Gloom Boxes: Dead Beets
Newman, Sally
DEAD BEETS olkhovsky Sovkhoz, a Soviet state 1 farm about fifty flat miles south of Moscow, has been officially designated a "sovkhoz-millionaire," meaning that it is among the most prosperous...
...At Polkhovsky, the plan called for us to fill two trucks with cabbages...
...Where are you from...
...asked one...
...That really does not explain why a recent clear October day found a couple of dozen Russians, an American colleague, and me bouncing along the pockmarked road to this model establishment to help in the last-ditch effort to harvest its cabbage crop...
...Our kompania was composed mostly of middle-aged women lured by the promise, new last fall, that they could bring home as many cabbages as they could carry...
...Racial and ethnic tolerance isn't the Russians' strong suit...
...This only provoked more incredulity...
...They interpreted that license quite liberally, with some lugging back as many as four bulging burlap bags weighing about eighty pounds each...
...Was this because our kompania had imbibed too much at lunch to function in the afternoon...
...Extra work...
...the "milk shop" was an old wooden shed not nearly as nice as some American doghouses I have seen, where milk was ladled out of a battered tin barrel into containers that stooped, kerchiefed women had brought from home...
...Sally Newman (Miss Newman, a doctoral candidate in Soviet Studies at UCLA, is an exchange scholar living in Moscow) 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...
...never mind that there were enough beets for us to have picked twice or three times as many...
...Unload the trucks and come back for more...
...once we did, the day was over...
...Indifference is, if anything, a tougher nut to crack...
...The five men on our bus and the two we met at the sovkhoz, seemed content to stand around and smoke, occasionally lobbing a cabbage into the open truck...
...I felt honor-bound to point out that, while American agriculture is more mechanized than its Soviet counterpart (actually, Zimbabwean agriculture is more mechanized than its Soviet counterpart), we Californians are heavily reliant on migrant farm labor at harvest time...
...the party headquarters was a crumbling, bare building...
...Although we had never picked cabbages before, we quickly outstripped the desultory pickers in the next row...
...I would certainly hate to see what a non-millionaire sovkhoz looks like...
...My co-workers wouldn't tell me exactly what they did, but the fact that they worked in the defense sector was confirmed on the busride home from Polkhovsky, when one of the men offered cup after cup of spirt, a pure—and, thankfully, diluted—alcohol that one does not find in Moscow stores...
...No, we traveled for four hours and worked for two-and-ahalf because the plan called for a given output, and, once we had filled our quota, no one had the slightest inclination to lift a finger...
...You mean that you came all the way to the Soviet Union so you could pick cabbages like a Mexican...
...Try suggesting that to a sovkhoznik...
...Another said bitterly, "You see, we can't even gather our own harvest without having the Americans come over and do it...
...Initiative...
...The only store was temporarily closed "for technical reasons" (the only food it had was bread...
...At Kubinka, we each picked two 500-meter rows...
...It would be almost as foolish as asking whether a sovkhoz-millionaire really is a seven-figure concern...
...At first, none of our fellow workers were aware that two Americans were in their midst, but we inadvertently made our presence known...
...After racking my brains for something favorable to say, the best I could come up with was that the apartment buildings at Kubinka were marginally less ugly than Moscow's...
...Do they still gather cabbages by hand in California...
...As at Polkhovsky, my companions were engineers and technicians at a Moscow military enterprise, whose skills will probably not be turned to civilian applications, like designing reapers, for years to come...
...At Kubinka, for example, numerous Su-27s performed aerobatic feats overhead, while people labored away in the fields below with not a single vehicle in sight...
...On both expeditions, we spent far more time getting to and from our destination than actually working...
...This desperate annual bid to salvage the harvest, complicated last fall by the rainiest September in recent memory, was indeed a resounding failure...
...Perish the capitalist thought...
...and, aside from one teenager and the two middle-aged men I'd been working with, Polkhovsky appeared to be an all-female settlement...
...The reasons most often adduced for this predicament are the primacy of military needs and utter peasant apathy...
...DEAD BEETS olkhovsky Sovkhoz, a Soviet state 1 farm about fifty flat miles south of Moscow, has been officially designated a "sovkhoz-millionaire," meaning that it is among the most prosperous collective farms in the USSR...
...The situation was equally chaotic at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU kolkhoz near the village of Kubinka, where I had picked livestock beets the previous week...
...Soon I was being peppered with questions...
...Was it because we had picked the fields clean...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
