Pugachevskaya’s Scars
AFTER ANOTHER WEEK IN camp, a rider arrived with news. Sent by Pastor Hergert, Armin Hegel, a youth well known in the different villages, jumped joyfully off his mount’s back. He was blond, blue-eyed, seventeen, with a fresh face that shone with good tidings.
Armin lived in the village of Hildmann, called Panovka by the Russians, some goodly miles south of Norka. His family too had gone into hiding, trying to save their possessions. Barely off his horse, he shouted joyfully:
“You can go home now! It’s over! They have gone. The Reverend Hergert sends me. It’s safe.”
Everyone crowded about him, besieging him with questions: “What is it like? Are the villages still standing? Did they burn? Was there pillage? Do we still have homes?”
“All things considered, we did not fare too badly. However, some of you will have grief upon coming home. The bandits torched many homes, just for the fun of it. There were families that did not leave. I am sad to say some of their people are dead. Pugachev nursed a deep anger against all authority. He looked for the mayors, for people of nobility and the clergy, to hang, but when angry, he killed women and children as well.”
Remounted, from horseback he read in their upturned faces the question, “What has become of our homes and barns?” and so he repeated, “On the whole, our villages stand. Pastor says we will help one another. We will rebuild and give to those who have nothing left.”
Yes, they survived, but at a terrific cost to their struggling communities, fighting to stay alive from year to year. Most of the buried treasure had been dug up by the rabble in the odd hiding places.
When they returned to the village Christoph and Martin found that they had lost the least, compared to others in their immediate neighborhood. Martin’s vivid memory of the tales of the Thirty Years’ War had stood them in good stead. The money and the few valuable pieces they had hidden had not been found. They’d lost their poultry and ten sheep, but six beef cows they’d pastured far away from the village were spared.
Their homes had been broken open and plundered. Many of their belongings had been destroyed, for no reason other than they belonged to them, and that the rabble could not drag away their large beds, for example.
Karin walked through her house, stepping over her broken pottery milk jars and the pieces of her axed chairs, stripped of their beautiful cushions. Her hands glided over her beautiful table, once so carefully worked by her father. With sadness her fingers sank into the deep gashes made by ax and knife in the heavy top. Yet, instead of seeing the havoc wreaked upon the things she had treasured, she just prayed. Before her mind’s eye were the faces of her husband and her children. It mattered little to her that once again in her young life she had to make another beginning.
God had saved them, protected them – all was well – all else would be well in time. However, the healing time for the Lower Volga was hard. Meanwhile, in the following days more horror stories kept arriving. One such story was told of a village only twenty kilometers from Norka: It seemed that in the village of Dönhof, founded by Count Dönhof, Pugachev himself had administered his own brand of justice against the nobility. The count’s faithful followers had hidden him, their founder and mayor, well under a cluster of tree trunks and building debris on a neighbor’s property.
Pugachev had arrived atop his plunder wagon. Instantly, he had his rabble build a gallows whereupon he hanged the settlers, whom he believed to have knowledge of hidden treasures. In this case the treasure was the Count himself. Yet, despite the threats, followed by hangings, not one person betrayed the Count.
Unsuccessful in his quest, Pugachev figured that the best house in town would belong to the eponymous founder. Burning with a zealot’s zeal, he sought out the finest looking Gehöft, marching there on stiff legs as a dog seeking a fight. Dönhof’s wife lay abed after childbirth with her twomonth-old little boy. In vain Pugachev’s minions feverishly tore through the house, searching for the Count.
Enraged that he could not find the count himself, Pugachev tore the little boy from his mother’s arms and flung him into the farthest corner of the room. There the mite lay lifeless after convulsions and was left for dead. Then he revenged himself on the Count’s wife. He yanked her violently from her bed, crushing her to the floor where, severely injured, he left her.
Still he was not satisfied. “Burn the town down to the last timber,” he roared to his men, “and begin with the house of the nobleman.”
He ascended his plunder wagon and left with his lieutenants, leaving his rabble to carry out the fiery task. However, one of the settlers, a servant to the Count, fearless and quick thinking, with enough Russian language skill to parley, offered the incendiaries a goodly number of choice horses, 500 rubles, and a small barrel of vodka, if they would leave town without burning.
By that time, with the army in hot pursuit, some of Pugachev’s followers had lost their heart for mindless burning and killing. They claimed the bribes and burned only a few straw-piles to provide visual effects for Pugachev.
From Sarepta came word that, before the final battle, which destroyed the abominable man and his army, he had ravished the colony, leaving it in shambles. The Moravians, every man, woman and child, had fled the village. Finding no one there except for a Russian hussar and a complement of Cossacks and laborers, the rabble had sacked the village, yet did not burn it.
However, this once splendid colony, with a candle factory and even a hotel to house the many guests that came to learn from the Moravians, had been laid to waste. It had been smashed into an unspeakable horror, wherein no one could ever live again without being forced through backbreaking, horrific labors to restore the place.
Sarepta had been a walled community with gates. It even had had a complement of Russian defenders who, albeit, were pulled out before Pugachev’s arrival. After the Russians had buried their cannons, they were sent to strengthen the ranks of Tsarytsyn’s commandant. Sarepta’s famous library, its church with candelabra, draperies, an organ and a piano, had been smashed, reduced to shreds, shards and broken wood. Strewn throughout the rubble were the rotting corpses of animals and the dead bodies of the few people who had stayed behind, in the mistaken belief that Pugachev would not kill his own, common Russian men. Adding to the foul stench, excrement and urine pools were liberally dispersed throughout.
Sent by the Moravians in Sarepta came another discouraging report, warning the colonies that the Kalmyks had become an organized plague. Incited by the rebels, their small family units had formed into robber bands. Now they were worse than ever before, pillaging and stealing. They even had the temerity to attack Sarepta before Pugachev’s rabble came near. For the people in the colonies this was just one more reason to be worried and vigilant in the days to come.