Therefore, in September 1973, having advanced to my second year of studies, I was sent to a kolkhoz for a month. We left Irkutsk in an overcrowded train and traveled for twenty-four hours, and then another 100 kilometers north by vehicle. The place where we arrived was isolated. The taiga stretched for hundreds of kilometers in all directions and a dirt track led to the village. The village stretched along the banks of a rapid and broad river. We were settled in the gym of the village school. We all slept together without undressing, in our boots and padded jackets on roughly hewn plank beds. Everybody was given a dirty mattress, a pillow, and a thin blanket. Forget about sheets. It was cold at night. Water in the pails froze. For a whole month we were promised that the heat would be turned on, but it wasn’t. The boiler was broken. The bath-house, where we could go once every ten days, was heated primitively (the smoke escaped through the windows). Students were given a daily ration of food which they prepared themselves. Few people owned cows in the village. The cows from the kolkhoz were sent to the slaughterhouse in the district center. So, in order to obtain meat, the cows had to be taken to a slaughterhouse more than 100 kilometers away, and the meat brought back. But the kolkhoz could not assign a vehicle for this purpose. The chairman decided that the students themselves should slaughter the cows. In this fashion, we advanced to a state of complete self-service.
During my first day at the kolkhoz I heard an unknown language being spoken in the village. It turned out that these were Chuvash people deported from the Volga. Later I met some Russians. These were exiles. Among them were laborers from Rostov-on-the-Don. I made acquaintance with one of them. He told me that when Khrushchev instituted his monetary reform in 1961, one of the Rostov factories announced a strike. The KGB searched out
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the organizers of whom my acquaintance was one. He received a ten-year prison sentence. After release in 1972, he was exiled. He was not allowed to leave the village. His family remained in Rostov-on-the-Don. They could not visit him for lack of money.
It turned out that there were exiles not just in this village but also in many others. Villagers frequently hid convicts who had escaped from the camps. Only the students worked the fields. The kolkhoz dwellers preferred to work on their own vegetable plots at this time. Our village was called Burkhun, which meant “residence of God” in Buriat, but this was far from a heavenly place. The poverty was staggering. One felt he had walked into the previous century. The homes were old, crooked, and unpainted. The roofs were grown over with moss. The yards were small and dirty. The street, which went the length of the village, was totally rutted and there were heaps of manure everywhere. The people were grim and came to life only at the stall where vodka, sticky dirty candy, and soap were sold. There was a store with humble wares: bottled kerosene, hunting boots, cologne, a doll with a fierce face, bread, and the ever-present vodka which was delivered regularly. Almost the whole male population was at the store each morning. By mid-day not a sober person could be seen, from the mailman to the drivers. The drivers and vehicles were sent from town to the kolkhozes to help in harvesting. Every evening the drunken drivers came to the club, the only place of entertainment and relaxation, in order to fight with the villagers or the students. The only entertainment was films which were shown nightly in the club. But they were all old ones, some twenty years old or so. New films were rare, and there were never any foreign films.
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.