I, a young Soviet schoolgirl, addressed this question to my granny 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 I was told 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 (Novonikolaevsky), - the grandmother began to recollect, - our breadwinner died early from 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 in the family there was 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 my mother will cook some fatty cabbage soup 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 ask: “Mommy, we would have bread, we would have a blink. 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 as a collar broadcasts. And in the field I drive away from the horse with a branch of gadflies, but I eat the loaf on my neck. And 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. Let's steam up, steam up, and immediately the strength seems to be taken up again and we run into the street - to lead round dances, sing songs, it was fun, good.
- Wait, granny, because everywhere they write that the peasants lived very badly, they were starving. And you tell something else.
- 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 starve? 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. People are all devout believers. What kind of drunkenness is there. - Marita).
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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 sculpt 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 you will pick up a bucket of mushrooms without leaving the place. There are plenty of fish on the river again. At night in the summer you will go, and the little squinting little ones sleep with their noses buried in the shore, you could pull them 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 her mother. The ear was greasy.
Granny smiles at me with her soft, sweet smile. Ah, grandmother, I would give a lot just to see this smile again and talk to you. I cherish your unhurried simple stories in my memory. And I also keep the memory of the love that you gave to your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
(in the photo - a real peasant hut in the village of Martyanovo, captured 100 years ago by photographer Prokudin-Gorsky)
And this is a photograph of a rural haymaking from the same photographer. 1909 year. Please note: haymaking in the pre-revolutionary rural community was a common, communal affair.