The men drew lots. It fell to Osip to lead the way. He pulled his pistol out of his holster and thumped loudly on the gate with his fist.
“Who’s there?” called a suspicious male voice.
“Red Army soldiers,” Osip said. “Only three of us. Can we spend the night in your house? We have supplies—there’s no need to feed us.”
That was a lie too. They had eaten their ration—a pound of bread and a small kettle of soup—earlier that morning.
The master of the house unbolted the gates. Osip struck another match. Pah, he thought. Just an old man with an oven fork.
“Who might you be then: Bolsheviks or Communists?” the old man asked. Evidently, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box when it came to state ideology.
“Neither,” Osip said with relief. “We’re just common folks.”
The old man welcomed them inside his dark house. While they were settling themselves down for the night on the floor, he asked them about the city, the war, and the prices, but he didn’t offer them any food, although it was clear that they had had nothing to eat.
Parasite! Osip thought indignantly. We’ll deal with you in the morning.
“Your rifles don’t go off by themselves, do they?” asked a young woman lying on the big brick oven. “We had another lot here before you, and one of the soldier’s rifles went off in the middle of the night.”
Their hosts didn’t have the slightest interest in politics. Only their little boy—seven to ten years old judging by his voice—asked if it was true that the Tsar had been sent into exile.
When the family was sound asleep, Fedunya moved closer to Osip.
“I had to run outside earlier, and I heard the sound of a cow—more than one, I think. These people are rich, I tell you.”
Osip pushed him away. “Hush! Don’t give us away.”
In the morning, the old man went to the fields—so he had a horse—and the woman gave Osip and his men milk and stale bread. Osip gazed around the house. It wasn’t as large as he had thought. However, the backyard was covered with an awning, and there were apple trees in the orchard.
Osip was at a loss as to how to begin the requisition process.
He started a conversation about the hungry workers in the cities. The woman listened to him in silence, spinning wool, her spindle humming quietly on the floor. Her little son, a handsome, fair-haired boy, was mending a fishing net and casting sidelong glances at Fedunya’s rifle. He had already tried to touch it once, but his mother had shooed him away.
“My husband is missing at the front,” the woman said. “I think the Germans have taken him prisoner. Our neighbors’ son was missing too. Then they got a letter from him, and he came back home on Palm Sunday. But he’s no worker now that he’s lost his left arm.”
It was time to get down to business. Osip rose from his seat, and Andreika and Fedunya followed him. But the next moment, they heard women’s screams outside. Apparently, Osip’s men had begun throwing their weight around without waiting for his order.
As they all ran outside, Andreika without a thought shot down a man trying to raise the alarm by banging on a piece of metal rail hanging from a tree.
“Just do what you’ve been instructed to do,” Osip ordered his assistants.
When Fedunya tried to drag a goat out of the yard, the woman who had sheltered them stabbed him in the side with a pitchfork. Osip pulled out his pistol and fired.
“Mama!” shouted the fair-haired boy.
Osip’s men pulled out sacks of grain from the granaries, grabbed chickens, and seized jars of preserved goods from cellars.
The villagers howled in terror, “Have mercy on us, master!”
Osip didn’t know how it all happened. He had come here with a clear aim in mind to commandeer surplus food, uphold the honor of the proletariat, and be stern but fair. But everything had gone completely wrong.
“There’s no law that allows you to take the grain I planted and harvested with my own hands,” yelled a black-bearded man, trying to push his way through to Osip.
Osip’s men held him back by the elbows to stop him clawing at the commissar’s throat. Osip gave him a hard blow in the jaw.
They found several sacks of grain stashed away at the man’s house. Then Osip found a bigger store of grain in a pit in the garden. It was covered with turf, but the grass over it had turned yellow, indicating the hiding place.
A hunched old woman in a black shawl watched as members of the brigade dragged struggling geese along by their necks.
“Stinking thieves!” she cried, pointing at Osip with a gnarled finger.
“Shut up, or I’ll burn your house down, you old witch!” he yelled in reply.
They didn’t leave a single house untouched. It seemed to them that Utechino must be full of hiding places, yet the amount of food they managed to collect was pitiful.
They needed to justify their behavior to themselves. They weren’t shooting and beating the villagers for nothing but for a great cause—to feed the hungry. The only way they could feed the people of Sormovo was by pillaging Utechino and the nearby villages. But they found little or nothing there. The locals had been warned and had escaped to the forest along with their stocks and supplies.
Osip had become a Bolshevik to deliver the working class from slavery, yet now the peasants were calling him a “master” and a “thief.”
It was clear that these people had no idea how serious the situation was. If they refused to feed the starving cities, there would be nobody to stand up for them. The landlords and factory owners would come back, and the Tsar’s regime would be restored with all its injustice. The poor would remain as miserable as they had always been.
Yet now that the revolution had delivered the peasants from their former oppressors, they felt they had no obligations to the new government. Mired in primitive ignorance, they gave no thought to the cities. As soon as they lost the right to trade their grain there, they began to use the grain to distill raw vodka. Osip was under orders from Moscow to execute anyone who made illicit spirits on the spot, but the men of Utechino had pooled their money together to buy their hooch still and consequently were all as guilty as each other. What was Osip supposed to do? Shoot every man in the village?
Seeing red, Osip ordered a meeting.
“If I find out that you’re speculating in grain or making vodka instead of giving your surpluses to the state, I’ll blow up your mill. Got it?”
“What?” the villagers were shocked. “But how will we mill our flour?”
Osip told them to bury their dead without ceremony and to get the carts ready to take the food to the railroad station.
All the way to the station the one-eyed cart-driver tried to curry favor with Osip, feigning sympathy.
“The folks around here are a feckless lot,” he sighed. “They get orders from the city and use them to make cigarette papers.”
Osip strode in silence beside the cart. He was deliberately letting Fedunya’s rifle strap rub the bare skin of his neck at his open collar. He hoped it would rub his skin raw. He felt an overwhelming urge to mortify himself.
“Hey, boss, are you from Penza city?” the cart-driver asked.
“No. I’m from Nizhny Novgorod,” Osip said.
“My son told me that over in Penza, there’s a train full of Chacks, former prisoners of war.”
“You mean Czechs, not Chacks,” Osip muttered. “The Austrians mobilized them to fight against Russia, but they said they didn’t want to fight their fellow Slavs. So, they gave themselves up.”
The cart-driver was delighted that this stern Bolshevik had deigned to join him in conversation.