Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (7 page)

The rebel forces continued to grow, and new partisan regiments of 1500 or 2000 men were formed one after another. There were
now
more than ten
regiments,
and they had their own banners and Maxim and Lewis machine guns. Former sergeants and warrant officers, veterans of the German War, assumed command; there were also some simple peasants who came straight from the plow. And they were good commanders.

In November, Antonov
’
s main force advanced on Tambov
itself,
creating great confusion among the authorities there (they felled ancient oak trees to block the roads into the city and sited machine guns in church bell towers). Ektov couldn
’
t believe it: Was it possible that he could dash into Tambov to rescue his family? (He would take them to
Serdobsk
, where Polina had a cousin. They would be safe with her.)

But no, twenty
versts
from Tambov, at
Podoskley-Rozhdestvensky
, the rebels had to withdraw after a major battle.

A new Vend
é
e?
But there was one obvious difference: our Orthodox clergy, living in some other world, did not join forces with the rebels; they did nothing to inspire them, as the militant Catholic clergy of France had done, but remained
cautiously in their parishes and in their houses, though they surely knew that when the Reds came they would be slaughtered just the same. (As happened in Kamenka, where the priest Mikhail
Molchanov
was shot just like that, while sitting on the steps of his own home.)

A
Vendée
?
A forced one, at times.
A Red Army soldier would come home to his village on leave, and his fellow villagers would destroy all his documents—and now what could he do? All that was left were the partisans. And there was no way he could desert from a partisan detachment, even though he might want to: his own folk wouldn
’
t let him live in the village with his family. Or people found out that some old woman had let slip to the Reds something about the movements of the rebels; and in the square in front of the church, she was given a public whipping across her bare backside.

The peaceful peasants of Tambov were now catching it from all sides: if you did something wrong, it might be the Reds who punished you later or it might be the rebels. They were even afraid to talk to their neighbors in case they might say the wrong thing. Once one of the
“
men with pitchforks
”
joined a band of others in raiding some nearby spot and was captured; though he was released, in the eyes of the authorities he remained guilty for the rest of his life.

A knock comes at the door:
“
Who
’
s there?
”
“
Friends.
”
Just in case, so as not to fall into a trap:
“
The whole lot of you are no better than devils. You may be friends, but you make our life a misery.
”

The Reds questioned one woman about the whereabouts of her son.
“
I don
’
t have a son!
”
she told them. And then when they captured him, he said he was the son of so-and-so. So they shot him: he must have been lying.

Pavel Vasilych often put himself in the position of the peasants. The family: man
’
s eternal joy, and his eternal weak spot! Who could have a heart so ironclad that it would not agonize over the fate of his dear ones who might be torn to pieces at any moment by someone
’
s devilish claws?

Things like this also happened: A requisitioning detachment had been badly mauled in one village, but two of its members, a Chinese and a Finn, managed to hide themselves behind some old peasant
’
s house. The Chinese was found and executed, but the old peasant felt sorry for the Finn and, risking his own neck, hid him in a haystack. He let him go at night, and the Finn took to his heels, back to his garrison in
Chokino
.
(Ready for the next expedition . . . ?)

A
Vendée
?
The SRs of Tambov Province couldn
’
t make up their minds: they couldn
’
t support a rebellion against the revolution, and they had missed the chance to head it; no one would follow them now. And yet, now that the Civil War was over, how could they not take advantage of the people
’
s resistance to the communists? They joined with the Unions of Working Peasantry that were now springing up and wrote some leaflets claiming the whole rebellion for the SR Party.

The rebels, in any case, had their own slogans:
“
Down with the Soviets!
”
(
that
certainly wasn
’
t from the SRs—they supported the Soviets);
“
We will not pay the assessments!
”
;
“
Long live the deserters from the Red Army!
”

Ektov had a typewriter that had been taken from a central executive committee office, so he himself wrote and painstakingly printed some proclamations:
“
To those conscripted into the Red Army! We are not bandits! We are the same peasants as you. But we have been forced to stop our peaceful work and rise up against our brothers. Are your families not in the same situation as ours? Everything has been crushed by the Soviets; at every step the communists are running wild, taking away the last of the grain and executing innocent people. They smash our heads like clay pots and break our bones—is this how they promise to build a new world? Throw off the communist yoke and go home with your rifle in your hands! Long live the Constituent Assembly! Long live the Unions of the Working Peasantry!
”

The partisans themselves, those who were able, would write proclamations on scraps of paper they came across:
“
Pay no more heed to these brazen communists, parasites on the backs of the working people!
”
;
“
We have come to cry out to you that the power of the wrongdoers and bandits must be ended!
”
And for those who had not yet made up their minds:
“
Peasants! They steal your bread and your livestock! Will you not awaken?
”

The communists replied with a mass of printed leaflets reflecting their usual narrow-minded class viewpoint or satirical cartoons: Antonov wearing a bloodstained cap, carrying a bloody knife, and on his chest, looking like medals, were drawings of Wrangel and Kerensky.
“
We, Antonov the First, Incendiary and Destroyer of Tambov, Autocrat of all Thieves and Bandits ...
”

This had been put together by
Eidman
, head of propaganda in the province, someone no one here in Tambov had heard of before. And the ominous series of directives being issued were more often signed by the provincial committee secretaries, Pinson,
Meshcheryakov
,
Rayvid
, and Meyer; the chairmen of the provincial executive committee,
Zaguzov
or
Shlikhter
; the chairman of the provincial Cheka,
Traskovich
; and the head of the political section,
Galuzo
. These names were also completely unknown in Tambov and also belonged to people sent here from elsewhere. There were others among the staff of the provincial administration who did not sign ominous orders but made all the decisions jointly:
Smolensky
,
Zarin
,
Nemtsov
,
Lopato
, and even some women—
Kollegaeva
,
Shestakova
. . . Ektov had never heard of them either, but there was one among them who truly was local, the vicious and unrestrained Bolshevik
Vasilyev
, a man known to everyone from his crude behavior in the city in 1917, when he had stamped his feet and whistled down speakers at formal meetings in the
Naryshkin
Reading Room. Ektov had never heard of any of the others, and yet this whole pack must have come from the same intelligentsia opposition that he had. And if they had met somewhere just a few years earlier, before the revolution, would he not have shaken their hands . . . ?

But propaganda is only propaganda, and the Bolsheviks had to call in reinforcements. Antonov
’
s intelligence determined that a Cheka
special forces
regiment had arrived from Moscow along with another squadron from the Tula Cheka, 250 more cavalry from Kazan, and about a hundred from Saratov. From
Kozlov
had come a
“
communist detachment,
”
and two more of them had been mobilized in Tambov. Even the
“
Sverdlov
Mechanized Detachment
”
appeared among them, as well as a separate railway battalion. (The risky business of intelligence was carried out by a faithful peasant woman who went about with a milk pot, and by a reliable peasant who hauled firewood into the city. It was through such a woman that Pavel once sent an oral message to Polina and got a reply that she and their daughter were unharmed and still undiscovered by the Cheka; they had little to live on, but their hopes were high . . .)

No longer fearing for the safety of Tambov city, the Red leaders began stationing their expanded forces through the three rebellious districts, in particular the Tambov District, aiming at systematically occupying it. (In a large village of some 10,000 inhabitants, they took eighty hostages and announced to the residents that if they did not turn in all their firearms by noon the next day, all eighty would be shot. The threat seemed far too extreme to be true, and the village did not believe it. No one turned in any weapons, and at noon the next day, before the villagers, all eighty were shot.)

Bolshevik airplanes (some painted in boastful red) began making flights to observe and sometimes even drop bombs, terrifying the villagers.

In the autumn, to avoid the growing pressure from these new forces, Antonov began temporarily withdrawing his main forces to neighboring Saratov or Penza Province. (The Saratov peasants, in revenge for the horses that were requisitioned or exchanged, began capturing the Tambov rebels and dealing out their own crude reprisals. Such is the fate of peasant uprisings . . .)

Ego took part in these raids along with the rest of the staff. He had grown accustomed to a life on horseback, always on the move and with no roof over his head, often cold and often terrified as he fled before pursuers. Did be become a soldier? No, that he could not do. He found it too difficult and had never been trained for it. It was a matter of simply enduring. He shared the pain of the peasants, and that filled the empty places in his soul: he was where he should be. (And had he not come here, he would be sitting and trembling in some little hideaway in Tambov, despising himself.)

Still the rebellious land refused to be pacified! Though it became much more difficult in late autumn and early winter to find cover and bivouacs for the night, the ranks of the partisans continued to swell. The requisitions made by the Red detachments, their brazen robberies in which they divided up the peasants
’
belongings right before the eyes of their owners, their vicious beatings of old men, and the villages like
Afanasyevka
and
Babino
that they burned to the ground, driving the old and the young out into the snow—all this gave new impetus to the partisan resistance. (But the partisans also had to feed themselves. Formerly, they had taken food from the families of the militant Reds, then from the families of Red
Army soldiers; but eventually, this was not enough, and they had to take from the peasants. Some gave willingly, others became bitterly resentful.)

By midwinter, two partisan armies had been formed, each having ten regiments. The first army was commanded by Tokmakov, the second by Antonov. Now there were some genuine soldiers among the staff and they set things in order, beginning with uniforms: private soldiers were to wear a red patch above the elbow on their left sleeve; commanders also wore a ribbon and a triangular patch, top down or up; brigade commanders wore a diamond patch. Commanders were elected at regimental meetings (they also chose political commissars and even members of the regimental tribunal). Clear orders were issued: there was a complete ban on entering villages to confiscate clothes and goods and search for food; partisans were instructed to exchange horses with the peasants as rarely as possible and only with permission of their medical assistant, and they were to take better care of their horses. The partisans were granted leave just as in the regular army, but they also had their own militia in the villages to check each partisan
’
s pass.