The next guy who stood up was missing half his left hand. One look at Volodymyr’s face, though, would have told you he was a veteran. You didn’t need to see the mutilation to know. “To our glorious leader, Joseph Stalin, and to victory!”
“To Stalin! To victory!” everyone chorused, louder than people had toasted antifreeze. You had to show your enthusiasm for the glorious leader. Someone would notice and rat on you if you didn’t. Bad things were liable to follow soon after that.
Before too long, the snow would melt. The land would turn to soup for a while. Then it would be time to plow and plant. There’d be more work to do, even if no one would do it with any marked enthusiasm. There wouldn’t be so many chances for a bunch of people to get together and get drunk. (It was a Soviet collective farm. There would always be some.)
Ihor eyed Anya. Maybe later on he could get her off by herself, and then…. Or maybe, by the time they got done here, he’d be so fried he couldn’t get it up with a crane. He wasn’t going to worry about it now. He wasn’t worrying about anything now.
Pyotr stood up, glass clutched in his meaty fist. He was a Russian, but people on the kolkhoz mostly didn’t hold it against him. “Here’s to the soldier’s hundred grams!” he said loudly, gulping the toast.
Everyone whooped and cheered at that one, especially the men who’d fought in the war, which was almost all of them. They’d gladly gulped their hundred grams every day then. You needed something to numb you and make you not think so much before you rushed the Germans’ trenches. After a while, there weren’t enough Germans left to stop the Red Army, but the Hitlerites always made their khaki-clad foes pay a hefty butcher’s bill.
Was the Red Army still feeding soldiers the daily dose? The Americans wouldn’t be much fun without it, would they? You could toast victory all you wanted, but they’d dropped an atomic bomb inside Soviet territory. Yes, the radio said the USSR had retaliated, but even so….
What would the Hitlerites have done if they’d had atomic bombs? Ihor didn’t need to think about that one much; the question answered itself. The Germans would have dropped as many of them as they could on the Soviet Union. Hitler didn’t just want the Russians and Ukrainians and Byelorussians and Poles conquered and subdued. He wanted them exterminated. He hadn’t had the tools for the job. They were here now.
“To smashing all of Germany!” the next man up said, and drank the toast. Ihor followed suit. It matched his mood and his worries. It also gave him the license to numb himself up some more.
Olga Marchenkova-Volodymyr’s wife-turned on the radio. After a couple of minutes of music, a familiar voice said, “Attention, Moscow is speaking.” Yuri Levitan had broadcast the news from Moscow all through the war. He was still doing it, even though he was a Jew, and Stalin had cooled on them in recent years. Levitan went on, “Here is the latest from around the world on Friday, February 15, 1951.”
The more sober kolkhozniks started shushing their drunk comrades, some of whom were singing and shouting and carrying on. When the news was over, they could start making a racket again. Now? No. The news suddenly mattered once more, mattered the way it had when Moscow teetered on the brink of falling to the Nazis. Listening to Yuri Levitan then had been a capital crime-the Ukraine already lay under the Germans’ harsh yoke. People did it anyhow. Some died for doing it.
“I regret I must inform you that the forces of imperialist aggression have struck new and harsh blows against the European states helping the Soviet Union to advance the socialist vanguard of humanity,” Levitan said in somber tones. “The United States uses as a pretext for its murderous onslaught the Soviet Union’s destruction of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. They choose to forget that the cleansing of Elmendorf came in direct response to their unprovoked attack against the harmless village of Pechenga.”
Why would the Americans drop an atom bomb on a harmless village? Ihor wondered. Even with vodka fuddling him, he could see that that didn’t add up. But it was one of those questions you thought of without asking. You did if you aimed to stay out of the gulags, anyhow.
“American atomic bombs have leveled Zywiec in Poland, Szekesfehervar in Hungary, and Ceske Budejovice in Czechoslovakia,” Levitan continued gravely. He was a professional; he didn’t stumble over any of the difficult names. “The United States claims these cities were chosen because they are transport hubs through which Soviet troops and those of the fraternal socialist people’s republics flow westward toward the frontier between the socialist world and its reactionary opponents. Simple blood lust seems the more likely explanation.”
When Ihor was a little boy, his parents would sometimes cross themselves on hearing grim news. It was a dangerous habit in the God-fighting USSR. They trained themselves out of it, and trained Ihor out of it, too. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slipped. But his hand started to move that way now.
Some of the soldiers from the Kiev Military District, the men he’d talked to not so long ago, probably would have gone through one of those towns or another. If not for his own lamed leg, he might have been summoned back into the Red Army himself. In that case, he might have gone through one of those towns. And if he had…what? Chances were, little pieces of him would be making a Geiger counter chatter right now.
He reached for a vodka bottle and swigged. No one had proposed a toast, but he didn’t care. He wanted not to think about that kind of fire blossoming above his head. If he’d had a bottle of ether and a rag, he would have used them instead of the hooch. When you thought of permanent oblivion, temporary oblivion was the only foxhole you had.
He expected Yuri Levitan to go on talking about the American atrocities. Instead, the suave newsreader told of Stakhanovite shock workers in Voroshilovgrad who produced twice as much aluminum as their quota required. “Even then, they refused to leave their posts,” Levitan said. “They insisted on doing everything in their power to aid the revolutionary proletariat on the march and on dedicating themselves to glorifying our beloved Comrade Stalin.”
That was laying it on with a trowel. With a shovel, even. Or Ihor thought so. And, despite Volodymyr’s toast, Stalin wasn’t widely beloved, not in the Ukraine. Too many people here had died. He was respected. Anyone who’d beaten Hitler had to be respected. Besides, Hitler had proved himself what seemed to be impossible: an even worse bargain than the Soviet leader. And Stalin was feared. People feared him the way chickens feared the chopping block, and for the same reason. But beloved? No.
All the same, at least half the kolkhozniks in the common room were nodding at Levitan’s words. Maybe they wanted to be seen agreeing with what he said. Maybe they were just patriots. Love of country was the biggest part of why people didn’t abandon Stalin in the Great Patriotic War’s blackest days.
Whatever their reasons, they were nodding. And Ihor decided he had better nod, too. You didn’t want to stick out from what everyone else was doing, no matter what that happened to be. If you stuck out, you got noticed. And if you got noticed, you commonly regretted it.
–
One of the guys in Tibor Nagy’s squad came from Szekesfehervar. He was as sure as made no difference that the American atom bomb had incinerated his whole family. Part of the time, he didn’t want to do anything but roll himself in his blanket and weep and wail. The rest, he wanted to grab his rifle, charge across the border between the Russian and American zones in Germany, and kill all the Yankees on the far side singlehanded.
Right now, Tibor had drawn the short straw in talking him out of taking warfare into his own hands. “You can’t, Ferenc. You just can’t, no matter how much you wish you could,” he said, as reasonably as possible. “Come on-don’t be stupid. Give me your piece.”