Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerensky became the Minister of War and Navy in the Russian Provisional Government a month prior to Filatov’s letter, in May 1917. That same year Kerensky became prime minister in July and commander-in-chief in September.
The November 1917 elections to the Constituent Assembly were the first and only free multiparty elections in Russia until the post-Soviet era. Each of Russia’s five wartime fronts constituted an electoral district. The remote Romanian front, on which Filatov fought, was largely insulated from Bolshevik agitation for immediate withdrawal from the war and confiscation of land and voted predominantly for the Socialist Revolutionaries. Of 1,128,000 votes cast by Russian soldiers on the Romanian front, 679,000 went to the Socialist Revolutionaries, while the Ukrainian Social Democrats received 181,000 votes to 167,000 for the Bolsheviks. Party lists were identified by numbers, and Filatov’s numbers correspond to these three parties. On the Western front, by contrast, where Bolshevik agitation was rife, these proportions were reversed: the Bolsheviks received 653,000 votes of 976,000 cast, to 181,000 for the Socialist Revolutionaries.
Konstantin Paustovskii, Save Your Strength
Please see note to the previous Paustovskii entry.
[. . .] But everyone was convinced that the war was not in vain, and that justice finally would be restored.
“Worst of all, there ain’t no truth or justice!” said a village shoemaker, a puny fellow with a sunken chest. “Travel around Russia, ask all of them people and you’ll see that each one’s got his own idea of truth. A local idea. And if you put them all together then you’d get the one and only, an all-Russian truth, so to speak.”
“Well, and what sort of local truth have you got?” I asked.
“Why, it’s standing over there, our truth!” answered the shoemaker and pointed at the hillock over the river. There a decrepit manor house was visible in the midst of a gnarled apple orchard. It was not very large, but it preserved all the features of the “Empire” style that had flourished on Russian estates during the reign Alexander the First: a pediment with peeling columns, narrow and tall windows rounded off at the top, two low semi-circular wings, and a broken cast-iron railing of rare beauty.
“Please explain to me,” I asked, “what does this old house have to do with your local truth?”
“Why don’t you go and visit the owner of this house, then you’ll understand. If we’re going to talk about truth, draw your own conclusions: who should this house, and this garden, and this land—the grounds around the house alone are two
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“What kind of business?”
“Well, something like you wish to settle in there for the summer, to rent a dacha. And you’ve come to make arrangements.”
I approached the house along a path barely visible in the snow. The windows were shuttered with old rotten boards. The front porch was swept with snow.
I walked around the house, saw a narrow door upholstered in torn felt, and knocked loudly. No one responded nor opened the door. I strained my ears. The house was silent as a crypt. “Who am I kidding,” I thought. “Surely no one lives here.”
All of a sudden, the door flew open. On the threshold stood a little old man in a threadbare, black quilted robe belted with a towel. On his head was a little silk cap. His whole face was wrapped in a dirty gauze bandage. Tufts of cotton, brown with iodine, stuck out from beneath the bandage. The little old man looked at me angrily with eyes that were absolutely blue, like a child’s, and asked in a high-pitched voice:
“What may I do for you, my dear sir?”
I answered as the shoemaker had told me to.
“You’re not of the Bunin clan, are you?” the little old man asked suspiciously.
“No, of course not!”
“Follow me, then.”
He led me into what appeared to be the only inhabited room in the house. It was crammed full of tattered rags and junk. A little iron stove was burning in the middle of the room. Trains of smoke belched out of it with every gust of wind.
In the corner I saw a magnificent round stove inlaid with decorative tiles. Almost half the tiles were missing; in their place were small niches filled with medicinal vials buried in dust, little yellowed paper bags, and shriveled worm-eaten apples.
Above a trestle-bed covered with a worn sheepskin there hung a portrait in a heavy golden frame; it was a portrait of a woman in an airy blue dress, with powdered hair combed up and the same blue eyes as the little old man’s.
It seemed as if all of a sudden I was back in the early nineteenth century, visiting Gogol’s Pliushkin. Prior to that I had never imagined that there still remained houses and people of this sort in Russia.
“Are you a nobleman?” the little old man asked me.
Just to be safe, I answered that I was.
“What you do professionally is of no interest to me,” said the little old man. “These days such new occupations have come into being that it would trip up even a policeman. Kindly imagine, there is now even something called a
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“taxator” [an agricultural and forestry assessor]. It is all nonsense! The Romanovs’ nonsense! I will let you the house for the summer, but under one absolute condition: you will not keep any goats. A certain Bunin lived here three years ago. A suspicious gentleman! A real Judas! Got himself goats, and sure—they were plenty happy to gnaw away on my apple trees.
“The writer Bunin?” I asked.
“No, his brother, the excise official. The writer came to visit. A somewhat more decent character than his bureaucratic brother but also, let me tell you, I don’t understand what’s there to boast about. Such petty gentry folk!”
I decided to stand up for Bunin, but on the old man’s terms.
“Come now,” said I, “The Bunins are old nobility.”
“Old?” the little old man mocked me. He looked at me as if I were a hopeless dimwit and shook his head.
