The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

“Bear in mind,” he said significantly, “that among those being sent there are almost no party or Komsomol elements. Therefore, if you do not justify the trust being placed in you by the Soviet regime in enlisting you in such a responsible and urgent task as the collectivization of the country, I will be unable to impose any punishment of a party-Komsomol nature, but will simply posit the question of the impossibility of your presence within the walls of a Soviet institution of higher learning.”

On a February morning I arrived at the institute from which we were to go to the station. I was wearing boots and a hat with earmuffs lent to me by Bo-ria [diminutive of Boris], a childhood friend. In my soul I was uneasy: I was not quite sure whether I would fully vindicate the celebrated trust of which Siiak spoke yesterday and sorrowfully looked at the massive oak door—it may close for me forever. The faces of my friends were also gloomy and only Misha [diminutive of Mikhail], stamping his feet and clapping his hands from the cold, was daydreaming out loud:

“Boy, will I eat my fill of sour cream with bread when I get there, just like in the country when I was a kid. These non-dekulakicized devils must still have some.”

The German colonies in Volynia, created under Catherine II, did not resemble Ukrainian villages with their small white huts, tightly pressed together along dusty roads. Here, one village soviet united farmsteads scattered over ten to fifteen kilometers. A wooden house, outbuildings, a small grove, fields all around—that made up each farmstead. The colonists lived prosperously even though they did not have much land. The cultivation of crops, cattle breeding, bee keeping and hops provided large incomes. But in 1932 these once attractive spots were already a desert. The notorious “dispossession of the kulaks” deprived the village of its richest, its hardest working, and most experienced peasants. They were shipped to Siberia, while many died in the torture-chambers of the NKVD.

It is not surprising that the two authorized officials sent from Kiev to “agitate,” were soundly beaten by the peasants and driven out on the road to Zhitomir. The chairman of a newly formed kolkhoz [collective farm] had been also recently sent to the Zhitomir hospital with bullets in his hip and leg. In an area of a neighboring village soviet, where people were able to eat only frozen potatoes, the women revolted and gave much trouble to the region’s party leadership.

The district party officials who sent us to work—evidently, the number of party members who knew German was insufficient—called upon the students not to eat and not to sleep, but to think of the grain that was to be deposited in the barns of future kolkhozes. Finding ourselves in one of the village soviets, my

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classmate and I immediately felt that, here, evidently, we would have to execute our directive precisely. The newly organized kolkhoz refused to give us provi-sions—“we don’t have enough for ourselves”—and in the unheated classroom in the school, a handful of rotting hay had been thrown on the floor.

We began to acquaint ourselves with the situation. The belongings of the exiles were turned over to the kolkhoz. Hundreds of beehives which had once produced such aromatic honey, were left in a cold building where all the bees perished from cold and hunger. No one took the trouble to feed them. Horses also died from hunger and often on the snowy fields one could see a dark heap above which a flock of ravens circled. This was a horse released from the kolkhoz stable when its time had come or one that had simply collapsed on the road. Of course, a different fate would have befallen this horse in the city. It would have been quickly converted into sausage that was very popular in those years and which was called “Konnitsa Budennago” [“Budennyi’s horse sausage,” a play on Budennyi’s “Red Cavalry”]. The colonists, however, though starving, resolutely refused to eat horsemeat.

All the grain had been shipped out. The small amount which each peasant saved after a poor harvest year, not even giving it to his family so that he could sow his fields anew, was mercilessly confiscated by the regime.