Though he had been sent down to the Don region in March 1930 to check on the spring sowing on the collective farms of the Russian south, Molotov never cut the pages of Boris Kushner’s travel book Southern Lights (Hot Dry Wind). Kushner had inscribed his copy ‘To dear comrade V. M. Molotov’ in a generous looping hand in the summer of 1930. The few pages of the first chapter – ‘Moscow–Don’ – that I was able to read without taking a knife to the delicate volume (which I felt I should not do) made me want to follow his journey into the light of the south, from the capital to Rostov-on-Don. Kushner, whose life, like so many others, ended abruptly in the purges of 1937, was a member of the Party and a Futurist writer, actively involved, with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Brik, in the journal Lef, whose purpose was to formalise an alliance between avant-garde artists and the Soviet state. The Lef writers, who wanted their work to serve the revolution, elevated reporting – in particular travel notes and sketches – to the highest status among literary forms, because such genres served, and did not disfigure, the fact. The dominant spirit of Kushner’s travel writing was his passion for technology, the factory, and the machine, which would at last overcome Russia’s backwardness. ‘Comrade commissars of trade …! Study the organisation of the American private company Singer, which has seized the world market and penetrated into the most obscure places – a Russian peasant hut, an Abyssinian village, the home of a Chinese agricultural labourer,’ Kushner remarks as his train passes the old brick Singer sewing-machine factory buildings at Podolsk, just south of Moscow. (‘America is great nation!’ a peasant on a train told Louise Bryant in 1917. ‘Sewing machines come from America!’) As the train to Rostov moves through orchards of white antonovka apples into the sunny steppe lands, golden with wheat, his travelling companion tells marvellous tales of American harvests, and a ‘giant complex machine’, a ‘miracle’ known as the ‘combine’. Kushner was writing rapturously of those ‘oceans of wheat’ in the year 1930, at the height of the first Five-Year Plan, when much of southern Russia was starving, as the state seized grain for export to finance its frenzied programme of industrialisation. A few months after Kushner inscribed his book, Stalin told Molotov, ‘Force up the export of grain to the maximum. This is the core of everything.’ In a speech lamenting Russia’s history of backwardness, Stalin quoted from the poet Nikolai Nekrasov’s folk epic, ‘Who Can be Happy and Free in Russia’: ‘You are wretched, you are abundant, you are mighty, you are powerless, Mother Russia.’
*
We turned away from the quiet of the Don, walking up into town on the curving side street down which the girl in boots had come, until it met Budyonny Avenue, a main road formerly known as Taganrog Street which cuts a dead straight line, parallel to Voroshilov Avenue, through the centre of Rostov. Like the granite plaques to Budyonny and Voroshilov on the façade of No. 3, these wide thoroughfares testify to the brilliance of their Civil War victories in Rostov and the Russian south-west, as well as to their unusual distinction in managing their own preservation (and the extinction of their enemies) throughout Stalin’s tyranny and beyond.
Semyon Budyonny’s life began in 1883, on a peasant farm on the Don. It ended ninety years later in the comfort of No. 3, in a panelled apartment overlooking the courtyard, among heavily framed oil paintings of himself, decorated with both tsarist and Soviet medals, astride a horse. In one room of his huge apartment, a visitor remembers, there was just one table on which were five telephones, one red, as though the Marshal ‘were waiting for the call from the Kremlin to saddle his horses and storm world imperialism’. (‘A benefactor and utterly devoted defender of the horse,’ Valery Mezhlauk had labelled him in one of his caricatures, which showed him on horseback.) Budyonny and his devoted third wife had moved out of his original apartment in No. 3 to a different part of the building, to be free of all the ugly memories of the Marshal’s first and second marriages. ‘History belongs to posterity,’ Budyonny wrote late in life in the journal Don (in an article that Molotov particularly admired and liked to quote), ‘may it not be a distorting mirror.’ Budyonny’s great fear as he contemplated history’s mirror was that it would give a distorted picture of Stalin, whom he had served with absolute loyalty since 1918. ‘The veterans of the Revolution went through a great deal,’ he reflected: ‘they survived many a disaster, and stared death in the face more than once. But we suffered no worse misfortune than to see doubt cast on the revolutionary passion and revolutionary acts of the leader of our Party, Lenin’s true comrade-in-arms, I. V. Stalin.’ History’s mirror was kind to Budyonny. As well as a main street in Rostov, the moustachioed cavalry general has a town in the south, a soldier’s cap, a breed of horse and a children’s game named after him.
By 1918, Budyonny had four St George Crosses, and the highest of tsarist military distinctions, a full ribbon of the St George Cavalryman. He had fought with distinction in a dragoon regiment in the Russo-Japanese War of 1903, studied at the St Petersburg Cavalry School, and served as a platoon sergeant in the Caucasus Cavalry Division during the First World War. He liked to tell his children that Tsar Nicholas II once extended his hand to him in St Petersburg. Budyonny exemplified a certain kind of military loyalty to political power, at once blind and cunning. After 1918, he calculated that it would be better to be a ‘marshal in the Red Army than an officer in the White’ and returned to the Don, which quickly became the principal arena of the Civil War, to join local partisans fighting the Whites. The partisans became the First Socialist Regiment under Boris Dumenko. Budyonny served as Dumenko’s aide. When the Socialist Regiment became the Special Cavalry Division, Budyonny was placed in command of a brigade.
The prosperous city of Rostov, the most heavily industrialised in the Russian south, with its intersecting railway lines, river links with north and south, and great trading port, was strategically vital, and changed hands six times between 1917 and 1920. ‘Take Rostov at all costs, for otherwise disaster threatens,’ Lenin declared in the spring of 1919, when the city had been taken from the Bolsheviks by German-backed White forces, swelled with Cossacks. ‘Proletarians to horse!’ Trotsky commanded, as he contemplated the success of the Volunteer White Armies in the south. Across the steppe, multiple armies clashed, conjoined and fragmented, taking turns at terrorising the local population, waging sadistic class war, assuaging every kind of hatred and bloodlust. Don Cossacks fought on both sides. As Trotsky observed, the allegiance of the Cossacks was, above all, to their own land, which they held on to ‘with claws and teeth’. In 1919, Lenin gave written instructions to deport Don Cossacks – three hundred thousand were sent to concentration camps or forced labour.
By the end of 1919, Budyonny was commander of the First Cavalry Army, and had decisively retaken Rostov from General Anton Denikin’s Volunteer White Army, which had made the city its organising centre. To commemorate the victory, Budyonny sent a signed photograph of himself to Lenin in Moscow. At first his forces contained only a small percentage of Don Cossacks, but when the White Armies evacuated Russia for Constantinople by sea from Novorossiisk most of the Cossacks who had not left or been deported showed Budyonny’s own flexible political allegiance. When his Cavalry Army entered Poland in 1920, as part of a Bolshevik attempt to push the Revolution westward, the fighting force was dominated by Cossacks.