Olga Chaplin: The Man from Talalaivka: A Tale of Love, Life and Loss from Ukraine

The simple feast-meal and grape wine raised their spirits. For so short a time, Stalinist dogma and bureaucracy were forgotten, soviet officialdom pushed aside. The samohon, clandestinely reclaimed from a hidden cellar, and the beckoning balalaika, made the men game: brought on their songs, their dancing. The ‘collective’ farmhouse families joined the wedding party. Someone brought out the pipe-flute, another expertly pumped a hand accordion. “Veprahaete xloptsi koni, a na zavtra pochevate…” the men began a spirited folk song, a reminder of their past unfettered lives, the music and laughter reverberating in the lofty ceiling of the farmhouse.

“Horko! Horko!” his friends called out, signalling to him and his new bride. Peter grinned and, taking the cue, took Evdokia’s hand, eyes flirting as they danced to a Ukrainian wedding song. He caught her eyes, shining, teasing him, as they moved in step in their traditional dance.

“Come on, Petro!” his friend Mikhaelo teased, challenging him. “Let’s see which of us is leader in the kopak!” His brothers pulled him away from his bride. The party circled them as they dared each other, and competed in their agility and sport to the ever-faster pace of the music. In these unguarded moments that seemed to have been snatched from his early freer days of the past, he threw himself into the energetic excitement of the dance. Not for a long time in these recent years had he felt such a sense of freedom and elation. For those few enraptured minutes he let go of the responsibilities and concerns he had been wearing for so long. The grape wine and samohon, the music and reverie of the bridal party, did its work on his senses: spurred him, artist and athlete as one, to leap ever higher, to the party’s cheers. Proud, exhilarated, his inhibition abandoned, he felt himself soar like a free bird, high above the mundane, to some higher plane: it was intoxicating, liberating to his senses. Evdokia watched, entranced, her heart daring to raise hopes for their happy union.

At celebration’s end, Evdokia embraced Yakim and Klavdina and honoured Stasyia and the priest, through tears of joy and sadness, and looked back one last time to the ‘collective’ farmhouse that had been her temporary home. “Don’t worry, Dyna,” Peter gently anticipated her emotions. “From now, our home will be your home… let’s make our way home.”

It was still light. He followed her, observing her careful steps as she lifted her long skirt and embroidered white linen underskirt, and as she sat composed, waiting in the buggy. “I hope I can live up to her ideals,” the thought flickered in his mind as he checked his horse and tied her bag securely at the back. The circumstances in which he married his first wife, the beloved Hanya, had been auspicious, even relatively easy, under Lenin’s more relaxed leadership of the twenties. The circumstances under which he was now to provide a home for Evdokia and Vanya were vastly changed. There was little hope his father’s farm would remain their home for long. And food was becoming more and more scarce by the week.

The cold night air, as he steered his horse in the direction of Kylapchin and his family’s farm, brought a chilling reminder of what lay ahead of them. He hoped fervently he would be able to keep the promise he made, before the priest and before his God, that he would keep his young wife safe, for all time. He held fast to the horse’s reins, held fast to the hope that their farmhouse had not yet been taken or, worse still, set upon by the local soviet-led bandits roaming their countryside in this totalitarian nightmare. Vanya waited for his new mother; Evdokia waited for her new home. He waited for a future, which was still unknown.

His horse manoeuvred the last south-westerly turn towards the farm. They were still a few kilometres away, but already he could see the red-black blaze of a huge fire in the direction of their farm. He caught his breath in disbelief. It could not be possible, surely, for fortune and misfortune to go so closely hand-in-hand for him in a single day.

He cracked the reins, unable to think beyond saving his family’s farm, unable to think of his own safety should the soviet soldiers try to stop him. The pain, anxiety and adrenalin that had been held down all these past days and months, in a finely balanced scale of emotions, suddenly shot uncontrollably in an opposite direction, throwing his fears to the fore. Juxtaposed balance of emotions was gone, logic escaped. In its place was the agony of not knowing whether he could save his family’s farm in time. Worse still was the agony of not knowing whether Vanya had come to harm. He cracked his horse’s reins again, racing almost recklessly towards the billowing red-black inferno in the night sky, towards he knew not what: towards the man-made hell.

What is it that makes a man risk everything he has, to achieve what is almost an impossible goal? Peter could not bring himself to answer this as he took the stained envelope proffered by his new assistant and pushed the letter deep into his coat pocket. He pretended composure, aware of the increased political intrigues surrounding him, and nodded thanks to his watchful colleague.

“Dakyuy, Dimitri… it is from my dear elders…” He caught the assistant’s arched brow. “He knows its contents, even before I do!” he realised, dismayed. “Another ambitious young man being groomed for higher office!” He feigned distraction and quickly collected the papers for his kolkhoz duties. He needed to remove himself from this cauldron of stultifying suspicion; to read his Yosep and Palasha’s censored words away from prying eyes.

His horse grazed on autumnal grasses as he leaned against a denuded tree, its yellowed leaves crumpling about him. He looked towards his next kolkhoz of duty from his resting place on the bluff-like hill. An uncompromisingly chilly wind whipped up, flattening the dying grasses and forewarning him of the barren landscape that would soon descend upon them, and trap them in its deep snows.

His fingers, blackened from the censor’s ink that besmirched the victims’ words, trembled as he tried to decipher the contents of his elders’ letter. Too many months had passed with the censor’s tampering. He could not gauge, from this last letter, whether or not his parents were still alive. His shoulders and body stiffened, like a visceral shell holding in his anxieties, his fears for his parents.

He looked out to the kolkhoz of his next calling, but hesitated. He felt the letter and sensed its fragility, felt also the depth of the blackened words denied to his Yosep and Palasha. He pondered the situation, weighed up the risks. He mentally laid out his life before him.

His beautiful first wife and baby son had died at the start of the famine that felled his fellow Ukrainians. But he had quickly remarried, primarily to give a home and mother for his surviving three-year-old son, Vanya. He could even hope for a happy and lasting marriage with Evdokia, this young woman who was attractive, agreeable and stable, even if she wasn’t his first great love, Hanya. Yet he was prepared to risk it all for this secret, reckless, almost suicidal plan to see his parents, who were now eking out a wretched existence in Siberia, until who knew when.

He knew the risks. He was acutely aware of the politics in his region of Sumskaya Oblast, in this north-eastern part of Ukraine, so close to Russia’s borders. This was no longer Lenin’s Russia of the early 1920s. It was Stalin’s Russia. The first Five Year Plan was executed with ruthless effectiveness, soon to be declared a ‘total success’ by the Communist regime. Collectivisation was almost complete, certainly in the Ukraine. His parents had been labelled ‘kulaks’ or wealthy farmers and were imprisoned in 1930, their farm confiscated. Their family, like so many of their Ukrainian fellowmen, was herded off to kolkhozes in this so-called ‘agrarian revolution’.