Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring by Kathleen E. Smith

Author:Kathleen E. Smith [Smith, Kathleen E.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 08-03 Student volunteers working on a state farm in the Kostanai region of Kazakhstan in the summer of 1956. Photograph by Semyon Fridlyand. Courtesy Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Like the young recruits to the stroiki, Virgin Lands’ volunteers also faced disappointment regarding wages. Authorities sometimes cheated students in calculating how much work had been done and some labor was valued very low. According to historian Ol’ga Gerasimova, the wage for loading fifteen tons of grain by hand was only 80 kopecks.51 Those working on the harvesting machines or driving trucks earned significantly more. Given the gender division in assignment of tasks, this meant that men typically outearned women. Here one can find students deciding how to arrange their affairs in a “just” fashion: Matveeva’s group, which had few boys, organized themselves so that the girl scholarship students were the ones to work on the harvesting machines, while a group from the Mendeleev Institute pooled their earnings. A student from this institute recalled that as a result, after paying for food, he had 640 rubles left, the equivalent of two months’ worth of his student stipend—enough that “one could buy a good suit, or two pairs of very nice boots, or a decent radio or bicycle.”52

Students also confronted worn, unreliable equipment. Since 1954 the Virgin Lands had gotten the majority of tractors and combines produced in the USSR, but by 1956 much of the machinery was in bad shape. Future geneticist Valery Soyfer recalls that he and a friend who had been a mechanic in the army accepted the challenge of assembling a working tractor from the remains of dozens of combines and tractors that had been broken in the past year. Given the high value put on mechanization as key to realizing large-scale farming, they were shocked by the neglect. However, Khrushchev had not considered how technology would be preserved given that the new farms often lacked barns or garages. Moreover, the equipment was employed intensively on the massive farms—harvesters often worked two shifts, reaping late into the night by the headlights of their vehicles. Wear and tear led to frequent breakdowns and the lack of skilled mechanics meant that often the settlers simply abandoned machines. Locals, Soyfer noted, covered up the situation by making junkyards “in spots far from the roads and invisible from them.… the bosses never delved into the depths of the endless fields; from the windows of their cars they could see only the array of crops.”53

Students were also often bedeviled by inefficiency and idleness. Many arrived in mid-July, when the academic calendar freed them up, only to find nothing ready for harvest. The first scene of student labor in the MAI documentary, not coincidently, shows young women working on some sort of construction project with the narrator cheerfully noting that though these women are preparing to be aeronautical engineers, they will always remember their first work experience as plasterers in the Virgin Lands. Out of boredom, Soyfer and his friends designed and built an irrigation system to make possible a vegetable garden for their farm.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.