A woman in a gray checked kerchief spoke up, with a lot of emotion: “Us folks in the village have come to the end of our rope. There’s no living for us here, there’s nothing to eat.”
The small woman in the green kerchief said: “There’s no proper road here, we know that . . .”
The village soviet fellow had to justify himself before the regional man and quickly said: “I always keep an eye on things, you know. Nikolai, I say, are you bringing in the bread? I am, he says.”
The woman in blue spoke up now, sharply: “So you keep an eye on us, do you? When did you ever pay us a visit? You, the chairman of the village soviet, haven’t been here even a single time . . . None of you people have been here since Adam was a boy.”
Others now added their complaints:
“Things have gone to rack and ruin . . .”
“Everybody’s forgotten we’re still here . . .”
The clean-shaven old fellow in the second row stood silently, not seeming to understand what was happening. He yawned and then went on standing with his mouth open.
Ovsyannikov had bowed his balding head. His peasant heart ached.
“Wait a minute, now,” the village soviet man hastened to say. “Why didn’t you tell me before that he hasn’t been bringing in the bread?”
“We don’t quite know how to go about it,” said the woman in green.
“We’re afraid,” said Iskiteya.
At this point the regional administrator joined in, in a powerful voice: “I’m telling you, you have to speak up. You’re afraid to tell Nikolai, you’re afraid to tell Mikhail Mikhailovich, you’re afraid to tell me. What are you afraid of?”
The woman in blue said: “Well, I’m not afraid, and I’d come in to see you. But I can’t get around at all anymore. And my old man’s in even worse shape.”
The woman in the red and brown kerchief leaned her left elbow on her stick, bent over, pressed her fist to her shoulder, closed her eyes, and said: “I don’t want nothing to do with any of you . . .”
“But haven’t I come to see you now? I keep asking Mikhail Mikhailovich, are they bringing bread for you? Every day, he says. Why didn’t you speak up?”
The woman in the gray check made a chopping motion with her hand: “Well, we’re speaking up now!”
“We just don’t know how to get back on our feet again.”
One of the women we met, the one in the dark gray scarf, had black hands on which the soil had forever left its mark; her fingernails were rimmed with black. She stood there, her hands clasped over the top of her stick. She had dozens and dozens of wrinkles on her face—you’d think there wouldn’t be enough room for them all. She’d calmed down now and fixed her eyes on something in the distance and stood there, frozen.
The regional administrator made his decision: “Let’s agree as follows. Mikhail Mikhailovich will come to you every day for the next week . . .”
“Every day? What for? Every other day, maybe . . .”
“Even if we got some bread every third day . . .”
“I’m not saying he’s to bring you bread each day. But for a week, up to Victory Day, he’ll come here every day and check that you have all you need.”
(But would he manage to write it all down?)
“. . . We chose him here, voted for him in the village administration, so he should carry out his responsibilities as head of the local government. At the very least, he has to see that you’ve got bread to eat. We’re not saying that he should start building houses for you—that’s something we can’t do, given our present circumstances.”
“Houses . . . Just imagine . . .”
“You’ve got water. And you’ll have bread. He’ll see that you have the essentials. That’s his job.”
A soft moan came from the women:
“A bit of bread and we could get by and we wouldn’t squawk . . .”
“We’d have some hope left . . .”
“Rye bread, now, that’s solid stuff . . .”
The village soviet man recovered as well: “Let’s agree as follows. Not only will you have bread, but every week I’ll send you a mobile sales van.”
The women were amazed: “A sales van each week as well! Now that’s something!”
The woman in the gray check didn’t miss her opportunity: “There’s another thing we’ve been needing. For a long time. While the front was here, some of us went off to do work there . . .”
“From August ’43, when the front moved on . . .” said Iskiteya.
The woman in the gray check was somewhat younger than the others; her eyelids weren’t swollen, and her gray eyes were wide open and lively. The words poured out of her readily, though only a single tooth flashed in her lower jaw: “I worked for almost three years in a war plant, for example. It was in the town of Murom, Vladimir Oblast. So you know how we worked and what for. Never a holiday, never a day off, never a bit of leave. And what did they tell us then? Your labor will be our victory; it will help us end the war quickly and bring some peace to the country. So why have you forgotten those who toiled away, tell me that? Now even our pensions are less than what other women get . . .”
The regional administrator brushed back his black forelock: “Yes, this year for the first time we have been remembering those who worked on the home front. Almost every day now I award a jubilee medal to our mothers. They’re moved to tears . . . Every day they’re getting these jubilee medals and weeping. Finally they’ve remembered us, they say, because we were carrying the whole front on our shoulders. We pulled the plows ourselves, we sowed the grain, we sent our last socks to the soldiers. So if you really were a war worker, in accordance with the Decree you have to either find the documents to show that you worked or find at least two witnesses . . .”
“There’s two of us right here. We’ll be witnesses for each other.”
“You’ll need a third person.”
“There’s one in Podmaslovo.”
“If you worked more than six months on the home front prior to 1945 and can document it or get statements from witnesses, we’ll certainly give you a medal. And there are certain stipulated benefits that come with the medal.”
The village soviet man, though, seemed to have a better knowledge of the regulations. He turned to caution the regional man.
“Unfortunately, I have to interrupt. That’s true only when an error is being rectified. In other cases the Decree does not take witnesses’ statements into account. If there’s no notation in your employment record book the jubilee medal can’t be awarded. We’ve raised this problem a number of times . . .”
The regional man frowned, slightly embarrassed: “In my opinion, this is a case that calls for rectification.”
The gray-scarfed woman pressed him again: “How can that be? The Military Committee mobilized us and treated us like serving women. When a few of our girls left their jobs, they were put on trial by a military tribunal. Don’t you realize how they treated us?”
Iskiteya could only nod her agreement: “Yes, that’s how it was.”
The village soviet man said: “Then we’ll have to make a request through the Military Committee.”
“That’s right,” said the regional man. “We’ll compile a list and send in an official request. They can find the documents from 1943. A lot of cases like this come up.”
I could see Ovsyannikov making a terrible face. His head was sinking lower and lower as he listened to all this, and he was holding it with one hand and looking as if he’d lost hope.
The small woman in green spoke up, as if she would not be interrupted: “I’ve already got a medal for the war years. Not the actual medal, you know, but I’ve got all the papers, right and proper. And I do get some benefits—like I only pay half for my electricity. But Lord knows what else I should be getting. I went to the office once but they just told me our collective farm is poor and we’ve got nothing to give you. I didn’t even get my seed grain ’cause the chairman never put in for any for the pension
ers.”
“As for benefits, they’re all built into the regional budget. And through the regional budget we can allocate funds to those who should only pay fifty percent. Of course, I can’t be here every day to sort these things out . . .”
“We understand,” the women said, all smiles.
Then Iskiteya ventured to say a few words. She spoke in that same soft and undemanding old woman’s voice she had used with me under the birch tree: “My husband fought in the war. He was wounded, and he got some benefits. But after he died they were all taken away.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ovsyannikov roused himself and spoke out indignantly : “You should be getting all the benefits that were being paid to your husband, and unless you’ve remarried . . .”
Iskiteya looked astonished, and her lips formed a weak smile: “Remarried? How could that be?”
“. . . then you should still have all those same benefits! And it doesn’t matter when he died.”
“It’s eight years now he’s been gone . . .”
“Well,” said the regional man, rousing himself and looking at his watch. “I’ll personally look into the questions that concern you, our veterans and mothers. And if I can’t do anything, then I’ll take it up with the oblast. But we shouldn’t bother Moscow with things like this, absolutely not.”
1998
TIMES OF CRISIS
1
YORKA ZHUKOV, BORN into a peasant family, could handle a rake at hay cutting when he was seven and helped around the family farm as he got older, though he finished the three-year parish school. Then his father sent him all the way to Moscow as an errand boy and apprentice to a distant, wealthy relative, a furrier. That’s where he grew up, starting as a servant, running errands and working bit by bit until he mastered the furrier’s trade. (When he finished his training he had his photo taken in a borrowed black suit and silk tie. He sent it back to the village, signed “master furrier.”)
But the German war broke out, and in 1915, when Yorka was nineteen, he was called up. Though he wasn’t that tall, he was strong and broad-shouldered, and they chose him for the cavalry and sent him to a squadron of dragoons. He learned about horses and he learned to keep his back straight. After six months he was chosen for more training and finished as a junior NCO. In August 1916, his dragoon regiment went to the front. Two months later he was concussed by an Austrian shell, and it was off to the hospital. Then Zhukov became chairman of the squadron committee in a reserve regiment and never went back to the front. At the end of 1917, his squadron simply disbanded itself: each one of them was given a valid pass, all right and proper, told to take their weapons if they wished, and head for home.
He stayed in Moscow for a bit and then went back to his village in Kaluga Province, where he came down with typhus, which was everywhere at the time; the typhus kept recurring. It was now August 1918, and general mobilization for the Red Army began. They took Zhukov into the First Moscow Cavalry Division and sent the division after the Ural Cossacks, who weren’t inclined to accept Soviet power. (He saw Frunze himself a few times while serving there.) They crossed sabers with the Cossacks and drove them into the Kirghiz steppe. Then the division was transferred to the lower Volga. They were stationed near Tsaritsyn and then sent to Akhtuba to fight the Kalmyks. Those Kalmyks had gone completely off their heads: not one of them wanted anything to do with the Soviets, and you couldn’t hammer any sense into them. Yorka was wounded by a hand grenade there, so it was back to the hospital again. The typhus came back as well—that plague was just jumping from one person to the next. In the spring of that year of 1919, Zhukov, as a conscientious soldier, was accepted into the Russian Communist Party, and at the beginning of 1920, he was promoted as a “Red officer.” They sent him to a place near Ryazan on a course for Red commanders. And here, too, he wasn’t just an ordinary officer trainee but the leader of his group. Everyone could see he was made to command.
The Civil War was already coming to an end, and Wrangel had been left isolated. The trainees thought they might be left out of the Polish war, but in June 1920, their training was suddenly broken off and they were hastily boarded on trains, some to the Kuban, others to Dagestan (where a good many of them were killed). Zhukov found himself in a composite regiment of trainees in Yekaterinodar. The regiment was sent to counter the landing that the rebel Ulagay had made in the Kuban. Then they fought the Kuban Cossacks, who had scattered into small detachments among the foothills. Those idiots wouldn’t surrender even after Denikin had been crushed. Zhukov’s unit cut down a lot of them and shot a good many more. With this, his officer training was considered complete, and in Armavir they gave him early promotion as a Red commander. Everyone in his group was issued new riding breeches, for some reason of bright raspberry red. They must have come from the stores of some old Hussar regiment, but they were all that was available. When these new graduates went to their assigned units, they stood out wonderfully, and the Red Army men looked at them like creatures from some other planet.
Zhukov took command of a cavalry troop, but soon he was promoted to squadron commander. They were on the same old operations—“mopping up gangs of bandits,” along the coast at first. Then in December, he was transferred to Voronezh Province to wipe out Kolesnikov’s band. And they wiped it out. Then to neighboring Tambov Province, where there were more rebel bands than you could count. The Tambov provincial headquarters had to bring in more troops to deal with them: by the end of February, the regimental commissar said, they had 33,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry, 460 machine guns and 60 pieces of artillery. He was complaining: We don’t have any political workers who can explain clearly what’s going on right now. This is a war brought on by the Entente, and that’s why the link between the city and the villages has been broken. But we’ll be steadfast and we’ll clear away all this rubbish!
In March, before it thawed, two of their cavalry regiments began an offensive from Zherdyovka Station in the bandit region of Tugolukovo-Kamenka. (The orders from the head of the provincial Cheka, Traskovich, were: Wipe Kamenka and Afanasyevka completely off the face of the earth and be merciless in your executions!) Zhukov’s squadron, with four heavy machine guns and one three-inch gun, headed the detachment. Near the village of Vyazovoe, they attacked an Antonov force of about 250 cavalry. Without a single machine gun, the rebels could reply only with rifle fire.
Zhukov was riding his golden-red Zorka (he’d taken her in a scrap in Voronezh Province after killing her rider). Then a strapping Antonov man slashed him across the chest with his saber, knocking him from the saddle. But Zorka fell as well, pinning the squadron commander to the ground. The enormous Antonov man raised his arm to finish off Zhukov on the ground, but the political officer, Nochyovka, rushed up from behind and cut him down. (When they searched the man’s body they learned from one of his letters that he had also been an NCO in the dragoons, almost in the same regiment as Zhukov’s.) First Squadron on their flank began to fall back, and Zhukov’s Second Squadron acted as a rear guard, using their machine guns to hold back the enemy. They barely managed to save their four machine guns, mounted on sleds, and pulled out their artillery piece as well.
Now Zhukov grew truly furious at the bandits. Weren’t they peasants just like us? But they were different somehow, not like our Kaluga people. What would make them rise up against Soviet power? His letters from home told of how people there were dying of hunger, while these folk wouldn’t give them any bread! The commissar explained that it was true we weren’t sending them any goods from the cities, but that was because we had none to send. They can get by on their homemade stuff, in any case; but where can the city get its bread? And the locals in all those backwoods places that our grain collectors haven’t reached just go on stuffing themselves.
So we didn’t need to waste words when dealing with these people. When we came into a village, we would take their best horses and leave them our worst. When an informer reported that Antonov’s men were in such-and-such a village, we would swoop in a
nd round them up, searching the attics, the outbuildings, and the wells (one partisan medical assistant dug himself a hiding place in the side of a well shaft). Or we’d do it another way: We’d line up the whole village, young and old alike, 1500 people in all. We’d take every tenth person hostage and hold them in a barn. The others would have forty minutes to make up a list of all the bandits from that village before we’d shoot the hostages. What choice did they have? They’d bring us a list. It didn’t matter much if it was incomplete, the Special Section would find it useful in time to come.
They also had good information. One day we came into a camp that the bandits had abandoned in a hurry, and we found a copy of the same order that had sent us here. Our enemies knew a thing or two as well.
The Red Army’s supply system didn’t work very smoothly. One day you’d get your ration, the next day—nothing. (The pay rate for a squadron commander was 5000 rubles a month, but what could you buy with that? A pound of butter and two pounds of black bread.) So where could we get food if not in these bandit villages? A cavalry troop would ride into some village that was nothing more than a windmill and a few houses with only the women left in them. The troopers, still mounted, would use their whips to herd all the women into the storehouse at the mill and lock them in. Then they’d go off to rummage through the cellars. They’d drink a pot of milk and then smash the pot, just out of spite.
We’d make some peasant kid drive his cart with the squadron’s baggage and an escort of Red Army men, and he’d complain in all seriousness: “I hope you catch those guys soon and let me go back to my mamma.” Another kid, too small to understand, asked quite innocently and not angrily, “Uncle, why’d you shoot my dad?”
We captured about two dozen rebels, questioned them all separately, and each one fingered another: “He was the one on the machine gun.”
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