Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

An hour or two later, when the entire eastern horizon was lit by a pre-dawn glow, a rider arrived with news that a Siberian Army column was approaching Ryazan. Not long after, Timofey could hear the muffled rumble of artillery shells exploding in the distance. Among the guards, fear spread rapidly that the monastery might be overrun before it could be evacuated. Though they requested orders to prepare the prisoners for transport, they received none. Timofey sensed a palpable gloom among the men.

Just before the scheduled shift change, Timofey asked the guard captain what would become of the prisoners if they were not evacuated. The Chekist formed his hand into the shape of a pistol and gestured as if to shoot himself in the temple.

Moments later, Commissar Yurovsky arrived in the courtyard, with Bishop Fyodor not far behind, the latter’s face a sickly shade of gray. The Maid’s defense counsel raced to overtake them, nearly tripping over his black cassock.

“The plan is changed,” Yurovsky told the shift chief in a matter-of-fact voice. “The prisoner will not be shot in the manner customary for counter-revolutionaries. She is to be burned at the stake, in accordance with ancient church practice. Make the arrangements. I will be back at noon to see the sentence carried out.”

And without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and headed back the way he had come.

“But that is an abomination!” the defense counsel protested to Bishop Fyodor. “The Eastern Church abolished such barbarity centuries ago. Surely, this is the Cheka’s idea!”

“The matter is out of my hands,” the bishop replied weakly, folding his arms tightly against his chest and staring at the snow-covered ground.

“You call yourself a bishop,” the younger cleric snarled, “yet you would allow the Cheka to besmirch the Holy Church by attributing this barbarity to us?”

Like Yurovsky, Bishop Fyodor walked away without a word.

* * *

After Yurovsky delivered his instructions to the shift chief, the Chekist guards banished Timofey and the other trial officials from the courtyard while they prepared to execute their famous prisoner. Timofey watched from a third-story window as guards and soldiers dug a hole with heated pickaxes in the center of the courtyard, inserted a telegraph pole in it, shored it up, then erected a raised platform around it, upon which Zhanna and the executioner could stand while he bound her to the stake. Beneath the scaffold, the men piled bales of dry brush and many cords of cut firewood, piled to a man’s height, though firewood was in short supply at Kazan. Toward the side of the scaffold that faced the monastery, a rope was stretched to set aside standing room for court officers and other witnesses to view the execution.

At a quarter before noon, Timofey joined Yurovsky, Fyodor, Nestor, and the other trial participants, as well as more than a dozen Cheka officials, in the courtyard facing the unlit pyre. A few minutes later, no less than twenty Cheka guards and Red Army soldiers escorted the Maid the short distance from her cell to the foot of the scaffold. The outsized escort was doubtless intended to thwart a possible rescue attempt, now that Siberian forces were approaching Ryazan.

As the executioner led Zhanna up the stairs to the scaffold, an elderly monk, one of the two clerical assessors who had pronounced her guilty, ducked under the rope barrier and raced after her, weeping and begging her forgiveness. Within moments, a guard felled him with a blow from his rifle butt and two others seized the old man’s inert body by the shoulders and dragged it away.

Timofey directed his gaze back to Zhanna, standing atop the scaffold, shackled at hand and foot, shivering in her loose-fitting gown, and sporting a conical black hat on which the word “heretic” was written in bold Cyrillic letters. In her hands she held a small cross, crudely made from two sticks lashed together that an old woman, possibly a cook or cleaning woman from the monastery, had thrust into her hands just after Zhanna stepped out into the courtyard.

The Maid stood motionless above the pyre, staring out into the distance with unblinking eyes, as the executioner draped heavy chains over her shoulders and then diagonally across her breast, taking absurd care not to disturb her ridiculous hat. Then he looped the chains around the stake and around her waist, and around the stake once more, before encircling her bare white calves. When at last the executioner descended the narrow stairs from the platform, Zhanna’s voice rang out with an eerie clarity above the confused noise echoing within the courtyard.

“Oh, Ryazan! Must I die here? I do not wish your people to suffer for my death. May God forgive you!”

A moment later, in an attempt to free her right hand to raise the makeshift wooden cross to her lips, she dropped the cross and lost it in the woodpile below. In a despairing voice, she called out again to the clerics who had participated in her trial.