It was dark when he woke-the dark of a blacked-out city. He yawned, but didn’t try to sleep any more. Time to get moving. He might be able to swap town for countryside by the time the sun came up.
–
Out in the kolkhoz’s fields, horses pulled plows. The tractors sat idle for lack of fuel. Sowers with bags of seed planted wheat and barley seeds in the furrows. Ihor Shevchenko was one of them.
The work was long and tedious, but he didn’t mind. The black earth that made the Ukraine famous smelled as rich as some of the chops he’d cut from Nestor’s loin. When you got a whiff of that newly plowed ground, you thought you could eat it instead of the crops that sprang from it.
Plenty of Ukrainian peasants must have tried that when Stalin starved them into collectivizing. They’d died, so it didn’t work, even if it smelled as if it should. You had to do the rest of the work.
Ihor cast seeds here and there. He wasn’t especially careful about it. Why bother? The fields were communal. He wouldn’t get anything extra if they yielded a lot of wheat. If they yielded only a little, the kolkhoz chairman would lie to the people in charge of this area. They would lie to their superiors, and life would go on.
One of the other sowers waved an empty seed sack. A kid tore across the field with a full one. You weren’t supposed to have used up all the grain in a sack so soon. It wasn’t as if Bohdan cared, though. All he cared about was getting through the day so he could start drinking.
Petro Hapochka stood watching the workers from the edge of the field. He would have joined the sowing himself, or perhaps guided the horses up and down, if not for his missing foot. Ihor wondered if he’d give Bohdan hell for screwing around. He ought to, but Ihor doubted he would.
Ihor paused to light a Belomor cigarette. The White Sea name celebrated the canal dug from Lake Vygozero to the arm of the Arctic Ocean. One of the guys who used to live at the kolkhoz had helped dig it: he was one zek among countless others. From what he said, the idea was more to use up political prisoners than to make a useful canal. He hadn’t had any idea how many died from overwork or hunger or cold. He’d pegged out himself, just after Ihor came home from the Great Patriotic War. The guy’d lived through his stretch in the gulag, but not with his health.
Did as many die as an atom bomb kills? Ihor wondered. The bomb gave an easy, quick way to measure the atrocities of Stalin and the MGB. The only trouble was, you’d see the gulag yourself if you told that to anyone you didn’t trust with your life.
“We’ll have a bumper crop this year,” Bohdan said loudly.
“Sure we will,” Ihor agreed, also loudly. You wanted people to hear you saying things like that. It showed you were loyal. If you talked that way, no one would care how much you screwed up the actual work.
The horse plodded up and down the field, plowing furrows and also manuring them. The tractor did much more in a day. Following the horse was more pleasant, as long as you didn’t step in anything.
Every so often, Ihor would glance up to the sky. That seemed more important than watching out for horseshit on the ground. Contrails scared him, especially when they came out of the west or south. Those might be American bombers paying Kiev another call. Jet-engine noises also alarmed him. Either they were bombers or fighters trying to climb high enough fast enough to go after bombers.
“Stalin will be pleased with our harvest this fall,” Bohdan declared.
“Of course he will,” Ihor said. “Great Stalin is always pleased when the peasants and workers do well under the leadership of the glorious Communist Party.”
He raised his voice, so as many of the sowers as possible could hear. Inside, he wanted to wash out his mouth with soap-or, preferably, vodka. You did what you had to do to get by. You couldn’t just keep quiet about the man and the party ruling the Soviet Union. No, if you did that, your friends and acquaintances might think you kept quiet because you had nothing good to say about Stalin and the Communists. Someone who thought something like that was bound to report you to the MGB.
And so, every so often, people spoke up in hearty tones about how wonderful things always had been, were, and always would be in the USSR. Famine in the Ukraine, famine spurred on by fanatical Communist officials? War against Germany so badly botched, the country almost went under? American atom bombs landing everywhere from Leningrad to Petropavlovsk? All those were only bumps on the road to true socialism.
You had to say they were, anyhow, as long as anyone could hear you. You didn’t dare say anything else, not unless you were in bed with your wife, in the middle of the night, all alone, with both your heads under the covers-and maybe not then, either, not if you knew what was good for you. You might have opinions about those other bits of business, but having them and voicing them were two different things.
“Great Stalin looks out for all the people of the Soviet Union,” Bohdan said. “Without his care, the country would fall to pieces.”
“He does,” said Ihor and some of the other sowers.
At the same time, others intoned, “It would.” By the way their voices rose and fell in unison, they might as well have been giving responses to the priest in church. That was another point you made only in the dark and under the covers, if you were so crazy as to make it at all.
Ihor had got far enough west with the Red Army before stopping one to see that life in Poland was richer than life in the USSR, while life in Germany was far richer than life in Poland, much less here. For the life of him, he’d never been able to figure out why the Nazis, who already had a country with so much for everybody, tried to conquer one so much poorer. It made no sense.
But then, a lot of what the Nazis did made no sense. If only they’d treated Russians and Ukrainians halfway decently, they would have got more willing workers and volunteers to fight alongside them than they knew what to do with. Instead, they turned everyone they overran into slaves-except for commissars and people like Jews and gypsies, whom they killed outright. Next to that, even Stalin started looking, well, great.
Somewhere off in the distance, in the woods or on the plain, Banderists lingered. They flew the Ukraine’s old blue-and-yellow flag, or their own red-and-black one. They still skirmished with the Red Army and the MGB. Sometimes the nationalists had fought Soviet soldiers alongside the Germans, sometimes on their own hook. When they went into the gulag these days, they won twenty-five-year terms, not the tenners that had been more common before.
Ihor wondered what they thought of great Stalin after the A-bomb fell on Kiev. He also wondered whether the bomb made people who hadn’t been Banderists decide the great Stalin wasn’t so great after all and join the rebels. He hadn’t seen any Banderist propaganda around here for a while. Would it start showing up again?
Down the field. Up the field again. Wave for a bag of seed. Wait till one of the boys brought it to you. Pause at lunchtime to eat blintzes full of cheese and gulp kvass. Kvass was slightly fermented: on the way to being beer. You’d do nothing but piss for a month if you drank enough of the stuff to get a buzz, though.
Petro Hapochka stood at the edge of the field all day long, shouting encouragement to the men working out there-and occasional obscenities at them when they faltered. He took being kolkhoz chairman seriously. You had to, if you were going to do the job at all.
If…Ihor wouldn’t have taken Petro’s post for a suitcase full of hundred-ruble bills, a motorcar, and a house all his own the size of the communal barracks. Some things came at too high a price. Trying to keep both the kolkhozniks and the Communist higher-ups happy seemed to him to be one of them.