armed with our false passports, we moved along up the valley of thetuba. every ten or fifteen versts we came across large villages offrom one to six hundred houses, where all administration was in thehands of soviets and where spies scrutinized all passers-by. wecould not avoid these villages for two reasons. first, ourattempts to avoid them when we were constantly meeting the peasantsin the country would have aroused suspicion and would have causedany soviet to arrest us and send us to the "cheka" in minnusinsk,where we should have sung our last song. secondly, in hisdocuments my fellow traveler was granted permission to use thegovernment post relays for forwarding him on his journey.
therefore, we were forced to visit the village soviets and changeour horses. our own mounts we had given to the tartar and cossackwho helped us at the mouth of the tuba, and the cossack brought usin his wagon to the first village, where we received the posthorses. all except a small minority of the peasants were againstthe bolsheviki and voluntarily assisted us. i paid them for theirhelp by treating their sick and my fellow traveler gave thempractical advice in the management of their agriculture. those whohelped us chiefly were the old dissenters and the cossacks.
sometimes we came across villages entirely communistic but verysoon we learned to distinguish them. when we entered a villagewith our horse bells tinkling and found the peasants who happenedto be sitting in front of their houses ready to get up with a frownand a grumble that here were more new devils coming, we knew thatthis was a village opposed to the communists and that here we couldstop in safety. but, if the peasants approached and greeted uswith pleasure, calling us "comrades," we knew at once that we wereamong the enemy and took great precautions. such villages wereinhabited by people who were not the siberian liberty-lovingpeasants but by emigrants from the ukraine, idle and drunk, livingin poor dirty huts, though their village were surrounded with theblack and fertile soil of the steppes. very dangerous and pleasantmoments we spent in the large village of karatuz. it is rather atown. in the year 1912 two colleges were opened here and thepopulation reached 15,000 people. it is the capital of the southyenisei cossacks. but by now it is very difficult to recognizethis town. the peasant emigrants and red army murdered all thecossack population and destroyed and burned most of the houses; andit is at present the center of bolshevism and communism in theeastern part of the minnusinsk district. in the building of thesoviet, where we came to exchange our horses, there was being helda meeting of the "cheka." we were immediately surrounded andquestioned about our documents. we were not any too calm about theimpression which might be made by our papers and attempted to avoidthis examination. my fellow traveler afterwards often said to me:
"it is great good fortune that among the bolsheviki the good-for-nothing shoemaker of yesterday is the governor of today andscientists sweep the streets or clean the stables of the redcavalry. i can talk with the bolsheviki because they do not knowthe difference between 'disinfection' and 'diphtheria,'
'anthracite' and 'appendicitis' and can talk them round in allthings, even up to persuading them not to put a bullet into me."and so we talked the members of the "cheka" round to everythingthat we wanted. we presented to them a bright scheme for thefuture development of their district, when we would build the roadsand bridges which would allow them to export the wood fromurianhai, iron and gold from the sayan mountains, cattle and fursfrom mongolia. what a triumph of creative work for the sovietgovernment! our ode occupied about an hour and afterwards themembers of the "cheka," forgetting about our documents, personallychanged our horses, placed our luggage on the wagon and wished ussuccess. it was the last ordeal within the borders of russia.
when we had crossed the valley of the river amyl, happiness smiledon us. near the ferry we met a member of the militia from karatuz.
he had on his wagon several rifles and automatic pistols, mostlymausers, for outfitting an expedition through urianhai in quest ofsome cossack officers who had been greatly troubling thebolsheviki. we stood upon our guard. we could very easily havemet this expedition and we were not quite assured that the soldierswould be so appreciative of our high-sounding phrases as were themembers of the "cheka." carefully questioning the militiaman, weferreted out the route their expedition was to take. in the nextvillage we stayed in the same house with him. i had to open myluggage and suddenly i noticed his admiring glance fixed upon mybag.
"what pleases you so much?" i asked.
he whispered: "trousers . . . trousers."i had received from my townsmen quite new trousers of black thickcloth for riding. those trousers attracted the rapt attention ofthe militiaman.
"if you have no other trousers. . . ." i remarked, reflecting uponmy plan of attack against my new friend.
"no," he explained with sadness, "the soviet does not furnishtrousers. they tell me they also go without trousers. and mytrousers are absolutely worn out. look at them."with these words he threw back the corner of his overcoat and i wasastonished how he could keep himself inside these trousers, forthey had such large holes that they were more of a net thantrousers, a net through which a small shark could have slipped.
"sell me," he whispered, with a question in his voice.
"i cannot, for i need them myself," i answered decisively.
he reflected for a few minutes and afterward, approaching me, said:
"let us go out doors and talk. here it is inconvenient."we went outside. "now, what about it?" he began. "you are goinginto urianhai. there the soviet bank-notes have no value and youwill not be able to buy anything, where there are plenty of sables,fox-skins, ermine and gold dust to be purchased, which they verywillingly exchange for rifles and cartridges. you have each of youa rifle and i will give you one more rifle with a hundredcartridges if you give me the trousers.""we do not need weapons. we are protected by our documents," ianswered, as though i did not understand.
"but no," he interrupted, "you can change that rifle there intofurs and gold. i shall give you that rifle outright.""ah, that's it, is it? but it's very little for those trousers.
nowhere in russia can you now find trousers. all russia goeswithout trousers and for your rifle i should receive a sable andwhat use to me is one skin?"word by word i attained to my desire. the militia-man got mytrousers and i received a rifle with one hundred cartridges and twoautomatic pistols with forty cartridges each. we were armed now sothat we could defend ourselves. moreover, i persuaded the happypossessor of my trousers to give us a permit to carry the weapons.
then the law and force were both on our side.
in a distant village we bought three horses, two for riding and onefor packing, engaged a guide, purchased dried bread, meat, salt andbutter and, after resting twenty-four hours, began our trip up theamyl toward the sayan mountains on the border of urianhai. therewe hoped not to meet bolsheviki, either sly or silly. in threedays from the mouth of the tuba we passed the last russian villagenear the mongolian-urianhai border, three days of constant contactwith a lawless population, of continuous danger and of the everpresent possibility of fortuitous death. only iron will power,presence of mind and dogged tenacity brought us through all thedangers and saved us from rolling back down our precipice ofadventure, at whose foot lay so many others who had failed to makethis same climb to freedom which we had just accomplished. perhapsthey lacked the persistence or the presence of mind, perhaps theyhad not the poetic ability to sing odes about "roads, bridges andgold mines" or perhaps they simply had no spare trousers.
