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PINEGA
The Orthodox Church of Russia is hated by the Soviets with an intense and vehement hatred, for the institution of kings was sustained by religion even more effectively than by the Imperial Guards. Therefore, no opportunity to deride reverend personages and sacred objects is ever neglected by the Bolsheviks, or to violate with leering and uncouth pleasure, the hallowed worship places.
Under the nimbose influence of Red Moscow, the religious precepts of the people will be snatched ruthlessly from them. Harsh and unyielding though these precepts be, they are the only note of spirituality in the life of the moujik, and without them he wallows in a mire of crass animalism. There was in Holy Russia many a homily in patience and honesty and humility; but will these homely virtues endure in the arid waste and the spiritless air of agnosticism?
At Pinega, some ninety miles east of Archangel (and nearly one hundred fifty on the devious road), the cleric party was well fortified, and the outstanding civic feature of the city was the ancient monastery, standing commandingly at the edge of Lake Soyla.
The Pinega monks were quite naturally opposed to the Bolsheviks, but the mayor was a Soviet, and the city was divided in allegiance between White Archangel and Red Moscow when the detachment of Americans came in October.
The Americans' presence shepherded the wavering ones to the fold. A company of Home Guards was organized, and from outward signs the cause of the Allies had ascended to triumph. But the surrounding Bolsheviks were far from disbanded. They gathered in much strength under the leadership of Kulikoff, a competent horsethief, and commenced to plunder the slender, household larders of the peasants in the lower Pinega valley, to whose succor a police force of thirty-five Americans and two hundred White Russians were dispatched in mid-November. This police party penetrated eighty miles southeast and took Karpagora, after an engagement, but early in December was overpowered by the returning Bolsheviks. A few of the Americans were killed, more wounded, and the rest went back to Pinega, posting the White Russians in outlying villages as they retired.
So critical was the outlook that another American detachment came the one hundred and fifty miles from Archangel, ten days' journey in the darkness and the cold. But, more important to Pinega than these Christmas reinforcements, was Joel R. Moore, who came with them, wearing the shoulder straps of an infantry captain for the time in being, but whose life profession was that of college instruction, as skilled in applied humanity as the classical Humanities, and possessed of tact and understanding and sympathy, and that indefinable gift of leadership. He organized the Russians for their own defense in this bloody internecine fight, and shamed their leaders to vivid consciousness of dreadful responsibility to their pitifully dependent people.
In February, a vicious and prolonged attack in conjunction with the great Vaga offensive was made on Pinega, but the defense was well held, and when the situation looked most strained, and the fall of the city almost sure, the Bolsheviks slackened and fell back without overt cause or reason for relenting in their fierce assault, just as they did on the Vaga when the life of the Expedition was the stake.
No soldier who was in it will ever forget that mid-winter march from Archangel in gray days and cold, when the spruce trees cracked in the frost with the report of rifle shots; when the wind, a blearing blast, swept down and piled great billowy swells on the whitened trail, covered men head and foot like powdered, clownish figures, plastered their eyelids and nostrils grotesquely white with hoary frost, and flicked snow particles under headgear where they stung with the sting of pelting sand; other days when oppressive calm would stifle the air with the mystery of eternal stillness, jarringly profaned by the crunch of heavy, marching feet, the shambling of the little convoy ponies; and the tenacious trail would lower to great sheeted space, that swelled to the summit of long hills where village roofs were etched in steel on a burnished background, where the ineffectual sun strove vainly to thrust back imprisoning cloud curtains, slate hued and black.