They told us the revolution would feed us.
I want to be clear that I am not saying this as a complaint exactly, because I understand the arithmetic of a country at war with itself and with half of Europe simultaneously, and I understand that arithmetic does not leave much room for regular meals. I am saying it because it is true, and because the truth of it — marching through the Ural foothills in the summer of 1918 on whatever the day had managed to produce — was a constant, low-level presence in every hour of the campaign, the way a bad tooth is a constant low-level presence, something you can push to the back of your attention when other things demand it and that comes back the moment those other things relent.
We ate what we found. That is the simplest way to say it. The column moved through villages and farms, and what the villages and farms had, we took or were given, and the distinction between those two things depended heavily on which village you were talking about and which men in the column you were watching at the time.
Some villages gave willingly. More than you might expect, actually — the revolution had reached further into the countryside than the Whites and the Allies seemed to understand, and there were farmers out here in the Ural foothills who had been waiting for something to believe in for longer than I'd been alive, and who came out to the road with bread and whatever else they had and pressed it into the hands of men in Red Army coats with an urgency that was less hospitality than recognition, the recognition of people seeing the thing they'd been told was coming finally walking past their gate.
Others did not give willingly. I won't pretend otherwise, because I promised myself when I started this account that I would not pretend otherwise about the things the revolution did that I wished it hadn't. In those villages the taking was not always clean, and the men doing the taking were not always careful about the line between requisitioning supplies for a military column and simply taking what they wanted from people who could not stop them. I watched it happen more than once, and each time I watched it I thought about what I'd believed in that dormitory in Moscow, and each time I found that I still believed it, and each time I hated, slightly more than the time before, that believing it required me to watch this and keep marching.
The commissar assigned to our column was a man named Grushko, from Penza, who had the specific quality of absolute conviction that I had learned, over the months since Moscow, to find both inspiring and slightly frightening. He believed the revolution in the total, structurally load-bearing way that some men believe in God — not as a position he'd arrived at through reasoning and could be reasoned back out of, but as something prior to reasoning, something that organised every other thought he had. When the taking was not clean he looked at it with an expression that said he'd filed it under *the cost of necessary things* and moved on, and I understood that expression and I hated it and I recognised it in myself sometimes and hated that most of all.
---
We had been moving for three weeks when we stopped at a farmhouse in the afternoon heat, the kind of stop that was supposed to be an hour for water and rest and became longer than that because the men were exhausted in a way that an hour's rest wasn't going to fix but was at least going to address at the margins.
My unit settled under the shade of a long barn wall, the wood warm against my back, and I ate the bread we'd been given at the last village — dark, dense, the kind that fills a stomach without doing much to persuade the stomach it's been treated well — and drank water from a stream that ran along the field edge, and did not think, for the first time in several hours, about anything in particular.
The man beside me was called Dmitri, a former steelworker from Yekaterinburg who had been with the column since before I joined it and who had the particular quality of someone who had already processed most of the questions the campaign was asking and arrived at a working relationship with the answers that, while not comfortable, was at least stable. He had a face that looked like it had been assembled from harder material than most faces, and he smoked a pipe that was always either lit or being lit, and he was the closest thing I had to a friend in the column, which in the context of a civil war through the Ural countryside meant we talked sometimes and watched each other's backs the rest of the time.
"How far to Perm," I said.
"Three days if the roads hold." He drew on the pipe. "More if they don't."
"When have the roads ever held."
"Fair point."
We sat with the barn wall warm behind us and the afternoon light coming across the fields at the long angle that meant the worst of the day's heat was past, and for that specific hour it was almost possible to forget what we were marching toward and why, which was the thing rest periods were actually for, I had come to understand — not recovery, exactly, but the temporary suspension of the knowledge of what came next.
The messenger arrived while some of the men were still sleeping.
---
He came on horseback, which meant the news was either important or urgent or both, and he went directly to Grushko without stopping, and whatever passed between them was brief enough and serious enough that Grushko raised his voice to wake the men who were sleeping and gather the ones who weren't.
"On your feet," he said, in the tone he used when the next thing was not going to be easy. "News from the advance scouts. Listen."
Perm was defended. That was the first part, which we had expected — Perm was a significant city, a White stronghold, and we had not imagined they would simply leave it open for us.
Defended by Czechoslovaks. That was the second part.
I want to describe what happened in my chest when I heard that, because I think it matters. It was not quite anger — I was already too tired for clean anger, and the fuel for clean anger had been burning for long enough that what remained was something more like the coals after the fire, still hot, not visibly burning, but capable of significant heat if you pressed on them.
Czechoslovaks. Prisoners of war from the Great War — men who had been captured fighting for the Empire or for Germano-Hungry, men who had been sitting in Russian prisoner camps while the revolution happened around them, men who had then been promised safe passage east to Vladivostok and a ship home if they kept themselves out of the civil war's business, men who had apparently decided that keeping themselves out of the civil war's business was less interesting than picking a side and fighting, and who had picked the wrong side with, from my perspective, a spectacular lack of gratitude for what the revolution had been offering them.
"And the Allies," Grushko continued. "British and French forces are present in support of the White position. Limited, according to the scouts, but present."
He said more after that — tactical assessments, approach routes, what the advance had told us about the defensive layout of Perm's outskirts — and I heard it all and processed enough of it to function, which was about as much as I was capable of in the ten minutes after the Czech announcement.
Dmitri had his pipe in his hand, unlit, turning it over in his fingers the way he did when he was thinking.
"You look angry," he said.
"I am angry."
"About the Czechs specifically."
"They sat in camps for years," I said, keeping my voice low enough that only Dmitri was hearing this rather than Grushko. "My cousin sat in a camp outside Brno for fourteen months before he died of something the camp produced. Men I know from the factory had brothers in those camps. And these men—" I stopped, because the sentence had several possible endings and none of them were things I could say at the volume required to finish them properly. "They were given passage home. They were given the opportunity to leave. And they chose this."
"War is the only thing some men know how to do," Dmitri said. He didn't say it as a defence of the Czechs, simply as an observation about a category of man he had apparently encountered before. "After enough of it, peace feels like something is missing."
"I know exactly what's missing from peace," I said. "I've been missing it since 1915."
Dmitri put the pipe between his teeth without lighting it. "Three days to Perm," he said. "Maybe more if the roads don't hold."
---
We moved out an hour later, the rest period having resolved nothing except giving our legs a brief renegotiation of terms with the distance still ahead of them. The countryside was summer-beautiful in the way that countryside is summer-beautiful regardless of what's happening in it, which I had long since stopped finding either comforting or ironic and had simply filed under the category of things the world does that have no relationship to what's happening to the people walking through it.
The skirmishes started the following morning.
Not a full engagement — the White forward positions were probing rather than committing, feeling out the column's strength and approach, sending small groups of cavalry across our flanks to test the response and then pulling back before we could do anything about it. It was the military equivalent of a man testing the temperature of water with his foot, and it had the same effect on the men watching it that all inconclusive engagements have: not enough to resolve anything, more than enough to keep everyone tight and watchful and further from rest than any of us could afford.
The first real skirmish came in a village called Medvedevo, which I know only because someone said the name and I happened to retain it, and which I have since been unable to find on any map, which is the kind of thing that happens to small villages in the middle of civil wars.
A White unit had set up in the village church — stone walls, elevated position, a clear view of the approach road — and they opened up when our advance scouts came around the bend. Two scouts went down immediately, one dead and one wounded, and the column behind them spread into the tree lines flanking the road with the practiced speed of men who had learned by now that the time between hearing the first shot and being behind something solid needed to be measured in fractions of a second rather than seconds.
I went left with half my unit, into a stand of birch that brought us around toward the church's side wall. The fire from inside was disciplined — short bursts, conserving ammunition, the fire of men who weren't planning to surrender and had done the calculation of how long their supplies would last. White officers, or men trained by White officers, who had learned something from the Great War even if they'd learned the wrong lesson from the revolution.
We worked around the flank and hit the side door with three men while the rest of the unit kept their fire focused on the windows. It was close and ugly and I will not catalogue it in detail beyond saying that the inside of a village church during a firefight is a specific kind of hell that manages to be worse than an open field for reasons that have to do with acoustics and confined space and the particular disorientation of fighting in a building designed for an entirely different kind of human gathering.
Six of them. Four dead in the fighting, one wounded badly enough that the question of what to do with him was answered by his own body before Grushko arrived to answer it officially, one who had managed somehow to be in the choir loft when the door went in and who came down with his hands raised, very young, White insignia on his jacket, the specific expression of someone who had not, until this moment, believed that this was actually how it was going to end.
Grushko looked at him for a moment. The young White soldier looked at Grushko.
I looked at the wall, which had acquired a great deal of new colour during the engagement.
The sound that followed was a single shot.
I kept looking at the wall and said nothing, and after a moment Grushko gave the order to move out, and I picked up my rifle and followed the column back to the road and we continued toward Perm, three days away if the roads held, which they would not, they never did, but we kept moving toward it anyway.
---
On the second night, camped in a field that had been someone's wheat before the war had reached it and stripped it of the kind of attention wheat requires, I lay on my back looking at the stars and thought about Ukraine.
Independent Ukraine. Free Ukraine. The German puppet state that had been given independence the way a dog is given a long leash — the freedom to move in any direction, provided you don't move too far. My village outside Kharkiv was technically in a free country now. The men who ran that free country were accountable to Berlin rather than to Petrograd, which was a different flavour of the same arrangement my father had lived inside his entire life, working land that belonged to someone else, the only question ever being which someone else it was.
I had joined the Red Army because the metalworker from Tula had said after the Whites with the specific implication of and then, and because and then was the closest thing to a promise about Ukraine that anyone had offered me, and because I had nowhere else to be and nothing else that still felt true.
After the Whites.
I looked at the stars over the Ural countryside and thought about how long after the Whites might be, and thought about the Czechoslovaks in Perm who were helping make after the Whites longer than it needed to be, and thought about the Allied soldiers — British and French men who had been fighting the Empire on the Western Front for four years and who were now, apparently, helping the people who'd been fighting alongside the Empire hold a Russian city against the revolution — and the arithmetic of it was so comprehensively strange that I ran it three times and got the same answer each time, which was that there was no version of this war in which the people who had nothing were not eventually fighting the people who had something, regardless of which flags were involved.
I had learned that in a dormitory in Moscow in 1915, reading pamphlets by lamplight after a twelve-hour shift. I had learned it again in a police station courtyard in October. I was learning it again in a field outside a destroyed wheat crop, a day and a half from a city defended by men who should have been on their way home.
Dmitri was sitting nearby, pipe finally lit, the small orange coal of it moving as he drew on it.
"You're not sleeping," he said.
"No."
"Czechs again?"
"Among other things."
He smoked in silence for a while. Then: "You know what makes me angriest about them?"
"What."
"They had the chance to go home," he said. "They had the chance to be done with all of this. And they chose to stay." He drew on the pipe again. "I would give everything I have left for the chance to be done with all of this."
I thought about what I had left, which was not extensive. A rifle I'd taken from a dead man's hands. A dormitory bed in Moscow that probably had someone else in it by now. A memory of a village outside Kharkiv that might or might not still exist in the form I carried it.
"So would I," I said.
We sat with the stars and the pipe's small orange light and the distance still remaining between us and Perm, and I thought about what I'd told the metalworker from Tula when he'd asked if I had family in the city.
No family in the city. My family was in Ukraine.
After the Whites.
I picked up my rifle when the order came to move at first light, and I kept moving toward Perm, because after was the only direction that still had anything in it worth walking toward.