Everything Flows (15 page)

“They were transported in sealed freight wagons. Their belongings went separately. All they could take with them was the food they had in their hands. And at one station the fathers were all put on the train. That day there was great joy in the freight wagons, and great tears. The journey lasted more than a month—peasants were being taken from all over Russia and the railway lines were jammed with transport trains. There were no bed-boards in the cattle wagons. Everyone just slept on the floor, packed together. The sick, of course, died before they reached their destination. But still, people did at least get fed. At each of the main stations there were pails of gruel, and two hundred grams of bread per head.

“The guards were ordinary soldiers, not OGPU. They weren’t vicious—they simply treated the peasants like they were cattle. So my friend wrote in her letter.

“And I’ve heard what it was like when they finally got there, I heard from those who got away. Everyone was simply scattered about the
taiga
. If you were old or sick, if you couldn’t work, you were dropped off in a village in the forest. The village huts ended up as crowded as the cattle wagons had been. And everyone else was just put down in the middle of nowhere; they were left to fend for themselves on the snow. The weak froze to death. Those who were able to work began cutting down trees. They left the stumps where they were, pulled the trunks along the ground, and began building makeshift shelters. They worked without a break, almost without sleeping, so that their families wouldn’t freeze to death. Only later did they have time to build proper log huts—two-room huts, one family in each room. They built those huts straight on the moss, and they filled in the gaps between the logs with moss.

“Those who were fit for work were bought from the OGPU by State logging enterprises. The logging enterprises supplied them with all they needed for work, and with rations for their dependents. The huts they’d built were called a ‘labor settlement,’ and everything was supervised by a ‘commandant’ and by ‘foremen.’ They were paid, apparently, the same as local workers, though
all their pay went into special books
. Our people are strong, and soon they began to earn more than the locals. But they had to stay within bounds—either in the settlement itself or in the logging area. Later on, I heard, during the War, they were allowed to travel within the region. And after the War, heroes of labor could go outside the region. Some even received internal passports.

“As for those considered unfit for work, my friend said that they were formed into ‘labor colonies.’ These were supposed to be self-sufficient—they were just lent some seed and supplied with rations to keep people going until the first harvest. Otherwise the ‘colonies’ were much the same as the settlements—supervised by guards and a commandant. Later they were turned into cooperatives. There was still a commandant, but the peasants also had their own representatives.

“Meanwhile, back in the village, our new life began. Now that there were no more kulaks, everyone was forced to join the collective farm. There were meetings that lasted all night long—with endless cursing and shouting. Some people were refusing to join; others said that they didn’t mind joining but that they weren’t going to give up their cows. Then came Stalin’s article in
Pravda
,
‘Dizziness from Success.’
Once again there was chaos. ‘But you can’t force us to join,’ people protested. ‘Stalin says so himself.’ People began writing declarations on scraps of newspaper, ‘I am leaving the collective to become an independent farmer.’ But after a while the authorities began forcing everyone to rejoin the collectives. As for the property left by the kulaks, most of it simply got stolen.

“And we all thought that no fate could be worse than that of the kulaks. How wrong we were. In the villages the ax fell on everyone—no one was big enough, or small enough, to be safe.

“This time it was execution by famine.

“By then I was a bookkeeper; I had moved on from washing floors. As an activist, I was sent to the Ukraine to ‘reinforce’ a collective farm. The spirit of private property, we were told, was more powerful there than in Russia. That’s as may be—but it’s certainly true that they were having a hard time of it, even harder than we were. I wasn’t sent far. Our own village was right on the border with the Ukraine, and this collective farm was less than three hours away. It was a beautiful place. And the people there were like people anywhere else. And so I became their bookkeeper.

“I think I learned about everything that was done there. It’s really not for nothing that that old man said I should have been a government minister. I only say this because I’m telling you everything—I’m not in the habit of boasting about myself. I could have kept all the accounts without even using paper—it was all there in my head. And when we had training sessions, when our
troika
had meetings or our bosses got drunk, I took in everything that was said.

“How did it all happen? After the dispossession of the kulaks, the area of land under cultivation dropped sharply, and so did the crop yield. But everyone kept reporting that without the kulaks, our life had immediately started to blossom. The village soviet lied to the district, the district to the province, and the province to Moscow. Everyone wanted Stalin to rejoice in the belief that a happy life had begun and the whole of his dominion would soon be awash with collective-farm grain. The time came for the first collective-farm harvest. Everything seemed in order. Moscow determined the quotas for grain deliveries from each province, and the provinces determined the quota for each district. And our village was given a quota it couldn’t have fulfilled in ten years. All the members of the village soviet were terrified; even the teetotalers took to drink. It was clear that Moscow had put all its hopes on the Ukraine. And so it was the Ukraine, above all, that then got the blame. Everyone understood very well: if you fail to fulfill the plan, you’re a kulak yourself—and you should have been liquidated long ago.

“It was, of course, impossible to fulfill the plan. The area under cultivation was down, and so were yields. Where was it then—this ocean of collective-farm grain? It must have been hidden away! Idlers, parasites, kulaks who had not yet been liquidated! The kulaks had been deported, but their spirit endured. The Ukrainian peasant was in thrall to private property.

“Who signed the decree? Who ordered the mass murder? Was it really Stalin? I often ask myself. Never, I believe, in all Russian history, has there been such a decree. No tsar, nor even the Tatars or German Fascists, ever signed such a decree. The decree meant the death by famine of the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don, and the Kuban. It meant the death of them and their children. Even their entire seed fund was to be confiscated. The authorities searched for that grain as if they were searching for bombs and machine guns. They stabbed the earth with bayonets and ramrods; they smashed floors and dug underneath them;
they dug up vegetable gardens
. Sometimes they requisitioned the grain inside people’s huts, the grain people had put in pots and tubs. One woman had some bread requisitioned, loaves that had already been baked. It too was loaded onto the cart and taken off to the district center.

“Day and night the carts creaked along, clouds of dust hung over the earth—but there were no silos to keep all this grain in. The grain was simply dumped on the ground, with sentries standing guard all around it. By the beginning of winter the grain was soaking and beginning to rot. The Soviet authorities did not have enough tarpaulins to protect the peasants’ grain.

“And while they were still transporting the grain, there was dust wherever you went. It was like clouds of smoke—over the village, over the fields, over the face of the moon at night. I remember one man going out of his mind. ‘We’re on fire!’ he kept screaming. ‘The sky is burning! The earth is burning!’ No, it was not the sky—it was life itself that was burning.

“That was when I understood: what mattered to the Soviet authorities was the plan. Fulfill the plan! Deliver your assigned quota of grain. The State comes first, and people are just one big zero.

“Mothers and fathers wanted to save their children, to put just a little grain to one side. They were told, ‘You hate the motherland of socialism with a ferocious hatred. You want to sabotage the plan. You’re nothing but vermin, you
subkulak parasites
.
’ But they didn’t want to sabotage the plan—they wanted to save their children, to save themselves. Everyone, after all, needs to eat.

“I can tell you the story, but a story is only words—and this was a matter of life and death, of torment, of people dying from starvation. When the grain was requisitioned, by the way, the Party activists were told that the peasants would be fed by the State. That was a lie. Not a single grain was given to the hungry.

“Who confiscated the grain? For the main part, it was local people: from the district executive committee and from the district Party committee; young lads from the Komsomol, locals all of them; the police, of course; and the OGPU. In a few places they even used army units. I only saw one man from Moscow. He’d been mobilized to the Ukraine by the Party, but he didn’t seem very eager. He kept trying to go back home...Once again, though, the same as during collectivization, people became dazed, crazed, like wild beasts.

“Grisha Saenko was a policeman. He was married to a local girl, and on holidays he used to come to the village and go to parties. He was someone bright and lively. He could dance the tango and the waltz, and he knew all the songs from the Ukrainian villages. One day an old man, a real graybeard, went up to him and said, ‘Grisha, you’re ruining all of us. What you’re doing is worse than murder. Why does a Workers’ and Peasants’ State treat the peasantry worse than the tsars did?’ Grisha pushed his hand in the old man’s face and then went off to the well to wash, saying, ‘How can I pick up a spoon with a hand that’s just touched the filthy mug of that parasite?’

“And the dust. Day and night, while they were taking the grain, there was dust. And at night the moon hung there like a stone, taking up half the sky. And everything beneath that moon seemed strange and wild. And it was so hot at night—like under a sheepskin. And fields that had been trampled, trampled, and trampled again...Just to look at them was like reading a death sentence.

“People began to lose their minds. The cattle kept lowing plaintively—they were becoming timid, frightened of people. The dogs were howling all night. And the earth began to crack from the heat.

“Then came autumn, and autumn rains. And then a snowy winter. And there was no bread.

“There was no bread for sale in the district center—it was only for those who had ration cards. Nor could you buy it at a railway-station kiosk—there were armed guards who didn’t let you anywhere near the station without special permission. You couldn’t buy bread anywhere, at any price.

“During the autumn people took to living on potatoes—but without bread, it doesn’t take long to get through potatoes. Toward Christmas they began slaughtering their cattle—but the cattle were nothing, just skin and bones. They slaughtered the chickens, of course. Soon they’d got through all their meat. And there wasn’t so much as a drop of milk to be found in the village. Nor was there a single egg. And worst of all, there was no grain, no bread. Every last kernel had been requisitioned. Come spring, there would be no spring wheat to sow, the entire seed fund had gone. People’s only hope was the winter wheat, but that was still under the snow. There was no sign of spring, and the village was already beginning to starve. They’d eaten all the meat. They’d eaten what millet they had. They were getting to the end of their stock of potatoes—the larger families already had none left at all.

“People began begging for loans of grain. From the village soviet, from the district committee. They didn’t get a word in answer. And it was nineteen kilometers to the district center, and there were no horses.

“It was terrible. Mothers looked at their own children—and screamed in fear. It was as if they’d seen a snake in the house. And they had seen a snake; they had seen famine, starvation, death. What could they do? No one in the village could think of anything except food. People would suck and move their jaws up and down. The saliva would flow, and they’d swallow it down—but you need more than saliva to fill up your stomach. If you woke in the night, there wasn’t a sound to be heard. No one talking anywhere, no one playing an accordion. The silence of the grave. No footsteps but the footsteps of famine—famine never slept. First thing in the morning, the children were crying in every hut, asking for bread. And what were their mothers to give them? Snow? There was no help to be had from anyone. The Party officials just went on repeating, ‘You shouldn’t have lazed about like that. You should have worked harder.’ Sometimes they added, ‘Just look around you. There’s enough grain been buried here for the next three years!’

“Still, there was no real famine that winter. People became weak, of course. Their stomachs began to bulge from eating just scraps and peelings, but there was no real dropsy. They began digging up acorns from under the snow. They dried them; the miller set his stones farther apart—and he ground them up into flour. People began making bread—flatbreads, really—from acorns. Some people added bran, or ground-up potato peelings. But the acorns didn’t last long—it was only a small oak wood and three whole villages had descended on it at once. Meanwhile a Party official came from the city and said to us in the village soviet, ‘See what those parasites are like! Digging for acorns! Digging under the snow with their bare hands! Anything to get out of work!’

“The senior classes carried on going to school almost until it was spring, but the junior classes stopped during the winter. And in spring the school closed and the teacher went off to the city. The medical assistant left too; there was nothing for him to eat. And there are no medicines against hunger. The village was left to look after itself—with everyone starving in their huts, and nothing but desert on all sides. And all the various officials from the city stopped coming. There was nothing more to be taken from the starving people—so why should anyone go to the village? There was nothing a teacher could teach them—and nothing a medical assistant could do. Once the State’s squeezed all it can out of you, then you’re no more use to it. No point in teaching or healing you.