The clatter of machine-gun fire and the thud of mortars sounded in the village street. I dragged Loshkin from one of the girls. Krassansky was already on his feet tying his rope belt. My woman was smiling, willing death upon us.
I ran upstairs and the whole house seemed to fall around me as the shell struck. I was the only one in the house to survive…
Upstairs, amid the opulence of his fragile present, Bukansky undressed slowly. Would she come up? He stood at the window in his heavy robe, looking down at the sticking plaster on his toes. He had no more to offer her now. Tomorrow she would be looking for a new job, a new protector, a new source of Western clothes for her young body. But would she come up now?
He looked up. Through the double-glazed window imported on special permit from Sweden he could see the sidelights of two cars moving slowly down the drive. He knew he should dress quickly.
But first he had to know. On this last night it had become of sudden desperate importance. He went quickly to the bedroom and opened it. Across the gallery he could see down into the room. She was sitting where he had left her, the manuscript closed on her lap.
At the thundering on the door she jumped to her feet, the book flying from her lap.
He came forward onto the gallery. “It’s all right, Lydochka,” he said. “It’s me they’ve come for.”
She stood trembling.
More than anything he wanted to ask her whether she would have come upstairs. Instead he gestured toward the door. “Let them in, Lydochka. I’ll get my clothes on,” he said.
They came in bustling with importance. The girl was sent home immediately by the plainclothes major in charge. Bukansky was dismissed to a corner of the room while a systematic examination began of his papers and his books.
Sitting at a small Alexandrine writing desk Bukansky watched the men clumsily dissecting the corpus of his life. What would the fools make of it? What would they make of his two years with Lydia?
While he waited he took a pen and began to write:
“Citizen Bukansky,” the major gestured to the door. “It’s time to go.”
Chapter Twenty-One
In Kuletsyn’s novel, To Be Preserved Forever, there is a young man who revels in being a poor student. He wears, most times we meet him in the book, a traditional Russian student cap, a belted linen shirt outside his breeches and leather knee-length boots. He neither drinks vodka nor chases girls. His contempt for Western standards is overwhelming. Toward the end of the novel, he enters a seminary and begins to study for the priesthood.
From this brief description it might be thought that Kuletsyn’s book describes a time a hundred years ago or more. But it is set in the 1980s. His student is a figure who became more and more common on the University campuses of Russia in those years. Like Kuletsyn’s student, these young men and women were deeply stirred by feelings for the Russia of the past, for its onion-domed churches, its villages, its sheer rustic simplicity. It is, of course, a medieval vision which keeps at bay the encroachments of the twentieth century.
Probably nobody in the government at this time saw the growth of Rodinist feeling for what it really was. Far from being imperialistic and expansionist as the Soviet leaders thought and hoped, this 1980s brand of Russian nationalism looked inward. Its beliefs gave no encouragement for young men to go and build an empire in Central Soviet Asia or the Caucasian republics. Instead they encouraged a surly sense of superiority toward anyone who was non-Slav.
It was a mood which in the 1980s was spreading deep into the Russian consciousness. Black Africans at Moscow’s Lumumba University were jeered at on the streets. Chinese faces were considered particularly offensive and almost equally Soviet citizens from the Chinese border areas. Street-cleaning babushkas spoke resentfully of Georgian farmers or the ever-increasing numbers of Uzbek workers.
The 1979 census showed clearly what was happening. In nine years the urban population had grown from 136 to 164 million. Concealed in this apparently innocuous figure is the fact that a massive part of this emigration to the towns was from the south and central Asian countryside to the Russian towns. The falling Slav birthrate had made it essential to attract workers north. The alternative, the partial resituation of Soviet industry in the south-central dominions, was unthinkable. But as the Soviet Union entered the eighties the social tensions created by the presence of the new workers became increasingly apparent. In Russian cities like Gorki and Sverdlovsk groups of Asiatics spent their lonely free time hanging aimlessly around the railway stations or, in the summer at least, on the benches of the public parks. Always in groups of a dozen or more, ill-dressed even by Russian standards, many barely able to speak more than a few words of Russian, they seemed to many inhabitants of the northern towns to be inalienably foreign and more than a little menacing.
Assaults on Russian women increased. Or at least news of them spread like wildfire around the city. In the ancient Russian city of Vladimir, 150 miles from Moscow and now a center of the electrical and chemical industry, a 16-year-old Russian girl was gang raped and battered to death on Third International Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. A group of 16 Uzbek laborers from Chemical Enterprise 7 were arrested by the militia that night. By noon the next day without a word having appeared in the press or on radio, a group of 400 women surrounded the Police Station on Podbelsky Street screaming for the Uzbeks to be brought out.
The women were dispersed only with serious difficulty and after militia reinforcements had been brought from other stations. But by nightfall they were back in even greater numbers. Again they were dispersed, this time with light water hoses (effective since the incident took place in winter).
But the violent feelings of the women of Vladimir were not doused by the water spray. That night five Uzbeks were attacked at the rail station by a group of women. Seven more Asiatics were chased by a mixed Russian crowd and caught and badly beaten on Sacco and Vanzetti Street. The next day stories flew around Vladimir of a wave of attacks on Asiatics in the local factories. If even a quarter of the stories were true it was clear that the situation was getting out of hand. The vlasti, God forbid, were losing their grip.
Then, the following day, something unprecedented in the history of Soviet journalism took place. The newspapers were almost completely devoted to the case of the raped girl. The militia inspector in charge broadcast locally giving details of the finding of the body, the postmortem, even the few leads the investigating team had to go on. But the Uzbeks, he insisted, who had been arrested outside the Planetarium on Third International Street were arrested for drunkenness, and at no time was there any suggestion of a mass rape which was the allegation which had swept through the town.
There was, he claimed, no point in demonstrating outside Podbelsky Street station. The Uzbeks had been given 12 hours in the town’s drunktank and released. Meanwhile a real suspect had been arrested, a Russian of subnormal intelligence whose semen count coincided with that of semen in the victim.