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p It’s winter. Night-time....

p In the solitude and quiet of the night, close your eyes, my dear countryman and friend, and let memory take you into the recent past. Then, with your mind’s eye, you shall see:

p . . .The cold, whitish mist wreathing eerily over the forests and marshes of Byelorussia, over the empty, long-abandoned dugouts overrun with shrivelled ferns, over the crumbling trenches and foxholes filled with rusty water through which you can see the dull glimmer of the verdigris-covered cartridge cases, lying on the bottom... .

p In Smolensk and Moscow country the pine trees, cut all over with shell splinters, moan hollowly and bend their crowns before the taut northern wind.

p White, fluffy snow falls rapidly on the outskirts of Lenin’s deathless city, as though anxious to cover up the cruel scars left by the war on this land, which our people hold sacred.

p Sun shadows slide across the resurrected fields of the Ukraine which, ploughed up time and again by countless shells, still remember the thunderous noise of battle.

p Biting snow, falling at a slant, is swept by the wind round Kursk, Orel, Voronezh and Tula—this ancient Russian country which for three whole years groaned under the insupportable weight of thousands of tanks. The last leaves, scorched by the frost, have fallen from the trees and everywhere—on the fields, on the highroads and cart tracks, trodden by the numberless patient feet of our infantry, unquestionably the world’s best— they stand out in russet patches as though human blood were seeping through the snow.

p In the boundless steppes round Stalingrad where every bit of ground is sown with splinters of a once lethal metal, where choice German divisions were reduced to dust and ashes, the angry wind blowing from across the Volga chases a ball of tumble-weed, as ugly and as rusty-brown as the skeletons of German tanks and cars scattered over the steppe.

p And in the Crimea and the blue Caucasian foothills, dazzlingly white threads of gossamer are still floating about in the transparent, cooled air. Where once the roar of battle went on day and night, the trenches and shell holes fringed round the edges with shaggy weeds have become covered over with a silver web, and the threads, beaded with tiny teardrops of dew, sag under the weight and tremble.

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p And everywhere, from Stalingrad to Berlin, from the Caucasus to the Barents Sea, wherever your glance may linger, you will see, my friend, the graves of soldiers who had died in battle, graves dear to our Mother-country’s heart. And in that moment you will poignantly remember those countless losses borne by your country in defending our own Soviet power, and in your memory the words “Eternal Glory to the Heroes Who Fell in Battle for the Freedom and Independence of Our Motherland" will sound like a solemn requiem.

p Recalling the past, you will find yourself thinking: how many people have been orphaned in the war! On this long winter night, with time and room for sorrowful reminiscences, many a woman, widowed in the war, will in her loneliness press her hands to her aged face, and in the darkness tears as bitter as wormwood will scorch her fingers. Many a child’s heart, wounded never to heal by the death of the father who fell in battle for his socialist Motherland, will shrink with unchildlike pain from a chance recollection at bedtime. Or else, it may be like this: in a small room, where a melancholy quiet has dwelt for years, an old man will come up to his greyhaired wife, tearlessly mourning her dead sons, and look into her lustreless eyes from which the supreme tragedy of a bereaved mother has squeezed out all the tears. And in a hollow, quavering voice he will say: “Come, mother, come, don’t take on so.... Please don’t, dear. . . . We’re not the only ones—-" Without waiting for a response, he’ll walk away to the window, clear his throat to gulp down his tears, rising in a short, dry sob, and will stand there for a long time staring at the misted window with unseeing eyes....

p Remember, friend, that in the thirty years of Soviet power the USSR has never known defeat in war or in any undertaking, however great the difficulties involved. Victory in the last, the greatest of wars, has cost us enormous sufferings and untold losses but these sacrifices placed on the altar of our country’s freedom did not lessen our strength, nor did the bitterness of bereavement make our spirit drop.

p It sometimes happens that steppeland wormwood sprouts luxuriantly and spreads in a bluish haze over the lush grassy meadows adjoining the wheat fields, and as the wheat grains ripen they absorb the bitterness of wormwood. Flour milled from such wheat grains is no good for cakes and other nonsense. But bread is still bread, despite this slightly bitter taste. And it seems a blessing to those who toil in the sweat of their brow, 86 for it lavishly gives man the strength to expend in the morrow’s endeavour.

p The people are healing the war wounds with miraculous, fantastic speed. Towns and villages are rising from the ruins; the mines in my native Donbas have come back to life; a harvest has already been grown on the fields which two years ago had bristled with thistle and weeds; smoke is pouring from the chimneys of the resurrected factories; new industrial enterprises are springing up in places where desolation reigned. Even a Soviet person who has seen things and has learnt to expect the impossible from the creative might of the people’s genius, will gasp and shake his head in glad amazement on learning that a reconstructed giant of metallurgy has been commissioned before the set date, or that a heretofore unknown Stakhanovite has set a new all-Union record.

p The working class of Leningrad—the pride of the country— has already issued a challenge to workers everywhere to try and fulfil the five-year plan in four years. And the magnificent outlines of a new, beautiful life are visibly rising before our eyes.

p Mighty indeed is the Party that could organise, teach, arm and rally the people to the performance of feats unprecedented in history! Great indeed and invincible are the people who not only defended their country’s independence and routed all the enemies, but have also become the beacon of hope for working people everywhere in the world!

Being a true son of such a people and such a Party, is it not, my friend, the greatest happiness we and our contemporaries can know in life? And do not we, the presently living, draw inspiration for indefatigable endeavour and new feats of heroism from our stern responsibility for the fate of our Motherland, for the cause of the Party, a responsibility we owe not only to the coming generations but also to the sacred memory of those who fought and died, defending our country?

p On January 21, the day of Lenin’s death, the world’s workers will pay a tribute of silence, just as they did 24 years ago, just as they have done ever since on this day of mourning, to the man who showed mankind the way to a new life. He, the leader of a great Party and the founder of the first socialist state in the world, said these unforgettable words in 1919:

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p “In this country, in Russia, for the first time in world history, the government of the country is so organised that only the workers and the working peasants, to the exclusion of the exploiters, constitute those mass organisations known as Soviets, and these Soviets wield all state power. That is why, in spite of the slander that the representatives of the bourgeoisie in all countries spread about Russia, the word ‘Soviet’ has now become not only intelligible but popular all over the world, has become the favourite word of the workers, and of all working people.

p “Soviet power,” Lenin said, “is the road to socialism that was discovered by the masses of the working people, and that is why it is the true road, that is why it is invincible.”

p Our friends know from what inexhaustible source we draw our strength both for war and for peaceful work.

p Our enemies remain true to themselves: some go in for plain slander, doing it crudely and with their characteristic brazenness, while others hastily dig in their dusty archives and bring out the old, moth-eaten arguments about the “mysterious Slav soul" and “Russian fanaticism”, covering up their shabbiness and baseness with these threadbare rags, pretending that they just cannot understand where the Soviet people get their tremendous strength.

p At the cost of many years of suffering and by a great revolutionary struggle our people found the only fair system of government, they fought for it with resolution and courage, consolidated it with their blood and their toil, and no power on earth can shake their faith in this system.

When you compare the recent past with our present day you will see very clearly how greatly the Russians have changed spiritually, and particularly the Russian peasants who, as collective farmers, have acquired such admirable, new qualities.

p In January 1930, when the collectivisation of farming got under way in the Don country, I happened to be travelling from Millerovo to Veshenskaya in a horse-drawn sledge. Neither my driver nor I had any delusions about our chances of making the 168-kilometre trip in quick time. The horses were tired, the road was very bad, so people said, with pits and bumps all the way, there was ground snow in the steppe, and the dense, purple clouds rising in a sombre mountain range in the eastern sky threatened foul weather.

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p We set off at daybreak. Out of town, the acrid smell of slag and of smoke curling from the chimneys gradually faded away and there was the fresh coolness of clean, new snow in the air, the fragrance of hay that had spilled from the haymakers’ carts to each side of the road, and the pungent smell of horses’ sweat. The profound wintry silence was broken only by the creaking of the runners, the snorting of the horses, and now and again, when the pit in the road was especially deep, by the crosspiece knocking against the shaft.

p My driver—an elderly bearded Cossack with a youthful bearing, deep-set, roguishly twinkling little eyes and a rakish forelock—turned out to be an extremely talkative person. In the beginning he drove the horses in silence, whistling a melancholy tune and thinking his own thoughts. All I could see of him was his broad back in the tight-fitting sheepskin coat, the back of his brown wrinkled neck, and the forelock, white with hoarfrost, showing from under the fur hat which he wore at a dashing angle. But the moment I asked him something, he quickly swung round to face me and, tucking the reins under his seat, answered me readily, with a smile:

p “You ought to see what’s going on at our homesteads now.... God forbid and save us. ...”

p “What is going on?" I asked.

p “Why, collective farms are starting, and so the folks sit and sit at meetings. I reckon that even in Moscow they don’t sit like that!”

p “Like what?”

p “Why, they go on day and night, for three days in a row!”

p “Have many people joined the collective farm where you come from?”

p “They’ve split in two: one half has joined, and the others are still in two minds about it, huddling like a flock of sheep in front of the homeyard gates. They all sit together at the meetings, and there they start fighting too, like young cocks. It’s a laugh, honestly! My neighbour, Mikhei Fomich, an old man in his last years, who only leaves the meeting when his need is acute the way it is with the old, all but lives at the village Soviet now, sleeping there and eating there too. His old woman brings him a pot of cabbage soup for dinner, but it takes her hours to get there, shuffling over the snow, so Mikhei Fomich spoons up a bit of the ice-cold soup and settles back again to go on with the meeting, sticking in the village Soviet like a nail in the wall, . . , My, what an activist he turned out to be!”

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p “Is he a collective farm activist?”

p “Who, Mikhei Fomich? Why, he’s an activist on the other side, he’s one of those rich middle peasants. He doesn’t speak out against the collective farm, not him. He sits quietly in the back row and oozes poison, maybe something from the Bible or maybe something he has made up himself. I went to one of those meetings myself the other day. It was something of a squeeze on the benches: I sat on the end, next to me sat this same Mikhei Fomich, and next to him a widow, Yefrosinya Melnikova her name is. Mikhei Fomich buzzed and buzzed so we couldn’t hear the speakers. This Yefrosinya Melnikova asked him to shut up very politely, then she asked him once more, but still he went on. The speaker was a Party man from the district centre, he was telling us about collective farms, and Mikhei Fomich went on with his own speech, whispering that this would be bad, and that would be even worse.... And then he nudged Yefrosinya with an elbow and said quietly: ’First they’ll make all the cows common property, and then they’ll drive all you women under a common quilt to sleep with the men. I heard this from someone who knows.’ And she, quick to make fun, went and said: ’Oh well, I’m a poor widow so I don’t stand to lose, only heaven forbid that I should have to sleep beside you! I’d have to resign from the collective farm then.’ Well, Fomich didn’t like it and asked in a louder voice: ’Just what do you mean by that, you shameless hussy?’ This got Yefrosinya real mad, and she shouted for all to hear: ’I mean that you stink of mouse droppings like an old barn from a mile off!’ Well, one thing led to another, and they went at each other’s throats, he calling her a shameless so and so, an impious sinner and so on, and she telling him that naturally he went against the collective farm, him being a near-kulak with two pairs of oxen and a pair of horses, while all she had was one wretched cow. He called her a dirty name, and she cursed back as well as she could, and then they began to fight. Like under the old regime, Fomich knocked the shawl off her head and grabbed at her hair. Yefrosinya—no fool, that woman—caught hold of his beard and, being a young and strong lass, she gave a tug and plucked out a handful of hair. It was a job pulling them apart, honestly. I glanced at Fomich and saw that half of his beard was clean gone! I tried not to laugh and said to him: ‘Don’t go to any more of these meetings, Mikhei Fomich, or else the womenfolk will pluck you like a chicken, they won’t even leave you any down for fluff.’ He glared at me, proudlike, and said: ’I won’t leave off going to the meetings even if 90 it costs me the last hair on my head!’ That’s what an activist he turned out to be, I’d never have thought it of him.”

p “And you, have you joined the collective farm?" I wanted to know.

p He stroked his brown beard sedately, and roguishly screwed up his restless blue eyes.

p “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Be it a wedding or any other happy occasion, I never hurry to sit down at the table first. When you sit down last, you have the end seat and if need be you can get out first.” In case his figure of speech was not quite clear to me, he added: “It may be that I won’t like it at that table, so what the devil for should I get into the squash under the icons?”

p Laughing, I told him that if he waited too long he might not get any seat at all at that table.

p “Not me,” he shook his head stubbornly. “I keep a sharp lookout. I’ve been invited to join the collective farm seeing that I’m the typical vacillating middle peasant: a pair of horses and a plain old cow are all I own. But since they call me that at the meetings, I’ll vacillate some more. I want to get a real good look at this collective farm, and rushing headlong into it is sort of, how shall I put it. . . .”

p “Frightening?" I prompted.

p “No, I don’t scare easily, but I like to play safe. Just in case. You tell me this: which is it safer to be—a collective or a private farmer? Which kind of life I should keep clear of? I’m afraid to make a mistake, you see. I got plenty of knocks when I was young, and I know that you may be expecting trouble from one side and it will hit you from the other, and good luck to you! I’ll tell you something, as an example. About thirty years ago, my late parents found me a bride on another farmstead, and we went to take a look at her. I was a brave fellow, but that first time I saw her my heart stopped beating and next moment I felt it hammering in my throat. . . . Standing before me was a robust wench with bold, sparkling eyes, and a face so beautiful, like the loveliest flower! She was looking at me, and I could not force out a word, and stood there as dumb as a dead fish.

p “Well, they left us alone in the room, and we sat down on the chest together, and I still did not say a word and just blinked my eyes as I looked her up and down. One thing struck me: her tiny hands, they were as small as a child’s. I remember thinking that with hands like that she’d never lift a pitchfork, so what sort of help would she be on the farm? 91 My head was working, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. We sat like that for a long time, and finally she lost patience,and bending close to my ear whispered: ’Maybe you’re dumb?’ I shook my head, but again I could not speak, I tried but it was no use. Then she frowned and told me sharply: ’Show me your tongue. Maybe you’d bitten it off on the way here when the cart bumped.’ Like a fool I went and stuck my tongue out—-Oh, hell, I blush to this day to remember what a fool I must have looked. She laughed so hard that tears rose to her eyes. She fair choked with laughter, she pressed her hands to her breast, and between gasps she screamed: ’Mother, come here! Look at him! Why, he’s a plain fool! How can I marry him?’ That’s how rotten things turned out.

p “I was mad at her but I wanted to laugh too, and here I looked at her laughing mouth and my heart dropped again: her teeth were so white, white as white, strong and sharp, set close together, and she had a mouth full of them like a young wolf. Now look at that, I said to myself. With teeth like hers she’ll easily bite a year-old calf in two, so what’ll happen to me if I marry her? If we have some disagreement she won’t get the better of me with her hands, of course—her hands are too small for a fight—but supposing she goes for me with her teeth, heaven forbid? She’ll rip my skin off in shreds. Why, before I know it she’ll have ripped enough hide off me to make two breech-bands at least.

p “Maybe it was from fear, or maybe from anger, but anyway my tongue began to move again, and I said: ‘You’re having your laugh now, but mind you don’t have to weep when you marry me.” And she came back: ‘We’ll see, said the blind. It remains to be seen which one of us will weep.’

p “We left it at that. And do you think she got the upper hand over me with her teeth? No, not with her teeth. No, God spared me that. She’s still got a mouthful of them old though she is, and the cursed old hag can still crack cherry stones with them as though they were sunflower seeds. It’s with her tiny hands that she got the better of me. Little by little, from year to year, she tightened the reins more and more, and maybe I could break loose now, but it’s too late, I’m used to wearing my horse collar, I take my misfortune for granted now, just like a mangy horse takes the crust on its back. I’m easy to handle when I’m drunk, and easier still when I’m sober, and so she bullies me all she wants, the witch.

p “Sometimes we, older Cossacks, get together on a holiday, drink a litre each, talk about old times, who served where, 92 who fought where, and sing a song or two. . . . But you know, however much a foal likes to frolick in the meadow the time always comes for him to run home to mother. Well, I’d crawl home on all fours and there my wife would be waiting in the door for me with a frying pan held at the ready like a rifle. It’s a long story, naturally, and I won’t go into it.... One thing I’ll tell you: she taught me to open the door with my back, that I admit. No matter how much I’ve had to drink, I’ll never forget to give myself the order: ’About turn!’ And that’s how I enter the house, back first. It’s safer that way, and I suffer less damage. I wake up next morning with my back aching all over, as though someone has been threshing peas on it, I find a bowl of cabbage brine beside my bed, and the wife gone. Before my hangover has passed maybe I’d take my resentment out on her, but she makes herself scarce till evening and the devil himself couldn’t find her even if he carried a lantern. Naturally, my anger cools before the day is done, and when she comes back she looks at me sweetly and asks: ’And how are you, Ignat Prokofievich?’ And I say: ‘I’m all right, only I’m sorry I didn’t catch you this morning, damn you, or I’d have hacked you into splinters for the fire.’

p “She’s always begging me to make an oakwood handle for the frying pan, but I’m not that simple either, so I choose the rottenest little tree and whittle the wood to just thick enough to hold the frying pan without snapping. ... Well, that’s how it goes with us.

p “Why d’you think I’m telling you all this? Because, you see, when I married my wife it’s her teeth I was afraid of, and what I’m suffering from is her hands. It’s the same now: I’m afraid of joining the collecive farm, yet who knows, maybe running my own farm will make me howl like a lone wolf. You stick to individual farming and before you know it you’ll have your tongue lolling. Am I right?”

p Grinning into his beard, he gave me a wink and screwed up his eyes, telling me with his roguish look that he wasn’t as simple and harmless as he seemed, and he was leaving me to take everything he said any way I wanted—as a joke, or in earnest.

p He remained silent for several minutes, and then said in a sadder tone, without any playful notes in it: “How the plague can I know what to do. . .. Oh well, we’ll live and see.”

p All of a sudden he rose from his seat, lashed at the horses with unexpected ferocity, and shouted at them: “You damned 93 individual farmers, you’ve been eavesdropping, have you? I’ll teach you how to swish your tails!”

p The snow which had been drifting down in sparse flakes soon began to fall hard, the wind became more vicious, sweeping snowdrifts across the road, and the tired horses with curly hoar-frost in their groins changed from a heavy jog-trot to a walk.

p It was midnight when we reached the village of NizhneYablonskoye. The large village was plunged in darkness, except for a faint light showing through the unshuttered, iceencrusted windows in one of the cottages.

p We went there and asked to be put up for the night. I went indoors while Prokofievich unharnessed the horses. On a low, lopsided stool placed beside the bed, piled high with rags, sat an old man, his legs spread wide apart and his back hunched despondently. At his feet slept a small black lamb, curled up on a matting of straw. Its curly wool glistened softly in the dim light of the paraffin lamp. The old man grudgingly answered my greeting, glanced at me casually and dropped his head again. His big, rough hand lightly and tenderly stroked the lamb, the thick fingers barely touching the gleaming black curls.

p An old woman, obviously his wife, spoke from the stovecouch: “You”d better go and show him where to put the horses.”

p My host slung his sheepskin coat on his shoulders and without speaking a word went out.

p “D’you always go to bed so late, or did something go wrong on your farm?" I asked the woman.

p Glad of the chance to talk to a stranger, she readily replied:

p “What farm have we, my dear man! Seems like we’ve done all our farming. The wind has the run of the place now. All we’ve got left are two sheep and this small lamb here. Even the dog we had has run off from our empty yard, there’s nothing for him to watch anymore.”

p Groaning and wheezing, she sat up, hung her stockinged legs down over the side of the stove-couch and, screwing up her eyes shortsightedly at the yellow flame in the lamp chimney, continued:

p “My old man is not all there, honest to God. This is the fourth night he’s gone without sleep. He’ll go to bed in the evening, he’ll lie down for a bit, then he’ll light the lamp, sit at the table, roll himself a great big cigarette and sit there smoking and saying nothing all night. I’ve even forgotten the 94 sound of his voice. By morning there’s so much smoke in the house that, believe it or not, my head goes round and round and 1 can’t breathe for choking. And 1 don’t dare say anything to him: he’ll glare at me savagely, slam out of the house and, with never a word, go away into the yard.”

p With the timeless gesture common to all Russian peasant women, she cupped her chin in her hand and said sorrowfully: “He”s hardly eaten these four days. He’ll sit down to dinner, pick up his spoon and lay it down again, reaching for his tobacco pouch with his other hand. How this cigarette smoking doesn’t sicken him, I don’t know. His face’s all sunken and grey from not eating, and yet he smokes and smokes. He’s healthy actually, except that he’s sick at heart and this malady’s gnawing at him. ...”

p “What sort of malady is it?" I asked, already guessing the cause of this illness.

p The woman promptly confirmed my suspicions.

p “We joined the collective farm last week, what else? He took the horse there himself, and drove our pair of oxen and the cow to the common cattleyard. We still have the sheep. The place is like a graveyard without the animals. . . .”

p Bending forward, she whispered confidentially: “D”you know what he went and did yesterday? He chopped down an apple tree for firewood. A good tree, mind you. I just gasped—my old man must be mad! What sweet early apples this tree bore us! But he doesn’t seem to feel sorry for anything any more, he doesn’t need anything, he cares as little as if all this belonged to someone else. No one forced him to join the collective farm, he put his name down of his own free will, and yet see what it’s done to the man! He came back from that meeting in such a happy mood, and he said to me: ’Well, wife, you and I are collective farmers now. I put my name down today. We’re going to work all of us together in an artel. Maybe we won’t burst with food in that collective farm, but at least we won’t slave so hard, and it’s time we had a rest.’ I began to cry, and he said: ’Fool woman, it’ll be easier on us, old people, so dry your tears.’ But when he led the animals off, he became a changed man. . . . True, they promised to give us back our cows, but who knows, maybe they will and maybe they won’t.. ..”

p We heard the snow creaking on the front path, and men’s voices. The old woman stopped talking and quickly pulled the ragged quilt over herself, head and all.

p Stamping noisily with his frozen felt boots, Prokofievich walked into the house, and behind him came our host.

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p At supper, Prokofievich did everything to draw our host into conversation, but the old man kept a morose silence, or else gave a brusque “yes” and “no”, making it obvious that his importunate guest was a nuisance. With a hurt air, Prokofievich spread his sheepskin coat out on the bench and lay down to sleep. The old woman must have gone back to sleep, and only our host was still up. He went out into the yard and brought back an armful of firewood. He lit the small stove he had built under his bed, and squatted before the fire. Sensing warmth, the lamb moved up closer. It stood swaying on its feebly bent legs, then started bleating softly calling mother, and finally lay down at the old man’s feet again, staring into the fire with its bulging yellow eyes. The rainbow reflections of the flames trembled in these long, slanting eyes, truly a devil’s eyes.

p “Look at this insect, just born yet it knows where it’s better to be,” the old man indicated the lamb with a nod, and gave a faint smile.

p Now that the long silence had been broken, I ventured to ask: “Why don’t you go to bed and sleep?”

p “I’ve no sleep, that’s why.”

p The sorrow he carried within himself was apparently brimming over, he could not bear it in silence any longer, and he unburdened his soul to me, now and then glancing at me with his sunken, gloomy eyes.

p “Old men never sleep soundly, and what with things being as they are, they don’t sleep at all. Clerks and townspeople think lightly of our peasant life, but they should not. The other day, a man was here in passing, a representative he was from the district centre. I had just brought my oxen and cow to the collective farm, and he said to me: ‘You’ll draw an easy breath now, Grandad. You won’t have a care in the world. No sheds to clean, no feed to worry about. Come winter all you’ll have to do is eat and sleep. Maybe in spring or in harvesttime you’ll help the collective farm a bit as far as you’re able.’

p “A light-minded person reasons lightly too. Did I join the collective farm because I wanted to be a drone? Sure I will work while I’ve strength in my hands and can stand up on my feet, so’s not to die of boredom. And according to him it’s like this: I must draw an easy breath now that I got rid of my animals. Good riddance, he thinks. And actually it’s not the way he thought it’d be at all. I gave away my horse, my oxen, my cart, my trap with metal wheels, two horse collars and all the harness I had, and now I don’t know if I’m living or not, 96 the whole wide world has kind of dimmed for me. . .. I’m sick at heart, and there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s getting me down. To think that since I was a mite I grew up beside horses and oxen, all my life they kept me in food, I’d grown old with them, and now I’ve been left without any draught animals, and I feel like an old tree stump in the forest. ... There’s no one waiting for me out in the yard, the yard’s empty, you see. ... Can you understand this, man, there’s no one waiting for me in the yard? Or maybe you think this kind of sorrow settles light as a feather in a man’s heart?

p “Take the oxen, for example. The care they need, you’d be surprised. In summer and in harvest-time—you graze them all night, so they’ll have plenty of strength, and you never sleep a wink for fear that they’ll wander off come dawn, and do damage to someone else’s wheat field. You have to work in the daytime and when you haven’t slept for several nights in a row you sway like a drunk and all but drop the pitchfork, it feels so heavy. When autumn comes, you’ve work up to your nostrils with these oxen, and all through winter, too. You have to get up two or three times in the night and go and look in on them. Put more hay in the trough because the nights are long and you can’t give them the lot in the evening—they’ll scatter it under their feet, and waste a lot. And your hay has to last till spring. No matter how hale the oxen seem after wintering, you’ve got to feed them properly in spring, or else with the first warm wind they’ll lie down in the rut and not budge. That’s when you’ll have a load of trouble with them, I’m telling you.

p “It’s the same with the horse, it wants the same good care: you must water it in time, scrub it down, and before going anywhere at night you must give it grain or hash to eat.. .. That’s how a good farmer spends his night—in cares and work. That’s why he learns to sleep like a hare: he seems to be asleep, but he has his ears cocked all the time, and with the first cockcrow he must be up and doing, no time to loll in bed.

p “In the fifty years since I’ve been my own master I got out of the habit of sleeping all through the night, and now I’ve lost sleep altogether. I doze off at first, but I wake up round midnight, and my sleep’s gone, I’m wide awake. Last night, too, I dozed off for a little, and then I awoke with a start because it was time to give the oxen a bit more hay. I stuck my bare feet into my felt boots, put on my sheepskin and went out into the yard, and it wasn’t before I got to the barn that I remembered that my oxen were at the common cattleyard and 97 that an easy life has come to me at last. . . . And I felt so sick at heart from this easy life, it was worse than the worst illness!”

p I slept fitfully, and far into the night I heard the old man’s plaintive, muted voice, and his dry cough. Prokofievich roused me before sunrise. In the small stove the coals, dusted with ashes, glowed palely, and tiny bluish tongues of fire darted over them gaily. The old man was asleep, sitting on his low bench and leaning back against his bed. His hand hung down as before to touch the back of the lamb, and his big, thickjointed fingers trembled and lightly caressed the curly wool.

Disturbed by the sound of Prokofievich’s footsteps, the old man stirred in his sleep, but he kept his hands where they were as if, even in sleep, he dreaded parting with the lamb, the last poor thing he owned whose living warmth was the remaining link with his recent past as an individual farmer.

p I remembered this old man as I was returning from Stalingrad last autumn.

p We arrived at one of the collective farms not far from Kalach in the middle of the night. Just as that time, in 1930, we drove to the only house that had a light in the window. This was a small cottage at the end of a wide street overrun with grass.

p There was something touching and dear in the moonlit scene: I saw a street of new whitewashed cottages and stands of tall Lombardy poplars that seemed to keep guard over them. The driver stopped the car, and immediately my nostrils were assailed by the bitter smell of wormwood coming from the nearby meadow.

p As the headlight swept along the low grey fence, a man with a greatcoat slung over his shoulders appeared on the porch. Screwing up his eyes against the dazzling light, he limped down the porch steps and called out:

p “Kolesnichenko, is that you?" At the gate, he said in disappointment: “No, it’s a passenger car. Who are you? Where are you from?”

p “That’s a house-owner for you, as stern as they come,” the driver said jocularly. “We had barely stopped at his gate and he’s already interrogating us, and before we know it he’ll order us to present our credentials. Is everybody here so particular?”

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p The man in the greatcoat came to the door of our car, and said good-naturedly:

p “Well, maybe I would ask you to present your credentials. I suppose you mean to stay the night, do you? Well, that’s the whole point: it’s late, there’s no place I can suggest, so you’ll have to stay with me. Don’t mind about the interrogation, it’s a frontline habit.. . . Besides, I’m in authority here, being chairman of the collective farm.”

p He led the way into the house. An elderly woman and two children were asleep on a wide bed. She opened her eyes for a moment and immediately closed them again, sleeping the overpowering sleep of a terribly tired person. Our host rolled up the wick a little in the paraffin lamp, and asked us to sit down.

p “You must forgive me but I’m not going to rouse the missus,” he said, dropping his voice to almost a whisper. “She”s been up for three nights, delivering the grain to the state stores.”

p The grey hair on the sides of his sunburnt face and the deepcut lines on his forehead told us that the life of this man had not been very easy.

p Walking on tiptoe, he went and fetched a jug of milk and sat down at the table with us.

p “Help yourselves. It’s all the refreshment I can offer you.”

p “Have you been the chairman long?" I asked him.

p “Since 1943. Soon after I returned from the front with a medical discharge on account of my leg wound, I was elected chairman of this farm.”

p By the look of him he was at least sixty, and my driver asked in some surprise:

p “How did you happen to be at the front? Old men like you weren’t called up.”

p Our host smoothed out his pepper-and-salt moustache with a jocosely dashing gesture, and grinned.

p “I happened to be there the same as you, son. True, people of my age weren’t drafted, and I joined up as a volunteer in summer of ’42, when I just couldn’t stand it any more. The secretary of our District Party Committee laughed at me and said: ’What use will you be there at your age? They might assign you to the infantry, you know, and you’ll disgrace yourself in front of the young men. You’d better work here as a team leader. We need men in the rear, too.’ To this I said to him: ’This is no time to laugh, Comrade Secretary, seeing what 99 a slice the Germans have hacked off. I wouldn’t be joining up if I weren’t sure of myself. As for the team leader’s job, any one of our brainier women can do it. Look at the way they boss us anyway.’ Well, so I joined up. At first they wanted to put me in a sapper’s company as a driver, but I begged to be transferred to the infantry. It wasn’t easy at my age, I’ll tell you, not easy at all, but I had to grin and bear it seeing that it was my own idea to join up. I fought at Stalingrad, came as far as Kursk too, and there, at Prokhorovka, the war was over for me—I got a medical discharge. Tough luck, dammit. I was only in the ranks a year and I was wounded three times. And 1 wasn’t as young as I used to be, you know.”

p He grew noticeably more animated when he came to this part of his story, and spoke in a slightly louder voice.

p “On young men the wounds heal before they know it, like on young trees, but it’s tougher on an old man. I know from experience. The second time I was wounded I was taken to hospital in Tambov, and there were some men there who had lost their legs. The older ones were down in the dumps, they lay there, their faces yellow and wrinkled, moaning and groaning all night, tossing and turning, worrying how they were going to support their families now, and how they would face life as cripples. The beds creaked under them all night. Naturally, their thoughts were pretty sick those sleepless nights. And a young man, he doesn’t give a hang. He grieves terribly, of course, but he won’t show it. When he wakes up in the morning and finds his crutches gone— there weren’t enough crutches for all of them at the hospital— he’ll go where he wants to anyway, hopping on his one leg and catching hold of the backs of beds or anything that comes to hand for support. He’ll even sing a little song about love as he hops along. That’s youth for you! Watching him you’d feel sorry for him, and envious too. If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I’d say to myself, maybe I’d hop like a sparrow, too, dammit.

p “Sometimes a young soldier would be in a very bad way when they brought him to hospital, and within a couple of weeks the son-of-a-gun would already be making passes at the nurses, sighing with a wheeze like a horse’s, and making faces one funnier than the other such as I, for instance, could not make for the life of me at my age. You’d watch him and marvel! An elderly soldier with a much lighter wound would turn all sour from lying in bed all the time, he’d plague the doctors and the nurses and grow sick of his own self, yet he’d stay 100 on and on, moping and staring at the ceiling, taking up a much-needed cot when he could long have been up and about.

p “But then, what I want to say is that we, older people, got into this war because the enemy threatened to rob us of absolutely everything we had gained under our Soviet power. We simply had to join in, you must understand that.. ..

p “I myself had a splinter-smashed bone that just would not knit. 1 asked the doctor why it took such a long time, maybe the plaster cast had not been put on properly, and he asked me how old I was. Fifty-six, I told him. Then he laughed and said: ’If you’re wounded again twenty years from now your bones won’t knit at all.’ Was I still going to fight twenty years from then, I asked myself. Nice business, dammit.

p “ ’No thanks, comrade doctor,’ I said to him. ‘I’ve got to finish with the nazis much sooner. For one thing, they got me damned sore, and for another, I can’t afford all that time to fool around with them. Besides, what good will I be as a soldier in twenty years’ time? I’d be a hobbling shame, not a soldier. My platoon commander wouldn’t lose any sleep if I took French leave, he’d run me down to earth quick enough following the trail of the sand that would be trickling from me by that time.’

p “That doctor was a jolly sort, so he just laughed and said: ‘Don’t you worry, leave it to us, doctors. If the need comes twenty years from now we’ll patch you up so neatly that not a grain of sand will drop out of you, and you’ll strut like a young cock—head and tail held high!’ I stayed in that hospital for about two months, and they did patch me up real well, but the wound I got at Kursk knocked me out proper.”

p After a pause, he resumed in a sort of defensive tone: “How could I help enlisting against an enemy like that? Think of the life the goddamned nazis had wrecked! Just before the war our collective farm already owned three trucks, two schools, a club, a flour mill, everything in plenty, food and anything we needed. And then the Germans swept through these parts, and left nothing but wreckage behind them, destroying everything, the crawling vermin.

p “When I returned home in 1943, I was flabbergasted. The bloody bastards had burnt down a good half of the farm property, they had pulled apart the surviving buildings to make dugouts, the schools had been set on fire, only two pair of oxen remained from the hundred and eighty pair we had, none of the horses, and the tractors we had were all wrecked and crippled. And so we had to begin from scratch.

101

p “All the manpower we had to work in the fields were women and children, and none but girls and boys to drive the tractors. A funny thing happened once: it was springtime, and as I walked down the field I saw a tractor standing there with the engine running and nobody in sight. What on earth could have happened to the driver and his trailer hand, I wondered. I walked on to the stand of trees at the end of the field, and there they were, both of them, sitting high up in the willow trees, looting the rooks’ nests for eggs. Both were kids of fifteen, no more, so what could you expect? And yet they did the work of two grown men, unbearably hard work, truth to tell. After a cold night a tractor’s never easy to start, however you try to warm it up. And very often I’d see one of these girl drivers running towards me from two kilometres away across the field, stumbling over the clots of earth and waving desperately. ’Please, Kornei Vasilyevich, give the handle a turn, 1 just haven’t the strength!’ How can a girl with her tender belly turn that handle, I ask you? She’ll burst a gut, easy enough. We men are made of sturdier stuff, but even so your back will creak from the strain. . . .

p “And the womenfolk? Good god in heaven, it breaks your heart to see what jobs a woman has to shoulder on the farm. She has to do everything at home, too: do her baking before the sun rises, look after the kiddies, and manage all her household chores, worrying herself sick about her soldier husband all the while. She has more work than she can manage, and more troublesome thoughts than she can think.. . .

p “Once I started across the field when it was still dark, and there was my neighbour cutting hay for her cow. Her husband was killed, and she was left with four little ones on her hands. I went up to her, meaning to help, and she gave me such a look that I actually felt shaken. The first thing I did on reaching the field camp was smoke a cigarette. I’d given it up, I didn’t smoke at the front, and here I rolled myself a cigarette and smoked it. The look she gave me had stabbed me right in the heart.”

p He drummed the table with his fingers for a reflective moment, and then said:

p “You know we have an old song, women sing it:

p “War is hardest on my lover
With those worries on his mind,
There’s the gun for him to fire,
And there’s me he left behind....”

102

p His face lit up with a jolly, young smile.

p “They have a pretty high opinion of themselves, our women’ folk have, and they’re right too! It’s true, we remembered them day and night at the war. When the fighting got really hot you’d forget everything for an hour or two, and then you’d feel homesick worse than ever.

p “When I came home and saw how the women were working, I realised what a burden they were shouldering—they were having just as bad a time as we were having there.

p “I got a present when I was at the front. The usual stuff, you know—an embroidered pouch, biscuits, and suchlike. And there was a letter enclosed from a woman who worked at a factory in Moscow. ’Dear Soldier,’ she wrote, ‘I’m sending you a parcel and my warm regards. Give the enemy a proper beating. We here are working for defence day and night, and all our thoughts are with you.’ Well, there was more things people usually write, wishing me to keep well and so forth.

p “We were in the Kursk battle just then, and the situation was very grim. The German tanks came on in a black cloud, we fought back for all we were worth without a moment’s respite, you marvelled every time how you came through alive, and here was this parcel. ... It was delivered to me right in the trenches, and will you believe it I wept over it.... I didn’t smoke so I had no use for the pouch, but I ate the biscuits, of course, and dropped bitter tears on them. .. . Here, I thought, was a working woman who, like us, had no rest day or night, working for us at the front, and yet she thought of me. Maybe by sending me those biscuits she was denying herself? Those biscuits tasted all the sweeter for my thoughts about her....”

p He touched his greyish moustache with his fingers, and grinned.

p “It was funny too. When she made up the parcel she was probably thinking of a young soldier boy, and it was an old geezer like me who got it....

p “Our womenfolk shouldered a great burden during the war. They gave no thought to themselves, knowing how badly their effort was needed by the Soviet state. The way I figure it out with my old and addled brains—they have earned a memorial to themselves.”

p ... I had only been asleep for an hour, no more, when the honking of a car startled me awake. My host’s voice came from the kitchen:

103

p “What’s the idea of taking all this time, Kolesnichenko? You ought to have been here hours ago. Is the tractor to stand idle because of your pleasure? You’ve little sense of responsibility, from what I see. Sure, I know without you telling me that the tyres are no good. Anyone could drive a car with good tyres, and more honour to you if you can do as well with rotten ones. Look smart now, and take the petrol out to the field, and tell Semyon I’ll be there as soon as it’s light.”

p He came into the room, without putting on the light, sat down on his bed and, grunting like an old man, started pulling off his boots. I went back to sleep and very soon was awakened by someone rapping sharply on the window-pane.

p “I say, Kornei Vasilyevich,” a man said in a loud, husky voice. “The carts from the second team have arrived. Shall we start loading the grain or wait till morning? The oxen are dead beat.”

p My host went to the window and gave his orders in a low voice:

p “Tell them to load the grain right now and set off. Wait a minute, we’ll go to the barns together.”

p I did not hear him come back, but it was still dark when he was awakened again and obliged to get up and go to the farm office to call the Machine and Tractor Station because one of the tractors had broken down. He was awakened three more times before morning.

p In the morning our poor driver who had also slept in fits and starts said to the host with a mournful sigh: “My, what a life! Sleeping here’s like sleeping in the club with the band going full blast.”

p “No peace and quiet for us,” our host, already fully dressed, replied with a tired smile. “It”s a big farm, there’s plenty to do, and so we have to use the nights too. Go back to sleep now, no one will bother you any more, I’m leaving, the farm board is meeting in half an hour.”

p I looked at my watch: it was half past four.

p “Who on earth holds meetings at five in the morning?" our driver asked, laughing.

p “It’s not all that funny, son. Why, in the daytime there’s no getting the board members together: one will be loading grain, another will be away in the fields, a third will be on his way to Stalingrad for some spare parts, and I, too, have to be out in the fields before dawn. That’s why we decided to meet early and settle things quickly. We’re all working for the same thing: to get the farm back on its feet as 104 soon as ever we can. We don’t intend to be poorer than other farms.

p “It would be a disgrace if we did, considering how much the Government helps us. We got more than thirty new tractors this year, to say nothing of other machines. That’s nothing to be sneezed at, you know! Things are going uphill for us, and very quickly too. The harvest was good this year, we ploughed more land last autumn than the year before, and we planted four hundred hectares more land to winter crops.

p “Seeing that we managed to keep our heads above water in the terrible drought of the year before last, there’s nothing that can hold us now! That’s for sure.”

p “Did the drought hit you real hard?" the driver wanted to know.

p “It did, son, and how! But we kept our feet. It’s our own land, and we stand firm on it. I think that in the old days half of the population would have died from hunger in a drought like that one. How did the peasants live before? One would be starving, and another, a rich man, would have his barns bursting with grain, yet he wouldn’t move a finger to help his neighbour. And the authorities couldn’t care less. It’s all different nowadays. When we came to grief in that drought, the state helped us out with grain and seeds. We supported people in every way we could, we saw them through the trouble, and everyone survived.

p “My, how hard we worked that spring! Some men were just skin and bone, a puff of wind might knock them over by the look of them, but still they came out to work with the rest and worked for all they were worth. Our people are pure gold, you know. That’s for sure.”

p We left the village when the sun came up. Out in the street there was a spicy, tender smell of faded goosefoot. A raw wind blew from the Don. The weighted clouds moving across the sky hung so low that they seemed in danger of getting caught in the naked crowns of the tall poplars with the pink lining of their wings.

p It was noisy and crowded around the barns in spite of the early hour. Two old men were sifting grain, and about a dozen carts which had evidently arrived from the threshing floor were being unloaded at the end barn. A small truck was also parked there, and the driver—a tall chap, wearing his padded jacket wide open and his fur pillbox pushed far back on his head—was furiously bumping the flat tyre, his mouth working with soundless but plainly readable oaths.

105

p We drove on our way, and after about three kilometres came upon a brand-new STZ-NATI tractor chugging not far from the road. It was so new that the paint had not yet faded on the body. A man in an army greatcoat came limping behind it, bending over every few steps and measuring the depth of the ploughing with a twig.

p “Why, there’s our chairman, pecking like a rook!" the driver pointed gaily, smiling all over his face. “He”s a menace, that hobbling devil! He won’t stand for any shallow ploughing from his tractor drivers, I’ll bet, and no carelessness either. I went and asked the way for us to go just before we left, and took a peep into his barns, just from curiosity. They’re just bursting with grain! The people here are pleased with him. ’The old chap’s on the strict side,’ they say, ’but he’s a wonderful chairman. He acts fairly in everything. We’re doing fine because he respects us and we respect him.’ I told them that we didn’t get a wink of sleep at his place, he was up and about all night on his farm business. One of the old men there laughed and said: ’He doesn’t know the meaning of the word “rest”, not our chairman! But no pains no gains, as the saying goes. If we took less pains we wouldn’t have put the farm back on its feet in two years!’ "

p The winter field rolled away into the distance in broad, green waves, and the beauty of it drew a gasp of admiration from the driver.

“That winter field belongs to the farm too,” he said. “Look what a crop they’re growing! Kornei Vasilyevich kept praising the people all night, but I’ll say that things really go well if good people have a good leader. And that’s for sure,” he finished with a chuckle, repeating the chairman’s pet phrase.

p Pelageya Vasilyevna Martynova, the oldest team leader at the Novy Mir collective farm, in Stary Oskol District, Kursk Region, recalled the black days of the 1946 drought when the sprouting wheat perished before her very eyes.

p “The wasted effort was a pity to see,” she said. “But never mind our effort, the drought caused harm to the collective farm, to the whole country! That parched, cracked earth was so painful to see, that I would have watered it with my own tears!”

p Our Government decorated a large group of collective farmers in Kursk Region for the rich harvest they grew in 1947. 106 Pelageya Martynova was one of the group, and she was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labour. At the ceremony she said:

p “Today, I went over my whole life in my memory, day by day. I remembered my childhood, and my married life. I’ve known some good, happy days, but never anything like the happiness I’m feeling today. ... It makes you want to work harder still, but no matter how much you do, it will still seem too little in return for the state’s wonderful concern for ordinary people like me.”

p Millions of Soviet people are working hard in all the spheres of endeavour prompted by their one desire to serve their glorious country.

p Dear, beloved Motherland! All our boundless filial love belongs to you, all our thoughts are with you!

1948