Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read online

  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.)