Coping with shortages

After a couple of my comments on Facebook, I got a request to share my experience of coping with shortages during hard times, and since hard times were constant during my childhood and youth, I have no problems coming with examples.

My parents and grandparents had of course lived through war, famine and rations, but by the time I was born our family was relatively affluent and even privileged. As a child I never wondered where food came from and how much it cost, and it was in my upper teens I realised how much things had deteriorated, or as the saying went: Communism has won a total victory over [cheese, sausage, caviar, salmon, bananas – substitute as required].

Vignette:
     An old lady enters the famous deli department store in Moscow.

    - I remember this shelf used to have fifteen kinds of cheese. That shelf had twenty kinds of sausage. The shelf over there had ten kinds of tea…

     One salesperson to another:

    - Hell of a good memory this granny has!

I remember those fifteen kinds of cheese on occasions when someone took me shopping, which didn't happen often. I remember hams and sausage and pate. I remember the smell of newly ground coffee. My grandfather, a great coffee lover, would blend one third of Arabica, one third of Colombia, and one Costa Rica. I remember that tea connoisseurs prefer Ceylon over Indian, and totally despised Grusian.

Variant of the above:

     - I remember this shelf used to have salmon, sturgeon, red and black caviar, shrimp, oysters… What was the harm of it all?

 By early 1970s, there was one kind of cheese, one kind of sausage, one kind of tea, and ham was a sweet memory.

Vignette:

     - Is there really no cheese in your shop?

     - No, it's the shop next door that has no cheese, we have no sausage.

Another:

     - Can you slice 200 gram sausage for me?

     - Of course we can, just bring your sausage.

These are jokes, but they were a close reflection of reality. So how did we cope with shortages, when there was shortage of everything? One day I will tell you how we coped with shortages of clothes, shoes, tights, shampoo, cosmetics, baby pacifiers, book shelves (not to mention books), rugs, female hygiene, pencils, notebooks, towels, bed linen, detergent, paper napkins, sewing thread, electric bulbs, Christmas candles, and many more items people in the first world take for granted. I may tell you how we coped without washing machines, or dishwashers, or freezers, or record players. But this will be another story that will be told another time. This story is a response to the current situation and will therefore focus on the current issues, such as toilet paper and food staples.

When my daughter Julia was three or four, we went to visit family in Moscow, and at the airport she needed a pee. I took her to ladies room, and after she was done she asked me helplessly: “Mummy, where is toilet paper?” She could not in her wildest dreams imagine that what she saw was toilet paper, more like sandpaper. For me, it was by far not the worst. I was used to wipe my bum with newspapers, as everybody else. As a child, when we ran around in nature, we would use leaves and grass.

During the worst shortages of toilet paper in the late 1970s and '80s, people would steal toilet paper from work – if it was available there. In nicer public toilets, for instance, in theatres and museums, there would be an attendant providing strictly one square of paper per person.

In mid-'80s, a Swedish writer was staying with a colleague in Moscow, a highly intellectual, refined lady. The Swedish guest was an idealist and had decided that during her visit she would live like ordinary Russians. The first culture shock came one early morning, when the hostess woke her saying: "Get up quickly. I have been told that in a suburb shop fifteen metro stops and ten bus stops from here there will possibly be toilet paper later today. They will allow twenty rolls per person. The shop opens in two hours, we must go as soon as possible and queue". The Swedish writer never believed in victorious socialism after that.

At that time you could see famous writers and artists walk Moscow streets carrying packages of toilet paper. A roll would be the best birthday present. This wasn't an emergency or a crisis, it was our everyday life.

When it comes to staples, I remember well when at the age of ten we were all promptly dispatched to queue for flour, equipped with pillowcases, since there were no bags available: flour would be poured from huge sacks into whatever you brought. It was rationed to maybe two or maybe five kilos per person, and after we children had queued for two or three hours, the rest of the family would join, each with a pillowcase.

Yes, that was the country of victorious socialism.

The manifesto of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted in 1960 and aiming at completed communism by 1980s, promised in accordance with Karl Marx's slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". 

A sign in a shop window during completed communism: "There is no need for milk today". 

The most important item every person always carried on them was a net bag, the infamous just-in-case bag, a Soviet citizen's best friend. It was fifty-odd years before environmental concerns so we didn't use our environmentally-friendly bags for ideological reasons, but exclusively because there were no shopping bags available in shops, and you needed to have your just-in-case bag just in case you saw something worth buying. Maybe potato, maybe apples, maybe cottage cheese, tea, salt, oats, pickles, mustard. And when you did see something, you were a good friend and bought as much as you could carry, to share with others. It wasn't shopping, it was hunting. For some things, such as cream, you had to bring your own jar.

The problem with just-in-case was that everyone could see what you were carrying. A friend once heard two guys behind her:

     - Look what a smart babe! Look at her fir-coat! She must be a foreigner.

     - No way! She is carrying five frozen chickens in her net bag.

I remember one day a friend and I were going along a central street in Moscow, on our way to visit some other friends. We saw a line and joined it without even asking first what was on sale. It turned out to be bananas, something we hadn't seen for many years. The line was long and moved slowly. People were buying as much as their just-in-cases could carry, and more. We were initially going to buy a kilo, but as we progressed forward in line, our appetites grew. We would buy a kilo each. No, we would buy more and give to our friends. No, we would buy more still and share with folk at work. By that time, the line got anxious that the kiosk would run out of bananas and demanded that they were restricted to five kilos per person.

On another occasion, a co-worker went hunting – during working hours of course, as was the accepted practice – and came back with ten boxes of a very special nostalgic candy from our childhood. We all happily paid for a box each, then looked at each other and said: “Let's eat it now. Our children don't even know what it is, so they won't miss it”.

This is, very briefly, how we coped with shortages. Firstly, you learned to manage with what was available. In winter, apples was the only fruit you could get if you were lucky. Once again, my little daughter caused indignant sensation during a visit in Moscow when she was offered an apple and asked for a pear instead, the spoilt Western brat! Secondly, you were nice to each other and shared. People who had allotments would share whatever they managed to grow. We made preserves, dried apples when they were abundant. We picked and dried mushrooms. I give you dried mushrooms, you give me a jar of jam. I give you a bar of chocolate, you give me a bar of soap. Thirdly, when you have no reference frames, you don't know what you are missing. Yes, we did remember the hams and cheeses of our childhood, but our children didn't, so they were happy with whatever we could put on the table. Buckwheat porridge, cabbage soup, potato cakes, bread and butter and cheese of the only kind available, “cheese”.

With this background, I am watching the current stockpiling with some amusement. That said, I have stockpiled toilet paper, chicken peas, beans, lentils, rice, buckwheat, coffee and cat food. I think I will survive. 

A quarter of a century

I seldom cry when I watch TV-news. Frankly, I selsom watch TV-news at all. But at that time, twenty-five years ago, we all sat glued to our TVs, watching history unfold.

Much as we hated the regime when I was young, we knew it was for ever. Communism was invincible, and the only thing you could do was learn how to cope. Some people tried to escape. Some brave people did it literally: crawling under barbed wire, swimming out to sea. Some, privileged to travel abroad, defected, knowing that their relatives remaining inside the Soviet Union, would be prosecuted. Dissidents who weren't sent to camps were sent abroad, which we honestly didn't see as punishment. Some got married to foreigners, for real or for convenience. In the '70, Jewish families were allowed to emigrate. But these were handfuls, sunshine stories in a bog of misery, and there would always be the hundred millions in Russia, the occupied countries and Eastern European satellites, deprived of material wealth and human rights.

Being one of the lucky handful, I always felt guilty. But what could I do? Communism was invincible, and the West didn't care. As the party bosses promised us, our children and grandchildren would live under communism.

And then one evening twenty-five years ago it all changed. I sat crying in front of the TV, repeating like a prayer that I had never, ever hoped to live long enough to see it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in memoriam

There has been a lot written about the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez these days, and I cannot add much except one detail that made a deep impression on me when I read it, many many years ago. In fact, so many years ago I am not sure which book it was, but I believe it is The Autumn of the Patriarch. It is the episode with the lotttery, when each year a young child is asked to pull out a random ball with a winning number. Only it is not a random ball, but the winning ball is heated, and the child is instructed to choose the hot ball, and the dictator always wins. The children are kept in custody so that they cannot reveal the secret. At one point, they are all taken on a boat trip as a reward for their services. By a strange coincidence, the boat sinks.

I am sure most people outside totalitarian contries think that this is satire and grotesque. For me it was just another confirmation of the bitter truth.

Book of the week: Slated

WARNING: spoilers!

After Divergent I promised myself that I would never read another Young Adult dystopia. Yet for some reason I got enticed by Slated, partially because I have met the author, but also there was something in the blurb that made me curious. Perhaps because I have been reading so much about the brain. I bet Teri Terry has read a lot of the same sources.

Opening the book I saw three features that normally make me want to close it again immediately: first-person narrative, present tense, italics to mark a dream. Still I usually give a book a chance of twenty pages before I throw it away in rage, and I didn't. For once, the present tense is justified. The protagonist/narrator has had her memory obliterated; she lives in the present. First-person perspective is counterbalanced by the dreams (well, in italics, but you can't have everything right. I am almost sure the editor insisted on the italics. Editors always think their readers are idiots). It creates heteroglossia. Counterpoint. Tension.

Scores of literary texts have dealt with the unreliability of memory; in fact I think most literature does it some way or other. I like Terry's take on it. It does not feel artificial, which it easily could have. The gradual and painful remembrance is piercing. I am with the character. I want to know more about her. I want to know what the chip in her brain makes her do and whether she will cope with it. I am so engaged with her that I don't care about minor inconsistencies that felt irritating on the first twenty pages. The novel takes place in 2052 (unnecessarily spelled out). The world has changed dramatically in the past forty years, but forty years from now Terry believes that it will be more or less the same. What her protagonist has gone through has been done, perhaps with less technological sophistication, for years and years. The family structure is the same, the school system is the same, and as a step in socialisation, a sixteen-year-old girl is sent off to put a letter in a mailbox. Mailbox in 2052? And a letter to whom? Well, never mind. It's all background noise. I want to know what happens to the character. I want to know how the author manages the impossible. Killing off a number of secondary characters, including the object of the protagonist's romantic interest, is a good strategy.

What I cannot help thinking about and what the author definitely did not think about is that what she describes as a dystopia was once a fact. People who read 1984 as science fiction have not lived in a totalitarian country. Millions of children during the years of Communist terror in the Soviet Union were separated from their parents and had their brains slated, with or without technical assistence, given new names and new histories so that they would never remember who they were. Kyla's identity number is around 19,000 – the fictional government has been extremely inefficient in their slating project. Reality always surpasses fiction.

The ending clearly prepares for a sequel. It seems unavoidable these days. I will not read the sequel. I am not interested in exactly what happened to Ben or whether Kyla's new teacher is her biological father. I hope Kyla does not join the terrorists to avenge Ben, because I don't believe there is any justification for terrorism, anytime, anywhere. Not even in fiction.

For me Kyla's story is finished, in the perfect fusion of past and present tense and of her split selves, and no more italics. The author has done a marvellous job portraying a maimed, incomplete mind with the sadly inadequate means available, our human language. Any sequel will merely be adventure.

Makeover, part 2

Read the first part of this tale.

When I got married I was determined not to accept any help from my parents, but of course it didn't work. We could pretend as much as we wanted that we were independent, but when it came to clothes I was still totally in my mother's hands. Then I was divorced and got a job. My salary was just enough to buy a pair of winter boots, but then the saying was: “May you only have your salary to live on”. Everybody had extra sources of income. I worked as interpreter, translator, reviewer – anything I could get. A book translation could yield as much as three yearly salaries, which was weird, but then everything was weird back in those days.

The huge problem was that the dress code at my work place said: never wear the same outfit twice. So apart from having to show off brands you also had to keep track of what you were wearing and create variation with mixing and matching. But the real solution was to swap. All friends swapped clothes, that's what friends are for! During the periods when I was on speaking terms with my mother, we would swap clothes all the time, especially for parties. She would also allow me to sell her clothes and shoes after I had worn them, and keep the money to get new clothes. By that time I had my own network on the black market.

I also started travelling abroad to the paradise of Eastern Europe: Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, which in our eyes were rich and plentiful beyond imagination. During these trips, I would save every penny, eating as little and as cheap as I could, to buy clothes – although I did go to museums and theatres and travelled around. And I never brought back clothes to sell, at least not until I had got tired of them. During one trip with my work colleagues we brought vodka and cigarettes and sold to a very suspicious shop on the edge of the shopping area. I am still ashamed of it. This is as low as I have ever fallen.

To be continued.

Some are more equal

Yesterday I took a compulsory online course on Equality and Diversity. I don't know why I had to take it – apparently as a step in my Professional Development. Frankly, I had felt I was sufficiently Equal and Diverse, but a subjective feeling doesn't get you a course certificate. The intro said it would take an hour, but apparently I am a slow learner, it took me an hour and a half. There was a test afterwards, and I had to score 80% to pass. I did quite well with the exercises, but I always get stressed about any kind of tests, exams and quizzes, so I only got 85. I missed some intricate legal nuances between discrimination, harassment and victimisation.

It was quite interesting and useful, especially learning about all the legal particulars. Not that I expect to be involved in any, but who knows.

Where I grew up, a professor could say to a student: Don't bother to apply for PhD, you are Jewish. Where I grew up, a professor could say to a student: If you want to pass the exam you'll have to sleep with me. Where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. Where I grew up, women were expected to work and take care of the family. Where I grew up, there were no wheelchairs, and you wouldn't see a disabled person in a public place. Where I grew up, people were discriminated, harassed and victimised by each other and by the authorities. Where I grew up, some people were more equal than other people.

In Sweden, I was a member of equality committee at my work place. I spent hours and hours trying to persuade the other committee members that equality was not only about gender. They thought that I was making too much of being Diverse. I pointed out that there were other Diverse people in the department, staff as well as students. I was useful by being Diverse when diversity was the slogan of the day, but being Diverse didn't make you Equal. In fact, the more Diverse, the less Equal. Perhaps we should all have taken courses in Equality and Diversity. It's easy to be Equal, but very difficult to be Diverse. If you are Equal, you don't think much about those who are Diverse.

Perhaps I should go back and revise until I get it 100% right.

Interesting facts from individual Russian history, part 3

The final part of the story of my Grossmama Maria (part 1 and part 2)

For the rest of the world, the second World War started in 1939. In the Soviet Union, it started on June 22, 1941 and was called the Great Patriotic War. Within a couple of weeks, all Germans in every city, town and villages in Russia were told that they would be deported. They were told it was for their own protection and that they would be able to come back once the war was over. Jonathan and Maria lived in a German village in the Caucasus, together with a huge group of relatives, nephews and their families. They were herded together and taken by a freight boat across the Caspian Sea, and from there they were to go by railway. They knew that they were going into death. But they did not despair. The family chronicle says that they sat on deck in rain and storm, like cattle, and suddenly one of the nephews said: "Uncle Jonathan, can you please sing something?" And Jonathan stood up and sand Mephistopheles' aria, which was his special hit.

Then they were put in the infamous cattle car to be transported further eastward. But Jonathan got very sick and had to be carried into the car. Three days later he died and was buried in a mass grave at a little railway station, together with others who had died on the way. Many, many years later we put a memorial plaque on our family grave in the German Cemetery in Moscow.

The family was forced to go on. They were dumped off in a tiny village in Northern Kazakhstan and put up to live in local people's homes. Soon first all men and then all able women and young girls were taken away to forced labour. It was called, in true Orwellian spirit, called "Labour Army". 

 

Maria was the only one left of the family, but there were some other old Germans with her. Some of those were artisans and made it somehow. Maria was sixty, but healthy and strong. She went to the boss of the collective farm and asked for work. Her first job was to pile dried cow dung. They heated houses with cow dung because there was no wood in the steppe. In that way she made some wages and got a little flour. The boss liked Maria and invited her to work in a nursery school. It was good, the kids liked her, the mothers liked her because she never stole bread from the kids and shared equally between them all. Most nurses stole food from the kids since the nursery was relatively well-supplied.

Some years later Maria's youngest daughter, who had also been deported and survived the horrors of “Labour Army”, found her way to her mother. All in all, they stayed fifteen years in Kazakhstan. At the end of the war all Germans expected to be allowed to go home, as they had been promised. But there came an official to the village and read a paper for the Germans. It said that all persons of German nationality who had been deported in 1941 according to the special decree of the Supreme Soviet were to live at their places of deportation "for ever" - this was the first time they heard the words: "For ever". Every attempt at escape was to be punished by twenty five years of labour camp. This was also a new word. Anyone who helped Germans to escape was to be punished by five years of prison.

Then in 1953 Stalin died. Three years later all Germans were summoned to the police and received their ID-cards. Clean cards too, no stamps, no indication of deportation. The deported Germans had shown in practice that they were good Soviet citizens, was the verdict. And they had indeed. They worked as hard an anyone just to show that they were Soviet citizens. No matter good or bad, Soviet was it. There were even Germans who wanted to join the Communist party to show how they liked the authorities. The same authorities who had driven them away from their home and let them die in the steppe.

Anyway, the Germans were allowed to live where they wished, but not where they had lived before the deportation. In that way the authorities tried to avoid that the Germans would claim back their houses, schools and churches. They had no property rights. Still some of them moved back to Caucasus. They were not allowed to live where they had lived before, bit they still wanted to live near the places their forefathers had lived. They came one after another, bought houses in old German villages, got jobs. During the '60s, we would often go and visit granny's cousins in Pyatigorsk.

But the majority stayed in Kazakhstan. They had nowhere to go. Some moved to towns, others stayed in the country and went on as peasants. They were diligent and hard-working, they had saved money, built solid stone houses, worked their land, become well-off. They did not want to leave all that once again. Instead, they started schools, libraries, theatres and choirs. This is what our recent visitors fromKazakhstan referred to.

Since my Grossmama Maria was deported from Caucasus she was allowed to come and live with her daughter, my granny, in Moscow. I remember her well. In 1958 we celebrated her eightieth birthday with a huge family gathering. She spoke, read and sang to me in German. Sometimes I was horrendously nasty and rude to her, and I am still ashamed to think about it. She was the nicest, kindest person in the world.

She was the last of her generation, and everybody came to us, to her, on the forbidden Christmas Eve, but I have already told this story.

She died on May 11, 1962, when I was ten and didn't understand death. Perhaps because of that I cannot say that I miss her, in the same way I miss my granny. But I have warm memories of her. 

 

Interesting facts from individual Russian history, part 2

Here continues the story of my Grossmama Maria. 

Jonathan and Maria were rich and happy and generous. Jonathan gave money to schools, libraries, hospitals and a prison. He was just about to buy a whole street in Moscow and turn it into an artists' colony.

Then came the Great War, and it wasn't popular to be a German in Russia during the war. He was treated with suspicion. But they didn't take away his property. That came later. According to the family chronicle, when they confiscated all his millions, he said: "What a relief, they were such a nuisance!" For obvious reasons he had not read the Moomin stories, but this was a very Moominish comment.

The one who wasn't happy was Elly who had dreamed of going to Paris to study music at the Conservatory. But there was nothing she could do about it. So when she was old enough she went to Moscow, but that is another story.

Back to Jonathan and Maria. The post-war time in Northern Caucasus was long and confusing. The rulers changed all the time. One day the white army came and forced all high school boys and all other young boys to join them. Next day the red army came and hung and shot people without asking questions. Eventually the Soviet power was established, and Jonathan and his family were evicted from their house. (The house was later turned into an old people's home. When I visited it in 1991 it was being renovated).

The family left the town for a nearby village where they lived with a distant relative. First they lived by selling their belongings. Then Jonathan got some jobs. From time to time there came orders from the new government in Moscow to shoot the ten topmost citizens in the town. This was part of the Great Terror, and the purpose was to hold people in constant fear. There were orders that ten richest and most prominent citizens should get shot, and Jonathan had been one of the richest and most prominent. But someone would come late at night and say: "Uncle Jonathan, tonight we must come and arrest you and shoot you. If we don't do it, they'll shoot us. Get away and hide for a while". So he did. He became a school inspector, then he worked at a wool factory buying wool. Then someone squealed on him. Without any reason Jonathan was accused of being a "saboteur" and "an enemy of the Soviet state", they said that he had stolen state money. He was tried and sentenced to a year in prison, which was a very mild punishment at that time. So he went to the very same prison which he himself once had built.

When Jonathan was released he moved to a little village where he was offered a job as an organist in a little German church. He was the only educated person in the village, and he started a choir, an orchestra and an amateur theatre there. Then he became a school teacher. The children had already left their home and moved to Moscow to study. The first grandchild (that is, my father) was born in 1931. Maria and Jonathan loved their little grandson who would stay with them during summers. There was nothing like the wealth and luxury they one had, but they were happy, far away from the turbulent events in the big cities.

To be continued.

A voice from our mutual past

I got an email with this subject line a few days ago and then saw the sender's name with a mixture of joy and awe. My old fellow student and friend whom I hadn't met in twenty-five years. 

We met in our first university year, starting a casual conversation at a freshmen welcome party, and very soon we became good friends. At that time, my childhood friend Alyona and I went apart, with new acquaintances and networks, and I was in urgent need of a new best friend. Why Marina needed someone I don't know, but we obviously needed each other. It so happened that in a year of 114 girls and 6 boys, three of the boys were in our group, and we had fun together, without any romantic interests. There were not many opportunities for students in the early '70s in Russia to have fun, but there was one cafe, and a skating rink, and we had a student theatre. Marina and I shared many interests, books, music. But our friendship went through a real trial in the beginning of our second year when we were sent to a collective to help the progressive Soviet agriculture to fights its four enemies: winter, spring, summer and autumn. Actually, I don't know how winder, spring and summer were managed, but every autumn, students from all universities and colleges were sent to assist with harvest. If anyone calls it anything else than forced labour, you don't know anything about the Soviet Union. If you observe that we lost a month of our study time, it is an absolutely correct observation. 

The students didn't have much to say about it: if you refused to go you'd be immediately expelled, with a note in your files that would close any path to education for ever. You could try to get a medical certificate about having some horrible disease, but the other students would view it as betrayal. So we packed our bags with warm clothes and arrived at the departure point. Warm clothes in this case implies coarse padded black jackets that you may have seen in war movies. Educated families wouldn't normally possess this kind of clothes, but in those days you could anything somehow, with some extra effort.

The collective farm we were sent to was about sixty miles from Moscow and it took two hours by a local train. From the station we had to walk for half an hour, with our bags. We were led to two barracks where we were to live, fifty girls in each, iron beds in rows without any space between. Marina and I fought with the others for two beds in a corner; we would have to crawl over other beds to reach ours, but in the corner we had a teeny tiny bit of privacy. We could put a comb and a book on a beam and mark our territory. The disadvantage was that one of the beds was right by the radiator where the whole barrack tried to dry their wet working clothes that smelled rotten cabbage. It wasn't much of a drying since it was plus four centigrade indoors, even with fifty hot bodies. We slept with our clothes on, including the padded jackets and rubber boots. It didn't matter since there wasn't any bed linen. In the next barrack, it was twenty-eight degrees, and I am not sure it was better. 

The work we did was rather inefficient. The first week we harvested beetroot. A stout female overseer showed us how to pull them from the soil and pile in rows. After some metres we would retreat, chop off the leaves with a knife (which we had been ordered to bring from home) and pour into huge sacks. When the sack was full, you tied it up and left by the side of the field. At the end of the day the woman came back and counted the sacks. This first week we never earned our keep. 

Meals we served in another barrack. For breakfast we had brown bread, porridge and weak tea, for lunch cabbage soup and pasta – with some luck, there was a hint of gravy in the pasta. Dinner was porridge and tea. We tried to complement the diet by going to the local grocery to get whatever was available there, which was bread and jam, huge tin cans of jam that we managed to open with our knives and ate direct from the can with soup spoons. We brought bread with us to the fields for snack. It got slightly better when we were finished with beet and were moved over to carrots. We feasted on carrots as if they were the sweetest of sweets. 

We worked from nine to six with a lunch break, and you would think that we collapsed afterwards, but we didn't. We washed as well as we could – there was no running water, just a couple of wash basins outside the barracks for the hundred of us – and got together with our bread and jam cans; made camp fires, danced in our padded jackets and rubber boots, fell in love. It was essential to have a friend like Marina by your side. 

We had free Sundays, and if you had been diligent and filled your sacks and hadn't defied curfews, you were allowed to go home. Walk to the station, two hours on the train, then a reward of a warm bath and decent food, then back by train and a walk in darkness and cold. We also went home for an night without permission, to meet our lovers in Moscow, and Marina and I would cover each other at curfews. 

Then the rains came, the fields became pools of mud, and all the carrots we hadn't picked were there, rotting. We were transferred to a cabbage cellar. There were mountains of cabbage by the entrance, harvested by some other students. We were told to build human chains into the cellar and throw cabbages to each other, like heavy bowling balls. We trampled cabbage mountains with our muddy boots. We knew that it would rot away long before it would be transported to grocery stores. 

The cellar was farther away from the barracks than the field, and we had to walk in pouring rain. With some female charm you could persuade a male truck driver to give you a lift. To avoid going back and forth for lunch we negotiated with the commander to skip lunch. Instead, we had our bread with cabbage leaves on top. 

My fellow students began to catch colds, went home and some never returned, including the Head Girl. I was told to take over. One of my tasks was to wake up the barracks in the morning, do head count and report. I was exhausted and almost wished I could get sick. But I didn't, and I could not pretend I was sick because it would mean betraying my fellow students. Marina and I were the only ones who endured the whole month, and only because we were smart. Every day two girls were selected for kitchen duty. It implied getting up an hour earlier, set tables for a hundred and clean the tables afterwards and wash up. Same for lunch and dinner. Washing up was done in huge basins of hot water with mustard powder instead of detergent, which was non-existent even in normal life. Rubber gloves had not been invented either in the Soviet Union, and after washing up our hands were red and coarse. We stole fat from the kitchen to use on our hands. No wonder everybody hated kitchen duty. But Marina and I realised that between meals you were free. After washing up you could run back to the empty, silent barrack and sleep or read. While everybody else walked in pouring rain to the cabbage cellar, Marina and I worked in the warm kitchen with dry clothes on. We knew that people had survived in this manner in Stalin's labour camps. 

To be continued.

Banned books, revisited

It's the last day of Banned Books Week, and I have once again been thinking about censorship. I am against all kinds of censorship, in any form, yet cancelling an author's school visit because some stupid parent thinks one of her books is offensive is somewhat different from banning 90% of world literature on loose grounds.

In the country where I was born, the list of banned books would fill a library in itself. Just some examples:

The Bible was banned because "religion is the opium of the people" (Marx). All other religious books were banned for the same reason. All books by Western philosophers not featured in Lenin's article "Three sources and three constituents of Marxism" were banned. All books by Russian philosophers who did not subscribe to Marxism were banned.
 
All books by Russian emigrees were banned because they were enemies of the people. All books by relatives of the emigrees were banned. All books by Russian writers repressed by the regime were banned. The Russian literary martyrology - writers murdered, sent to labour camps, famished to death - carries at least 2,500 names, whose only crime was their words. All books by relatives of the repressed were banned. All books by people who protested against repressions were banned. All books that even vaguely alluded to the Great Terror were banned. All books that even vaguely expressed sympathy with characters representing the opponents of communism were banned. All books by the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky were banned because his country had sent him to exile. 

All foreign books that did not portray class struggle were banned. Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past were banned bacause they did not portray the inhuman conditions of the working class under capitalism. For whom the Bell Tolls was banned because it portrayed the Spanish civil war that did not exist according to Soviet history books.  All books by foreign writers who had made the tiniest utterance questioning the country of the victorious communism were banned. All books that did not show life as it should be according to the communist worldview were banned.

All books that had the slightest allusion to human reproduction were banned. That doesn't leave much of world literature.

Still, I repeat: I am firmly against ALL forms of censorship. Including cancelling a school visit.

Wings of history

Twenty year ago today I was in Moscow to attend the Congress of Compatriots. I still don't know who invited me and why; I was a Swedish citizen by then, but I guess the Soviet Embassy kept an eye on us expats. The Congress was one of many events that marked the new openness after Gorbachov's ascent to power; a huge gathering of diaspora from all over the world. I wasn't particularly keen to go because I was, as usual, suspicious of anything to do with the official side of my former Motherland, but Staffan was eager, and he wasn't invited. So we went by car, loaded with wheelchairs, Bibles and soft toys because I was at the time involved with charity work in Moscow.

We were placed in the monstrous hotel Russia overlooking the Kremlin, and in the morning, twenty years ago, we went down to breakfast, and then we were meeting one of my contacts who would collect the wheelchairs. We overslept after the long travel the day before and hadn't listened to the news. In the gigantic restaurant, two ladies were talking agitated at the table next to us. We addressed them politely saying that we couldn't help hearing their conversation, so could they please explain what was going on. After half a sentence, we left our breakfast unfunished and rushed to our room. The radio was playing classical music, the TV was showing an old movie, and we knew it was really bad. We were in the middle of a coup d'etat.

My wheelchair contact did turn up, only to say that as a medical doctor he had to be on the barricades in case of casualties. There were tanks in the city centre. We called our friends; they were packing emergency bags and expecting arrests (when it was all over, lists oif people to be arrested were indeed found, and all our friends were on those). We went to a newspaper office where all major dailies, already prohibited by the new authorities, were producing a joint flyer Everywhere we saw people bringing food to people oin barricades.The Congress of Compatriots continued as planned.

If you hear anyone say that they knew from start that it would all end well - that's not true! Everyone was in panic because everyone had their own or their family's memories of the Great Terror of the 1930s. The Swedish Embassy encouraged all Swedish visitors to go home. Many did. We were trying to figure out how many friends' children we would be able to save, and how. The radio was playing classical music, and TV was running old comedies. We listened to world news on our short-wave.

Don't believe foreign correspondents and casual eye-witnesses that claim they were not scared. We all were. But we, the visitors, at least knew that in real emergency we would find shelter in our embassies. Our Russian friends had no protection.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that classical music was interrupted by news from an independent station. The coup was suppressed, Gorbachov was back in Moscow after three days of house arrest. Statues of former KGB generals were pulled down. The Communist Party headquarters was sealed off. The hated regime was overthrown, although we didn't know it yet.

I was there.

“Based on a true story...”

A friend gave me a book that she thought I should read. I am always grateful for reading suggestions because there are too many books our there, impossible to keep track of. It isn't a well-written book in my humble opinion, but I am glad I have read it because it will certainly get a lot of attention and likely to win awards because of its subject matter. Between Shades of Gray is the first novel by the American writer Ruta Sepetys, of Lithuanian origin, and it is a story (“based on first-hand family accounts and memories”, the back cover informs) about the deportation of Lithuanians after the Soviet occupation in 1939. For someone who has read a least some Holocaust literature, including children's literature, the gruesome details are not particularly shocking. For someone who has read books about Soviet labour camps, nothing is particularly new, and with all the horror and misery, the story is relatively idyllic. For someone like me, who learned the words “deportation” and “labour camp” among the very first, much is recognisable from family history: my great-grandfather, too, was thrown out of a cattle car when he died under transport. And yes, it is true that you could be shot if you stole a beet.

The writer has obviously done some serious research, visiting Lithuania and collecting evidence about the events she describes through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old. Since it is a book of fiction, she is not telling a story about any individual, but a collective story of a nation among other nations, and it is quite natural that in a novel everything is deliberately amplified and many stories brought together. Sepetys has got almost everything right. But it is this tiny “almost” that spoils the book for me.

It is, for instance, highly unlikely that a deportee would be allowed to keep a sketch pad and pencils, not to mention a fountain pen. This is one of the premisses of the plot, and I can accept it as poetic licence; however, the metaphor might have been stronger if the protagonist's drawings were imaginary rather than material. A deportee would definitely not be allowed to keep a Bible, which was forbidden under the Soviet regime even outside the penitentiary system.

When the Lithuanian are taken from a Siberian railway station to a labour camp, the truck stops in the middle of nothing, and the deportees are ordered into a building to take a shower. This is a poignant scene reflecting the humiliation of the female prisoners who must undress in front of the male guards. Apparently, Sepetys cannot imagine that in the region she depicts there is still no running water today, seventy years later. Sepetys describes in great detail the squalor of the local population, so where would a shower come from in the desolate Siberian steppes? (Showers are generally not a feature of Russia).

As they settle in the camp, some deportees write letters to surviving relatives and friends in Lithuania – and get replies. Lithuania is now under Nazi occupation; there is no way a letter from a Soviet prison camp would be delivered, and no letter “with Lithuanian stamps” would ever reach Siberia. The truth about totalitarian regimes is so unfathomable that no research helps you to comprehend it.

I would really like to believe that Sepetys has done her research properly, but there are too many gaps between her informants' evidence that she fills inadequately. The final drop comes when the protagonist gets a book for her sixteenth birthday. Well, by some serendipity a pretty, hardbound book with golden lettering might have found its way into a Siberian village. The protagonist is thrilled, because it is a book by her favourite author, Dickens, and a title she has not read, Dombey and Son. Then she opens the book and is utterly disappointed: the book is in Russian, which she cannot read. So how could she read the name of the author and the title? Shouldn't a writer who sets her story in Russia know that Russian language uses a different alphabet?

You may think it doesn't matter in a story of unimaginable suffering, and most readers will never notice. But if a writer decides to “tell ye your children...” she has to be credible all the way through.

From undergrad to Chair, Part 2

It may seem strange that you can have an academic career outside academia, but this is by far not the most bizarre feature of Soviet reality. There were hundreds of research institutes all over the country, and some did research, while most were part of the propaganda machine. If you think that Orwell's Ministry of Truth is dark science fiction – I worked there once. Film Studies Institute was a research centre for the powerful Ministry of Film. Film was in the Soviet Union, like in Nazi Germany, an important part of ideological propaganda, so it was worthwhile having a centre with a hundred researchers in Moscow alone. My department, specifically, worked with foreign press in secret departments of state libraries, searching keenly for any utterance about Soviet (or anti-Soviet) film. If a director or actor or critic said anything slightly unfavourable, they became a non-person.

I am not ashamed of having been part of this monstrous structure because that was the way it was. We all had to survive, and the only thing you could do was keep your integrity and be honest toward yourself. What choice did I have? It wouldn't have been much different in any other place.

There were sixteen research assistants in my department, and I could have easily managed all of their work (of course, today you would have simply googled. But it was Stone Age when I was young). We only had to be in the office once a week, and we had no desks or any workspace in the office anyway. It was also part of the job to watch movies. Sometimes four movies a day. Since I did what was expected of me quickly, I had plenty of time for other things: interpreting, translating, reviewing. My dream was to become a freelance translator.

Like everything else, the production of PhDs was strictly planned, so I was chosen to write a PhD on Norwegian film. Swedish film was taken by someone else. The only method allowed in research on anything, from film to nuclear physics, was Marxist. Unfortunately, Marx didn't say anything helpful about Norwegian film. I had done all coursework and submitted three chapters when my professional life took an unexpected turn.

To be continued.