Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (6 page)

Like fire along a line of thatched roofs, the rebellion immediately spread across the whole district; the Kirsanov and
Borisoglebsk
districts were ignited as well. Local communists were massacred everywhere (and the women attacked them with sickles), village soviets were destroyed, state farms and communes were broken up. Those communists and activists who survived fled into Tambov itself.

The communists from outside—well, you could understand where they came from. But how did we come to have our own homegrown ones? Pavel Vasilych had figured this out from things he picked up in the villages, and there were other facts he had known already. In the first regional and local soviet elections, the peasants still didn
’
t realize the all-embracing power this new system would have. They imagined it would be a small thing, since now that everybody had got their freedom, what mattered was taking over the landowners
’
land, not the elections. And what proper peasant would drop all his farmwork to take up some elected
post? So the ones who got these posts were peasants only by birth, not by the work they did. They were the troublemakers, the reckless, the lazy, the beggars, and the ones who had moved from one unskilled job to another in towns and on building sites, managing to pick up a few revolutionary slogans along the way. And then there were all those who had deserted from the army in 1917, the ones who were quick to take up pillaging. Such were the people who became village communists and activists, the ones who held the power.

All of Pavel Ektov
’
s education and the humanitarian tradition he came from made him absolutely opposed to bloodshed. But now, particularly after this righteous march of the people at Kuzmina Gat, the relationship between those who were powerless but right and those who relentlessly wielded brute force was as obvious as the naked truth itself: the peasants could do nothing other than take up arms. (And there were still many rifles, cartridges, sabers, and grenades available, brought home from the German War or left behind after Mamontov
’
s breakthrough. Some had been hidden, some buried.)

As a Russian populist and lover of the people, Ektov saw no alternative but to join them and do as they were doing. Still: The great Civil War had ended, and what chances were there now for a peasant uprising? There was no doubt, though, that the peasants would have few competent leaders who could guide their movement. Granted, he was just a worker for the co-op and no soldier, but he was competent and clever. He could be very useful to them in some capacity.

But then there was his wife, Polina, an inseparable part of his heart.
And Marina, the little five-year-old with cornflower eyes.
How could he abandon them? What trials and dangers would they face? He might well be leaving them to starve. Yes, indeed, family was the greatest worry—the source of our happiness and our weakness.

Polina was deeply alarmed, but she forced herself to be strong and blessed him on his decision: You
’
re right. . . Yes, right. . . Go.

He left her and their daughter in their city apartment with a small supply of food and firewood for the coming winter; and she, a teacher, was earning something.

Pavel Vasilych left Tambov and set off to find what he supposed was the headquarters of the uprising.

And he found it, a small, mobile group around Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov. He was a Kirsanov townsman by origin and, in 1905, had been an
“
expropriator
”
(meaning he robbed banks) for the SR party. (You couldn
’
t close your eyes to that: So now you
’
re mixed up with criminals?) He
’
d come back from Siberian exile in 1917, and before the Bolshevik coup was the head of the Kirsanov militia that later collected a large stock of weapons during the disarming of the Czech Legions passing through Kirsanov. In the summer of 1919, with a small body of troops, he was raiding and destroying local communist cells here and there at a time when the SRs themselves could not resolve to stand up to the Bolsheviks for
fear of aiding the Whites. Now Antonov was not acting for the SRs, he was acting on his own. The provincial Cheka searched for him all through the winter of 1919—20, but they couldn
’
t catch him. Antonov had no education to speak of and hadn
’
t even finished the district school, but he was bold, decisive, and sharp.

In the headquarters that Antonov was forming—which could hardly be called a headquarters—there wasn
’
t a single officer with staff experience. There was a local fellow with a good deal of natural talent, Pyotr Mikhailovich Tokmakov, from the peasant village of Inokovka-1. He had been an NCO in the tsarist army, and on the German front had risen to the rank of warrant officer and then to second lieutenant. He was a first-class soldier, but had no more than three years of parish school. There was also a wild, combative warrant officer, another former NCO, bursting with energy: this was
Terenty
Chernega
, who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and served with them for two years, even in their special forces; but after he had seen the things that were happening he went back to the side of the peasants. Another NCO and artillery man,
Arseny
Blagodaryov
, came from the same village of Kamenka where it had all begun; he was one of the people who had begun the revolt. Later, each of these three took command of a partisan regiment. Tokmakov would eventually command a brigade of four regiments, but not one of them was even close to being able to do staff work. Antonov
’
s adjutant wasn
’
t a soldier at all but a teacher named
Starykh
who came from
Kalugino
on the
Sukhaya
Panda.

When Ektov reported to Antonov, it turned out that he was just the man to be his
“
chief of staff,
”
if only because he was a competent and smart fellow who could also read a topographical map. Antonov asked his name. Strangely enough, Ektov didn
’
t reveal himself. He began saying
“
Ek
…”
and then caught himself: he mustn
’
t give his name! What came from his throat was only,
“
a . . .
ga
. . .
”

Antonov heard it as
“
Egov
.
”

Why not? It wasn
’
t bad as a pseudonym. He answered clearly:
“
Ego. Let
’
s keep it at that.
”

Well, so be it. Antonov didn
’
t ask any more questions.

And soon everyone knew him as
“
Ego,
”
and also as Pavel, only it was Pavel Timofeevich. Before long they accepted his authority as
“
chief of staff
”
(he himself was amazed), but he was barely able to establish some communications and coordinate their joint actions, while Antonov himself and his partisan leaders more often ran their detachments by their own sudden impulses, asking no one
’
s approval and responding to the sudden changes in circumstances.

Tambov Region was not well suited for a partisan war. Like much of the province, it had little forest; it was a plain with some low hills, though there were a lot of deep gullies and ravines
(
yarugi
,
as called locally) that gave cover for cavalry. There was a network of dirt roads rutted by cart tracks, but the cavalry could move at speed across the plain.

And what a cavalry it was! Stirrups made of rope, saddles most often just pillows (feathers would drift out from beneath the rider as he trotted along). Some had military uniforms, some kept their peasant dress (they wore red ribbons across their hats: they were for revolution and were Reds, too, and called each other
“
comrade
”
when they didn
’
t use their village nicknames). On the other hand, the rebels always had fresh horses since they could easily change them in the villages (though not without a lot of grumbling from the peasants:
Our
lads may be ours, but that horse is
mine . .
.) They collected
Berdanka
rifles here and there, along with shotguns, sawn-off rifles (they were easier to hide and almost as accurate at close range), and some
Mannlicher
and Gras rifles brought back from the war. At the beginning they had no more than five cartridges per rifle, but then they captured some ammunition from the food detachments and
special forces
and even captured a few entire arms depots.
Once Antonov carried out a daring operation: he seized a whole trainload of military supplies from the Reds and hastily carried them off in wagons to the villages well back from the railway, which couldn
’
t be secured for long.

Because there were so many rebels, however, they were still very short of weapons, even sabers, and when an alarm was given, they still came running from the villages with pitchforks. (The rebels would signal the arrival of a Bolshevik detachment by stopping the arms of the village windmill or by sending a messenger galloping out from the far end of the village to warn the neighbors.)

The joy of successful
raids,
and of successful withdrawals as well, amazed Ektov and greatly raised his spirits: How could they manage to do these things? They had begun with nothing, after all!

And so they lived—first for weeks, then for months: by day they would work like peasants; by night, or when the alarm was given, they would mount their horses and go off on a raid. Rebel and Soviet detachments pursued one another through the deep gullies. When the rebels were routed, they would disperse and hide their weapons—not in their own yards but in some gully.

... And after a battle a dead man
lies
, his head in the water of a brook. For hours his horse stands sadly next to its dead master ... A wagtail bird flutters over the grasses . . .

A favorite refuge of the Antonov cavalry was the lowland along the Vorona River. There was a broad circle of clearings among the oaks, elms, aspens, and willows that seemed to have been carefully arranged there. The exhausted riders would drop from their horses to lie in the clearings grown over with meadow grass and horse sorrel; the horses would nip at the grass as they slowly wandered nearby. Only a few abandoned tracks led to the place, and beyond it lay dense and impassable woodland—low thickets of entangled bushes and dry grass in which lurked five-foot-long vipers with darkly
hatchmarked
backs. (One of the most inaccessible spots was in fact called Snake Bog.)

In September the rebellion broke out in
Pakhotny
Ugol
as well, a place well north of Tambov, toward
Morshansk
. The year before, the communists had cobbled
together a
“
model commune
”
there, but now the commune people had come to their senses and become a separate but powerful ally of the rebels.

The numbers of rebels were multiplying and, emboldened, at the beginning of October they launched an attack from the south on Kamenka to free it from the Red garrison quartered there. The Reds replied with artillery, and in their counterattack they sent in infantry along with their cavalry. The rebels dismounted and—for the first and only time—dug trenches, something that had become second nature in the German War. But this was their mistake: they could not sustain a two-day, pitched battle. They abandoned their trenches and withdrew to
Tugolukovo
, where there was a plentiful supply of horses. Many peasants from
Tugolukovo
mounted their horses and, leading another horse behind them, went off with the
partisans.

The area of rebellion was dangerously restricted within a triangle of the rail lines between Tambov,
Balashov
, and
Rtishchevo
, and troops were garrisoned at the major stations. These rail lines had to be sabotaged at every opportunity. Antonov
’
s forces did dash in several times to cut the lines and then use their horses to bend the rails into a bow.

The mass of the railway workers, particularly the telephone and telegraph operators, sympathized with the rebels, and some of them would hold up the transmission of instructions to the Reds, or they would lose or garble them and even pass them on to the partisans, so that the Bolsheviks could not fully rely on their lines of communication. The railway workers in
Rtishchevo
District even elected a delegation to go to the rebels and show their support, but the Chekists managed to arrest the delegates and declared a state of emergency for the whole area.