The Purge

A Story by Anastasia

A man narrates the first Purge committed by the Red Soviet Army in his town, the aftermath, and how it changed his life.

You couldn’t imagine it if I told you, the absolute depravity of the moment. In all your lifetime, in all your anguish, with all your effort, never could you come close to understanding the hopelessness and horrors of that day.

It was a cold winter’s morning when they ravished our village. We’d built a simple town with simple people- occupied by farmers and carpenters. We worked for our possessions and bartered amongst ourselves to obtain what we needed to survive- nothing more. We all began our day’s labor before the sun had risen, and before most of the world had even begun to make their first cup of coffee; but, this day, we weren’t the first ones to rise.

The morning shook with a tumult of violence. We could feel it in our souls as we jolted out of bed. The enemy was approaching, but we weren’t at war. Were we? Shots rang in the distance and we could hear our fellow men screaming. They drew closer, and we could see them storming our neighbors’ houses, ripping them from their beds and into the streets. That’s when I saw it- the red star upon their jackets.

“Russians,” my heart shuttered in horror. I would have never dreamed that our own brothers had been orchestrating the torture

I’ll never understand how our own people could have done such a thing- tortured their own fathers, brothers, children. Had they any understanding left in their hearts to connect with another human being, regardless of our politics? We had no politics, we were farmers.

I stood motionless as a sea of fleeing men and women rushed in my direction. Their force knocked me left and right, but I remained planted upon the ground. My gaze fixated on the red army officials who locked their sights on a young mother and her two children. She pressed them closely against her skirt and uttered six words through her tears, “I’ll meet you in the light.”

Pasha, my neighbor, grabbed my arms and attempted to shake me from the shock. His mouth moved, his words drowning in the chaos, but his face screamed urgency. He ripped me from my position, before I could witness the fate of the young woman and her children, and I joined the school of fleeing fish.

Bodies fell left and right, as bullets ripped through their flesh. We ran for salvation in the bosom of the forest and scattered, every man in a different direction. Pasha tucked me beneath the raised roots of a Manchurian walnut tree, and left to find his own shelter.

I could hear the leaves crunching as somebody crept through the woods, searching for their escaped prey. Their steps were planned, precise, controlled like a hunter stalking an oblivious buck. They slowed as though catching a whiff of my scent on the wind, and his shadow towered over the roots I lied hunched beneath. I stiffened every muscle in my body and prayed with every breath.

Suddenly, the echo of a cracking twig rang in the distance. His shadow shifted, and he quickly pursued the source.

It wasn’t until the sun had begun to lower back to the horizon that I realized that I’d still not relaxed my muscles. The forest had become silent, now. I wondered how long it had been since we had been awoken by the purge. It seemed like an eternity since the morning, yet somehow it still seemed as though no time had passed at all. My entire past, present, and future, were all consumed in a matter of seconds.

I scanned the woods for any movement, but it were as though every tree and every fallen leaf had become motionless with shock as well. I cautiously crawled into the open and slowly headed back home. Thinking back, I wish that I’d never crawled form those woods; I wish I’d fallen to sleep beneath that root and never awoken; but I did.

A drop of rain trickled onto my nose, and I wiped it away. As I pulled my hand from my face, I noticed the crimson swatch across my fingers. Slowly, I lifted my gaze to the lifeless body dangling from the branch above me. There were more, maybe seven bodies in sight with blood dripping from their toes

I wondered, my eyes still fixated on the bodies, when my foot snagged. My body crashed to the ground. I felt lucky that my head had seemed to find a soft surface to fall upon, until I identified the still, lifeless body of a burly man. It was Pasha, his unfocused eyes seemed to gaze into eternity.

“Thank you for your help, old friend,” I said, kissing his cheek and pulling my hand over his eyelids.

Finally, I saw the town through the trees. I hurried to the opening, becoming more anxious with every step. As I broke through the foliage, my hopes of returning to a normal life sunk into darkness. Our homes had been reduced to ash, the soil shone red from the blood spilled, and charred corpses lied in the fields; even the cattle had been incinerated.

I kneeled, and wiped the hair from the face of a body lying face down. As I brushed the matted locks of platinum hair from her cold cheek, my sorrows were confirmed; the young mother hadn’t made it. I tiny hand fell from beneath her chest, as I lifted her hand to check her pulse. She’d huddled over the bodies of her children. It was likely an attempt to shelter them from the bullets, but their blood spilled in with hers just the same.

I mourned them at the time, questioning why such young souls would be exterminated? I sobbed for their lost futures, but now, I thank the Lord that they didn’t survive to experience our fallen nation- this prison of a life.

Times like these are for men, men of strength and scruples, men of honor who would risk their lives for the fate of their posterity. But suddenly, there were no men anymore. Suddenly, we had all become like mice, scattered among the shadows and selling one another for another moment of light or morsel of grain. We were shameful beings.

At the time, I thought it was a moment of utter horror. I thought only of my fear and my desire to save my own life. I, now, realize that we lost much more that day. Perhaps, if we’d just fought, we could have salvaged our future for humanity. If we would have fought just that one day, maybe we would have won our children the freedom we all now desire in death. Now It was an isolated incident which would haunt my existence; now, I would give anything to return to that day. Fight, to retrieve what was lost. When it didn’t end, we waited for somebody to save us. But nobody ever came. And each day we waited, more of us died while they increased in power. By the time we realized that we had to save ourselves, it was too late. We were outnumbered. Now, we tell ourselves that we survive for our children. We survive to teach them the squashed history and to save our children from the hands of the state.

But we never tell them the truth: we never tell them that we could have saved this nation. That we let their futures slip through our fingers as we ran.