One day, shortly before the threshing of
the wheat, chief steward Ivanovsky and Kumanovsky, the
commander of his punitive detachment, were killed by a
grenade thrown in as they were sitting down to dinner in
their mansion.
All the wheat had been gathered into sheaves and it
was now time for the threshing. Now the thresher had been
dismantled, the drum being in need of repair. Furthermore,
Taratki's was the only thresher to have escaped the wide-
spread destruction of the thirteen neighbouring estates back
in 1917.The villages in the region were in a sorry predica-
ment, because not only had their seigneurial estates been
put to the torch, but the livestock and poultry had likewise
been destroyed How had that come about? Very simply,
whoeever was strongest and had the most sons to help
him had seized the best animals and the finest lands from
the lord's estates. Plainly these were mostly kulaks, whilst
the bedynaks (poor peasants) got only the crumbs Even
when a bednyak had managed, say, to grab a calf, he gen-
erally would not have had the feed it needed, nor a pen to
hold it, in so he had no choice but to butcher and eat it.
Moreover, in most cases, he would have received only a
plot of the poorest land and did not have the tools to work
it. So it very often happened that he would ask the kulak to
plough his holding, in return for which he would commit
himself and his family to labouring for the kulak. It was above
all the kulaks who had welcomed Ivanovsky, the chief stew-
ard, most cordially upon his return and they who reported
the bednyaks to him as being in their eyes, the source of
all evil. The bednyaks had to pay dearly for these accusa-
tions which sometimes cost their very lives.
All of the neighbouring villages came to regret that they
had not done the same as had been done in Tartaki, where
everybody had food to eat and clothes to wear, and there
there were neither kulaks nor bednyaks.
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