I was for shooting the two soldiers; they were both Communists and belonged to the Gpu troops. But Bezsonoff persuaded me not to do so, arguing that an act of vengeance at such a moment was useless, and that no one would gain anything by it.
At that moment the Kuban Cossack, who had flung himself on the ground in surprise, stretched out his hands to us, and cried:
"Little brothers, don't kill me!"
We calmed him.
"What are you making all this noise about, you fool? Nobody's going to kill you. The freedom you had in the Solovky Kalinin gave you, we give you the freedom you have now. Do as you like. If you go back to the camp you'll be shot. If you come with us, there's a risk there too. Or, if you like, go south on your own, to the Kuban. We can do without you. Do as you like."
The Cossack came with us. His name, by the way, was Pribludin.
We had decided long before to cover our tracks in every possible way. Our real objective being the frontier between Russia and Finland, which lay to westward, we went due north for twenty miles along the railway embankment, taking the two Red soldiers with us. After covering nine miles, we sent one of the soldiers off in a westerly direction, and the second when we had gone eleven miles, first taking off their boots. We reckoned that even if they found the way back they would not reach the camp before the following morning.
We came to a railwayman's hut. We asked the pointsman to sell us bread (we had six tchervontsy, which we had saved while we were preparing to escape), but the man, apparently a Communist, refused. We had to take the food by force. We loaded up Pribludin, Sazonoff and Malbrodsky with the provisions and went on for three miles in a northerly direction, then turned east, then south, and came back almost to the same place from which we had started northward two days before. We crossed the railway embankment and steered due west.
During these first days we walked without a break, either by day or by, night. The "rests" mentioned in Bezsonoff's diary, which he kept on the inside of the cover of his Bible, were halts of a few minutes only for food. Our weariness soon began to make itself felt. There were no roads; our route lay over damp ground, covered with thick undergrowth, and endless marshes. Bezsonoff, who had constituted himself an inexorable dictator to the rest of us, brandished a rifle under the nose of anyone who stopped even for a minute, and threatened to kill him on the spot. At the time we thought him cruel, but I know now that the merciless insistence of our "dictator" contributed in a high degree to the success of our flight.
We changed direction sharply once again and marched southward, towards the river Kem. A snowstorm overtook us. The violence of the tempest blew us off our legs. My boots got burnt through at a fire; luckily I had an old pair of goloshes with me, and put them on, winding strips of rag round my legs. It is possible that the fearful blizzard, which caused us such hardships, benefited us at the same time, for the snow covered our tracks.