The four young guards, their rifles pointed at the zeks, trembled and dropped their weapons and ran for the door. Somewhere outside as they tried to tear their way through the barbed wire, the penals caught them and cut their throats.
In the hut Bubo stood forward. “We are prisoners like yourselves,” he shouted at the group of men. “We have a right to live.”
“He was a good work leader out in the woods,” a voice shouted from the back.
A small man with a summer black mosquito helmet dangling over his ears waved a rifle. “We’ve no quarrel with the zeks,” he said. “We’ve come on Barkut’s orders. We’re taking your women.”
Though Bubo and Anton fought until they were unconscious, the other zeks held back. Can you blame them? Zoya asked.
Why should they have died for us? We were dragged outside and thrown onto the back of a horse-cart, Anna, Laryssa and myself, and among the chanting men carried down to the main gate where penals crowded the road, ready to march.
I think we must have been assigned a protector, or perhaps several. A young penal, Anatoly, who drove our cart, found us a covering of blankets and some bread and cold soup for the journey, and any penals who grabbed at our arms were quickly beaten aside by the men marching behind the tailgate.
That evening we reached Krasibirsk. There was some rumor, perhaps invented, that a thousand KGB guards were expected. But as the penals swarmed through the streets into Lenin Square, there was no sign of militia or KGB.
Anna, Laryssa and myself were locked in a small hut made of railway sleepers in a siding next to the station, so we saw nothing of the events in Krasibirsk that night. But we heard shouts and screams and shooting and could smell smoke as it penetrated the gaps in our timber hut.
When we were released in the morning, half the penals seemed to be still drunk. And Anatoly, laughing, brought an armful of women’s dresses, old-fashioned with long skirts, and insisted we put them on.
During that day we were moved into the waiting room of the railhead station where perhaps sixty young and not so young women had been imprisoned. They were desperate for information which we, in any case, could not give. And sorry as we felt for them in one sense, they were not zeks. They had continued living their lives while we, 30 miles away, served our time in Panaka. Many of them though had worked as cleaners or cooks or secretaries at Kraslag headquarters. No, it would be untrue to say we felt overmuch sympathy for them as they told of rapes and beatings during the night. How hard we had become! But after all for them it was just one night!
The KGB troop train turned out to be more than a rumor. When the penals looted the local Kraslag general’s office they found evidence that a train was due that day. Hundreds of penals, even thousands, scattered across the countryside. But many thousands of others, probably under pain of death from Barkut Khan, stayed in Krasibirsk. At three in the morning the KGB train arrived. From the waiting room we saw the old steam engine drag itself into the railhead station. It was too long to enable it to line up with the 100 feet of platform, and yawning, stretching KGB troops stood in the cattle-car doorways ready to jump down.
From where we were, crouched in the darkened waiting room, we saw bullets split and rip through the woodwork of the cattle cars, we saw KGB men pitch forward from the doorways and we saw hordes of penals storm forward with knives and axes, hurling themselves on the border troops as they tried to jump down onto the lines.
We hid our eyes from the worst. But I heard afterward from Anatoly that those border guards who had survived the first onslaught were all butchered in the warehouses opposite before morning. The terrible screams and pleas for mercy which we could not block our ears to testified to the truth of Anatoly’s account.
Oh God, it’s so easy to forget. Was it on the third morning that we were ordered onto the train? Two women were assigned to each cattle car of fifty men. But still Laryssa, Anna and myself were held apart, assigned to a cattle car where clearly Anatoly was still to guard us.
We were going west. That’s all Anatoly would tell us, probably all he knew. We were going west and they now had real guns. Not only the border guards’ small arms but the twenty 60-mm guns on the light tanks which were also part of their equipment. Until then I had forgotten that all the penals had been soldiers before their imprisonment.
No modesty. Of course we suffered that night. Not like the other women. But still, many times…
Chapter Thirty-Six
In Transylvania the Ukrainian Liberation Army proved to be hard fact. It was not large, hardly more than two brigades in numbers, but groups of Ukrainians were crossing the border into Transylvania every day now to join the battle.
The Hungarian government saw the danger of embracing their unasked-for allies, but the Ukrainians, although only lightly armed, were providing a valuable diversionary element in the battle. More important, their presence had had a totally stultifying effect on the policymakers in the Kremlin. The Rumanians demanded the bandits should be dealt with by the Soviet Army, but refused to allow the Russians across their borders. They clearly had no confidence that they would ever be able to eject them. Hungary rejected all Soviet demands for the forcible return of the Ukrainians pleading that they could not spare the troops for the operation.
The response to the war of the Hungarian minority in Rumania had been such that the Ceausescu government now faced an internal rebellion as well as an invasion by foreign forces. In the largely Hungarian belt of counties stretching across Transylvania and deep into Rumania itself — Bihor, Cluj, Mures and Harghita — Hungarian partisans were attacking Rumanian troop formations as they moved toward the front.
In Hungarian-speaking areas there was hardly a family without relatives in the Magyar homeland and Hungarian tanks were welcomed with emotional scenes in the villages along their line of advance. Equally emotional was the Rumanian reaction which saw in the possible loss of Transylvania the reduction of the national territory by almost half.
Two Soviet delegations were dispatched in the first week of the war to the two capitals. In Budapest they were received quietly and asked to await developments. Without firm instructions from Moscow they had no option. In Bucharest the Soviet cars driving the delegation from the airport had been identified on the streets and stoned by the populace. In Rumania it was already widely believed that the Soviet Union had prompted the Hungarian attack and that the Ukrainian National Army was nothing more than a disguised Soviet military formation. Such are the complexities of Balkan politics.
But in Moscow, grave as the Transylvania crisis was in fact, people in the city were much more concerned with the new evidence of the Chinese threat. Almost a quarter of a century of propaganda had enflamed the Slavs’ distrust of the East to a deep loathing. Russians respect numbers. The sheer size of the Chinese population was enough to impress the average Russian citizen.
Yet detestation and fear of the Chinese, far from unifying Soviet citizens against the external threat (it had been used successfully as a deliberate technique many times in the past), now had the effect of drawing Russian citizens together against the backsliding republics of the Soviet Union and against a government which appeared to be too weak to control events. The autumn of desperate shortage of food and fuel had revealed that anarchy which lies just below the surface of Russian conformism.
Yet the Moscow Carole Yates walked through as she left the foreigners compound that evening seemed little different than the city she had come to know in the last few months. A cutback in power had just ended and the streetlights were on again. Office windows were brightly lit, the queues lined the shop fronts and the buses roared busily down the prospekts. At the Metropole Hotel she hailed a taxi.