Dvory is a mill-centered village on the Chilimka River, assigned as a winter refuge for peasants fleeing the Whites. Its destruction turns that plan into a desperate journey through the taiga, revealing how the Forest Brotherhood’s effort to manage civilian flight founders on the very violence driving people from their homes.

Refugees and the camp’s plan

After the partisans break through the White encirclement, refugees pour into the taiga camp. Many are not related to the partisans: they are peasants from the surrounding countryside, driven from their homes by White punitive measures and looking to the partisans as their natural protectors. The arrival creates a practical problem for a camp already anxious to rid itself of its own dependents and lacking room for newcomers.

The command sends men to divert the new arrivals to Dvory, where it proposes to settle them for the winter and send them their allotted supplies. The village’s name, meaning farms, reflects the farmsteads clustered around its mill. The arrangement treats refuge as a matter of placement and provisions, but events quickly outrun the command’s capacity to direct them.

Destruction and return

When the camp asks how the new refugees have reached it instead of following orders to Dvory, the answer is that the village has burned, mill and all, leaving only cinders. Faced with the ruins, some refugees panic and turn back toward the Whites; the others turn toward the partisan camp. The intended refuge has become another point of danger rather than a secure destination.

The returning group makes its own route through the difficult terrain. With saws and axes, and help from some of the men sent to guard them, the refugees cut twenty miles of road through the taiga and swamps, bridges included. Their work brings them back to the camp despite the command’s earlier attempt to redirect them. Dvory thus marks the failure of an imposed resettlement plan, while the refugees’ route records a resourcefulness that military orders could neither anticipate nor contain.

Narrative significance

Dvory appears through a sequence of decisions and consequences rather than an extended portrait of village life: it is selected as a destination, reported burned, and then remembered through the refugees’ arduous return. The village’s mill and surrounding farmsteads make the loss concrete, while the cinders explain why the people refuse the assigned route.

The episode places civilian displacement beside partisan strategy. The camp’s breakthrough opens a way for refugees to arrive, but its authorities respond by trying to move them elsewhere; the burning of Dvory and the refugees’ return expose the limits of that administrative logic. In a landscape repeatedly shaped by armies and reprisals, the civilians’ road-building becomes a practical act of survival.