ToPics

Adam Chwaliński sawing lumber

In these two extracts, Adam Chwaliński describes how at the age of eleven and a half he worked sawing lumber in the forests of Siberia.

Adam Chwaliński work in the taiga

Work in the mine

Naum Kleiman on working in the mines.

Jakobs Shats: Logging

"They ordered us out of the train and onto buses and took us north of Kansk in Taseevo district. There, they found us accommodation with local people, took our passports away and gave my father a paper to report with every week. That is how our life in Siberia began.

My parents were not allowed to do intellectual work, they had no authorisation. They could only do very hard physical tasks, such as work in forestry, kolkhoz or camps. Remember that all of us deportees were townsfolk, not used to hard labour in the fields.

Remember, too, that in that region it is very cold in winter, down to minus 50°C. We were not prepared for the cold; we’d been arrested and deported in June and hadn’t brought any warm clothes with us; there were major supply problems, the locals also suffered from the lack of food, and a lot of deportees who didn’t manage to sell or barter clothes died of hunger.

Q. Did you go to school?

I didn’t go to school because I had no warm clothes to go out in; in winter you had to have fur coats, hats, warm boots, and I didn’t have any; so for three years I couldn’t go to school and it wasn’t until 1944 that my parents could afford to buy clothes, so I then went to school for two years. We spent five years in Siberia.

Q. You didn’t go to school. What did you and your sister do?

All of us in the family worked, my parents started working because if you didn’t work you had no money and you couldn’t afford the essentials. My mother worked, my sister worked. In 1943 my elder sister was drafted again and sent further to the east, where a railway line was being built.

Q. What work did your family do in the Krasnoyarsk region?

We felled trees, my second sister was drafted to help with floating timber downstream. I was younger than 18, under age, but I went working too with my mother in the fields on the kolkhoz, I helped my mother during the harvest and took part in the fieldwork in that way.

Juozas Miliauskas: Tractor mechanic!

Juozas Miliauskas:“I worked on tractors and my brother worked with our team accountant.

I was about 19. In those days, all the tractors belonged to the local agricultural equipment station. The people would cry, “A tractor mechanic!” And they would stop to watch us. It was certainly a lot better than digging with a spade!”

Work in the camps

Work in the camps was different from the special resettlers’ work. The location was often harsh, the days endless, and the work itself – mining, building in extreme conditions – were at the limit of what a human being could take.

Work in special resettlement villages

Special resettlers’ work

Promotion through work

Since Domas’s mother could not work, he began cutting timber at a young age, and then was hired for building work. He went from being an unqualified labourer to crane operator in 1951, and was employed outside the special settlement with the tacit agreement of the commandant, under the surveillance of his employer. He followed a career as mechanical plant operator.

Alexandra Belomestnykh, as a child, follows a plough

Juozas Miliautskas describes how he earned a living with farm work

Floating timber

Floating timber

The film is taken from an Irkutsk newsreel shot in 1949. Floating was the usual way of transporting timber from the huge logging operations, particularly north of Irkutsk.

Sowing

Sowing

Stalin kolkhoz

Becoming Soviet through work

This depiction of work on the kolkhoz includes all the features of what may be called “Sovietism”: the arrival of mechanisation along with the persistence of a large amount of unmechanised labour. The collective organisation of farming almost reproduces the factory assembly line. There are also signs of domination that were not then seen as such, such as that of men over women, where the men have all the attributes of power (suits, machines, in this case a motorbike, etc.).

This film was shown in a newsreel in Eastern Siberia, in 1950.

Building a railway line

Newsreel film from 1950. It is not known whether prisoners worked on this site, but it is quite possible for they were often used for this type of construction.