TRANSPORTATION

Counfry roads in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were notorious for their thick, impassable, ankle-deep mud. Abominable travel conditions have been so universal and chronic that Russians even have a word for it: bezdorozhnost', or "roadlessness.” Just short distances outside of big cities highly traveled roads in certain seasons quickly became mud traps deep enough to "sink a big truck to its axles." Even when road conditions were ideal, few Soviet villagers had their own cars, and local public transportation was often scarce and undependable. Roads branching off main arteries were nearly always unpaved—and often not even roads, but mere narrow paths or wagon-rutted trails. The poorer the republics, the poorer and fewer fhe roads connecting villages and farms fo outlying areas. These abysmal travel conditions affected people's lives physically, psychologically, and culturally. Country folk found it difficult or often impossible to get themselves and their dependents to health care, child care, or educational facilities; to the closest town for shopping; or to see a play or a movie or visit a relative or friend. Nor were mud and the lack of roadside services the only hazards:

Horse and cart remained the most common means of transportation in the countryside. This photo was probably taken around 1967. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress, LC-L9-67-3337 #23A.

Late in the evening I'm driving to Kraskovo. Tliere's not a single sign on the road indicating where it's leading. Cars are riding without brake lights. Some of them have their headlights dimmed. A truck is stuck in the middle of the road with no flares to mark it. Bicyclists as a rule ride without lights. Pedestrians stroll nonchalantly in the road. A harmonica is playing. In general, as the French say, you're riding right into an open grave

NOTES

1,  Lazar Volin, A Century of Kussiatt Agriculture: From Alexnnder 11 to Khrushchev

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 103-7, 130-60; M. Lewin, Russian Pensants and Soviet Poioer, n Study of CoUectivizafioti (New York: W, W. Norton, 1975), 81-106. '

2.  Olga Litvinenko and James liiordan, eds.. Memories of the Dispossessed: Descendants of Kulak Families Tell Their Stories (Nottingham, England: Bramcote Press, 1998), 68.

3.  Andrei A. Amalrik, Inmluntary lourney to Siberia (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 174-75.

4,  S. Hedlund, Crisis in Soviet Agriculture (New York: St, Martin's Press, 1984),

5.  Robert Conquest, Agricultural Workers in the USSR (London; Bodley Head, 1968), 92, 94, 98,121-22; Basile Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, trans. Rupert Swyer (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 74; Mervyn Matthews, Patterns of Deprivation in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1989), 34-35.

6.  Conquest, Agricultural Workers, 93-94, 98, 121-22; Peter Maggs, "The Legal Status of Collective Farm Members," in Soviet Law after Stalin, ed. Donald D. Berry, George Ginsburgs, and Peter Maggs (Leyden, The Netherlands: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977), 166; Edward Lea Johnson, An Introduction to the Soviet Legal System (London: Methuen, 1969), 212-13; Alexander Vudnich, "The Peasants as a Social Class," in The Soviet Rural Community: A Symposium, ed. James R. Millar (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 321; Demitri Shimkin, "Current Characteristics and Problems of the Soviet Rural Population," in Soviet Agricultural and Peasant Affairs, ed. Roy D. Laird (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1963), 82.

7.  "Pis'ma vozhdiam," letters to the Leader, Istochnik 4 (2000): 98-107.

8.  Amalrik, Involuntary Journey, 145, 158-60; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996), 145; "Trudoden'," in Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Izd-vo "Sovetskaia entsiklopediia," 1977); Conquest, Agricultural Workers, 102; Matthews, Patterns of Deprivation, 35-36.

9.  Shimkin, "Current Characteristics," 82.

10.  Maggs, "Legal Status," 163-65; Matthews, Patterns of Deprivation, 34-35.

11.  Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 142-45.

12.  Conquest, Agricultural Workers, 106; Jiri Zuzanek, Work and Leisure in the Soviet Union: A Time-Budget Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1980), 120.

13.  Louise I. Shelley, Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control (Lon

Don: Routledge, 1996), 135; Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 159, 161-62; Stephen P. Dunn, "The Soviet Rural Family," in The Soviet Rural Community: A Symposium, ed. James R. Millar (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 331; Amalrik, Involuntary Journey, 152; Johnson, Soviet Legal System, 207; Stefan Hedlund, Crisis in Soviet Agriculture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 165-69; Karl-Eugen Wadekin, Ethnic German Emigres from Rural Areas of the USSR (Munich: Ost-Europa Institut, 1986), 10-11. ‘

14.  Hedrick Smith, The Russians, rev. ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), 265.

15.  Smith, The Russians, 265-66, 268, 279; Shimkin, "Current Characteristics," 83; Susan Bridger, "Soviet Rural Women: Employment and Eamily Life," in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Earnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 283.

16.  Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer, trans. Gary Kern (New York; Harper and Row, 1978), 188.

17.  Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967), 405; Bridger, "Soviet Rural Women," 280, 286, 271; Vudnich, "Peasants as Social Class," 323; Smith, The Russians, 269; Norton D. Dodge and Murray Feshbach, "The Role of Women in Soviet Agriculture," in Jerzy F. Karez, ed., Soviet and East European Agriculture (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1967), 249; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Matryona's Home, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, vol. 2, expanded edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 2311; Lynn Viola, "Bab'y Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization," in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 198-99; Roberta T. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World

War II, 1935-1940," in Farnsworth and Viola, 1992, 193-96.

18.  Amalrik, Involuntary journey, 256.

19.  Amalrik, Involuntary Journey, 239, 255; Manning, "Women in Soviet Countryside," 216-18; Bridger, "Soviet Rural Women," 274-78, and "Rural Women and Glasnost," in Farnsworth and Viola, 1992, 294-304; Conquest, Agricultural Workers, 98; Shimkin, "Current Characteristics," 88; Ginzburg, Whirlwind, 51; "Agricultural Workers," in The Soviet Union: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Library of Congress Federal Research Division, Country Studies, Area Handbook Series, Soviet Union 1989), Http://memory. loc. gov/frd/cs/sutoc. html/ (accessed October 20, 2003).

20.  Lewin, Russian Peasants, 25; Helmut Altrichter, "Insoluble Conflicts: Village Life Between Revolution and Collectivization," in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 192, 215; Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 112-13; Johnson, Soviet Legal System, 214 ff.

21.  Conquest, Agricultural Workers, 116-18; Bridger, "Soviet Rural Women," 290-91; "Rural Women and Glasnost," 295; "Decreasing Social Differences" in The Soviet Union: A Country Study, 1989, http://lcweb2.loc. gov/cgi-bin/query/ D? cstdy: 1:. / temp / ~frd_ktGi::

22.  "Pis'ma vozhdiam," 99.

23.  "Decreasing Social Differences"; Amalrik, Involuntary Journey, 178; Smith, The Russians, 272-74.

24.  Unpublished journal of Il'ia Il'f, quoted in Alice Nakhimovsky, "Death and Disillusion: Il'f in the Thirties," in Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Soviet Literary, Theater, and Film Arts in the 1930s, ed. Katherine B. Eaton (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 219; Horst Herlemann, "Aspects of the Quality of Rural Life in the Soviet Union," in Quality of Life in the Soviet Union, ed. Horst Herlemann (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 163-66; Smith, The Russians, 73, 270-78; Gertrude E. Schroeder, "Rural Living Standards in the Soviet Union," in The Soviet Rural Economy, ed. Robert C. Stuart (Towata, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld, 1984), 254.