The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Every morning we were taken out to the fields. The kolkhoz fields stretched for many kilometers but nobody worked them other than our group. Half of the harvest was left in the fields. Potatoes, turnips, carrots, and beets froze in the ground. There was a fair amount of mechanical equipment on the kolkhoz but it was all broken. Machinery, tractors, and combines were left under the open skies and were rusting away. The kolkhoz was served by two truck farming operations in town. Some trucks brought potatoes from the fields to the warehouse, others from the warehouse to town. One group of students in the field gathered potatoes in buckets and filled a dump truck which then went to the warehouse. The potatoes were dumped right on the ground, and another group of students, again using buckets, would load a truck which then went to town. As was later explained to us, the town and the trucking operation could not agree on trucks going directly to town.

Once, the kolkhoz chairman came and told us that if we moved all the potatoes out of storage, we could go home. We had ten days of work left. In order to return to Irkutsk earlier, we organized the work in three round-the-clock shifts.

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Chapter Thirty-Two

We emptied the warehouse in three days. Satisfied with our successful effort, we went to the chairman to get our accounts squared. But he categorically refused to release us, saying that there was much work yet to be done on the kolkhoz. We students were indignant and refused to go to the fields the next day. The chairman ordered that we be denied food. Two days of unwitting hunger strike commenced. On the morning of the third day the director of agriculture, the secretary of the regional Komsomol, and a representative from the institute arrived by car. We were not allowed to say one word in self-justification. Only the director and the secretary spoke. They demanded to know who was the first person to suggest the work stoppage. The students replied that they all went out together, there was no first person. When the “commission” found out that the chairman had denied us food, they pretended to be very angry and promised to reprimand him. The regional secretary declared to the kolkhoz chairman that the Komsomol had its own methods of combating such negative phenomena. As a result, we had to work another week.

I found out accidentally that not only students were brought to work on the kolkhoz. Once I had to go to the regional center to make an emergency phone call to Moscow. To do this I needed an off day, but we had to work without them. I asked the team leader to assign me to the grain threshing operation on the night shift. In the evening, a covered truck arrived there. Fifteen prisoners, guarded by three sub-machine gunners, stepped out of the truck. I found out that they were from the nearest concentration camp. Another group of students from our class worked at the storage facility. They had been doing so for a whole month side by side with prisoners loading potatoes into freight cars.

All the students returned from the kolkhoz together. Four dilapidated, shaky cars were added to the freight train. But the students noticed nothing since this was payday. For a month of work we were allotted thirty-five rubles, but after taxes we were each given thirty.

Two cases of vodka appeared immediately in the railroad car. The medical students were celebrating something akin to a harvest festival. By morning the cases were empty and we were all dead asleep. Drunkenness in the USSR was a constant problem. Everybody drank, and drank a lot, especially the youth. On the streets of Irkutsk, one could see drunken people from morning to night. Girls and women drank; school children and students drank. In the vestibule of the Irkutsk Medical Institute there was a wall placard called the “Komsomol Spotlight.” It was titled “War on Drunkenness.” Every week the names of students who wound up in the city’s medical drying-out ward were listed on it. Sometimes interns from sixth level classes made the list.

Young doctors working in villages were especially prone to alcoholism. Not a single student party took place without vodka. I knew students from the

Vladimir Azbel, Siberian Adversity

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