Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

I have to reassemble his life from its constituent parts, from various accounts, breaking off and beginning again from the same place, from records of employment, military ID and photographs. The most detailed of these is the “record of employment,” which begins in 1927 and gives Nikolai Stepanov’s nationality (Russian), his employment (joiner), education (three years at a village school, elsewhere it is recorded as four years), first employment (cowherd in Bezhetsk and Zharki). At sixteen he found work at a privately owned forge, but only lasted a couple of months there. From November 1922 he was employed as a joiner’s apprentice in the Bezhetsk Mechanics Works. It is there that he joins the Komsomol, the Communist youth movement created in 1918 as a first step to joining the party. At eighteen he is the secretary to the workers’ committee in the same factory, and at nineteen he moves to Tver as a cadet in the local party school.

To try to imagine this journey, I had to wind the film back to its beginning, to its very source, where there is nothing, just the midday heat, and him walking behind his mother, moving from yard to yard, and when they open the gate to her and she mutters “for the sake of Christ,” he can only focus mutely on the cracks in the loam. My paternal grandfather was the only person in my family for whom the revolution was like rain in July, like the emptying of a full load of grain onto the waiting earth. His life began just as all hope was over; all of a sudden everything was made good and filled with meaning. The injustices could be set straight like a broken arm, and the world made better for people like Nikolai Stepanov. Each and every person had a birthright to land and work; working class young people could finally access learning, it was there for them to reach for, like library books on freshly scrubbed shelves.

This new and more caring reality spoke in the language of newspaper headlines and party decrees, and all its promises were directed at him and his interests. It was now possible to gain an important set of masculine skills without leaving work, like handling arms properly, and learning to shoot and to command the groups of fighters the factory workers were producing munitions for. The Bezhetsk Mechanics Works was also called a Munitions and Firearms Works, and it ceaselessly strove to provide the young republic with what it needed more than bread: revolvers, rifles, mortars, and machine guns. In time, their grim production was watered down with the needs of a nation at peace — plows and coffee grinders — but it was clear that the workers in the factory were intent on defending what they had won in battle, holding onto the gains of the revolution. Nikolai was the secretary of the factory committee, an organization combining management and union, which dealt with everything from purchasing raw materials to paying workers. This committee was also responsible for forming battalions of armed workers who were familiar with the tactics of street fighting and conventional combat.

It was a time of confusion and uncertainty. The peasants in the surrounding villages — in the family’s native Zharki, for example — weren’t so keen on giving up their grain for the new state. It was quite as if they hadn’t realized that it was in their own interests, and they hid the grain wherever they could, and when asked for it directly they were sullen and hostile. Rumors circulated around the villages that there would be a war soon, or certainly an uprising, and that the Bolsheviks were about to bring in new taxes: five rubles for a dog, thirty kopecks for a cat. Waves of peasant uprisings moved across the area, thousands joined in. Tiny Bezhetsk District saw at least twenty-eight riots over three years. Newly formed detachments of Red Army soldiers were sent to put the rebellions down. Both sides had meetings, passed resolutions, beat up offenders, executed them, buried them alive. After the war, the natural fear of killing another human had gone. It was easier to pull the trigger, and there were more arms “lying around” — the piles of requisitioned rifles had multiplied. The political “agitators,” who were in charge of convincing the peasants to cooperate with the Soviets, set off for the villages as if they were heading into battle: “A revolver hanging at his waist, sometimes two, grenades stuffed into his pockets.”

There are moments in time that seem characterized by blindness; or rather by darkness, like the inside of a sack in which people are thrown together, hardly distinguishable from one another, and yet all agitated by a sense of their own righteousness. The great animosity between the new Bolshevik government and the rural peasantry — reviled, strange, uncooperative; twitching and turning in its unwieldy and unchanging twilit world — could have ended differently. But the villages gave in first, and this was the beginning of the end for Russia’s rural communities.

Tax collection was undertaken by special detachments, whose arrival in the villages was feared like the Day of Judgment. These visitors dug up supplies that were being saved, turned over the houses, looked in underground stores, took the last of the provisions. Unused to this practice, communities at first tried to resist, everyone playing their part: sometimes firing warning shots from the rooftops, and sometimes unexpectedly killing someone. There were also attempts to steal from the collection points where precious grain was stored: the peasants went in groups with pikes and axes to demand their portion. Red Army soldiers were set loose on them like guard dogs let off the chain, and the crowds slowly dispersed.

There were not enough people who understood combat and military discipline and they needed people just like Nikolai, people who were warmed by the sun of the new regime, who saw it as the beginning of a new time of justice and were ready to die for it. Aged sixteen (not even old enough to order a drink now), he joined a special task unit. There are no documents or photographs in the family album to prove this, but they are hardly needed: the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.

The advantage of these special task units was that they were somewhat like volunteer militia groups, but together they made up a huge militarized organization (600,000 soldiers in 1922), well-armed, with weapons they kept with them at all times (hidden behind the stove, or under the bed). Three-quarters of them had no professional military training. They were flying squads, ready for action, and a living manifestation of the idea of the Soviet Union as one big military community, where every person could leap from his or her job at the lathe or the kitchen sink to fight for socialist justice. The units had their own uniform and motto, and they were sent to tackle flare-ups as if they were proper military units, but all the same they had a kind of tangential relationship with the Red Army itself, as if they were considered by the army to be so much dross and sawdust. You could join a special task unit from a young age: they recruited at sixteen, and you were handed your Mauser as soon as you enlisted.

At the margins of the country, where everything still hurt and smoke was still rising, the special task units fought in straight combat. In the central areas it was a different matter. Here the class enemy had learned to hide, to mask himself and pretend to be the old man fetching water at the well, or your mother’s brother, or even you yourself. The stories of what these units did, sometimes in their own villages and communities, flit like ghosts in the communal memory. My grandfather joined up in 1922, when the work of the units was coming to an end. In April 1924 the organization was officially closed. Nikolai had not turned eighteen. What he did in those two years, he never revealed. When he went to wash in the bathhouse his scars were visible, and he always said that he had been jabbed with a pitchfork when collecting taxes from the peasantry — and immediately changed the subject. What he had in his memory, I will never know. In the box marked “social background” on the ubiquitous form, he, the son and grandson of peasants, stubbornly wrote “factory worker.”