Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [525]
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