My mother's stories (chapter five)

My mother's stories
chapter 5
Collectivization and electrification of all the country

My mother was born in 1930 – just eight months before that (in November 1929) Stalin announced his programme of sweeping collectivization all over the country, and within nine years the centuries-old way of life in our villages was forcibly broken. The catastrophe that burst out during that period was not really unexpected. Peasantry considered collectivization as treachery of the new communist regime that gave them the land soon after revolution and was now trying to take it back. Peasants couldn’t be convinced or attracted by abstract conversations about future happy life in the communist society without any private property. The land had to have its master – that was their deep inner belief. The consequences of the inevitable struggle that followed were really disastrous. The resistance of the peasants, who didn’t want to join collective farms, the confiscation of their crop, two years of draught caused a great famine with six million peasants starved to death. And as if this was not enough, several millions of the most successful, the most industrious workers were labeled as “kulaks” and killed, imprisoned or sent into exile depending on the form of their resistance, or just for the very fact of their prosperity.

The creation of collective farms was completed in the end, but what price did we pay? Why did we have to pay so dearly for collectivization? Our school textbooks explained it clearly – it was a struggle between centuries-old backwardness and new communist consciousness. It sounded very convincing for my young brains but, eventually, some doubts began to come. If collectivization was so beneficial, as we were always taught, why was the growth of agriculture the first and the most urgent issue at all the Congresses of the Communist Party? Though lack of food on the shelves in our shops and its low quality, especially in comparison with expensive products from peasants’ kitchen gardens at our markets, was the best proof that something was wrong with our collective farms.

             I used to go to the countryside occasionally, but even those short visits were enough to show me clearly that there was no prosperity in our villages. My mother never got on well with her mother – so I visited her village only twice. I went there for the first time at the age of five with my father and aunt, because my mother refused point-blank to join us. I remember very little of my first visit. Yet, for some reason, two small barefooted girls in ugly grayish dresses, my distant relatives I think, stuck steadily in my memory. They were too proud to play with me and it hurt my feelings of course. Now I understand their reasons – in their eyes I looked like a little princess in my multicoloured cotton dress and leather sandals. Later my mother told me that those girl’s dresses were grey with dirt as there was no laundering for small children’s garments in the villages.

             I remember I told this story to my future husband and, surprisingly, he had the same recollection from his early childhood when he lived with his parents in the village for some time. He told me about a feeling of shame and injustice, that he had in his young age, comparing himself in his nice clothes with pockets full of sweets, with barefooted and always hungry rural children.

            Several years ago my friend from university, whom I thought I knew well, shocked me with two stories from her childhood. She lived in a village in Moldova till the age of twelve. Her father was the chairman of the collective farm there and his most important achievement was the electrification of the village. I couldn’t believe it, but till the age of nine my friend lived without electricity and even after that she spent a lot of dark evenings because of frequent breakdowns in the line. How could it be that in 1965, 45 years after Vladimir Lenin proclaimed his daring “plan of electrification of all the country” my friend with her fellow villagers still spent their evenings in the dim light of oil lamps? We learnt about electrification at primary school! I remember well this touching story about Herbert Wells, the well-known writer and father of science fiction, who visited Lenin in Moscow in 1920. It was the time of Civil War - all the country lay in ruins and people suffered from cold and hunger. So no wonder that Wells couldn’t believe his ears when Lenin told him about his plan of electrification, and later called him “the dreamer in the Kremlin” in his famous book “Russia in the shadows”. Nevertheless, as our teachers always triumphantly finished, following Lenin’s advice, the famous writer visited our country 14 years later and admitted that all Lenin’s dreams had come true.

             And many years later my friend’s simple story shattered this myth about the USSR that I still believed. But she impressed me even more with her second story: how she, a daughter of the main person in the village, once went to the nearest town for the New Year Celebration, organized for children. She told me with a weird frozen expression on her face how overwhelmed she felt, when she, in her cheap homely dress, entered the brightly lit hall with a glittering New Year tree in the center and saw all those girls in magnificent frocks with diadems sparkling on their heads. And there she stood stiff on the threshold, a little awkward Cinderella – only without a lovely dress to support her confidence and bring out her beauty. Those diadems were made of white cardboard and multicoloured glass beads, actually, but for her it was like a fairy tale and even now, almost 50 years later, she still dreams about that brightly decorated hall with smartly-dressed children, dancing around the New Year tree. And I am afraid the same feeling of being out of place is coming to her in these dreams.

             How all of this could be happening in the country, where there were so many talks about equal rights for everybody declared in the Constitution? We were taught since the primary school that our country was the best, with the fairest relationships in the world. It was written everywhere: in our textbooks, newspapers, on our placards and proclaimed from our TV screens. Why didn’t we realize how dramatically it didn’t match the reality?

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations

2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages