Word: kolkhozes
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...Kremlin likes to paint life on a Soviet collective farm as spiritually rich and financially rewarding. The kolkhoz manager is always a cross between Paul Bunyan and Luther Burbank, and his sterling example inspires glorious acts of self-sacrifice from the lowliest peasant. Though foreigners laugh off the myth as nonsense, millions of Russians are asked to swallow it. Hence the shocked incredulity of Russians who picked up the Leningrad literary monthly, Neva. There, in a short story by Fedor Abramov, was a startling indictment of the apathy, discontent and frustrating failure of collective farm life that still exists after...
...Seventeen years after the war we are still fighting on the farm for every pound of bread," exclaims Anany Egorovich Mysovsky, chairman of the fictional New Life kolkhoz in Abramov's tale, entitled Round and About. In these excerpts, Abramov follows Mysovsky on a day-long inspection tour of a typical collective. It is the middle of the harvest season, but one of the farm's tractor drivers shows up drunk and the other is stuck in a ditch; villagers are lolling about in the community bath houses instead of working the fields; for five months they have...
...Seven young girls, just out of school, and they are the ones who really are holding the whole kolkhoz together. Each kopek is milked by their hands, and getting more milkmaids is one of his biggest headaches. The old women can't build a modern kolkhoz; that's why he had to argue for weeks to break down the resistance of schoolgirls. And then, if the girl was ready to sign up, her mother would hit the roof. 'What? My daughter muck around in the manure! Is that why my husband and I sweated our guts...
...national situation saw the difficult situation in agriculture, but Stalin never even noted it. Did we tell Stalin about this? Yes, we told him, but he did not support us. Why? Because Stalin never traveled anywhere. He knew the country and agriculture only from films. Many films so pictured kolkhoz [collective] life that the tables were bending from the weight of turkeys and geese. Evidently Stalin thought that it was actually so. The last time he visited a village was in January 1928. How then could he have known the situation in the provinces...
These slight changes had at least three motivations. They provided the peasant with added incentives to work harder on the kolkhoz; they provided Russia with a propaganda vehicle with which to shower the world; and they served to improve the morale of the peasantry. But, unfortunately for Malenkov, the actual production of consumer goods was far short of what the leaders had predicted, producing an economy in Russia which is almost inflationary...