“It's not something that needs concern us too greatly”, Sergeant Shternmiler pointed out to his men. Privately, he was of the opinion that no aspect of his new assignment was something that needed to concern him greatly. He had not, at least, been relegated to complete inactivity like many others, both soldiers and civilians, of non-Russian extraction had. But his new assignment was disappointing at every level. Perhaps, he told himself, he had been used to too much of a good thing. A respected officer in the St Petersburg force, assigned high-profile political investigations and even covert operations, he had gained an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Russia, he had tried to convince himself, was a big country and needed good men everywhere. Yet every piece of experience in his posting conspired to hammer home the message that he had been relegated. Parked, like an unwanted locomotive on a side track. Oh, he was being treated with the kind of deference he was quite unaccustomed to from his earlier position, no complaints there. At the arse end of Kazan, an Okhrana sergeant was somebody. He was invited by wealthy families and got to dance and converse with ladies hungry for conversation with someone who happened to not only speak French and German, but also have first-hand knowledge of how you did things in the capital. Even his official quarters were spacious and well-appointed, a world away from the pokey two-room flat he had inhabited for the better part of ten years. It was just that in the end, none of this mattered. At least not more than a day or two. He was comfortable, he was deferred to, he was even able to carry on a discreet affair (more, he admitted to himself, to exercise his skills at clandestine business than for any real interest in the lady). He wasn't doing anything worthwhile, though.
The question on the table today was the kind of thing that concerned the gendarmes here greatly: Were they to interfere with the increasing number of barter deals with which cityfolk (who had had a bad year, with the railways hardly running at all and fewer people buying their goods) tried to ensure they had food for the winter. Shternmiler himself was in two minds about the whole business. He was from the countryside himself, though not from peasant stock, and felt a small measure of satisfaction that the high and mighty urbanites actually had to defer to the farmers who grew their bread for one. On the other hand, if the system had deteriorated to the point that it was impossible to take their grain from the peasants – and it certainly looked that way - then the consequences would be immense. He understood the world well enough to know that Russia depended on the tax take in cheap grain and hard labour its countryfolk provided. The harvest had not been bad – he would have heard from his family if it had been. But even in Simbirsk, amid the good black earth of the Volga basin, grain was short. The trainloads that landholder families used to sell for shipment down the river or up the rails to Moscow were rare. Sales were relatively free here – the ridiculous orders that only good patriots were to be allowed to buy bread had gone unimplemented when the governor announced that as far as he knew, everyone in town was a good Russian. But even so, some days there was no bread to be had in the bakeries. Of course, he and his men did not go hungry, but he had his ear to the ground; a growing number of people did. And there was practically nothing that could be done. He was forbidden from taking his gendarmes into the villages to enforce sales, as he had suggested a few days into his new post. Now that he realised how badly control had slipped, he even admitted that the decision had been correct. Without the military to back them, the gendarmerie would have been dead men in short order. And the soldiers were not to be had. Rumour had it that the garrison was unruly, and while some units remained reliable, too many of them were away guarding railway lines and canal locks. What was left was policing the marketplace to discourage hoarding and price gouging. And that, the sergeant reflected, was what the eyes and ears of the Czar had come to: Glorified market overseers.
“Let them barter.” he instructed his subordinates. “Everyone needs to eat. But try to see what the going rates are while you are at it. And step hard on anyone trying to pull a fast one.”
The blank looks greeting him told him more about his force than he wanted to know.
“If you catch anyone selling sawdust for flour, watered-down milk, or mouldy grain, I want you to bring him in. We need to teach that kind of people a lesson early.”
The men nodded, saluted and trooped out of the station room. Not for the first time, Shternmiler asked himself whether it really was too late to take his wife and children to America. They didn't have an Okhrana there, of course, but working for Pinkertons might be possible. And it couldn't be worse than this.
