Maly Ermolaï, spread through the valley below Kuteiny Posad and divided from it by the swift Pazhinka River, becomes the center of a recruitment crisis. During a village celebration for new recruits, the county draft office catches fire and men flee; by dusk, Colonel Strese’s mounted force has ringed Kuteiny and begun searching homes and farms. The location’s significance lies in that rapid reversal: an Easter-season gathering and a military examination give way to pursuit, concealment, and an argument over whether ordinary villagers may speak freely.

Setting and the draft board

On the third day of an unusually late Easter and unusually early spring, the medical board under Colonel Strese resumes its examination of local draftees in Maly Ermolaï. Mounted militia and Cossacks are stationed in the village for the occasion. Across the river in Kuteiny Posad, villagers have laid out a farewell feast for the recruits, placing long, white-covered tables down a street. The food comes from shared contributions and includes smoked hams, Easter buns and cakes, pickled vegetables, thick slices of home-baked bread, and colored eggs. The neighboring villages are therefore linked by the recruitment itself, but arranged in contrasting roles: official scrutiny and armed enforcement in Maly Ermolaï, communal hospitality in Kuteiny.

The celebration and the fire

The crisis begins amid the Kuteiny feast, where drinking and loud conversation have drowned out ordinary restraint. A rumbling explosion abruptly silences the crowd, then intensifies the uproar: some people jump to their feet, others collapse beneath the tables, and women scream. Vlas Pakhomovich looks for the culprit and threatens to find whoever has thrown hand grenades, even if the offender is his own son. But attention turns from his attempt to impose order when a column of black smoke rises above Maly Ermolaï’s county office.

The draft-board building is burning. Several recruits run out with Colonel Strese and the other officers; one is barefoot and wearing nothing but trousers. Cossacks and militiamen gallop through the village, swinging their whips and searching for someone, while people rush toward Kuteiny and church bells ring the alarm. The sequence makes the fire more than damage to a building: it is the visible sign that recruitment has turned into flight and pursuit.

Search and concealment

At dusk, Colonel Strese rides into Kuteiny with his Cossacks. Apparently convinced that the person he seeks has left Maly Ermolaï, he has the village surrounded and orders searches of every house and farm. The search reaches the neighboring settlement, extending the pressure of the draft-board crisis from the site of the fire to the place of the farewell meal.

By then, many recruits are too drunk to respond quickly. Some remain asleep on the ground or with their heads on the feast tables; it is already dark when the militia’s presence becomes known. Several young men run through back yards and crawl under the floor of a nearby barn through a narrow opening at the bottom of its wall. They cannot tell whose barn they have entered. Its smell of fish and kerosene suggests a village shop’s warehouse, an ordinary storage place turned into a hiding place by the search.

Authority and village speech

The pursuit brings Colonel Strese into contact with the mayor of Maly Ermolaï, an old fisherman named Otviazhistin. When the colonel insists that he heard people speaking nearby, Otviazhistin does not simply confirm or deny it. He answers that people may talk in a village because it is not a churchyard; they are not dumb animals, and perhaps the devil was disturbing someone in his sleep. The response uses mock deference and village humor to defend the presence of ordinary speech against an officer’s suspicion.

Strese rejects the mayor’s answer as an act and warns that the villagers have become too bold and may talk themselves into Bolshevism. The exchange turns a house-to-house search into a contest over the meaning of dissent: the colonel treats suspicious speech as a sign of political danger, while Otviazhistin insists on the elementary human right to speak. Maly Ermolaï thus appears not only as the location of a burning draft office, but as a rural community caught between compulsory military authority and the everyday independence its people try to preserve.