Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

She stared at the envelope in her hand with the torn mail stamps along its sides.

“Are you all right?” she heard her mother-in-law’s voice. “I noticed that the letter had been opened, but the clerk at the post office told me that that’s how they receive them these days.”

Nina nodded and pulled out a sheet of lined paper. It was a letter from a woman she didn’t know asking for a pair of canvas shoes and a set of drawing instruments to be sent to her.

Nina looked at the envelope. The address was in Klim’s handwriting.

“It would appear that the letter has gone astray,” said Sofia Karlovna, taking it from Nina’s shaking hand. “Princess Anna Evgenievna told me that the Cheka censors are opening and inspecting all correspondences before they get to their recipients. The censors have probably made a mistake and put Mr. Rogov’s letter in the wrong envelope.”

“His letter has gone astray,” Nina repeated in despair.

“You’re lucky to get at least something from Mr. Rogov,” said Sofia Karlovna. “I’ve heard that the Cheka destroy all letters that look like they’ve been written by anyone who is half-educated, assuming that they must be counter-revolutionaries. At least you know that Mr. Rogov has reached Petrograd safely. According to the stamp, this letter was sent a month and a half ago.”

Nina snatched the envelope out of the old countess’s hand. “What’s the return address?”

But it was impossible to read. Someone had placed a sticky cup of tea on the corner of the envelope and torn off the top layer of paper. Nina could make out nothing but the word “Petrograd” and the apartment number.

“Please don’t mention this to Mr. Fomin,” Nina whispered.

The old countess gave her a reproachful look. “Why do you think I summoned you here instead of bringing you the letter in the dining room?”

“Thank you!” Nina found herself breaking down in tears. “I’m so afraid that if Klim comes back, Mr. Fomin will—”

Suddenly, the old countess did something unthinkable: she patted Nina on the shoulder.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t expect Mr. Rogov to stay in Russia,” Sofia Karlovna said. “Since he hasn’t betrayed you, he deserves to be treated with the same respect as he has evidently shown us. As for Mr. Fomin, don’t worry too much about him. Right now, there is nothing you can do about your situation, but later, who knows how things will turn out? As you grow older, you start to notice that most of the alarms in our lives turn out to be false ones.”

1

Dr. Sablin was perfectly aware that his wife had taken a lover. The squat, red-faced soldier called Osip who now worked at the regional Military Commissariat and had appointed Lubochka head of its canteen. If in the past, she had channeled her energy into putting the lives of her friends in order, now she did the same for that vats of sour cream and other provisions that had been confiscated by the Cheka and handed over to the Commissariat. Lubochka could keep track of hundreds of names in her head and knew exactly who needed what, and that made her very useful.

Everybody in the hospital knew about Dr. Sablin’s misfortune.

“I simply don’t understand it!” Ilya Nikolaevich, the chief doctor at the hospital, had exclaimed when he next saw Sablin. “You need to put your foot down. I know that morals are in decline and that we live in troubled times—but you know as well as I do how it will end: one day this fine fellow will stick a knife in her ribs. Do you remember that young cabaret girl who was brought in to us recently? Well, it’ll be the same story with your Lubochka.”

“If Lubochka ends up on my operation table, I’ll shove the knife into her ribs myself,” Sablin had said in a husky voice.

Ilya Nikolaevich had gaped at him for a moment. “If I ever hear you talk like that again, you’ll be out of a job.”

Sablin didn’t care. He felt as if his life was pouring out of him, as though he were hemorrhaging to death and there was no way to staunch the flow.

When Sablin had suggested to Lubochka that they divorce, she had merely nodded but hadn’t brought the subject up again since.

The problem was that she had no place to go. Initially, Lubochka had hoped that she and Osip could move into her father’s house, but it had been requisitioned as a “shelter for proletarian widows.” Osip lived in his office in the building of the former seminary and didn’t want to ask his bosses for anything. He believed that a private apartment was too much of a luxury, and a true Bolshevik should share the same hardships the people suffered.

Sablin and Lubochka now slept in different bedrooms and barely exchanged a word beyond icy greetings as they passed each other in the house. Sablin left money on the chest of drawers in his wife’s room, and Lubochka made sure that there was food in the house for dinner.

Sablin had no idea and didn’t care to know where Lubochka spent her days. When he pictured his wife in the arms of another man, he—whom his wife thought “incapable of real emotion”—wanted nothing more than to plunge a scalpel into his heart.

2

Osip Drugov had been born in the village of Chukino in the Balakhna rural district. His mother’s hands had been so calloused from work that they would catch in his hair when she stroked his head. His father was a drinker and a fighter, but when he was sober, he tried to do his best for his family.

Once, he went to the market and brought Osip a brand new pair of leather boots. “You should only wear them in church,” he said to his son. “You’ll never get another pair. Our kind were born to wear bast shoes.”

However, Osip dreamed of wearing leather boots every day and also a large peaked cap and a brass chain for his waistcoat. He begged his parents to let him go to Sormovo, Nizhny Novgorod’s industrial district. Osip had imagined life in a factory would be some sort of proletarian workers’ paradise—full of strong, jovial young men who had left their villages to make their fortunes in the city. They learned all sorts of things, they went away to distant lands, and they even traveled to work on a tram—a sort of huge metal carriage that moved without horses.

But in reality, Osip found himself in hell, not paradise. The workshops of the Sormovo factory were illuminated by the crimson flames of the constantly burning furnaces and the streams of red-hot metal flowing down the gutters, and it was made even more unbearable by the roar of the machinery. Here, even the healthiest of men became crippled by work in the span of a few years.

Osip didn’t understand why things were as they were. Why was it that some had money to burn, and others had to sweat and slave in scorching factory workshops? The priest told him that it had ever been thus and that it was sinful to ask such questions.

Osip started to drink and often ended up at the police station. There he came into contact with Bolsheviks who gave him his purpose in life back and cured his sick soul. He felt like a wounded soldier who had been rescued from the field of battle. The Bolsheviks were clever; they understood the great science of Marxism that explained who was to blame for the misery of factory workers like Osip and what those workers needed to do to improve their lives.

The Bolshevik revolution was the biggest event in Osip’s life, and his greatest achievement was Lubochka. He found it hard to believe that a doctor’s wife could have fallen in love with him, an uneducated man.

He did his best to mask his confusion by making impassioned political speeches to her.

“We are forging a new way of life,” Osip told Lubochka. “We will build new communal houses. All of us will work in teams. Every one of us shall have the same sort of accommodation, furniture, and clothes. No one will have luxuries, so there will be no envy or greed. Won’t that be wonderful?”

She smiled enigmatically. “I’m afraid we probably won’t live long enough to see that become a reality.”

“We will!” Osip exclaimed but then fell silent, abashed.

Above all, he was afraid that Lubochka would become disappointed—in him, in the revolution, and in the Bolshevik Party. And there were plenty of reasons to be disappointed.

During the first months of the revolution, Osip had been fond of repeating Lenin’s statement that it would be simple for the state to be run by the people themselves. But nothing was going according to plan. Criminals and madmen had joined the Cheka while the workers who had been put in charge of factories had allowed them to idle into talking shops.

An epidemic of food riots engulfed the city. Osip traveled from factory to factory trying to drum up support and issuing empty threats. Nothing he did had any effect.

“Down with Lenin and horse meat!” the crowd started to shout as soon as he mounted the rostrum. “Give us the Tsar and our salted bacon back!”

Osip knew that a counter-revolution could only be controlled with force. On the instruction of his Commissariat, he combed military warehouses, gathered up broken weaponry, and organized repair shops. No one—not even Lubochka—knew how hard this work was for Osip.

3

The food situation in Russia was deteriorating every day. It seemed that the well-to-do peasants—the kulaks—were setting out to starve the revolutionary government. They hid their grain and refused to give it up to the hungry cities. As soon as the food brigades went into the countryside, the peasants would start rioting.

Osip studied the reports about the rebellions. The scenario was always the same: the men from the food brigades didn’t care who was rich and who was poor. They went from home to home taking any food they could find and stockpiling it at random. The grain and meat spoiled, and anything that actually made it to the city was embezzled by the local officials.