Their conversations at the table turn out to be warm, even heartfelt. Ignatov knows Kuznets is taking detailed mental notes of everything he says, whether sober, tipsy, or passing out from drunken intoxication, but Ignatov isn’t afraid of that because he has nothing to hide. All his sins are as prominently on display as Kuznets’s mustache. There’s even something attractive about that, some special joy that smacks of vengeance – drinking with a person from whom you have no secrets and can no longer keep secrets, but who might himself have secrets. So let Kuznets tense up, keep himself in check, and hold his tongue, afraid of letting something slip. He, Ignatov, sits down at the table with ease and joy, as if he’s offering up his own bared soul for show.
“Where’s this from?” Kuznets takes a small yellow turnip the size of a child’s fist, with a long and fluffy green tail like a comet, from a table set with dishes, bowls, cups, and kettles of various sizes.
“Well, I have this… agronomist here,” says Ignatov, gulping impatiently as he pours crisp-sounding Moscow vodka into glasses with sharp, gleaming facets.
They usually drink from mugs but Kuznets brought glasses with him this time; he apparently wants to sit for a while in good taste, the urban way. A lush green label the color of young conifer needles on the bottle’s round side promises pure fifty-percent enjoyment, guaranteed by the USSR’s Glavspirtprom trademark. They finally clink glasses. The turnip is sharp and juicy, with a hint of gentle bitterness, so it turns out to be just the thing with the vodka.
“Let’s consider our meeting open,” says Kuznets. He eats his turnip whole, leaves and all, and waves his fat fingers over the glasses, gesturing as if to say: Come on, hurry up with the second now. “Here you go, Vanya, first item: kulak growth, damn it to hell.”
Kulak growth is what the authorities have begun calling the rapid accumulation of wealth among exiled peasants. After being sent thousands of kilometers from their native homes, they’re the ones who’ve recovered six or eight years after the blow, adapting somewhat in alien places and contriving, even there, to earn an extra kopek, set it aside, and use it later to buy up personal inventory and even cattle. In brief, the peasantry that lost absolutely everything is kulakizing all over again, and of course that’s completely intolerable. And thus a wise decision was made at the highest levels of government to stop the growth immediately, punish those guilty, and organize the kulaks (who practiced their ineradicable individualism so craftily even in exile) into collective farms. A wave of punitive actions for permitting so much rekulakization had already swept through the ranks of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, adding to the relentless flow of repressions during 1937 and 1938.
They tackle the first question on the agenda quickly. The bottle doesn’t even have a chance to empty, for what is there to yammer about anyway when everything’s clear? Forbid private construction (in Semruk, a few especially nimble people have already finished building themselves small, solid houses, moved out of the barracks, and started families) and hold a general meeting with an explanatory discussion, cautioning against kulakization.
“Oh, yes, we will hold one,” Ignatov promises the green label, picking at its fancy edge with his fingernail. “Oh, will we caution…”
Their session’s second item for discussion flows organically from the first: organizing a local collective enterprise.
Back in January of 1932, the USSR’s Council of Labor and Defense issued a resolution “On seeds for special migrants,” under which labor settlements were to be regularly supplied with grain seeds so they could independently produce their own bread and cereals. Seeds have been provided to Semruk, too. There’s oats, barley, wheat, and, for some reason, even warmth-loving hemp, which doesn’t have enough time to mature in the meager Siberian sun. Sumlinsky has taken on agronomist responsibilities and has been handling the job fairly well. Ever since receiving Ignatov’s cautious permission, he has had the audacity to order additional seed resources from the central office over the last two years (the insolent man even indicated specific sorts!), and thus turnip made its appearance at the settlement, along with carrots, bulb onions, and radishes. Sumlinsky has been obsessed for two years with the idea of growing melons but Ignatov, fearing ridicule, has forbidden him from including melon seeds in the order. Their harvests cannot be considered abundant, though they should be worth the working hours invested. They eat their own bread at the settlement and occasionally vegetables, too. It’s true the grain they prepare doesn’t last the winter, but they’re now readying another field where Sumlinsky intends to grow autumn-seeded crops.
The second bottle has emptied; ten of Kuznets’s expensive cigarettes have been smoked; all the turnips and radishes, which were as small as peas and awfully sour to the taste, as well as the supper that Gorelov brought (flaky fried fish in breadcrumbs, still sizzling with smoked pork fat) have been eaten; and the kerosene lamp is already burning lemon-yellow through the thick blue-gray smoke: but the question still isn’t closed. Kuznets wants the Semruk collective farm to supply products not only to the settlement but also to the “mainland.”
“What am I going to supply you with?” Ignatov shakes a pale green scallion with feathery, white-tinged leaves in front of Kuznets’s raspberry-colored face. “These vegetables are only enough for one meal for the settlement. The wheat barely matures! We work for a year and eat for a month! Four hundred mouths!”
“Then try harder!” Kuznets tears the onion from Ignatov’s fingers, stuffs it in his broad maw, and grinds it with his teeth. “What do you think, my dear man? That we’re establishing a collective farm so it’s just your own kisser chowing on turnip? You’ve got four hundred pairs of hands! Be ever so kind! Labor along and share with the state!”
They send for Sumlinsky. He runs up, disheveled from sleep and wearing a jacket he’s tossed on to cover his underclothes. They splash something into a mug for him but Konstantin Arnoldovich refuses to drink and just stands by the table, frightened, with his cheeks wrinkled and his hair sticking up. After grasping the essence of the question, he grows pensive, furrows his brow, and smoothes his long, sparse beard, which has taken on an utterly goat-like look over the years.
“Why not supply?” he says. “We can supply, too.”
Ignatov slams his hands on the table out of annoyance. Here I am protecting these fools and then they go sticking their necks in the noose on their own. After the hand gesture, he lowers his head to the table, too; all the talking has worn him out. Kuznets is roaring with laughter: Nice job, old man. I love people like you!
“But,” adds Sumlinsky, “there’s a series of necessary conditions.”
And so he counts on his pointy fingers. “No fewer than fifteen people as workers in the collective farm, the sturdiest and handiest men, and they have to be on a permanent basis, not like now, as volunteers and with other assignments on their days off: that’s first. The seed stock has to be in strict accordance with the preliminary order I personally compiled. And I need the right to refuse rotten or spoiled grain if that’s what’s supplied under the guise of seed stock, like in 1934. That’s the second thing. Bring new metal tools for uprooting trees because the wooden ones are torture. Sometimes we work with rocks, like primitive people, but we need pickaxes, crowbars, spades, hoes, and pitchforks of all sizes. I’ll compile a list. That’s third. Agricultural tools are another matter. A lot of these are needed, too. I’ll specify those in a list in a separate section so nobody’s confused: that’s fourth. Definitely beasts of burden, five or more oxen – we can’t plow without them; they could come toward next spring, toward the beginning of sowing: that’s fifth. Now fertilizers…”