The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

So Mitia and I lugged in all kinds of junk from the ravine next to the farmstead. We mixed clay right on the spot and built a hut. We made bricks and built an oven, covered the roof, plastered the walls, put in a door and window frames, and built a table and four stools.

“Now, sister,” I said, “get ready. We’re going to the village into society, to your own home. You’ll live freely and unconstrained.”

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My sister immediately broke out into tears.

“What have you planned? To get rid of me?” And the complaints started.

“I don’t have a garden there. Where will I get seedlings? And what will I do there? If I had a sewing machine, I could sew and make a living, but what will I do there?”

Nevertheless, I moved her to the new home saying:

“Here you’ll be a gardener yourself and you’ll have enough seedlings for half the village.”

She smiled through her tears: “We know these tender persuasions. Then I’ll have to suffer with the children in any way I know.”

Toward the winter we bought her a sewing machine and a cow. We built a spacious shed. Mother gave her some chickens. In the spring we dug a seed-plot, planted cabbage seeds, and instructed the children to water them and guard them against the hens. My sister became more cordial to Mitia and me. We often visited each other for various reasons since there are many of these among those who love each other. Mitia and I stayed alone. Then we took in two boys who had lost both parents. They spent the winter with us, got used to the place, and were happy. But for some dark reason, their grandfather then took them. Afterwards Mitia’s brother and his wife died and left six children. The older brothers were already adults, about twenty years old. They remained living in their home and we helped them.

The infant girl was taken by a peasant woman, adding to her own three children. Mitia and I took the four-year-old boy. People who were curious came to us from various places expressing a desire to live with us jointly. But they soon became bored and left, finding a more attractive life style. They went where people walked about with clean hands and did not dig in the dirt, where they ate ready-baked, clean bread produced by those who lead a boring life and dig in the dirt. They became “wise leaders” thinking that peasants could not make it without their help. They engaged in all kinds of science, acting in theaters, dancing, playing football, chess, and performing somersaults beyond the clouds, etc. At the same time, however, they carefully made sure that the peasants should not eat up their own portion of bread by themselves. Otherwise, one could die from hunger with all one’s cultural games and pursuits.

Only a religious-moral attitude towards life helps a person choose a requisite labor and hold to it irrespective of any difficulties. It is to be carried out urgently and only leftover time may be allotted to amusements, merriment, and carousing. Only having set upon this path of the working peasant can a person establish brotherly relationships with people, be independent, and not sell his labor, creating exploiters in so doing. Additionally, he himself can respect another such brother-toiler.

Part Three

Unrelenting Order and Terror: 1930–1953

By 1930, the first Five Year Plan was in effect. It ushered in consequences that no one could foretell, policies that no one had ever seen, and terror that no one accused could survive.

The two main thrusts were forcible industrialization and collectivization. Through centralized planning and implementation, industrialization was slated to proceed at such a rapid pace that the Soviet Union was then, theoretically, to enter the ranks of the world’s leading industrial nations. Huge amounts of money were channeled into the most extensive projects—heavy industry at a massive and rapid scale. Though at an enormous cost, human and fiscal, close to a tripling of heavy industrial production was achieved by the time the plan ended in 1932.

Collectivization refers to the lumping of millions of individual farms into huge kolkhozes, or collective farms. Neither ideology nor economic theorizing could explain why this would not work. It would not have mattered anyway as the process rammed its way through the Russian countryside. Agriculture, which had shown signs of recovery in the late 1920’s, was devastated with huge drops in all the standard measures, from grain production to heads of livestock. The one measure that was the most “innovative” was also the least understood by the population and the most feared. This was the brutality of forced collectivization.

Some 15,000,000 people perished by means of forced starvation, execution, or concentration camps to insure collectivization that became entrenched. At the time of the formal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, agriculture had yet to recover from collectivization since the system was still in place.

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Part Three