The Commissariat of Enlightenment (12 page)

1919

THE
Thorneycroft stopped at a roadblock on a small rise under a sky so leaden it appeared to crush the flat, washed-out country beneath it. No clouds could be distinguished, only a great limiting grayness. Things burned in the landscape and tendrils of sweet smoke spiraled up the hill. The country was as soundless and lifeless as a tomb.

After a minute the back doors of the car squealed open left and right and two men stepped from it. The one in uniform nodded to the indifferent sentries. The second man, in Army boots and a rough militarylike civilian jacket with tarnished brass buttons, lifted a pair of gun-metal binoculars to his face. They were poor pieces of equipment, hardly better than opera glasses. He trained the instrument on the countryside. Running the two interlocking spheres of sight along the black river, he could pick out a few man-made structures, which were signified as a town on the map. But it was a large village at most, apparently uninhabited. The fields of grain around it showed ugly patches of spoiled rye; also patches of land that had been harvested early and plowed over, as in Kamenka and Yatsk.

Down the rise a young soldier on horseback galloped toward them and snapped at the animal’s flank with a long switch. His face was red from exertion and upset. Despite the horse’s gallop, it took the rider an impossibly long time to climb the hill, as if man and beast were moving within a nightmare. Comrade Astapov saw that the news brought by the soldier would be disappointing. The young man surfaced at the top of his climb, gasping for breath, and nearly hurled himself off the horse.

“Comrade!” he cried, first to Astapov, but then, confused by the new situation, as he had been for days, he turned to his commander, and again said, “Comrade!”

Commander Shishko frowned and waited. Astapov looked away, down at the country. Char lined the empty window-frame of a small house off the road. Two contests of wills played out now: one, in the occupied village, that would have no bearing on the course of the civil war, whose front had passed them by; the other, here on this hill, between the commander and the civilian commissar, extending a series of skirmishes that would decide the future relations between the army and the Party. The soldier was made uneasy by the competing authorities. Fatigued by the day, Shishko gave in for the moment, turning toward Comrade Astapov so the soldier could report to both men.

“They’ve killed Tarass!”

Having relieved himself of the information, the soldier exhaled and brushed some burrs from the front of his uniform. He was a handsome youth, a boy named Nikitin from Kemerevo with a shock of blond hair and strong, gleaming teeth, perhaps the only feature that Astapov envied in other men. Nikitin was more intelligent than the others—he could read, he followed orders, he was conscious of the great historical moment. The troops respected
him. In Yatsk, his revolver emptied, he had picked up a stave and killed an armed peasant with a blow to the side of the head.

“Some sort of sniper, by the graveyard. We returned fire, but he escaped. We never saw him. He got Tarass with a single shot.” And then, because he thought his assessment sounded nearly appreciative, the young man added, “the fucker.”

He waved in a general direction down the road, on the other side of the river, but Astapov couldn’t make out the cemetery.

“Civilians?” he asked.

“Yes, comrade, local peasants. The White Army never reached this far, and there’s no Cossacks in the area. But they’ve put up resistance. They know the terrain, they have rifles…”

“Have you summoned the headman? He has to be brought to account,” Shishko demanded in a tone whose urgency was unable to mask his weariness. This was his sixth consecutive year at war and he had grown old in it. Ashes from Kamenka, three days before, still clung to his uniform pants leg. He was filled with foreboding and regret, not for the first time in this campaign. He longed for home, which either no longer existed or would no longer provide refuge.

Nikitin’s glance flickered for a moment, down at his feet. “No, comrade commander. After losing Tarass…I thought it was better to wait for direct orders, in case we met further resistance. But we’re patrolling the road. The peasants are staying indoors. In the meanwhile, we’ve kept the camp down by the bridge. Gryaz seemed too dangerous.”

Shishko grimaced and Comrade Astapov’s expression seconded his unhappiness with the position of the troops. In fact, Nikitin had done the right thing, but Astapov couldn’t contradict Shishko directly. Although the Party claimed primacy in all affairs,
whether political or military, or moral and personal, the chain of command was often left to be decided in the field. It was made more ambiguous by the absence of the unit’s regular military commissar, who had been left behind in Lomov to lie undisturbed in his sweaty embrace with dysentery. Astapov, urgently sent to Kamenka as a substitute, had met Shishko just a few days earlier. The commander had been no more than a lieutenant in the Tsar’s army and was obviously bewildered by the tactics required in this new war against a hidden native enemy.

Shishko spat. “The bridge is useless.”

“Yes, comrade commander,” said Nikitin. He paused for a few moments to gather his thoughts. Astapov realized that the report wasn’t finished. “The peasants will continue their resistance,” Nikitin predicted. “They’ll try to pick off our men, I’m sure of it. They’ve hidden their grain and livestock. I know this territory. I know these peasants, they’re a lot like the ones we have back home: crafty and greedy. Comrade commander, they’ve killed one of our own. We need to take hostages and make reprisals.”

Reprisals had been taken in Kamenka, where the village had nearly overwhelmed Shishko’s company; the peasants had even acquired a machine gun. The troops had responded by setting fire to houses and farm buildings. The village headman was eventually captured and hung from a tree by a well off the road. His body was left there for two days while the Reds searched every cellar and barn for gold and food. Livestock was slaughtered and what could not be taken for provisions was left in ruins. A girl was raped.

Comrade Astapov arrived in Kamenka on the second day of the reprisals; his lacquered black Thorneycroft had been fired upon accidentally by his own troops. His driver had been livid. Although no damage was done and it was evident that the attack had come from their side, he demanded permission to fire back. Once they
arrived, Astapov exchanged few words with the tight-lipped, distrustful commander. As the day stretched on, its increments marked by gunfire, Astapov’s face hardened. Only when the soldier who raped the girl was brought to the Revkom command post by a platoon commander vaguely aware that the man had violated army discipline did Astapov speak to the troops’ disorder.

“And how do you serve the Revolution?” he asked the soldier.

The soldier, whose name was Sergeyev, did not know what to make of the civilian, who was obviously a Bolshevik, if not a Jew. Sergeyev was drunk and in this condition maintained perfect conformity with his comrades; the main provisions the Red Army had uncovered in Kamenka had been vodka. Sergeyev had come into the Revkom looking cowed, prepared to be beaten. But Astapov’s question, which was intended to intimidate the soldier, merely amused him, and his fat, gap-toothed mouth worked itself into a grin.

“With my dick, your honor!”

Astapov flinched, but not so the other men noticed. He dismissed the soldier. Shishko made no comment; he had already seen too much brutality in this war to care about a single instance of rape.

Now, as Nikitin waited for orders, Shishko beat down a rising swell of anger at Astapov’s presence. Astapov had probably never fired a gun in his life. Even his credentials were suspect: he was from the…the Commissariat of
Enlightenment?
A
cultural
commissar? The civil war might have already been won if it weren’t for the Bolshevik interference: the military commissars, the political commissars, the cultural commissars, fucking Trotsky in charge of the army. He suppressed a scowl when Astapov responded.

“Have you
taken
any prisoners?” Astapov asked Shishko’s deputy, his sarcasm thick. “Do you
have
any hostages?”

“Not yet, comrade,” said Nikitin. “But that’s easy enough.”

Astapov gazed down again on the country and now his vision cleared. He realized that he was looking at another hill on the other side of the river, where a scatter of small structures on a green berm lay around a white stone wall. Inside the wall some ecclesiastical buildings were arranged: a bell tower, a single dome like a dim beacon in the haze. He should have seen it before.

“What church is that?”

“Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz,” said Nikitin. “It’s a small monastery.”

The maps didn’t show a monastery. Issued decades ago by the Imperial Army, the maps were worse than useless. It was no wonder Russia had lost the war against Germany.

“What church authorities reside there?” he asked Nikitin.

“An archpriest, some Nikon or Kuzmas. Some monks and other clergy, I suppose.”

“And what kind of resistance have they presented?”

“None. We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of them. Perhaps they’ve given sanctuary to some women and children, but that’s all.”

Comrade Astapov raised his glasses and inspected the monastery. It was in poor condition, with part of a wall tumbled down, but someone had tended the lawn around the wall and it glowed lush in defiance of the neglect and poverty of its surroundings. The monastery appeared to be uninhabited. No smoke rose from any of its chimneys nor those of the outer buildings.

“That’s plenty,” he said. “Sanctuary is a symbolic notion. It ennobles the building and the territory around it. It suggests that the Church somehow stands apart from the Revolution.”

The Church had sought to stand apart from the Revolution
from the very beginning. The Moscow Patriarch had called on “faithful children of the Orthodox Church…to have nothing in common with these monsters of the human race.” The Bolsheviks had replied by confiscating Church property and prohibiting organized religious instruction. The state press labeled the clerics “black crows” and “filth.” In the desperate war for the grain-producing regions of the eastern and southern provinces, faith remained the peasants’ bulwark. Local clergy spoke out against expropriations of land and produce; religious agencies organized resistance. The countryside was inflamed by rumors that Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev, leaders of peasant uprisings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had returned to life. As famine raged, the Bolsheviks promised victory in “the battle for bread.” The Church encouraged belief in the coming advent of a Redless peasant utopia.

“We can take Saint Svyetoslav in a half hour,” Nikitin said brightly. “And billet there tonight.”

Respecting the official lines of authority, Nikitin had turned his head toward Shishko when he made the suggestion, but without moving his feet, so that the bulk of his body still faced the civilian. The merits of the proposal were obvious. Although the monastery was elevated, with a tower that made a good defensive position, the Reds could bring artillery against it. And it would be safer to bunk there than in the restless village.

“We have no orders to seize the monastery,” Shishko snapped, not wanting to be in too-ready agreement with Astapov. “It’s not even on the maps.”

“The monastery may prove valuable,” Astapov suggested cautiously, “for enlightenment-propaganda work.”

The commander took quick offense. “This is a military deci
sion. I’m not going to waste ammunition and risk men for a church. Gryaz has to be suppressed before the food brigades arrive. That’s my orders.”

“You’ll spare the monastery?”

“It can wait.”

“The monastery is the key to the lock,” said Astapov, half to himself. For months he had watched the Red troops occupy one sullen, defeated settlement after another. The peasants bided their time, waiting them out until the next occupier. Astapov went on: “The people can’t recognize their vital interests—their class interests—as long as they’re besotted by priests and imprisoned by superstition. It’s our duty to free them.”

The commander grunted. “It’s my duty to follow orders.”

Astapov said abruptly, “Please, comrade commander, give me a horse. I’ll leave the car here. I want to be seen unarmed. And Nikitin, you come too, without your carbine.”

Shishko noted that his deputy accepted Astapov’s command directly, as if Astapov held rank. This blatant civilian meddling was contrary to the first principles of military discipline, even contrary to the stipulations of the War Commissariat. Without thinking, borne on a tide of bitterness, Shishko brought his hand to rest on his sidearm. Someone might get a bullet in his back before the day was through.

THE
girl rarely made an effort to recall her early childhood and hardly thought of the past or even of the previous day. The circumstances that had placed Yelena Bogdanova in the Saint Savior’s Home for Girls located in Moscow’s Presnya district would always remain unclear. She possessed no memory of a family, nor of the baptismal priest who, per orphanage tradition, had given her his surname. The nuns had cared for her tenderly, intimating in the girl a sacred vulnerability, and she had grown to nascent womanhood apparently destined to become a nun herself. In those years war and famine lapped against the gray stone walls of the institution, which was adjacent to a restive, strike-prone bread factory. Workers they never met kept them fed with loaves thrown over the wall, but the absence of grain eventually closed the factory. Then came October and both the factory and the orphanage were requisitioned by the city soviet.

Nuns, girls, and infants: they were all cast out, dispersed so thoroughly that in the years ahead when the survivors passed in the street or waited together in a rations queue they would not
recognize each other. For months Yelena Bogdanova wandered the stricken, hotly contested country, a runtish fifteen-year-old with a patched cloth valise. Her skin was so pale and her hair so colorless, her step so light and her purchase on this earth so trivial, that she did not seem possessed of substance at all. She traveled by herself, with hardly a word to the men and women she encountered.

The roads were dangerous, held by bandits and irregular formations, and even the official armies preyed upon refugees for their maintenance. She was left untouched by them, by men who either didn’t see her or found in her something to fear or imposed some other daunting meaning on her luminous solitariness. They were correct in their suspicions that she was deranged: her mind was occupied less by articulate thoughts than by sequences of related and unrelated images that collided and merged like playing cards being shuffled in a deck. Rarely did one observation lead to another or to some theory about her fate. Life came at her raw, unseasoned by meaning. Entirely focused on the moment, Yelena told herself no stories.

In the orphanage she had rarely looked from the draped, leaded windows onto the front yard. Now, although the world seemed impossibly large and various, constructed from hardships, Yelena was not made unhappy by her tramp across central Russia. Most of it was accomplished in dry, warm weather. The consumption of whatever meager nourishment she could obtain satisfied her. She had been given no expectations of good fortune in this life.

The girl begged wordlessly. She found temporary jobs in a dairy, in a vegetable market, in a stable, and finally (after dairy, vegetable market, and stable were nationalized) with the Revo
lution. Because the nuns had taught her to read and write, the Reds sent her to the agitprop unit in Samara, which was then under the command of Comrade Astapov. She arrived with a dozen other similarly nondescript girls. Most of their work was clerical, but she did it competently in the Enlightenment offices that had been established in an expropriated religious school. After showing dexterity in repairing some torn moving picture film, she was assigned to the cine-section. She liked the work, especially the sharp, yielding touch of the celluloid edges between her thumb and forefinger. She had never met the substance before.

The entire unit was kept on a military footing, with early-morning reveille and target practice. Comrade Astapov declared that the propaganda battle was the war’s most vital struggle. Every day he rushed about Samara in his black car, inspecting Enlightenment’s propaganda dissemination points, the
agitpunkts,
and searching for places to locate new ones. Then he rushed back to headquarters, shouted out some orders, and returned to the field. In the evenings he gave political lectures to his staff, repeating the arguments that had come down from Comrade Ilich, the supreme Bolshevik leader, who was known affectionately by his patronymic. Yelena heard barely a word of the lectures.

One afternoon about six months ago, several films and other propaganda material had arrived from Moscow. Yelena helped unpack the goods, including bundles of fresh political posters. The workers chose the floor of an empty room on which to lay them. Yelena hardly looked at the drawings, which she could not possibly comprehend, neither their exhortations nor even which personalities the brashly drawn caricatures caricatured. The civil war was a distant argument between relations she hardly knew. A single poster caught her attention, even though she was unsure of its
meaning. The only feature that she immediately recognized in it was the woman in the foreground, who represented the Mother of God.

“Comrade?”

It was Astapov, interrupting her study of the artwork. He was wondering why she had stopped working. Yelena didn’t realize that she had been standing motionless above the poster for nearly five minutes. A rashlike flush was raised upon her cheeks and an unusual warmth now ignited deep within her pelvis and passed through her body. The heat had a stimulating effect on her consciousness. In only a few moments she became aware exactly of where she was and the events, small and large, that had brought her there. Every half-thought and image that had been whirling around her suddenly came to a halt, settling like fallen leaves.

The poster was a trick black-and-white illustration in which a pregnant Mother of God looked at another poster, which advertised a film promoting abortion. The anonymous artist (it was Borovich, Astapov knew him slightly) had treated Saint Mary roughly, twisting her head heavenward into an impossible position, in a broad parody of a conventional icon. Her grief was transformed into comic ruefulness. In the caption at the bottom of the poster, the Mother of God exclaimed, “Oh, why didn’t I know that before!”

Yelena replied slowly, finding it difficult to speak, her voice thin. “I don’t understand the poster. What didn’t she know before?”

Now Astapov blushed. “You know.” He was impatient with himself for his embarrassment and annoyed with the girl. “That it’s possible to have an abortion. To end a pregnancy. There’s famine now and damn the Church. Mothers should limit the num
ber of mouths they feed, that’s simple enough. The poster’s crude, but it gets the point across.”

The point came across. Until that moment abortion had existed for Yelena Bogdanova only as an obscure, undefined notion. The agitation-propaganda poster made it concrete, drawing several additional concepts out of abstraction, in the order contrary to their progression: the exigencies of famine, pregnancy, sexual relations. Although they had been dutifully and superficially revealed to her by the nuns, these facts had never before possessed materiality. Yelena felt herself take on weight, seized within the embrace of the earth’s gravitational field. The abortion, the pregnancy, and the sexual relations became hers.

She became aware that Comrade Astapov was staring, appraising her reaction to the poster. Yelena then, six months ago, had been afraid for the first time since she had left the orphanage.