Written: Unknown date, by J. Okunev
First Published: Moscow Pravda, September 3, 1921
Source: The Living Age, October-December, 1921.
Translated: Unknown
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Soviet History Archive 2005. This work is completely free.
THE schoolhouse used to be a landowner's home. In former days there was an iron railing around it; but the iron bars were carried of long ago, and the only things that now remain of the railing are the four stone posts and the heavy iron gate. The building stands at quite a distance from the village, by the main road, on a high, sun-lit spot.
The teacher is ill with consumption. His face is emaciated, green, always angry. He sits on his chair, all bent forward, and shakes his little thin beard as he tells me his grievances.
'They want me to educate them,' he was saying in his hoarse, rasping voice, 'and how am I going to do it? There are no books, or paper, or pencils. And then, have you any idea of what the village people are like? No? And yet you come here to "touch their hearts"! They are like beasts. Even the children. Why, a boy of seven smokes and uses the worst kind of profanity, and sings the most disgustingly obscene songs. Just try to touch their hearts!'
As I listened to this man with yellow instead of white rings around the pupils of his eyes, I thought that he must be very bilious, and I listened to him with the same feeling that one experiences in listening to a man who is ill.
'Beasts, that's all they are. They won't move an eyelash, if you die in their plain sight. This spring they were cutting up the meadows, and I begged of them to give me a small strip for my cow. Wouldn't give me an inch. "You wouldn't cut the hay yourself," they say to me. "You'd hire somebody to cut it for you. You are not entitled to any meadow land." And why am I not entitled? And now they are trying to get away from me the land around the school, which we are using for an experimental farm. The beasts!'
He choked in his anger and coughed strenuously. His eyes filled with tears as he coughed, and his face became covered withred blotches. And through his coughing, he still repeated a number of times, 'The beasts!'
Just at that moment the door opened slowly. A pair of strong bare legs appeared through it, then a light-bearded, blue-eyed face peered in, and finally a tall, strongly built figure appeared in the doorway.
'Peter Andreyevich,' said the newcomer in a loud, ringing voice, smiling so that his even white teeth gleamed merrily, `I've come for the newspaper.'
'I won't give it to you,' rasped out the teacher.
'Why won't you?' asked the bearded fellow in genuine astonishment. 'Will I eat it up? I'll return it to you.'
'The devils, the devils, all of you!' the teacher shrieked at him, striking the table with his tiny bony fists. `You won't give me a piece of the meadow land, or any wood, and then expect me to serve you and teach you. What am I to you - a dog? No paper for you. Get out!'
The bearded visitor gave a short laugh, turned around slowly, and started away, saying: -
'The trouble with you, Peter Andreyevich, is that you are ill. That's why you scold everybody. Good-bye.'
I followed the bearded fellow out of the schoolhouse. Half closing his eyes against the bright sun, he stood there looking at me with a slight smile.
'What a devil! Worse than a dog,' he said to me.
Once, when our detachment was in the village Erkovtsi, a peasant suddenly appeared, mounted on an unsaddled horse, and holding in his hands a letter addressed to the commander. This letter read as follows:
'He is complaining about you. Says that you don't treat him well,' said I.
'Is that so?' the bearded fellow exclaimed ironically. 'We don't treat him right? And how about him? Is he the sort of a teacher we ought to have?'
'What's wrong with him?'
'Ask the children who go to his school. He's worse than a wild beast with them. Beats them all the time. We don't want a fellow like that. We've already written a complaint about him - a good complaint, too.'
'What's your name?' I asked him.
'My name? Mitriy. Or if you want my other name, Zaitzev. But what do you want it for?' he asked suddenly, and a troubled expression came into his face. 'Who are you, anyway?'
I told him.
'We are all afraid of everything,' he explained to me. 'If you complain much, they'll get you.'
'Have they ever got you?'
'N-no. But the old folks say-' He was again lively and merry. 'The old folks tell us all the time we ought to be afraid, and not say anything. The teacher's head isn't like ours: he knows a lot. He might write somewhere.'
'So you are fighting with the teacher, eh?'
'Yes, fighting all the time,' said Mitriy merrily. `We want a teacher who wouldn't beat the children. We've been beaten long enough. We are still afraid of a lot of things, but we won't let anybody do that. It's the revolution.'
'The teacher was complaining to me that the peasants around here are like wild beasts.'
'That's true about the old folks. They just make life unbearable. The moment they see any of the young people reading a book, they must know all about it, and if there is anything there against religion. And the moment they suspect anything, they just throw the book into the stove. One of the fellows here, Matvey, came back from the military service and told everybody he was a Communist. And my - my, what happened then! The old folks nearly ate him alive. Gave him the worst kind of land, all near the sand, and hardly any meadow land at all. And he is a good fellow, too. Maybe you have a paper? Then we'd go to Matvey tonight and you'd see for yourself what sort of a fellow Matvey is.'
Concerning the work in gathering grain one can judge by the following: the Pereyaslav county was expected to yield 2,000,000 poods, but it has actually yielded 2000 poods. The local Communist organizations follow the principle, 'We are not to be touched either from above or below.' They cannot bear outside interference.
'Yes, I have a paper.'
`You have? That's fine.' Mitriy was genuinely glad. 'That's fine. I'll go and tell Matvey. And you'll come tonight, will you?"
'Yes, I 'll come.'
Matvey is an invalid. A wooden peg takes the place of one of his legs. His black hair shows signs of premature whiteness. But his black, bulging eyes are ablaze, and whenever he speaks, every word of his sounds firm and confident.
Matvey was sitting on the bench. Opposite him, on a stool, sat his father - a short, weazened little man with a thin beard.
'They take and take all the time,' the old man was saying complainingly. 'And what did they give us? Nothing but the cholera.'
'They gave you land,' said Matvey firmly.
'La-and, yes,' repeated the old man, and spat on one side contemptuously. 'Land! If they'd give us all the land, it would have been different. But this way. Where there were landowners before, there are still landowners now.'
'What landowners?' asked I in surprise.
Matvey smiled, for he apparently knew what landowners his father would speak about.
'What landowners? The Soviet estates, right next door to us, same as the landowners,' the old man shouted angrily. 'They have a tractor and eight horses. Isn't that like a landowner?'
'But they are peasants, the poorer peasants, too,' said I in reply.
'The poor peasants,' the old man repeated after me with derision. 'I know the kind they are, the cholera take them! And if they were ours at least. But they brought them from way over in Kaluga. What do they want here, anyway? Only to take up our land. And the way they work, too. Just eight hours, from bell to bell.'
Matvey screwed up his eyes and asked his father: -
'And last spring, I suppose, they didn't plant their ground at all, seeing they are working by the bell?'
'No, they planted the whole thing, the cholera take them,' the old man threw at him angrily.
`And maybe they didn't harvest the whole crop?'
'Finished it in two days, the devils. But if we had their machines, we could do that, too. Just give us the machines.'
'What would you do with a machine? You wouldn't have room enough to turn round' on your own land. If you got a machine, you'd probably have to start a commune.'
'I? Go into a commune? I don't want your machines and I don't want your commune. Let them perish together, the two of them!'
And feeling that his position in this regard was not particularly strong, the old man started again on the old tack.
'All they want is to get something from us. Now they are demanding the grain tax. And why should I pay it?'
'But you must pay something to the state,' replied Matvey. 'It's a just tax.'
'And what the devil do I want the state for, anyway? I can live without it. The way we understand what's just and what isn't is that, if I am my own master, I live as I want to live and I do what I want to do. And this way, all they know is to take something away from us.'
At that moment, Mitriy and two young peasants entered the room. One of them was about eighteen and wore city clothes. The other was dressed like a villager.
'Here we are,' shouted Mitriy from the doorway. 'Here are the workmen,' and he pointed demonstratively at the young fellow in city clothes. 'Here are the peasants,' and he pointed to himself. `And here is the Red Army,' pointing at Matvey. `Everybody is here.'
He began to laugh, and the room seemed suddenly too small for his huge figure and loud voice.
The old man jumped up from his stool.
'Yes, yes, they are all here. I can no longer be master in my own home. All right, friends and comrades, go to all the devils!' And he accompanied this with an outburst of the choicest profanity, and then ran out of the room. The boys burst out laughing.
'He has no use for us,' said Mitriy. 'That's nothing,' said Matvey thoughtfully. 'They'll grumble for a year or two and then maybe die out. What can you do with them? But the new people will come and everything will move along. They'll come, I tell you.'
The second young fellow said, pointing to the one in city clothes: -
'And his father is chasing him out of the house. "If you are for the Communist," he says to him, "go where you came from. We don't want anybody like you here."
'That's true,' said the workman. 'Father is chasing me out of the house, and mother is crying all the time. "You've sold your soul to the devil," she says, "and now you don't believe in God."'
'And don't you believe at all?' asked Mitriy.
'No, not at all.'
'You don't say?' asked Mitriy quickly. 'How can it be without God? Where did all this come from?'
'That's what science is for. It explains everything to the last dot. It all came without any god,' said the workman.
Mitriy whistled. 'Without God? That's a miracle for you.'
'Let's read the paper,' suggested Matvey.
We began to read. My audience listened with utmost attention, occasionally interrupting me with exclamations like this: -
'That's a brainy minister for you, that Lloyd George!'
`That Lloyd George knows how to hold the workmen in his fist.'
'Bad business with that famine. You can't feed a crowd like that all at once.' We were not nearly through reading the paper, when Matvey's father returned, blew out the lamp without a word, and then shouted: -
'Get out of here, all of you! Burning up all of my oil! Get out, I am telling you. I own this place. I won't let you read here, the cholera take you all!'