Borderland by Anna Reid

Author:Anna Reid [ANNA REID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

A few weeks later Kravchenko found himself collectivising in person. Eighty young activists were summoned to a pep talk by the local Party committee. Dnipropetrovsk region had fallen behind schedule, they were told. Kulaks were sabotaging livestock; the grain plan had not been fulfilled. What the local soviets needed was ‘an injection of Bolshevik iron’. This was no time for ‘squeamishness or rotten sentimentality’; they were to go forth and ‘act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin’.15

Kravchenko was despatched to Podgorodnoye, a large village not far from Dnipropetrovsk. Collectivisation had already reduced it to a shambles. Crops stood unharvested in the fields; farm machinery lay scattered about in the open, rusting and broken. Emaciated cattle wandered the farmyards, unfed and caked in manure. Kravchenko spent the next weeks persuading the peasants to bring in what remained of the harvest while his colleagues went about the business of grain requisitioning and further dekulakisation. He claims – not wholly convincingly – to have been profoundly surprised and shocked when he saw at firsthand just what their methods were:

Evening was falling when I drove into the village, with several companions. Immediately we realised that something was happening. Agitated groups stood around. Women were weeping. I hurried to the Soviet building.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked the constable.

‘Another round-up of kulaks,’ he replied. ‘Seems the dirty business will never end. The GPU and District Committee people came this morning.’

A large crowd was gathered outside the building. Policemen tried to scatter them, but they came back. Some were cursing. A number of women and their children were weeping hysterically and calling the names of their husbands and fathers. It was all like a scene out of a nightmare.

Inside the Soviet building, Arshinov was talking to a GPU official. Both of them were smiling, apparently exchanging pleasantries of some sort. In the back yard, guarded by GPU soldiers with drawn revolvers, stood about twenty peasants, young and old, with bundles on their backs. A few of them were weeping. The others stood there sullen, resigned, hopeless . . .

For some reason, on this occasion, most of the families were being left behind. Their outcries filled the air. As I came out of the Soviet house again, I saw two militiamen leading a middle-aged peasant. It was obvious that he had been manhandled – his face was black and blue and his gait was painful; his clothes were ripped in a way indicating a struggle.

As I stood there, distressed, ashamed, helpless, I heard a woman shouting in an unearthly voice. Everyone looked in the direction of her cry and a couple of GPU men started running towards her. The woman, her hair streaming, held a flaming sheaf of grain in her hands. Before anyone could reach her, she had tossed the burning sheaf on to the thatched roof of the house, which burst into flame instantaneously.

‘Infidels! murderers!’ the distraught woman was shrieking. ‘We worked all our lives for our house! You won’t have it. The flames will have it!’ Her cries turned suddenly into crazy laughter.

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