The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

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  the building, nevertheless, remained in the hands of the victorious students. For a long time, as a payback, the hydrologists did not remove their remaining furniture and Siiak appointed students to keep guard and maintain protection so that not even an ink well could disappear.

  We were split into brigades and it was announced that studies would proceed under collectivist principles—via the laboratory-brigade method. Of course, Lena and I rushed to sign up for the same brigade but Shura Zapiller boldly cancelled the composition of the brigades as submitted and announced that the professional group and the party-Komsomol community would be vigilantly checking to see that the brigades be structured on sound production principles and not on the petty bourgeois bases of personal affinity.

  “We will not permit exclusive, individualistic groups of so-called friends to form under the guise of brigades. Therefore, we will now vote on those brigades which the action committee feels it necessary to present to the general meeting.”

  The vote was taken, as usual, by commencing with the question “who is against?” In each brigade, the most talented and mature student was appointed brigadier, then came two or three of the middling students, and then the inevitable “blockhead for shaping and finishing.” That was what the un-talented and uneducated were called by students. They had obtained entry into institutions of higher learning as a result of recruitment or being pushed into it at work.

  An immediate clarification: in many poorly prepared students, the lack of education was balanced by natural abilities and a sincere desire to work and learn. Such students improved rapidly and their friends willingly helped them. But there were quite a few of the lazy and the dullards. The brigade method eased their stay in the institution. The procedure was such that the brigadier and other brigade members were passed only after all members, without exception, completed their assignments. The brigadier and his deputy spent all of their free time with such a “backward pupil,” endlessly reviewing the material and writing his essays and reports—which their “ward” could not even read properly in class. This system led to a situation where capable students had absolutely no time to study since the time left to them after lectures, community labor and endless meetings was taken by “working with the blockheads” from their brigades. It was especially difficult with the inept of the worst kind, those who invariably at meetings, directed harsh criticism at senior professors. Such students looked at their brigadiers, especially those from intelligentsia backgrounds, as “milk cows,” demanding complete academic servicing of them.

  If any of the students were depressed by the “wholesome productive atmosphere” of the brigade, built on scamming the professor and pulling the lunkheads through from year to year, and if such a student strove to work in-

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  dependently, searching the libraries for corresponding materials and staying late at his books and truly deepening one’s knowledge, the nickname “individualist,” frightening in its consequences, was hurled from the podium at meetings and cemented venomously in the columns of the wall newspaper. One then had to hurriedly repent in order to avoid trial by his comrades and even expulsion from the institute.

  If a capable student, moved by good will, attempted to help a less talented friend on his own initiative, this too was considered to be reprehensible. Fearing the rise of “secret organizations” under the pretext of brigade work, party leaders paid particular attention to the splitting up of friends.

  Later, seeing the nonviability of such brigades, the institute’s leadership attempted to reconstitute them according to a different principle, namely the territorial wherein students living in the same district were to be united. But this too did not improve the work of the brigades. Then a final effort was made. Exemplary students were concentrated in the first brigade, good students in the second, mid-level in the third, and so on. Such an organizational principle also did not produce positive results. Those who were behind and even the average students were left without help and were unable to carry out any of the brigade assignments.

  The matter kept worsening because in the time period described, the beginning of the 1930’s, the institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union, especially the newly organized ones that did not arise on the foundations of the old establishments, which were simply renamed, had problems: they did not have well equipped laboratories or studies, nor textbooks besides primitive “work books” that reminded one of self-study manuals, and which, by the way, were published in very small press runs. Unheated classrooms and students’ empty stomachs did not facilitate successful learning. In such fashion, the laboratory-brigade method was destined for total failure under the conditions of Soviet higher education. However, as a result of its application over a number of years, there appeared a type of Soviet “specialist,” incompetent in his field and frequently simply ignorant, who was able to graduate from an institute by hiding his squalid baggage behind the backs of brigade comrades. However, the authorities became convinced quite swiftly that such “defective production” emanating from higher education, was completely inapplicable in the nation which had an acute need for specialists. Finally, special emphasis was placed on individual student responsibility, substantially raising the requirements for those entering and graduating from higher educational institutions. Results showed themselves quickly.

  One day Siiak sent for all the students who were fluent in German and announced that on the very next day we were to depart for the Pulinskii Region

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  of Zhitomir Province in order to help in the collectivization of the German colonies.

  “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, t
he 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.

  In the main, our responsibilities were to translate into German the pronouncements of the visiting party agitators and other officials. They either spoke at meetings or called in peasants for individual “talks.” Here we observed, while shuddering with indignation, the application of “effective” measures, including putting an unyielding person’s fingers into the crack of an open door and slowly closing the door. Later, such behavior was hypocritically criticized as “dizziness from success.” “Guilty” lower level party workers were demonstratively removed from their posts, though they had acted on directives from the center. Sometimes they were even executed. But the deed was done. As to the German colonists, even those who were collectivized, there remained no trace of them after a few years. All of them were shipped in a direction unknown and “reliable” kolkhozniks were placed on their lands. As the war was to show, however, they too rapidly became unreliable.

  We were without any food for almost three days. Only a delayed directive from the region forced the kolkhoz officials to attend to the unwelcome, though involuntary guests. We began to receive food consisting of a small bowl of watery soup and a piece of corn bread that was much akin to brick. For some reason this soup was given to us in a dark, semi-demolished house.

  Once we couldn’t determine what was the mass of white that had aggregated on the sides of the soup bowls. These were maggots; the soup had been made with completely rotten flour.

  No, Misha was not able to treat himself to sour cream here.

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  We were charged with compiling a list of how much grain was still due from each farmstead and we dragged ourselves from house to house over barely walked-on, snowy paths. My city boots were soaked through and I wrapped my feet in newspaper. It froze to the soles of the boots. I was coughing violently, but I visualized the headline on the institute’s wall newspaper: “Saboteurs have no place in a Soviet institution of higher education!” And I continued on, making notations with ossified fingers.

  For some reason, meetings were always scheduled at night and, in hoarse voices, we translated the stereotypical speeches of the regional orators. Sometimes the kolkhozniks who were “adapting” spoke—those not yet acclimatized usually remained grimly quiet.

  Once I was going to a women’s meeting, as usual, scheduled late in the evening. My friend was occupied at the other end of our district and I struggled along on my own from the school. I tried not to lose the path and fall into knee deep snow. Clouds alternately blocked off the sky or revealed a narrow sickle of the cold moon. My path followed a sparse wood, then it led out to the public road. It was there by the woods that I saw a dark figure lying right on the trail and moving slightly to the right and to the left, the way a person does in a shooting gallery preparing for an unerring shot at the target.

  I turned cold: at this instant there will be a flash from the sawn-off muzzle. I will fall into the snow and never see my mother again . . . But why would anyone shoot me? The colonists, after all, understand that we are only screws in the machine, that we are incapable of changing anything in this fearful operation. Maybe the person is lying in wait for someone else, not me? To run is hopeless—the shot would get me in the back. I tear off my hat that hides my hair and go directly at the dark figure.

  But there is no shot. . . . Only having come up very close do I see that this is a dying horse moving its head in agony. Then I run across the barren, cold fields choking from the tension. Only upon reaching the road do I notice that I am still clutching my hat in my hands.

  The trees are covered with bright, still sticky leaves, and baskets of lilies of the valley are being sold in the streets. I really don’t want to be stuck in boring meetings at the institute. But this time I will not be able to slip away easily. My name is listed in the agenda for the day. It is proposed that I and some other friends be inducted into the professional union. This is essential in order to obtain work—but I do not worry since I feel that everything is in place. My grades are high, I have some half dozen social commitments, and my old ladies, housewives whom I am bringing out of illiteracy, are already reading in syllables. And suddenly, completely unexpectedly—rejection.

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  “Comrade Pavlova [the author’s maiden name] must be more fully immersed in the proletarian kettle and definitively reject her bourgeois ways,” drones a horse-jawed student who does not miss the occasion to flaunt his vigilance. “Even today, look at her dress!”

  All stare at me and, bewildered, even I look at my humble dress, re-sewn out of something by my mother. Finding nothing reprehensible, I wait perplexed. Sustaining an effective pause, my accuser triumphantly announces:

  “See how long it is? A whole quarter below the knees.”

  Here he is truly correct. In accordance with fashion magazines, waistlines were raised and skirts lowered—and mother’s creation reflects these tendencies. In a period when engineers did not shave for weeks so as to graphically demonstrate their enthusiasm and zeal for the building of socialism—ostensibly having not even a minute for personal matters—and a student who showed up at an institute in a white shirt and tie would be immediately censured by the wall newspaper, any manifestation of femininity irritated the guardians of the purity of proletarian taste.

  “I cannot consider the length of my dress to be a reason interfering with my entry into the professional union at this time,” I say with a non-penitential look, “Comrade Tarasov’s displeasure would be understandable if I raised my skirt a quarter above the knees.”

  There are giggles in the hall, but Shura Zapiller, who is running the meeting, interrupts me: “A motion has been made to postpone the entry of comrade Pavlova into the professional union until she liquidates the left-over bourgeois habits in her consciousness. In the name of the institute’s professional organization, I fully support this action for re-education. Who is against?”

  It is difficult to say when the necessary shifts in my behavior would have appeared. Unexpectedly, Sergo Ordzhonikidze [Minister of Heavy Industry] stopped accepting unshaven engineers and it was proposed to Komsomol secretaries that they lift the ban on white collars.

  I was a
ccepted as a union member in the fall.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nila Magidoff, Only to Travel! Only to Live!

  Nila Magidoff was born in Belarus in 1905 to a peasant family. Her family moved to Kursk in central Russia when she was still a child. There she was accepted into a school for indigent girls funded by Maria Fedorovna (Romanov), the Queen Mother. After the Revolution the active and restless Nila trained to parachute jump and joined the Soviet merchant marine. These activities were far more interesting to her than the factory work that she was doing. In 1938 she married and American in Moscow, Robert Magidoff, a noted correspondent for the Associated Press and NBC radio. She was unexpectedly able to come to America in October 1941 where she became heavily involved as a speaker and fundraiser for Russian War Relief. The book Nila was co-written by Willie Snow Ethridge to whom Nila narrated her story. The narration makes for the colorful and idiosyncratic English. Excerpted from N. Magidoff and W.S. Ethridge, Nila. New York: Keedick Press, 1956.

  I worked at this factory for some time and then I want to see the world. I understand I can go to the Merchant Marines and apply to be a sailor. I had a nice, clean biography. It was absolutely pure like a white page—nothing written there. I came from poor family with no capitalists, which was all they required. So here I went. It was very strange, I suppose you think, Willie, this married life. I don’t understand it myself. I loved my husband very much, and he loved me. It was just that I was young and crazy to travel and Karel at this time was so involved in his work.