Biriuchi mutiny and the killing of Commissar Gints

The Biriuchi mutiny and the killing of Commissar Gints mark the collapse of his authority at the station: surrounded soldiers reject his appeal and threats, the Cossacks cease to support him, and the men pursuing him kill him just beyond the safety of the station building. The episode turns on a widening gap between official language and exhausted soldiers’ experience, then sharpens into a fatal contrast between Gints’s sense of honor and the practical chance to take shelter.

The mutiny and the failed appeal

The rebels of the 212th are surrounded in a clearing by Cossack horsemen, whose presence makes them appear especially formidable among the trees. With swords drawn, the Cossacks form a ring around the infantrymen. Inside it, Gints climbs onto a pile of timber to address the men. His speech invokes soldierly duty and the fatherland, but these abstractions meet listeners worn down by the war and weary of political phrases. Their disaffection has been compounded by months of competing appeals from the Left and Right, as well as by their suspicion of Gints’s foreign-sounding name and Baltic accent.

Gints recognizes that his speech is failing, but instead of withdrawing, he changes course. He warns the deserters that revolutionary courts-martial have been established and demands that they lay down their arms and surrender their ringleaders on pain of death. The threat escalates the confrontation: the men, unused to being addressed in this manner, answer with a tumult of anger and derision. Their objections cast his language of authority as a return to the humiliations of the old order, while their taunts question his identity and loyalty.

The Cossacks withdraw their support

The collapse of Gints’s appeal is not limited to the infantrymen. The Cossacks also become increasingly discontented with his speech, muttering that he treats everyone as inferiors. They begin sheathing their swords and dismounting, at first one by one and then in growing numbers. Once most have left their horses, they move into the center of the clearing and mingle with the soldiers of the 212th. The force that had surrounded the rebels thus loses its cohesion from within: the Cossacks fraternize with the men they were meant to contain.

Cossack officers urge Gints to leave quietly. His car is at the station, and they offer to have it meet him, but he considers slipping away beneath his dignity. He instead turns openly toward the station and makes himself walk calmly, despite his agitation. The decision preserves his public composure but leaves him exposed as soldiers with rifles follow him. When he looks back near the tracks, he sees that they are still coming; he quickens his pace, and they maintain the distance behind him.

At the station

At the station, a double row of derelict wooden coaches stands beside the tracks. Gints passes behind them and runs across the cleared lines toward the raised platform. The soldiers emerge from behind the coaches in pursuit. Povarikhin and Kolia call to him to enter the station building, where they could protect him, but he does not take their offered refuge.

Instead, Gints turns toward the pursuers beneath the station bell. At the entrance stands a tightly covered water butt intended for use in case of fire. He climbs onto its lid and begins an incoherent but compelling address. His choice to speak rather than shelter briefly arrests the soldiers: they lower their rifles. The moment offers the possibility that words might still interrupt the violence, but Gints loses his balance on the lid and ends up awkwardly astride the edge of the butt. The soldiers laugh, and the man in front shoots him. The others reach him and thrust their bayonets into his body; he is already dead.

Significance

The episode moves from collective refusal to an individual killing through a sequence of failed authorities. Gints’s language of duty cannot overcome the soldiers’ war-weariness, and revolutionary threats repeat the coercive manner he believes he must displace. The Cossacks’ dismounting makes that failure visible in action: the armed boundary around the rebels dissolves into fraternization, leaving Gints without the force that had protected him.

His final appeal repeats, at the station, the public gesture of speaking from a platform, but the setting makes the gesture precarious rather than triumphant. The station building is within reach, and others explicitly direct him toward it; nevertheless, his sense of honor keeps him in the open. The water butt becomes an improvised platform, briefly stopping the soldiers before the scene turns to ridicule and death. The mutiny’s outcome is therefore not simply the defeat of one speech by another: it is the destruction of Gints’s authority and of his hope that a heartfelt appeal can restore understanding at the moment when the crowd has become a firing force.