Doctor Zhivago (57 page)

"
Only through the Soviets can this alliance of the poor in town and country be achieved. Willy-nilly, the Siberian peasant will now pursue the end for which the workers of Siberia began to fight long ago. Their common goal is the overthrow of the hateful autocracy of hetmans and admirals, and the establishment, by means of an armed uprising, of the power of the peasants
'
and soldiers
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Soviets. In fighting the officer and Cossack hirelings of the bourgeoisie, who are armed to the teeth, the insurgents will have to wage a full-fledged war. The struggle will be long and stubborn.
"

Once again he stopped, wiped his face, and shut his eyes. In defiance of the rules, someone in the audience got up and raised his hand, signifying his intention to make a comment.

The partisan leader, or, to be more exact, the commander of the Kezhemsk group of the trans-Ural partisan units, sat in a provocatively nonchalant attitude under the speaker
'
s very nose; he kept interrupting him rudely and disrespectfully. It was hard to believe that so young a soldier—little more than a boy—could be in charge of whole armies and that his men obeyed him and looked up to him with veneration. He sat with his hands and feet wrapped in the skirts of his cavalry overcoat; its top, thrown back over his chair, showed his ensign
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s tunic with dark patches on the shoulders where the epaulettes had been removed.

On either side of him stood a silent bodyguard of his own age, in a white sheepskin grown a little gray, with a curly lamb
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s-wool edging. Their handsome, stony faces revealed nothing except blind loyalty to their chief and readiness to do anything for him. Taking no part in the discussion and unmoved by any of the issues raised in it, they neither spoke nor smiled.

There were a dozen or so other people in the room. Some were standing, others sitting on the floor; they leaned against the walls of calked logs, their legs stretched out in front of them or their knees drawn up under their chins.

Three or four were guests of honor and sat on chairs. They were old workers, veterans of the revolution of 1905. Among them were Tiverzin, morose and greatly changed since his Moscow days, and his friend, old Antipov, who always agreed with every word he said. Counted among the gods at whose feet the revolution laid its gifts and its burnt offerings, they sat silent and grim as idols. They had become dehumanized by political conceit.

There were other noteworthy figures in the shed, such as that pillar of Russian anarchism,
"
Black Banner
"
Vdovichenko, who, never resting a moment, kept sitting down on the floor and getting up again or pacing back and forth and stopping in the middle of the shed. A fat giant of a man, with a big head, a big mouth, and a lion
'
s mane of hair, who had been an officer in the war with Japan if not in the one with Turkey, he was a dreamer eternally absorbed in his fantasies.

Because of his excessive good nature and colossal size, which kept him from noticing anything smaller than himself, he did not pay sufficient attention to what was going on, misunderstood everything, and, mistaking the views of his opponents for his own, agreed with everything they said.

Next to him on the floor sat his friend Svirid, a trapper. Although he was not a tiller of the soil, his earthy nature showed through the collar of his opened dark cloth shirt, which he bunched in his hand together with the cross he wore around his neck, pulling it about and scratching his chest with it. He was half Buriat, warm-hearted and illiterate; his hair was plaited in thin braids, and he had a sparse mustache and a still sparser beard. His Mongol features aged his face, which was always creased in a sympathetic smile.

The speaker, who was touring Siberia on a military mission from the Central Committee, mentally surveyed the vast expanses he had still to cover. He was uninterested in most of the men he was addressing. But as an old revolutionary and from childhood a champion of the people, he gazed with adoration at the young commander who sat facing him. Not only did he forgive him his lack of manners, which he regarded as the expressions of a genuinely revolutionary temperament, but he delighted in his insolence as an infatuated woman may be pleased by the arrogant ways of a masterful lover.

The partisan commander was Mikulitsyn
'
s son, Liberius. The speaker was a former member of the co-operative labor movement, Kostoied-Amursky, who had once been a Social Revolutionary. He had recently revised his views, admitted his past errors, and recanted them in several detailed statements, and he had not only been received into the Communist Party but had soon afterwards been entrusted with his present responsible task.

He was chosen for it—though he was anything but a soldier—partly as a tribute to his long years of revolutionary service and his ordeals in Tsarist prisons, and partly on the assumption that, as a former member of the co-operative movement, he knew the mood of the peasant masses in insurgent western Siberia. For the purpose of his mission his knowledge was regarded as more important than military training.

His change of political convictions had altered his looks and manners beyond recognition. No one could remember him as either bald or bearded in the old days. But then, perhaps it was all merely a disguise. He was under strict orders from the Party not to reveal his former identity. His underground names were Berendey and Comrade Lidochka.

There was a moment of commotion when Vdovichenko prematurely said that he agreed with the instructions just read. When calm was restored, Kostoied went on:

"
In order to keep up with the growing movement of the peasant masses, it is essential to establish contact at once with all the partisan units operating in the territory of the Party Provincial Committee.
"

He then spoke of arrangements for secret meeting places, passwords, codes, and means of communication and went over the whole ground in detail.

"
The units must be informed of the location of the stores of arms, food, and equipment belonging to the Whites and of the places where they keep large sums of money, as well as of their means of safeguarding it.

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It is essential to work out to the last detail all questions concerning the organization of partisan detachments, their commanders, proletarian discipline, conspiratorial work, contact with the outside world, behavior toward the local population, revolutionary courts-martial, and sabotage in enemy territory—for example, the destruction of bridges, railway lines, steamships, barges, stations, workshops with all their technical equipment, telegraph offices, mines, and food supplies.
"

Liberius could bear it no longer. All that had been said seemed to him to be irrelevant and amateurish.

"
A very fine lecture,
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he said.
"
I shall take it to heart. I suppose we must accept all this without a word of protest, lest we lose the support of the Red Army?
"

"
Of course you must.
"

"
And what am I to do with your childish recitation, my wonderful Lidochka, when my forces, damn it—three regiments, including artillery and cavalry—have been campaigning for months and routing the enemy?
"

"
What a marvel! What strength!
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thought Kostoied.

The argument was interrupted by Tiverzin, who disliked Liberius
'
s impertinent tone.

"
Pardon me, Comrade Speaker, there is something that I don
'
t understand. I may have put down one of the points in the instructions incorrectly. May I read it out—I should like to be sure.
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It is most desirable that war veterans who were at the front and belonged to soldiers
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organizations at the time of the revolution should be drawn into the committee. It is desirable that the membership of the committee should include one or two N.C.O.s and one military technician.
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Have I put it down correctly, Comrade Speaker?
"

"
Perfectly. Word for word.
"

"
Then allow me to say this. I find the point concerning military specialists disquieting. We workers who took part in the revolution of 1905 are not used to trusting army people. There are always counterrevolutionary elements among them.
"

There were cries of
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That
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s enough! The resolution! Let
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s have a resolution! It
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s time to go home, it
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s late.
"

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I am in agreement with the majority,
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said Vdovichenko in a deep rumbling voice.
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To put it poetically, civic institutions should be founded on democracy, they should grow up from below, like seedlings that are planted and take root in the soil. You can
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t hammer them in from above like stakes for a fence. This was precisely the mistake of the Jacobin dictatorship and the reason why the Convention was crushed by the Thermidorians.
"

"
It
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s as clear as daylight,
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Svirid, his friend and fellow vagabond, backed him up.
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Any child can see it. We should have thought of it earlier, now it
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s too late. Now our business is just to fight and to push on for all we
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re worth. How can we turn back, now we
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ve started? We
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ve cooked our soup, so now we must eat it. We
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ve jumped into the water, and we mustn
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t complain.
"

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The resolution! The resolution!
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people were repeating on all sides. They talked on a little longer, but what they said made less and less sense, and finally, at dawn, the meeting broke up. They went home one by one, taking the usual precautions.

There was a picturesque place along the highway, where the swift little river Pazhinka divided the two villages of Kuteiny Posad and Maly Ermola
ï
, the one extending down a steep hill and the other spread in the valley below it. In Kuteiny a farewell party was being given for the new recruits, and in Ermola
ï
the medical board under Colonel Strese had resumed, after the Easter break, its examination of the draftees of that area. Mounted militia and Cossacks were stationed in the village for the occasion.

It was the third day of an unusually late Easter and an unusually early spring, warm and without a breath of wind. Tables spread with food and drink for the recruits stood in a street in Kuteiny, some distance from the highway. Placed end to end but not quite in a straight line and covered with white cloths hanging to the ground, they stretched down the street like a long hose.

The villagers had pooled their resources to provide the treat. The main dishes were the remnants of the Easter food, two smoked hams, several
kulich
buns, two or three large paskha cakes. Spread over the tables were bowls of pickled mushrooms, cucumbers, and sauerkraut, plates of home-baked bread cut into thick slices, and dishes piled with Easter eggs most of them were colored pink or light blue.

Broken eggshells, pink and light blue with white insides, littered the new grass around the tables. Pink and light blue were the shirts of the young men and the dresses of the girls. And pink clouds sailed in the blue sky, slowly and gracefully, and it seemed as if the sky were sailing with them.

Wearing a pink shirt with a silk sash and pointing his toes right and left, Vlas Pakhomovich Galuzin clattered down the steps of Pafnutkin
'
s house on the slope above the highway and the tables, ran down to the tables, and began his speech:

"
For want of champagne, I drink to you, my boys, in our own home-brewed vodka. A long life and happy years to you young men who are setting forth today. I should like to make you many other toasts. Gentlemen recruits! May I have your attention! The calvary that stretches out before you is the road of defense of our motherland against the ravishers who flood her fields with fratricidal blood. The people cherished the hope of enjoying the conquests of the revolution in peace, but the party of the Bolsheviks, in the pay of foreign capital, dispersed the Constituent Assembly, which was the people
'
s highest hope, by brute force of bayonets, and now the blood of the defenseless flows in rivers. Young men who are setting forth today, to you is entrusted the outraged honor of Russian arms! We have covered ourselves with shame and we are in debt to our gallant Allies. For not only the Reds but also Germany and Austria are raising their brazen heads once again. God is with us, boys.…
"
He was still speaking when his voice was drowned in a roar of hurrahs. He raised the glass of weak, poorly distilled vodka to his lips and sipped. It gave him no pleasure. He was used to vintage wines. But the thought that he was making a sacrifice to the public good filled him with satisfaction.