Chapter 8
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’.
His parents, elderly and in poor health, were spared execution. They were given the mandatory sentence of five years in a Siberian labour camp and were languishing in prison when he remarried. It seemed even now almost a surreal situation to him: happiness at finding another life partner, and relief at saving his little son from illness and likely death; and despair at being powerless to help his parents. “God, keep them safe,” he prayed daily, willing them to find strength to live.
Now, a year later, as he looked eastward to the distant horizon in the direction of the Siberian wastelands, he was making the decision to try to see his parents, to take some hidden food to them, to comfort them if he could. The risks were enormous. He would be missing from his work as a veterinary practitioner in the local kolkhozes. His travel papers would be forgeries of the proper documents allowing travel through and from his region. He held his breath as he considered the dangers. Travel in the Ukraine was hazardous enough at the best of times. But under Stalin, with Communist dogma and implementation of further restrictions, it was foolhardy. The famine was worsening by the week, and month. Life was becoming cheap and dispensable. Peter knew this and observed, with increasing anguish in his travels for work, the daily hardships endured in his own Oblast.
But he knew, only too well, that if life was precarious in his own region, it was nigh almost impossible in the Siberian wastelands, hastily created camps to isolate huge numbers of Ukrainians and other nationalities for political expedience. He wanted to reach his incarcerated parents before it was too late. “And Halka must be struggling … she is still so young!” It was a further pressing reason to get to them. His youngest sister, only fifteen at the time his Yosep and Palasha were sentenced, chose to go with them to the labour camp. Her reasons were noble: to care for her parents, regardless of the consequences. She could not bear to see them go and to never know their fate and condition in the camp. Practically, there was little opposition to this from the regime: one less mouth to consider, one less body to accommodate in the kolkhozes; and the relatives were also relieved not to be labelled as housing the daughter of sentenced persons.
It was already late autumn, 1931. He had anxiously observed the prematurely denuded trees in his own Sumskaya Oblast as he strove to meet the kolkhozes’ deadlines in his increased rounds of veterinary work. He had heard that winter had also come early to the Siberian camps. This last letter, trembling in his fingers, only confirmed those other sporadic ones, and again was too censored to make any sense of his parents’ condition. He sighed, his heart heavy. It had taken so long for this last letter to reach him that he feared his parents might already have met their doomed fate. If he was to try and see them, it had to be before winter was fully upon them, before travel in Russia and in Siberia was made impossible by the harshness of the climate, the massive snows, the freezing temperatures.
For Peter, though he didn’t know it at the time, it was the defining moment of his life.
Chapter 9
Timing was everything. If he had seen a complete map of the Soviet Union, if he had really known the distance he was planning to cover, it must have been only cursorily considered. Just as his parents must have experienced weeks of transportation to their Siberian wasteland prison, so Peter also expected a long journey. ‘Revolutionary’ changes had altered his beautiful Ukrainian culture and life to a point where it was now unrecognisable. But some things always stayed the same. Travel within the regions, and throughout the whole of the Soviet Union was always counted in days, weeks, months. This secret journey would be similar to any that a State official would make for his Party.
Luck would also have to play a part, in order for him to succeed in his plan. His years as veterinary practitioner in his district, and now in the kolkhozes he was forced to supervise, made him relatively valuable to the Communist regime. The regime had brutalised the farmers and peasants, taking all their possessions, and burnt farms to force the villagers into kolkhozes. The hapless farmers took revenge and killed their own livestock rather than lose it to the Stalinist regime.
Peter’s work, in saving what livestock he could, temporarily gave him a higher status in the political upheaval. “It must count for something,” he thought as he considered the possible routes he would need to take, “that already I am trusted on longer journeys without checks, at times.” He had to use this to full advantage in the limited time available. The irony, that he was placed in this situation in his work, whilst his parents suffered at the hands of these same officials, played on his mind. It deepened his resolve to help his parents, to save them if it was possible.
Luck of a different kind, in the form of his despairing close friend, gave Peter the chance to finalise his plan. “Count me in with you, Petro! We will need each other for this journey, my friend!” Mikhaelo pleaded with him, in the secrecy