“Of course not,” said Saika. “You love to argue, Tania. You have an opposite opinion on everything.”
Unflappable herself, Tatiana went on. “Well, in my humble opinion, by choosing to follow the serpent, Adam and Eve were already choosing— just unwisely. God commanded, they chose not to listen to Him. The serpent sibilated, and they chose to listen to him. The free will came before, not after.”
Saika laughed dismissively. “What’s this obsession with free will? The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in fate.”
“The pagan Greeks and Romans, you mean?”
Saika widened her eyes and laughed. “Oh, I just got it! That’s why you don’t like this talk about fate! That’s at the root of your troubles with it! You’re not afraid of it, you just don’t believe in it.”
“This isn’t about me,” Tatiana said evenly.
“The pagans believed in fate! That’s what you just said with such derision.”
“There was no derision,” said Pasha. “And Saika—leave Tania alone.” He was clearly unforgiving over the biking incident. “Tania, I know you know about Lucifer. If Saika won’t enlighten me, tell me what you’ve read in your little books about the peacock angel.”
“I don’t know much,” said Tatiana. “But in one book Blanca Davidovna lent me, Lucifer spends eternity in the center of the earth in the deepest circle of hell while three traitors are submerged in his three open mouths, Judas in the middle, head first.” Tatiana shrugged. “That’s all I know.”
“You’ve been poisoned by lies,” declared Saika. “Lucifer has been blatantly misrepresented by your overzealous singing baptizing village women and your overwrought medieval writers. Our religion is called angel-worship, because that’s what it is. Unlike you, we don’t even recognize that demons exist. Circles of hell! Bah!”
The children stared at Saika. Even Pasha was speechless. A withered Blanca Davidovna, her head involuntarily nodding, studied Tatiana.
“Wait,” Tatiana said, grasping to understand. “What do you mean, you don’t recognize demons? What about the devil? What about Satan?”
“No, no—and no.”
“You mean you think there are only angels?”
“That’s right.”
“Everybody is an angel?”
“Yes!”
Tatiana and Pasha glanced pleadingly at Blanca Davidovna for guidance. Blanca remained mute staring into the tea cups.
Tatiana quietly asked, “No right, no wrong then for the Yezidi, Saika? No light, no dark? No Newtonian laws?”
“Different principles, Tania. Why is it so hard to understand? Lucifer is an angel who is reconciled—and one—with everything in the universe. In Lucifer’s universe, everything is good and everything is in balance. Our religion believes that since he was forgiven for his perceived transgressions, those who worship him are forgiven for theirs.”
A question hung in the air that Tatiana didn’t hear an answer to— though she suspected it was a rhetorical question. She opened her mouth. “Forgiven by who?” asked Tatiana.
“By who? Those who worship Lucifer are forgiven for their transgressions by Lucifer,” Saika replied.
“Yes,” Tatiana said quietly, “but who is Lucifer forgiven by?”
She heard her thudding heartbeat in the gathering silence.
Saika jumped to her feet. “Your question, as you well know, has no answer,” she said. “Why don’t you stand under the rowan tree to ward off the evil spirits you’re so worried about?”
Blanca Davidovna spoke at last. “Why in the world would we need the rowan tree,” she asked, “when we have the cross?”
“Well, tell that to the Ukrainian Catholics, tell that to the Romanovs,” snapped Saika. “The cross didn’t save them, did it?”
“Then it didn’t save Peter. Or Paul. Or Luke. Or Matthew—”
“I don’t want to talk about this nonsense anymore. I’m going home. Coming, Marina?”
Marina jumped to her feet.
“Want your tea leaves read, Marina?” said Blanca Davidovna. “Because they’re ready.”
“Maybe later, Blanca Davidovna.”
Tatiana got up herself. “Pasha, don’t just sit there. Babushka will kill us, we’re so late. I still have to milk the cow. Come help.”
Saika called after him, “Wait, Pasha! I told you about the peacock, but you haven’t told me something about Tatiana!”
“I changed my mind,” said Pasha, striding away. “I have a fickle heart. Your own ecstatic mother said so.”
Back near their dacha, Pasha dragged Tatiana away from Marina and said, “Tania, I don’t care what Marina does, but you’re not allowed to play with Saika anymore.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. You’re not allowed to play with her. Not at her house, not in the hammock, not in the river, not on the bikes.”
“Well, I don’t have a bike now,” said Tatiana.
“Talk to Dasha, talk to Deda, but I think they will agree that you should not play with anyone who doesn’t believe there are demons.”
“I’ve been telling you about her, Pasha. From the very beginning. You didn’t want to listen.”
“I’m listening now.”
A Knock on the Door
Late that evening, well after dinner, there was a knock on the door. Murak Kantorov stood on their porch. The Metanovs didn’t know he was back from Kolpino. They weren’t sure what he wanted, but they invited him in and offered him some vodka. At first it seemed as if he wanted to be neighborly. He sat with them a while; the vodka flowed, the talk soon followed. Even Deda was politely fascinated by Murak’s travels, and Murak was only too happy to regale. “Two years ago when we were picking cotton near Alma-Ata . . .”
Tatiana listened carefully.
“And a few years ago when we were in the oilfields in Tashkent...”
“We stayed in Yerevan just a few months...”
“In Saki we lived the longest of any stretch, two years. Saika started to call it home and then we came here. No, thank you,” Murak said to the black caviar offered by Babushka. “In Baku on the Caspian Sea we ate so much sturgeon caviar, we never want to see caviar again. Sturgeon are bottom dwellers, you know.”
“Where haven’t you lived!” exclaimed Babushka.
“We’ve lived everywhere,” Murak said boastfully. “In the Kara-Kum desert like nomads in tents, and in the mountains of Turkmenistan. On collective farms, in collective fishing villages, in collective concerns all across the Soviet Union. Saika has lived in twenty different places in her fifteen years.”
Deda was quiet. “Where is the place you call home?” he asked.
“The place I am at the moment,” Murak replied, downing a large glass of pepper vodka without even a pickle to chase it down. “I’m home everywhere. Everywhere is my home.”
Pasha and Tatiana exchanged a glance. “Saika told me only about a few places,” she said. “Three maybe.”
“Yes, Stefan, too,” seconded Dasha.
“Oh, they don’t like to brag.” Murak had another long drink of vodka. “By the way, Saika told me that earlier today she saw Anna Lvovna dragging a heavy burlap bag.” He smiled politely. “What was that?”
Everyone fell silent. It was Dasha who came forward. “It was a bag of sugar, comrade Kantorov. What’s your interest in it?”
“My interest in it,” said Murak, and his tone was mild, “is that my daughter said it had a hammer and sickle on the canvas.”
“Haven’t answered the question though,” said Dasha. Tatiana was proud of her.
Deda stood up, his hand raised. “My granddaughter is forward for her age. She is learning to have more tact, but you know youth.” He came closer to Kantorov. “What do you want, Murak Vlasovich?”
“The bag belongs to the State and must be returned to the State.” Kantorov got up and headed toward the door. Turning around, he said, “I don’t have to tell you—you’re a smart man—that every seed of grain, every grain of su
gar, every potato goes toward fulfilling our Five-Year Plan production quota. This is the last year of the second plan. It is therefore even more imperative that the quotas be met. Make sure it’s returned tomorrow.”
After he had gone, the Metanovs stared at each other in confounded apprehension. Babushka placed her arm on Deda. “You were right, Vasili.”
“When am I ever not right? And had you not taken what didn’t belong to you, we wouldn’t be in this predicament! How many times have I told you? Don’t touch what isn’t yours!”
“Oh, look at him, raising his voice!” yelled Babushka.
They stormed off to their room.
Tatiana’s head was shaking. Deda and Babushka were arguing? She went and knocked on Deda’s door. The sharp voices behind the door had no choice but to stop. She came in, gently pulled Deda to sit, climbed into his lap and pressed herself against him. “Shh,” she said.
“You see? Even your child is telling you to shh,” said Babushka loudly. “Heed her at least.”
“I told you not to touch a grain of that sugar! Did you heed me? I don’t think so. Didn’t you hear? It’s for the Five-Year Plan.”
They laughed, and then stopped shouting.
Still on Deda’s lap, Tatiana said, “Deda, what do you think Murak Kantorov does for a living, moving so often from collective to collective?”
Her grandfather thoughtfully stroked her hair, wrestling with himself, looking at Babushka, glancing down at her. Finally he spoke.
“Tanechka, Murak Kantorov is a weeder.”
“What’s a weeder, Deda?”
The First Five-Year Plan
During the First Five-Year Plan, the farms in the Ukraine fell short of yearly goals. The Politburo had set the goals based not on demand, or capital costs or labor costs—the fixed capital—or operating costs or any practical concerns. It set its goals in 1927, based only on one thing: what they thought the farms needed to produce for one hundred and fifty million people over the next five years. There were convex hull formulas, divide and conquer algorithms, statistical probabilities, logical assumptions. The plan was faultless, the triumph of tortuously long meetings of the Politburo’s most brilliant economic minds. All it required was execution.
But a few things happened that the Party had not foreseen despite its wisdom and its plan. For one, the people turned out to be hungrier than anticipated. They needed more wheat and more rye, more potatoes, more milk. So in 1928 the demand had spiked up. And in 1928 there was a terrible drought in the Ukraine. Supply went down. And in 1928 there was a typhus epidemic in the Ukraine. Labor went down. And millions of Ukrainians, who had owned big productive profitable farms, had been taken into “protective custody,” tried as “kulaks” and “enemies of the people” and shot, and their farms brought under government control. So means of production and supply went down, and the farms in the agrarian republic of Kazakhstan were unable to make up the shortage. The prices remained static—set in 1927.
And so it began.
To feed the hungry in the industrialized cities, the Soviet councils— men and women armed with rifles and under orders to shoot to kill— came and requisitioned the food in the farms, without compensation. In Central Asia, there had been little protest. But in the Ukraine— ninety percent of Soviet agriculture—the farmers protested. They were shot, exacerbating the paucity of labor.
And so it continued.
The new collectivized farms could not produce enough; the workers were in the fields from sunup to sundown, and their entire harvest went on trucks to the cities, while the farmers remained with their families in the Ukraine—one of the most fertile regions in the world—without income and without food. To everyone’s surprise, the farmers, their wives gone, their children dying, their parents long dead, started working less. They were shot for idleness. The orphaned children were promptly sent off to the Siberian collectives, and those who survived the transit trains worked there.
Despite these minor setbacks, the Ukraine continued with the Five-Year Plan, into 1929, 1930, and 1931. While 1930 and 1931 were better harvest years, they were no better for the farmers, who had fallen so far behind the five-year grain requirement that all the produce from the farms continued to be forcibly removed by the Party apparatchiks.
The farmers did the only thing they could. They started stealing.
For this they were shot, further narrowing the human capital.
Those still alive during the famine of 1933—the last, and worst, year of the first Plan—had finally had their fill, and in an act of futile protest, slaughtered their cattle before they could be taken away and ate the remains on the village streets. They burned down their own collectives and their carriages and their huts; and then they scorched the fields they refused to harvest.
All across the Ukraine they were hanged on the streets, shot in public, burned with their cattle; all silage, seed stock, farm stock and grain was confiscated. All rail lines and roads were closed by the Red Army and the OGPU. Labor—the fixed capital—became unfixed at a rate of ten thousand executions a week, with hunger and disease swelling the numbers of the dead to several million in the Ukraine alone between 1932 and 1933.
Comrade Stalin vowed to do better in the next Five-Year Plan.
Doing Better in the Next Five-Year Plan
For the second Five-Year Plan from 1933-1938, the Politburo set the production goals a little lower and the prices a little higher. Impatiently they waited out the drought in 1933 and the government-sponsored famine in 1933 and 1934, but in 1934, Stalin had had quite enough. When he received a letter from the Nobel prize-winning author Mikhail Sholokhov accusing him, the Great Leader and Teacher, of destroying the Ukrainian countryside and starving its people, his brisk reply was, “No, Comrade Sholokhov. They are starving me.”
Reconstruction and industrialization of the country was proceeding apace, but Stalin recognized that labor—the most expensive part of production—was going to be the hardest to come by in the next few years, for reasons, he felt, that were completely outside his control. Fortunately he had conceived a plan in the 1920s that he believed solved the fledgling state’s early problems. He expanded his solution in the 1930s.
An organized system of government work camps!
An organized system of government farms!
Against all reason, the Ukrainian farmers allowed themselves to be starved and hanged and shot! rather than give up their grain, their cattle, and their farms. The wealth of the country and therefore the future of the Soviet Union rested in the hands of the Ukrainian farmers.
Suddenly a firm believer in free will, Stalin changed policy. He gave the farmers in the Soviet Union a choice: Work on the collective farm or work in the Gulag.
This reorganization of social structure of a vast country required massive help at the lowest levels. The OGPU hired and paid regular folk to help them. Young men, women, and children who had the stomach, the disposition and the inclination for this kind of work, stood with rifles in the fields from dawn till night, making sure the farmers continued to choose to toil on the volunteer collectives and not steal.
These people were called weeders.
The Future
The next morning, when Deda and Babushka went to the Soviet to return the bag of sugar, Tatiana and Pasha came with them. They sat on the bench outside the open window of a two-room wooden council house, where they could hear what was happening. Inside, councilman Viktor Rodinko, said, “Comrade Metanov, we’ve been expecting you. Where is the sugar?”
The councilman and his two assistants weighed the bag—three times. And then Rodinko stood in front of Deda and Babushka and asked them why it took so long to return it. “Why didn’t you return it immediately, comrade?”
“It was late in the day. We were about to have dinner. The Soviet was closing.”
“Look at it from our point of view. It’s almost as if you weren’t planning on returning the bag until Comrade Kantorov came to see you.”
D
eda and Babushka were quiet. Deda said, “I do not need Comrade Kantorov to tell me to return what isn’t mine,” in a voice so neutral Comrade Kantorov had no place in it. “Will there be anything else?”
“There will be,” said Rodinko. “Have a seat.”
And so it began.
“The bag of sugar, Comrade Metanov, belongs to our soldiers, our factory workers, our proletarian farmers. As you very well know, we are fighting for our existence. We don’t have enough to feed our soldiers, our factory workers, our proletarian farmers...”
“That’s why we returned it.”
“When you take as much as a spoonful for yourself, you are stealing from the people who are building our country.”
“I understand.”
“We have many enemies who would like to see us fail. The fascists in Europe, the capitalists in America, they’re all waiting for our collapse. We import the sugar from China, but there is not enough for a hundred and fifty million people, of which you and your family are just seven.”
And so it continued.
What about the workers who build the tanks? The doctors who treat the wounded? The farmers who reap the grain? The Red Army soldier, who will lay down his life to protect you... “Get in line, Comrade Metanov.”
“I’ve been in line since 1917, Comrade Rodinko. I’m well aware of my place,” said Deda. “My intentions were always to return the bag.”
The councilman nodded. “But one hundred and twenty-five grams lighter, no?”
Deda and Babushka said nothing.
“Comrade Metanov, as a nation we need to trust our people. But we are also realistic. There are some people who will think of their families first. I’m not saying you are such a man, what I’m saying is that such men exist. Even during the noble French Revolution, despite fighting for liberty, fraternity and equality, men resorted to all kinds of criminal behavior to provide for their families.”
The councilman fell quiet. Tatiana and Pasha, listening outside the window, waited. Rodinko wanted something from Deda. After many minutes of silence, Deda spoke. “That is criminal, you’re right,” he said with resignation. “Placing your family before the survival of the state.”