Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Our Progress

The military support base in Pankratovka – a village half sunk into the marshes north of Stargorod – was dismantled in the early 90s. Soon after the order was issued, the army stopped supplying coal for the base’s boilers. The pipes of portable corn-stalk stoves emerged like bristles from the two-story lime-and-sand-brick housing units, which came to resemble a Pacific fleet flotilla awaiting its sad fate at Port Arthur.⁵ The base veterans wrote to the Defense Ministry twice a year: they were entitled to new, comfortable apartments, but the Ministry had forgotten about them. Over the next 15 years, of the 82 officers’ families that used to live on the base, only 43 were left in Pankratovka.

The very first year, the retirees planted orchards and vegetable gardens and would have become complete peasants were it not for Lieutenant Colonel Semyon Semyonovich Bulletov. Understanding that the men had to be kept busy, the former CO ripped the old banner “Our Progress Heads for the Woods!” from the gates of the base’s garage and nailed up a new sign. It read “Automotive Club Varyag.”

To start with, the men hauled a T-34 tank out of a nearby gulch and returned it to combat-ready condition. Then, in a marsh, someone found the shell of a light BT-7A tank. This machine was a rarity; you can count the surviving examples of this model on the fingers of one hand. The crew dug up original construction blueprints, restored the machine to its old glory and power, and added it to their fleet. Over the next decade and a half, the repair workshops of the former military base gave new life to several ZIS 151 trucks (basically assembling them from snot and shoelaces), a three-ton army workhorse – the ZIS 5 (1934 vintage) with a 6x4 wheelbase, one each of a German and a Soviet AFV, and a legendary Nazi Tiger tank. The crown jewels of the collection were one of the first trucks of the 1940 Freightliner model, manufactured by James Leland and Co. at their Utah plant, before the corporation moved to Portland, and a GAZ-A which was said to be one of the cars that took part in the 1933 motor rally across the Karakum Desert, as described by Ilf and Petrov in The Little Golden Calf. Collectors would have offered insane sums for either of these two vehicles, but Varyag was not in the business of selling history. At the very dawn of the club’s existence, Bulletov purchased, at scrap prices, a garageful of vintage Volgas, Pobedas, Moskviches, and ZIS and ZIM limousines; a special division – Varyag Corporation – restored and custom-tuned these for private clients.

In the new millennium, in light of the new trend for vintage vehicles, the business finally began to turn a profit. Twenty-two mechanics, four spare-parts experts, an accounting office and a crew of laborers – almost all of them retired military – worked under Semyon Semyonovich’s management, and, what is most important, no one felt left out or short-changed.

The club began to attend vintage car and machinery shows; a TV crew made a show about them, and it was broadcast on national television. This brought it to the attention of the governor himself, a great lover of all things vintage. To line up the heroic machines in the Red Square, just before the elections to the federal Duma, where the Governor aspired to win a seat, struck him as a brilliant political move. On top of that, an influential person from one of the forces’ ministries let it be known that, were the legendary GAZ-A to come into his possession, he could smooth out a few disagreements that had arisen between our Governor and the Kremlin.

The Governor sent a message to Bulletov.

Bulletov sternly demanded the long-promised apartments for his veterans.

At the end of April, a team of auditors descended upon the village and the prospect of serving time was revealed to Varyag’s director.

On May 9,⁶ a convoy of two tanks and three trucks delivered a strike-force of camouflage-clad Pankratov men to Stargorod’s central square. The police let them through, thinking they were costumed actors from Moscow. Once on the square, the uniformed squad unfurled banners and signs: “We’ll fight for the promised apartments!” The tanks aimed their guns at the Big House. The press snapped pictures. A special commission from the Ministry of Defense landed in Pankratovka a week later and signed a deal with the retirees that obliged the Ministry to move them all into warm apartments within two years. The event was covered in the national 9 o’clock news. The anchor spoke of the progressive trends in a government that finally dealt with its veterans. In the hubbub, Moscow quietly removed the Governor from his post. The machines were donated to the Stargorod museum. The important person never got the GAZ-A he wanted.

Bulletov won the battle and the war, but didn’t move into a new apartment. Instead, he settled in a log house on the river, not far from the village, and took up beekeeping.

A Stargorodian Herald reporter once tried to interview him. The lieutenant colonel stunned him at the door by asking: “From the intellectual point of view, does technical progress move translationally?” And then he answered it himself: “Even if it does, I’m tired of it.” Then he poured them both some mead, clinked his glass with the reporter’s and drained it. The interview was not to be, the drunk correspondent was delivered home by a bread truck that happened by.

Bulletov was not so humble, however, as he made himself out to be. He didn’t quite revert to getting around by horse and buggy; he drives a brand-new diesel UAZ and the corporation, which moved to Stargorod, pays him good dividends off its profits. When he works on his beehives, he often sings an old army song about how every soldier has a right to rest at the river’s edge.

5. In 1904, the Russian fleet was destroyed by the Japanese at Port Arthur, in the Russo-Japanese War.

6. Victory Day, celebrating the end of World War II.