Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

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