uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint.
In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine.*
But, as noted, all of this was still in the offing. And when Nina’s train finally arrived in the far reaches of Ivanovo, where the fields of young wheat bent in the breeze for as far as the eye could see, she was almost overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, and by the sense that her life had just begun.
1938
An Arrival
Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.
In addition to starvation in the countryside, the famine of ’32 eventually led to a migration of peasants to the cities, which, in turn, contributed to overcrowded housing, shortages of essential goods, even hooliganism. At the same time, the most stalwart workers in the urban centers were wearying under the burden of the continuous workweek; artists faced tighter constraints on what they could or could not imagine; churches were shuttered, repurposed, or razed; and when revolutionary hero Sergei Kirov was assassinated, the nation was purged of an array of politically unreliable elements.
But then, on the seventeenth of November 1935, at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites, Stalin himself declared: Life has improved, comrades. Life is more joyous. . . .
Yes, generally speaking such a remark falling from the lips of a statesman should be swept from the floor with the dust and the lint. But when it fell from the lips of Soso, one had good reason to lend it credence. For it was often through secondary remarks in secondary speeches that the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party signaled the shifts in his thinking.
In point of fact, a few days before giving this speech, Soso had seen a photograph in the Herald Tribune of three healthy young Bolshevik girls standing before a factory gate—dressed in the tunic and kerchief long favored by the Party. Normally, such a picture would have warmed the cockles of his heart. But in the context of the Western press, it struck the Secretary of Secretaries that this simple attire might suggest to the world that after eighteen years of Communism, Russian girls still lived like peasants. Thus, the fateful sentences were slipped into the speech—and the direction of the country veered.
For upon reading in Pravda that life had improved, the attentive apparatchiks understood that a turning point had been reached—that given the Revolution’s unqualified success, the time had come for the Party not only to countenance but to encourage a little more glamour, a little more luxury, a little more laughter. Within a matter of weeks, the Christmas tree and Gypsy music, both long in exile, were given a warm welcome home; Polina Molotova, wife of the foreign minister, was entrusted with the launch of the first Soviet perfumes; the New Light Factory (with the help of some imported machinery) was charged with producing champagne at the rate of ten thousand bottles a day; members of the Politburo traded in their military uniforms for tailored suits; and those hardworking girls exiting their factories were now encouraged to look not like peasants, but like the girls along the Champs-Élysées.*
So, not unlike that fellow in Genesis who said Let there be this, or Let there be that, and there was this or that, when Soso said Life has improved, comrades, life—in fact—improved!
Case in point: At this very moment, two young ladies are strolling down Kuznetsky Most wearing brightly colored dresses fitted at the waist and hemmed at the calf. One of them even sports a yellow hat with a brim that slopes seductively over a long-lashed eye. With the rumble of the brand-new Metro underfoot, they pause before three of the great windows at TsUM, the Central Universal Department Store, which respectively showcase a pyramid of hats, a pyramid of watches, and a pyramid of high-heeled shoes.
Granted, the girls still live in crowded apartments and wash their pretty dresses in a common sink, but do they look through the store’s windows with resentment? Not in the least. With envy, perhaps, or wide-eyed wonder, but not resentment. For the doors of TsUM are no longer closed to them. Having long served foreigners and high Party officials, the store had been opened