Down on the Collective Farm
By TIBOR SZAMUELY
THE best way of finding out how Russians actually live—short of going to live there oneself—is not by examining statistical yearbooks, still less by going on conducted tours, but simply by reading works of Russian fiction. In Russia straightforward fiction has always been a much more reliable guide than official 'fact.' Our best sources for studying pre-revolutionary Russian life are not sociological treatises, but the works of Turgenev, Dostoievsky or Chekhov. Times change, of course—the deplorable laxity of the effete Tsarist censorship has been eradicated by its dynamic and forward-looking successor. But, in the slacker atmosphere of recent years, from time to time we have had books that once again show us what Russia is really like.
The latest issue of the literary monthly Novy Mir contains a short novel by a hitherto unknown author, B. Mozhaev. It is called From the Life of Fyodor Kuzkin, and it deals with the life of Soviet collective farm peasants—a social category embracing nearly half the population of the USSR—in the first post-Stalin years. The novel describes a state of affairs which very few people in the West would have believed existed.
Unlike other Soviet authors, Mozhaev is not concerned with improving the administrative or agronomical methods prevailing in Soviet agricul- ture. His hero is neither a kolkhoz chairman nor a party bureaucrat, but a plain, middle-aged peasant, a war invalid with a large family. Fyodor Kuzkin does not give a damn for increasing efficiency or fulfilling the plan—all he cares about is how to feed his family. But, for all his ordinari- ness, he is an exceptional man : driven to despair by the hopeless struggle, he rebels against the system. He is no revolutionary—he only wants to opt out of the kolkhoz and acquire a measure of human dignity. The book is the story of his tenacious one-man fight against 'the bosses,' a fight in which he is sustained solely by peasant guile, natural resourcefulness and an enormous resilience.
Fyodor Kuzkin decides to leave the kolkhoz, come what may. The threat of deportation holds no terrors for him : `So what! I'll have a ride at state expense, and at least there they'll have to feed me, if only on slops.' One is hardly surprised at this : the life of a collective farmer, nearly thirty years after collectivisation, is one of con- stant under-nourishment, interspersed with bouts of starvation. For a year of back-breaking work on the kolkhoz Kuzkin and his wife receive 62 kg. (136 lb.) of buckwheat. That was all—the other crops were either ruined or went to the state. Since this has to last the family through the whole year it works out at 14- oz. per head per day—in contrast, as Kuzkin points out, to the 11 oz. of millet pro- vided for a kolkhoz chicken. The Kuzkins' unchanging menu consists of thin buckwheat soup with boiled potatoes instead of bread. (Everything, however, is relative, and there had been worse years, such as 1946, when the family had sub- sisted without a crust of bread or a potato.) Since kolkhoz work is virtually unpaid, it is the half- acre allotment on which they grow potatoes in their spare time which means the difference between life and death. The only escape from reality is provided by moonshine vodka, which almost everybody distils and consumes in large quantities.
All other avenues of escape from the kolkhoz are blocked, and it is to discovering one that Kuzkin turns his ingenuity. Not many people in the West know that every Soviet citizen is obliged to carry an internal passport, without which legal existence is impossible. Every Soviet citizen, that is, except the peasants: no passports are issued to them, and by this simple expedient they are pre- vented from ever leaving the vicinity of their
kolkhoz. Passports can be obtained only by special permission of higher administrative bodies. To make this state of bondage even more secure, industrial enterprises and other state institutions are prohibited from employing collec- tive farm members without the express consent of the kolkhoz chairman.
To keep the peasants in their place (literally and figuratively) the state has installed a whole
hierarchy of officials : brigade-leaders, kolkhoz chairmen, district Soviets, regional Soviets, etc. Their authority over the peasants is practically unrestricted; the only limits to their powers are set not by law, but by the interference of higher and even more puissant officials. Laws and regula-
tions exist to be obeyed by the peasants—the 'bosses' disregard them at will. The kolkhoz chairman, the author casually remarks, was appointed by the district Soviet—although accord- ing to the statute he should have been elected by the farmers themselves; when addressing him kolkhoz members are expected to stand at atten- tion. At the close of the agricultural year the bosses of the collective gather to raise each other's salaries and bonuses; when a hapless peasant woman interrupts them to ask for a raise for herself she is indignantly thrown out and ordered to go back to shovelling manure, and no more of these stupid ideas. . . . This scene reads like something out of Animal Farm.
Stalin is dead, but the local authorities can still do more or less as they like. Dire retribution is meted out to the mutinous Kuzkin. He is deprived of his allotment; his property is con- fiscated and preparations are made to have him deported. In the nick of time he is saved by the intervention of the regional party secretary—not out of high moral principles, but from pity. (To send out his complaint Kuzkin has to trudge twenty-five miles to the railway station, and back, for he knows that the district authorities search through the local mail=boxes.) Thanks to this miraculous intermediation he gets his passport and starts on a series of odd jobs, but his troubles are by no means at an end. The local procurator (the official who—as we have recently been solemnly assured by a delegation of eminent British jurists—'works to assure the observance of legality') fabricates a criminal case against him, complete with perjured evidence. Once again he is rescued—through the cowardice of the false wit- nesses. And so it goes on. At the end we meet Fyodor Kuzkin, bloody but unbowed, and still alive—but only just. He is still the underdog, while his persecutors, the authors of innumer- able flagrant malpractices, all remain in positions of power. It can hardly be otherwise.
Kuzkin and his friends have no illusions about the collective farm system. Among themselves they curse their wretched life frequently and volubly. In the old days, Fyodor reminisces, every- body had a horse, and we could drive anywhere we wanted. Today the only automobile belongs to the chairman, no one is allowed to use the three kolkhoz horses, and the peasants have to go everywhere on foot. Why is this? What is more, under the old order not only did a man eat his fill, but farming itself was far more efficient: `Why is everyone expected to help the kolkhoz? In the old days nobody helped the peasants, but they managed to plough, sow and reap, and did it all in good time.' The author leaves the reader to answer these questions.
I suppose one should now be grateful at least for being able to read the truth about life on the collective farms. Personally I would much rather see something being actually done about it. The 105 years that have passed since the emanci- pation of the serfs seem a long enough time
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