Read Apricot Jam: And Other Stories for Free Online Page A

executing them. (They had called up three age groups at once, the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds. But if you joined the party, you were exempted.)
     
    In August 1920 there was a spontaneous uprising in Kamenka, in Tambov Region: the peasants massacred the food detachment that had arrived and seized their weapons. About the same time, something similar happened in Treskino: a food detachment had called together a group of local communists outside the district administration office when suddenly a band of peasants armed with pitchforks, spades, and axes came running down the street. The detachment fired at them, but the peasants rushed over them like a wave and cut down two dozen along with some communist wives. (They also killed a small boy from the crowd. He recognized one of the rebels: “ Uncle Petya, remember me? ” And the man killed him so that the boy would not later give him up.) And in Grushevka they were so enraged by all the pillaging that they knocked down one of the men in the detachment and sawed through his neck as if it were a log.
     
    It ’ s a long and difficult task to get the Russian peasant to move, but once the pressure from the people ’ s ferment bursts forth, it cannot be contained by the limits of reason. A crowd in bast shoes, armed with axes, oven forks, and pitchforks and driven by a righteous quest for justice, set off from Knyazhe-Bogoroditskoe in Tambov Region to “ take Tambov. ” They were “ men with pitchforks ” such as had risen up in the time of the Tatars. They marched to the sound of church bells in the villages along the way, their numbers growing as they went. They advanced toward the provincial capital until, at Kuzmina Gat, the helpless crowd was cut down by machine gun fire from the outposts guarding the town. The survivors scattered.
     
    Like fire along a line of thatched roofs, the rebellion immediately spread across the whole district; the Kirsanov and Borisoglebsk districts were ignited as well. Local communists were massacred everywhere (and the women attacked them with sickles), village soviets were destroyed, state farms and communes were broken up. Those communists and activists who survived fled into Tambov itself.
     
    The communists from outside—well, you could understand where they came from. But how did we come to have our own homegrown ones? Pavel Vasilych had figured this out from things he picked up in the villages, and there were other facts he had known already. In the first regional and local soviet elections, the peasants still didn ’ t realize the all-embracing power this new system would have. They imagined it would be a small thing, since now that everybody had got their freedom, what mattered was taking over the landowners ’ land, not the elections. And what proper peasant would drop all his farmwork to take up some elected post? So the ones who got these posts were peasants only by birth, not by the work they did. They were the troublemakers, the reckless, the lazy, the beggars, and the ones who had moved from one unskilled job to another in towns and on building sites, managing to pick up a few revolutionary slogans along the way. And then there were all those who had deserted from the army in 1917, the ones who were quick to take up pillaging. Such were the people who became village communists and activists, the ones who held the power.
     
    All of Pavel Ektov ’ s education and the humanitarian tradition he came from made him absolutely opposed to bloodshed. But now, particularly after this righteous march of the people at Kuzmina Gat, the relationship between those who were powerless but right and those who relentlessly wielded brute force was as obvious as the naked truth itself: the peasants could do nothing other than take up arms. (And there were still many rifles, cartridges, sabers, and grenades available, brought home from the German War or left behind after Mamontov ’ s breakthrough. Some had been hidden, some buried.)
     
    As