The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (69 page)

So there they are, huddling by the coal bunkers of the Lady Eleonora, locked in a cage of rain and solitude, these people without a homeland.

“This is strange,” an old stoker says to me. “Who are we? We’re Russians, but we’re not citizens. Here they won’t allow us in, and there they chase us away. The Russians won’t have anything to do with me, and the English never had anything to do with me in the first place. Where should I go, and how can I start over again? Four thousand ships are lying idle in New York, and three hundred in Marseilles. Everyone tells me to go back where I came from. But I came from Ryazan* thirty years ago.”

“You shouldn’t have made a run for it, you foolish stoker!” I tell him. “Who were you running from?”

“I know, I know,” the old man answers. “You’re right.”

In the evening, like a morose herd, they went with their knapsacks down to the port to board a foreign boat heading for Constantinople. They were pushed and jostled on the gangway by the gray mackintoshes and the trunks of the perfumed ladies. A crimson captain with gold brocade on his cap shouted at them from the bridge, “Get away from there, you dogs! I’ve had enough of you, you freeloading scum! Out of the way! Let the passengers pass!”

They were standing next to a pile of ropes on the stern. Then the ropes were needed and they were driven to the other end of the ship. They loafed about on deck, stunned, timorous, silent, with their stained sailors’ shirts and their little waiflike bundles. When the ship whistled its departure, and the ladies on board started throwing flowers to the people who were seeing them off, the old stoker went to the railing and yelled over to me in despair, “If we were at least subjects of some country or other, that bald-headed dog wouldn’t be bullying us like this!”

MUSLIM SEMINARIES AND SOVIET SCHOOLS

A crucial and imperceptible battle is being waged with hidden and muffled doggedness. It is being waged everywhere, on the □leak slopes of inaccessible mountains and in the humid valleys of Lower Ajaria.
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One camp has a mosque and a fanatical hocha> a teacher of the Koran, the other an unprepossessing little hut with some of its doors and windows missing, and a red banner with “Workers’ School” written in faded lettering. In a few days I will head out into the mountains to take a close look at the tortuous tactics of the battle for cultural predominance. I will set out on the inscrutable zigzagging trek that one has to undertake to reach these muffled and remote villages that are still saturated with the blind and poisonous poetry of feudalism and religious stagnation. In the meantime, I will share with you a few facts that I have collected from my review of the work of the People’s Commissariat of Education.

Influencing a persons soul requires vision and circumspection. Under the difficult conditions of the East, these qualities must be multiplied by ten and pushed to the limit. A situation that is crystal clear. But the Menshevik cavalry of enlightenment^ thought otherwise. They imported the guileless ardor of shortsighted national chauvinism into

the tottering kingdom of the Ajarian Mullah. The results were not surprising. The population ended up ferociously despising anything that came from the government. The state school serving a dozen villages had ten to fifteen students, while the Muslim seminary was bursting at the seams with the sheer abundance of its pupils. The peasants brought the hochas money, food, and building supplies for repair work, while the Menshevik school deteriorated and emptied out, which undermined not only the authority of its founders (that would have been only a minor misfortune), but also gnawed away at the basic foundation of the culture that these prereform schools had brought with them.

And so the Mensheviks left a legacy, a cursed legacy. Now we were faced with getting rid of it. Not an easy task. Mistrust had been fanned in the Muslim peasants, and passions burst into flame. The basic battle over alphabets wound its roots around the immense task of political education. The Congress of Ajarian Executive Committee Members was fully aware of this. It prescribed a method of careful gradualism and ideological competition which is now beginning to bear fruit.

The Muslim seminaries were left alone. They coexisted with the Soviet schools. On top of this, the Peoples Commissariat of Education persistently set about opening schools in those places where religious schools already existed. It was not uncommon for hochas to be asked to teach the Turkish language in Soviet schools, and the hochas came and brought with them large crowds of children. The decree that Turkish had to be taught, while the official administrative language was to remain Georgian, played a decisive role.

We have now had the experience of a year and a half of work. What are the results? They are highly propitious. The rift has been completed. The scholastic cadaver of the Muslim seminaries has been crushed by the vital workers’ system of teaching that is inherent in our schools. The children are literally running from the hochas classes, jumping out of windows, at times breaking down doors to run and hide from their severe tutors. The number of pupils studying in Soviet schools is sharply rising. And this victory was achieved without a single repressive measure, without a shadow of coercion. Unstoppable change and the power of the self-evident have brought this about with unparalleled speed and clarity. Our vital task is clear: we must fortify these bloodless and momentous conquests and expand them, but . . .

there are so many “buts” at this point that I shall have to begin a new paragraph.

The Ajaristan Peoples Commissariat of Education has no money. It wouldn’t even be worth touching on this routine fact had not the Ajaristan Peoples Commissariat of Educations lack of money reached legendary proportions. Suffice it to say that the teachers’ wages for the last seven months—from January through August—were only paid a few days ago, thanks to a four-billion-ruble credit that was finally allotted by the Ajarian Council of People’s Commissars after almost a year of reflection. If one considers the unbearable conditions that a cultural worker thrown into the wild gorges of Upper Ajaria has to endure, cut off from the outside world in the winter, trapped with distrustful peasants who are in need of tireless and drawn-out processing—all of this without any form of pay—then it is a true miracle that these cultural workers do not simply run away. The basic preparation of the teaching staff has been taken over by the People’s Commissariat of Education. There is now a Teacher’s College in Khutsubani, where about two dozen Ajarian youths are studying, and very soon the first staff of Muslim teachers will graduate. These will be teachers equally proficient in Georgian and Turkish, imbued with belief in Soviet power and familiar with the basics of modern pedagogy. A pedagogical institute with the same goals will be opened in Batum in the coming school year. This institute will have to be given particular attention. Crumbs from the Menshevik pedagogical table have proved quite a hindrance to the work at hand, as has the problem of our workers having not yet adapted to the particular characteristics of the population. Everything will change the moment the true flesh-and-blood Ajarians return to their villages as teachers and propagandists. They will be welcomed with honor, trust, and love.

They will return as teachers and propagandists. I use the word “propagandist” deliberately. It is not coincidental that to implement the new school system, our districts have welded together a triad made up of a local director from the People’s Education Committee, a representative of the Party Committee, and an instructor from the People’s Commissariat of Education. The little hut with its red banner with “Workers’ School” written in faded lettering is the core to which we must in the future attach a reading room, a model workshop, and a cultural movie theater. There is no better way of penetrating the halfopened hearts of these mountain people. In a village, a teacher must be, all in one, the Peoples Commissariat of Education, the Chief Political Educator, and the Agitation and Propaganda Minister of the Party Committee. In the coming year several schools are already beginning small model weaving workshops and courses in silkworm breeding. The success of these enterprises is preordained. Even women, veiled Ajarian women, are eagerly participating in these courses.

But as far as the repairing of school buildings is concerned, things couldn’t be worse. Most of the buildings are no more than dilapidated hovels. The local Executive Committees have declared themselves ready to help rebuild the schools in whatever way they can. Compared to last year, when the peasants believed that they were showing immeasurable indulgence toward the government by even sending their children to school, the Executive Committees current readiness to help shows an important change in attitude. But a village can only offer what it has. The villages have no steel, glass, tiles, and no learning materials. Let us hope that the recently renewed staff of the Ajaristan People’s Commissariat of Education will show some persistence in this. Needless to say, there is not much it can do if the central Tbilisi institutions will not help by sending supplies such as textbooks and handicraft manuals.

TOBACCO

A weak-eyed little old woman turns to the People’s Commissariat for Social Security for help.

“There is no tobacco,” the official at the People’s Commissariat for Social Security tells her in consternation. “We’ve run out of it. You can forget tobacco!”

What role does tobacco play here? Murky waters. But let us continue.

A schoolmistress goes to the People’s Commissariat of Education.

“We did have tobacco, but there’s none left,” the comrade from the People’s Commissariat of Education venomously shouts in response to her request. “You can kiss tobacco good-bye! Another month or two and we’ll have seen the very last of it!”

And finally, the garbage man roughly demands his due from the Department of Municipal Economy.

“Where are we supposed to find tobacco?” the comrade from the Department of Municipal Economy yells angrily. “Do you think it’s sprouting here on my palms, huh? Or are you perhaps suggesting we start a tobacco plantation in the little garden in front of the building?”

Amazing Abkhazia! Little old ladies smoke tobacco with the same fervor garbage men do, and the primmest schoolmistress doesn’t lag far behind.

Murky waters. And how sadly these waters shimmer when a decisive complaint is lodged in the Department of Tobacco Cultivation.

In 1914, the tobacco harvest in Abkhazia had risen to a million poods. That was a record number, and all the conditions indicated that it would continue to rise steadily. Even before the war, the tobacco from Sukhumi triumphed decisively over the Kuban and Crimean tobaccos. The factories of Petrograd, Rostov-on-Don, and southern Russia worked with the Sukhumi crop. Exports grew with every passing year. The former tobacco monopolists—Macedonia, Turkey, Egypt—had to acknowledge the incomparable quality of their new competitor’s crop. The most delicate assortments, issued by the illustrious factories of Cairo, Alexandria, and London, acquired new status from the Abkhazian tobacco blend. Our product was quick to clinch its reputation as one of the best in the world, and foreign capital headed briskly for the Abkhazian coast, building gigantic storehouses and setting up industrialized tobacco plantations.

In the years before the war the price of tobacco fluctuated, depending on its quality, from fourteen to thirty rubles a pood. The average yield per hectare was eighty to a hundred poods. The most prevalent size of a peasant plantation was three to four hectares. The pioneers of tobacco culture on the shores of Abkhazia were Greeks and Armenians. Then the inhabitants of the region made successful use of the pioneers’ experiment and turned the cultivation of tobacco into the areas economic mainstay. The Sukhumi farmers’ profits grew, in spite of the thievery of the wholesalers and the Czars imperial administration. Now it is clear why “tobacco comes in all qualities”—because it is embraced by everyone, from frail little old ladies to diligent schoolmistresses.

After 1914, the war began plying its ruinous trade. Waves of migrants crushed the delicate crop, the first onslaught of the Revolution inevitably deepening the crisis, and then the dire Mensheviks obliterated what was left.

In the fertile and enchanted garden we call Abkhazia, one quickly learns to vehemently detest the Mensheviks, that species of sluggish wood louse that left its tracks in full manifestation of its creative genius. During the two years that they ruled, they managed to wreck all the vital establishments of the city, opened up Abkhazia’s wealth of timber to the plunder of foreign sharks, and, with the declaration of a tobacco monopoly, finally dealt a fatal blow to the nerve of the region. The monopoly wasn’t half the evil. A government, conducting intelligent economic policies, will resort to measures that are even more drastic, but it will resort to them cleverly. The Menshevik monopoly was calculated to cause the quick demise of the tobacco industry. Parallel to the fact that the low government price did not reflect the manufacturing cost, there was also the problem of prices on the foreign market exceeding the fixed rate by four hundred percent. What recourse did a planter have under such circumstances? None. He gladly extricated himself from this dead-end situation.

Under the aegis of enlightened seafarers, Abkhazia’s tobacco industry came to a peaceful end. To put it in starker terms: not even a pound of newly harvested tobacco ended up on the markets between 1918 and 1920. The plantations were given over to maize, a situation accelerated by a suspension of grain imports from Soviet Russia. The gaping wound began oozing and has remained open.

Such was the legacy of the Mensheviks. And here—when one considers how the present Soviet government is going about liquidating this sad legacy—one frankly has to admit that there is neither enough know-how nor a systematic rigor. It is true that the new Soviet government abolished the monopoly—but this only to make room for official mayhem. Petitions lodged by the tobacco industry are looked at every two weeks, at which point the most contradictory responses rain down upon the bewildered heads of the planters. All kinds of institutions have a hand in running the tobacco industry, but none of them are putting much effort into it. There is right now an unsettled dispute between the Committee of Exports and the People s Commissariat of Abkhazia about who will dispose of the rest of the tobacco funds left over after the Menshevik tenure. During the year and a half of Soviet rule, about half a million poods of tobacco was disposed of without a plan and at minimal prices, in order to cover ongoing government expenses. As for the future, the yield of 1922 will barely reach ten thousand poods of fresh tobacco. The dwindling plantations are not being restored. Vague permissions, vague prohibitions, cumbersome footnotes to bulky paragraphs, have resulted in the complete bewilderment of the planters, who, as it is, have been uncertain of what the future has in store for them. Without that certainty there will be no revival. And therefore the farmer is planting maize on his hectare of land, which can bring him at best a wholesale revenue of ten, fifteen million. Tobacco, an average yield of which can bring him a revenue of seventy-five to a hundred million, is neglected. The material conditions of the Abkhazian peasant have drastically worsened. His clothes are tattered and he lives in a dilapidated house, which he cannot renovate for lack of money.