Mourning Paradise Lost
Many Ukrainian media outlets recite grandiloquent obituaries to the late Soviet system. Thus, publications of the Peasants’ Party mourn recent collective-farm life, when “people in the countryside lived like one happy family” (without doubt an opinion shared by all the chairmen of collective farm and village councils). However, politics is a free-for-all, yet even among peasants, former collective farmers, one finds quite a few individuals sincerely believing in that brilliant past (the future that was but never quite came to be? — Ed.). The farther it passes into the twilight, the more attractive it appears, especially now that people hate the current reality with all their hearts (inter alia because it is so new and changeable). Today’s future is frightening because it is unpredictable. Strangely, the fact remains that even those who have found a their own place in the sun now long for the Soviet order.
Yet there are all those whose memories that remain undeceiving. I, for one, remember perfectly well my own village childhood, without electricity, sidewalks, and paved roads. To get to the nearest railroad station, one had to ride a cart for 20 kilometers on bumpy dirt roads that turned into swampland every spring and fall. I also remember my family and relatives turning into real slaves after World War II; they were not issued passports, so they could not leave the village. For decades on end, the collective farmers had no right to receive old-age pensions, were paid token money for their work, and mostly lived by stealing products they made themselves but did not possess. What they received by way of their trudoden (workday) pay could only let them die slowly of starvation. The state did not bother to supply the countryside with gas, no roads were paved, and there was no electricity in many village homes even after the war. Even now natural gas supplies are not available in all rural areas (suffice it to visit Novohrad-Volynsky district). In general, everything rural was traditionally considered second-rate, because whatever care for the people the Soviets showed was aimed at the “advanced working class,” not the peasantry, which was “petty bourgeois” by nature. The rural lifestyle formed accordingly. Once I happened to read a Wehrmacht soldier’s memoirs. He had been in Ukraine during the war. He wrote that he, being an inherently tidy German inhabitant of Western Europe, was amazed to see the shabby Ukrainian villages and towns, with heaps of garbage, homes looking more like dugouts or rundown barns, barefoot children dressed in rags, women wearing kersey boots and old quilted jackets turning real beauties into old crones.
Today, many try to revive in our minds the Soviet myth about the blossoming countryside, heaven on earth lost to the current and coming generations; every effort is being made to kindle the fires of nostalgia. Oldsters longingly recall the time when everything was available virtually free, when no one was responsible for anything, even for one’s own fate, because those above took care of everybody and everything, and there was practically no resistance below. Those with energy, initiative, and a talent for management, prepared to assume responsibility for their own life, were somehow or other taken away from the land and denied an opportunity to play an active role in society. My father told me that when collectivization began his father had single- handedly taken apart his mill, so he would not be blacklisted as a kulak, so his children’s future would not be ruined. (He was right: our consultant points out that during collectivization possession of a mill automatically meant being classified as a kulak [kurkul in Ukrainian], who were officially to be “liquidated as a class” — Ed.) It was a true tragedy for him, because the whole hard- working family had toiled to erect that windmill, denying themselves even basic necessities. At the time people would sell their horses, cattle, farm equipment, and plots for token money, so they could be referred to the poor as the most privileged social group [under the Soviets], thus losing their freedom.
One of Anton Chekhov’s characters, a serf of God knows how many generation named Firs, believed his life consisted of two parts: before the Trouble and after the Trouble. The Trouble (also described as a disaster) was, in his eyes, the 1861 reform when the Russian government outlawed serfdom. The old man should have known better than mourn his lot. Several decades after Alexander II’s reform, serfdom was actually restored in the form of the collective farm system and in a variety of other [Soviet] manifestations. This must be why we still have so many Firses in all social strata, among those giving and taking orders. Apparently our “freedom-loving Cossacks” cannot come to terms with the Trouble of 1991.
