Maximilian Voloshin
Red guard

(The model of disintegration of the old army)

To gallop in grand review
With a cockade on the head,
In melted Petrograd,
In revolutionary Moscow.

In delirium and in drunken fervor
To surrender to the spirited game,
To stand up for the Motherland — in March,
For the Bolsheviks — in October.

To throng through the corridors
Of the Tauride Palace,¹
Not seeing in the bourgeois buttresses
Either a way out, or an end.

To address a meeting,
To straighten your mustache with your hand,
To lash out with vulgar curses,
Cocking a peaked cap on your ear.

To appear before sensible people,
“In view of special contributions”
To be sent with Muraviov
For propaganda to the south.

To go through a neglected garden,
To probe a lock with a bayonet,
To smash doors with a rifle butt,
To burst into a house in a mob.

To break open the bottom of barrels,
To discharge wine in a cellar,
Then to set fire to the heap
And smash windows with your shoulder.

In Razdelnaya near Krasny Rog²
To destroy estates and be off
Across the steppe on muddy roads
To gallop into the autumn night.

After seizing all grain, to go on
And on to peasants about liberties.
To search for horses in chests of drawers,
And cannons in boxes.

To fire from machine guns...
Who? With whom? But does it matter!
Petlyura... Grigoryev... Kotov...
Taranov or Makhno...³

To loiter with a violent mob,
To become intolerable to all your own.
And to die in a ditch
Shot for stealing.

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1. St. Petersburg palace built by Catherine the Great for receptions and celebrations.
2. A small town southwest of Moscow.
3. S. V. Petlyura (1877-1926), leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement that fought against the Soviet Red Army during the Civil War. N. I. Makhno (1884-1934), leader of the anarchist military force that fought with and against both Reds and Whites in the Ukraine during the Civil War.

Translated by Albert C. Todd