Extracts from The Red Road to Europe by Delanore Theroux (New york, 1977)
The water in my canteen froze on the last night of September.
‘The cold comes early to Poland,’ Kapuscinski told me, as he stiffly saddled his horse, ‘or late, depending on where Poland happens to be that day.’
Comrade Ryszard had warned me that there would be no comforts in the “Unorganized Territories”, but assured me that “If anyone can get a soft American capitalist dog to the Ural railhead, it is the Polish People’s Militia”. He had then invited me to a fourth glass of Genuine Polish Vodka, which was to my taste indistinguishable from Russian vodka, and we’d toasted ‘The Children of Poland, wherever they may sleep’, before stepping out unsteadily into the warm August sun of Omsk.
For all his relaxed charm and bonhomie, it had been clear Ryszard Kapuscinski was a man of considerable influence in Omsk. I had been waiting for exit papers for a month when I met him in Nevskybar on Beria Prospekt, drinking neat vodka with a group of older Poles. A little drunk already, I went over and introduced myself and was politely informed that I had interrupted a meeting of the Central Committee of the Polish Socialist Party. My apology was waved away and I was invited to join the “meeting”. Upon production of my Union Card for the American Brotherhood of Longshoremen, the Committee unanimously resolved to send the Workers of America fraternal greetings, and to buy me a vodka. It was the first of many drunken nights.
With Comrade Ryszard in my corner, Party doors which had been closed were open to me, and ten days after our meeting in Nevskybar, he turned up at my hotel with a bottle of vodka and an envelope.
‘Congratulations Comrade Delanore, the People’s Soviet Republic has, in its wisdom, granted you permission to enter Zukhovburg Oblast, which, according to my official maps, extends to Leningrad and beyond. Of course, you will be accompanied, for your own safety, by a detachment of the Polish People’s Militia.’
I embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, after the Russian custom.
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The PPM is supported unquestioningly by the Soviets, fed, armed and watered whenever they arrive in the frontier posts of the Irtysh Oblast, riding their sleek well-groomed horses with a cowboy swagger. In exchange, the Possacks police the wilds between Zukhovburg and the railhead near Perm, organizing the Czechs, Poles and Russians of these badlands, and preventing German settlers from getting a foothold in the eastern Urals.
They are hard men and women, mostly second generation exiles born in the Soviet Republic and in the Unorganized Territories, the only Polish-born PPM man I met was Kapuscinski, who had been deported East sometime in the early ‘40s.
We rode across their “homeland” for weeks, as the weather grew steadily colder. The wild Slavs live in the most desperate poverty and want, they speak a kind of pidgin of Russian, Polish and Czech. Lacking schools, for the most part they are illiterate. There are no doctors, and the people suffer greatly from smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza.
The day my water-bottle froze, we came to a village of Untermenschen which had been the victim of a slave raid by the Uralstetlers.
I had never witnessed such a sight in all my born days. Neither, I think, had I ever truly hated, until that cold morning at the bleeding edge of Europe.