Russian Treasures

10. THE DEFECTOR

Dr. Sablin was perfectly aware that his wife had taken a lover. The squat, red-faced soldier called Osip who now worked at the regional Military Commissariat and had appointed Lubochka head of its canteen. If in the past, she had channeled her energy into putting the lives of her friends in order, now she did the same for that vats of sour cream and other provisions that had been confiscated by the Cheka and handed over to the Commissariat. Lubochka could keep track of hundreds of names in her head and knew exactly who needed what, and that made her very useful.

Everybody in the hospital knew about Dr. Sablin’s misfortune.

“I simply don’t understand it!” Ilya Nikolaevich, the chief doctor at the hospital, had exclaimed when he next saw Sablin. “You need to put your foot down. I know that morals are in decline and that we live in troubled times—but you know as well as I do how it will end: one day this fine fellow will stick a knife in her ribs. Do you remember that young cabaret girl who was brought in to us recently? Well, it’ll be the same story with your Lubochka.”

“If Lubochka ends up on my operation table, I’ll shove the knife into her ribs myself,” Sablin had said in a husky voice.

Ilya Nikolaevich had gaped at him for a moment. “If I ever hear you talk like that again, you’ll be out of a job.”

Sablin didn’t care. He felt as if his life was pouring out of him, as though he were hemorrhaging to death and there was no way to staunch the flow.

When Sablin had suggested to Lubochka that they divorce, she had merely nodded but hadn’t brought the subject up again since.

The problem was that she had no place to go. Initially, Lubochka had hoped that she and Osip could move into her father’s house, but it had been requisitioned as a “shelter for proletarian widows.” Osip lived in his office in the building of the former seminary and didn’t want to ask his bosses for anything. He believed that a private apartment was too much of a luxury, and a true Bolshevik should share the same hardships the people suffered.

Sablin and Lubochka now slept in different bedrooms and barely exchanged a word beyond icy greetings as they passed each other in the house. Sablin left money on the chest of drawers in his wife’s room, and Lubochka made sure that there was food in the house for dinner.

Sablin had no idea and didn’t care to know where Lubochka spent her days. When he pictured his wife in the arms of another man, he—whom his wife thought “incapable of real emotion”—wanted nothing more than to plunge a scalpel into his heart.

Osip Drugov had been born in the village of Chukino in the Balakhna rural district. His mother’s hands had been so calloused from work that they would catch in his hair when she stroked his head. His father was a drinker and a fighter, but when he was sober, he tried to do his best for his family.

Once, he went to the market and brought Osip a brand new pair of leather boots. “You should only wear them in church,” he said to his son. “You’ll never get another pair. Our kind were born to wear bast shoes.”

However, Osip dreamed of wearing leather boots every day and also a large peaked cap and a brass chain for his waistcoat. He begged his parents to let him go to Sormovo, Nizhny Novgorod’s industrial district. Osip had imagined life in a factory would be some sort of proletarian workers’ paradise—full of strong, jovial young men who had left their villages to make their fortunes in the city. They learned all sorts of things, they went away to distant lands, and they even traveled to work on a tram—a sort of huge metal carriage that moved without horses.

But in reality, Osip found himself in hell, not paradise. The workshops of the Sormovo factory were illuminated by the crimson flames of the constantly burning furnaces and the streams of red-hot metal flowing down the gutters, and it was made even more unbearable by the roar of the machinery. Here, even the healthiest of men became crippled by work in the span of a few years.

Osip didn’t understand why things were as they were. Why was it that some had money to burn, and others had to sweat and slave in scorching factory workshops? The priest told him that it had ever been thus and that it was sinful to ask such questions.

Osip started to drink and often ended up at the police station. There he came into contact with Bolsheviks who gave him his purpose in life back and cured his sick soul. He felt like a wounded soldier who had been rescued from the field of battle. The Bolsheviks were clever; they understood the great science of Marxism that explained who was to blame for the misery of factory workers like Osip and what those workers needed to do to improve their lives.

The Bolshevik revolution was the biggest event in Osip’s life, and his greatest achievement was Lubochka. He found it hard to believe that a doctor’s wife could have fallen in love with him, an uneducated man.

He did his best to mask his confusion by making impassioned political speeches to her.

“We are forging a new way of life,” Osip told Lubochka. “We will build new communal houses. All of us will work in teams. Every one of us shall have the same sort of accommodation, furniture, and clothes. No one will have luxuries, so there will be no envy or greed. Won’t that be wonderful?”

She smiled enigmatically. “I’m afraid we probably won’t live long enough to see that become a reality.”

“We will!” Osip exclaimed but then fell silent, abashed.

Above all, he was afraid that Lubochka would become disappointed—in him, in the revolution, and in the Bolshevik Party. And there were plenty of reasons to be disappointed.

During the first months of the revolution, Osip had been fond of repeating Lenin’s statement that it would be simple for the state to be run by the people themselves. But nothing was going according to plan. Criminals and madmen had joined the Cheka while the workers who had been put in charge of factories had allowed them to idle into talking shops.

An epidemic of food riots engulfed the city. Osip traveled from factory to factory trying to drum up support and issuing empty threats. Nothing he did had any effect.

“Down with Lenin and horse meat!” the crowd started to shout as soon as he mounted the rostrum. “Give us the Tsar and our salted bacon back!”

Osip knew that a counter-revolution could only be controlled with force. On the instruction of his Commissariat, he combed military warehouses, gathered up broken weaponry, and organized repair shops. No one—not even Lubochka—knew how hard this work was for Osip.

The food situation in Russia was deteriorating every day. It seemed that the well-to-do peasants—the kulaks—were setting out to starve the revolutionary government. They hid their grain and refused to give it up to the hungry cities. As soon as the food brigades went into the countryside, the peasants would start rioting.

Osip studied the reports about the rebellions. The scenario was always the same: the men from the food brigades didn’t care who was rich and who was poor. They went from home to home taking any food they could find and stockpiling it at random. The grain and meat spoiled, and anything that actually made it to the city was embezzled by the local officials.

Some of the peasants had brought sawn-off rifles back from the front, and they greeted the food brigades with hails of bullets. To keep them under control, the Bolsheviks periodically bombarded villages with artillery fire.

During the next meeting of the Regional Executive Committee, Osip met the issue head-on. “We need to change the makeup of our food brigades. If we only accept working-class people and not bourgeois types masquerading as workers, then all this abuse of power will stop. The commanders should be trustworthy party members devoted to our communist ideals.”

He received an unexpected reply.

“You are just the sort of person we need, Comrade Drugov. You should head a food brigade and set an example for everyone.”

Osip pored over the map.

Where should we go? he thought. To my home village? But there are no more than a couple of kulak households there, and my men will eat the village’s supplies in a matter of days.

Osip’s finger hovered over the rural district of Bolsheyelnitskaya. A friend of his had once told him that the people there were quite prosperous.

Osip summoned a couple dozen volunteers for his food brigade, workers from the Etna factory.

When they reached their destination, Osip asked a terrified signalman where they might find the local kulaks.

“Go to Utechino,” he said. “They’re a bad lot there—greedy, the lot of them.”

It was dark when they arrived in Utechino. Osip told his men to scatter throughout the village and explain to the locals that they were Red Army soldiers who had become separated from their regiment. He, his assistant Fedunya, and another lad, red-haired Andreika, went up to the last house on the street. Osip struck a match and looked over the sturdy gates. It seemed that the signalman had been telling the truth: Utechino was indeed a prosperous village.

A guard dog on a chain barked behind the gates in a frenzy. Osip shifted from one foot to the other, reluctant to knock at the gate. The villagers were unpredictable and could well be violent. Many a food brigade volunteer had been killed or gone missing in the countryside.

The men drew lots. It fell to Osip to lead the way. He pulled his pistol out of his holster and thumped loudly on the gate with his fist.

“Who’s there?” called a suspicious male voice.

“Red Army soldiers,” Osip said. “Only three of us. Can we spend the night in your house? We have supplies—there’s no need to feed us.”

That was a lie too. They had eaten their ration—a pound of bread and a small kettle of soup—earlier that morning.

The master of the house unbolted the gates. Osip struck another match. Pah, he thought. Just an old man with an oven fork.

“Who might you be then: Bolsheviks or Communists?” the old man asked. Evidently, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box when it came to state ideology.

“Neither,” Osip said with relief. “We’re just common folks.”

The old man welcomed them inside his dark house. While they were settling themselves down for the night on the floor, he asked them about the city, the war, and the prices, but he didn’t offer them any food, although it was clear that they had had nothing to eat.

Parasite! Osip thought indignantly. We’ll deal with you in the morning.

“Your rifles don’t go off by themselves, do they?” asked a young woman lying on the big brick oven. “We had another lot here before you, and one of the soldier’s rifles went off in the middle of the night.”

Their hosts didn’t have the slightest interest in politics. Only their little boy—seven to ten years old judging by his voice—asked if it was true that the Tsar had been sent into exile.

When the family was sound asleep, Fedunya moved closer to Osip.

“I had to run outside earlier, and I heard the sound of a cow—more than one, I think. These people are rich, I tell you.”

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.”