I really can’t compare my life now with the way we lived when I was a child. My father worked in a factory in Moscow and my mother lived in the village with her 9 children. In order to fill those 11 mouths, my father and mother worked themselves to death. Half the day my mother ploughed for herself and half a day for other people. Even a horse couldn’t do double ploughing, but my mother did 16-18 hours a day. She fell ill and died comparatively young.
Until I was 18 there was scarcely a day when I had enough to eat, scarcely a night I could sleep peacefully. At 18 years, I was married off, but things didn’t get better. Only under Stalin rule could we begin to breathe freely and live like human beings. And when the farm organised, things got better still. I worked first in the stables, then as a brigadier, and now I am Chairman of the farm.
Last year, I went to Moscow to attend courses for farm executives. I travelled from place to place in the magnificent Metro, where the doors open and shut by themselves, where stairs go up and down by themselves. In the evening, I sat in the middle of the velvet and gold at the best theatres and thought to myself. “Is this really me, a country girl and an orphan without dowry, who used to work and starve worse than a broken-down peasant horse?” 

 

Houses of skilled workers composed of some 50 large apartment houses, 3, 4 and 5 storeys high, containing between 75 & 200 rooms each. The houses were brick and stone and painted various colours. They were arranged in long rows, like military barracks and were all of the same matchbox shape. The metal roofs were painted red and blue. All the houses in Kirov district were equipped with electricity, central heating and running water. Most cooking was done on coal stoves, although electricity was used more and more.
The homes of the unskilled workers were a collection of mud huts huddled in a sort of ravine overlooking the railroad yards. The roofs were usually made of scrap metal, sometimes covered by earth or thatch. The same house was inhabited by the family, the chickens, the pigs and the cow, if there was one. Their possession of chickens and goats was witness to the fact that they ‘were living well’ by the standards of Russian peasantry.