloaded Nagan pistol to strap on his hip and a puny nag to ride. (The four Chekists in civilian clothes stuck close to him, playing the role of the new staff he had collected after the defeat of Antonov’s forces. Their Nagans were fully loaded, and it was clear they would shoot him at his first wrong move.)

  Kotovsky and his squadron had arranged the meeting in a forester’s cabin on the edge of a clearing. Misha Matyukhin, brother of Ivan Matyukhin, the commander of a rebel detachment that was still active, was coming from the other direction with a few dozen horsemen. (Several brothers would often join the Tambov rebels. Aleksandr Antonov’s younger brother Mitka, a village poet, always went into battle by his side. The two of them had also escaped together.)

  The riders stopped at the clearing. The main negotiators entered the forester’s hut, where two candles burned on the table. Their faces could just be made out.

  Misha Matyukhin had never seen Ego’s face, but his brother Ivan had. “He’ll vouch for me,” said Ektov, who could barely recognize his own voice and believe that he was serving such brazen falsehood to the peasants. But once he had taken his first steps across this shaky little bridge, there was no stopping. Looking at Kotovsky, he said: “Here’s the head of their detachment, Lieutenant Colonel Frolov.” (So as not to overdo it, Kotovsky had not donned a Cossack colonel’s insignia, though he could easily have done so.)

  Matyukhin insisted that Ego come with him to a place a few versts away to meet his elder brother, who could confirm his identity. This was no problem for the Chekists, and they never hesitated; they had good cavalry horses and a stock of ammunition for their Nagans.

  They rode first along a cutting through the forest, then across a field, under a starry sky. In the darkness and moving at a brisk trot, no one wondered why Ego’s horse was so wretched in comparison with those of his aides.

  As he jolted along in his saddle, Pavel Vasilyevich kept thinking, desperately thinking, that soon he would tell Matyukhin the truth; he would be killed, but these four Chekists would be slaughtered along with him! And Matyukhin’s 500 troops would be saved. They were an elite force!

  But still—and how many times he had gone through this, forming logical arguments in his head, while his heart overflowed with pain. Not pain for himself, of course—there was none of that. But they would take it out on Polina, as they had threatened, and perhaps on his little daughter as well. For a long time now he had known what the Chekists were capable of, and after those months in the Lubyanka and those days traveling here, he knew it even better. So how could he save his family? How could he do it himself, with only his own hands?

  Antonov’s military campaign had failed, after all. If you took a broader view and put it in a larger context, the whole province might be better off if peace at last did come. The merciless requisitions of food had now been stopped and would be replaced by a fair tax on food. Perhaps it would be better, then, to end the fighting as soon as possible. The wounds would heal gradually. It would simply take time. And life, an entirely new way of life, would somehow come to rights, would it not?

  We’ve been through enough pain, every one of us.

  They came to a new hut, much better lit up.

  Ivan Matyukhin, a sturdy, powerful man with a thick moustache the color of ripe wheat, a tireless warrior, strode up to meet them, recognized Ego, and swung his arm forward to clasp his hand.

  Ektov felt the ache of a Judas in his hand! Who could understand his pain unless he himself had experienced it? But he had to carry on, confidently and without hesitation, looking like a commander.

  The honest and straightforward Matyukhin, with plump, rosy cheeks and a thick, fair forelock slanting across his forehead, had a powerful grip—a warrior from head to toe.

  He trusted Ektov, and he was overjoyed: Our ranks have filled out! A new chance to thrash the Bolsheviks! He grinned like a man who knew his strength.

  They talked of their plans. Tomorrow evening both detachments would assemble in one of the large villages, and the next day they would begin an offensive.

  Now was the moment! Like a lightning flash, Ektov thought: No! I tell you, no! Shoot me, torture my family, but I can’t betray these honest men!

  But at the same moment, his throat seized as if it had been scalded.

  As he swallowed, someone interrupted to put in his word. And then someone else. (The Chekists were playing their roles well, and each one of them had his own story about why no one had seen him in the uprising before. All of them had the bearing of soldiers or sailors.)

  And now this moment of decisiveness had flown past and dissolved into impotence.

  At this, the two groups parted.

  ~ * ~

  Then he spent an endless and agonizing day with Kotovsky’s detachment.

  He despised himself. His treachery had plunged him into a nightmare of darkness. One could not go on living in such darkness, one could no longer be a man. (The Chekists were watching every movement of his brows and every blink of his eyes.) Once I’ve done what they’ve asked, most likely they’ll just shoot me. (And then they’ll leave Polina alone!)

  Toward evening the whole cavalry brigade mounted their horses. Many of them were dressed as Cossacks.

  They moved off in formation. Ego was there with his retinue of Chekists. Kotovsky’s feral gaze could be seen from under his shaggy Kuban papakha.

  Was it Kotovsky or Katovsky (from the word kat, executioner)? He’d been in prison for murder, and not just one murder. He was a horrifying man, and just looking at him was enough to turn your stomach to jelly.

  At twilight the detachments entered the village where they had agreed to meet from opposite directions; the troops dispersed among the huts. (Kotovsky’s men, though, left their horses saddled, ready for the slaughter that would begin in another hour or two. Matyukhin’s men settled in and made themselves at home.)

  They met in a large house of a prosperous family that stood in the middle of the village, near the church and where the lines of houses met. The imposing woman of the house, not yet old, and her daughters and daughters-in-law had set up a row of tables to seat twenty. There was mutton, roast chickens, new cucumbers, and potatoes. Bottles of home-brewed vodka were set along the tables, together with some cut-glass tumblers. There were kerosene lamps on the tables and on the walls.

  The Matyukhin men were mostly on one side of the table, Kotovsky’s on the other. Ego, presiding over the dinner, had been seated at the end where he could be seen by both sides.

  What vital strength emanated from these rebel commanders! So many of them had gone through the German War as NCOs or private soldiers, but now they were serving as commanders.

  They were Tambov types, with high cheekbones, rough and hardened faces, and thick lips; a few had bulbous noses, others long and drooping ones. Some had forelocks as fair as flax, others as black as coal; and there was one man who looked like a gypsy, with a face so reddish black that it set off the whiteness of his teeth.

  Kotovsky’s men, to pass themselves off as Kuban peasants, were to speak in the dialect of that province and some of them in Ukrainian. There was not a single man from the Don region among them, but they counted on the Tambov people not recognizing the Don dialect.

  One of the Matyukhin men had a prominent chin and the suspicious face of a backwoodsman. He had bags under his eyes and a drooping moustache; clearly, he was exhausted. But another was a dashing and slender fellow with a twisted moustache and eyes darting about, alert but cheery. He sat at the corner where there was more room, turned sideways with one leg crossed over the other. He seemed not to be expecting any surprises, but was ready for them and for anything else.

  Ego could not refrain from nudging him with his foot, twice. But the fellow didn’t seem to understand.

  Glasses of vodka were poured, raising the mood and the fellowship of the meeting. Mutton and ham were sliced with long knives; smoke from the bracing homegrown tobacco rose here and there and spread across the ceiling. The hostess floated about the room while the younger women fussed, served, and cleared away the dishes.

  What if some miracle suddenly took place and saved everything? What if the Matyukhin men realized what was going on and saved themselves?

  The “Cossack” second lieutenant, “Borisov” (a commissar and Chekist), rose and began reading a fabricated “Resolution of the All-Russian Conference of Partisan Detachments” (that now must be convened). Soviets, but without communists! Soviets of the working peasants and Cossacks! Hands off the peasant harvest!

  One of the Matyukhin men, a younger fellow with a round, flowing beard, a fluffy moustache, and a face well tested by life, looked at the speaker with calm, intelligent eyes. His neighbor, who might have been cast from iron, cocked his head and squinted a bit.

  What fine fellows they are! And how unbearable this is!

  But now it’s too late to save anything, even if you shout out loud.

  Matyukhin, showing his support of the second lieutenant, pounded the table with his fist: “We’ll destroy their bloody communes!”

  From the far end of the table, a young fellow with a broad forehead and flaxen hair that looked as if it had been freshly curled, a village dandy, shouted out: “Hang the bastards!”

  Kotovsky returned to the business at hand: Where was Antonov? Without him we’re not likely to make it.

  “We still haven’t found him,” Matyukhin said. “I’ve heard he got shell shock in the last fight and is getting treatment. But we can raise all the Tambov people again on our own.”

  His next plan: attack the concentration camp near Rasskazovo where they put the families of the rebels and are killing them off. That’s our first job.

  Kotovsky agreed.

  Now—was that a signal from Kotovsky . . . ?

  All the Kotovsky men, in unison, whipped out their weapons—some of them huge Mausers, others Nagans—and began firing across the table at their “allies.”

  A thunderous roar filled the hut; there was smoke, fumes, and the desperate cries of the women. The Matyukhin men fell, one after the other, onto the table with their chests in the food, onto their neighbors, backwards off the bench.

  The lamp fell on the table, and a burning stream of kerosene ran along the oilcloth.

  The dashing, sharp-eyed fellow in the corner managed to fire back twice and drop two Kotovsky men. Then a saber cut off that head with the twisted moustache, and it tumbled onto the floor; a crimson stream of blood spurted from the neck to the floor, forming a pool around his body.

  Ektov did not move; he was frozen. If only they would finish him off quickly—a Nagan, a saber, it made no difference.

  Kotovsky’s men ran out of the hut to seize the confused Matyukhin guards who still did not realize what was happening.

  Kotovsky’s horsemen were already rushing in from the other side of the village, shooting and cutting down the Matyukhin men in the yards, in the huts, and in beds, not letting them mount their horses.

  The few who were still able galloped toward the dark forest.