The train was overcrowded with returning soldiers, almost all ardent Bolsheviks. I remained in the compartment for eight days, leaving it only occasionally at night. I sent out a companion passenger to buy food for me at the stations. As we neared Chelyabinsk, at the end of the eight days, the crowd had diminished in number, and I thought, I might safely go out on to the gangway and get off at the great station for a little walk. No sooner did I appear on the gangway than I was recognized by some soldiers.
“Oh, look who is here!” one exclaimed.
“It’s Bochkareva! The harlot!” a couple of others echoed.
“She ought to be killed!” shouted somebody.
“Why?” I turned on them. “What harm have I done to you? Oh, you fools, fools!”
The train slowed down, approaching the station. I had scarcely turned my head away from the insolent fellows, when I was suddenly lifted by two pairs of arms, swung to and fro once, twice, three times, and thrown off the moving train.
Fortunately the momentum of the swinging was so great that I was thrown across the parallel tracks and landed in a bank of snow piled along the railway. It was the end of November, 1917. It was all so sudden that the laughter of the brutes behind me still rang in my ears as I became conscious of pain in my right knee.
The train was halted before pulling into the station. In a few moments a big crowd collected round me, composed of passengers, railway officials and others. All were indignant at the brutality of the soldiers. The Commandant of the station and members of the local committee hurried to the spot. I was placed on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. It was found that I had a dislocated knee, and my leg was bandaged. I then declared that I desired to continue the journey, and I was given a berth in a hospital coach attached to a train going east. There were attendants and a medical assistant on the car.
My injured leg grew more and more painful as I proceeded homeward. It began to swell, and the medical assistant telegraphed to the stationmaster of Tutalsk, the village in which my family now lived, to provide a stretcher for me.
My sister, Arina, was employed at the station as attendant at the tea-urn, which is always kept boiling at Russian railway stations. It was this employment of hers that had caused the family to move to Tutalsk from Tomsk, where they had no means of livelihood whatever. When the message from the doctor in charge of the car reached my sister and through her my parents, there was an outburst of grief. It was three years since they had seen their Marusia and now she was apparently being brought to them on her deathbed!
On the fourth day of the journey from Chelyabinsk the train stopped at Tutalsk. My leg was badly swollen and was as heavy as a log. The pains were agonizing. My face was deadly pale.
A stretcher was prepared for me at the station. My sisters, my mother and father and the stationmaster were at the door of the coach when I was carried out. My mother shrieked in heartrending tones, “My Marusia! My Manka!” stretched her hands toward heaven and threw herself full length on me, mourning over me as if I were ready for burial.
Her prodigal daughter had returned, my mother sobbed, but in what a condition! She thought that I must have been wounded and have asked to be sent home to die. I could not speak, I could only grasp her bony arms, as my throat was choked with a tempest of tears and sobs. Everybody was crying, my sisters calling me by caressing names, my father standing over me bent and white, and even the strange stationmaster. …
I became hysterical and the doctor was sent for. He had me removed home immediately, promising in response to my mother’s entreaties to do everything in his power for me. I was ill for a month, passing Christmas and meeting the New Year, 1918, in bed.
The two thousand roubles I had saved I gave to my parents. But this sum, which would have been reckoned a fortune before the war, was barely sufficient to keep us for a few months. It cost nearly a hundred roubles (about £10 11s.) to buy a pair of shoes for my youngest sister, Nadia, who was going about barefoot! It cost almost twice as much to buy her a secondhand jacket at the Tomsk market. Manufactured goods sold at a premium when they were to be had, but it was much more difficult to find what one needed than to pay an exorbitant price for it. There was plenty of flour in the country. But the peasants would not sell it cheaply because they could get nothing in town for less than fifty or a hundred times its former price. The result was that flour sold at sixty roubles (about £6 6s. 8d.) a pood (thirty-two pounds)! It may be imagined how far two thousand roubles would carry one in Russia.
Tutalsk had also been swept by the hurricane of Bolshevism. There were many soldiers who had returned from the front imbued with Bolshevik teachings. Just before my arrival the newly-fledged heretics
