A stretcher was prepared for me at the station. My sisters, my mother and father and the stationmaster were at the door of the coach when I was carried out. My mother shrieked in heartrending tones, “My Marusia! My Manka!” stretched her hands toward heaven and threw herself full length on me, mourning over me as if I were ready for burial.
Her prodigal daughter had returned, my mother sobbed, but in what a condition! She thought that I must have been wounded and have asked to be sent home to die. I could not speak, I could only grasp her bony arms, as my throat was choked with a tempest of tears and sobs. Everybody was crying, my sisters calling me by caressing names, my father standing over me bent and white, and even the strange stationmaster....
I became hysterical and the doctor was sent for. He had me removed home immediately, promising in response to my mother’s entreaties to do everything in his power for me. I was ill for a month, passing Christmas and meeting the New Year, 1918, in bed.
The two thousand roubles I had saved I gave to my parents. But this sum, which would have been reckoned a fortune before the war, was barely sufficient to keep us for a few months. It cost nearly a hundred roubles (about £10 11s.) to buy a pair of shoes for my youngest sister, Nadia, who was going about barefoot! It cost almost twice as much to buy her a second-hand jacket at the Tomsk market. Manufactured goods sold at a premium when they were to be had, but it was much more difficult to find what one needed than to pay an exorbitant price for it. There was plenty of flour in the country. But the peasants would not sell it cheaply because they could get nothing in town for less than fifty or a hundred times its former price. The result was that flour sold at sixty roubles (about £6 6s. 8d.) a pud (32 pounds)! It may be imagined how far two thousand roubles would carry one in Russia.
Tutalsk had also been swept by the hurricane of Bolshevism. There were many soldiers who had returned from the front imbued with Bolshevik teachings. Just before my arrival the newly-fledged heretics even burned the village church, to the great horror of the older inhabitants. It was not an unusual case; it was typical of the time. Hundreds of thousands of deluded young men had returned from the trenches with the passion to destroy, to tear down everything that had existed before: the old system of Government, the church, nay, God Himself—all in preparation for the new order of life they were going to establish.
But one institution—the scourge of the nation—they failed to wipe out. Nay more, they restored it. The Tsar had abolished vodka. The prohibition was continued in force by the new régime, but only on paper. Nearly every returned soldier took to distilling vodka at home, and the old plague of the country recovered its power and took its part in the building of the Bolsheviks’ new world.
Every town and village had its committee or Soviet. They were supposed to carry out orders from the Central Government. An order was issued to confiscate all articles of gold and silver. Committees searched every house for such belongings. There was, also, or was supposed to be, an order taxing furniture and clothes. When the taxes arbitrarily demanded were not paid, the furniture and clothes were taken away.
In the towns it was the townsmen who suffered, in the villages the peasants, all under the pretext of confiscating the riches of the bourgeoisie. It was sufficient for a peasant to buy a new overcoat, perhaps with his last savings, for him to be branded as an exploiter and lose his precious garment. The peculiar thing about such cases was the fact that the confiscated article would almost invariably appear on the back of one of the Bolshevik ringleaders. It was merely looting, and the methods were pure terrorism, practised mostly by the returned soldiers.
I received some letters at Tutalsk. One was from my adjutant, Princess Tatuyeva, who had arrived safely in Tiflis, her native town.
One morning I went to the post office to ask for letters.