Some rural folk regularly had the opportunity to mix and mingle with city people: relatives and former neighbors who had moved to cities
Returned to visit; many city dwellers had access to a summer house [dacha] ¦, seasonal workers came and went; and hundreds of thousands of city dwellers, including students, were drafted to work temporarily on farms for little or no pay. Although students and other draftees from urban life regularly appeared af Audrey Amalrik's Siberian kolkhoz, the city visitors did not particularly impress their hosts, and vice versa. These "volunteer” workers were usually university students who did their work poorly, and the results were more likely to be wasteful or even disastrous than mutually enriching. In the village of Malinovka a student-built cattle-shed collapsed, fatally crushing a milkmaid and wounding others. Other "volunteers” were drafted out of factories, and they, too, were as often as not a disaster for agriculfural production. "The potatoes have been more or less harvested," an exasperated rural Party official wrote to Stalin, "But what kind of harvesf is this?”
They [the drafted factory workers] didn't try to pick all the potatoes, because they weren't interested, they wanted to get away as soon as possible, so they only picked the ones lying above ground; over half the potatoes were never harvested.
Model farms equipped with sleek, humming machinery and cheery, well-scrubbed farm families were maintained for foreign visitors to admire, but the Soviet government blocked foreigners from visiting an ordinary collective or state farm "far from the railroad tracks" even for a day or two. This policy cut off Soviet farmworkers from the outside world, as did the infamously poor roads.
World History
