Word: communed
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...surrounded by a high board fence; in the evenings, music blared inexplicably from loudspeakers on the lawn. He never entertained, made the postman put the mail through a slit in the fence. Until he retired five years ago, Kuznetsov worked as a valenki (felt boots) maker in a commune, dutifully handed in his monthly norm of 15 pairs of valenki per month. For some reason, he insisted on doing all his work at home...
...tung's proudest contribution to Communist theory was the commune. Undreamed of by Marx or Engels, the commune was designed to mobilize China's peasant masses into huge work units, was a sharp point of dispute between Moscow and Mao. "Impracticably Utopian," said the Russian orthodoxy. Retorted Mao: "The best form of organization for the attainment of socialism and the gradual transition to Communism." But after nearly three years of all-out effort, it is apparent that Mao's communes have failed. They are now being abandoned, in fact if not in name...
...first commune was formed in April 1958 by the merciless amalgamation of 10,000 families from 27 smaller collective farms in Honan province. Tough young cadres divided men and women into "production brigades." Members turned all their private property over to the state...
...April of 1959, a secret meeting of the Communist Central Committee decided to shift the focus away from the commune and concentrate on small, village-size "operation squads," each squad with its own mess hall, nurseries and private plots of land. Further retreat came in August of 1959, when the village "production brigade" became, in theory, the basic unit, and commune members were allowed to keep such possessions as houses, clothing, bicycles, blankets and radios. Parents could even decide for themselves whether they wanted their children to be sent off to boarding schools and communal nurseries...
...Life in a commune? "In an ill-lit corner, a dozen women of indeterminate age clad in blue overalls and white skullcaps, are darning trousers that belong to 1,500 anonymous spouses . . . There are 23 'factories' in this particular commune, each one employing from 100 to 700 women workers. The workers, many of them older women, crouch on their heels, blow on their stiff fingers, and try their clumsy best to keep their output up to the norm...