Pre-revolutionary life in grandmother's stories

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This question was addressed by me, a young Soviet schoolgirl, to my grandmother in 1975. It was a school assignment: to ask your relatives about their difficult life under the king and to compose a story. In those years, many still had grandfathers and grandmothers who remembered pre-revolutionary life. My grandparents, born in 1903 and 1905, are simple peasants from a Siberian village. Therefore, I prepared to write down a vivid story-illustration for a school textbook firsthand.

What they told me was surprising and new for me then, that's why I remembered that conversation so vividly, almost literally, here it is:

“We lived, you know, in a village near Novosibirsk (Novonikolaevsk),” the grandmother began to recollect, “our breadwinner died early in an accident: a log fell on him when he helped build a hut for his brother. So our mother, your great-grandmother, is a young widow at 28 years old. And with her 7 children are small, small, less. The youngest was still lying in the cradle, and the eldest was barely 11 years old.

Therefore, our orphaned family was the poorest in the village. And we had 3 horses, 7 cows on our farm, and we never counted chickens and geese. But the family had no one to work at the plow, how much would one woman plow the land? And this means that there was not enough bread in the family, they could not hold out until spring. But bread for us was the head of everything. I remember that on Easter, Mom would cook fatty cabbage for us, bake a whole goose in the stove, natomite potatoes with mushrooms in sour cream in a large cast iron, paint eggs, cream, cottage cheese on the table, and we cry little and we ask: "Mom, we would have bread, we would have a pancake." That's how it was.

This was only later, when, three years later, the older brothers grew up and were able to plow well - that's when we all healed again. At the age of 10, I was a plowman on plowing - my duty was to drive off horseflies and gadflies from the horse so that they would not interfere with her work. I remember that my mother gathers us for plowing in the morning, bakes fresh rolls and one huge roll around my neck like a yoke broadcasts. And in the field I drive away from the horse with a branch of gadflies, but I eat the roll around my neck. Moreover, I don't have time to drive away the gadflies from myself, oh, and they will bite me in a day! In the evening, they immediately went from the field to the bathhouse. We'll steam up, steam up, and immediately the strength seems to be taken up anew and we run into the street - to lead round dances, sing songs, it was fun, good.

- For the peasant, dear, the land is a nurse. Where land is scarce, there is starvation. And in Siberia we had plenty of land for plowing, so why go hungry? Here, how could only some lazy people or drunkards starve. But in our village, you understand that there were no drunks at all. (Of course I understand that they had an Old Believer village. The people are all devout believers. What kind of drunkenness is there. - Marita).

There are also flooded meadows with waist-deep grass, which means there is enough feed for cows and horses. In late autumn, when the cattle are slaughtered, the whole family prepared dumplings for the winter. We sculpt them, freeze them and put them in large self-woven bags, and lower them onto the glacier. (Granny called the ice cellar a deep cellar with ice, in which the temperature was always below zero - Marita). In the meantime, we are sculpting them, - we will cook and we will overeat! We eat them until the last dumpling rises in the throat. Then we, kids, bang on the floor in the hut and roll on the floor, play. The dumplings will be smart - so we will eat more additives.

In the forest, both berries and nuts were collected. And you didn't even have to go to the forest for mushrooms. Here you will only go beyond the edge of the garden, and without leaving the place you will pick up a bucket of mushrooms. The river is again full of fish. At night in the summer you will go, and the little squinting little ones sleep with their noses buried in the shore, they could be pulled a lot with a loop. I remember that once my sister Varvara accidentally "caught" a pike in winter - she went to the ice hole to rinse her clothes, and the pike grabbed her hand. Varvara, well, yell, and the hand itself, together with the pike clutching under the armpit, and runs, calling for the mother. The ear was greasy with sweat.

(in the photo - a real peasant hut in the village of Martyanovo, captured 100 years ago by the photographer Prokudin-Gorsky)

And this is a photograph of a rural hayfield from the same photographer. 1909 year. Please note: haymaking in the pre-revolutionary rural community was a common, communal affair.