I can’t remember when it was we began to realize things were really short. I suppose in the hostels the meals had been getting worse and worse, potatoes would disappear from the evening meal, or cabbage even, but I seem to remember there was enough bread. But then one day it was announced supplies had not arrived and we were given 1 ruble and 50 kopecks to go out and find a café.
Well, we Uzbeks didn’t normally go out much at night. The Russians in the town weren’t all that friendly and when our work brigade first arrived there were a lot of very violent incidents. They say there’s no racism up here in Russia, but I can tell you different.
Anyway, that night we went out in force, fifty or sixty of us from my brigade section alone. I suppose some of them struggled through the mud and found a beer hall that served kasha. My group didn’t. We ran into trouble straightaway with a line of Russian women outside a food store screaming at us that we were using up food meant for them. Then the men appeared, some of them even local Russian workers of our own plants, and a nasty fight started in the mud of the main street.
That was the first night. The next day supplies still hadn’t reached the hostel and the factory canteen was serving only a short ration of soup and tea. By the evening we were starving but most of us Uzbeks didn’t particularly want trouble so we stayed in the hostel playing cards and talking about lamb sizzling on a spit the way we cook it back at home.
The next day was Saturday. Usually there’s not a Russian to be seen at the plant that day because we Uzbeks work the Saturday shift for the extra money to send home. The Russians say they can’t buy anything with it anyway.
But that Saturday when we reached the plant, two or three hundred Russian workers were there already. They’d elected some sort of soviet and sent a delegation to the plant manager. Unless food supplies were provided for the town, no one would turn up for work on Monday. And they soon made clear what would happen to the Uzbeks if they tried to work that day’s shift.
Well I speak Russian as a section leader in my work brigade, and I translated for those who couldn’t understand what was happening. The factory manager, it seems, had guaranteed a good canteen meal for any man at work. Somehow he’d got some supplies. But that was no good for the Russians. They wanted food for their families because it seems that although in the hostel we’d been getting more or less enough for the last few weeks, things in the town had been getting worse and worse. And a lot of families had been going really hungry.
So the Russians wouldn’t work for one canteen meal a day — and the Uzbeks, with no families to worry about, saw this as the only way of getting something to eat.
When the Uzbeks announced their decision to the Russian workers’ soviet, the Russians went mad. They came at us with iron bars and spades and anything they could lay their hands on and we scattered through the town. It was the last day I saw the plant for a month.
But in the hostel there was no food. From time to time a trainload of fruit or cabbage would arrive in the town and be stripped bare before the authorities could distribute it properly. And for us Uzbeks there was only one thing to do. Like hundreds of groups of Russians we went into the country around.
I can’t pretend I’m very proud of what happened in those weeks. I think of myself as an educated man, I believe in the teachings of the Prophet and know that theft is forbidden by the Koran. But hunger, real hunger, is an evil driver. In bands of thirty or forty we began to roam the sodden farmlands. At first we bought from the peasants. But soon the prices became so high we began to threaten. Then when our money ran out (we weren’t earning anything at the plant, remember) we just took what we wanted. And those peasants had everything. While we were starving hungry they had sheds full of potatoes and pigs running in the downstairs styes. More food and fuel than we’d seen even before the shortages.
Well, the peasants didn’t give up without a fight. Sometimes we arrived at a village to find the men of the collective farm organized, ready to resist with axes, hammers, even guns. And then it was murder or maiming before we triumphed or were driven off.
Sometimes we’d have the women, too. There didn’t really seem any reason not to, and most of the Uzbeks in any case had not been near a woman since the beginning of their contract period.
But let me just make it clear, it wasn’t just us Uzbeks. Or the Tadzhik contract workers from the plant next to ours. The Russians were doing the same. And when they hacked their way into a village they didn’t spare the women either, I was told.
I suppose it went on for about a month altogether. The militia arrived after the first week and I heard the Russian workers attacked their headquarters and fought a pitched battle in the middle of the town. However true it is, we weren’t worried by militia until almost the very end of the famine when thousands were drafted into the area with helicopters and light-armored track vehicles. Apparently the Army itself was already sealing off the whole oblast.
I heard that deaths, not through starvation, just through the violence, amounted to over 2,000 in our factory town alone — and the peasants must have suffered at least as heavily. But rumors run like hares and I can’t tell you anything more because we Uzbeks were all rounded up and returned home as the supplies started coming in again. Nobody ever asked my labor brigade to volunteer for work up north again…
The Kirov Clinic was once a compact classical mansion built in what is now the Lyublino suburb by the architect Gilardi in the years before Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. Its elegant facade had now been extended by two low concrete wings, the brutal ugliness of which was enhanced by the double row of square barred windows which each contained.
From his room in the west wing, Bukansky could look out over the park. By climbing on his chair he was able to see the creeper-covered corner of a stone pavilion, a statue of Diana the Huntress and the edge of a small ornamental lake.
He had occupied this room since his arrest and, squeezed against the side of the window, he had watched the snow melt from the lead roof of the pavilion, and the first sprouting leaves of lilac by the side of the lake.
He had suffered no more than a few cursory interrogations and was fed adequately, although no vodka had passed his lips since his arrest. He was consequently fitter than he had been for some years. But there are no compensations for captivity.
In the early spring he had been visited by a doctor, or at least a man in a white coat who introduced himself as a doctor. He had come into the room and sat casually on the bed while Bukansky observed him, his head cocked to one side. “May I at least know what this place is, doctor?”
“It’s the Kirov Clinic in Lyublino. That must have been made clear to you when you signed your arrest papers.”
“I signed no papers. I was given none to sign.”
“Unusual,” the doctor said, “if true.”
“It’s true.”
“I’m here to examine you,” the doctor said after a moment or two. “I have to write a report on your condition.”
“I’ve no complaints,” Bukansky told him. “I’m very fit. A mouthful of vodka wouldn’t go amiss, however, if you have such a thing in that black bag of yours.”
The doctor placed the bag beside him on the bed and opened it. From inside he took a bottle containing some white tablets. Unscrewing the top he shook some into the palm of his hand. “Take these,” he said.
“What for?”
“You’ll find they’ll calm you.”
Bukansky smiled. “I’m calm enough already, doctor.”
“They’ll help you suppress your desire for alcohol. Your craving.”