The afternoon lunch break had just come to an end, and eighteen year old Amanda Davis proudly held her chin up high as she marched out in front of her zveno work crew. As a devout Trotskyist, Amanda zealously embraced the doctrine of global revolution, and she eagerly looked forward to the day in which all the peoples of the world would live under the umbrella of a stateless communist utopia.
By the same token, and perhaps a bit because of her youthful innocence and idealistic naiveté, she tended to fancy herself as a revolutionary hero of the people, and she also liked to believe that her steely gaze and stiff necked body posture made her look just like one of those valiant figures depicted in the propaganda posters adorning the worker's commissary. As Amanda so often explained to her fellow zveno directors, during their weekly committee meetings: How could the workers in her charge be expected to follow her orders, if she herself didn't set a good example by looking and acting like a proper revolutionary leader?
A sudden stray breeze off the Kazakh Steppe caused the red scarf that she wore around her neck to annoyingly flip up over her face for several long seconds, and the disruptive gust nearly snatched away the straw hat that she liked to wear atop her head at a jaunty angle, if not for the leather string firmly cinched below her flawless jawline. Amanda managed to maintain her stoic demeanor, in spite of the turbulent wind blowing across the dusty fields, and the heels of her goose steeping boots never fell out of cadence as she led her formation of workers back towards the communal cotton field they had been assigned to pick.
Each of the workers following at Amanda’s back carried a large picking sack loosely bundled beneath an arm, as they marched in lockstep with their leader. The marching workers enthusiastically sang out a revolutionary anthem, calling for the immediate forceful liberation of all oppressed workers throughout the world, as they slowly made their way back to another laborious round of picking in the hot afternoon sun.
However, rather than toting a burlap picking sack beneath her own underarm, Amanda instead used her long powerful arms to hold aloft a large crimson banner boldly emblazoned with the English words, LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S WAR - DOWN WITH CAPITALISM! Amanda herself had selected the radical slogan for the official banner of her zveno, and just now she held the wooden flag pole, arms straight out from her torso, as she heartily sang along with the commonplace workers at the top of her lungs, “...Come comrades and join our fight, and in this last battle we shall all unite. Soon the sound of our bullets shall disturb the oppressor's ear, and then we shall break the chains of hatred greed and fear...”
The brigade of workers tending this particular collective was made up entirely of black migrants from America, many of them survivors of the grisly death camps that had once operated in the now defunct Confederate States of America. After the 1947 Revolution, Premier Trotsky himself had invited the workers of the world to join the revolution by coming to Russia, and as a result, untold numbers had come from all over the globe, including an estimated five hundred thousand black refugees from America. Many historians considered the exodus of black refugees to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to be the largest human migration in modern history, but few people living outside of Russia knew the exact fate of the black expatriates who had come to the RSFSR seeking a better life.
Many of the black laborers now toiling away on collective farms throughout Russia’s Central Asia region held fervid dreams of someday returning home in order to establish a permanent black socialist republic on American soil, but thus far the Kremlin had shown little interest in supplying them with the necessary weaponry or training to do so.
Amanda herself had only the vaguest recollections of the first four years of her life spent in a US government refugee camp just outside of Snyder, Texas. Her long ago childhood memories of life in America were more or less limited to a few hazy fragments of being fed by US soldiers, sleeping beside her mother in a surplus army tent, and playing with the handful of other black children living in the refugee camp. She had no real firsthand knowledge of life in modern America, to speak of, and Amanda's strident anti-American views were largely based upon the heavy-handed indoctrination she had received while growing up in a community of displaced black Marxists living in a remote corner of Red Russia.
According to Amanda's view of history, which just so happened to be a view shared by a great many black migrants now residing in the RSFSR, the people of the United States were just as guilty as the citizens of the former Confederacy for the unspeakable atrocities that had occurred in the Confederate run death camps. The common belief was that the US government hadn’t done enough, and that it had acted far too slowly in liberating the murderous camps from Confederate hands. Some even went so far as to suggest that the United States didn’t want to fully crush the Confederate States, until after the Freedom Party had completely eliminated blacks from all Confederate territory. This was a view taught to black children growing up in Red Russia, as undeniable fact, and when Amanda thought of her own young mother languishing away in Camp Determination, during the war, her blood boiled with a seething anger towards the United States of America.
Her oversized work boots, she thought of them as a soldier's pair of boots, kicked up an unending progression of miniature dust clouds each and every time her heel came down upon the hot dusty dirt road. Likewise the parade of workers marching to her rear left an impressive swirling dust storm in their wake that could be observed from well over a mile away.
Amanda grimaced slightly as the tiny granules rose up from her feet. It simply couldn't be helped, the gritty red dust landed everywhere, including her eyes, nose, throat and bare legs; but for some unknowable reason, the evil little dust grains seemed to prefer clinging to her highly polished work boots above all else. To Amanda it seemed almost as if the vile capitalists had somehow managed to entice the filthy specs of dirt to stick to her feet in order to sap her revolutionary drive. Tonight she would have to put some extra effort into cleaning and polishing her treasured boots, in order to make them look presentable for the following morning. After all, the collective's political commissar himself had ceremoniously presented them to her when she had been newly promoted to the position of zveno director, a position similar to shop director in a collective factory. It was a moment she would proudly cherish forever.
The crew of workers abruptly concluded their singing upon reaching the edge of the field, and they quickly fanned out amongst the rows of cotton plants waiting to be picked. Off in the distance an occasional dust devil, or two, danced across the broad plain under the brooding sky. The leaves of the cotton plants themselves had begun to turn brown, almost the same color as the dry sandy soil, and the white cotton bolls waiting to be harvested stood out in sharp contrast to everything else in the surrounding parched landscape.
Amanda assumed her position of authority atop the harvest wagon parked near the middle of the field. The harvest wagon was a somewhat modern affair mounted on rubber tires designed to be pulled along behind a steam powered traction engine. The engine and harvest wagon had once been used by the Kaiser's men in a failed bid to grow cotton in German occupied Ukraine, but back in 1946 the running dog imperialist Germans had been forced to abandon their harvester, and to flee for their lives in the face of a massive Red uprisings amongst the glorious Ukrainian peasantry.
Today, roughly sixteen years later, the dilapidated traction engine sat uselessly along the edge of a communal field in Central Asia, for want of a field mechanic skilled enough to fix its leaky boiler. In the interim, one of the carpenters had affixed a long wooden tongue to the front of the German made wagon so that it could be moved about by a team of horses. Typically once the wagon had been topped off with harvested cotton, Amanda would then summon a fresh wagon from the mill by raising a green signal flag from her platform. A driver would then bring out a new wagon, pulled by a team of horses, deposit the empty wagon in the spot indicated by Amanda, and haul away the full wagon back to the mill. At the moment the empty tongue of the wagon rested in the dirt, as the wagon was slowly filled.
Amanda slipped her zveno flagpole into a makeshift bracket attached to the side of her workstation; she turned about in her small standing area opened the top of a small rickety wooden desk, and quickly snatched out a ledger-book used to record the productivity of each of her workers. Amanda reached down below her desk without looking, as she had done so many times before, and she nimbly retrieved an old-fashioned unpowered bullhorn that she used to communicate with her workers.
A handful of the more experienced members of her zveno were able to pick up to three hundred pounds in a single day, but most of the workers in Amanda's crew averaged less than half of that. It would be sometime before the first of the more productive workers began to approach the harvest wagon, dragging their full sacks of cotton between the rows of plants, and in the meanwhile Amanda intended to keep her flock motivated by peppering them with Marxist slogans as they worked.
“In the past we were forced to pick cotton as slaves in the plutocratic Confederate States of America! But today we are picking cotton in order to support the world wide revolution against the capitalist system of the oppressors! Every cotton boll that we pick brings the oppressed workers of the world that much closer to liberation! The fruits of our labor shall be used to create uniforms for the glorious proletariat soldiers who shall be sent out to liberate the rest of the world from German and American imperialism!”
Amanda was a true believer in Marxist-Trotsky ideology, and she was just now getting herself warmed up.
“Here in Russia the workers have liberated themselves from the tyrannical rule of the old Russian Czar, and in China, Chairman Mao Zedong has swept away the oppressive culture of the past by establishing the People's Republic of China! From Tehran, in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, to Nagano, in the Democratic Republic of Japan, the workers have been united under the cause of global revolution, and soon they shall raise up to smash the obsolete reactionary regimes out of existence. Today, nearly half of the world's population lives under the red banner, and the faltering capitalist system cannot stand against our collective might! Tomorrow the Red Army will drive the Germans out of Poland forever, and they will keep on going all the way until they reach Berlin!” Even Amanda had to admit that the idea of the Red Army driving all the way to Berlin was a bit fanciful, and everyone remembered the humiliating bloody nose that the Red Army had received when it had attempted to liberate Poland from German hands a decade earlier back in 1952.
The workers kept their heads bent low as they quickly and efficiently filled their bags, seemingly indifferent to Amanda's unending speech. Occasionally someone would put their bag down and head over the berm at the far end of the field to visit the latrine, but for the most part her crew remained continually productive, which was just the way that she liked it.
A little over an hour later the first of the pickers approached the wagon with a full bag of cotton to be dumped. Josephus Alexander was one of the more irascible members of the zveno, but he was also one of the most productive as well. At approximately forty five years of age, Josephus wore a sour look upon his face, a face that Amanda might have found handsome if not for the huge age gap between them, as he wordlessly dragged his full bag of cotton forward by the purse like strap around his neck.
Josephus ignored Amanda as he mutely climbed onto the running board at the rear of the wagon, and single handedly hung his picking sack on the weigh up scale suspended from an overhead wooden boom. Josephus slid the two weights back and forth until the needle balanced at the end of the scale arm. “FIFTY THREE POUNDS!” Josephus called out in a voice loud enough to make a drill sergeant proud. Amanda dutifully entered the figure in her ledger-book as Josephus deposited his load atop the growing mound in the center of the bed.
At only six and a half feet in length, the picking sacks used on the collective were much smaller than the sacks that had once been used in the old Confederacy, which were up to twelve and a half feet in length. The smaller sacks were much easier for the workers to drag through the field as they picked cotton bolls, and part of the intension behind implementing the smaller picking sacks was to demonstrate to the black workers how much the Communist Party cared for their wellbeing.
“The oppressed workers of the world thank you for your diligent efforts, Josephus.” Amanda always felt somewhat uneasy in the presence of Josephus, and she wasn't exactly certain how she should deal with such a quarrelsome subordinate in her ranks.
Rather than responding to her words directly, Josephus briefly eyeballed her from the rear of the wagon for a few seconds before gruffly removing the top of a small barrel mounted near the tailgate and then using a wooden handled ladle to draw an exceptionally long drink of water. Josephus let out a dramatic sigh of satisfaction before retrieving his empty sack and hopping back down to ground level. His bare feet kicked up twin plumes of dust as they landed on the powdery earth.
“You are doing your part to support the revolution,” Amanda informed him with crisp certainty in her voice. Josephus stopped dead in his tracks and paused briefly as he used the backside of his thick wrist to push the brim of his somewhat crumbled straw hat up from his face.
“Revolution! You want to talk to me about revolution?” Josephus responded in an exasperated tone. Uh-oh, Amanda thought to herself, this was exactly the sort of wild outburst she wanted to avoid.
“Let me tell you something, li'l Miss Davis, during the last war I spent two and a half years marching around in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia, fighting in the guerrilla resistance movement against the CSA!” Josephus said as he viscously thumbed his own bare chest. “I don't care what anyone else has to say, we destroyed the Confederate oppressors ourselves, and I personally killed more goddamn ofay than I can possibly care to remember, so don't lecture me about revolution!”
“Yes, you are right, but now we need to continue that revolution, and to extend it on to other oppressed peoples as well.” However, in her own mind, Amanda didn't really consider any of the quasi black socialist republics that had once existed on Confederate soil to be successful Marxist revolutions, because none of those abortive states had been able to establish a permanent existence, or to export its revolution to the rest of America. What's more, by all accounts women were never treated equally in the black socialist republics, and there was never any attempt on the part of the black leadership to implement any sort of collectivism within the territory they held. How could the circumstances in the transitory black socialist republics possibly be compared to the long lasting socialist revolutions that had occurred throughout much of the world following the end of the Second Great War?
“Josephus continued, “If you ask me, this here Rusky collective ain't no goddamn better than a fucking Confederate slave plantation, and we've been stuck out here since 1957, when that goddamn ofay in Moscow decided to kick our black asses out of European Russia! How much longer is they planning on keeping us exiled out here in the middle of nowhere, Amanda, can you answer me that?” Josephus placed his hands on his hips as he gave Amanda a skeptical stare.
Amanda stared back at Josephus with a complete sense of dumbfounded shock. The idiotic man was straying into some very dangerous territory, and such counter-revolutionary claptrap could land the entire zveno in hot water if word happened to reach the wrong set of ears. She quickly scanned the surrounding area for any white faces, but did not find any. For the most part, the relatively small number of Russians functionaries present on the collective tended to congregate in the mill, and they generally only came out into the cotton fields a few times a week. However, Amanda considered it blind luck that no one in higher authority happened to be about when Josephus had foolishly decided to display his obstructionist views to the whole world, and above all else she didn't want this craven imbecile standing before her to sully the honor of the entire zveno in the eyes of the blessed Russians.
A few of the other worker seemed to sense that something was amiss at the harvest wagon, and they patiently waited some distance away with their full sacks before coming any closer.
Amanda spoke as though she were explaining something to a particularly slow student, “When we were forced to grow cotton as slaves in the Confederacy, our labor enriched the pockets of the plantation owners, and they grew wealthy on our backs. No one here in Russia is profiting from your labor, Josephus, and the work we perform here is to support the coming global revolution.”
“All I know is that if I would have stayed back home in America, I'd be a US citizen right now, and I'd be collecting reparations for being a former black resident of the CSA. Now look at me over here, I'm no better off than my goddamn grandfather was in his day!” Amanda did take a good look at him, and inwardly she had to admit that his dark weather beaten skin, bare feet, straw hat, ragged dungarees tied off at the waist with a with a cord, along with a tattered open shirt made him look for all the world like the old tintype photographs she had seen of slaves in the Confederacy before manumission had occurred in the 1880s.
“There are no whips here, everyone is treated as equals, and we all share equally in the fruits of our labor! Take a look around you, Josephus,” Amanda exclaimed as she gestured around the wide field with her ledger-book, “Do you see any plantation mansions here on our collective? Do you see any stovepipe hat wearing oppressors wondering how much profit they can earn from selling your children? Do you see anyone being put outside the gate because they are too old, sick, or weak to work any longer?
Josephus has been knocked back on his heels, and he stammered for a few moments while he considered his rebuttal. “Do you want to know why those boots they gave you are too goddamned big on your feet, Amanda?” Josephus proclaimed as he pointed an accusatory finger at the shoes on her feet. “Those boots are too goddamn big for you because they were originally meant for me! That's right, think about it, who is the number one worker around here? Me, I'm the number one picker, that's who! Everyone around here knows that the only reason you were made director is because that Venezuelan school teacher you've been rolling in the hay with just so happens to be a member of the collective planning committee!” Josephus nodded his head in an affirmative gesture to finish things off.
Amanda exploded into a blind rage. “Get your stupid black ass back to work this very minute, or else!” she proclaimed with as much imperious fury as any Confederate overseer might have ever displayed. Josephus gave her a hearty laugh as he turned and began to slowly amble his way back towards the row of plants he had been working on. He knew he had won, and for the moment he felt contented. Fortunately the rest of her day went rather uneventfully.
Later that evening she recounted her fiery exchange with the infamous Josephus to her fiancé, Pablo Gutierrez. Pablo laughed and said in an all knowing manner, “Well, if you’re going to be the director of a zveno, then you're just going to have to learn how to deal with stubborn thick-headed peasants such as Josephus. I'm afraid that it just comes with the territory, My Dear.”
Pablo and Amanda lived in the same two-room cottage along with Amanda's mother, and at the moment Amanda was washing her face in front of the mirror, while Pablo idly sat at the kitchen table drinking vodka. Amanda's mother was a member of the zveno responsible for tending the collective's vegetable gardens, and she had not yet arrived home from work.
“It's not his stubbornness that bothers me,” Amanda answered as she admired her own dazzling blue-green eyes and caramel skin in the mirror, “It is the fact that he seems to hold such hostile feelings towards our revolution, and that he openly wishes to live in the United States! Doesn't he know about the great slums that exist in places such as New York City, and how can he be so ignorant of the fact that American workers are routinely worked to death in all those dangerous armament factories that they have over there? The American worker has no rights, they have no control over production, and Josephus is a complete fool for wanting to live in such a terrible place!”
Pablo came up behind her and buried his face in her neck. Amanda giggled like a child as his long whiskers tickled her cheek. Pablo said, “I know, I know, My Dear. Five or ten years ago men could be killed for making such careless comments, but these days our glorious Premier Sharangovich wishes to put a more human face upon socialism, and he has ordered the NKPD to take a more compassionate approach towards illiterate oafs such as our dear friend comrade Josephus.” The official portrait of Vasily Sharangovich was one of the few adornments hanging on the bare walls of the cottage. The caption at the bottom of his portrait read, Vasily Sharangovich - Premier of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.
“He can't be allowed to run around spouting such nonsense, he'll upset the other members of the zveno, and who knows where that could lead,” Amanda said as she playfully shooed Pablo away so she could finish washing up. Pablo sauntered back to his chair and picked up his glass of state distilled vodka. Although he had never been a soldier himself, he enjoyed dressing in military fatigues and polished combat boots. His black beret lay on the table next to his half-finished bottle. Although he was ten years her senior, Amanda thought of him as a very handsome man, and she adored him dearly. Her mother did not necessarily share the same opinion.
“Well, in my opinion you should simply ignore his grumblings,” Pablo offered as he relaxed in his chair and crossed his long legs. “No doubt Josephus would be hauled away for some very intensive questioning, if you were to make an official complaint to the political commissar, but keep in mind that he is one of your very best pickers, and if he is taken away...” he then shrugged and made a who knows gesture with his hands. “After all, if we happen to report everyone who voices some sort of petty complaint, then there would be absolutely no one left to run our collective farm, and how would that situation help to promote our revolution?” Pablo added as an afterthought.
“Do you know what else he said?” Amanda asked as she turned away from her own reflection in the mirror, “He said that the only reason I was made director, was because I was sleeping with you.” Pablo dismissively waved a hand as his face put on a disinterested frown. Amanda was slightly disappointed that this latest disclosure hadn't sent him into jealous fit. It seemed as though the older she got, the less she understood men in general. She took a step closer to him, her heavy boots clopping loudly on the unfinished pine floor, and she intensified her questioning gaze as her eyes drilled holes in him searching for the truth.
“Do not listen to anything that Josephus has to say, the man is an illiterate animal, and his words are of no consequence to anyone,” Pablo announced in a haughty tone. Amanda continued to stare, waiting for a more definitive answer. “Well, it is true that he was at one time considered for the position of director, but after he was summoned in front of the planning committee, it soon became apparent that he was unsuitable for such a role. The man cannot even write his own name, let alone recite Marxist theory, and besides, he isn't even a member of the Communist Party. The entire planning committee agreed that he is incapable of leading anyone, save for possibly another stupid donkey such as himself, and in the end that is why he was not given the position.”
“So then, I wasn't made director just because of our relationship?”
“Of course not, don't be so silly, My Dear,” Pablo assured her as he took a stiff slug of his cheap vodka. “The committee selected you because of your dedication to the revolution, and your ability to recite Marxist theory. Also, you're excellent at keeping accurate records, and until the German traction engine broke down, you were one of the few people who weren’t afraid to drive it.” Amanda beamed with the praise she had just received, and Pablo was relieved that she appeared to accept his explanation of things.
Relieved, Amanda returned to the mirror to inspect herself for any remaining grime. She intently scrutinized her long slightly curved nose, high cheekbones, and high forehead, because those areas tended to be susceptible to acne due to her somewhat oily skin. She had her mother's eyes and mouth, there was no doubt about that, but she often wondered why she looked so different from everyone else on the collective. Occasionally someone would complement her on her exotic beauty, and ask her if she had Cherokee blood in her ancestry, but honestly, Amanda had no clue, and her mother had never been very forthcoming regarding her father.
“Don't you think that I should at least report Josephus' negative remarks to the political commissar? When I was appointed director, the commissar warned me that German and American agents might try to take advantage of those who did not have a firm enough belief in the cause of our revolution,” Amanda informed him as she used the corner of a small ragged cloth to remove a stubborn smudge of dirt from her pointed chin.
Ay caramba! The girl was such an incredible dullard, just like her mother, Pablo thought to himself. How many times did she need to go over the same problem before she finally figured out the answers? Didn't she have any clue as to how the real world operated? Apparently not! To make matters worse her asinine zealousness had caught the eye of the head commissar, so her ass had to be constantly kissed as though she herself held the same status as a commissar! Pablo himself was still somewhat on probation after that incident two years ago in Moscow with an under aged female student, and it had been made crystal clear to him that one more mistake would land him in a Siberian labor camp. He was hoping to ride Amanda's coattails back up to the top, but so far his plan had proven excruciatingly difficult to endure, and if it wasn't for the sex, Pablo had no idea how he would possibly manage to tolerate her simplemindedness. He kept his annoyances to himself, as he managed to give her question a few seconds of serious consideration.
Pablo answered, “Oh well, perhaps, he is just feeling a bit demoralized for some reason or another. Since tomorrow is Sunday, I think that I shall invite comrade Josephus to go fishing along with some of my amigos, up at the reservoir. You know, get him away from the collective farm for one day, and help him to clear his mind a bit. He can tell us all about his old revolutionary exploits in the Confederacy, and so on. It will be a lovely time, and I'm sure that afterwards Josephus will be a much happier man, you shall see.” The way that Pablo saw it, anything that caused Amanda trouble, would ultimately cause him trouble on down the road as well.
Josephus gave Amanda a calculatingly vindictive stare from behind a partially broken nose and swollen eyelids during formation time the following Monday morning. Nevertheless, during a dinner conversation the night before, Pablo, who had mysteriously chipped a tooth during his fishing expedition, had managed to assure her that Josephus had seen the errors of his previous ways, and that he was now one hundred percent committed to the revolution. Consequently, Amanda failed to investigate what was going on under the brim of Josephus' curiously down turned hat, and she might have been completely shocked if she had noticed the shocking injuries to his face. Josephus never again picked three hundred pounds of cotton in a single day, during his remaining time on the collective, but Amanda did notice that. For better or worse, Amanda had managed to earn the title of the “Iron Bitch” amongst the members of her zveno, and for the time being, her crew kept their heads down as they picked cotton.
By the same token, and perhaps a bit because of her youthful innocence and idealistic naiveté, she tended to fancy herself as a revolutionary hero of the people, and she also liked to believe that her steely gaze and stiff necked body posture made her look just like one of those valiant figures depicted in the propaganda posters adorning the worker's commissary. As Amanda so often explained to her fellow zveno directors, during their weekly committee meetings: How could the workers in her charge be expected to follow her orders, if she herself didn't set a good example by looking and acting like a proper revolutionary leader?
A sudden stray breeze off the Kazakh Steppe caused the red scarf that she wore around her neck to annoyingly flip up over her face for several long seconds, and the disruptive gust nearly snatched away the straw hat that she liked to wear atop her head at a jaunty angle, if not for the leather string firmly cinched below her flawless jawline. Amanda managed to maintain her stoic demeanor, in spite of the turbulent wind blowing across the dusty fields, and the heels of her goose steeping boots never fell out of cadence as she led her formation of workers back towards the communal cotton field they had been assigned to pick.
Each of the workers following at Amanda’s back carried a large picking sack loosely bundled beneath an arm, as they marched in lockstep with their leader. The marching workers enthusiastically sang out a revolutionary anthem, calling for the immediate forceful liberation of all oppressed workers throughout the world, as they slowly made their way back to another laborious round of picking in the hot afternoon sun.
However, rather than toting a burlap picking sack beneath her own underarm, Amanda instead used her long powerful arms to hold aloft a large crimson banner boldly emblazoned with the English words, LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S WAR - DOWN WITH CAPITALISM! Amanda herself had selected the radical slogan for the official banner of her zveno, and just now she held the wooden flag pole, arms straight out from her torso, as she heartily sang along with the commonplace workers at the top of her lungs, “...Come comrades and join our fight, and in this last battle we shall all unite. Soon the sound of our bullets shall disturb the oppressor's ear, and then we shall break the chains of hatred greed and fear...”
The brigade of workers tending this particular collective was made up entirely of black migrants from America, many of them survivors of the grisly death camps that had once operated in the now defunct Confederate States of America. After the 1947 Revolution, Premier Trotsky himself had invited the workers of the world to join the revolution by coming to Russia, and as a result, untold numbers had come from all over the globe, including an estimated five hundred thousand black refugees from America. Many historians considered the exodus of black refugees to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to be the largest human migration in modern history, but few people living outside of Russia knew the exact fate of the black expatriates who had come to the RSFSR seeking a better life.
Many of the black laborers now toiling away on collective farms throughout Russia’s Central Asia region held fervid dreams of someday returning home in order to establish a permanent black socialist republic on American soil, but thus far the Kremlin had shown little interest in supplying them with the necessary weaponry or training to do so.
Amanda herself had only the vaguest recollections of the first four years of her life spent in a US government refugee camp just outside of Snyder, Texas. Her long ago childhood memories of life in America were more or less limited to a few hazy fragments of being fed by US soldiers, sleeping beside her mother in a surplus army tent, and playing with the handful of other black children living in the refugee camp. She had no real firsthand knowledge of life in modern America, to speak of, and Amanda's strident anti-American views were largely based upon the heavy-handed indoctrination she had received while growing up in a community of displaced black Marxists living in a remote corner of Red Russia.
According to Amanda's view of history, which just so happened to be a view shared by a great many black migrants now residing in the RSFSR, the people of the United States were just as guilty as the citizens of the former Confederacy for the unspeakable atrocities that had occurred in the Confederate run death camps. The common belief was that the US government hadn’t done enough, and that it had acted far too slowly in liberating the murderous camps from Confederate hands. Some even went so far as to suggest that the United States didn’t want to fully crush the Confederate States, until after the Freedom Party had completely eliminated blacks from all Confederate territory. This was a view taught to black children growing up in Red Russia, as undeniable fact, and when Amanda thought of her own young mother languishing away in Camp Determination, during the war, her blood boiled with a seething anger towards the United States of America.
Her oversized work boots, she thought of them as a soldier's pair of boots, kicked up an unending progression of miniature dust clouds each and every time her heel came down upon the hot dusty dirt road. Likewise the parade of workers marching to her rear left an impressive swirling dust storm in their wake that could be observed from well over a mile away.
Amanda grimaced slightly as the tiny granules rose up from her feet. It simply couldn't be helped, the gritty red dust landed everywhere, including her eyes, nose, throat and bare legs; but for some unknowable reason, the evil little dust grains seemed to prefer clinging to her highly polished work boots above all else. To Amanda it seemed almost as if the vile capitalists had somehow managed to entice the filthy specs of dirt to stick to her feet in order to sap her revolutionary drive. Tonight she would have to put some extra effort into cleaning and polishing her treasured boots, in order to make them look presentable for the following morning. After all, the collective's political commissar himself had ceremoniously presented them to her when she had been newly promoted to the position of zveno director, a position similar to shop director in a collective factory. It was a moment she would proudly cherish forever.
The crew of workers abruptly concluded their singing upon reaching the edge of the field, and they quickly fanned out amongst the rows of cotton plants waiting to be picked. Off in the distance an occasional dust devil, or two, danced across the broad plain under the brooding sky. The leaves of the cotton plants themselves had begun to turn brown, almost the same color as the dry sandy soil, and the white cotton bolls waiting to be harvested stood out in sharp contrast to everything else in the surrounding parched landscape.
Amanda assumed her position of authority atop the harvest wagon parked near the middle of the field. The harvest wagon was a somewhat modern affair mounted on rubber tires designed to be pulled along behind a steam powered traction engine. The engine and harvest wagon had once been used by the Kaiser's men in a failed bid to grow cotton in German occupied Ukraine, but back in 1946 the running dog imperialist Germans had been forced to abandon their harvester, and to flee for their lives in the face of a massive Red uprisings amongst the glorious Ukrainian peasantry.
Today, roughly sixteen years later, the dilapidated traction engine sat uselessly along the edge of a communal field in Central Asia, for want of a field mechanic skilled enough to fix its leaky boiler. In the interim, one of the carpenters had affixed a long wooden tongue to the front of the German made wagon so that it could be moved about by a team of horses. Typically once the wagon had been topped off with harvested cotton, Amanda would then summon a fresh wagon from the mill by raising a green signal flag from her platform. A driver would then bring out a new wagon, pulled by a team of horses, deposit the empty wagon in the spot indicated by Amanda, and haul away the full wagon back to the mill. At the moment the empty tongue of the wagon rested in the dirt, as the wagon was slowly filled.
Amanda slipped her zveno flagpole into a makeshift bracket attached to the side of her workstation; she turned about in her small standing area opened the top of a small rickety wooden desk, and quickly snatched out a ledger-book used to record the productivity of each of her workers. Amanda reached down below her desk without looking, as she had done so many times before, and she nimbly retrieved an old-fashioned unpowered bullhorn that she used to communicate with her workers.
A handful of the more experienced members of her zveno were able to pick up to three hundred pounds in a single day, but most of the workers in Amanda's crew averaged less than half of that. It would be sometime before the first of the more productive workers began to approach the harvest wagon, dragging their full sacks of cotton between the rows of plants, and in the meanwhile Amanda intended to keep her flock motivated by peppering them with Marxist slogans as they worked.
“In the past we were forced to pick cotton as slaves in the plutocratic Confederate States of America! But today we are picking cotton in order to support the world wide revolution against the capitalist system of the oppressors! Every cotton boll that we pick brings the oppressed workers of the world that much closer to liberation! The fruits of our labor shall be used to create uniforms for the glorious proletariat soldiers who shall be sent out to liberate the rest of the world from German and American imperialism!”
Amanda was a true believer in Marxist-Trotsky ideology, and she was just now getting herself warmed up.
“Here in Russia the workers have liberated themselves from the tyrannical rule of the old Russian Czar, and in China, Chairman Mao Zedong has swept away the oppressive culture of the past by establishing the People's Republic of China! From Tehran, in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, to Nagano, in the Democratic Republic of Japan, the workers have been united under the cause of global revolution, and soon they shall raise up to smash the obsolete reactionary regimes out of existence. Today, nearly half of the world's population lives under the red banner, and the faltering capitalist system cannot stand against our collective might! Tomorrow the Red Army will drive the Germans out of Poland forever, and they will keep on going all the way until they reach Berlin!” Even Amanda had to admit that the idea of the Red Army driving all the way to Berlin was a bit fanciful, and everyone remembered the humiliating bloody nose that the Red Army had received when it had attempted to liberate Poland from German hands a decade earlier back in 1952.
The workers kept their heads bent low as they quickly and efficiently filled their bags, seemingly indifferent to Amanda's unending speech. Occasionally someone would put their bag down and head over the berm at the far end of the field to visit the latrine, but for the most part her crew remained continually productive, which was just the way that she liked it.
A little over an hour later the first of the pickers approached the wagon with a full bag of cotton to be dumped. Josephus Alexander was one of the more irascible members of the zveno, but he was also one of the most productive as well. At approximately forty five years of age, Josephus wore a sour look upon his face, a face that Amanda might have found handsome if not for the huge age gap between them, as he wordlessly dragged his full bag of cotton forward by the purse like strap around his neck.
Josephus ignored Amanda as he mutely climbed onto the running board at the rear of the wagon, and single handedly hung his picking sack on the weigh up scale suspended from an overhead wooden boom. Josephus slid the two weights back and forth until the needle balanced at the end of the scale arm. “FIFTY THREE POUNDS!” Josephus called out in a voice loud enough to make a drill sergeant proud. Amanda dutifully entered the figure in her ledger-book as Josephus deposited his load atop the growing mound in the center of the bed.
At only six and a half feet in length, the picking sacks used on the collective were much smaller than the sacks that had once been used in the old Confederacy, which were up to twelve and a half feet in length. The smaller sacks were much easier for the workers to drag through the field as they picked cotton bolls, and part of the intension behind implementing the smaller picking sacks was to demonstrate to the black workers how much the Communist Party cared for their wellbeing.
“The oppressed workers of the world thank you for your diligent efforts, Josephus.” Amanda always felt somewhat uneasy in the presence of Josephus, and she wasn't exactly certain how she should deal with such a quarrelsome subordinate in her ranks.
Rather than responding to her words directly, Josephus briefly eyeballed her from the rear of the wagon for a few seconds before gruffly removing the top of a small barrel mounted near the tailgate and then using a wooden handled ladle to draw an exceptionally long drink of water. Josephus let out a dramatic sigh of satisfaction before retrieving his empty sack and hopping back down to ground level. His bare feet kicked up twin plumes of dust as they landed on the powdery earth.
“You are doing your part to support the revolution,” Amanda informed him with crisp certainty in her voice. Josephus stopped dead in his tracks and paused briefly as he used the backside of his thick wrist to push the brim of his somewhat crumbled straw hat up from his face.
“Revolution! You want to talk to me about revolution?” Josephus responded in an exasperated tone. Uh-oh, Amanda thought to herself, this was exactly the sort of wild outburst she wanted to avoid.
“Let me tell you something, li'l Miss Davis, during the last war I spent two and a half years marching around in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia, fighting in the guerrilla resistance movement against the CSA!” Josephus said as he viscously thumbed his own bare chest. “I don't care what anyone else has to say, we destroyed the Confederate oppressors ourselves, and I personally killed more goddamn ofay than I can possibly care to remember, so don't lecture me about revolution!”
“Yes, you are right, but now we need to continue that revolution, and to extend it on to other oppressed peoples as well.” However, in her own mind, Amanda didn't really consider any of the quasi black socialist republics that had once existed on Confederate soil to be successful Marxist revolutions, because none of those abortive states had been able to establish a permanent existence, or to export its revolution to the rest of America. What's more, by all accounts women were never treated equally in the black socialist republics, and there was never any attempt on the part of the black leadership to implement any sort of collectivism within the territory they held. How could the circumstances in the transitory black socialist republics possibly be compared to the long lasting socialist revolutions that had occurred throughout much of the world following the end of the Second Great War?
“Josephus continued, “If you ask me, this here Rusky collective ain't no goddamn better than a fucking Confederate slave plantation, and we've been stuck out here since 1957, when that goddamn ofay in Moscow decided to kick our black asses out of European Russia! How much longer is they planning on keeping us exiled out here in the middle of nowhere, Amanda, can you answer me that?” Josephus placed his hands on his hips as he gave Amanda a skeptical stare.
Amanda stared back at Josephus with a complete sense of dumbfounded shock. The idiotic man was straying into some very dangerous territory, and such counter-revolutionary claptrap could land the entire zveno in hot water if word happened to reach the wrong set of ears. She quickly scanned the surrounding area for any white faces, but did not find any. For the most part, the relatively small number of Russians functionaries present on the collective tended to congregate in the mill, and they generally only came out into the cotton fields a few times a week. However, Amanda considered it blind luck that no one in higher authority happened to be about when Josephus had foolishly decided to display his obstructionist views to the whole world, and above all else she didn't want this craven imbecile standing before her to sully the honor of the entire zveno in the eyes of the blessed Russians.
A few of the other worker seemed to sense that something was amiss at the harvest wagon, and they patiently waited some distance away with their full sacks before coming any closer.
Amanda spoke as though she were explaining something to a particularly slow student, “When we were forced to grow cotton as slaves in the Confederacy, our labor enriched the pockets of the plantation owners, and they grew wealthy on our backs. No one here in Russia is profiting from your labor, Josephus, and the work we perform here is to support the coming global revolution.”
“All I know is that if I would have stayed back home in America, I'd be a US citizen right now, and I'd be collecting reparations for being a former black resident of the CSA. Now look at me over here, I'm no better off than my goddamn grandfather was in his day!” Amanda did take a good look at him, and inwardly she had to admit that his dark weather beaten skin, bare feet, straw hat, ragged dungarees tied off at the waist with a with a cord, along with a tattered open shirt made him look for all the world like the old tintype photographs she had seen of slaves in the Confederacy before manumission had occurred in the 1880s.
“There are no whips here, everyone is treated as equals, and we all share equally in the fruits of our labor! Take a look around you, Josephus,” Amanda exclaimed as she gestured around the wide field with her ledger-book, “Do you see any plantation mansions here on our collective? Do you see any stovepipe hat wearing oppressors wondering how much profit they can earn from selling your children? Do you see anyone being put outside the gate because they are too old, sick, or weak to work any longer?
Josephus has been knocked back on his heels, and he stammered for a few moments while he considered his rebuttal. “Do you want to know why those boots they gave you are too goddamned big on your feet, Amanda?” Josephus proclaimed as he pointed an accusatory finger at the shoes on her feet. “Those boots are too goddamn big for you because they were originally meant for me! That's right, think about it, who is the number one worker around here? Me, I'm the number one picker, that's who! Everyone around here knows that the only reason you were made director is because that Venezuelan school teacher you've been rolling in the hay with just so happens to be a member of the collective planning committee!” Josephus nodded his head in an affirmative gesture to finish things off.
Amanda exploded into a blind rage. “Get your stupid black ass back to work this very minute, or else!” she proclaimed with as much imperious fury as any Confederate overseer might have ever displayed. Josephus gave her a hearty laugh as he turned and began to slowly amble his way back towards the row of plants he had been working on. He knew he had won, and for the moment he felt contented. Fortunately the rest of her day went rather uneventfully.
Later that evening she recounted her fiery exchange with the infamous Josephus to her fiancé, Pablo Gutierrez. Pablo laughed and said in an all knowing manner, “Well, if you’re going to be the director of a zveno, then you're just going to have to learn how to deal with stubborn thick-headed peasants such as Josephus. I'm afraid that it just comes with the territory, My Dear.”
Pablo and Amanda lived in the same two-room cottage along with Amanda's mother, and at the moment Amanda was washing her face in front of the mirror, while Pablo idly sat at the kitchen table drinking vodka. Amanda's mother was a member of the zveno responsible for tending the collective's vegetable gardens, and she had not yet arrived home from work.
“It's not his stubbornness that bothers me,” Amanda answered as she admired her own dazzling blue-green eyes and caramel skin in the mirror, “It is the fact that he seems to hold such hostile feelings towards our revolution, and that he openly wishes to live in the United States! Doesn't he know about the great slums that exist in places such as New York City, and how can he be so ignorant of the fact that American workers are routinely worked to death in all those dangerous armament factories that they have over there? The American worker has no rights, they have no control over production, and Josephus is a complete fool for wanting to live in such a terrible place!”
Pablo came up behind her and buried his face in her neck. Amanda giggled like a child as his long whiskers tickled her cheek. Pablo said, “I know, I know, My Dear. Five or ten years ago men could be killed for making such careless comments, but these days our glorious Premier Sharangovich wishes to put a more human face upon socialism, and he has ordered the NKPD to take a more compassionate approach towards illiterate oafs such as our dear friend comrade Josephus.” The official portrait of Vasily Sharangovich was one of the few adornments hanging on the bare walls of the cottage. The caption at the bottom of his portrait read, Vasily Sharangovich - Premier of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.
“He can't be allowed to run around spouting such nonsense, he'll upset the other members of the zveno, and who knows where that could lead,” Amanda said as she playfully shooed Pablo away so she could finish washing up. Pablo sauntered back to his chair and picked up his glass of state distilled vodka. Although he had never been a soldier himself, he enjoyed dressing in military fatigues and polished combat boots. His black beret lay on the table next to his half-finished bottle. Although he was ten years her senior, Amanda thought of him as a very handsome man, and she adored him dearly. Her mother did not necessarily share the same opinion.
“Well, in my opinion you should simply ignore his grumblings,” Pablo offered as he relaxed in his chair and crossed his long legs. “No doubt Josephus would be hauled away for some very intensive questioning, if you were to make an official complaint to the political commissar, but keep in mind that he is one of your very best pickers, and if he is taken away...” he then shrugged and made a who knows gesture with his hands. “After all, if we happen to report everyone who voices some sort of petty complaint, then there would be absolutely no one left to run our collective farm, and how would that situation help to promote our revolution?” Pablo added as an afterthought.
“Do you know what else he said?” Amanda asked as she turned away from her own reflection in the mirror, “He said that the only reason I was made director, was because I was sleeping with you.” Pablo dismissively waved a hand as his face put on a disinterested frown. Amanda was slightly disappointed that this latest disclosure hadn't sent him into jealous fit. It seemed as though the older she got, the less she understood men in general. She took a step closer to him, her heavy boots clopping loudly on the unfinished pine floor, and she intensified her questioning gaze as her eyes drilled holes in him searching for the truth.
“Do not listen to anything that Josephus has to say, the man is an illiterate animal, and his words are of no consequence to anyone,” Pablo announced in a haughty tone. Amanda continued to stare, waiting for a more definitive answer. “Well, it is true that he was at one time considered for the position of director, but after he was summoned in front of the planning committee, it soon became apparent that he was unsuitable for such a role. The man cannot even write his own name, let alone recite Marxist theory, and besides, he isn't even a member of the Communist Party. The entire planning committee agreed that he is incapable of leading anyone, save for possibly another stupid donkey such as himself, and in the end that is why he was not given the position.”
“So then, I wasn't made director just because of our relationship?”
“Of course not, don't be so silly, My Dear,” Pablo assured her as he took a stiff slug of his cheap vodka. “The committee selected you because of your dedication to the revolution, and your ability to recite Marxist theory. Also, you're excellent at keeping accurate records, and until the German traction engine broke down, you were one of the few people who weren’t afraid to drive it.” Amanda beamed with the praise she had just received, and Pablo was relieved that she appeared to accept his explanation of things.
Relieved, Amanda returned to the mirror to inspect herself for any remaining grime. She intently scrutinized her long slightly curved nose, high cheekbones, and high forehead, because those areas tended to be susceptible to acne due to her somewhat oily skin. She had her mother's eyes and mouth, there was no doubt about that, but she often wondered why she looked so different from everyone else on the collective. Occasionally someone would complement her on her exotic beauty, and ask her if she had Cherokee blood in her ancestry, but honestly, Amanda had no clue, and her mother had never been very forthcoming regarding her father.
“Don't you think that I should at least report Josephus' negative remarks to the political commissar? When I was appointed director, the commissar warned me that German and American agents might try to take advantage of those who did not have a firm enough belief in the cause of our revolution,” Amanda informed him as she used the corner of a small ragged cloth to remove a stubborn smudge of dirt from her pointed chin.
Ay caramba! The girl was such an incredible dullard, just like her mother, Pablo thought to himself. How many times did she need to go over the same problem before she finally figured out the answers? Didn't she have any clue as to how the real world operated? Apparently not! To make matters worse her asinine zealousness had caught the eye of the head commissar, so her ass had to be constantly kissed as though she herself held the same status as a commissar! Pablo himself was still somewhat on probation after that incident two years ago in Moscow with an under aged female student, and it had been made crystal clear to him that one more mistake would land him in a Siberian labor camp. He was hoping to ride Amanda's coattails back up to the top, but so far his plan had proven excruciatingly difficult to endure, and if it wasn't for the sex, Pablo had no idea how he would possibly manage to tolerate her simplemindedness. He kept his annoyances to himself, as he managed to give her question a few seconds of serious consideration.
Pablo answered, “Oh well, perhaps, he is just feeling a bit demoralized for some reason or another. Since tomorrow is Sunday, I think that I shall invite comrade Josephus to go fishing along with some of my amigos, up at the reservoir. You know, get him away from the collective farm for one day, and help him to clear his mind a bit. He can tell us all about his old revolutionary exploits in the Confederacy, and so on. It will be a lovely time, and I'm sure that afterwards Josephus will be a much happier man, you shall see.” The way that Pablo saw it, anything that caused Amanda trouble, would ultimately cause him trouble on down the road as well.
Josephus gave Amanda a calculatingly vindictive stare from behind a partially broken nose and swollen eyelids during formation time the following Monday morning. Nevertheless, during a dinner conversation the night before, Pablo, who had mysteriously chipped a tooth during his fishing expedition, had managed to assure her that Josephus had seen the errors of his previous ways, and that he was now one hundred percent committed to the revolution. Consequently, Amanda failed to investigate what was going on under the brim of Josephus' curiously down turned hat, and she might have been completely shocked if she had noticed the shocking injuries to his face. Josephus never again picked three hundred pounds of cotton in a single day, during his remaining time on the collective, but Amanda did notice that. For better or worse, Amanda had managed to earn the title of the “Iron Bitch” amongst the members of her zveno, and for the time being, her crew kept their heads down as they picked cotton.