For the first time now in the Soviet Union, through Iskra, Free Trade Unionists could speak to each other. For the first time reports of strikes and injustices were reported. The BBC Overseas Service began to quote Iskra and Western news agencies recognized the veracity of its reporting. Throughout the autumn, as the reputation of Iskra grew the KGB constantly redoubled its efforts to trace its presses and distributors. But the cellular system and the Pravda-like editorial organization continued to elude all KGB efforts. Still, as autumn faded, the editor of Iskra occupied a high position on the Lubyanka’s list of wanted men.
In the marketplace the shortages from decreased production raised both black market and free market prices and the Soviet worker was no longer earning the wages necessary to pay.
What was true of consumer goods production was equally true of agriculture. After a temporary meat glut in early October when wholesale slaughtering took place, meat disappeared completely from shops in hundreds of cities across the Soviet Union.
Then the problems of transportation intervened. Back in the days of Leonid Brezhnev the leadership had warned of an impending transportation crisis. The age of railroad locomotives and freight cars, and above all the poor quality of their maintenance, were already affecting the efficiency of food distribution when the Soviet Union entered the eighties. Five years later when the corruptly administered Transport Restrictions were added to the burden of the railways, the system quite literally ceased to function over whole areas and districts for periods of up to two or three weeks at a time.
Thus one of the most bizarre developments at this time, and one which Western commentators totally failed to predict, was the advent of the local temporary famine.
When first reports from Iskra began to reach Western Europe most governments were frankly skeptical. Shortages, even localized severe shortages, they knew existed, but famine in a developed state like the Soviet Union? Hardly possible, was the verdict of most specialists. They took even the low current figures for grain production in the Ukraine and the Virgin Lands, added emergency purchases from the United States and Canada, calculated dairy food production and added cheese and butter sales by the European Common Market and announced in their reports that no citizen of the Soviet Union could be even remotely close to malnutrition.
But to be of value to a family food must reach the kitchen table. Vast stores of grain in the black earth regions of the Ukraine are of no value to the workers of, say, Novosibirsk. A glut of butter and cheese in Belorussia is no guarantee that Bratsk, east of the Ural Mountains, is similarly favored. In these months the harsh truth emerged that the food distribution system of the Soviet Union, in particular by rail, had in many areas temporarily collapsed. Vikenty Lossov was a stationmaster at the small but important junction of Stara in the Kazan oblast.
I was over retirement age at the time, of course, but that’s not to say I was too old for the job. The local chairman had come to see me himself and asked me to return to work. The stationmaster who succeeded me had just been kicked out. It seems he’d left unprotected trainloads of grain in the sidings for two months. Just forgotten about them. And you can imagine what the rats and the rain did to that consignment.
I don’t mind admitting I was flattered. Nearly seventy years of age and being asked, personally mind you, by the local chairman! I’d had forty years of experience. During the war against fascism I ran four junctions just behind the front. And in those days we had to deal with old equipment, worn rolling stock, and air attack as well as the usual Russian problems of flooded lines or solid frozen points. Just a staff of five and myself. Eighteen, 20 hours a day were normal. But then we knew what we were working for. We knew that every rail-car of mortar ammunition or anti-tank shells was going to be used to drive the fascists back where they came from. And the returning trainloads of our wounded, well, you didn’t sit on your backside and watch the samovar bubble when a hospital train had to be expedited.
Things had changed a lot since the time I retired ten years ago. The younger ones just didn’t care. No pride in the work any longer. But even so I was completely unprepared for what I found when I went back to Junction 616 in January of that year. Chaos, my friend, would be a pretty way of describing it. I don’t even know how to start. The staff had grown from 50 to 300. Yet the siding tracks looked as though the Messerschmitts had been over the night before. Five full trains were derailed in the sidings themselves! Pilfering, I’d seen plenty of before. But this was full-scale looting. Farmers would come in with trucks and shovel the grain off the wagons and nobody thought to stop them. Loco repairs? On the day I took over, the manifest showed 15 shunting engines on the junction. Fourteen were unusable through neglect and lack of basic repairs.
That same day I was shown what they called “the dump.” When a train carrying perishables broke down in the junction area, its load — fruit, cabbages, potatoes, whatever — would be shoveled onto a vast rotting dump of vegetables — after all the still edible stuff had been looted, of course.
And nobody cared! We’d come a long, long way since the days of Stalin. That peasant Khrushchev started it all, that’s when we lost our pride in ourselves, making a fool of the country in the United Nations, boasting that every Soviet citizen would have an automobile and a refrigerator and a television set. Why did we want to be like the capitalist West? Under Stalin we were different — times were hard, but we had the world’s respect. That first night when I got home to my wife, I don’t mind telling you, friend, I wept…
Of course transport conditions throughout the Soviet Union weren’t all as bad as Junction 616. But especially in the autumn thaw, large areas of north and northeastern Russia were vulnerable to complete, if only temporary, transportation collapses when road transport became impossible on immense stretches of mud highways. Although we even now have few details, it seems certain that while no large-scale famine was suffered, virtually all foodstuffs could, and often did, disappear from a whole district for a period of up to a month at a time. By then airlifts, military supply echelons and farmers with an eye on a quick capitalist profit would frequently flood the area with foodstuffs. But the memory of that local brief famine would remain, even if public order had been effectively maintained. But it wasn’t always so.
Bita K. was a young Uzbek worker who had come north on the promise of highly paid factory work in the labor-starved plants outside Perm.
Naturally I had never seen a winter like that, with snow up to fifteen feet thick and great drifts along the highway between my hostel lodgings and the plant. And when the spring thaw came the mud seemed to be everywhere. You couldn’t drive a truck along the main street without it sinking up to its axles. A man on a horse would get sucked down just as quickly.