Russia Washed in Blood: A Novel in Fragments

Russia Washed in Blood

Artyom Vesyoly by Daniil Daran

Russia Washed in Blood

A Novel in Fragments

Artyom Vesyoly

Translated by Kevin Windle

With an introduction by Kevin Windle and Elena Govor

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Artyom Vesyoly; Translated by Kevin Windle

With an introduction by Kevin Windle and Elena Govor 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940394

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-484-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-484-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Note on Russian Names

Introduction by Kevin Windle and Elena Govor

Death Tramples upon Death

Private Maxim Kuzhel Has the Floor

The Blaze Spreads and Rages

On the River Kuban

The Black Epaulette

The Conquerors’ Banquet

Bitter Hangover

Etudes

Pride

Summary Justice

A Glimmer of Courage

The Capture of Armavir

A Letter

What the Guns Told of

A Garden of Delights

Escaping Turkish Captivity

Blood Brothers

Filka’s Career

In the Steppe

A Wild Heart

The Town of Klyukvin

The Village of Khomutovo

Might Is Right

Glossary

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the editors of Cardinal Points for permission to make use of material published therein in October 2019.

The translator is deeply grateful to his colleague Elena Govor, Artyom Vesyoly’s granddaughter, for her close collaboration and advice at every stage of this project. Without her willing support, it would have been difficult to bring it to fruition.

Sincere gratitude is due to Marian Simpson, who read the complete typescript with great care and offered valuable advice, to Robert Chandler for helpful suggestions, to the late James Grieve, for many conversations on matters of wording, usage, phrasing and history, and to Ludmilla, for her ready assistance and patience.

The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.

NOTE ON RUSSIAN NAMES

Personal names in Russian have three components: first name, patronymic and surname, for example Ivan Mikhailovich Chernoyarov, Anna Pavlovna Sinitsyna. The patronymic indicates the name of the bearer’s father, Mikhail in the first example, Pavel in the second.

Formal address, roughly equivalent to Mr and Mrs, is traditionally by first name and patronymic.

First names usually have many hypocoristic forms, which express different nuances of attitude and emotion: Ivan will be known to his intimates as (among other forms) Vanya, or Vanka; Maria – Masha, Mashenka; Dmitry – Dima, Mitya, Mityenka or Mitka; Alexander and Alexandra – Sasha, Sashenka, Sashka, Shura; Vasily – Vasya, Vaska. In the interests of clarity, and at the cost of some expressive nuances, the variety of forms has been somewhat reduced in this translation. Since Vasily Galagan is almost always addressed and referred to as Vaska, the latter form is the one predominantly applied. In southern Russia, Mikhail (Misha, Mishka) often occurs in the forms Mikhailo or Mikhaila, and Nikolai (Kolya, Nika) is replaced by Mikola (in Ukrainian Mykola).

Nicknames and names of animals and ships are translated in the text where possible. Surnames, however meaningful, are left untranslated.

Many geographical names have changed in the past century, some more than once. The translation preserves the forms used in the original, for example Tiflis (Tbilisi), Petrograd (St Petersburg), Yekaterinodar (Krasnodar), Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad, Volgograd), adding a note where required. Where English usage has changed, the translation adheres to the norms of the period: for example the Ukraine, the Crimea. With few exceptions, geographical names are not translated.

INTRODUCTION

Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938, real name Nikolai Ivanovich Kochkurov) was born in Samara on the Volga. His father was a carter and loader, and the son, who started work at fourteen, would later describe his own working career as follows: ‘factory – tramp – newspaper seller – cabman – clerk – agitator – Red Guard – newspaper – party work – Red Army soldier – student – sailor – writer.’¹ He joined the Bolshevik Party in March 1917, aged seventeen, and was soon involved in the Civil War of 1918–1921. After being wounded in action in June 1918, having enough schooling to read and write – the first of his family to acquire literacy – he was assigned to propagandist duties. He travelled the front-line areas in an ‘agit-train’, producing propaganda material and editing local Bolshevik newspapers.

At this stage of his life, Vesyoly’s political and ideological views accorded fully with those of the revolutionary leadership. When in the spring of 1918 he met the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, then in Samara and a staunch supporter of the Bolshevik cause, the two argued heatedly: Hašek upheld Russia’s pre-revolutionary literacy legacy, while Vesyoly spoke fiercely in favour of unceremoniously consigning Pushkin and Tolstoy to the dustbin of history.²

When the Civil War ended, Vesyoly was able to attend the Moscow Institute of Literature, founded by the poet Valery Bryusov, and study the craft of writing. He did not complete the course, but soon began to publish fiction and drama, most of it based on his experience of the social upheaval brought by war and revolution. Recognised as a young writer of great promise, he was a founding member of the Pereval group of writers and briefly a member of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers).

The novel Russia Washed in Blood (Rossiya, krovyu umytaya), first published in full in 1932 but further developed in subsequent editions, is the best-known of his works. In it, he relied heavily on his own experience of the Civil War and on the letters he received from newly literate soldiers and veterans. He also incorporated, in revised form, some novellas which he had published separately in the 1920s.

With Russian writers prominently in mind, Henry James spoke of the novels of the nineteenth century as ‘large, loose, baggy monsters’. Had he lived long enough to read Russia Washed in Blood, which has little else in common with the classics of that period, he might have found that it outstripped in bagginess anything he had previously read. It lacks a unifying plot, and a definite beginning, middle and end. Most parts of the book can be read independently of the others as a series of extended episodes rather than a connected narrative. Nor is unity provided by the characters, though some appear in more than one chapter. It is free of heroes in the traditional sense; its focus is less on individuals than on the crowd, and the voices we hear, often of unidentified speakers, are mostly those of ordinary people with little education. The novel is unfinished: it continued to evolve throughout the author’s life, and we know that his plan was a novel of twenty-four chapters.³ Some early editions bore the words ‘fragments’ or ‘fragment’ beneath the title. Since this remains fully appropriate, we have retained it here. It helps explain, for example, why Ivan Chernoyarov, who is killed at the end of one episode, reappears alive in the next, and why some of the adventures of Maxim Kuzhel and Vaska Galagan, briefly ‘remembered’ in ‘The Conquerors’ Banquet’, are set out only later, in the ‘étude’ entitled ‘In the Steppe’.

A surviving plan, drafted in 1933, tells us that after every three chapters there would be seven études, serving as ‘musical pauses’. Altogether there would be forty-nine such pieces, free-standing stories of two or three pages, linked to the main lines of the novel by ‘their hot breath, place of action, theme and time’.⁴ Clearly, Vesyoly did not follow this design closely: most of the dozen études are much longer, and all are grouped together after the chapter ‘Bitter Hangover’.

The American critic Sophie Court, who read the Russian original at an early date, found much merit in its unusual structure, observing that its ‘fragmentary nature makes each episode, each scene stand out more independently and gives the narrative an unforgettable vividness’. In her view, ‘the sparkling Russian humour, the depth of Russian sadness, and the sincerity and naiveté of Russian pathos combine to make this novel of the Civil War a brilliant, powerful work of art.’⁵

While its form marks a clear break with established tradition, the work’s thematic unity is plain to see: the author’s experience of revolution and civil conflict had wrought a change in his views and brought home to him that the barbaric atrocities which accompanied anarchic elemental freedom would in the end destroy that freedom, and that the adherents of such freedom were laying the ground for dictatorship. Jekatherina Lebedewa observes that this novel, like no other of its time, captured the contradiction between peasant Russia with its dreams of freedom on the one hand, and the ideas, aims and methods of the Bolsheviks, on the other. Vesyoly warned, she writes, that the violent revolution would devour everything, including its own children.⁶ Nowhere is this more forcefully stated than in the étude entitled ‘A Glimmer of Courage’, described by I. V. Boyashov as ‘testimony to the total bestialisation of Russia in a few packed pages’.⁷ The defiant countess, soon to be brutally executed, denounces her tormentors as follows: ‘Who are you going to rob when you’ve finished with us? You’ll go for each other’s throats and all of wretched Russia will drown in your beastly blood!’ All Vesyoly’s works, and Russia Washed in Blood in particular, belong to the literature of moral resistance to the falsification of history, which took root early in the Soviet period.

As Communist Party control over literature tightened in the late 1920s, Vesyoly found it increasingly difficult to conform to its stringent ideological requirements. His short story ‘The Barefoot Truth’, dealing with the difficulties faced by Civil War veterans in finding a place in society, published in 1929 in the journal Molodaya gvardiya, brought the journal a strict reprimand from the Central Committee for printing a ‘caricature of Soviet reality’, ‘of value only to our class enemies’.⁸ As Nina Malygina has pointed out, the story offended by its assertion that power in the Soviet state did not lie in the hands of those who had fought to establish it.⁹ Later his major works would be found wanting for their failure to recognise the ‘leading organisational role’ of the Party in the revolution, the Civil War and the new society. The Party demanded that history and literature record the Civil War as a clean-cut struggle between Reds and Whites, progress and reaction, right and wrong. Vesyoly paints a more complicated picture, in which Reds, Whites, Greens, Cossacks, anarchists and partisans all contend for dominance, ‘normal’ life for civilians is impossible, and neutrality is forbidden. Russia Washed in Blood describes a world of anarchic chaos, social dislocation and frenzied mob violence, devoid of organisation of any kind. The structure – or deliberate formlessness – of his novels reflects this.

The first editions of Russia Washed in Blood were subtitled ‘A Novel in Two Wings: fragments’. ‘Wing One’ featured the collapse of the Transcaucasian front and the turmoil of civil war in the North Caucasus between 1917 and early 1919. ‘Wing Two’ (based on an earlier work entitled Native Land) tells of the installation of Bolshevik rule in provincial Russia in 1918–1919, in a fictional location, somewhere on the Volga. This was the period known as War Communism, when nationalisation of all industries and private enterprises resulted in the collapse of the economy and trade. The peasants refused to sell their produce at the prices set by the state, and famine gripped the cities. In response, Bolshevik requisitioning squads raided the villages to confiscate food products to supply their urban constituencies. Resentment in the ‘straw-thatched countryside’ erupted in violent peasant revolts against the armed might of the Soviet authorities. Few writers have left such disturbingly vivid descriptions of the resulting atrocities as Vesyoly.

Vesyoly’s life came to an early end in the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–1938. By that time, literature was under strict ideological supervision and ‘Socialist Realism’ had been enshrined as doctrine. Free spirits such as Vesyoly, who pulled no punches in his accounts of the revolutionary period, were accused of placing their talents at the service of the counter-revolution. In May 1937, the critic R. Shpunt wrote of Russia Washed in Blood that ‘the whole book slanders our heroic struggle with our enemies, it lampoons the fighters and builders of the young Republic of Soviets’, and that it had enjoyed praise and promotion by ‘Trotskyites’.¹⁰ In June, Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD, wrote to Stalin seeking permission to arrest Vesyoly ‘in connection with his counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity’. ‘Evidence’ had been assembled that he ‘detested the Party leadership’, had stated his ‘terrorist intentions’, and was planning to write a poem in praise of members of the ‘Trotskyite- Zinovyevite centre’ who had been executed.¹¹ He was duly arrested on 28 October 1937, the same day as Boris Pilnyak, with whom he had been linked, and shot on 8 April 1938. His name was then expunged from the annals of Soviet literature and his books removed from libraries and in many cases destroyed. Posthumous rehabilitation came in Khrushchyov’s ‘thaw’ of 1956, and the publication of some of his writings was again permitted, with careful ideological editing.

To this extent, Vesyoly has features in common with Pilnyak and some others who wrote on the theme of the Civil War, for example Isaak Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov, whose Quiet Don, like much of Russia Washed in Blood, is set in the Cossack lands. Of these, only Sholokhov, ‘Stalin’s scribe’, survived the purges.¹² In other respects, however, Vesyoly’s work is very different. Indeed, it is a unique and striking contribution to Russian literature.

The novel is characterised by a distinctive use of language in both dialogue and narrative. The author’s preferred medium is far from the literary language of pre-revolutionary times: it is the colourful, earthy Russian of uneducated people, with a strong admixture of southern dialects. Many chapters include stanzas of poetry and song, and occasional chastushki – a traditional genre of popular song of which Vesyoly was particularly fond. Proverbial sayings are frequent, many of them not well known today. The narrative features folksy locutions, poetic inversions, grammatical forms which are not part of standard Russian, oaths and abusive terms in profusion, arresting images and turns of phrase and much unconventional use of words. In addition, the author deploys a vocabulary of extraordinary range and richness, much of it not recorded in standard dictionaries, but often traceable in the famous dictionary compiled by Vladimir Dal in the nineteenth century, which covers a broad range of dialects. Like a writer of a later period, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vesyoly was known to have spent much time exploring the lexical treasures to be found in it. His wife Lyudmila Borisevich remembered that he filled the margins of his copy with copious notes, adding words he had heard in the course of his travels. In his prose he often formed neologisms by adding new affixes to familiar roots, after the manner of the Futurist poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh, whose bold linguistic experiments he admired.¹³ His unique style attracted wide interest, but not universal approval: one critic observed that it was difficult to penetrate the variegated textual fabric without a dictionary.¹⁴

In her afterword to the German edition, Jekatherina Lebedewa writes that the novel seems ‘virtually untranslatable on account of its unconventional language, its colourful slang and colloquial idioms from the speech of peasants, sailors and soldiers. Literary vocabulary is almost the exception.’¹⁵ And Viktor Shklovsky, in conversation with Ignacy Szenfeld, the Polish translator, opined that before translating the novel into any other language, one first needed to translate it into Russian.¹⁶

It seems therefore legitimate to wonder whether an attempt to produce a translation is a fool’s errand. The same might, of course, be said of many works of literature, especially of poetry, and there is much poetry in Vesyoly’s prose. As in the translation of poetry, some degree of loss is inevitable: the use of regional forms of language and sub-standard Russian, which add much local colour, can hardly be fully replicated. Here the decision has been made to avoid any particular dialect of the Anglosphere, instead resorting where possible to a synthetic sub-standard, exploiting those common features which mark uneducated speech in most of the better-known varieties of demotic English. However, where a choice has to be made, preference has gone to the translator’s native idiom, which is British rather than North American. The interpolated fragments of song and verse, some of them blatnye (of the criminal classes), cannot be closely matched in translation, and the same is true of some earthy adages.

The translation has been made with a close eye to two masterly versions in other languages, mentioned above: Ignacy Szenfeld’s Polish translation (Rosja we krwi skąpana, Warsaw 1964), and Thomas Reschke’s German translation (Blut und Feuer, Berlin 2017), which includes some material not available to Szenfeld. While they may at times differ in their understanding of some passages, these versions often prompt reflection on nuances of interpretation and overt and concealed meanings, and sometimes suggest a solution which can be applied in English. Thomas Reschke’s translation has also provided a model for the annotation. The notes to the text have been supplied by the translator, with the exception of a small number provided by the author (marked ‘Author’s note’).

In addition to vetting this English version closely, Elena Govor, the daughter of Vesyoly’s youngest daughter Volga, has brought to bear her intimate knowledge of the texts, their variants and the background to them. With other members of her family, in particular her aunts Gaira and Zayara Vesyolaya, she has done much to preserve Artyom Vesyoly’s legacy and ensure his place in Russian literary history. For further information in Russian on Vesyoly’s life and works, the reader is referred to Elena Govor’s website: https://artemvesely.com/

This translation is based on the most comprehensive Russian editions (Moscow 1935, 1936, 1958 and 1990), but includes some passages deleted by the censor or by editors. Vesyoly is known to have given his assent to the removal of certain passages, for example those of sexual content, like the soldierly joke about Rasputin and the Empress in ‘The Blaze Spreads’. In addition, by the 1930s he felt increasingly constrained by the censorship, and applied a degree of self-censorship in the attempt to ensure publication. To clarify some points, it has been necessary to refer to early editions, while working principally from the latest editions. The material removed from ‘Filka’s Career’ was published by Zayara Vesyolaya in the journal Novy mir in 1988. It is incorporated in full in this translation.¹⁷

Many of Vesyoly’s gifted contemporaries – Babel, Pilnyak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Konstantin Paustovsky, Mayakovsky, Sholokhov and Boris Pasternak – have been widely translated into other languages, including English. Vesyoly too has received the attention of German, French, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Swedish translators. In English, however, only a nine-page excerpt from Russia Washed in Blood has appeared, in an anthology edited by Serge Konovalov in 1932.¹⁸ It is to be hoped that, over eighty years after his premature death, some of the recognition he continues to enjoy in Russia may yet accrue to him in the English-speaking world, and that Russia’s brutal Civil War, now largely forgotten in the West, may be returned to memory.

Kevin Windle and Elena Govor

Australian National University, Canberra

1. Artyom Vesyoly, ‘Avtobiografiya,’ in V masterskoi sovremennoi khudozhestvennoi prozy , ed. Ye. F. Nikitina (Moscow: 1931), vol. 2, 173.

2. O. K. Minenko-Orlovskaya, ‘Yaroslav Gashek v samarskom podpolye,’ Druzhba narodov 11, 1961, 217–226. http://гашек.рф/minenko-orlovskaya-ok-vospominaniya/minenko-orlovskaya-ok-yaroslav-gashek-v-samarskom-podpole\

In addition to The Good Soldier Švejk, Hašek left a series of stories based on his time in the Samara region: Velitelem města Bugulmy [Commandant of the Town of Bugulma] (Toronto: 1976).

3. See Zayara Vesyolaya, ‘ Rossiya, krovyu umytaya Artyoma Vesyologo. Po materialam lichnogo arkhiva pisatelia,’ Novy mir 5, 1988, 138.

4. Ibid. Some of the études had been published separately as short stories.

5. Sophie R. A. Court, review of Rossiya, Krov´u Umytaya , by Artem Vesyoly, Books Abroad , 8/3, July 1934, 351.

6. Jekatherina Lebedewa, ‘Artjom Wesjoly – Revolution und Poesie,’ in Artjom Wesjoly, Blut und Feuer , trans. Thomas Reschke (Berlin: 2017), 624–625.

7. I. V. Boyashov, ‘Artyom Vesyoly: Bomba na prilavke,’ Universum: Vestnik Gertsenskogo universiteta 12, 2011, 46.

8. Quoted in Vesyolaya, ‘ Rossiya, krovyu umytaya ,’ 160.

9. Nina Malygina, Andrei Platonov i literaturnaya Moskva (St Petersburg: 2018), 355.

10. Quoted in Vesyolaya, ‘ Rossiya, krovyu umytaya ,’ 141.

11. See Stiv Levin, ‘Volzhskaya doroga Artyoma Vesyologo,’ Voprosy literatury 5, 2017, 197.

12. See Brian J. Boeck, Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov (Cambridge: 2019).

13. See Ignacy Szenfeld, translator’s foreword to Artiom Wiesioły, Rosja we krwi skąpana (Warsaw: 1964), 13, and Lebedewa, ‘Artjom Wesjoly – Revolution und Poesie,’ 627.

14. Vyacheslav Polonsky, ‘Artyom Vesyoly,’ in O literature , ed. V. V. Eidinova (Moscow: 1988), 79.

15. Lebedewa, ‘Artjom Wesjoly – Revolution und Poesie,’ 632.

16. Gaira Vesyolaya and Zayara Vesyolaya, Sudba i knigi Artyoma Vesyologo (Moscow: 2005), 258.

17. Vesyolaya, ‘ Rossiya, krovyu umytaya ,’ 144–49.

18. Serge Konovalov, ed. Bonfire: Stories out of Soviet Russia (London: 1932), 74–82.

DEATH TRAMPLES UPON DEATH

Revolution in Russia –

raw Mother Earth shuddered and

the whole wide world was plunged into turmoil.

Shaken by the hurricane of war,

the world staggered, drunk with blood.

Cruisers and dreadnoughts plied the seas and oceans, belching fire and thunder. In their wake roamed submarines and minelayers, thickly sowing the watery wastes with the seeds of death.

Aeroplanes and Zeppelins flew west and east, south and north. From the heights above the clouds a pilot’s hand flung burning brands into the hives of human aggregations, the bonfires of the cities.

Crushing every living thing in their path, tanks crawled over the sands of Syria and Mesopotamia and the fields of Champagne and the Vosges, furrowed by trenches.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Trabzon to Baghdad the hammers of war beat on without a pause.

The waters of the Rhine, the Marne, the Danube and the Neman were clouded with the blood of the warring peoples.

Belgium, Serbia, Romania, Galicia, Bukovina and Turkish Armenia were swathed in the flames of burning villages and towns.

The roads … Along roads wet with blood and tears came armies, artillery, baggage trains, field hospitals and refugees.

The terrible year 1916 rolled towards its close, flecked with crimson.

The sickle of war was reaping the stalks of life.

Temples and mosques, prayer-houses and churches were filled to overflowing with weeping parishioners, sorrowing, groaning and prostrated with grief.

Trains laden with bread, meat, spoiled canned food, rotting boots, field guns, shells … And the front devoured, wore out, tore up or fired all of it.

Cities writhed in the claws of cold and hunger, the groans of the villages soared to the very heavens, but the drums of war thundered on relentlessly and the guns roared in anger, drowning the squeals of dying children, and the screams of wives and mothers.

Grief came calling, and misery made its nest in the mountain auls of Chechnya, under the roofs of Ukrainian homesteads, in Cossack stanitsas and the shacks of workers’ cantons. The peasant woman wept as she plodded behind the plough. The townswoman wept as she bent her head over a notification bearing the terrible words ‘Killed in action’ against her beloved’s name. The Flemish fisherman’s wife sobbed as she gazed longingly at the sea which had swallowed her husband. In a refugee encampment, under a cart, a woman from Galicia sobbed over the body of her child as it grew cold. Shrieking eddied ceaselessly round the recruiting offices and barracks, and at the stations of Toulon, Kursk, Leipzig, Budapest and Naples.

The standards of grief fluttered over the whole world, and the air was filled with groans and agonising, heart-rending cries of despair, like the glow of a vast conflagration…

And only in gilded palaces – in Moscow, Paris and Vienna – did music, drunken merriment and debauchery reign supreme.

‘Fight on to victory!’

The barons of war and the leviathans of capital raised their glasses of sparkling wine with one accord:

‘Fight on to victory!’

And there, in the fields, besoms of fire swept into common graves, like so much litter, Hamburg stevedores, Donbass miners, Arabian nomads, fruit-growers from the banks of the Ganges, Liverpool dockers, Hungarian shepherds, proletarians of various races, tribes and dialects, and ploughmen who raised their daily bread on the lands of their forefathers.

Crosses and graves, graves and crosses.

The Balkans, Kurdistan, the Carpathian valleys, the heart of the lands of Poland, the forts of Verdun and the Côtes de Meuse were crammed with the flesh of soldiers.

In the coal pits of the Ruhr and Krivoi Rog, in the ore mines of Siberia, and in chemical works in Germany, prisoners-of-war toiled at the harshest of forced labour. They languished in camps behind barbed wire, ending their days under the lash of a guard or a corporal, dying in their barrack huts of hunger, longing and typhus.

Field hospitals … Havens of misery, refuges of wretchedness … The crippled, the frostbitten, the shell-shocked, the gassed – with shattered bones and reeking wounds – tossed in delirium on bunks and operating tables, where blood mingled with pus, sobs with curses, groans with prayers for orphans and despair with hopes blown away in smoke.

The legless, the armless, the eyeless, the deaf and mute, the maddened and half dead beat a path to charitable institutions and official agencies, or begged for alms as they crawled, limped or steered their wheelchairs through the streets of Berlin and Petrograd, Marseilles and Constantinople.

The country was drunk with grief.

The shadow of death wheeled over hungry towns and destitute villages. Maidens’ unkissed breasts grew cold, and the sleep of the women was troubled and restless. Children hoarse from crying fell asleep at their mothers’ empty breasts.

The war devoured humans, bread and cattle.

In the steppes the herds of horses and flocks of sheep dwindled.

Weeds claimed the abandoned fields, and blizzards covered the unharvested crops, laid flat by the autumn winds.

The first waifs of war began to move wherever the road took them.

Industry ground to a halt – for want of fuel, raw materials, manpower – and factories closed down.

Transport ground to a halt. The granaries of Siberia and Turkestan were full of grain; it was rotting, with no transport to move it. In the Kalmyk and Kazakh steppes, mountains of meat, prepared for the army, were piled under the open sky; maggots ate into it, and dogs made dens in it to rear their whelps.

Letters from the front …

My treasured little spouse!

My greetings to you and all our folk. So far I’m fit and well, praise be to God. Vasily Ryazantsev was killed at the Turkish fort of Bayburt. Ivan Prokhorovich has been badly wounded, his whole jaw shot away. He’s not likely to live. Shmaroga got killed. Ilyushka Kostychev’s dead, go round to his place and tell his mother Feona. I went into the attack with my brother-in-law Grigory Savelich. He was hit, got a couple of pounds of flesh taken out of his thigh, we envy him, they sent him way back to the rear to recover and he could be back home for the sowing season.

The only one jumping for joy is our Polikashka, he’s got a new medal and a corporal’s stripes. ‘I’m fit to fight another hundred years,’ he says. Well, maybe till the next battle, if we don’t knock the bugger off first.

Mind you don’t fool around while I’m away, Marfinka. Look after your husband’s name, and mind your own honour. I read your letter every hour and every minute. I see to my horse, get back to my dugout, lie down – and read it. At night when my heart’s bursting with longing, I take it out of my pocket and read it.

Have you heard any talk of peace back there in the Kuban? The men keep saying to each other bitterly, ‘Why are we shedding our blood and wrecking our health and laying down our young lives in this bloody Turkey? What’s the point?’

Signing off now,

Maxim Kuzhel

The tears of women smudged the scribbled lines sent from the front, and more than one shaking hand placed a candle before an icon, with a prayer for the salvation of dear and dying ones.

And there, in those far-off fields, snowdrifts and blizzards swept over young lives!

In heat and cold, waist deep in snow and neck deep in mud, soldiers advanced, soldiers retreated, soldiers lived in dugouts and froze in open trenches. A shell splinter or a bullet could catch a man in battle, at rest, asleep or in a latrine. Somewhere, at headquarters, a general would write: ‘To the Commander, Sumy Rifle Regiment. Tonight 5 January at 0000 hours the regiment is to attack the enemy in full strength in the sector under its control. Results to be reported immediately.’ And so in the dark of midnight the order flew along the trenches and dugouts in an anxious whisper: ‘Stand to!’ Men stripped down and reassembled their rifles and tightened their heavy cartridge belts. Some hurriedly crossed themselves, some muttered a prayer and others gave vent to a stream of furious curses through clenched teeth. The regiment made its way through the narrow communication trenches to assemble in the forward trench, and on the command ‘Over you go! Good luck!’ the men mounted the parapet and crawled over a snowy field pitted with craters. A torrent of lead and a storm of bursting steel broke upon the advancing regiment like a cloud of hail. Beneath them the ground rumbled and groaned. In the ghostly light of cascading blue flares, with faces distorted with horror, they crawled, ran, collapsed and fell … A hot bullet kissed the bridge of Ostap Kalaida’s nose, and his white fisherman’s cottage on the shore near Taganrog was orphaned. Ignat Lysachenko, a fitter from Sormovo, fell with a rasp in his throat and twitched – his wife and three small children in arms would face hard times. The young volunteer Petya Kakurin, tossed into the air with sods of frozen soil by a bursting mine, fell into a ditch like a burnt matchstick – what a joy for his aging parents in faraway Barnaul when news of their son reached them. Yukhan, a strapping forester from the Volga, pitched head first into a tussock and didn’t get up again – never again would he wield his axe and sing his woodman’s songs. Lieutenant Andriyevsky, the company commander, fell next to him – he too was dear to somebody and had grown up surrounded by motherly love. A hissing grenade rolled under the feet of the Siberian hunter Alexei Sedykh, and the full force of the blast hit him in the stomach. With a howl Alexei Sedykh fell flat on his back, arms flung helplessly apart, arms which had once torn apart a bear’s jaws. Big Karp and Little Karp, from the same village, hung in a web of barbed wire, riddled with machine-gun bullets – when spring came and the steppe was enveloped in a blue haze, the two ploughmen would sleep soundly in a common grave … In his headquarters the general was asleep and heard neither the pounding of hearts stricken with terror, nor the groans which swept the battlefield.

Torrents of fire and steel were eating away the pillars of the massed armies.

Mobilisation orders were posted on fences; they were proclaimed in village churches and market squares.

Working men and junior clerks came, and country doctors and schoolteachers; half-trained officer cadets and students leaving their courses, children of the fields and city outskirts; craftsmen and artisans came, and sales assistants from fashionable shops, and highway robbers; bearded fathers of large families, and youths straight from school came; the fit and strong and loud-voiced came, and cripples returning to the front; the war wrenched bridegrooms from the arms of their brides, separated brothers, took sons from mothers, husbands from wives, fathers and breadwinners from their children.

War, war …

To the roar and squeal of accordions,

hearts brimmed over,

voices brimmed over:

O my little birch tree,

Let your branches bow,

Village maidens! Pity us!

We’re in the army now.

Wild, tormented bands roamed the streets, yelling, breaking down fences, smashing windows, dancing, weeping and bawling their desperate songs.

The draft card showed my number,

My number’s on the card.

My beloved took to crying,

Crying louder than my ma.

‘Live it up, lads! Make the most of your last few days … Live it up, all you defenders of the faith, the Tsar and the homeland!’

‘The Tsar? The homeland? Don’t give me none of that! I’ve been there, I’ve seen it all. Them words is just a stick to beat a dog!’

‘A drink to drown our sorrows, brother?’

‘I’ll drink to that, brother.’

Brother looked at brother,

Each brother shook his head;

And one said to the other,

‘We’re both as good as dead.’

Petrukha shook off the wife who was hanging on his arm, smashed his accordion in two, flung it into a corner, and launched into a Cossack dance.

‘We’ll lay waste all of Herrmany!’

‘Leave off!’ said his despairing wife, trying to stop him. ‘Leave off, you stupid gasbag!’

Petrukha was bent on throwing over the traces:

‘You can’t touch me. I’m the government’s man now.’

An old woman with a face like the rotten kernel of a walnut stretched out her earth-coloured arms:

‘Grisha, let me give you one last hug!’

‘Don’t be sad, Granny! Not everybody gets killed in a war.’

‘I feel sick at heart … Grisha, my dearest grandson … Say a prayer as you pass the church, won’t you, dearie?’

‘Goodbye, friend!’

‘Keep well.’

‘War is war.’

‘We won’t see the end of it soon.’

‘It’s not the booze that’s getting to me, it’s the sorrow.’

‘Grisha, you won’t get drunk there will you? Do what the officers tell you.’

‘Don’t you worry, Granny.’

The last hugs, the last kisses.

And beyond the village limits, amidst the silent fields, the wild songs, cries and lamentations gradually died away.

And outside the village, having fallen into a snowdrift, the elderly mother went on and on crying out, ‘My last one … My very last … Oh, if only I’d given birth to a stone, at least it would have stayed at home. Oh Lord! Alyosha, my precious! Couldn’t the Tsar find enough men without you?’

The wind lashed the black hem of her skirt and ruffled the grey strands which her shawl didn’t cover:

‘They’ve taken my last one … And he’d hardly had time to grow up … My very last! Oh, oh! My poor boys …’

But the sons couldn’t hear their mother, and the only answer to her cries was the howling of wolves in a distant gully.

Along the tracks over the Kuban and Don steppes, along the highways and byways of Ryazan and Vladimir, the rivers of Karelia, the mountain pathways of the Caucasus and the Altai, the lost forest roads of Siberia – for thousands of versts around, through heat and frost, mud and clouds of dust – men walked, rode, sailed, galloped and took trains to the cities, to the recruiting offices.

When they got there, they found a scene of anger and uproar, grief in plenty, boisterous banter and noxious oaths.

Garrison clerks asked them a few questions, and doctors felt them over briskly and listened to their chests.

‘You’ll do. Next.’

The conscripts drew numbers out of a hat.¹

‘Head down!’

And a regular sergeant took his scissors and lopped off a handful of hair.

‘Head down!’

The dirty floor was covered in hair of all colours, hair which only yesterday somebody’s loving hand had stroked and combed.

From the reception office they flew out red and roasted, as from a bathhouse, with their service numbers crookedly pinned to their hats. To quench their thirst, they scooped up handfuls of dirty snow and devoured it.

‘They’ve scalped me for the army, Dad. Ripped the heart out of me.’

‘You know Petrovan? He’s wangled his Lyonya out of it.’

‘They have deep pockets, that lot. They’d pull anything off.’

‘What can you do? We’re all in God’s hands. Do your bit … You’re not the first, and won’t be the last.’

‘Vasya,’ a woman pushed her way through the crowd. ‘Anyone seen my Vasya? I do want to see him …’

‘He’s dead drunk, can’t stand up. Lying in a ditch behind the inn, ha ha ha! Pickled in spirit.’

‘Oh my! I’ve told him so many times: you’re not to drink, Vasya. And he’s at it again!’

‘Goodbye, Volga! Goodbye, forest!’

Barracks

hurried training

prayers

the station.

By the peeling station wall stood a boy of five who’d lost his mother. He was wearing a nice sheepskin coat and his father’s hat, which came down over his eyes, and sobbing his heart out, unable to catch his breath, sobbing inconsolably and repeating in a hoarse voice: ‘Daddy, daddy …’

An engine clanked, and everybody’s hearts stopped beating at once.

The crowd began to heave.

Buffers clanked, and the train slowly stirred into motion.

The women erupted into louder shrieks.

Their despairing cries blended into a single united howl, which it seemed would split the earth in two.

The lad in the little sheepskin coat wept more and more bitterly. With his left hand he pushed up his father’s hat, which kept covering his eyes, and held out his right, clutching a melted sugar bun towards the carriages as they flashed by, and called out endlessly, as if his life depended on it: ‘Daddy, daddy …’

The wheels tapped out verst after verst, sector after sector.

The trains rolled

to Riga, Polotsk

Kiev and Tiraspol

Tiflis,² Yerevan.

The soldiers drowned their longing for home and lost freedom with eau de cologne, furniture polish and varnish. During brief halts they danced on the platforms and had their pictures taken by station photographers, and in bigger towns they piled into horse-drawn cabs and rode off at full tilt to the brothels.

In Samara and Kaluga, Vologda and Smolensk, in Cossack stanitsas and mean Vyatka hamlets, half-drunk deacons kept up their sleepy muttered litany:

‘We pray, O Lord, for the souls of your departed servants, the god-fearing soldiers Ivan, Semyon, Yevstafy, Petr, Matvei, Nikolai, Maxim, Yevsei, Taras, Andrei, Denis, Timofei, Ivan, Pantelei, Luka, Yosif, Pavel, Kornei, Grigory, Alexei, Foma, Vasily, Konstantin, Yermolai, Nikita, Mikhail, Naum, Fedor, Daniil and Savvatei. We pray, O Lord, for those who have laid down their lives on the field of battle and assumed the crown of martyrdom … Take in the fallen, O Lord, to the home of the righteous, where there is no sickness or sadness or sighing, but only life everlasting … For ever and ever.’

Lutheran pastors, Catholic priests, Siberian shamans and Muslim mullahs echoed the Orthodox deacon’s prayer.

A song of mourning spread over the world.

But the seeds of wrath and vengeance were ripening in the blood-drenched soil.

Petersburg was dully astir, and the first stones were already flying at the windows of police stations.

1. Not all men of draft age were conscripted for active service. Selection was decided by drawing lots.

2. Tiflis: the capital of Georgia, now known as Tbilisi.

PRIVATE MAXIM KUZHEL HAS THE FLOOR

Revolution in Russia –

all of Russia is one big mass meeting.

Our regiment was on the Turkish front when the revolution came and overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.

The men were astonished.

At first some of the old soldiers couldn’t really believe it, and a burble went through the ranks … ‘Let’s wait and see, there’s sure to be an order from the divisional commander – a coup, the Tsar’s abdicated, … Now we’ve got a Duma and a Provisional Government¹ … time for some prayers of thanks, brothers!’

‘Any time!’

The bugler plays parade; the regiment forms up in a triangle.

‘By the right! At-ten-shun! Caps off!’

The padre lights up his censer, shakes out his sleeves: ‘Blessed be the Lord our God …’

The soldiers shiver and their hair stands on end … We stand there holding our breath, feeling oh so sorry for ourselves, and it’s so cold it brings tears to our eyes.

‘Let us pray together to the Lord …’

We cross ourselves, fall on our knees, foreheads to the ground, thinking, ‘O Lord our God, you unwashed uncombed soldiers’ God … Where have you got to and where have you dumped your flock, like a bad shepherd, not to mention your untouched untainted virgin? Why have you left us to the torments of an evil fate, and why don’t you – you soldiers’ lousy God – have pity on a soldier’s bitter life?’

The padre waves his censer, only his hair flutters in the breeze …

The soldiers feel cheerier, look at each other brightly and push out their chests.

Prayers over, we straighten up. What next?

The divisional commander rides out in front of the parade – beard grey, chest covered in medals, voice bulging. He rises in his stirrups and waves a telegram in the air: ‘Brothers! His Imperial Highness the Emperor Nicholas II is no longer ruling over us.’

He waves his little telegram and bursts into tears.

And the soldiers say nothing, alarmed.

Only Bombardier Pimonenko isn’t one to be cowed, he boldly unfurls the red flag he’s brought with him:

DOWN WITH THE TSAR! LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE!

We’re stunned and all agog.

The band strikes up!

The weaker souls really do burst into tears. We stand there not knowing whether to look at the flag or listen to the general.

‘Brothers! The old regime is gone … Titles of rank are abolished … No more Your Excellency, Your Worship, Sir … Freedom has dawned. We’re all equal. But whatever happens, keep your oath in mind … Russia is our mother, and we’re her children …’

Up goes the cry:

‘Hurrah!’

‘Hurrah-ah!’

‘Hurrah-ah-ah!’

The band drowns out all our shouts.

The general’s wipes his neck with his handkerchief, clears his throat and turns to the troops again:

‘Remember your standing orders, love the army, and don’t forget your faith or your fatherland … You grey eagles are the honour and glory of Russian arms … The whole world admires your selfless heroism.’

Again a cry of Hurrah thunders through the whole regiment.

‘Hurr-ah!’

‘Hurr-aaah!’

‘Hurr-aaa … aaa … aaaah…!’

‘What we’ve been through!’

‘The blood we’ve shed!’

‘For three hundred years!’

‘Not a minute longer!’

‘Bravo!’

‘To hell with the Tsar! Lock ’im up on short rations!’

The old fellow done us an honour with his nice words. From the beginning of time when they talked to the lower ranks, a big stick did the talking, and listen to His Excellency now! Would you believe it? All equal … honour and glory … grey eagles … He touched our hearts and stirred the soldiers’ blood, and we started shouting ‘Hurrah!’ even louder, and some of the junior officers ever so gingerly took the general down from his horse and raised him up on their shoulders.

The regimental band strikes up.

The old fellow gets his breath back, smooths down his beard and steps up all sprightly and lightly to the front ranks:

‘Brother, give us a hug!’

And in front of all of us the general and divisional commander hugs and kisses our right-flank man, Private Alexei Mitrokhin, of ‘A’ Company.

The regiment

gasps.

We stood stock-still and only then did we really believe that the old regime was gone and new-born freedom had come fully fledged.

The ranks wavered and everybody got together in a huddle, some weeping, some embracing each other. It looked like everybody was on side – officers, men, clerks; only that rat the regular sergeant Fomenko, the pug-nosed mongrel, listened and listened and puffed and spluttered, and wouldn’t come round. With eyes out on stalks he starts yelling his mouth off: ‘It’s not true! We have God and we have the Tsar! … His Imperial Majesty was with us in the past and is now and always will be, for ever and ever! … We have God and the power of the cross on our side!’ He crossed himself, spat with relish and goose-stepped off swinging his arms as far as they’d go. Square-bashing scum.

None of us paid him any heed.

Speakers held forth till nightfall, the bosses talked, and so did the men, getting their tongues all tied in knots.

It was as if everybody was drunk.

The regiment swore the oath and signed, kissed the cross and vowed revolutionary allegiance to the Provisional Government.

As I recall, this was all during Lent.

We hung out a red flag over the trenches: to hell with the war!

A month went by, then another, Holy Week and Whitsun were long over, and there was no fighting, but nothing good to look forward to either. We lounged in our dugouts like bears, pressing our earthen bunks into comfortable shape; we posted sentries on schedule, went on patrol, put our backs into any everyday job that needed doing, and longed and longed for home. Just like the old days, under the old regime, the lice chewed at our skin, the yearning gnawed at our bones, and the men went on not knowing anything, observing standing orders, putting up with hunger and cold and serving their time at the front as before.

We marked the revolution by stripping the divisional stores bare. I got four skeins of binder twine and some canvas cartridge pouches – nothing really worth having, but I thought they might come in handy when I got home. A couple of Poltava lads from ‘K’ Company made off with the regimental strongbox; how they managed that, the Devil only knows: it was the weight of two men, if not ten.

And everywhere there were committees, and the committees went on talking and arguing.²

Every regiment had its committee, and every company. Apparently even the army corps had one. Come to that, every man in the ranks was his own committee if he got the chance to bump his gums. And me – without blowing my own trumpet – I had my share of brain power; I’d learnt a thing or two at the front and earned those two St George Crosses stuck on my chest. ‘B’ Company as one man decided:

‘Maxim Kuzhel, our steadfast comrade! You can be our representative and use your horny hands to look after the soldiers’ interests.’

I was rolling a cigarette, and my hands were trembling – whether from fear or joy – but I didn’t let that show. I lit up and said, ‘If I served the crown, I can serve a clown. I mightn’t have much schooling, but I’ll stick up for the soldiers and not hold back.’

‘That’s the way, Kuzhel!’

‘We’re right behind you.’

‘Give it your heart and soul.’

So I gives me whiskers a twist and off I go to the committee.

The committee met pretty much in the open, in an officer’s tent. In the old days you’d halt four paces away, come to attention, tight as a drum, and bark: ‘Reporting for duty! Permission to enter!’ Now anyone who had a mind to could come and go as he pleased and feel right at home. Your ordinary soldier shakes the officer by the hand: ‘Had a nice nap, have we?’ or even worse: he sits down and takes his ease like some Turkish pasha, lights up a Turkish cigarette and coolly breathes smoke right under the officer’s nose and His Excellency doesn’t seem to notice.

All so strange and funny.

I get back to the company and put them in the picture. The lads all split their sides laughing, like so many stud horses, then heave deep sighs and start talking about home.

‘How long till we get home?’

‘How can we get away?’

‘High time …’

‘They tell us to just sit tight, like we was in a trap.’

‘Abandoned and forsaken …’

‘Defending the homeland? More like dumb animals.’

In the committee the soldiers keep on asking: ‘How’s it looking?’

‘Be patient, boys. The papers say the Germans’ll be finished soon. Then there’ll be an armistice, and we’ll all be able to disperse peacefully and go home like conquering heroes.’

‘They’ve been promising us the earth for three years, sir, and we ain’t got nothing.’

‘Keep doing your duty.’

‘My duty’s past its due date, and still no end in sight.’

‘You’ve waited this long, wait just a bit longer.’

Here the conversation went a bit deeper. ‘Haven’t we been humouring the bourgeois for long enough, sir? Our pain is their pleasure.’

‘Your prayers and your service will be rewarded in the end.’

‘We’ve heard that song once too often. The soldiers don’t want to fight any more. Time we went home.’

The commanders kept on saying, ‘Russia is our mother.’

And our reply was, ‘Home!’

And they just kept on: ‘Heroism, honour, duty …’

And we said, ‘Home!’

And they said, ‘The glory of Russian arms.’

And we said flatly, ‘The hell with glory! Home, home, home!’

‘Didn’t you swear an oath?’

‘True enough, we did … but who the hell thought up that oath to be the death of us?’

And although we had no answer, we started feeling a little less warmth towards our officers.

Out of frustration and dejection we thought we’d get in touch with the neighbouring units. A group of us went to see the 132nd Rifles. It was a hot and weary day. Some of the soldiers were shirtless in their vests, strolling around beltless, some barefoot and cap-less.

‘Where’s your committee, friend?’

‘Gone off to bathe. The chairman’s on duty at HQ.’

We all pile into their HQ.

Jan Seromakh, the committee chairman, was busy shaving with a piece of glass in front of a little blistered mirror, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, sharpening the bit of glass on a brick.

‘So, Chairman, tell us how things are looking here.’

‘Things are rotting just beautifully,’ he replied.

And we struck up a jolly, soldierly conversation until Seromakh had finished shaving. Then he wrapped his shard of glass in a rag, placed it in a chink in the wall, washed his shaven cheekbones and shook hands with us. ‘Well, I can see you lot are good hard-bitten men, you won’t give the demons no quarter, nor even the devil himself … Let’s go to my dugout and have some tea.’

So we had some tea brewed with rye-bread crusts and ate some dried berries which Seromakh had collected on recce, and he told us how they’d demoted their regimental commander for his vile cruelty and posted him to the cookhouse; how they’d sent a delegation to the army corps committee demanding to be sent to rest in the rear; how at a regimental meeting they’d adopted a decision to maintain military order and hold the front as long as their patience lasted, and then all pack it in and head for home together.

‘If we leave, we leave together,’ we said. ‘We don’t plan to spend the winter here.’

‘That’s for sure: happy in hell if you’re all in it together.’

Seromakh saw us off, still joking: ‘Life’s got tougher, boys: we have freedom, we have that tool Kerensky,³ but nowhere to shove him …’ We laughed all the way home, remembering Seromakh.

We stayed there five more months, then ten, with no end to the misery in sight.

Of an evening we’d climb out of our dugouts and see a wretched landscape – forest, mountains, thorn bushes … Not like our Kuban steppe with its gentle rivers and silken steppe grass! Steppes too wide for the eye or the mind to take in …

You’d sit feeling sorry for yourself …

From the Turkish lines came the muezzin’s prayer on the wind: ‘Allah var … Allah sahih … Allah raḥmāni, raḥīm … la ilaha illallah wa muhammad ur rasulullah …’⁴

Out of boredom we visited the Turks and brought them over to our line, fed them borshch, and swapped yarns. They were dark, swarthy, like they’d never had a wash in years; it made you ill to look at them at first. They’d bring tobacco and goat’s cheese. We’d sit on the grass in the summer, smoking and talking by signs.

‘Do you want to go home, kardeş?’⁵ a Russian asks.

‘Çok, ister çok!’⁶ they bare their teeth and shake their heads, which means yes, they sure do.

‘So why are we sitting here keeping watch on each other? … We’ve had our fun, time’s up, time to go home … Ours has quit his throne, you ought to give yours a push.’

They start babbling again, baring their teeth,