Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read online

  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 t
he 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 e
njoyment 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.