The Iron Flood
철의 흐름
A 1924 novel by Alexander Serafimovich about the real march of the Taman Army under Yepifan Kovtyukh in the summer of 1918. A starving mass of refugees with families and carts turns into an army over some 500 kilometres of road. It is a canonical work of early Soviet civil-war literature.
In depth
What is the story?
An immense human stream enters a Cossack village: a camp of settlers or an army, no one can tell. On the hill people shout and want to disperse, but enemies are all around. A bloodied rider gallops up crying "The Cossacks are coming!", and only then do they elect as commander the iron-jawed Kozhukh.
Mountains on one side, the sea on the other. Kozhukh decides to follow the coast to Tuapse, cross the range and join the main forces. A village herd boy in childhood, he was sent to officers' school three times and jeered at until he barely scraped through. When revolution came he tore off his epaulettes, but the sailors keep invoking his officer past to incite mutiny.
The road is terrible. A German warship in the harbour shells the column. A young mother loses her baby and will not let go of the body. Food runs out and they seize goats from Greek villages and hens from Russian ones; they fill their bellies with wild apples and unripe maize, while a gramophone found in an empty villa blares from morning to night. They outflank a Georgian position by mountain paths, then a cloudburst in the mountains kills many. When a horse falls, mothers carry their children; those with many leave them in the cart and go on without looking back.
The turning point is at the telegraph poles. Coming down from the pass, the column sees four corpses hanging, one of them a woman, with a paper naming them executed Bolsheviks. The noisy crowd falls silent, and its footsteps fall into a single rhythm. This is where the horde becomes an army, an iron stream. They smash the Cossacks and reach the main force.
Did it really happen?
Yes. In August 1918 a rising in the Kuban gave the Whites Yekaterinodar and cut the Taman Army off from the Red forces in the North Caucasus. It broke out with its families and marched some 500 kilometres. Serafimovich, touring the fronts as a Pravda correspondent, took down participants' stories, and met the commander Yepifan Kovtyukh in Moscow in 1921. Kozhukh is based on him.
The author was not chiefly after a record of battle. He described his theme as "the reorganisation of the consciousness of the mass": they set out as individualist proprietors and arrived as true supporters of Soviet power. That is why the book's hero is the mass rather than any individual.
Why was it withdrawn and rewritten?
First printed in the 1924 almanac Nedra, it spread widely: over 200,000 copies at the State Publishing House alone in 1926-1930. With Furmanov's Chapaev and Fadeyev's The Rout it became a flagship of civil-war literature.
Then in 1937 Kovtyukh was arrested and shot as an enemy of the people. The book was withdrawn en masse, and new editions no longer named him; his afterword and even the true name of the chief of staff disappeared. Prototypes began to be named again from 1973, but Serafimovich scholars at first retorted that Kozhukh was "not at all Yepifan Kovtyukh". Even a canonical book of the revolution could no longer hold the name of its executed real hero.
On screen?
Yefim Dzigan adapted the novel for the screen as The Iron Flood.