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Ihor Shevchenko’s valenki made the snow crunch as he walked across the field. A hooded crow hopping along looking for mice or whatever else it could get cocked its head to one side and studied him, trying to figure out whether he was dangerous. He was a good twenty meters away and not heading straight toward it, so it decided he wasn’t.
Which only proved the crow was dumb. When he was a kid, he would have killed it and proudly carried it home for his mother to cook. He’d eaten crow often enough during the famine years, and been glad every time. He’d eaten anything he could get in those days, and thanked the God in Whom he wasn’t supposed to believe any more at every swallow.
Stalin had wanted to purge the Ukraine of prosperous peasants, and to collectivize the rest. As usual, Stalin had got what he wanted. If a few million people starved to give it to him, he lost not a minute of sleep over that.
No wonder so many Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt when they invaded. Ihor had been fifteen then. He hadn’t celebrated when Hitler’s men drove out Stalin’s; he’d already learned wariness. But he hadn’t been sorry, either.
Not at first. It didn’t take long to see, though, that the Nazis made an even worse set of masters than the commissars. Ihor at fifteen had watched. Ihor at sixteen had slipped away to join one of the partisan bands operating west of Kiev.
There were bands, and then there were bands. Not all the men in the Ukraine thought Hitler was a worse bargain than Stalin. Some wanted to break away from Russia come hell or high water, and tried to use the Germans as their tools, never seeing that the Germans were actually using them. Some saw and didn’t care. They could rob and plunder, settle scores and murder Jews, and they were happy enough doing that.
Even now, going on six years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, a few bands who’d followed nationalist Stepan Bandera still skulked across the countryside. Ihor kept his eye out for more than crows. He hadn’t seen any Banderists for a while, but you still heard stories.
These days, they had to know there would be no free Ukraine. As soon as the front started moving west again, that had become clear. But they had also known the secret police would kill them, so there wasn’t much point to giving up.
When the front came through here at the end of 1943, Ihor stopped being a partisan and joined-or was dragooned into-the Red Army. He ended the war a sergeant, laid up with a leg wound outside of Breslau. They’d done a good job fixing him up. He hardly limped at all.
He counted himself lucky that they’d let him come back to his kolkhoz after they mustered him out of the army. Plenty of men paid the price for seeing Europe west of Russia by going into the gulag instead. Maybe he had an innocent face. Maybe the Chekists had already filled their daily quota by the time they got to him. Who the hell knew?
He could have been messing with a tractor engine or putting up barbed-wire fencing or doing any number of other socially useful things. Nobody would use a tractor for six weeks or two months. Fences could wait. Everything on the kolkhoz except his and Anya’s little garden plot could wait. He didn’t see any benefit from most of the work, so he did as little as he could get away with. It wasn’t as if he were the only one.
He stumped along. After a while, he lit a papiros. His breath didn’t smoke much more when he exhaled than it had before. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular: just away from the other kolkhozniks for a while. Except for his wife, he wouldn’t shed a tear if they all went and hanged themselves. Well, it wasn’t as if they’d miss him if he lay down in the snow out here and died.
He drew on the papiros again. One thing he’d seen in Europe was that most countries’ machine-made cigarettes were like roll-your-owns: they were all tobacco. Russians mostly preferred a short stretch at the end of a long, useless paper holder. For the life of him, Ihor couldn’t see why.
A distant rumble made his head come up. He might have heard it sooner if he hadn’t had the earflaps of his army cap pulled down. When he did notice it, his gut twisted in fear too well remembered. “Fuck me in the mouth if those aren’t tank engines,” he said, even if no one was anywhere near close enough to hear him.
Those were diesels: Soviet tank engines. The Fritzes’ panzers burned gasoline, and sounded different. None of those still in business, but yes, the fear remained. You could still find coal-scuttle helmets around here, and Gott mit Uns belt buckles, and cartridges and shell cases. You could find shells that hadn’t gone off, too, buried in the ground but working their way up frost by frost. And if you messed with them, you could still blow your stupid head off.
The rumble got louder. Ihor spotted the black exhaust plumes in the distance. Plenty of Red Army tank crews had died because the Germans could do the same thing. The Germans had made better soldiers than his own countrymen. Ihor knew that. But when you took on somebody with three times your manpower and far more resources, better didn’t mean good enough.
Here came the tanks. Some were dark green; others had whitewash slapped on over their paint. All were dusted with snow. They kicked up white clouds as they rattled west. About half were T-34/85s: the workhorses of the last war. The rest were T-54s, with a curved turtleback turret and a bigger, more powerful gun. They all looked as if they were going somewhere important, and wasting no time doing it.
Looks, of course, could be deceiving. The commander in the lead tank rode head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could see more. Good commanders did that even in battle. It was one reason you went through a lot of good tank commanders.
This fellow spied Ihor. His tank swerved toward the kolkhoznik. The rest of the big, growling machines followed. Ihor could have done without the honor, not that he had a choice.
“Hey, you!” the tank commander shouted as his machine slowed to a stop. “Yeah, you! Who else would I be talking to?”
Ihor thought about playing dumb. If he answered in broad Ukrainian, he might convince the tank commander he knew no Russian. But the bastard might decide that made him a Banderist and have the gunner give him a machine-gun burst. The risk wasn’t worth it. “Waddaya want?” Ihor would never speak good Russian, but his stint in the Red Army had sure beaten bad Russian into him.
“Where’s the nearest railhead?” the soldier asked. “Fuck my mother if the map I’ve got is worth shit.”
If he’d said Fuck your mother, Ihor would have sent him in the wrong direction. As things were, he pointed west and said, “That way-four or five kilometers.”
“Thanks,” the tanker told him. “I didn’t want to break radio silence to ask the brass. They wouldn’t like that, know what I mean?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ihor said in a way that showed he’d done his bit. Because he’d done the commander a good turn, he asked, “Why are you guys on the move, anyhow?”
“Whole Kiev Military District is on the move,” the man answered, not without pride. “The imperialists are stirring up trouble against the peace-loving socialist nations. We’ve got to be ready to show them they can’t get away with that crap, right?”
“Uh, right,” Ihor said. No other reply seemed possible.
“So-” With a wave, the tank commander got his monster moving. The rest followed. Ihor coughed. The stinking diesel exhaust was fouler than the cheapest, nastiest makhorka you could smoke.
The whole Kiev Military District? That was a couple of Guards Tank Armies, some of the best troops the Soviet Union owned. Ihor’s shiver had nothing to do with the snow on the ground.