Then the voice of the church warden thundered: “They slaughtered the spirit of the Russian army!” The colonel with the fez shouted: “We will not let them!” And the storekeeper gave a blunt and deafening roar: “Swindlers!”
Bareheaded women thronged around the meekly smiling priests and chased the speaker off the podium, jamming two workers, Red Guardsmen who had been wounded at Pskov, against the wall. One of them started yelling, shaking his fist: “We know your little tricks! In Kolpino* they hold evening masses till two in the morning now! TheyVe come up with a new service—a rally in a church! We’ll make those cupolas shake!”
“You wont shake nothing, you cursed wretch,” a woman said in a muffled voice, turning away from him and crossing herself.
At Easter, the crowds stand with burning candles in the Cathedral of our Lady of Kazan. The people’s breath makes the small yellow flames flutter. The immense cathedral is packed from wall to wall. The service is unusually long. Priests in sparkling miters proceed though the halls. There is an artful arrangement of electric lights behind the crucifix. It is as if Christ were stretched out across the starry dark blue sky.
In his sermon the priest speaks of the Holy Countenance that is once more averted in unbearable pain. He speaks of everything holy being spat upon, slapped, and of sacrileges committed by ignorant men “who know not what they do.” The words of the sermon are mournful, vague, and portentous. “Flock to the church, our last stronghold! The church will not betray you!”
A little old woman is praying by the portal of the cathedral. “How nicely the chorus is chanting,” she says to me tenderly. “What nice services these are! Last week the Metropolitan himself conducted the service—never before has there been such holy goodness! The workers from our factory, they too come to the services. The people are tired, they’re all crumpled up with worry, and in the church there’s quiet and there’s singing, you can get away from everything.”
QUITE AN INSTITUTION!
No one was filled with more admirable intentions than the Welfare Commissariat in the days of the “Social Revolution.” It started out on quite a grandiose note. It was assigned the most important of tasks: “The instantaneous uplifting of the soul, the decreeing of the realm of love, and the preparation of citizens for a lofty existence and a free commune.” The Commissariat headed straight for its goal without once straying from its path.
In the Welfare Commissariat there is a department that goes by the clumsy name of Refuges for Minors Accused of Socially Dangerous Deeds. These refuges were supposed to be established according to new guidelines based on the latest psychological and pedagogical data. And that was exactly how the Commissariat’s measures were implemented—according to the newest of guidelines.
One of the directors appointed was an unknown doctor from Murmansk. Another director was a minor railroad functionary—also from Murmansk. This latter social reformer is currently being tried for cohabiting with female wards and for freely spending the funds of the free commune. He writes semiliterate petitions (this director of a refuge for minors), full of backbiting insinuations, smacking of prison-guard penmanship. He writes that he has “dedicated body and soul to the Holy Cause of the people,” and that he was betrayed by “counterrevolutionaries.”
This man entered the service of the Welfare Commissariat describing himself politically as “a worker of the Party, a true Bolshevik.”
It seems that these were the only qualifications necessary to become an educator of juvenile delinquents.
The other educators:
A Latvian woman who knows very little Russian. She seems to have had four years of schooling of some kind.
An ex-dancer who was schooled by life and danced in the ballet for thirty years.
A former Red Army soldier who, prior to being a soldier, had been a sales clerk in a tea store.
A barely literate shop boy from Murmansk.
A shop girl from Murmansk.
There are also five “uncles” (what a knack these people have for Communist terminology!) appointed to look after the boys in the institution.
Their official job description reads: “On duty for a day, sleep for a day, take a day off, do whatever you think needs doing, have whoever shows up mop the floors.”
I must also add that in one of the refuges there are twenty-three attendants for forty children.
An audit revealed that the records kept by these attendants, many of whom have already been indicted, were found to be in the following state:
Most of the bills have not been signed, one cannot ascertain from these bills what the moneys were spent on, there are no receivers’ signatures. The receipts do not indicate the number of hours for which workers are being paid—a junior employee’s traveling expenses for this January alone amounted to 455 rubles!
If you visit the refuge, you will find that there is no schooling or instruction of any kind. Sixty percent of the children are barely literate. No work of any kind is being done. The children’s diet consists of root-vegetable soup and herring. A powerful stench has saturated the building, as the sewer pipes are broken. No disinfecting measures have been taken, even though there have already been ten cases of typhoid among the children. There is much illness. In one case, a boy with frostbite on his foot was brought in at eleven o’clock at night, and left to lie in the corridor until morning without receiving treatment of any kind. Escapes are frequent. At night they make the children go to the cold, wet bathrooms naked. They hide the childrens clothes out of fear they might escape.
Conclusion:
The Commissariat's Welfare Institution Refuges are nothing more than stinking holes that bear an uncanny resemblance to prereform police lockups. The administrators and educators are people of the past, who have jumped on the bandwagon of the “peoples cause” without having the slightest specialization in welfare, the majority of them having had no training whatever in this field. It is unclear what the basis was for them to be hired by the government of the workers and peasants of our nation.
I saw all this with my own eyes—the morose, barefoot children, the pimply, swollen faces of their doleful warders, and the cracked sewer pipes. Our poverty and wretchedness are truly beyond compare.
THE GEORGIAN, THE KERENSKY RUBLES, AND THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER (A MODERN TALE)
Two sad Georgians are sitting in the Palmyra Restaurant. One of / them is old, the other young. The young one is named Ovanes.
• • •
Things aren’t going well for them. The tea they are served is watery. The young one is eyeing the Russian women. He is an aficionado. The old one is eyeing the gramophone. The old man feels morose, but warm.
The horizons are clearing. The Palmyra Restaurant offers to sell the young man almonds and raisins. Ovanes buys them. A woman he knows from the State Inspection Agency will cook guzinaki 15 for them at her house.
The merchandise brings in a profit.
• • •
Days and weeks go by. Ovanes owns a store on Mokhovaya Street selling Oriental sweets.
• • •
Now Ovanes has a store on the Nevsky Prospekt. Petka, his assistant, struts around in shiny new galoshes. Ovanes does not bow to the servant girls he knows, but salutes them. His doorman gets a whole chocolate cake on his name day. Everyone respects Ovanes.
• • •
Meanwhile, General Orlov is living on Kirochnaya Street. His neighbor is Burishkin, a retired medical assistant.
• • •
When General Orlovs daughter, Galichka, graduated from the third class to the second at the institute, the Empress kissed her on the cheek. Friends and relatives were certain that Galichka would marry a communications engineer. Galichka has a slim, shapely foot in a delicate suede shoe.
Lightning strikes from a clear blue sky: Galichka moves in with Ovanes.
The general is so distraught that he starts a friendship with Burishkin. There is a lack of supplies. The government distributes Siberian salmon. T
he general doesn’t see his daughter.
One morning the general woke up and thought, “They’re all a bunch of dunderheads! The Bolsheviks are the real people!” Then he went back to sleep, happy with his thought.
Galichka sits at the cash register in Ovanes’s store. Her friends from the institute work as salesgirls at the store. They have fun. The customers come in droves. The store is just like Abrikosov’s. The customers are treated with disdain. Galichka’s friends are called Lida and Shurik. Shurik is very lively, she is cuckolding a second lieutenant. Galichka has set up daily hot breakfasts. At the Ministry of Food Provisions, where she worked before, the workers always set up hot breakfasts along Cooperative guidelines.
• • •
The general mulls things over some more.
The general and his daughter are reconciled. The general eats chocolates every day. Galichka is unusually pretty and tender. Ovanes has acquired a Nikolayevsky greatcoat.* The general is surprised that he has never taken an interest in Georgians. The general studies the history of Georgia and the Caucasian campaigns. Burishkin is forgotten.
The city government distributes Siberian salmon. Pensions are paid out in Kerensky rubles.^
It is spring. Galichka and her father ride along the Nevsky Prospekt in
* A military coat of the former Imperial Army.
t Rubles printed during Kerensky’s provisional government, which was in power between February and October 1917.
a carriage. Burishkin’s thoughts are rambling—if only he could find some food. There is no bread. The old man is desolate.
• • •
Burishkin decides to buy some guzinaki to quell his appetite.
• • •
Ovanes’s store is filled with customers. Burishkin stands in line. Lida and Shurik look at him disdainfully. The general is telling Ovanes a joke, and laughing. The Georgian smiles condescendingly. Burishkin is crushed.
• • •
Ovanes does not want to give Burishkin change for his Kerensky rubles. Even though Ovanes has change.
“Have you read the decree about change for Kerensky rubles?” Burishkin asks Ovanes.
“I spit on those decrees!” the Georgian answers.
“It’s the only money I have,” Burishkin whispers.
“Then give me back the guzinaki.”
“And what if I bring in the Red Army?”
“I spit on the Red Army!”
“I see!”
Ovaness store is searched. They find: flour, oatmeal, sugar, gold bars, Swedish crowns, “Eggo” egg-powder, shoe-sole leather, rice starch, ancient coins, decks of cards, and bottles of “Modern” perfume. Its all over.
Ovanes is in jail. At night he dreams that nothing happened, that he is in the Palmyra Restaurant looking at women.
• • •
Burishkin is bristling with energy. He is a witness.
• • •
Galichka’s abortion went well. She is weak and tender. Shuriks husband became an instructor in the Red Army, participated in a number of battles on the home front, receives a pound of bread a day, is very cheerful, has come back with a regrettable illness. Shurik is being treated by an expensive doctor, and is full of whims and fancies. Her husband says that everyone is sick nowadays.
• • •
The general is cultivating a friendship with Leibzon the chemist. The general has become weak, emaciated. He is beginning to admire Jewish enterprise.
• • •
Lida visits Galichka, who has not yet managed to get over her illness. Her looks have faded, she is working as a secretary in the Smolny,16 and spring is having a bad effect on her. She says that its hard for a woman to get by nowadays. The railroads aren’t working, so you cant go on trips to the countryside.
THE BLIND
The sign said: “Refuge for Blind Soldiers.” I rang the bell by the tall oak doors. Nobody answered. It turned out that the door was open. I went inside, and this is what I saw.
A tall, dark-haired man wearing sunglasses comes down the broad staircase. He taps in front of himself with a reed cane. The blind man has negotiated the staircase, but now many paths lie before him: dark back streets, blind alleys, stairs, side rooms. His cane softly taps the smooth, dimly shimmering walls. The blind mans head points upwards unmoving. He walks slowly, probes for the step with his foot, stumbles, and falls. A rivulet of blood cuts across his protruding white forehead, flows around his temples, and disappears under his sunglasses. The dark-haired man gets up, dips his fingers in his blood, and quietly calls out, “Kablukov!” The door to the adjoining room opens noiselessly. Reed canes shimmer before my eyes. The blind are coming to the aid of their fallen comrade. Some cannot find him, and huddle against the walls, looking upward with their unseeing eyes; others grab him by the arms and help him up from the floor and, hanging their heads, wait for the nurse or the orderly.
The nurse comes. She leads the soldiers to their rooms, and then explains things to me. “This sort of thing happens every day. This building is completely wrong for us, completely wrong! What we need is a level, one-story building with long corridors. Our ward is a death trap, full of stairs and more stairs! Every day they fall!”
Our government, as everyone knows, wallows in administrative bliss in only two cases: when we need to run for our lives or when we need to be mourned. During periods of evacuation and ruinous mass resettlement, the government’s activity takes on a vigor, a creative verve, an ingenious voluptuousness.
I was told how the blind were evacuated from the refuge. The initiative for the move had come from the patients themselves. With the approach of the Germans, the fear of occupation had unleashed extreme agitation in the blind men. The reasons for this agitation are many. The main reason is that all worry is sweet for the blind. Excitement grabs them quickly and unyieldingly, and restless aspiration toward an imaginary goal triumphs over the gloom of their darkness.
The second reason for the evacuation is their peculiar fear of the Germans.
Most of the blind men have come from prisoner-of-war camps. They firmly believe that when the Germans come they will be made to slave and starve again.
“You are blind,” the nurses have told them. “You’re no use to anyone! They wont do anything to you!”
But the blind men answered, “The German doesn’t let anyone slip through his fingers! The German makes everyone work—we’ve lived with Germans, sister!”
Their fear is touching, and typical of returned prisoners of war.
The blind men asked to be taken to the depths of Russia. Since it looked as if an evacuation was in the works, the authorization was quick to come. And this is where it all started.
With decisiveness stamped on their haggard faces, the blind men, wrapped in their coats, hobbled over to the train station. Their guides later told us what they had to go through. It was raining that day. All night the drenched men huddled together in the rain waiting to board the train. Then, in the cold and dark boxcars, they rattled over the face of their destitute fatherland, went to government offices, waited in dirty reception halls to be handed rations, and, dismayed and silent, followed their tired, angry guides. Some of the blind headed for villages. But the villages wanted nothing to do with them. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them. These worthless dregs of humanity, of no use to anyone, roamed about the railroad stations like packs of blind dogs looking for shelter. But there was no shelter. They all returned to Petrograd. Petrograd was silent, absolutely silent.
There is a single-story house huddling at the side of the main building. In it live peculiar people from a peculiar time, blind men with their families.
I talked with one of the wives, a pudgy young woman in a housecoat and Caucasian slippers. Her husband, sitting right next to her, was an old, bony Pole with an orange-colored face eaten away by poison gas.
I asked a few questions, and was quick to get the picture. The slothful little woman was a typical Russian woman of our ti
mes, who had been hurled about by the whirlwind of war, shock, and migration. When the war began she had enlisted as a nurse, “out of patriotism.” She had gone through a lot: maimed “boys,” German air raids, dances at the officers’ club, officers in “riding britches,” a womans ailment, love for some delegate or other, then the Revolution, the Campaign, another love, evacuation, and then the subcommittees.
Somewhere, at some point, she had had parents in Simbirsk, as well as a sister, Varya, and a cousin who was a railway man. But she hadn’t had a letter from her parents in a year and a half, and as her sister, Varya, was far away, the warm family aroma had dissipated.
What she now has instead is exhaustion, a body that is coming apart at the seams, a seat by the window, a penchant for idleness, lackluster eyes that slither gently from one object to another, and her husband—a blind Pole with an orange face.
There are quite a few such women in the refuge. They don’t leave because there’s nowhere to go and no point in going.
“I can’t understand what kind of a place we’re running here,” the head nurse often says to them. “We all live here bunched together, but you people have no right to be here! I don’t even know what to call this refuge. By law we’re supposed to be a public establishment, but with all of you here, I’m not so sure!”
In a dark, low-ceilinged room, two pale, bearded muzhiks sit facing each other on narrow beds. Their glass eyes are fixed. With soft voices they talk about land, wheat, the current price of suckling pigs.
In another room a rickety, apathetic little old man is giving a tall, strong soldier violin lessons. Weak, yelping sounds flow from under the bow in a singing, trembling stream.
I walk on.
In one of the rooms a woman is moaning. I look in and see a girl of about seventeen with a thin crimson face, writhing in pain on a wide bed. Her dark husband sits on a low stool in a corner, weaving a basket with broad hand movements, listening carefully and coldly to her moans.
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Page 50