Tag: ussr

Water Heaters

My Armenian hosts mentioned that they had a gas water heater “just as it was in Saint-Petersburg in old times, do you remember?” I told them – not really, but actually, I do remember. It was very different from what they had in their house, so I thought that this was one of the fun facts I should share in my historical posts, because nobody would ever ask!

In this post, I described what my childhood apartment looked like, and in that post, I talked about the heating systems. To reiterate: you had to light a match to start a pilot in the water heater, and then you had to keep the water running; otherwise, the flame would die off. Since you had to light a match each time you needed hot water, you had to have “something” to discard the burned matches. This “something” was a tin mug which worked perfectly for that purpose as long as I remembered. Many years later, when I was about 14, I finally noticed “1915” scribbled on the side of the mug and realized it was an army mug from WWI.

There was a large washing machine in the bathroom; for the life of mine, I couldn’t tell the brand, but it was the size of a small table, and that’s how it was mostly used :). I hardly remember any time it was operating, and I am not sure whether it was not working properly, or at some point it broke and no one fixed it, or whatever the deal was. All I know is that it was there and not working, and I washed all my clothes in a washing bowl in the sink using the laundry soap.

The kitchen had no hot water at all. There was a gas heater as well, but I can’t remember why it was not used. To wash the dishes, I had to do the following:

  • boil a kettle of water
  • put a washing bowl in the sink
  • pour some hot water from the kettle and mix it with cold water from the faucet to make it warm
  • wash the dishes
  • rinse the dishes with cold water
  • put all the dishes back into a washing bowl and pour the remaining hot water from the kettle over the clean dishes
  • dry the dishes with the kitchen towel

There was a gas stove in the kitchen (as I mentioned, the old wood-burning stove was not operational), but you still had to use matches to light a burner. For some reason, I was afraid of lighting matches until I was eight or nine years old, and my mom yelled at me for it. Upon returning from school, I had to warm up my dinner, and for me to be able to do that, my mom had to leave a burner on low since the morning (again, no idea why; my grandaunt was there, but that’s something in their relationships I was never able to figure out). I was very proud of myself when I finally overcame my fear and learned to light matches.

It’s good to remind myself how things used to be; humans become spoiled very fast and are miserable when there are problems with hot water, or when a washer breaks!

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Being Married In The USSR

When Igor and I decided to get married, there was no question that I would move in to live with him and his mother and stepfather. Having our own place was absolutely out of the question: as I mentioned earlier, the housing market didn’t exist, and only a very small fraction of people rented; the vast majority lived in their “given” apartments. I didn’t have a room of my own: I shared a room with my mother in the same gigantic apartment on Galernaya Street – my childhood apartment. Igor lived with his parents (as everyone did), but he had his own room, so I was supposed to move there.

That might explain the alarm of his parents: all of a sudden, they were getting a roommate. One thing we did a little bit differently: I said from the start that we would have our own household, meaning that we would cook separately and have our own budget. I was used to that situation because that’s how my mom and I lived in one apartment with my father’s relatives, but for Igor’s parents, it was something unheard of. To their credit, they didn’t make a big deal out of it.

Later I learned that they were absolutely sure that we rushed to get married because I was pregnant, and since I got pregnant shortly after the marriage (that’s what we wanted, or rather, I wanted and Igor agreed), they were still sure it was the case, and were surprised at the end. After our son was born, we overheard Igor’s mom saying to somebody over the phone: nine months and six days! That was the time between our marriage and the birth of Igor-junior.

Igor’s parents had a washing machine, which not everyone had at that time. What I learned, however, was that they used it in an interesting way: they would turn it on once a month or so, and do several washes. Since there was no custom of daily clothes changing, everything was worn for several days and required more than a quick rinse. Igor’s mom used to soak everything in the bathtub before washing. The soaking could take a couple of days, and during this time, it was not possible to take a shower 😂. I was alarmed only the first time, but later I got used to the situation.

A more challenging thing was that Igor’s mom had almost all of his clothes in this dirty laundry pile just before our wedding, and then she got upset with him. I forgot about what, and she pulled all of his dirty laundry out of the big pile and handed it to me; now, I was in charge.

Needless to say, I found it absolutely normal. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that it was very difficult to hand-wash the clothes, which stayed in a dirty pile for weeks. I spent a long time scrubbing the dirty shirt collars, and fortunately, I never had to do it again, since I washed everything right away.

The only chores we did together with Igor were shopping, at least sometimes. I was doing cooking, dishes, laundry, and ironing. I didn’t think something was wrong with that: that’s what all wives were doing, it was normal, expected, and was a source of pride: I am a good wife, and I can “serve” my husband well.

It was all fine during the first six months of our marriage because I had just a few classes left in the University, and was finalizing my thesis, so I could focus on “being a wife.” I still worked on some tasks Boris gave me, but it was far from being “full-time employed.” Later, when I started working, things became more challenging.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Languages

I want to record this as a separate post because my mom suddenly remembered that something like that happened at some point and started to tell everyone. I do not remember the episode itself because the conversation happened without me :), but I remember who my mom described it to me many years ago. What she told me back then makes sense, while what she is saying now does not make any sense at all.

I should start with mentioning that my paternal grandmother’s side of the family were polyglots. Living in the pale of settlement, they had to speak four languages to get around, plus Hebrew, just because you should know, plus foreign languages taught in the gymnasium, plus some Greek and Latin. So it was only natural that when I started to talk (which, as I already mentioned, was very early – I recited first nursery rhymes at the age of 14 months), my great-grandmother started to introduce some Yiddish, her first language. She started casually saying to me, “And in Yiddish, this is called so and so.” When my mom overheard that, she said: “Gustava Markovna (my great grandma’s Russified name), let her learn how to speak Russian first!” For which my great grandma replied: “I never expected you to be such an antisemit!” For which my mom got very upset and ran out of the room, and my great ant Fania followed her and tried to console her saying that “nobody meant anything.” My great grandmother never apologized because she was not a type of a person who ever apologies, but the question of Yiddish was never raised again. (And it has nothing to do with my mom teaching me English later)

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

The Eighth Grade and Specialized Schools

Although we didn’t have a formal distinction between grade, middle, and high school (as I mentioned earlier, in most cases, it was one establishment, and all grades were located in one building), finishing the eighth grade had some special meaning. We had formal exams after the eighth grade (Composition, Russian Grammar, Algebra, and Geometry), and we were given a diploma for “Graduating from the Eighth grade.”

Those who had poor grades (what exactly “poor” meant was relative) could not continue with the “upper grades” and were sent to “professional schools” (i.e., vocational schools) to complete their educations. They had to study for three years instead of two and, theoretically, would receive the same instructions in all subjects plus learn some vocation, and then theoretically, they could either go to work in the field they were trained or could try to apply to college. In addition, there was a very limited number of specialized schools, which were much more like High Schools in the US: they had only the 9th and the 10th grades and were focused on in-depth learning of some subjects.

The trick was, however, that the school I attended was already “specialized” because we were taught English starting from the second grade, and by the eighth grade, we had English lessons every day of the week. Education was free, but we had “to pay it off.”

Everyone who had good grades in English was required to attend the tour guide courses in the “House of Friendship.” The course was designed for three years, and by the time of high school graduation, the students were certified tour guides for the city tours (year one), several major museum tours (year two), and the tours of the summer tzar palaces (year three).

I didn’t want to attend these courses. At the beginning of the eighth grade, I already attended the Youth Math School twice a week and a stage reading studio (I forgot once or twice a week), and I started to entertain the idea of going to a specialized math school after the eighth grade. Fortunately, there was one more option: instead of the House of Friendship, I could attend the tour guide courses at the Hermitage Museum, a one-year program. This program was still done through the school, and even now, I am unsure to what extent it was another “spy school.” However, that was a very fun time, and I am exceptionally glad I had this opportunity.

We met once a week (and I had a special free pass to the Hermitage Museum). We spent two hours with an extraordinary museum curator, Ludmila Voronikhina (who was, indeed, related to a famous architect, Voronikhin). Each time, she took us for a tour (in English) to cover one of the museum collections. We learned a great deal about art and artists and about the history of the Hermitage, and we learned all artistic terms in English. I was an art lover even before that, but these lectures gave me a world of knowledge and even deeper arts appreciation.

We were not required to have a formal exam at the end of this course. Instead, Ludmila Voronikhina asked each of us to choose the topic we would like to cover. During the last several meetings of the school year, the two hours were divided between our mini-tours, and she kept teaching us about Matisse and Picasso.

Since I was in ultimate and unconditional love with Leonardo da Vinci, I chose the tour of two Leonardo’s Madonnas, and I still can talk about each of them for at least twenty minutes!

However, as much as I enjoyed this course, my heart was increasingly with math. The most important change that happened when I was in the eighth grade was that the Youth Math School classes were moved from the University to three specialized schools (they were still taught by University students). That’s how I found myself entering the building of School Number 30 for the first time.

To be continued

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

How Math Became My Favorite Subject, But Not Right Away

I was a good student from the very beginning of school: my mom, Aunt Kima, and Baba Fania would never allow me to be less than that. However, I didn’t have a favorite subject for a while. I loved books and reciting poetry, so I was always the kid who opened the shows, but other than that, I didn’t have any special talents.

We didn’t have science or social studies lessons until the fifth grade, although I read many popular science books. We started to study Russian history in the fourth grade and botany and geography in the fifth. I immediately fell in love with biology, especially because by then, I had read many books about the wonders of nature, the mysteries of cells, endangered species, and so on.

In the fifth grade, I started to attend academic competitions, which were called olympiads. We had school olympiads, and the winners attended district olympiads, and the winners of district olympiads were sent to the city-wide competitions. All of them took place on the weekends, and having that we had school on Saturdays meant no weekends at all.

My first competitions were in biology, and I easily made it to the city-wide olympiad and easily got a second-degree diploma, finishing the fifth person in my grade level. I remember that I did great in microbiology and almost failed zoology (we didn’t have zoology at school yet, and I didn’t read enough by myself). I could not tell the difference between the black grouse and the wood grouse, could not identify the birds by skeletons, and so on. In the end, the examiner asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I told them what I knew about birds’ migration, and somehow got a passing grade in biology. The last subject was ecology and wildlife protection, and I spoke my heart out and got a top grade. I remember that I was very nervous about not remembering the names of the national parks and the dates they were founded, but my examiner said: please, spare me from the dates and name; tell me what you think about protecting endangered species. And I rocked!

My mom became very nervous about my fascination with biology because all of the craziness with genetics and Lysenko was fairly recent, and she didn’t want me to be in trouble. She started to steer me towards math. I liked math, but not even close to how much I loved biology. Besides, there was a new thread on the horizon – I started to be very interested in history.

How we were taught history in school will be a topic for a separate post, and in any case, we didn’t have any history olympiads – I guess it was dangerous to know too much about history. However, we had olympiads in math, physics, chemistry, and literature, and I participated in all of them.

My mom wanted me to focus on math because it was the only safe subject from her perspective. I was not against math, but I didn’t feel strongly about it. In the sixth grade, I started attending a Youth Math School, an after-school activity hosted at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University. Back then, the Department had yet to move to the out-of-the-city campus, and the classes took place in the old building on the 10th linia of Vasilevsky Island, about 15 15-minute tram ride from my home. Most times, I was the only girl in the class, and I always felt stupid. Our teachers were first- or second-year university students, and they rarely had enough pedagogical skills. The boys pretended they understood all that was said, and sometimes, they could solve complicated problems, and I was barely able to keep up with them. Still, I thought it was cool to come to the University once or twice a week, so I kept coming. In the sixth grade, I participated in the district math olympiad but didn’t make it to the city-wide.

I kept attending the Youth Math School in the seventh grade and still didn’t get any diploma at the olympiad, but I quite unexpectedly made it to the city-wide essay competition, got a second-degree diploma, and was interviewed for a radio show. I suspect that made my mom even more alarmed :), especially because my award-winning essay was about Euguene Schwarts’ plays. It’s not like Schwarts was a forbidden writer, but he never praised the Soviet State and the Communist Party, many of his friends and peers were imprisoned, and the officials silently ignored him.

Fortunately for my mom, things changed when I started the eighth grade.
To be continued.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

My First River Cruise

One thing I am very thankful to my mom for is that since I was ten, she took me on long tourist trips, which would last for three weeks or even more. I tried to start writing about these tours several times, and each time I thought that I needed to find the photos form these trips, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to write about them.

But realistically thinking, I won’t have time to search for these pictures for a while, let alone to scan them, so I finally decided to start writing about the trips and add the photos later, whenever I have time to find and process them (most likely, after I retire, but who knows!)

Before I start, I want to say a couple of words about vacation-taking in the Soviet Union.

I know that it was different in the beginning of the Soviet state, but by my time, most people had at least one month of vacation (and some had even more!) Vacation time was strictly about “calendar days,” not “workdays,” so if some public holidays were in the middle of your vacation, they were “lost.”

Since vacations were so long and were taken strictly once a year (in most cases, you couldn’t split it into parts), everyone tried to take them in summer. The parents needed this summer vacation to take their kids “to dacha” (as I already mentioned a couple of times), and others just wanted to have time off work. Since it was not sustainable for everyone in a company to take a month’s vacation in summer, there was a perennial nightmare of scheduling vacations in the beginning of the year and hard limits on how often each person could take a vacation in summer.

What would people do with their vacation month? In most cases, they wanted to get away from the city, and it could be just going to the countryside to visit their relatives or going to a dacha. In many cases, people could use a “trade-union voucher” to go on a tour or to some resort. A local trade union bureau would approve the distribution of the vouchers, selecting “the best workers” and/or “those who needed it most,” and the lucky ones would end up paying 10-20% of the full price.

Unlike most people, my mom usually bought the tours without trade union vouchers, paying the full price because most tours she wanted to go to were not available through the trade union vouchers. She would save money during the whole year to go to new places. For seven summers, from 1973 to 1979, we went on these tours together.

The first one was in the summer of 1973, and it was a relatively short one. We were going to take a “Volgobalt course,” departing from Leningrad and then getting to the Volga River through the system of locks, visiting Yaroslavl – an old city on the Volga River, and then returning back to Leningrad. There were several complications with this trip. First, it started on May 20, which meant my mom had to ask for permission to take me out of school on my summer break ten days earlier (that was not a problem; I was a good student). Second, I was only ten, and and a child had to be eleven to be admitted to the cruise (do not ask, I have no idea why), so my mom had to get permission from the captain of the ship. And the last problem was a force of nature: it was very early in the navigation season, and Lake Ladoga was still covered with ice, so the ship couldn’t get to Leningrad. A couple of days before the departure date, all passengers were given railway tickets to Cheboksary, where our ship was waiting for us.

As far as I remember, there were no organized tours at the stops. We had a full day in Yaroslavl. We disembarked, and my mom and I went to the city and tried to visit as many museums and churches as time permitted. We loved a fairy tale -looking city, and only wished we could stay longer.

I know that I have pictures from this cruise somewhere, and I hope to eventually scan them.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Watermelons

That’s a historical post about something you can easily forget. I remembered it when I was thinking about the day Igor was born and the days before that.

In the Soviet Union, at least in the northern part of it, the beginning of September meant not only the start of school but also the start of the watermelon season. My granddaughters might not believe it, but watermelons were not sold in the stores. It was a seasonal fruit that would arrive at the end of August/beginning of September. Watermelons were sold at the temporary locations (same as New Year trees). The trucks unloaded watermelons in the cages, and then the shoppers were allowed to walk around and select a watermelon. There was no guarantee that a watermelon would be ripe; nobody checked whether they were ready for harvesting if the timing was right. There was always a risk of getting a watermelon, which was almost white inside.

And there were lines! Watermelon lines of shoppers waiting for their turn to enter the point of sale and start hunting for a perfect watermelon. In September 1985, Igor’s dad spent a lot of time in these watermelon lines. I remember that he even wrote a poem about “waiting in a watermelon line forever.”

I have no logical (or any other) explanation for why watermelons were “deficit.” They were not imported; they were grown in the southern parts of Russia and Ukraine. But still, when I think about the time Igor was born, it comes to mind: “I am standing in the watermelon line. Forever.”

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Children Molesting In The USSR

I mentioned that topic several times, and now I want to focus on it. Child molestation was very widespread, and at the same time, nobody mentioned it back then and does not mention it now.

With me, it started when I was about eleven, and it would go on at least until I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, but the pick was during my pre-teen years. You would get on the bus or a train, which were very crowded pretty much all the time, so you had to swirl yourself into the crows just to stay in. And then somebody would start touching your private parts. And it will continue for the whole duration of your trip.

Why would you not dare to stop a molester? Because you are in a crowd, and everybody is touching everybody, and even if you look around, you can’t tell who is doing it to you. Actually, the only time in my life when I dared to stop a molester, the man was looking aside as if he was not even there, so I hesitated for a moment but then said: Hands! He quickly moved his hands away from my body and disappeared into the crowd. Also, it felt overwhelmingly embarrassing. You just couldn’t accuse an adult of doing such a horrible thing. And, of course, whatever happens to you, it’s all your fault!

Overall, nothing about sexuality was explicitly said, but somehow, by the age of eight or nine, you would come to the conclusion that there is something really bad related to your private parts (which, by the way, were never called “private”). If a boy happened to see your underwear (when you were playing together, climbing a tree, jumping a rope – and remember, girls wore dresses, shorts were rarely worn) – that was one of the worst humiliation you could experience. When you were at the overnight camp, your counselor would walk the bedroom, commanding everyone to have “hands on top of your blanket.” And it’s worth mentioning that my mom, like many other moms, did the same thing: coming to check on me when I was in bed and saying: where are your hands?

A word about male teachers. I was never molested by any of the male teachers, but as I learned later, some of my friends were. I learned it many years later because, once again, it was impossible to say it out loud. It meant admitting the shame, it meant that nobody would believe you, and it meant that “it was all your fault.”

The most horrific and never spoken about was the opposite effect. By the age of twelve, most girls would firmly believe that their worth was exclusively defined by how attractive they were to the opposite sex. By the time we were in the seventh grade, stories were whispered about some girls in our class who “had abortions.” We listened to these stories in horror, but at the same time with the strangest sense of jealousy: these girls were attractive enough for adult men! I am writing it, and I can’t make sense of why we felt this way, how we could think this! And that’s while we knew almost nothing about our bodies, including how you could get pregnant. Even though my mother preemptively explained to me that in a couple of years, I may start menstruating, she somehow managed to avoid an explanation of what exactly it was. I had my first period earlier than anybody in my class when I was just eleven, and I had no idea what was happening to me. My best friend had her first period three years later, and her parents explained to her and gave her a book to read. She gave this book to me, and it was only then that I learned the facts. It was a great trust crisis in my relationship with my mom, but not the first one and not the last one.

I don’t know how to finish this post. I do not know why nobody talks about it. Why do so many people talk about “happy young pioneers’ childhood, clean and pure and innocent” as if none of the things I described were there? I do not know whether these are the tricks the memory plays on people, forcing out the things we would rather forget, or that’s something else …

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

How My Relationships With My Mom Evolved

My mom definitely punished me at a relatively young age. Even though she didn’t spank me, she would yell at me and give me “citations” but that was pretty much what all parents would do even with their toddlers. Later, she started giving me a sielent treatment.

I am trying to recall when it started, because at the time that I am writing about (when I was ten year old) this was definitely happening on regular basis. She would all of a sudden stop talking to me, stop replying to my questions, won’t tell me what I did wrong, and it would continue until I start to cry unconsolably. She would then keep ignoring me and just periodically say in a very tense voice: don’t you dare to be hysterical around me! By that time, I was extremely emotionally depended on her. It was not like this when I was younger. I would be fine staying at dacha when I was five, or being in the sanatorium when I was six. She told me later that she missed me very much and was looking for excuses to visit me more often. I was happy to see her, but I was not unhappy when she was not around. By the time I was nine or ten, it changed. When she was not around, I felt like an abandoned lover, and when she was around and was upset with me, my life was a living hell. At the time when she was giving me a silent treatment and letting me cry and cry, I thought to myself that it is not possible that she loved me and let me cry. Eventually she would finally tell me what my crime was, and after I admit my crime and ask for forgiveness, she was a loving mother again.

Now I understand that being subjected to this treatment, I learned that it’s OK to hurt a person whom you love. It’s OK to be cruel, and it does not diminish the value of your love. It took me many years to unlearn this, and not without casualties. I do not hold this against her, nor many other things. It’s not about redemption. I just remember about it when she attempts to do something similar, and make sure I am not involving myself in these games. Sometimes, I actually have to yell at her, because it’s the only way to make her take something seriously, and it’s upsetting that that’s the language she understands.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Young Pioneers’ Activities

Back to where I left: what were the Young Pioneers activities we were doing? The thing which we thought was the most fun happened rarely. Now that I think about it, it was mostly due to the fact that it required a lot of additional work from adults. One of the most anticipated activities was scrap metal collection. I think it was way more popular during my parent’s young pioneer’s youth when there was more scrap metal lying around. However, we had it in my school a couple of times, and we would find some old pipes in the corners of the courtyards and triumphantly bring them to school. And, of course, there was a “socialist competition” between classes (or, to be more precise, between different pioneer detachments). Retrospectively, I suspect that there was a big hassle of taking this scrap metal away from the schoolyard to the processing facility, which is why it was not a very popular activity. Also, the need for scrap metal was not as dire in the 1970s as it was in the 1930s-1950s.

Less exciting but still moderately adventurous was recycling paper collection. That involved ringing the doorbells of innocent citizens and asking: do you have some recycling paper by any chance? With a relatively high probability, they would give us a stack of old newspapers. And then again, there was a “socialist competition” between detachments. In case it is not obvious to the next generations, we were running around, looking for this scrap metal and knocking on people’s doors completely unsupervised, starting from the age of ten (that’s when you would become a young pioneer).

Other activities were way more boring. Nobody liked to “clean the territory” during “subbotniks”—voluntary-obligatory cleaning work on Saturdays or other days whenever they were announced. Nobody liked to stay after school for voluntary-obligatory meetings. A big part of the meetings was scolding our classmates who fell behind with their grades. As I mentioned earlier, everybody’s grades were public knowledge, and all teachers, even those whom we liked and who were genuinely better than others, would announce everybody’s test grades and even comment on specific mishaps of students in front of the whole class.

Then “class active” which included the detachment council chairperson and a couple of others, obtained addresses of those who were “falling behind” (otherwise called “tailers” as “tail’), and then the whole group of us went to these addresses to “talk to the parents.” Almost all apartments in our neighborhood were “communal,” with many families living in one apartment with the big communal kitchen being the center of the social life. We would walk in, call for “Misha’s parents” or “Natasha’s parents,” and tell them that their son or daughter was “holding the whole class behind.” They would, in turn, yell at their son or daughter, “You should be ashamed that your own classmates came to tell us about your behavior!” We would ask parents “to take appropriate measures” and leave, never thinking what those appropriate measures were going to be.

Yet another activity was making wall newspapers: there were articles, cartoons, etc., as in the real newspaper, but everything was mounted on a big poster paper that was in turn mounted on the wall in the class so everybody could read and comment out loud. Unfortunately, I didn’t save any of those from my middle school years, but I have a couple from my mom’s time (I didn’t scan them yet!).

Usually, very few students in each class were interested in doing any of these things. Our teachers and “pioneer leaders” used to say that most of the students were “inertial” and “not active,” and to be honest, I do not even think that the lack of desire to do anything was related to the politicized agenda. I think that by the beginning of the fourth grade, most of my classmates really didn’t want to do anything. 

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.