Kuteiny Posad is the hillside village in a paired landscape divided from Maly Ermolaï by the swift Pazhinka. The two settlements become a single field of action when a springtime farewell party for recruits is overtaken by the burning of the county draft-board building below. Kuteiny’s tables, Easter food, and festive colors briefly suggest communal continuity; the search that follows turns the village into a place of flight, concealment, and suspicion.

Setting and relationship to Maly Ermolaï

The highway runs between the villages, with Kuteiny Posad extending down a steep slope and Maly Ermolaï spread in the valley. The Pazhinka marks the division, but the villages are linked by the draft-board proceedings in Maly Ermolaï and the party held for recruits in Kuteiny. Their contrasting elevations give the sudden alarm a visible direction: smoke rises from the county office in the valley, and people at the feast rush to the ravine’s edge to see what is happening below.

The scene takes place on the third day of an unusually late Easter, during an unusually early spring. The weather is warm and windless. This calm, seasonal setting makes the outbreak more jarring: the village is not introduced as a military position but as a place gathered around food, drink, and a send-off for its young men.

The recruits’ farewell feast

Villagers have pooled their resources for a communal meal in the street. Tables covered in white cloths stretch down the road, carrying what remains of the Easter dishes: smoked hams, kulich buns, paskha cakes, pickled mushrooms and cucumbers, sauerkraut, thick slices of home-baked bread, and colored eggs. The meal is a local act of hospitality toward men about to leave, yet its setting also exposes the pressure behind the occasion: the recruits are being examined and sent away amid the civil conflict.

The landscape echoes the feast’s colors. Pink and light-blue eggshells lie on the new grass; the young men wear pink shirts, the girls pink dresses, and pink clouds drift across the blue sky. The repeated colors make the village appear briefly unified with the spring day. They also give the scene a fragile brightness that will soon be broken by smoke, alarm bells, and mounted search parties.

Vlas Pakhomovich Galuzin, dressed in a pink shirt and silk sash, comes down from Pafnutkin’s house and addresses the recruits. He raises a toast in home-brewed vodka, presenting their departure as a defense of the motherland and denouncing the Bolsheviks for dispersing the Constituent Assembly. His speech gives the gathering a political frame, but its public rhetoric sits beside the plainly local character of the meal: the villagers have assembled what they have, and Galuzin drinks a poor spirit he dislikes while taking satisfaction in the idea of sacrifice for the public good.

The fire and the search

A loud explosion interrupts the drunken voices. The crowd first looks for a culprit close to the tables, and Galuzin calls for the village to be cordoned off. Attention shifts when a pillar of black smoke appears above the county office in Maly Ermolaï. Recruits run out with Colonel Strese and the other draft-board officers; one of the young men is barefoot and wearing only trousers. Cossacks and mounted militiamen gallop through the village, swinging their whips as they hunt for someone, while church bells ring the alarm and people flee toward Kuteiny.

At dusk, Colonel Strese arrives with his Cossacks, surrounds Kuteiny Posad with guards, and orders searches of houses and farms. The urgency of the manhunt transforms the farewell feast into a liability: many recruits have stayed behind drinking, and some are asleep on the ground or at the tables when word comes that the militia has entered the village. The scene’s rapid sequence—from toast, to explosion, to smoke, to a military cordon—shows how quickly a communal occasion can be recast as a security crisis.

Hiding and the village under suspicion

Several young men escape through back yards and crawl beneath the floor of a nearby barn through a narrow opening at the bottom of the wall. In the darkness they cannot identify the building, but the smell of fish and kerosene suggests a warehouse used by the village shop. Their concealment is initially an impulsive response: most have no particular reason to expect arrest and have run because they are drunk and frightened. A few fear that their associations with rowdy companions may be interpreted as politically compromising.

The space beneath the barn floor becomes a compressed image of the disorder outside. People from both villages have gathered there; some Kuteiny villagers are so drunk that they snore, grind their teeth, moan, or are sick. Those who arrive last plug the entrance with stones and earth, shutting the group into darkness and foul air. The hiding place is not a planned refuge but the improvised result of a panic that has drawn both villages into the same confined space.

Political suspicion reaches even the meaning of ordinary misconduct. The young men know that hooliganism can be treated as evidence of black reaction in the Soviet zone or Bolshevism in the White zone. Their fear is therefore not limited to the actual fire or to Colonel Strese’s search: in a landscape divided by rival authorities, an association, a drunken escape, or a village disturbance can acquire a political interpretation. Kuteiny Posad’s episode joins the spring feast to the broader instability of the period, showing how conscription and factional suspicion invade the most ordinary forms of local life.