“This year’s hay harvest is the best ever, especially in the north. But nobody ever looks north for hay. Nobody tries to estimate and coordinate stocks of hay over the whole country. The Quartermaster Department, Northern Army Group, arranged to procure hay in the neighborhood of Petrograd, and forbade anybody in that district to bring hay into the city. So although the Quartermaster Department didn’t take all of the hay, the peasants couldn’t go into the city and sell it. Hay has been left to rot on the very outskirts of Petrograd, while in the city itself there’s no fodder for dairy cows. So now the city has no milk of its own.”
His stories are a bit long-winded. Any other time I’d stop listening. But on a train journey it’s bearable. What is hard is adjusting to all this, trying to make sense of it. Isn’t there a single bright spot, damn it all, in this outrageous muddle?
“They’d never seen anything like last year’s hay in Vologda province. Peasants were queueing up to cart it to the station at ten kopecks a pood. So what happens? The plenipotentiaries couldn’t agree on storage, on freight cars, on loading arrangements, or on when and how to pay. That went on all winter. In March, when it was getting wet and the roads were no good, they started inviting the peasants to please bring it in for as much as half a ruble a pood. But not many got through, and the hay wasn’t much good by then. So everybody was the loser—and Russia was loser number one.”
He excused himself and removed his starched collar altogether. Obviously feeling more at home, he became even more relaxed in manner. He was about forty-five. Heavy bristling mustache. No beard at all.
“Or take Siberian butter. There was something in Novoye Vremya the other day. As soon as war broke out they stopped exporting it, and the price immediately slumped—from fourteen rubles a pood to eight. That’s when the government should have bought it up and stockpiled it. Nothing of the sort happened. They bankrupted the dairymen and in no time lard was selling at twice the price of butter. So they’ve started rendering Siberian butter down for soap.”
That touched a raw nerve in Vorotyntsev. Siberian butter—for soap? It was unbearable! Just like that July, when the harvest was in full swing, and they called up the reservists, then canceled the decree ten days later. How could anybody be so stupid? Who was in charge of the government? (Can that monarch of ours make an even bigger mess of the rear than of the front? Or does “society” share the blame? Has he bungled his duties as monarch even worse than those of Supreme Commander? And anyway, why does he stay on at GHQ, now that there are no military operations in progress? Why doesn’t he sort things out in Petrograd?)
Fyodor Dmitrich’s tone was that of one who knows better. Not a didactic tone, though, he seemed used to the idea that no one would attach any importance to what he said, that he would convert no one, including this phlegmatic officer. He spoke without urgency, in a relaxed manner, ready to stop at any minute.
“So what was their solution? To authorize butter exports again. So a million and a half poods have gone abroad to Holland and Denmark among other places. Denmark! As though they had no butter of their own. It goes to Germany, obviously.”
Russian butter? To Germany? If only the train would speed up! He was in a hurry to meet people and start doing something. He wouldn’t put up with this for a single week, a single day longer! Vorotyntsev had been in a great hurry to begin with—but now, with this touch of the whip along the way …
“But you read the papers yourself, so you know. They report all sorts of similar cases …”
Vorotyntsev laughed and came clean: “Well, you know … I don’t go in much for newspapers.”
“You can’t really mean that!”
His companion sounded surprised, but the amusement in his green eyes showed that it was just as he had expected.
In different company Vorotyntsev might have been ashamed to make such a confession, but with this funny fellow, not at all. How had it happened, though? However busy he was in his years at the Academy he had still read them. Only at the front had he started noticing that the newspapers were somehow artificial, insincere, sometimes too prejudiced, and always somehow alien.
“What is there to read? The summaries and analyses of military operations, completely unsatisfactory. They’re drafted either by ignoramuses in a tearing hurry or by exceedingly wily politicians, you’ll never understand from them how an operation was carried out. You’ll only learn how it really was from visiting officers or eyewitnesses.”
Learn as fully and precisely as he, for instance, could talk about the doings of his own regiment and division.
“Ye-es, ye-es.” His funny, naïve, talkative companion seemed to be in respectful agreement. “It’s the same everywhere, in the rear too, in trade and industry too, you can only learn from somebody who’s seen it for himself … But if you write the whole truth, as I’m telling it to you now, they slash it to bits, so people still can’t find out.”
“Ah, yes,” Vorotyntsev went on, “but what does a newspaper set itself to do? Keep its readers fully informed, perhaps? No, to twist the reader’s mind into its own particular way of thinking. Especially when it comes to the government, the Duma, or Zemgor—who’s going to write about them impartially? All those Vedomosti—Russkie Vedomosti, Birzhevye Vedomosti—all those Slovos and Bogatstvos are too partisan. If you went by what you read in the papers you wouldn’t be able to fight: everything is bad at the front and worse in the rear—and the top is utterly rotten.”
His companion seemed less pleased to hear this than might have been expected, indeed quite upset. He cringed as though Vorotyntsev had struck him, and turned away to look out the window.
There was something comic about him, something rather catlike about his round whiskered face and his greenish eyes. And he looked so unsure of himself, somehow aggrieved, as though life had always sprung unwelcome surprises on him.
Vorotyntsev tried to cheer him up a bit. “There may be serious articles in some of the journals. But the illustrated press … well …”
He felt ashamed to say it, as though he had published the stuff himself. “Every time you open a magazine …” It would have been quite improper for an officer of the imperial army to finish the sentence. On every centerfold—those decorous family portraits, of its individual members, of the women by themselves, in nurse’s uniforms (he had heard from an officer who had been a patient at Tsarskoye Selo that the Tsaritsa didn’t do dressings very well), the heir to the throne separately, sometimes the whole family together. The Empress sends gifts of thousands of crosses and amulets, as though she couldn’t trust the soldiers to bring their own from home. She sent icons to the forts at Ivangorod and Kovno—and they surrendered the day afterward. On every royal occasion—and there are a dozen of them in a year—there’s a service in every regiment, and better not balk at it. None of these things matter greatly, not worth chewing over, but they all add up to …
An officer could say no more out loud, but a Russian talking to an intelligent fellow Russian didn’t need to: “every centerfold” said it all. Who else could he mean?
Fyodor Dmitrich brightened up again and looked approving. Vorotyntsev too was pleased that they were not talking at cross-purposes, as students and cadets, or politically minded civilians and officers excluded from politics, and never daring to discuss affairs of state, had been for many years past. None of that hostility which had caused many officers to give up an army career. The war, for all the sufferings it has brought, has shown us that we are Russians first and foremost.
With no great effort they could have found still more in common by talking about Germans. The same jokes circulated at the front and in the rear. The Emperor, on parade, had “taken prisoner a whole retinue of German generals,” or else “although surrounded on all sides by Germans he had not laid down his arms.” They could have—but it would have been improper. Vorotyntsev himself was of two minds about the Germans in Russia’s service. He knew dozens of them personally and they were all honest professional soldi
ers. All the same, that there were so very many of them was a flaw in the system, a radical miscalculation inherited from Peter the Great, perhaps best put this way: however honorably they served, they served only the throne and did not identify heart and soul with the real Russia. Because of that they were all in the wrong place. Peter the Great had imposed the German imperial system on Russia, and it had lasted ever since.
The man was comic all right, but also likable. He didn’t put on airs. Didn’t look crammed with knowledge, but as if he hadn’t been given enough education and wanted more.
Vorotyntsev’s cryptic allusion to the monarchy emboldened Fyodor Dmitrich to lean forward over the table and confide in him sadly. “But what about the Duma? The Duma doesn’t know what it’s doing either. The ‘meatless days’ law, for instance. Four days a week you can’t kill cattle or serve meat, but the other three you can? It’s a joke! Only half-baked city folk could think up such a thing: driving cattle into the abattoir and keeping them there for days on end losing weight. And what about Siberia? Meat’s all they eat, and they’ve got so much they don’t know where to put it. They’ll stop the cattle drives from Mongolia next.”
City folk? Of course, that was it. There was something quite uncitified about the man. A rustic with some education.
“At supply conferences they’re all city folk who can’t tell soft wheat from hard, or oats from barley for that matter, and as for growing them, and what it costs, they don’t know the first thing. All city folk can do is set up ‘committees on price inflation,’ so they won’t have to dig so deep into their pockets. And where’s it got them? What sort of idiot will supply them at those prices?” His indignation almost choked him. “There’s a proverb that says, ‘Prices are fixed by God.’ Prices are determined by psychological factors, and we can’t keep track of them. You need a good head to tamper with prices. If exports come to a stop, shouldn’t grain be more plentiful? And cheaper? Well, in this country it’s dearer, and there isn’t any. What do you make of that?”
Here we go again! You bring your own agony with you, and imagine that there can be nothing more excruciating than all those casualties, the depleted units, your weariness—and en route another terrible problem is rushing to meet you: where has our grain gone? This was the second time he’d been told all about it, his brain was scarcely able to process it all: pricing in general, and now these fixed prices.
“What concerns the towns most is: Why do the villages ask such a high price for what townsfolk eat? Well, the townsfolk have newspapers and lawyers, they set up citizens’ councils and fix maximum market prices without consulting the peasants, what they call a ‘tariff.’ While the peasants, although they’re three-quarters of Russia, are like so many dumb oxen—they have no newspapers, nowhere to get across their point of view.”
What, then, was the solution?
Fyodor Dmitrievich assured him that fixed prices should be abolished, the sooner the better. And the government should … “No, forget the government. Not worth tiring your tongue with it. In Russia the government only exists to get everything wrong.” (Precisely my view!) “We had one excellent Minister of Agriculture, Krivoshein. They fired him because he wasn’t a toady, and put Naumov in his place—lightweight, didn’t know a thing, so as soon as he started learning they fired him, without explanation, as usual. All through the summer months, and harvest time, the post remained unfilled.”
“Can it really be true”—Fyodor Dmitrich didn’t want to believe it, but his eyebrows climbed his forehead nevertheless—"can it really be true that there’s a secret organization here working for Germany? You hear all sorts of rumors from ordinary people. First there’s a direct line from Tsarskoye Selo to Berlin, and the Tsaritsa reports everything to the Germans. Then we’re supposed to be making shells to fit German, not Russian, guns. Then the generals are all traitors and sell military secrets …”
Rumors of treason stole across the warring country and the restive army like a malodorous plague. The public thirsted for the blood of spies. There was a universal passion, shared by the military, for the punishment of traitors. Driven to desperation, the mob naturally explains muddle by treachery. But Russian factories producing shells for German guns … well … On commerce, and prices, this man’s knowledge seemed unlimited, but his experience, like everyone else’s, had its limits. Vorotyntsev drew the line at the story of the shells.
“Traitor generals would make things only too simple, Fyodor Dmitrich. Two or three of them would be found out sooner or later. But what if there are no traitors, just a hundred idiots, and no hope of firing them? Anyway, our shells are of a different caliber.”
“Well, why haven’t we got any for ourselves?”
“Didn’t have, not haven’t got. We have got them now. And take it from me, the reason we didn’t have any wasn’t treason, and wasn’t really even stupidity.”
It was the other man’s turn to look astonished. “Eh? What was it, then?”
“It just happened. We never found ourselves short of military supplies in the war with Japan. And, basing ourselves on the rate of use then, we had stocks for six months of the present war, which wasn’t bad. Should we have laid in more? How could we know when war would come? And what if it didn’t come? It would take more than half a century to use up all those shells in training exercises. Besides, smokeless powder and time fuses can’t be kept for long. And new types of shells and detonators appear over the years—so how can you lay in big stocks?”
Fyodor Dmitrich looked dazed. He couldn’t take it in.
“You mean to say they didn’t make a mistake with the shells?”
“There was a mistake all right. But it wasn’t failing to build up stocks—it was not getting the factories ready to produce more. And not adjusting to the situation quickly enough after the first month of the war. It was obvious from the East Prussian campaign alone that you needed seven thousand, not one thousand, shells a year for a three-inch gun. Try getting it into their thick skulls. The French, mind you, went into the war with no howitzers at all. But nobody there accuses the government of treason. You can’t allow for everything. Mistakes will be made. You need to readjust quickly.”
“You mean even Sukhomlinov isn’t guilty?”
“In my view, only of carelessness and stupidity. The arrest of the War Minister in wartime is, of course, a disgrace—and more of a disgrace for Russia than for him. The government’s credit was damaged, not Sukhomlinov’s. What they should have done was quietly retire him long before. But who raised the outcry about treason? The Duma did. They’re so blinded by political passion they don’t stop to think.”
What people in railway carriages kept telling him would need careful sieving. Were things really so bad, or was this just a manner of speaking the public had adopted, seeing in every setback signs of malfeasance and the collapse of central government?
“So there isn’t any espionage?”
“Of course there’s espionage. The Germans aren’t such misers as to begrudge the money for a few agents. Take the Empress Maria, for instance—the ship that blew up at Sevastopol.” (Fyodor Dmitrich hadn’t known.) “I can easily believe that a German agent blew her up.” Only just commissioned, a new, first-class ship of the line! It makes your heart ache. What a blow!
Vorotyntsev’s stories were meant at the end of the line for other hearers, he ought to be unbosoming himself to very important people and ridding himself of all the anxieties that were like hot coals in his breast—and obviously not to a comic character who happened to be in the same railway carriage. But the train beat out its inexorable rhythm, lapping, cradling, lulling his overeager mind, his important schemes, in its soothing rhythm. You can’t jump off, you can’t get there any quicker. From Moscow to Petrograd nowadays takes a long evening, and the night, and the morning hours before dawn, a wasted, blank day in your life, one you didn’t need, a day you could have spent on anything you pleased, only it seemed there was nothing to spend it on. Outside, a sodden, darke
ning landscape—what little could be seen of it. Are train journeys anywhere as long as in Russia? Your ties with the past slacken, you feel as yet no ties with the future, the only real people for today are the attendant who offers to unfurl the heavy linen covers onto the velvet seat if you want to lie down early, and the comical fellow passenger with the big notebook—look away for a moment and he will be writing in it or taking it out into the corridor. Are you from Bryansk? You’ve mentioned the place twice. No, I’ve got a brother there, a forester. It appeared from another of his stories that he had been a schoolteacher. He was at the front occasionally, with a Duma group inspecting food supplies and medical facilities. Did you ever get as far as Romania? Well, heaven forbid you should. If you haven’t been there you don’t know what misery is.
Romania isn’t Russia’s ally—she’s a misfortune and makes us a laughingstock. While she was neutral she protected us on one side, like a sandbag. Now the sand’s all run out and our chests and ribs bear the brunt. France hitched us up with this other little ally. Our front on land is half as long again, an extra six hundred versts, the whole of the Balkan range, which was previously fenced off. And the Germans needed only three divisions to topple this whole great state and break through a week ago to the Black Sea. While we send small contingents to stiffen the Romanians, and come to grief. So Romania is swallowing up our troops and contributing nothing herself.
“You ought to see their army! A few artillery rounds will send a regiment running in all directions, and you won’t reassemble it in three days. The Romanians could at least withdraw in good order, but it’s every man for himself, trailing his rifle—it’s a sight that has to be seen—like a lone deserter. They’ve got no machine guns, no shovels, no idea how to dig themselves in. If you hear rapid fire, don’t be too sure that’s what it is—it may mean that the Romanians have abandoned two-wheelers carrying cartridges and they’re on fire. People say that when they saw the war coming the corn-mush eaters sold the Austrians a lot of food and military equipment, right down to telephone wire, at a good profit, reckoning all those things would be provided to them by their Russian allies. Mind you, I don’t think myself that they ever had telephone wire, they don’t know the first thing about field communications. Their artillery is the most antiquated in Europe. They slept through the Japanese war, and they’re sleeping through the world war. They even contrive to point their batteries at each other’s backs! Their officers are effeminate creatures who wear corsets and use face powder and lipstick. And they’re such liars—as soon as they snap out of their panic they start bragging, or deliberately misrepresent the situation because they’re ashamed to own up to the Russians. They retail malicious local gossip in official reports and change instructions almost hourly. They abandon positions without warning their Russian neighbors. They allow civilians into the front-line areas with their troops. No, I just can’t tell you what it’s like!”
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