Solovyov and Larionov

10

The next morning (which began late), they realized that this was the day Solovyov had promised to read his paper about General Larionov. The reading was to be held at Zoya’s house. Despite recent events, Zoya thought the reading was appropriate; this puzzled even the lecturer himself. He was even more surprised that evening when he was coming into the entryway of the communal apartment and ran straight into Taras. Taras was absolutely calm, even courteous. He was the first to greet the guest, after which he backed away, toward the kitchen, and continued standing there, leaning against the general’s cabinet. He was not invited to hear the paper.

The attendees were the same as the first time: the princess plus Shulgin and Nesterenko. It occurred to Solovyov that the fact of the powerful Nesterenko’s presence might also be restraining Taras from repeating yesterday’s hysterics. In any case (Taras’s face expressed its usual shyness), Zoya’s neighbor was fully able to calm down naturally. Solovyov himself gradually calmed down, too. Coming here was not nearly as simple for him as he had led Zoya to believe that morning.

Solovyov felt a sudden awkwardness as he took the text of his prepared paper from the folder; this time, the feeling was not related to Taras. What Solovyov wanted to report could not appear either important or even worthy of attention for the group that had gathered. All his findings and corrections regarding the Crimean operations seemed like utter pointlessness by comparison with what they knew about the general. But it was too late to retreat. So Solovyov began his reading.

Strictly speaking, this was not even a reading. When he sensed that method of delivering the material was out of place here, the young historian switched to telling a story; this was close to the text of his paper but did not lack for improvisation. This was happening for the first time in his scholarly life. It was not that he could not render his previous papers without reading aloud—every phrase of what he had written was just right and he knew the texts by heart. The academic honor code mandated speaking from a prepared text. The folder of papers lying on a lectern was the first, albeit most approximate, attestation of a report’s scholarliness. It was as if all further qualities of what was pronounced did not exist without the written text. Solovyov knew of only one exception: a paper that Prof. Nikolsky had read at a conference lectern, in a monotone, sentence after sentence, from sheets containing nothing but caricatures sketched with a ballpoint pen. It was Prof. Nikolsky who had forbidden Solovyov from speaking without a written text.

Solovyov did not even glance down as he turned page after page of his paper. A feeling of flight had seized him, almost the same as that first ride on a bicycle. He recalled the dates of battles, the strength of subunits on both sides, and the military ranks of all the senior officers taking part in combat.

The topic of Solovyov’s paper was ‘General Larionov’s Rout of Zhloba’s Cavalry Corps.’ It concerned a key operation in 1920 that allowed the Whites to hold on to Crimea until late autumn. Solovyov began by briefly touching on the composition of the troops positioned on the front line in Northern Taurida. Here he could not help but speak of General Kalinin’s Second Cavalry Division (1,500 sabers + 1,000 bayonets) and about General Guselshchikov’s Third Cavalry Division (3,500 sabers + 400 bayonets from general Abramov’s Don Corps): these troops were positioned from the Azov Sea to the village of Chernigovka. Naturally, he did not forget about the Drozdov Division, either (it was located by the village of Mikhailovka) or about General Morozov’s Second Cavalry Division. In speaking about the line of the front to the west of Mikhailovka, Solovyov mentioned General Babiev’s Kuban Cavalry Division and the Native Division positioned to its left along the front. Finally, the Markov and Kornilov Divisions were located in the region of Kakhovka, while General Barbovich’s division was positioned closest to the Dnieper Estuary.

Opposing those forces were divisions of the Reds’ Thirteenth Army, including the First and Second Cavalry Divisions of Dmitry Zhloba’s Combined Corps. The numbers for just that one corps—including the troops attached to it—reached 7,500. After some wavering, Solovyov decided not to dwell on the numerical data of other divisions that supported Zhloba (for example the Latvian and the 52nd Rifle Division, which were in the area of Beryslav). After casting a glance at his listeners, the researcher felt that an overabundance of figures might dull their attention.

In speaking about the Reds’ plans, Solovyov began by limiting himself to pointing out Zhloba’s corps’ intention of attacking the Don Corps and taking Melitopol. After grasping, however, that this picture would be incomplete, the speaker nevertheless elaborated that four divisions were mobilized from Fedko’s group in the area from Zherebets to Pologi at the same time as the 52nd and Latvian Divisions were already moving out of the area from the region of Berislavl to Aleshki. Zhloba placed particular hopes on Fedko’s group, something that raised no doubts among the attendees. Fedko, however, did not warrant those hopes.

Did General Larionov know about the Reds’ plans? Sources available to researchers (Solovyov carefully evened out the file of papers lying in front of him) gave no answer to that question. The general acted as if he was familiar with the enemy’s plans in full detail. He had always been a half-step ahead of the Reds before, but those half-steps invariably determined the outcome of the fighting. Zhloba’s most cunning schemes broke down against the measures the White commander had taken, regardless of whether they were the result of reconnaissance activity or the general’s ingenious foresight. Solovyov preferred to think the latter.

After the general had studied his opponent’s way of thinking (this happened fairly quickly), he flawlessly guessed all the operations Zhloba had conceived. In Solovyov’s opinion, the general’s strength consisted of an absolutely precise assessment of Zhloba’s strategic potential. It was not overly high (which was natural) but was not lower than average, either. As General Larionov himself once said, flight school is capable of raising anyone—Dmitry Zhloba among them—to an average level. Then again, it was the hand of fate that threw Zhloba into the cavalry before he had the chance to take wing as he should have. This merging of the earthly and the heavenly in his fate (along with unfavorable genetics, according to some data) significantly twisted the Red commander’s brains. To General Larionov’s credit, he was able to sort through those intricacies.

Early in the morning, he ordered that strong coffee be served; he would drink it in small sips, sitting on the steps of his armored train car. After the coffee, he smoked his first cigarette. When the weather was not windy, he blew smoke rings, observing their melancholy motion toward the sky. When there was wind, the general released the smoke in a thin stream, unconcerned about its further fate. It is usually thought that it was during those moments that he formed the plans that ended up ruining Red commander Dmitry Petrovich Zhloba’s career.

The steppe’s drowsy breathing, which moved in barely perceptible waves, and the scent of grass that was still fresh, instilled calm and joy in the general. The sun rose quickly over the horizon, as if it were in a speeded-up film, and the steppe changed its colors. The steppe appeared to the general in the form of a kaleidoscope that had been hurriedly deployed around the armored train. It was unlimited in its capabilities, boundless, and strewn with the ash of his cigarette.

Sometimes General Larionov would lie down in the grass and observe the life of its inhabitants. In his eyes, this life appeared just as petty as human life. Perhaps not as brutal. The grass’s businesslike residents ate each other but they did so out of necessity, conforming to biology’s ancient laws. They did not experience mutual hatred. Encouraged by the general’s motionlessness, these creatures ran along his splayed fingers, between which something was already sprouting, springing up, and maturing. One could maintain that more than a dozen or two ants, grasshoppers, aphids, beetles, and numerous other creations he would have had difficulty giving names to had passed through his hands. Located in a region of embittered battles between the Red and White Armies, they maintained strict neutrality. Their ability not to notice social cataclysms achieved an absolute, evoking the general’s admiration.

There was something posthumous in the general’s fingers when they were plunged into the grass. If this was connected with life, then it was in some sort of broad, age-old sense of converting human bodies into grasses and trees. Pressing his face to the crushed stalks, the general imagined himself dead on that field. Arms outstretched. Head sprinkled with earth. This is how he saw his soldiers again and again after battle.

The general remembered how one time, when he was still a cadet, he had gone to military summer camp. During field exercises, he had to dig trenches while being timed. There was a hot spell. He was digging a trench for the first time and became horribly tired. Nausea rose in his throat and his legs began to shake. He was soaked in sweat. After digging the trench, cadet Larionov lay down in it and closed his eyes. A fabulous coolness replaced the scorching sun. The shouts of officers, clanging of shovels, and clatter of horses on the road still carried to Larionov, muted, as if from hundreds of versts away, but none of that was with him any longer. Maybe it was in another world.

‘A blissful coolness,’ he whispered, imagining he was lying in a grave.

‘It’s not the time to rest up, cadet!’

An officer was looking at him from somewhere above, almost as if from the clouds that were sailing past, over the trench.

‘I’m deathly tired,’ said the boy.

The officer walked away without saying anything. The expanse he had vacated was immediately covered over by a celestial curtain speckled with white clouds.

‘Thank you,’ the cadet uttered soundlessly. He did not rule out that this had been an angel.

The general continued to lie there. He already sensed a powerful call from below. He was experiencing the soothing sense of growing into the earth that, as it seemed to him, was familiar to everyone killed in battle. The killed understood that everything was over for them and they could enjoy the repose that had arrived. The general’s immobility was almost otherworldly. Only the cautious glance of the sentries—the general knew they were observing him, for security reasons—prevented him from giving himself over, completely, to merging with the earth.

In speaking about the essence of what happened during the summer of 1920, Solovyov could not help but quote from Mikhail A. Kritsky’s famous characterization in The Kornilov Shock Regiment, which discusses how, over the course of multiple battles, the Russian Army surrounded Zhloba’s cavalry, squeezing the troops into a dead-end situation and severely reducing their maneuverability. Because of the natural crowding that came about, Zhloba’s group lost a significant degree of the cavalry’s most important qualities: movement and maneuverability.’

The natural crowding into which Zhloba cast the troops entrusted to him was the result of General Larionov’s considered and protracted actions. Like an experienced chess player, the general offered a sacrifice to his adversary: a few pawns at the center of the board that Zhloba swallowed very readily. After winning a series of localized battles, the Higher Aviation School graduate did not notice that the places he was victorious were located on a defined axis and had a precisely delineated direction. The victories ceased when the general was of the opinion that Zhloba had moved far enough in that direction. Zhloba continued to attack out of inertia, but this time the adversary was not thinking of retreat. And although the general’s army did not counterattack, all the Reds’ attempts to move further were crushed on that very first line of trenches that, it turned out, had been dug more than a week earlier.

Only after familiarizing himself with how solidly the defense had been prepared in this spot did Zhloba begin to understand that his own victorious march had done nothing more than enable the Whites to occupy previously arranged positions. That understanding became complete for him the morning the Whites’ first lines appeared at the rear of the troops he headed. General Larionov had personally led them into battle, leaving his habitable armored train for the occasion. The general was not one to take a risk for the sake of risk. He simply knew that sometimes one must lead the troops oneself. He sensed those moments flawlessly.

After warning his listeners that he was going to depart from the Zhloba theme for a while, Solovyov reminded them of the famous breach in Kakhovka. He had in mind an episode of the war when part of General Larionov’s army ended up surrounded. Discussions began about surrendering as prisoners.

The general formed his troops and lit a cigarette. He released several smoke rings and those who had gathered watched, entranced, as they soared.

‘This is the sort of question I do not wish to decide for you,’ said the general. ‘Whoever wants to may go ahead and surrender.’

The general began heading toward his horse but stopped halfway. The smoke rings he’d released were still hanging in the air, like doleful zeroes. The general’s horse was stamping its hoof. Several dozen people broke ranks and gloomily wandered toward the front line. The general did not utter a word. He looked at them without judgment, most likely surprised. He himself could not explain his certainty that death awaited them. He knew cases when the Reds had shot only officers and then mobilized the rest. Everyone watched, silent, as those who were leaving moved toward the grove: it was a red grove. With clouds gathering over it. They choked up when they saw those people moving under that leaden sky. And felt better after they had finally disappeared behind the trees.

This is how strange the war was—Russians against Russians—when soldiers taken prisoner could fight the very next day for the other side. They did so just as selflessly as before. There were quite a few people for whom shifts of this sort became a habit. For some, it was the only possible work under war conditions. For some, it was a way of life at a time when, by and large, people were indifferent about who they fought for. L’existence for civilians did not give them the thrill they needed. Or that intoxicating military brotherhood that is available only in the face of death. As a rule, it was a bullet that stopped those shifts. Or a saber. Essentially, there were not many choices.

Lightning flashed beyond the grove where the departed had disappeared. It was still very far away: the thunder only caught up a minute after. Another minute later, several bursts of machine gun fire sounded from the grove. Both the general and his soldiers remained silent. It is possible there were more bursts of fire but they were no longer audible through the drumming of the rain pounding at their tents, helmets, and field kitchens. It was the drumming before marching out. They began a prayer service under pouring rain.

The general did not lead them toward the grove. They moved along the steppe, southwesterly, to where the thunderstorm was slowly heading and where—according to the general’s notions—the encirclement was less dense. They walked for a long time. Water flowed from their soaked clothing into their boots, squishing loudly. Larionov formed his soldiers into a hollow square a few hundred meters from the Red positions. The cavalry was placed up front, at the head, with the general. What alcohol remained was distributed to his personnel.

The general broke into a trot, as did his horse cavalry. The general drew his saber and the cavalrymen galloped off, their sabers drawn, too. He felt the cold drenching rain snaking down his back and it was pleasant. They rode into the adversary’s position—this happened on its own—as lightning struck. The celestial electricity glinted threateningly on the general’s saber. Along the way, he remembered ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man…’ Our Figner… Lightning flashed three times in a row, illuminating listless shadows by the tents. Three brief flashes did not pinpoint any movement among the defenders, though they were not really defending anyway. Forlornly pressing into whatever was closest to them, these people first let in the general, then the cavalry and then, of course, the infantry, too. This all happened without a single shot.

In Solovyov’s opinion, the history of the Kakhovka breach was the complete opposite of what happened near Melitopol. Since an oppositeness in substance implies a particular resemblance in form (Prof. Nikolsky called this ‘historical circumstances’), the young historian did not consider it possible to examine these two cases of encirclement in isolation. After showing a map of the Kahkovka breach with bright red arrows, Solovyov took a map of Zhloba’s encirclement from his folder, too. The sheets were held up briefly and then handed around. The princess held them longest of all. She drew her index finger along the arrows and looked pensively at the lecturer from time to time.

Zhloba began racing around after (as Kritsky so aptly put it) falling into the cul-de-sac. At first, Zhloba tried to get away from the general’s cavalry that had overtaken him, but he ran into intense machine gun fire. This is where Zhloba finally grasped that he was surrounded. He again turned his troops to meet the cavalry but that could no longer improve matters. The appearance of the legendary general heading up the attackers made a stunning impression on the Reds. They began surrendering.

Zhloba successfully boarded his armored train and began rolling north, fighting battles along the way. The armored train, accompanied by a detachment of about two hundred men, managed to leave the encirclement. This was all that remained of a cavalry corps of many thousands. Lacking troops, weapons, the armored train (which eventually had to be abandoned during the retreat), and, most importantly, horses, Zhloba fell into severe depression. All that remained at his disposal was an old airplane that he had never used in battle, for reasons of principle. Forgotten by everyone, the machine was collecting dust in a hangar outside the combat zone.

Zhloba remembered the plane. After reaching the sought-after hanger, he rolled it outside with the help of local peasants. The women hurriedly wiped down the fuselage. Someone applied strength to turn the propeller, and, to everyone’s astonishment, the motor started. The propeller rotated fitfully at first, as if it were gathering strength for each new movement of its blades. Little by little, the rotation grew uniform and the two propeller blades transformed into a large, translucent circular area. The machine jounced and snorted for several minutes but would not budge.

‘The motor’s warming up,’ the peasant men nodded knowingly.

They puffed on hand-rolled cigarettes to reconcile what was happening with their own agitated consciousness. And to attach an everyday quality to the nearness of flying technology. Using an expert motion, the aviator turned some sort of lever and the machine jerked sharply, then stopped as if it were rooted to the ground.

‘Get away!’ Zhloba yelled, almost flying out of his seat.

He placed in that shout all his hatred for his former flying classmates. All the pain of the insults he had suffered at various times. All the bitterness of the defeat that had come to him. The peasants, who were already on edge, scattered. The airplane began moving and rolled along the steppe, shuddering on the potholes. A minute later, it took off.

After circling over the disheartened witnesses to the takeoff, the plane set a southerly course, to where General Larionov’s units were finishing disarming the Red Armymen they had taken prisoner. Everything was proceeding peacefully, even somehow routinely. The regimental clerk was compiling a list of the prisoners, also indicating the types of weapon confiscated and the names of the horses. The former Red Armymen stood in a long, joyless line, waiting for the clerk to record them. After registration, they were led off in groups for lunch.

Some who were standing there lifted their heads when they heard the airplane’s motor. They all knew the general had eleven such machines in his equipment, so this must have been one of them. Nobody was concerned. The clerk dipped his pen into a spill-proof inkwell and stretched, satisfied, lacing his hands together in front of himself. Indifferently and near-sightedly, he observed the dot growing in the sky. The mere fact of flying technology no longer attracted attention in 1920.

There was something unusual in the airplane’s movement. Observed from below, its flight lacked that grand tranquility that usually accompanies large flying objects (organisms) in the air—from balloons and dirigibles to eagles and seagulls. More and more heads turned toward it. The airplane turned somersaults in the air. It resembled a fly, an angered bumblebee, or perhaps even a hummingbird.

This was not the height of aerobatics: Zhloba was extraordinarily far from even the thought of executing Nesterov’s ‘dead loop.’ This was not even a manifestation of the aviator himself being so extremely wound up, either, though the abruptness of his motions, needless to say, could not have been conducive to fluidity in flight. The reason for what occurred lay in the cables for the steering rod: they were not in working order because the machine had been in the damp hanger for so long. Need it be said that Zhloba’s affective state had not allowed him to verify their tension?

Whether it was that a wind rose or the energy of desperation that had carried Zhloba toward his flight destination, well, at some point he actually ended up over the Whites’ positions. When he saw below him the scene of his disgrace, he threw his arms on the fuselage and hung down. The airplane finally stopped jerking after losing its steering and began flying over the steppe at low altitude. Hanging over his adversary’s positions—as if he were leaning on a windowsill and conversing with someone on the street—Zhloba floated over the field kitchens, lines of prisoners, and the herds of horses they had lost. His fluttering hair and pale, unshaven face were very visible from below. Tears from the head wind glistened in his eyes. He was an ideal target. Each person standing below understood that the aeronaut was seeking death. And nobody shot at him.

On Prof. Nikolsky’s advice, Solovyov saved one of his important findings for the conclusion of his paper. During his work on the topic ‘General Larionov’s Rout of Zhloba’s Cavalry Corps,’ the young historian had decided to compile a maximally precise, inasmuch as was possible, hourly account of the activity of both commanders during the month of June 1920.

Many of Solovyov’s colleagues regarded that work as deliberately unachievable so suggested that for starters he write down his own hourly life in June (during the previous year, for example) and then later set his sights on events seventy-six years in the past. The hidden irony in that advice touched on not only the possibility of searches of this sort but also their practicability. To his colleagues, these searches seemed, to some extent, like scholarly pedantry or (this sounded more offensive) scholarly poseury. It turned out that Prof. Nikolsky was the only person who approved of the graduate student’s plans, without reservations. And that was enough.

Solovyov disagreed with his colleagues’ irony and actually did compile his own life story for June of the previous year. This proved to be completely straightforward. He spent the entire time of his final examination period—that was what fell in June—sitting in the Public Library. All his remaining actions were associated with exams. Their times were calculated easily, according to the schedule of exams and other tests he had kept. From his course on source study, the young man had internalized the idea that any piece of paper, even one of little significance, could later become an important historical source. He knew the value of documents and never threw them away.

As far as June 1920 went, that task did turn out to be more complex, though it was not at all unachievable. Solovyov first pieced together the texts from all the memoirs regarding that stretch of time. After ascertaining the basic character of General Larionov and Zhloba’s actions, the scholar moved on to highly focused archival searches. He looked through thousands of written orders, telegrams, and telephonograms from that time (frequently they specified not only the date but also the hour and minute of sending) and compiled—in spite of his colleagues’ doubts—a fairly detailed listing of what happened during the month of June. The result turned out to be stupendous.

It emerged that on the night of June 13 into 14, e.g. before the start of active military operations, General Larionov and Zhloba’s armored trains stood facing one another. This occurred on territory that was neutral at the time, namely near Gnadenfeld, a settlement of German colonists. Aided by telegrams sent by both sides, the historian managed to establish that Zhloba’s armored train arrived at 23:30 on the first track, stood there until 04:45, then headed north. The sources Solovyov used allowed him to calculate the arrival time of the general’s armored train as 23:55. It departed at 03:35, in a southerly direction. And though the number of the track where the second armored train stood is not indicated in the documents, the process of elimination managed to determine that, too: it was track No. 2. There were only two tracks at the Gnadenfeld station.

Prof. Nikolsky was very satisfied with his former student (and are any students ‘former’?). More than anything, he approved of the result from the point of view that Solovyov had been on the right track with his methods. Despite all his love for brave deductions, the professor considered empirical research the only possible basis for any scholarly work. On top of that, he emphasized that any work, even if it looks pointless at first glance, will certainly bear fruit if the work has a source. In this regard, by the way, he did not rate the future Crimean conference very highly. He called the majority of its participants ‘inspired blowhards’ but did not talk Solovyov out of going.

‘You need to see that, too,’ he told the graduate student in parting. ‘Once, at any rate.’

The second circumstance that evoked the professor’s interest in Solovyov’s finding was its significance for the history of the war itself. Until now, no documents had existed that directly or circumstantially confirmed a personal meeting of the two adversaries. Even so, conjecture about the possibility of such a meeting had been expressed in the émigré press back in 1930. Lacking any factual confirmation for his conjecture, in Ten Years Later, author Yuri Krivich permitted himself to go even further. He posed the question of whether the hypothetical meeting was the general’s attempt to arrange a secret connection with the Reds. Since the question was posed in an accusatory tone, the essence of the general’s betrayal remained unclear. How did it come about that he prevailed over the Reds in one of his most convincing victories as a result of a deal with them? And, consequently, why did the Reds need that sort of deal? The only thing the author could produce to support the theory was the unchanging question: why did the general remain alive at the end of the war?

It is interesting that the Red side later also expressed a supposition regarding the general’s meeting with Zhloba. Moreover, this mention of a deal—this time, naturally, in favor of the Whites—no longer sounded like a hint. The deal was announced as if it were a verified, albeit unconfirmed, fact. Since Zhloba had already been shot by that time—under a decision of the ‘troika’ of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—in his article ‘At the Last Boundary’, Sergei Drel expressed restrained satisfaction that justice had triumphed after all with regard to the traitor, albeit slightly in advance of the determination of his guilt. Solovyov concluded his talk with this sarcastic phrase, which he thought was not lacking for effect.

Princess Meshcherskaya nodded silently but genially. Zoya watched as Shulgin finished constructing some sort of complex, albeit two-dimensional, figure out of matches. Since the table shook constantly, he had thought it pointless to create a figure with volume. Nesterenko was sleeping.