A Gentleman in Moscow

Addendum

On the morning of the twenty-second of June, even as the Count was looking through his pockets for Mishka’s letter, Nina Kulikova and her three confederates were boarding a train headed east for Ivanovo full of energy, excitement, and a clear sense of purpose.

Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production.

But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint.

In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine.*

But, as noted, all of this was still in the offing. And when Nina’s train finally arrived in the far reaches of Ivanovo, where the fields of young wheat bent in the breeze for as far as the eye could see, she was almost overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, and by the sense that her life had just begun.