Stepanovna continued to be a good friend. Dmitri’s regiment was removed to a town in the interior, and Dmitri, reluctant though he was to leave the capital, docilely followed, influenced largely by the new regimental commissar who had succeeded in making himself popular—a somewhat rare achievement amongst commissars. Even Stepanovna admitted this unusual circumstance, allowing that the commissar was a poriadotchny tchelovziek, i. e. a decent person, “although he was a Communist,” and she thus acquiesced in Dmitri’s departure.
It was in Stepanovna’s company that I first witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of an armed raid by the Bolshevist authorities on a public market. Running across her in the busy Siennaya Square one morning I found she had been purchasing meat, which was a rare luxury. She had an old black shawl over her head and carried a bast basket on her arm.
“Where did you get the meat?” I asked. “I will buy some too.”
“Don’t,” she said, urgently. “In the crowd they are whispering that there is going to be a raid.”
“What sort of a raid?”
“On the meat, I suppose. Yesterday and to-day the peasants have been bringing it in and I have got a little. I don’t want to lose it. They say the Reds are coming.”
Free-trading being clearly opposed to the principles of Communism, it was officially forbidden and denounced as “speculation.” But no amount of restriction could suppress it, and the peasants brought food in to the hungry townspeople despite all obstacles and sold it at their own prices. The only remedy the authorities had for this “capitalist evil” was armed force, and even that was ineffective.
The meat was being sold by the peasants in a big glass-covered shed. One of these sheds was burnt down in 1919, and the only object that remained intact was an ikon in the corner. Thousands came to see the ikon that had been “miraculously” preserved, but it was hastily taken away by the authorities. The ikon had apparently been overlooked, for it was the practice of the Bolsheviks to remove all religious symbols from public places.
I moved toward the building to make my purchase, but Stepanovna tugged me by the arm.
“Don’t be mad,” she exclaimed. “Don’t you realize, if there is a raid, they will arrest everybody?”