Armageddon (38 page)

“Damn them! You know what the Reds give us for our grain! A piece of paper no one can read.”

“They ... they promised to make Sergei a hero of the Soviet Union if he told.”

“A hero for telling on his own parents?”

“Sergei told.”

Igor bolted to his feet “You should have told me immediately.”

“I ... I only found out about it ... and I was afraid ...”

“I’ve got to warn the village!”

Igor raced across the fields yelling at the top of his voice. He ran all the way back to the village center, a muddy street, gasped dizzily, grabbed the rope of the alarm bell, and pulled for all his worth, bringing villagers on the run from fields in all directions.

Igor blurted out the story, and Sergei, his own age of twelve, was brought into the square and questioned until he broke down and confessed. His father dragged him off to their barn and thrashed him to within an inch of his life as Natasha screamed. The Cossacks frantically scrambled to remove their hidden grain to another place. In the middle of all this the Reds swooped in and caught them. Natasha’s home was burned to the ground and her father hung by the neck in the square.

When he was cut down and buried and the grieving was done and the shock settled, Natasha and her mother went off to live with relatives in the next village.

Sergei was carried off by the Reds to Armavir to a children’s home, which was soon renamed in his honor. He was extolled by the Reds as the first of the youth heroes of the Kuban Cossacks. Over a period of time sixteen villages, twenty factories, ten collective farms, eight tractor stations, and dozens of Children’s Homes and Pioneer Camps were named in his honor.

During the years that followed in the 1920s, Alexander Karlovy became an official of considerable influence in Rostov. The fact that he was a Cossack from the land and at the same time a dedicated Communist proved of great value. He was among the key planners to get greater production from the farmlands of southern Russia.

Fantastic changes were taking place all over the Soviet Union. This awakening giant trembled into a new century, having to pay in toil for past failures to educate her people and industrialize. Now the sweat of the workers and the farmers driven before the unrelenting Communist whip shoved them into this new world.

The Kuban Cossacks of Glinka clung to their land. These new ways remained strange to them; many of their sons were gone and the village wore unhealed wounds. The agitators sent in to enlighten them were treated with suspicion. Their beliefs were as simple and primitive as their lives. The Cossacks had been sent as border guards centuries before by the czars to outposts on the Don and Kuban in Siberia and on other borders. In times of emergency they had raised armies. In exchange, they were granted a status as free men. This, and nothing more, nothing less, was what they desired from the Reds.

Igor Karlovy reached young manhood with a basic faith in the old ways. He suppressed his personal desires to examine this great new world, for it would have created an untold hardship to follow Alexander from the family farm. Gregory Karlovy had grown very old. Despite his furious pride he could not deliver a full day’s work and so Igor subordinated his curiosity to family duty.

A fire for knowledge remained alive though, and each night he read and studied on his own until his eyes burned. When the school came to Glinka he begged for books and periodicals to feed the growing hunger to learn.

Although more and more writing became available, the books began to fall into a dull pattern. Everything had been rewritten so that it was ultimately a glorification of the Bolsheviks.

Igor taught himself both German and English in order to find new avenues of thought away from the repetition of the Communist books. He discovered that he could read great Russian writers of the past in foreign languages as many were no longer published in Russian. It was the same with Russian history, which seemed to begin, so far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, with the birth of Karl Marx.

In other ways, Igor was the son of his father. In true Cossack tradition he became a magnificent horseman, sang with the sweetness of the marsh swallow, and developed into a drinking man of no small accomplishment. His heart, frivolous at times, never truly strayed or really ever belonged to anyone but Natasha.

Days and sometimes weeks seemed endless until that glorious moment when she rode in from her village and they could go off together to a place known to them alone, away from all the world. But they had come to that time in the springtime of life when meetings brought frustration and partings became a thing of pain.

Natasha understood his yearning to seek the world, his predicament and imprisonment. She did not press him to the promise of marriage, for to have done so would have sealed him to Glinka forever.

And so, on a summer’s day when Igor was eighteen and she sixteen, they came to know each other’s bodies; it happened in their secret place by the Kuban River.

At the end of the 1920s a vast change swept the land. The order came from Moscow to collectivize the farmlands. The planners made an edict that farm production had to catch the march of industrialization. It was not an edict understood by the Kulaks, who were free farmers, or the Cossacks, who were free men.

The Kuban Cossacks armed and rode their horses out to defend their land and charged wildly into fusillades of Red Army guns which cut them down like stacks of wheat.

At last it became Glinka’s turn to collectivize. Alexander Karlovy returned to the place of his birth out of sentiment. A meeting was called. Alexander pleaded with the villagers to accept it peacefully for the good of Russia, and warned that only by quiet acquiescence could Glinka be spared the fate of hundreds of blood-soaked villages. It was beyond his power to do more.

The villagers of Glinka, led by old Gregory Karlovy, gave their answer. They burned their crops and slaughtered their livestock.

And so, it came to pass that the centuries-old tradition of free men ended. The people of Glinka were rounded up and deported for slave labor to Siberia, never to be heard from again. Only a single villager was spared. By trickery, Alexander had his young brother Igor come to Rostov to visit him at the exact moment of the deportation.

Igor, of course, sensed that something terrible had taken place, but travel permits were almost impossible in those days. Furthermore, Russian life had conditioned him not to inquire. In due time Alexander told him of what had happened and that their father and mother had chosen not to escape to Rostov.

The farm was gone forever, yet there were a number of compensations in living in Rostov with Alexander and his family. Mainly, new doors opened to learning in the great drive to educate the masses. As a Communist official Alexander had his own two-room cottage. He was able to fix up a shed outside so that Igor had his own six- by ten-foot room; this was a luxury for a single man.

Igor threw himself into that vast, faceless legion of toilers going to work in one of the new tractor factories and continued his studies by night.

It was impossible to bring Natasha to Rostov because of the travel papers. Even if he had been able, there was no way to support her or ask her to share the shed. She learned to read and write so there were letters to sustain them. Then, once each year, he was able to go off with her for a week to the Black Sea.

During the early 1930s he formulated his ideas about his future life. He hated the factory; away from the freedom of the land he thought of himself branded, like a cow, and expected to produce so many buckets of milk. He hated the four walls filled with slogans and portraits; he hated the charts and the pitting of his team against the other teams in a never-ending search to push production.

During the lunch breaks and two or three days a week after work they were compelled to attend lectures by the agitators and the Komsomol extolling their “way of life.” It was explained that life was temporarily difficult because of the backwardness of the country inherited from the Czar, the bloodshed, and mostly, the outside pressures of the imperialists to crush them.

The Action Squads made up of party and Komsomol members Igor detested the most. The Action Squads saw to it that the workers showed up 100 per cent for all lectures and activities. The Action Squads led them on “spontaneous demonstrations” for visiting dignitaries and holiday parades. The Action Squads saw to it 100 per cent of the vote was cast for the party in the “elections.” It was the Action Squads who visited lagging teams to induce them to “donate” free days of labor to increase quotas.

The pressure became so unbearable that workers desperately met in secret for the intention of organizing a strike. The Action Squads along with the secret police rounded up the leaders and shipped them east. Then the Agitators came in and explained that strikes in the Soviet Union were illegal because there was no need to strike. The workers owned the factories and therefore they would be striking against themselves.

The only way to gain recognition as a worker appeared to be to work one’s self to an early grave through donation of almost every free hour. For this, the worker’s reward was a medal, the Labor Order of the Red Banner, to wear on his shabby suit.

The farm had been primitive, but the words of Igor’s father were never forgotten ...
“freedom is life.”
He realized that the Communists were trying valiantly to make the Soviet Union a modern country and that harsh methods were called for. He also came to understand that the West was the true enemy of the masses. Nevertheless, he had to escape the factory.

His brother Alexander’s revolutionary fires had been dimmed. Alexander was now in a jungle for survival. The only way to prosper was to follow classical party lines. The early idealism was replaced by the never-ending terror. Alexander attempted time and again to have Igor join Komsomol. As a Komsomol member new opportunities would open. Igor was determined to escape the fanatical discipline and the distasteful duty as an agitator or member of an Action Squad.

He found his way through the study of science and set in a number of improvisations in the factory that won him the attention of the planners and finally a medal as a Hero of Soviet Labor. As an engineer Igor knew he had a chance for a better life because engineers were desperately needed.

He pressured Alexander to arrange for him to take entrance examinations for the great University of Moscow. It was a far-reaching dream. The university belonged to the Komsomol faithful and the sons and daughters of the new ruling class. A Cossack boy from Rostov simply did not have a chance. But Igor persisted, and won the dream.

Natasha wept on his last visit before his departure. Moscow was 1000 kilometers away. Igor would be gone for four years with little or no chance of seeing her and just as small a chance of getting papers for her to come to Moscow. Afterward he had to give two years of free service to the government to repay his education and would most likely be sent to Siberia to the virgin lands.

Igor tried to comfort her by promising that the years would fly by and they would still be young enough to make a life. His last words were a vow to return to her.

Igor Karlovy never went into Siberian service. Upon graduation from the University of Moscow he was commissioned into the Red Air Force and sent to Leningrad. The Army and Air Force were frantically reorganizing trying to recover from the purges and the fiasco of the Finnish campaign.

The eve of the Great Patriotic War found him designing and constructing bulwarks on the Karelian Isthmus for the defense of Leningrad. Natasha moved to Armavir to a war factory, but after a short while communication was cut off between them.

June, 1942

My Beloved Brother, Igor,

The war has kept contact from us for a full year. I have not heard from you in all this time, but I know from friends you are stationed in the same place as where you were assigned after you left the university.

The bearer of this letter, a colleague in the Party, is being transferred to your district and has agreed to try to get this message to you.

My family and I have been evacuated into the interior. We are settled, and now to the task of organizing food production. We are faring quite well.

I have terribly bad news. Natasha is dead. She was among the defenders of Armavir. Many survivors are now in my area so the accounts of her death are authentic. I fear to say the entire business is most distressing. She was wounded and captured by the Nazis, abused, and done away with in a most brutal manner.

My deepest pity is for you at this moment of grief. I beg you to be of stout heart and take vengeance on the Nazi monsters for what they have done to Natasha and our glorious Motherland.

Long live the Communist Party! Long live Stalin! Death to the enemy!

Your loving brother,

Alexander

The Russian lands are cold and morbid, and a long shadow of death and tragedy hovers over her people. The woeful cries of toil and grief and poverty fill her music and her poems; life is suffering, suffering is life. The winters are as brutal as life is brutal.

All that is tragic in Russian heritage struck down on Igor Karlovy where he lived among the freezing and the starving in the Siege of Leningrad. The letter was the most painful chapter in a pain-filled journey through life. The death of his beloved Natasha all but sucked the will to survive.

When is it that a man like Igor Karlovy seeks out a woman such as Olga Shiminov? Is it when his soul wallows in a bottomless pit of grief? Is it when he clings stubbornly to a thinning thread between hope and complete depression?

Or perhaps it was the warmth that first brought him back to life, the warmth of Olga Shiminov’s apartment. Outside the dead were stacked like frozen logs in the gutters; the starving walked about in trances; Finnish and German cannon beat upon them without respite. Was it something so simple as the cold and the rumble of hunger in his belly that drew him to Olga Shiminov?

She was one of the most important Komsomol leaders in Leningrad. As a deputy in charge of women’s labor battalions she came into frequent dealings with Igor in the numerous engineering problems in building fortifications, roads over the ice, demolishing dangerous buildings, clearing rubble.