Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

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