The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I also spent some time in Siberian kolkhozes. Students who were not assigned to construction brigades in the summer were obligated to work on a kolkhoz. Beginning with this year, students were forcibly enrolled in construction gangs. Earlier, when the initial brigades were formed, students signed up willingly, since they could earn some money. Under the compulsory system, students working on the most demanding construction projects received less money than workers. Komsomol leaders announced that students were obligated to help the nation that year in achieving the goals of the five-year plan. Thus, the mandatory “third labor semester” was introduced. Nobody protested, even though many were unhappy. In the USSR students were quiet and cowed. They little resembled western students. Every student knew that it only took a criticism of some injustice on their part to be expelled from the Komsomol. (At the Irkutsk Medical Institute, expulsion from the Komsomol signified automatic expulsion from the institute. Thus, students did not even have a say about their vacations.)

Therefore, in September 1973, having advanced to my second year of studies, I was sent to a kolkhoz for a month. We left Irkutsk in an overcrowded train and traveled for twenty-four hours, and then another 100 kilometers north by vehicle. The place where we arrived was isolated. The taiga stretched for hundreds of kilometers in all directions and a dirt track led to the village. The village stretched along the banks of a rapid and broad river. We were settled in the gym of the village school. We all slept together without undressing, in our boots and padded jackets on roughly hewn plank beds. Everybody was given a dirty mattress, a pillow, and a thin blanket. Forget about sheets. It was cold at night. Water in the pails froze. For a whole month we were promised that the heat would be turned on, but it wasn’t. The boiler was broken. The bath-house, where we could go once every ten days, was heated primitively (the smoke escaped through the windows). Students were given a daily ration of food which they prepared themselves. Few people owned cows in the village. The cows from the kolkhoz were sent to the slaughterhouse in the district center. So, in order to obtain meat, the cows had to be taken to a slaughterhouse more than 100 kilometers away, and the meat brought back. But the kolkhoz could not assign a vehicle for this purpose. The chairman decided that the students themselves should slaughter the cows. In this fashion, we advanced to a state of complete self-service.

During my first day at the kolkhoz I heard an unknown language being spoken in the village. It turned out that these were Chuvash people deported from the Volga. Later I met some Russians. These were exiles. Among them were laborers from Rostov-on-the-Don. I made acquaintance with one of them. He told me that when Khrushchev instituted his monetary reform in 1961, one of the Rostov factories announced a strike. The KGB searched out

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the organizers of whom my acquaintance was one. He received a ten-year prison sentence. After release in 1972, he was exiled. He was not allowed to leave the village. His family remained in Rostov-on-the-Don. They could not visit him for lack of money.

It turned out that there were exiles not just in this village but also in many others. Villagers frequently hid convicts who had escaped from the camps. Only the students worked the fields. The kolkhoz dwellers preferred to work on their own vegetable plots at this time. Our village was called Burkhun, which meant “residence of God” in Buriat, but this was far from a heavenly place. The poverty was staggering. One felt he had walked into the previous century. The homes were old, crooked, and unpainted. The roofs were grown over with moss. The yards were small and dirty. The street, which went the length of the village, was totally rutted and there were heaps of manure everywhere. The people were grim and came to life only at the stall where vodka, sticky dirty candy, and soap were sold. There was a store with humble wares: bottled kerosene, hunting boots, cologne, a doll with a fierce face, bread, and the ever-present vodka which was delivered regularly. Almost the whole male population was at the store each morning. By mid-day not a sober person could be seen, from the mailman to the drivers. The drivers and vehicles were sent from town to the kolkhozes to help in harvesting. Every evening the drunken drivers came to the club, the only place of entertainment and relaxation, in order to fight with the villagers or the students. The only entertainment was films which were shown nightly in the club. But they were all old ones, some twenty years old or so. New films were rare, and there were never any foreign films.