The People’s Representative of Bolshevik Agriculture, Commissar Dyudovich reported that the spiced red beet that grew in the fields outside Shanghai’s Russian Quarter were prolific and richly-colored as bulbous jewels. He observed that The Red General had never before paused in his People’s Republic march to catch the faint scent of beet. It filled his thick nostrils with a dizzying perfume that dissolved – for moments on end – the perpetual rote of Bolshevism’s call to arms that propelled his heart.

The Red General would be seen, puzzled over even by loyal general staff officers, closing his eyes and no officer dared think that behind his eyes the General dared to envision a massive pure iceberg of sweet cream floating in a dark maroon sea of borscht. The dreamy pale clefts and tips of the cream arose in his shadowed mind and soothed him. Food, it must be remembered, as said the good comrade Bertolt Brecht, came even before philosophy.

In the Russian Quarter of Shanghai, Aleusha Arkinova stirred the steamy broth – the color of old wine – as she poured generous splashes of vodka into two fragile crystal glasses.

“It’s an old recipe, General,” she said, voice drowsy and husky. Her pale silk covering revealing the curves of her breasts as she twirled the large spoon. “The little czarinas hated it.”

“It cannot be a traitorous act, can it?” His fingers marched along her pale-as-snow thigh. His thumb sought her crease and traced it lightly, feeling it grow wetter through the thin silk. “It’s…” He looked into her smoke-gray eyes. “It’s got so much power over me.”

His heart stuttered over her laugh. She threw back her head, the ripple of golden hair caught his eyes. She looked at him and lowering herself slowly, straddled his legs. She nipped at his ear lobe and growled softly like a shewolf in the snowy mountains.

The Red General’s trained senses — keen to the historical imperative — were staggered. Silken gossamer touches of her scant clothes against his thick woolen tunic became unbearable. She laughed again, deep and throaty. She stripped him, brass hammer button by brass sickle button with her teeth, until his chest was bared. As her mouth began a kissing, wet descent along his belly, the Red General’s eyes locked upon the floating, melting mountain of cream, adrift, island-like, in the silver bowl of borscht on the table.

The aroma of the highly-spiced beet soup mingled with the clinging, fluid scents of their bodies as she moved upon him.

“Oh, this is decadence!” a minor official within the Red General’s memory shouted. The Red General dismissed him. The White Russian whore licked at his thinly-haired balls and he squirmed on the chair. His fingers stretched for the spoon. A little further. A little more. He cradles a spoonful of borsht to his lips. The Red General shivers his shoulders as he feels the pale lips enclose the head of his cock. The roof of his mouth tingles with the heat and the spices, his tongue curls around the ambrosial liquid gold of the soup, flecked with sweet cream. The senses – rushing through his blood, his nerves – make him shudder even more as she glides her mouth down his pulsing shaft.

“I want…” He laughed, pulling at his mustaches, his eyes locked on the deep red soup.. “I want to taste the honey of you, Aleusha Akinova. I want to drink it like the strongest vodka. I want to get drunk of you.”

She climbed him then, bracing at last against the wall; her thighs squeezing his lips together as she teased his bristly mustache with her wet cunt. “I am from Stephanizov,” she whispered, her fingers in his hair, guiding his mouth and tongue. “I was trained as a lady-in-waiting for The Empress’ daughters…” She swiveled her hips, grinding herself harder on his mouth.

She bowed her back and scissored her legs around his shoulders. “I…I…broke my own hymen when I was 12…with… with…a man…a big man…his cock was huge. I….I….”

She suddenly screams – piercing baby cries – and immediately falls limp in the Red General’s lap. His cock between her legs. His large hands grip her hips and as she falls, near unconscious against his chest, he impales her. She spasms, yielding, taking the full length of him in a breath.

Again, her head bows back. Now her fingers stretch to the still steaming borscht. She takes up two fingers of the whipped creamy froth and wipes it on her nipples. “Lick me,” she murmurs. The Red General’s tongue snakes out pinkly and flickers over first one nipple, then the other. Back and forth. His teeth lightly bite them into stiffness.

The Red General rides her. Her slim legs encircle his hips. His hips find the natural gallop rhythm of his long years of campaign with the wild-horsemen of the People’s Cavalry Regiments. He lopes – driving the length of his cock into her – and lolls back into the chair. He never tires of her.

“Your cock is magnificent.” Her voice comes as a faint breath in his ear.

“It is your aristocratic cunt that I am fucking. I am nothing. The State is…” His eyelids flutter closed and his cock – at last – erupts inside her. His foot jerked out as he came, geysers pounding from the cockhead, dribbling down her labia to spill like lava on his balls. The silver bowl splashed borscht and tendrils of cream, across the floor. The Red General’s mind seemed to him to flash and go blind, then flash, blindness. He inhaled deeply…the hot mist of beet soup, the richer, muskier perfume of their fucking…the fainter sandalwood scent of her skin.

For a moment, the spilling beet soup is frozen in the air, a splayed wedge of burgundy sparkling in the candlelight. For a moment, Shanghai ceases to be. Faded the shouts of rushing Amahs and screaming babes, gone the never-ceasing thunder of distant cannons, erased even the pocked walls and shabby wooden frames of the Russian Quarter itself. The year dissolves away. For a moment – call it back! – the Red General and his White Russian whore are merged into the timeless, whorling and humid swamp of pure human pleasure. From that moment onward, the Red General had been stolen. The glorious Party – long life to Bolshevism! – shrank to a humbled thing within him. His smiles grew fainter as The Revolution sagged. She could not weep when he was ordered to The Front. She burned candles before her saintly icon, kneeling nights away as no message from him came.

When the telegram came ordering the Red General to shell the city of Stephanizov, he crumpled it and burned it. It was a good memory, he mused, sipping the tasteless turnip and roots broth in his dented mug.

“We retreat tonight,” he growled at the Major.

That, comrades, is how the city of St. Stephanizov was saved from the Great Destruction from the People’s Revolution in 1922.

© 2000 William S. Dean. All rights reserved.