Pills of OUR history (7). "I march towards Leshnjuv where the divisional command is located. My companion is once again Prishcepa, a young Cuban, an indefatigable rogue, a polished communist, a carefree syphilitic, a lazy liar. He wears a red Circassian cloak made of fine cloth and a fur hood thrown over his back. On the road, he told me his story. I will never forget the tale. A year ago, Prishcepa escaped from the whites. They took his parents hostage in revenge and killed them in retaliation. Neighbors had looted their property. When we drove the whites from Kuban', Prishcepa returned to his hometown. It was morning, dawn was breaking, and the farmers' slumber sighed in a heavy and rotten air. Prishcepa hired a military cart and rode through the village collecting the gramophones, the kvas jars, and the embroidered napkins of his mother. He had gone out into the street wearing a black cloak and a curved dagger at his belt: the cart dragged behind him. Prishcepa moved from one neighbor to another, and the bloody trail of his footprints stretched behind him. In the huts where the Cossack discovered his mother's belongings or his father's pipe stem, he left behind the old slaughtered, the dogs hanged over the wells, and smeared the icons. The villagers followed his itinerary gloomily, smoking their pipes. The young Cossacks had scattered across the steppe and were tallying up. The count swelled and the village fell silent. As soon as he finished, Prishcepa returned to the desolate family home. He rearranged the recovered furniture in the order he remembered from his childhood and sent for some brandy. Locked up in the hut, he drank for two days: he drank, sobbed, and chopped the tables with his sabre. On the third night, the village saw smoke rising from Prishcepa's shack. Ragged and singed, with his legs buckling, he dragged the cow out of the barn, put the revolver in its mouth, and fired. The ground smoked under him, a cerulean ring of flame shot up from the chimney and dissipated; in the barn, the abandoned calf sobbed. The fire sparkled like a Sunday. Prishcepa untied the horse, jumped on its back, tossed a strand of his hair into the flames, and disappeared."

From "Red Cavalry" (1926) by Isaak Babel', writer and cavalryman of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. A fervent Leninist Bolshevik shot dead by the NKVD with Stalin’s approval.