Linguistic Difficulties — Joyful Certainty — Bezsonoff's Diary — Finnish Peasant's Claim for Damages — A Friend in Need — Free at Last.
We had not a dry thread on us. Our cartridges were soaked. Our fingers shook with cold, we could not speak to one another. To crown all, our small supply of bread had run out. Luckily, a couple of days later we came upon a deer in the woods, and Bezsonoff, who had contrived, unlike the rest of us, to keep his ammunition dry, shot it. In our joy we ate half of it at once without bread. We made soup out of a part of it, and took the cooked meat that was left over along with us. The result of this feast was that we all fell ill with an acute gastric disorder, and for several days were so weak that we could hardly walk.
After a long tramp we came, two days after we had crossed the river, to a cottage. We went in and asked the people to sell us bread and other food. They could not speak or understand a word of Russian. Supposing ourselves to be already in Finland,[35]we repeatedly asked:
"Where are we? What is this? Finland? Russians?"
We had recourse to mimicry, to talking on our fingers. It was quite useless. (On arriving in Finland, by the way, we discovered that the Finnish name for the country is Suomi.)
We took some food of various kinds, and offered them a tchervonets. They would not take it. We gave them all our small change, ninety silver kopeks; they took the silver. We went off, followed by unfriendly looks.
Several more days passed, full of uncertainty. Had we crossed the frontier or not? Were we in Finland or still in the U.S.S.R.? If we assumed the former to be the case, did we not risk making our escape a failure after all the difficulties we had overcome, and falling into the hands of the Tchekists again?
On June 23rd we came to a big river. There were a crowd of people on the opposite bank; evidently wood-floating was in preparation. We had noticed during the past week a certain change in our surroundings, signs of order and culture; and we had found a cigarette box with an inscription that was not in Russian. The workmen on the river bank were much better clothed than Russian workmen are. After long hesitation and uneasiness we decided that the frontier lay behind us. We called for a boat to be sent from the other side. The workmen who came across explained to us, certainly not without difficulty, that the U.S.S.R. lay far in our rear.
For a moment or two we could not utter a word for mingled joy and weariness; all our strength seemed suddenly to leave us. Bezsonoff chronicled that unforgettable moment in his diary in one significant word: "Finland."
Our "dictator" kept this diary on the inside of the cover, the back of the table of contents, and the last (440th) page of the "New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ" (Synod edition of 1916). He made short pencil notes daily. These disconnected entries, which had in truth been through fire and water, give the clearest possible picture of all the vicissitudes of our flight. It was thanks to them that we did not lose count of the days.
I give some typical extracts from Bezsonoff's diary:
Bezsonoff evidently did not note all the days in his diary, for in reality our flight came to an end on June 23rd, 1925.
The Finlanders received us very kindly, gave us food in abundance and sent us to Uleaborg. The Chief of Police of Uleaborg moved us all to tears by his attentions; he not only brought a quantity of food to the prison for us, and supplied us with money, but he took me himself to a doctor to have my frost-bitten feet bound up. I, in outward appearance a complete bandit, dirty and in rags, felt strange in his smart carriage, and could read on the faces of the people we met the dubious query: "Who on earth is that convict in the Chief of Police's trap?"
We were, however, not liberated immediately. It appeared that the owner of the dairy farm from which we had taken food a few days before, paying for it with only about a rouble in silver (as the people would not take our Soviet paper money), had made a complaint against us, demanding compensation to the amount of 1,000 marks. The newspapers, privately informed of the occurrence, wrote that "five Bolshevist bandits had crossed the frontier and made an armed raid on a Finnish dairy farm." While this affair was being settled, we had to spend several weeks in prison, first at Uleaborg and then at Helsingfors. But even prison seemed paradise to us after the Solovky and the Karelian jungles!
When we arrived at Helsingfors, the president of the special committee for Russian affairs in Finland, A. N. Fenoult, came to see us in prison. Thanks to his extraordinary energy, and the infinite trouble he took on our behalf, we were very soon set at liberty, and were able to get ourselves decent clothes and assume once more a human aspect. It was significant that Malbrodsky (the other Pole, Sazonoff, being a native of the former Government of Vilna, was not recognised as being a Polish subject), who had immediately appealed to the Polish Consul, did not leave prison until later than we, who had no official diplomatic protection.
I should like to conclude my simple narrative by expressing our heartfelt gratitude to all, both Finlanders and Russians, from whom, on our arrival in Finland, we received so much kindness and sympathy. After the ferocity shown by man towards man in the concentration camps, after the devastating egoism, the hardness, the inhuman callousness, with which the Bolsheviks have inoculated the unhappy Russian people, the reception we met with in Finland touched us to the bottom of our hearts.
[35]Language was not a certain guide, as the peasants on both sides of the frontier are Finnish-speaking.
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