A short story about the occupation of Kyiv by the Poles in 1920. 'Life became unbearable. All segments of the population felt her stupidity. Cut off from the whole world, left to its own devices, without industry and trade, without money and without true power, Kyiv was doomed to a dull, hungry vegetation. In no regime, which at the beginning of the century often replaced each other, did the intelligentsia in Kyiv starve as much as it starved under the Poles."