Virgin Soil Upturned

Semyon Davidov, a Leningrad factory worker sent to the Don village of Gremyachy Log as one of the thousands of urban Communists dispatched to organize collectivization, arrives with no farming knowledge and a mandate to force the local Cossacks into a kolkhoz over whatever resistance he meets. Sholokhov, unlike almost every other officially sanctioned novelist of the collectivization campaign, does not flatten that resistance into simple class enmity: Yakov Lukich, the peasant Davidov comes to rely on as a local organizer, is secretly sheltering a White officer in hiding and quietly sabotaging the very kolkhoz he appears to be building, and the novel lets his double life run for most of its length without tipping its hand.

Andrei Razmyotnov, one of the village's own Bolshevik organizers, is given the novel's clearest moment of conscience: ordered to evict a family, including small children, from their home during the depths of dekulakization, he refuses to finish the job and walks away, a scene Sholokhov stages without punishing Razmyotnov's hesitation as weakness. For a novel written explicitly to celebrate collectivization, the willingness to let one of its own organizers balk at the policy's human cost is a small but real crack in the propaganda it was commissioned to deliver.

Makar Nagulnov, the village's most fervent revolutionary, spends his evenings teaching himself English from a battered grammar book, convinced that a world revolution is close enough that he will soon need to speak with the international proletariat directly. Sholokhov plays the detail for both comedy and pathos: Nagulnov's earnest, isolated study, conducted in a village where nobody else has any use for the language at all, is the clearest picture in the novel of a true believer whose faith has entirely outrun the material world around him, including his own collapsing marriage to Lushka, who leaves him for a life his ideology has no language for.

Faced with handing their livestock over to the collective, Gremyachy Log's peasants slaughter their own cattle and horses en masse rather than surrender them, a documented historical response to collectivization across the Soviet countryside that Sholokhov renders with unusual, visceral attention: animals killed not for meat or profit but purely so the state cannot have them. It is the novel's most honest scene of resistance, an act with no ideological cover story, and Sholokhov lets it stand largely without editorial comment, a rare instance of the book simply showing what collectivization actually cost its subjects.