He went out into the corridor to watch the eastern sky lighten, the crest of the hills slowly sharpening as the sun rose up behind them. And as the light grew, he became aware of movement and color by the side of the tracks. People. Some walking, some lying prone. And the latter were clearly not sleeping—they’d succumbed to exhaustion, hunger, or both.
The fact that some parts of Russia were suffering serious food shortages had been mentioned in the Moscow press, but the extent of the shortages had been left rather vague. Well, here they were, McColl thought, and it looked very much like a famine.
The sun climbed over the hilltops, flooding the valley with yellow light, laying bare the horror. Corpses were strewn on both sides of the line, young and old, male and female, each with its cloud of hungry flies. Those people still moving, stumbling northward, showed little interest in the train that was rumbling past them or the bodies that littered their passage. Each emaciated face seemed set in the same mold of utter resignation.
In the sky above, black shapes hovered, flapping their wings in anticipation.
McColl stood at the window, arms outstretched, unable to turn his eyes away. He asked himself why they weren’t stopping to help, but already knew the answer: the food they had on board would feed only a few for less than a day, and hold up the train without making any real difference.
How had famine blighted a land rich as this one? Was this a consequence of the revolution, of turning everything upside down, of the bitter war between party and peasants? But then what did that matter to these figures below, trudging northward in sheer desperation?
He suddenly became aware that the young officer Krasilnikov was standing at another window only a few feet away, absorbed by the same sights as he was. And that the officer was silently weeping, tears coursing down either cheek.
On the other side of the train, Komarov watched as the mural of pain unrolled. He had known there was a famine in the Volga region, and here it was. An emotional response would be self-indulgent and of no help to anyone but himself. The NEP would right the situation in the months to come; these poor people were simply paying one retrospective price of the civil war. The leadership in Moscow was already doing all that could be done.
The prospect of eating made him feel sick, which was all the more reason to set an example. He finished dressing and headed for the dining car, two trembling hands concealed in his pockets.
All day the train chugged up the valley; all day the hungry and starving trailed past, the number of those in motion steadily dropping in favor of those who were not. Small stations were gatherings of despair, their villages eerily empty save for the carrion birds expectantly strutting the streets.
Late that afternoon the train rattled into a station high in the hills—Sorochinsk was the name on the board. With her cabin door open, Caitlin could see that hundreds of people were camped on both sides of the tracks. Most were sitting or lying and probably lacked the energy needed to stand. In the eyes now surveying the train, she saw a range of emotions that stretched from pure indifference to manic hope.
Even before the train juddered to a final halt, soldiers from the troop car were jumping down to line up beside it, their rifles pointing outward, their faces locked in nervous immobility. As if in response, some members of the crowd rose slowly to their feet, some swaying with the effort of staying upright. A few began shuffling toward the train, and then stopped as they realized that most of their fellows were not.
“Where have they all come from?” Caitlin heard herself ask out loud. Neither Jack nor Krasilnikov, standing at the windows on either side of hers, offered a reply. And why should they? she thought. What was there to say?
They’d spent a whole day traveling through these people’s graveyard, and she couldn’t remember ever feeling more helpless. At first it had brought back the weeks of waiting for her brother’s execution in the Tower of London, but as the hours had passed, the sheer scale of what they were witnessing had defied comparison.
The train had not stopped to offer help, only to take on the water needed to carry it free of this nightmare. Caitlin’s coach was standing halfway between the station house and the water tower, where bodies had been stacked inside the girder supports. She could smell the putrefaction from her window and was not surprised to see the fireman holding his nose with one hand as he unclipped the hose with the other.
A small child, perhaps six or seven years old, was sitting, staring dully into space, not twenty feet away against a low wall. As Caitlin stared at her, the girl looked up, caught her eye, and smiled shyly, as if she had just been asked for a dance.
The incongruity tied a knot in Caitlin’s stomach.
The crowd had begun inching forward, as if barely perceptible advances would deny the soldiers an excuse to open fire. But the gap was obviously closing, and the fireman was still disconnecting his hose when someone fired the first shot.
The crowd let out its anger in one enormous roar and launched a hail of stones at the troops and the train they were guarding. Yells of pain mingled with the sound of shattering glass, but the clod of earth that struck Caitlin’s window merely bounced off, leaving only a starburst of yellow fragments.
The locomotive whistle screeched, as if to sound a retreat. The crowd was advancing in earnest now, the soldiers leaping back aboard, expecting the train to move. It didn’t. Caitlin could hear someone on the roof shouting at the crowd, promising a relief train. The crowd believed it no more than she did, and the man was cut off in midsentence, presumably by a well-directed stone. As people began hammering on the side of the train, a machine gun opened up farther down the platform.
The whistle screeched again, but still the train refused to move. Looking to the right, Caitlin could see people swarming around the engines, and guessed that others were blocking the tracks. If that was the case, then the driver had had enough. For several seconds the train gave a good impression of straining at the bit, before suddenly bursting into motion, viciously spurting steam, and leaving agonized screams in its wake. Their carriage seemed almost to stumble as the wheels encountered something solid, which Caitlin could only hope was a brick or a stone.
Her last image of Sorochinsk was of a young boy, thin enough to squeeze through iron railings, standing by the track. After watching him wave the train good-bye, she lowered her head and closed her eyes.
Later that evening, the whole party ended up in the curtained-off saloon. Mostly, McColl suspected, because guilt was more bearable shared.
Arbatov wanted to twist the knife. “You were warned,” he said, addressing Komarov directly but allowing an accusing gaze to sweep across them all. “There was no rain last summer and precious little snow in winter, and you kept on taking whatever you could.”
“The cities needed food,” Komarov protested, but McColl could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.
“The cities weren’t starving,” Arbatov went on, “but you decided that the workers had more right to the food that the peasants had grown than the peasants did themselves. You even took most of their seed corn! And when your own agricultural scientists produced a report outlining the mistakes you had made, you refused to publish it. Your government just sat on its hands and hoped for a miracle, which needless to say never came.”