Chronicle of a Collective
SHANOR, DONALD
Chronicle of a Collective ONE DAY IN THE NEW LIFE By Fyodor Abramov Praeger. 174 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by DONALD SHANOR Soviet Affairs Specialist, United Press International Seven years...
...But maybe it was difficult now just because it had been so easy then...
...But the real impact of the book comes from the fact that it is dealing with current abuses, with the continuing failure of the Soviet regime to come to grips with the farm problem, and not merely with the crimes of a dictator dead 10 years...
...It is for this reason that Abramov's story, even though it had initially been praised, was condemned as "vulgar, stinking symbolism" by Soviet critics shortly after its appearance last winter in the Leningrad magazine Neva...
...That's an anti-State practice...
...Word from the district committee had told him it would be good politics to get in the silage, which was being pushed at that time as "the main source of fodder for stockbreeding...
...That's encouragement for the private sector...
...The difficulties of Soviet agriculture are shown by a chronicle of Mysovsky's day (actually one day and the morning after...
...But the chairman is left to face the consequences from higher party officials...
...The most recent addition to this literature is Fyodor Abramov's One Day in the New Life, a description of life on a collective farm where bureaucracy, peasant apathy and the harsh climate combine to defeat not only the idealistic Chairman's dream of converting the peasants to Communist ways, but even the seasonal crop quotas...
...There is, of course, a connection between Stalin's mistakes in the countryside in the '20s and '30s and Khrushchev's problems there now...
...The critics seemed to be saying that Abramov, a peasant's son who comes from the poor farming country in the north near Archangel, should have kept his fire directed on Stalin, not on the farming expert who succeeded him...
...But if they did, there would be a frightful scream from the district prosecutor or the secretary of the district committee: 'Don't you dare...
...And those looking for a dramatic story like that of the other One Day, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of prison-camp life in the Stalin era, will similarly be disappointed...
...His peasants, armed with disability certificates and other excuses, were growing marvelously productive crops on their own land, gathering mushrooms for sale, or working on their houses, while the collective's crops lay rain-soaked in the fields...
...Was his picture in the New Life a true one, or is the true picture to be found in the stories of heroic collective members and bulging corn cribs...
...They show that, however bountiful the next three harvests, Khrushchev's Seven-Year Plan targets for agriculture will not be met...
...True, there is drama in Abramov's quiet and deliberately understated narrative, and there is certainly criticism of Stalin's war on the countryside...
...In all his statements and speeches on agriculture thus far, Khrushchev has not touched on the central theme of Abramov's book: that as long as incentives are withheld from the peasants, they will connive to sabotage or at best neglect collective production...
...The transformation in the fields is magical...
...Yes, they understood it...
...Obviously, not all collectives are as poor as the one in Abramov's book...
...Mysovsky asks himself...
...Ananiy Yegorovich Mysovsky, the novel's honest, hopelessly frustrated Communist collective farm chairman, took part in the forced collectivization drive that Stalin ordered and remained in the countryside to reap its results 30 years later: peasant hostility, a concerted program of evading work in the "Socialist sector" and putting one's energies into the private garden plots, excuses and lethargy...
...Western readers seeking sensational disclosures will find little satisfaction in Abramov's short novel...
...Reviewed by DONALD SHANOR Soviet Affairs Specialist, United Press International Seven years after the literary "year of truth" that followed Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, new Soviet works keep appearing, adding to the testimony of other writers in the case against Stalinism being presented to the Soviet public...
...But the problem of incentives is common to nearly all...
...Mysovsky finally effects a change in the peasants the morning after when, while drinking with his foremen, he recklessly promises an adequate incentive to get the crop in...
...And every chairman was trying in one way or another to get round this system...
...At one point in the narrative, Mysovsky muses: "No, it had been easier in 1930...
...But his tour of the collective and his talks with the peasants showed him there was little use in following either line as long as organized goldbricking deprived him of field hands...
...Who was right—Abramov or the official critics...
...Did they understand this in the collective farms...
...In two days...
...They also show that population increases are wiping out whatever small gains are being made...
...Abramov clearly demonstrates this...
...To turn the countryside upside down in two days...
...If anything, Soviet statistics on farm production support Abramov against his critics...
...Good sense had told him to get in the hay while good weather lasted...
Vol. 46 • September 1963 • No. 18
