83
Crimson Riding Breeches
My good-humoured arguments with Zozulya about art and literature came to an unexpected end with my call-up. So far, my short-sightedness had guaranteed me a so-called ‘white ticket’, meaning a deferral from military service. But now they were calling up everyone. Along with a few sickly youths, I was given a perfunctory medical examination and packed off to the ‘Prisoners’ Regiment’. As far as I can tell, this was the most bizarre regiment in all of history.
In one of the skirmishes with Makhno’s forces, a top adjutant had been captured. His name was either Antoshchenko or Antonyuk, I don’t recall. We’ll call him Antoshchenko. Such were Antoshchenko’s crimes that he was sentenced to death by firing squad. As he awaited execution in a cell of Kiev’s Lukyanovskaya prison, his crazed mind sought a plan for salvation.
Antoshchenko sent for the prosecutor and dictated to him a letter for the local head of the Extraordinary Commission.fn1 He wrote that the Soviet government didn’t know what to do with the bandits it had captured. There were too many of them to shoot and what with the widespread shortage of food it made no sense to feed all these parasites. It was for these reasons that the bandits had simply been disarmed and released, and most of them immediately returned to their atamans and went straight back to looting, pillaging and murdering all over Ukraine. Antoshchenko offered a way out of this predicament: instead of shooting him, the Soviets should release him, and as an expression of his gratitude Antoshchenko promised to form an exemplary regiment out of the large number of imprisoned thugs and killers. He noted the great respect he commanded among these men and insisted that he alone had the authority to succeed with such a plan.
The government decided it was worth taking the risk and freed Antoshchenko. And he really did organise in quick fashion this Prisoners’ Regiment, made up of separate companies of captured bandits based on their gang affiliations. There was the Makhno Company, the Struk Company, the Zelëny Company, and others for the Angel Hearts, the Red Coats and the Grigorievites. A final one was formed from members of smaller, less important gangs, referred to as ‘the Forgotten Slaves Company’. It was to this Prisoners’ Regiment that we ‘white-ticket men’ were assigned.
An escort picked us up at the recruiting station and took us to the regimental HQ in the Pechersk neighbourhood. Along the way he refused to acknowledge our questions but muttered from time to time in an ominous way: ‘He’s a viper, that one, you’ll see soon enough’ or ‘So much as look cross-eyed at him and you’re done for.’ Apparently, he was referring to Commander Antoshchenko.
Upon arrival they lined us up with other conscripts opposite a small old house. The tops of the lilacs in the garden extended beyond the roofline. There were no obvious signs of danger, although the tense, pale faces of the escorts did not bode well. A short man with bushy black side-whiskers and crooked crab legs waddled out of the house. He wore a red wool tunic, crimson riding breeches with silver piping, enormous, clanking spurs and boots made of red leather. To this he had added red leather gloves on his pudgy hands and a scarlet-tipped Cossack hat pulled low over his forehead. It was the exact caricature of a ‘Red Commander’ as envisioned by Makhno’s men.
None of us conscripts dared to so much as smile. Just the opposite – we shuddered upon catching sight of the man’s eyes, bright and almost white with malice. We guessed this had to be Antoshchenko. On one side of the belt around his waist hung a Mauser with a large wooden butt and on the other a curved sabre in a sheath decorated with silver. He pulled a snow-white handkerchief from the pocket of his riding breeches, delicately shook it out and wiped his lips before asking in a hoarse voice: ‘Who’d you bring me this time, slaves? More scum of the earth?’
The escorts were silent. Antoshchenko slowly walked up and down the ranks, inspecting each one of us from head to toe. Two lanky officers walked behind him. We assumed they must have been battalion commanders. All of a sudden, Antoshchenko unsheathed his sabre and cried in a high, plaintive voice: ‘I’m going to teach you to serve the revolution, and when I’m done, I’m going to have my way with your mothers! Understand, you bastards? Do you know who I am? I carved up General Kaledin with this very sword, so just imagine what I can do to the likes of you with it. I spit up a dozen mugs of blood a day, I’ve taken more bullets for the Fatherland than any man alive, and that’s why Moscow sends me thirty thousand gold roubles a month, just for pocket money. Did you know that, eh? Well, if not, maybe you do know that I don’t waste my time on human scum like you. Some hot lead in the back of the head and into the ditch, that’s how I handle things!’
He was shrieking by now. Spit bubbles popped in the corners of his mouth. Clearly the man was either insane or an epileptic. Stepping up close to a tall youth in spectacles, a student most likely, he prodded him on the chin with his sword hilt. ‘And what’s your problem?’ he asked, staring drunkenly at the boy. ‘What are the glasses for? With these very hands I killed my wife for sleeping with another man.’ He had spread out his short fat fingers and was holding them up to us. The blood-red gloves were several sizes too big for him. ‘Do you think because you’re wearing glasses, I’ll spare you? Why, I could just as easily skin you alive, and no one would lift a finger to stop me.’
We were speechless, bewildered and didn’t understand what was happening or even where we were. The escorts stared at Antoshchenko with a look of tense anger. Only the two battalion commanders stood calmly by and looked at us with bored expressions. Apparently, they were used to such displays.
Antoshchenko hopped back a few steps and called out in an affectedly cheerful tone: ‘Well now, who here can read and write? Do be so kind as to step forward three paces.’
He made an inviting gesture with his sabre, and I was about to step forward when the escort standing next to me said in a hushed whisper: ‘Stop. Stay where you are.’
I stood still. All of us were literate, but many of the conscripts suspected something nefarious in Antoshchenko’s voice, and so in the end only a dozen or so men came forward. Antoshchenko didn’t seem the least bit surprised.
‘And which of you are musicians?’ he asked in the same phony tone. Again, the escort whispered: ‘Don’t move.’ Next, Antoshchenko, joking and laughing, called out for cobblers, singers and tailors. The conscripts relaxed and a great many of them stepped out of rank. By now only a dozen of us useless ignoramuses were left – evidently, only those whom the escorts had managed to warn. Antoshchenko turned to one of the battalion officers and said in a tired voice: ‘Commander, look at these shirkers – all wanting to be clerks at HQ or mend soldiers’ trousers instead of dying a hero’s death fighting for the oppressed peasants of the world. Do you see these bastard intelligènty trying to find some nice safe perch for themselves, even though they don’t have any right to it?’
‘I see them, Comrade Commander,’ said the officer wearily.
‘Send them all off today against Zelëny’s men near Tripolie. And if a single one of them comes back alive, you’ll pay for it with your head. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir, Comrade Commander,’ the officer said just as wearily.
Antoshchenko gave us illiterates a quick look, popped his sabre back into the sheath and said: ‘I’d better not lay eyes on this rubbish again. Off to the kitchen patrol! For Christ’s sake, forward march, now, all of you!’
We were separated from the other men and marched over to the regimental barracks in the Nikolsky Fortress. A large semicircle surrounded by slopes overgrown with elder, the fortress stood on a bluff overlooking the Dnieper not far from Mariinsky Park. As a boy, I had spent a good deal of time, especially in spring, in this shady and empty park. I had once seen a midshipman there and this encounter had awoken a passion in me for the sea. There, to the humming of the bees in the jasmine bushes, I exhausted myself in reading and rereading my favourite poets, reciting aloud those especially wonderful lines I couldn’t get out of my head. This is why the grey-brick fortress, with its embrasures, its archways, its decrepit drawbridge hanging from rusty chains, its bronze lion heads on the cast-iron gates, had always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic places on earth.