Red Ice

Yuri’s birth had been difficult and his mother had died in childbirth. A sickly child, Yuri Vyshinsky was deemed ill suited for farm work because of his delicate constitution and because… of his gift. At four, Yuri could complete basic problems in farm math flawlessly. He could play a respectable game of chess on the village’s one chessboard (which did not have carved pieces but only symbols stamped on disks). This game he played endlessly on each pech or brick oven of the many izbas—family huts—in the village.

There were some in the village who said he should be sent somewhere to learn how to read and make himself useful. Others attributed his strange aptitudes to something more sinister, in some way related to his Rumanian grandmother’s alleged Gypsy blood, and very likely to result in ill fortune. The second group announced that he would come to no account and end up in the company of fortune-tellers, actors, musicians, and mountebanks. Unknowingly, Yuri possessed a rare talent for harnessing abstractions.

That spring, a party commissar came to the village meeting. He explained the new farm policy with commendable Soviet thoroughness. It became evident that the new order placed industrialization and the well-being of the cities well above peasant sensibilities. The commissar, clearly a city man, countered sanctimoniously every awkward question with generous use of the new term kulak. The picture presented to them did not sit well with peasants who were only just getting used to the idea of owning their own land. Now someone had come to take it away. There were angry words. The Vyshinskys’ patriarch closed the meeting with an old slavic political custom, a defenestration. The commissar was lucky the meeting had been held in a typical one-story izba.

“We are not ‘kulaks,’” bellowed the senior Vyshinsky out the window to the retreating commissar. “This is hard, ungiving land. Do you think some air-sniffing Muscovite is going to tell us how to wring a living from it?”

Isolated and illiterate, the villagers were surprised when the armed men of the GPU arrived. They rounded up the families of the village and herded them to a holding camp at a railroad station tens of miles away. They awaited their unnamed Siberian destiny in despair.

“We must write Kalinin, Grandfather,” the small, awkward boy suggested one day. “Pyotr heard the train master say that he is the head of the Bolshevik government,” Yuri added shyly.

His grandfather smiled at the naïveté of his reedy grandson, but Yuri seemed to function at a level beyond them. Anyway, the assistant train master could write and seemed sympathetic. Who knew when their train would come?

The letter started, “We beg you, Comrade Kalinin, a mistake has been made. We are not ‘kulaks’ but honest peasants who wield our humble sickles in the fields….”

The Vyshinskys tried a one-in-a-million shot. In the end, no one dared to tamper with a letter addressed to one so high up. Though Stalin was the real power, Kalinin was president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Perhaps the party leaders were having second thoughts about their attack on the Russian breadbasket. Perhaps it was time to demonstrate that Soviet thoroughness could distinguish between peasants and kulaks. Perhaps Kalinin, who had made so much of his peasant background so often, found it expedient to underscore his ties once again. In any event, that fall when the train finally came, the Vyshinsky family alone was spared. Quiet young Yuri was torn between his pride of achievement and the knowledge that his playmates were gone forever.

The family’s fortunes reversed abruptly. Yuri’s grandfather was a man who corresponded with the president of the Soviet Union. Consequently, Yuri’s father was offered the position of assistant to the colonel who supervised the new collective. Yuri’s father could not admit he found the job distasteful. The family had come perilously close to oblivion and too recently for him to decline. Yet he would never really adjust to constantly thrusting himself between the system and his people. The new inhabitants of the collective were surprised that Yuri’s grandfather, once so vigorous, died not long thereafter. Yuri’s father understood and suffered on.

Yuri, his father, and his brothers weathered the foreseeable harvest of the kulak liquidation—three years of famine, the death of millions by starvation, and destruction from which Soviet agriculture never recovered.