The pressure became so unbearable that workers desperately met in secret for the intention of organizing a strike. The Action Squads along with the secret police rounded up the leaders and shipped them east. Then the Agitators came in and explained that strikes in the Soviet Union were illegal because there was no need to strike. The workers owned the factories and therefore they would be striking against themselves.
The only way to gain recognition as a worker appeared to be to work one’s self to an early grave through donation of almost every free hour. For this, the worker’s reward was a medal, the Labor Order of the Red Banner, to wear on his shabby suit.
The farm had been primitive, but the words of Igor’s father were never forgotten ... “freedom is life.” He realized that the Communists were trying valiantly to make the Soviet Union a modern country and that harsh methods were called for. He also came to understand that the West was the true enemy of the masses. Nevertheless, he had to escape the factory.
His brother Alexander’s revolutionary fires had been dimmed. Alexander was now in a jungle for survival. The only way to prosper was to follow classical party lines. The early idealism was replaced by the never-ending terror. Alexander attempted time and again to have Igor join Komsomol. As a Komsomol member new opportunities would open. Igor was determined to escape the fanatical discipline and the distasteful duty as an agitator or member of an Action Squad.
He found his way through the study of science and set in a number of improvisations in the factory that won him the attention of the planners and finally a medal as a Hero of Soviet Labor. As an engineer Igor knew he had a chance for a better life because engineers were desperately needed.
He pressured Alexander to arrange for him to take entrance examinations for the great University of Moscow. It was a far-reaching dream. The university belonged to the Komsomol faithful and the sons and daughters of the new ruling class. A Cossack boy from Rostov simply did not have a chance. But Igor persisted, and won the dream.
Natasha wept on his last visit before his departure. Moscow was 1000 kilometers away. Igor would be gone for four years with little or no chance of seeing her and just as small a chance of getting papers for her to come to Moscow. Afterward he had to give two years of free service to the government to repay his education and would most likely be sent to Siberia to the virgin lands.
Igor tried to comfort her by promising that the years would fly by and they would still be young enough to make a life. His last words were a vow to return to her.
Igor Karlovy never went into Siberian service. Upon graduation from the University of Moscow he was commissioned into the Red Air Force and sent to Leningrad. The Army and Air Force were frantically reorganizing trying to recover from the purges and the fiasco of the Finnish campaign.
The eve of the Great Patriotic War found him designing and constructing bulwarks on the Karelian Isthmus for the defense of Leningrad. Natasha moved to Armavir to a war factory, but after a short while communication was cut off between them.
June, 1942
My Beloved Brother, Igor,
The war has kept contact from us for a full year. I have not heard from you in all this time, but I know from friends you are stationed in the same place as where you were assigned after you left the university.
The bearer of this letter, a colleague in the Party, is being transferred to your district and has agreed to try to get this message to you.
My family and I have been evacuated into the interior. We are settled, and now to the task of organizing food production. We are faring quite well.
I have terribly bad news. Natasha is dead. She was among the defenders of Armavir. Many survivors are now in my area so the accounts of her death are authentic. I fear to say the entire business is most distressing. She was wounded and captured by the Nazis, abused, and done away with in a most brutal manner.
My deepest pity is for you at this moment of grief. I beg you to be of stout heart and take vengeance on the Nazi monsters for what they have done to Natasha and our glorious Motherland.
Long live the Communist Party! Long live Stalin! Death to the enemy!
Your loving brother,
Alexander
The Russian lands are cold and morbid, and a long shadow of death and tragedy hovers over her people. The woeful cries of toil and grief and poverty fill her music and her poems; life is suffering, suffering is life. The winters are as brutal as life is brutal.
All that is tragic in Russian heritage struck down on Igor Karlovy where he lived among the freezing and the starving in the Siege of Leningrad. The letter was the most painful chapter in a pain-filled journey through life. The death of his beloved Natasha all but sucked the will to survive.
When is it that a man like Igor Karlovy seeks out a woman such as Olga Shiminov? Is it when his soul wallows in a bottomless pit of grief? Is it when he clings stubbornly to a thinning thread between hope and complete depression?
Or perhaps it was the warmth that first brought him back to life, the warmth of Olga Shiminov’s apartment. Outside the dead were stacked like frozen logs in the gutters; the starving walked about in trances; Finnish and German cannon beat upon them without respite. Was it something so simple as the cold and the rumble of hunger in his belly that drew him to Olga Shiminov?
She was one of the most important Komsomol leaders in Leningrad. As a deputy in charge of women’s labor battalions she came into frequent dealings with Igor in the numerous engineering problems in building fortifications, roads over the ice, demolishing dangerous buildings, clearing rubble.
It was on a night in December during one of their many conferences that they became unbearably cold in his heatless office and Olga suggested they finish their work in her flat, where it was warm. Warmth ... that is what one needed in the Leningrad winter. For the masses there was no fuel. Every wooden structure had been demolished and long consumed as firewood. Everyone was cold and hungry ... except important officials like Olga Shiminov.
She had her own room with a private bath and kitchen. It was a luxurious palace in that frozen tomb of a city. And her cupboards held tea and vodka and potatoes and bread and beef.
Did he sell himself for warmth or was it just a weariness of life that afforded him no resistance? In truth, Igor never looked at her as a man looks at a woman in all those months they had worked together. Olga kept herself drab and severe as befitting an official of the party.
She was entirely without Natasha’s female wiles, sensuous looks, soft touches, desirable body. Olga was a daughter of the revolution, the ultimate product of this new way of life. She carried her breasts with a sort of defiance, as though they constituted a challenge to her equality. Olga was a slogan, a dedicated heartless mold which functioned with the machinelike efficiency of the new breed of Russian. Nonetheless there was still something of her that was “woman” ... there was female flesh. No matter how well it was Sovietized, it still existed.
Igor was an attractive man. Despite her objections that he had no background as a Communist, there was a special wartime dispensation for heroes of the Red Air Force. He was of the new legend. Wounded by gunfire, a man of great ingenuity and great courage, a hard-drinking Cossack surrounded by loyal officers. Perhaps it was Igor’s total indifference to Olga that awakened a challenge in her. He took her because he had reached the depths ... and her apartment was warm.