Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [125]
“The Reds,” she quivered at last ‘They have talked to my brother, Sergei.”
“Where? When?”
“When we were at market three days ago in Armavir. Poppa went to the Jew’s quarters to trade with them and left Sergei to watch our stall. When I came he was gone. He didn’t tell me until this morning where he had been. The Reds had taken him away.”
“What did they want?”
“What they always want. They wanted to know where the village was hiding the grain.”
“He didn’t tell, of course.”
“Not at first. Then they told him we were all saboteurs and provocateurs ... whatever that means ... and that the people in the city were starving.”
“Damn them! You know what the Reds give us for our grain! A piece of paper no one can read.”
“They ... they promised to make Sergei a hero of the Soviet Union if he told.”
“A hero for telling on his own parents?”
“Sergei told.”
Igor bolted to his feet “You should have told me immediately.”
“I ... I only found out about it ... and I was afraid ...”
“I’ve got to warn the village!”
Igor raced across the fields yelling at the top of his voice. He ran all the way back to the village center, a muddy street, gasped dizzily, grabbed the rope of the alarm bell, and pulled for all his worth, bringing villagers on the run from fields in all directions.
Igor blurted out the story, and Sergei, his own age of twelve, was brought into the square and questioned until he broke down and confessed. His father dragged him off to their barn and thrashed him to within an inch of his life as Natasha screamed. The Cossacks frantically scrambled to remove their hidden grain to another place. In the middle of all this the Reds swooped in and caught them. Natasha’s home was burned to the ground and her father hung by the neck in the square.
When he was cut down and buried and the grieving was done and the shock settled, Natasha and her mother went off to live with relatives in the next village.
Sergei was carried off by the Reds to Armavir to a children’s home, which was soon renamed in his honor. He was extolled by the Reds as the first of the youth heroes of the Kuban Cossacks. Over a period of time sixteen villages, twenty factories, ten collective farms, eight tractor stations, and dozens of Children’s Homes and Pioneer Camps were named in his honor.
During the years that followed in the 1920s, Alexander Karlovy became an official of considerable influence in Rostov. The fact that he was a Cossack from the land and at the same time a dedicated Communist proved of great value. He was among the key planners to get greater production from the farmlands of southern Russia.
Fantastic changes were taking place all over the Soviet Union. This awakening giant trembled into a new century, having to pay in toil for past failures to educate her people and industrialize. Now the sweat of the workers and the farmers driven before the unrelenting Communist whip shoved them into this new world.
The Kuban Cossacks of Glinka clung to their land. These new ways remained strange to them; many of their sons were gone and the village wore unhealed wounds. The agitators sent in to enlighten them were treated with suspicion. Their beliefs were as simple and primitive as their lives. The Cossacks had been sent as border guards centuries before by the czars to outposts on the Don and Kuban in Siberia and on other borders. In times of emergency they had raised armies. In exchange, they were granted a status as free men. This, and nothing more, nothing less, was what they desired from the Reds.
Igor Karlovy reached young manhood with a basic faith in the old ways. He suppressed his personal desires to examine this great new world, for it would have created an untold hardship to follow Alexander from the family farm. Gregory Karlovy had grown very old. Despite his furious pride he could not deliver a full day’s work and so Igor subordinated his curiosity to family duty.
A fire for knowledge remained alive though, and each night he read and studied on his own until his eyes burned. When the school came to Glinka he begged for books and