The elder couldn’t have been more helpful. He took Peter up to the house and found the package he was looking for. Some music, it seemed, locked in a cupboard. Then he had personally escorted him back through the wood towards Russka.
No one knew what had happened to him. No trace was ever found. It was just one of those mysteries.
And young Dimitri Suvorin completed the splendid slow movement of his Revolution Symphony from memory. It was dedicated, naturally, to his father.
1918, August
Young Ivan watched tensely as the troops approached. Red Army. They had been busy in the town of Russka that morning; they had a commissar with them, a man of some importance; and to Ivan’s amazement he had just heard the commissar was coming to the village in person.
The commissar and his Uncle Boris. He wondered who would win.
The village had prepared carefully. A week before, on a moonless night, the entire village, men and women, had turned out and moved all the grain to new hiding places. Because he and his mother lived up at the big house, and because his uncle hated Arina, they had not been asked to take part. But Ivan had sneaked down and watched them. Two stores were underground, at the edge of the wood. More ingenious, some fifty sealed containers had been lowered into the river a short way upstream. Some grain, however, had been left in plain view, in a large storehouse at the end of the village. ‘Let the thieves take that,’ Uncle Boris had said. And then, with disgust: ‘Even when my father was a serf, they never came and took away his grain.’
All over Russia, the countryside was in a state of seething revolt. To the south, a week before, the people in one hamlet had chased two Bolshevik officials away with pitchforks and killed one of them.
The problem had begun last year when the Provisional Government had directed that all surplus grain must be sold to the government at set prices. Naturally since the prices were low, most of the peasants had ignored this; besides, every peasant had been accustomed to sell his produce at market since time began. But now the Bolsheviks – or Communists, as they nowadays called themselves – said this was speculation and the Cheka officers had been shooting people they caught. ‘But have you seen what these fools want to pay?’ Boris had thundered. ‘They’ll pay sixteen roubles for a pud of rye. And you know what that’s worth if I can sell it in Moscow? Almost three hundred roubles! So let them come,’ he said grimly, ‘and see what they can find.’
They were coming now: thirty armed men in rather dirty uniforms. At their head walked two figures, both wearing leather coats: one young, the other perhaps sixty, with greying hair that had a reddish, sandy look. And it was only as they drew close that Ivan heard his uncle mutter.
‘I’ll be damned. It’s that accursed red-head.’
Popov approached the village without particular emotion. Indeed, he had only come to this region because Lenin had personally asked him to do so.
He had never known Vladimir Ilich so angry. Of course, they both knew, the fact that most of the old officials from the agriculture ministry had gone didn’t help. Someone on the Central Committee had even suggested allowing grain to be freely sold for a while. ‘But if we’re going to allow a free market, then what are we Communists doing here at all?’ Lenin had countered. Meanwhile, the cities were so short of food that they were emptying. It was absurd.
The object of the exercise today was two-fold. Firstly, to obtain grain. Secondly, to discipline the villagers. Lenin had been very explicit.
‘The trouble, Yevgeny Pavlovich, is the capitalist class amongst the peasants – the kulaks. They’re profiteers, bloodsuckers! If necessary the entire class should be liquidated. We’ve got to take the revolution to the countryside,’ he had added grimly. ‘We have to find the rural proletariat.’
Popov smiled thinly as he remembered his experiences down here in the past. Who was a kulak? A selfish peasant? A successful one? In his own view, all peasants were petit bourgeois, but then he had never liked them. It was time to sort them out.
‘If only,’ he remarked to the young commissar who was accompanying him, ‘it was as easy to organize these cursed villagers as it is to sort out a factory.’
The morning in the factory had gone very well. There was a soviet there, led by a young Bolshevik he could trust. One of the factory managers had been kept on for the last few months to ensure that the plants functioned smoothly. This morning, however, in conversation with the committee, he had satisfied himself that they could operate without the manager now.
‘So you’re to be taken to a concentration camp,’ he had told the astonished manager at noon. Lenin and Trotsky were both very keen to see these camps used more. ‘A new camp is just being set up at Murom,’ he informed the manager. ‘I hope you enjoy it.’
‘But for what crime?’ the fellow had asked.
‘That will be decided in due course,’ the young commissar at Popov’s side had snapped and, grimly amused, Popov had left it at that.
And now the commissar and the village elder faced each other. If either recognized the other, neither gave any sign.
‘Where’s the grain?’ Popov asked quietly.
‘Grain? Over there, Comrade Commissar.’ And he indicated the storehouse.
Popov did not even bother to glance at it. ‘Search the village,’ he ordered the troops peremptorily.
It was a strange little comedy, Ivan thought, as he watched the two men. The two commissars strolled round the village, inspecting the huts, accompanied by Boris who, it seemed, was anxious to show them everything. Indeed, Ivan had never seen his burly, overbearing uncle put on an act like this. He bowed and scraped like an innkeeper from the old days, calling Popov: ‘Comrade Commissar’, ‘Sir’, and even once, in an apparent fit of absent-mindedness, addressing him like a tsarist officiaclass="underline" ‘Your Highly Wellborn’.
But Popov’s face remained a mask.
‘Nothing, Commissar,’ the sergeant reported.
To which Popov only replied: ‘No, I didn’t think there would be.’
Turning suddenly to Boris he demanded: ‘What’s up at the big house?’
‘Nothing much, esteemed Comrade Commissar. Just his mother, now.’ Boris indicated Ivan.
‘Good. We’ll see it.’
As they went up the slope, the young commissar asked Popov quietly: ‘You think they have grain?’ Popov nodded. ‘What will you do?’
‘Find it and take it all.’
‘All? Won’t the village itself go hungry then?’
‘Yes.’ Popov glanced at him. ‘You should know, comrade, that hunger is sometimes very useful. It makes the people turn on each other at first – they’ll attack the kulaks who have food. And then they become submissive. These things are well studied, and useful.’
They reached the house. Popov made a brief tour of inspection, insisting on seeing the attic as well as all the outbuildings and the workshops. Having satisfied himself that the place contained no stores, he came back outside. Then he called the people there to come to him in front of the verandah.
There were half a dozen villagers, who had followed out of curiosity, Boris, Ivan and Arina, and three Red soldiers. Popov gave them all a faint smile. Then he turned to Boris.
‘You are the elder. Do you swear you have no grain?’
‘I do, Comrade Commissar.’ Boris nodded vigorously.
‘Very well then.’ He beckoned one of the soldiers. ‘Take aim at her.’ He pointed to Arina. Then he turned to young Ivan. ‘Now tell me where it’s hidden,’ he said gently.
The Red soldier shot Boris by the river, as soon as the last of the containers of grain had been pulled out.