My Russian Family

by Lilia Sariecheva

  Mikhail loved folk dancing and in school he became an expert at the fast movements. He later taught me the intricate steps. I can still see the bold arrogant moves, from the beginning pose with the hands on the hips, the tilt of the head, the dismissive wave of the arm and the sparkle in the eye, to the blur of motions with twirls, hand clapping, jumping, and steps too fast to follow with the eye. I remember the feeling when my dad would take my hand and walk me to the middle of a circle of people. I looked into his eyes that were full of mischief and waited for his first motion. With his chin up and hands on his hips, he tried to stay serious, but couldn’t. I felt as though all of my being was full of happiness. We danced like two weightless birds unlimited by gravity and unaware of our physical bodies. Our spirits were free as the wind and at this moment we belonged to each other like an essence of two-a daughter and a father. It was an unforgettable moment. Now I understand how the high school girls felt when my dad, as a boy, had invited them, one after the other to waltz at the school dances. None of them was his girlfriend, but each one of them felt special.

  However, high school days were now over and everyone had to decide what to do after graduation. Mikhail dreamed of being a teacher or an engineer. But he was not yet aware that it wasn’t to be. Planning for the future requires looking at the past and as Mikhail went through this process he came to understand just how complicated the world had become for Russian peasant families.

  The Russian Revolution of October 1917 had brought economic breakdown and uncontrollable inflation. This prompted the Bolsheviks to nationalize industry and property. They declared private enterprise illegal and demanded that the peasants deliver all farm surpluses to the state. Money lost all value.

  The Sariechev family, like other peasants, simply took possession of land for farming after the 1917 revolution. The early 1920s were a time to work hard for the future. The late 1920s were the good years. Peasants discarded the wooden plows as the more efficient iron plows appeared. Other goods also became available and the peasants actually became prosperous. Mikhail’s family, like other peasant families, had more cropland and could buy more seed, which yielded more profits. They could build barns and have land for pasture to raise livestock. It was a pleasant upward spiral!

  The state did “assessments” on the farms up to the early 1920s. For example, if you raise ten tons of grain, the state assesses your farm and tells you what you need for your farm to survive, say, one ton of grain. The state then takes everything else. In this example, it collects nine tons for its own needs. It was not much incentive for a peasant to work harder and grow more food! This was changed to a more gentle “tax-in-kind” which was a nominal amount the state collected, about three tons out of ten tons. This collection could be sacks of grain, sunflower seeds, cows, and any other farm product. The Sariechev and the other peasant families were relatively contented. They worked hard and prospered.

  These happy families were greatly disillusioned around 1929 when Stalin embarked upon the huge collective farm project. The plan was to induce rapid industrialization financed by wealth extracted from a collectivized peasantry. Life in Russia, for agricultural people, changed for the worse. The only land controlled by peasants was the garden in his backyard; the rest was confiscated. It was especially hard, as the peasants had just received a taste of independence with their new wealth. These huge government managed farms did not function well. Certainly larger farms are more efficient than smaller ones, this is indisputable, but the management must be local, not thousands of kilometers away by a bureaucrat sitting at a desk.

  There is a long list of socialistic countries all over the globe that tried to combine agriculture with a centralized management. They all failed.

  One of the largest problems with state organized farms was that people lost the stimulus to work because they had lost their own land and livestock. Peasants want to work for themselves and not “all for one and one for all.” Peasant resistance brought death and imprisonment to millions, especially in the Ukraine where resistance was the boldest. Many of Ukraine’s people, particularly the Cossacks, had earlier fought for the Whites, against the Reds.

  The period of 1932-34 recorded some 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 deaths from starvation in the Russian countryside after the government confiscated grain supplies for use by urban populations. It was one of the two largest famines in the 20th century. The largest being in China in 1958-60, during the Great Leap forward, when disorganization of agricultural production compounded by bad weather resulted in as many as 20,000,000 deaths.

  Information like this was a secret at that time and unknown to the Sariechev family or other citizens. The press and radio were quiet and only the hierarchy knew about it. It was decades before the horrible secrets sprang a leak. How could information about millions of people dying be kept a secret?

  A remarkable picture was recently provided by my Uncle Vassily’s only son Anatoly, which shows the villagers of Arscent’evo posing for a group photograph. It was 1932-33 during the Great Depression. It was also the second year of a drought so food was especially scarce and times were very tough. Why was this picture taken in such an isolated village? It was a seven kilometer walk on a winding dirt road from the closest train station and no one had an automobile or a horse at this time. I believe that this photograph was a reward to the villagers for winning the local “Best Brigade of Workers” award in a work production contest which pits village against village. The villagers were poorly dressed and armed with homemade farm implements. Most were slender, strong, and handsome, but the ravages of time affected the photo and obviously some faces were poorly restored causing blurred and misshapen features. I could not identify most of the faces as this was some 18 years prior to my birth. Also, most of the young men and boys were killed in World War II and I never met them. A house and various fruit trees are visible in the old photograph.

  Arscent’evo Villagers,1932-33

  I could positively identify only my 15-year-old father (1), my 53-year-old Grandfather Ivan (2), who was still recovering from a severe beating, my 45-year-old Granny Varvara (3), my 25-year-old Uncle Vassily (4), who is kneeling next to his cousin (5), a son of my father’s Uncle Piotr, and Peasant Oohov (6) who is standing on the left.

  A village some eight kilometers (5 miles) from my father’s village resisted collectivizing. The Stalin-style lesson was effectively taught as troops came and suppressed that brief revolt. My father’s village had its own stories to tell. A kindly well-liked older farmer named Oohov had an ideally large working family, a wife, several daughters, and four or five sons. They all worked hard and started to prosper so they decided to purchase a carding machine, which would semi-automatically card the wool fleece from the hand-sheared sheep and prepare it for spinning into thread or yarn. Most people did have a few sheep and it was some 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) to the closest carding machine, so it was a brilliant idea. Everyone in the village was happy and Oohov was living well.

  When agents of the Soviet Secret Police arrived to ensure the distribution of wealth for the farm collectivizing process, they questioned Oohov about his wealth from the carding machine. In the end, they took the machine to God knows where and the local villages were again forced to transport their raw wool fleece the 25 kilometers to another carding machine. Only the intervention of all the villagers kept Oohov from going to prison.

  Who had the benefit of this stupid action? Not the Soviet peasant, that is for sure! This was one of the reasons that Mikhail’s parents sent him to the city for education so he could quit farming forever. His future would be elsewhere. In fact, there actually was another strong reason for him to quit village life in a collective farm.

  When Arscent’evo and nine other large and small villages were collectivized, a problem arose. Collective farms were being set up faster than trained, qualified Communists were available to manage them so the peasants would vote in their best available man to take charge until the boss approved by the Ryazan District G
overnment became available. The local Communists accepted the peasants’ choice of my Grandfather Ivan to be boss of this collective farm. It brought him great honor but it also brought on a great challenge.

  Wealthy villagers called kulaks were a privileged class that the Communists were successfully eliminating so that the Red Power would have greater control. It was class warfare at a basic emotional level. Many of the villagers saw the injustices and sided with the kulaks. They were strongly against the process of creating collective farms and this brought them head-to-head against my grandfather, who understood and sympathized with their thinking but felt duty bound to enforce the edicts of the Communists. As happened in many villages during that era, opponents of collective farming decided to kill the person in charge, in this case, my Grandfather Ivan. A group of 15 or so men cornered him one night and, instead of shooting him, they decided to beat him to death, the better to vent their frustrations. The vengeful group left him unconscious and presumed dead.

  Grandfather was a tough old bird. He coughed up and urinated blood for a long time but he somehow survived— although he never completely recovered. His wife, family, close friends, and the Communists pressured him to identify his attackers but he never did. When the approved Communist boss of the collective farm arrived, grandfather was transferred to supervisor of the numerous horses in all ten villages of the farm. He loved horses and greatly enjoyed this position which he kept for many years.

  Only recently did my father Mikhail reveal to me that one of the leaders of that group of rebel villagers that tried to beat my Grandfather Ivan to death was Ivan’s older brother Piotr. My father kept the secret all those years and our families always wondered why Piotr was reluctant to attend family functions.

  Incidents similar to that of Grandfather and Oohov became typical as the Soviets transformed all Russian agriculture into two categories of farms. Sovetskoe Khozyaystvo (sovkhoz for short) which means state farm. The sovkhoz developed from the few private estates taken over in their entirety by the Soviet Power. The principles of large-scale industrial production were used as the model for organizing the farms with little regard for the uniqueness of agriculture. Workers were paid wages and allowed to cultivate personal garden plots.

  The second category was the kolkhoz, short for kollektivnoye khozyaynstvo, which means collective farm. Originally conceived to be a voluntary union of peasants, this became the dominant form of agricultural enterprise. Peasants from a number of households joined forces in a collective or cooperative agricultural enterprise operated on state-owned land. The quality and quantity of labor determined the salary paid to these individuals. State authorities kept operational control through the appointments of kolkhoz chairmen and, until 1958, through political units in the machine-tractor stations which provided heavy equipment to kolkhoz in return for payments in kind of agricultural produce. The kolkhoz allowed individual households to grow a garden of their own.

  A paid workday in the kolkhoz was complicated and led to a lot of frustration. The record book would indicate a workday for each person as a straight perpendicular line or “stick” for that particular day. A boss would tell a worker to do a certain job and give him credit for three sticks, while the actual job might take five days. Only rarely was the salary paid in rubles. Typically, it was paid in farm produce, and it was the poor or cull portion of the crop. Later on, during the 1950s, many women decided to only work in their own garden, raise the crops, and sell them. They could make more money that way. This was good for the gardeners and a disaster for the collective farms.

  Other economic events were underway which would shake the world to its foundations. The Great Depression from 1929 until about 1939 was a major catastrophe for everybody. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized world. The trigger was greed and lax laws in the United States’ stock markets. Most of the countries in the world at that time were linked by the gold standard in a network of fixed currency exchange rates. It took the economics of a world war to finally end that terrible depression. Its social and cultural effects were enormous, as it brought drastic declines in output, severe underemployment, and acute deflation in almost every country in the world. The Great Depression wrought extreme human suffering in numerous countries, including Russia.

  This depression was a main reason that Mikhail’s parents could not help him with money for his university education. The boy found a part-time bookkeeping job for food money that helped him get through two years of engineering courses at Moscow College.

  At the start of the second year, his shoes gave out. The toes of the shoes opened up as if they were asking for food themselves. Neither glue nor thread could close these two hungry mouths. The shoes were old and thin and a cobbler informed Mikhail that they could not be repaired. The poor scholar tied them together with twine and started classes. Another student saw his plight and donated an old ugly throwaway pair, which Mikhail used for the rest of the school year.

  That next spring, he lost his job through a time conflict with his course schedule. They gave him an excellent reference but he couldn’t eat the paper. Unemployment was high and he could not find a job. He visited his oldest sister Tania who was now married and living in a one-room flat in Moscow. They were poor with two children and her husband made a low salary Mikhail’s sister explained that she could not give him any money. She had already sold her wedding ring and other valuables for food. She tried to convince him to come every day for dinner, but it was too far to walk, maybe 25 or 30 kilometers (15.5 to 18.6 miles) and he had no money for transportation.

  However, she made him stay for dinner this day. She had been cooking borsch and she pulled him into the kitchen. A battered old soup pot with a chunk of meat on a bone and a chili pepper, was dancing on the stovetop as the boiling water did its work, fueled by the flaming bits of wood. The aroma filled the room and the hungry Mikhail felt his mouth water as he savored the familiar smell that brought back a rush of pleasant memories. Tania smiled at her brother’s visible reaction.

  “It’s been cooking an hour and a half. It is time to add the potatoes,” she said. She pulled out a well-used, homemade wooden cutting board and a large sharp kitchen knife. Two small potatoes appeared and Tania converted them into very small and thin slices. She carefully dumped the potatoes into the soup pot together with two bay leaves.

  Mikhail breathed in deeply and his stomach started to growl. Tania heard it and smiled as she rumpled his curly black hair, “Very soon it will be ready.”

  She then proceeded to slice up a cabbage, a small onion, and several fresh tomatoes from their home garden. She continued talking with Mikhail as she peeled and then grated two fist-sized beets and then some carrots. She worked slowly as they became involved in their discussion. After 15 minutes had passed she gathered the vegetables and added them to the boiling water. Mikhail stopped talking in mid-sentence as he watched open-mouthed. Typically, she would have added the juice from a lemon, but the foreign grown fruit cost too much so she substituted a glass full of homemade sauerkraut juice. Tania added a pinch of salt and replaced the lid on the pot. Mikhail smiled and licked his lips. Exactly three minutes after the veggies went into the pot, the pot came off the fire.

  Right on time, Tania’s husband Vanya arrived. He changed to his house clothes and slippers, washed his hands, and then the men sat down at the kitchen table. Vanya sliced some black bread as Tania ladled out the soup including a small piece of meat each into three bowls. She added a generous pinch of chopped parsley and some pressed garlic followed by a tablespoon of sour cream. The table was silent as they stirred their soup bowls and then enjoyed the meal. Tania was a good cook.

  Later, Mikhail left with a full stomach and good feelings. The three of them were close and their companionship had worked its magic. It was around this time that Tania’s husband Vanya was about to leave on a long-term work project and he wanted a picture of his wife to comfort him. Tania took Mikhail with her to
the photographer’s and had him take a picture of them both. She was about 27 and he was 14 years old. Typically, people wore neck scarves inside of their coat but, at Tania’s suggestion, Mikhail wore his outside for the picture to cover the shabbiness of his coat.

  Aunt Tania and my father in Moscow, 1933

  Nanny, Uncle Vanya and Aunt Tania in Moscow, 1934.

  Grandfather Ivan’s little sister Linda, known as Nanny, had left Arscent’evo years earlier to work in a Moscow textile factory and she kept that position until she retired. She was respected at work, had her own place to live, and she was happy. She is probably in her early 40s in the following picture.

  Mikhail returned to job seeking. His money ran out and he went three days without eating, just water. Desperately, he turned to his Uncle Andre, who was the youngest brother of his mother Varvara. The two had a very close rewarding relationship that exceeded friendship or just blood ties and this bond endured and grew stronger over the years. Uncle Andre was working at that time as an Investigative Prosecutor in Moscow. He had a reputation of being fair and honest. He would not take bribes and he was well liked and admired. Mikhail arrived at his one-room flat and found that his uncle was not home. Uncle Andre’s wife greeted him sadly and explained that her husband had not only lost his job, he was himself being prosecuted. A trial in the Stalin Era was exceedingly scary and dangerous. There was little food and no money but she brought out a crust of black bread and some tea as they sat and talked. Mikhail did not mention his problems to the kindly woman.

  After Mikhail left their flat, he happened to meet his Uncle Andre just a short distance away. They hugged and talked happily. Mikhail quickly noticed that his uncle had been drinking. It was quite strange, as Andre never drank. Andre was perceptive and when he asked Mikhail if something was wrong, Mikhail explained his situation. Andre pulled out his coin bag and fished out two rubles, which left the bag empty. Mikhail protested loudly, but his uncle said, “Mikhail, take this money. At least I have something to sell and I can survive. You have nothing and you need it!” Finally, my father accepted the gift.