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Interlude

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Commissar Goloshchyokin:

Damn Sverdlov, anyway. What business did he have threatening me with execution if I didn’t take this mob on the road, ready or not? He knows everyone and he knows everything important about everyone, but he doesn’t know a damned thing about creating a regiment from scratch and moving it.

No more do I, of course; like any good Bolshevik I avoided military service in the swine-of-a-tsar’s imperialist army like the plague. Now, I wish I’d listened to Engels and gone in and learned something. Oh, well; too soon old . . . and besides, I might be dead now if I had.

Well, I did what I could with both the column and the town. For the town, before I stripped out the bulk of the forces of liberation, I instituted a brief reign of terror, surely not one hanging more than needed, to make sure that the counterrevolutionaries who were certain to creep out from the sewers in which they cowered would never get a hearing. No doubt many, perhaps most of those, I had hanged were innocent, but one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Moreover, the loss of life would be more than made up by the sheer joys, the utter goodness, of the society we are bringing to life.

As for the column, that was a much less tractable problem. I didn’t have any trained leaders—not that would admit it—and didn’t entirely trust the rank and file, so I put a couple of comrades of proven worth in charge of each grouping—“companies,” they’re called—of the rank and file. I found a merchant, one who didn’t want his head on a pike, to receive supplies, account for them and forward them to us in convoys, on sleighs, if possible, or telezhka, carts, if not.

As it turned out there weren’t enough sleighs. There also weren’t enough rifles. I was at something of a loss as to what to do, so we waited a dozen versts outside of Tyumen—after all, Sverdlov had only demanded I leave by such and such a date; he’d said nothing about when I had to arrive by—while I tried to figure it out.

It was the soldiers who actually figured it out, though the stupid bastards didn’t realize it. Without command, a couple of hundred of them linked arms and tramped down the snow where we were camped, to play some game or other. I never found out what they’d wanted to play and I didn’t really care. As soon as I saw it and realized it was densely packed enough to support a cart, that was it, I had our way to beat through the snow.

It took almost an entire day to collect the leadership, such as it was, and get things organized. By the next morning, we were ready to march. Progress, yes, was slow when we started, barely five versts on the first day. The second day was worse, still, as taut and sore muscles refused to move quickly.

I picked one of the men at random, accused him of being a saboteur, had him tried by a committee of comrades of proven worth and then shot. Speed picked up a good deal after that, though we never have made more than about ten versts in a day, even so. I didn’t think shooting more of them would have helped any or I’d have done it.

For the first week or so, I found it impossible to sleep. Oh, no, it wasn’t that I wasn’t tired; I was exhausted. But every five minutes someone would be at my tent asking for instructions about something or other. Eventually, using the excuse of anti-revolutionary forces sniping from trees, I took to hiding my tent—rather, having it hidden—every afternoon and not telling the men where I was. I tried to make up for this by spending a couple of hours daily, walking the length of our encampment, enquiring about the men’s welfare, making spot corrections as I saw the need, and talking up the thrashing we were going to give the tsarists with our machine guns, our artillery, and our numbers. And our rifles, once the rest of them showed up. We were and are short about four hundred of them.

I wondered from time to time whether I’d be better off if I abandoned the carts and sleighs as the men and horses ate the contents, then used the horses freed to mount some of the men up for reconnaissance and security duties. In the end, I was afraid to face a court of inquiry on a charge of misusing the revolution’s property, so I kept the carts and sleighs, even when empty, up with us.

Did I have anyone who could ride? It was a good question but the only way to find out would have been to ask the men, while in the first place, they’d lie if they thought it would get them out of marching, and, in the second place they might start wondering why we didn’t abandon the carts . . . bad idea, I thought, bad, bad idea.

Eventually, I came to realize that some things, some good things, were happening that I had never ordered, things like a nightly guard mount, designation of places for the men to go relieve themselves. I wondered—I still wonder—if there were some old soldiers, corporals, sergeants, or even officers, in among the ranks. I resolved to sniff them out to try them for counterrevolutionary attitudes.




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Framed