p Harvesting was in full swing on the boundless Don fields. Tractors rumbled and roared, and the thin blue smoke over the harvesters mixed with the whitish rye dust. The reapers whirred as they squashed the tall, thick rye with their wings. A peaceful scene by the look of it, but the grim stamp of war lay over everything. The people and the machines worked at a different pace, the rhythm was faster and more tense than before. Reddish-gold Don horses, brought here from the herds, neighed at the tethering posts in the village square. Sunburnt young horsemen wearing faded cavalry caps rode off to the enlistment stations, and the women who were binding the sheaves in the field, straightened up and waved to them for a long time, shouting: “Come back safe and sound, Cossacks! May luck be with you. Strike the nazi vipers dead! And give the Don’s profound respects to Budyonny!”

p Along the roads leading to the Grain Purveyance Stores came caravans of carts loaded high with sacks of newly reaped grain and majestically swaying mountains of excellent hay as green as spring onions and never touched by a drop of rain. The Red Army needed everything. And everything was being done for the Red Army. All the people’s thoughts were there, 40 at the front. And all the hearts beat with the same wish: to break the nazi viper’s spine as soon as possible.

p An elderly farmer stood crushing a wheat ear in his hands and smiling.

p “Nature herself is for us and against Hitler, let alone England and other clever nations who’ve become our allies. Look at the harvest this year, it’s like in the fairy tale: the wheat stalks grow as thick as shafts, and potatoes are the size of cartwheels. The spring crops of wheat, the sunflowers and the millet wanted rain, and rain did fall just before reaping time! All these crops are a sight for sore eyes! Everything’s to our good.”

p At the Bolshevistsky Put collective farm I spoke with a combine harvester operator, Pyotr Zelenkov. The very first hectare of rye he had harvested, he told me, yielded 2.8 tons of bunker weight, and, what is more, the grain had a relatively low moisture content and there was hardly any foreign matter. In places, the yield was as high as three or three and a half tons from a hectare.

p Zelenkov unloaded his harvester as he went along, and so I had to wait some time before he stopped. During this brief rest, he climbed down from his machine, after glancing into the bunker, and walked a little distance away over the bristling stubble to have a smoke.

p “Have you got someone to replace you in case you have to go to the front?" I asked him.

p “Naturally.”

p “Who is it?”

p “My wife.”

p “You’re quite sure she can do your job?”

p Zelenkov smiled all over his sunburnt face, the darker for the film of dust on it. The young woman working at the wheel leaned over the railing and said:

p “I’m Zelenkov’s wife. I’m doing this job temporarily, and last year I worked as combine operator and earned more than my husband.”

p Obviously, Zelenkov resented this reminder, and said rather grudgingly:

p “If the worst comes to the worst, she can replace me, of course. But we’ve other plans: we want to go off to the front together. ...”

p Marina Zelenkova wasn’t the sort to let her husband do all the talking, and so she finished what he had begun to say.

p “We’ve no children, so we can easily go off together. And I 41 can drive a tank no worse than my husband, never you worry about that!”

p Zelenkov hurried back to his combine, for he had no time to waste on chat. Of the farm’s 540 hectares planted to rye 417 had already been harvested with reapers, and he was anxious to make up for lost time.

p The simplest reapers were extensively used at most of the collective farms in Rostov Region that year. Without waiting for the grain to ripen sufficiently for reaping with combine harvesters, they started the job with plain reapers, greatly speeding up the harvesting process and saving a lot of fuel. This is what one of the men at the Stalinets collective farm had to say about the matter: “We stopped sweating once collective farms were started. Soviet power relieved us from backbreaking toil. And now these young fellows who work the reapers can’t do a day’s job without complaining of backache! Pampered, that’s what they are. It was all very well in peacetime to have the tractors plough the fields for us, and the combine harvesters do the reaping and the threshing, but now that the nazis have started this fight with us it’s no time to worry about your back. The way to work now is to get every joint in your body to do its bit, and save all the fuel you can for the Red Army which has more need of it than we do here. They’ll put it to such good use that the nazis’ joints will not only crackle but will start turning inside out.”

p More or less the same thing was said to me by Vassily Soldatov of the Twenty-Six Baku Commissars collective farm who had just done double his daily quota in stacking.

p “We’ve got a hard and stubborn enemy, that’s why we must also do a hard and stubborn job. And the quota . .. we’re set a quota here, but when we’re sent to the front we’ll go for the enemy without any quotas.”

p All the collective farms I visited impressed me with their excellent labour discipline and the people’s awareness of their civic duty. Everyone came out to work—youngsters and old people, even those of them who had felt too old to do much work the year before. Everybody without exception worked to the best of his ability and with tremendous enthusiasm. Vassily Tselikov, team leader at the Bolshevist Road collective farm, said the following in response to the praise he heard from one of the district committee officials:

p “We just can’t do less than our best. The way I see it, we’re defending the country with our toil just now, and when the time comes we’ll defend it with weapons. And anyway, how 42 can we work half-heartedly when practically every family has someone fighting at the front? Myself, for instance, I have two sons, and both of them are away righting. Alexei’s a gunner, and Nikolai’s a tankman. I’m too old to go, but I’ve enlisted in the home guard just the same. In the last German war I got wounded in the stomach. That German bullet’s given me a lot of trouble, but I can still work.... If the need arises I’ll join my sons in the fighting.”

p On learning that I was going to write an article for the Krasnaya Zvezda (Army paper) he said eagerly:

p “Let my boys and all the fighters out there know through your paper that we won’t fail them here, in the rear. Tell them to have no mercy on those nazis, let them make it so hot for them that they’ll find nothing but their graves in our land.”

p When we arrived at the office of the Road the Socialism collective farm, we found no one there except an elderly bookkeeper. The chairman, he told us, was out in the field. There wasn’t a soul about in the village: the entire population was busy reaping, cleaning the threshing floors or loading the grain.

p “My son’s at the western front,” the bookkeeper told us, putting down his pen for a moment. “He was in active service for three years, he was commander of a gun crew. I would write and ask what kind of gun he had, and he’d write back and say: ‘I’m fine, give my regards to the family, and don’t ask me about guns, Dad, it’s none of your business.’ " The bookkeeper said this with a pleased smile. “Means he knows the regulations well. In the Civil War, I, too, had my share of fighting. I fought in the north, then I fought against the basmach bands, and every other brand of enemy too. I’m in the home guard now. There’re about a hundred of us in the village. It’s funny things are just now. There’s any number of young men here, in the rear. When our hundred lines up, among us oldsters there’s many a young fellow strong enough to haul a field gun. They’ve got the strength of stallions, they have. They’re listed as volunteers, but for some reason they haven’t been called up yet. It means we’ve got a huge army. It makes you feel good just thinking about it.”

p Team No. 2 was doing the harvesting with reapers. Two pairs of oxen were harnessed into each reaper, and though the wings had been raised as far as they would go, the going was hard because the rye had grown so high and thick. The women ox-drivers urged the animals on with shouts and whips, and the tough young Cossacks who wielded the pitchforks were 43 themselves driven so hard that they couldn’t spare a second to wipe the sweat pouring down their faces. When at last they made a halt, I came up to the team and asked why they were racing the oxen at such a breakneck speed.

p “These oxen are used to it, no harm will come to them,” one of the Cossacks replied. “Our job’s easier when we’re going fast, and besides we’ve got to hurry, we might be sent to the front any day and it’ll be pretty tough on the womenfolk to manage a crop like this. Why don’t they draft me anyway, I’d like to know? They’ve drafted other chaps my age, and left me behind for some reason. Aren’t I as good as the others, or what?”

p The man’s name was Pokusayev, a son of the local blacksmith. This hefty fellow with a barrel chest was in the artillery during his military service. From conversation with the others I learnt that they all had had military training in one arm of service or another, and I could well appreciate the impatience of these strong, healthy young men to go and give a good shellacking to the Germans, who were drunken with blood and cheap triumphs. It was an impatience shared by all the young Don Cossacks, the impatience of men whose forefathers had over the centuries watered the frontiers of our country with their blood defending it from its numerous enemies.

p I remembered the words of Isai Markovich Yevlantyev, a man of eighty-three who now worked as watchman at the collective farm’s threshing floor. It was a quiet night in July, with stars falling from the dark sky. He spoke in a soft, old man s voice.

p “My grandfather fought against Napoleon, and he told me about it when I was just a kid. Before starting war against us, Napoleon called his generals together in the open field one fine day, and said to them: ’I have a mind to conquer Russia. What have you got to say to this, mister generals?’ And these generals all said together: ‘Can’t be done, Your Majesty, it’s a mighty powerful country, we’ll never conquer it.’ Then Napoleon pointed to the sky and asked: ’See that star up there?’ ’No,’ said the generals, ’we don’t. You can’t see it in daytime.’ Napoleon told them: ’And I can see it. That star’s a good omen.’ And with that he moved his armies against us. He came in through a wide gate, and left through a narrow little door, just managing to squeeze through. Our people saw him off all the way to Paris. Seems to me the same stupid star appeared to this German commander, and when he’s been fixed to leave the doorway will be made so narrow for him, I don’t 44 know if he’ll slip through or not. Let’s hope to God he doesn’t. So others should never try it again for now and forever.”

1941