Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (41 page)

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 and 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.
”

You
’
d come into a village with mounted patrol and find it all shut tight, as if everyone had died. You
’
d knock on a door and hear a woman
’
s voice:
“
Don
’
t be angry, but we
’
ve got nothing left. We
’
re starving.
”
You
’
d knock again:
“
We can
’
t trust anybody these days. Every bigwig who comes through here just wants to take our grain.
”

They
’
d been so terrified by the Soviets and by the partisans that all they wanted was to be left alone.

At our political meetings, they warned us not to antagonize the local population unnecessarily. But they would also say,
“
Don
’
t let them pull the wool over your eyes. If you suspect anything, just give them a rifle butt in the face.
”

But even our own Red Army men worried us when they were reluctant to use their weapons against peasants (
“
We
’
re peasants, same as them, so how can we shoot at our own folk?
”
) The bandits were also spreading leaflets for our troops:
“
It
’
s you who are the bandits here. We did not invade your lands. Leave us
alone,
we can live well enough without you.
”
A rumor came from somewhere that within a few weeks, all the Red Army troops would be demobilized.
“
Why wait that long? How much longer do we have to keep fighting?
”
(Some of our men also went over to the bandits or deserted, particularly whenever our troops had to be redeployed.) The political officer Nochyovka would say:
“
Men like that have to be reeducated. Otherwise, when they
’
ve had a few drinks and start singing, it won
’
t be revolutionary
songs,
it
’
ll be
‘
Stenka Razin
’
or some filthy stuff. And if they spend a night in a village where all the men are away in the forest, they exploit the women as a class.
”
And he would give talks on the topic:
“
Spending your life without labor and without revolutionary struggle is parasitism!
”
(And someone would remind him of our woman medical assistant who was available for the whole division:
“
I
’
m not like a bowl of porridge,
”
she
’
d say,
“
there
’
s enough to go around, and plenty for the whole squadron.
”
)

We
’
d hold our breath at morning muster, waiting to see who
’
d gone off on French leave. We had to keep our own Red Army men in hobbles. The instructor from the provincial military committee told us that there were 60,000 deserters in Tambov Province, all of them now reinforcements for the bandits.