Our Ukrainian war was the first great war between Urban- and Country-dweller. To survive today, one must league oneself with the city. Those who leave are at best sentimentalists, at worst deserters. Ukraine was a land of wealthy industrial cities drawing on our mineral resources; of wealthy kulaks drawing on our infinite wheatlands. More than anywhere else in Russia, Ukraine displayed both the dilemma and the solution. That is why we have suffered so much up to the present day. I do not speak from self-pity. There is little of that in my nature. I speak objectively. The problem could have been defined. It could have been remedied. Ukraine could have become the world’s first modern civilisation. Trotsky and the Nationalists between them put an end to that. Two negative forces collided. Ego: they all thought they knew best. Chaos and Old Night were released upon the world.
Brodmann and I became friends, of sorts. He admired me and would often ask for practical advice. I did what I could to modify his excesses. I invented examples drawn from my fictitious Red activist life. As a result, my reputation grew. My engineering skills were often called upon as we moved from camp to camp. I was still a prisoner. Of course, they did not know it. Dozens of times I pointed out I would be more useful to them in Odessa. I was now ignored. They began to plan in earnest the assassination of Hrihorieff. They had received direct orders from their Moscow superiors. The Ataman was acting out of hand, refusing to take orders, winning over Bolshevik liaison men to his own point of view, seducing some of their best people. I was asked to make an infernal machine to blow up the Cossack chieftain. My conscience would not let me. I claimed materials were hard to come by. Of course they offered to requisition everything I needed. I said it was a dangerous business. Whoever used the bomb might also be blown up. They would employ someone not particularly ‘useful to the Party’. I mentioned the possibility of people other than Hrihorieff dying. I was told that those who had gathered about him were as much responsible as the Ataman himself. I heard the whole litany: the now-familiar Bolshevik rationalisation of cold-blooded murder. This, too, would establish itself in the consciousness of all kinds of socialists, including the National Socialists, who hampered their own cause by adopting the tactics of those they opposed. They also inherited the Bolshevik talent for efficient-sounding neologisms. Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin have a great deal to answer for. Stalin regarded himself as a philologist. I was not surprised to learn that. It was easy for him. He had invented the very language he pretended to examine. Zamyatin, with his eloquence and insight, pointed this out in his book Mi (We in English). He had all his ideas stolen by Huxley and Orwell, those poor imitators of H.G. Wells. The Anarchists on the other hand were always bad at inventing new words, though most of their best slogans were taken over by the Bolsheviks. This was probably the reason for Anarchism’s failure. It could not simplify problems. Lenin understood how effective simplification could be. Cheka. The word is a chilling abbreviation of words meaning Special Commission for Internal Affairs. We would be wary of such a name, but we would not immediately fear it. In Scandinavian the word for terror is something like Skrek. Skrek would have the same mixture of coldness and authority: a no-nonsense sound. And how the Chekists loved to use their name!
‘Cheka!’ And off would come the hats and caps. Men and women would even kneel. Russians were still scarcely aware they were no longer serfs, let alone that they were ‘comrades’. ‘Cheka!’ And out would come the pathetic little hoards, or the papers, or the pleas for mercy. And the machine-guns would go cheka-cheka-cheka just to prove what mercy meant: a quick death rather than a slow one. Of course the Chekists turned on one another in the end. Down they went, in cellars, in ditches, in camps, until the name was so foul it had to be changed and Beria began his rule, whispering words of fear in Stalin’s ear. They say he laughed when he saw Stalin was really dead. He strutted about as if he had achieved that death himself. He thought he had triumphed entirely. We should have had a Jewish Tsar sitting on the Russian throne. Luckily Beria met the fate of Rasputin, an amateur at manipulation compared to his famous successor. Stalin was ready to begin an action against the Jews. That was why Beria poisoned him. But these facts are obscured. What did Stalin do, for instance, with .Hitler’s body? To that uncertain, Georgian mind it was his by right of vendetta. Or was Stalin the first true robot; this Man of Steel? Is that the joke Beria played upon the world? In Russia they still call KGB ‘cheka’: it has become a slang word.
Brodmann confided to me, at last, that he wanted no part of the assassination plan. I told him I agreed. As a professional saboteur, the killing of Hrihorieff was beneath me. ‘My violence is done to machines and communications,’ I said. We shared a Wagon-Lit. It had been parked in a siding somewhere to the north of Nikolaieff. We got few reports. Hrihorieff seemed undecided which town to attack first. Antonov did not want Hrihorieff to attack either. He claimed he wished to ‘save’ the citizens from outrage. He really needed to prove himself to his masters, to claim Hrihorieff’s glory. Hrihorieff, in turn, boasted of a dozen conquests a day. Half the towns taken were shtetls or gypsy camps. But his boasting had the desired effect. More and more partisans joined him as he moved towards the cities: firing threatening cables before him as an ancestor might have fired human heads; to frighten the garrisons and undermine their morale.
At some time in March we learned Hrihorieff had taken Kherson by storm. His telegrams ‘To All, All, All!’ came back and were posted up throughout South Ukraine. The city was occupied in the name of ‘The Working People of the World’, but the tone of his messages was clear: Hrihorieff, Ataman of the Zaporizhian Cossacks, had done what the Bolsheviks could not do. The pogroms continued. Even Antonov, in control of Kiev, had been unable to stop the sacking of Podol by regular Red Army soldiers.
There was a multitude of rumours. We were fifty versts behind the lines and received no direct information. I was only interested in Hrihorieff as far as he concerned me. I still could not get permission to go to Odessa. Antonov had become suspicious of Bolsheviks playing ‘happy ships’ with Hrihorieff. This naval term describes what happens when one crew falls in love with another. The Bolshevik officially in command of irregular units did whatever Hrihorieff ordered. We were not all so sure of the chieftain’s ability to hold his gains. This was why Antonov wanted him liquidated.