Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [126]
Although more and more writing became available, the books began to fall into a dull pattern. Everything had been rewritten so that it was ultimately a glorification of the Bolsheviks.
Igor taught himself both German and English in order to find new avenues of thought away from the repetition of the Communist books. He discovered that he could read great Russian writers of the past in foreign languages as many were no longer published in Russian. It was the same with Russian history, which seemed to begin, so far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, with the birth of Karl Marx.
In other ways, Igor was the son of his father. In true Cossack tradition he became a magnificent horseman, sang with the sweetness of the marsh swallow, and developed into a drinking man of no small accomplishment. His heart, frivolous at times, never truly strayed or really ever belonged to anyone but Natasha.
Days and sometimes weeks seemed endless until that glorious moment when she rode in from her village and they could go off together to a place known to them alone, away from all the world. But they had come to that time in the springtime of life when meetings brought frustration and partings became a thing of pain.
Natasha understood his yearning to seek the world, his predicament and imprisonment. She did not press him to the promise of marriage, for to have done so would have sealed him to Glinka forever.
And so, on a summer’s day when Igor was eighteen and she sixteen, they came to know each other’s bodies; it happened in their secret place by the Kuban River.
At the end of the 1920s a vast change swept the land. The order came from Moscow to collectivize the farmlands. The planners made an edict that farm production had to catch the march of industrialization. It was not an edict understood by the Kulaks, who were free farmers, or the Cossacks, who were free men.
The Kuban Cossacks armed and rode their horses out to defend their land and charged wildly into fusillades of Red Army guns which cut them down like stacks of wheat.
At last it became Glinka’s turn to collectivize. Alexander Karlovy returned to the place of his birth out of sentiment. A meeting was called. Alexander pleaded with the villagers to accept it peacefully for the good of Russia, and warned that only by quiet acquiescence could Glinka be spared the fate of hundreds of blood-soaked villages. It was beyond his power to do more.
The villagers of Glinka, led by old Gregory Karlovy, gave their answer. They burned their crops and slaughtered their livestock.
And so, it came to pass that the centuries-old tradition of free men ended. The people of Glinka were rounded up and deported for slave labor to Siberia, never to be heard from again. Only a single villager was spared. By trickery, Alexander had his young brother Igor come to Rostov to visit him at the exact moment of the deportation.
Igor, of course, sensed that something terrible had taken place, but travel permits were almost impossible in those days. Furthermore, Russian life had conditioned him not to inquire. In due time Alexander told him of what had happened and that their father and mother had chosen not to escape to Rostov.
The farm was gone forever, yet there were a number of compensations in living in Rostov with Alexander and his family. Mainly, new doors opened to learning in the great drive to educate the masses. As a Communist official Alexander had his own two-room cottage. He was able to fix up a shed outside so that Igor had his own six- by ten-foot room; this was a luxury for a single man.
Igor threw himself into that vast, faceless legion of toilers going to work in one of the new tractor factories and continued his studies by night.
It was impossible to bring Natasha to Rostov because of the travel papers. Even if he had been able, there was no way to support her or ask her to share the shed. She learned to read and write so there were letters to sustain them. Then, once each year, he was able to go off with her for a week to the Black Sea.