Yanks for Stalin
Interview Transcript

Alexander Luznevoy,  (cont)

Q.  How did people spend their free time?

A.  People were very inventive.  We-- the Komsomols were very-- I was a Komsomol.  It was a very active organization.  At night they would wake us, carrying whitewash, saying, "Get up quick."  We would get up, go to the station, everyone there is covered in whitewash and… that was all done for free for the good of society.  As far as recreation goes, we spent our Saturdays and Sundays volunteering.  In general, they would always find some work for us.  The Saturdays and Sundays usually ended at 8 o'clock.  Many things around here were built for free on those Saturdays and Sundays, and I believe that the American engineers also participated in these volunteer days.  I don't know for sure, but I think they did.  We built a palm avenue.  We built metal palm trees.  There weren't any trees.  We had to make it seem like home.  Girls came here, and they wanted to get married.  There was no place to go on dates or just meet.  So we built a palm avenue on the far shore, but to plant a tree, you have to wait 15-20 years for it to grow large.

Q.  And where did you go to be alone?

A.  Nowhere.  So we decided to build a palm tree avenue.

Q.  So you have a great number of young people, young men and women wanting families.  How were they able to be alone with each other?

A.  When women received 600 grams of bread a day and some men couldn't make quota, well, there wasn't much thought of love.  We ate once a day, at work.  Nonetheless, people fell in love, were married, bore children.  There were some small clubs built, from wood.  They could hold a hundred, maybe two hundred people.  Each agency built its own club.  There were all kinds of clubs, like the Kosokhima, the Domovskiy, the Tsesarskiy.  I liked the Tsesarskiy club because my fiancée liked to dance there.  I couldn't dance, so I sat and watched her.

Q.  What about the avenue?

A.  It was in 1934 when we understood that the park we were waiting for might never come, and there was no place to go, we decided to build this palm avenue, right in the park on the far shore.

Q.  What did you make them out of?

A.  Telegraph poles.  The construction director gave them to us.  We painted them green.  We had a skilled artist here named Solovyov, and he cut some palm leaves out of paper for us, about three meters long.  We used them as templates and cut the leaves out of sheet metal.  We nailed the leaves to the poles, just likes palms, and stood them up.  And when we stood up the first one we all cheered.  It was just like Sukhumi.  We had some people from Sukhumi working with us, they were our consultants.  They did an excellent job.  We made perfect copies of Sukhumi palms.  This palm avenue made everyone happy.  The entire city would go there.  There were more than 100,000 Komsomol members here, even more young people.  This was 1933 and 1934.

Q.  Where did people go on dates?

A.  Dates?  Many people here lived in mud houses.  I lived in one myself for a while.  They were replaced only in 1939, and some remained anyway.  Korobul built the first apartment houses with the intention of getting the shopworkers out of their mud houses.  My fiancée received this room that we are sitting in.  Other people lived in that room.  No one could have more than one room.  A family lived in that one.

Q.  Everyone was waiting for rooms?  Where could people be alone together?

A.  Well, they found time.  Children were born.  They found places, wherever they could.  In the summer there was a flood, the water rose over two dams.

Q.  Did women want to meet the Americans or the Germans?

A.  I don't know.  Probably some wanted to, tried to, women always try to marry well.  I heard that a female plumber, who drove around an American engineer, later got married to him.

Q.  Who was better off?

A.  Well, that depends.  Americans lived in their settlement, they had their own club there.  The director of the plant lived there, Gugel, who later was shot.  Gugel was the first director of the plant, and only with a high school education, in grain milling, no less.  The director, can you imagine?

Q.  Could you talk about where you came from?

A.  I came from Belgorod Oblast, no, there was no Belgorod Oblast, it was the Kursk Oblast, from the village of Zhabakryukovka in the Bolshetroitskiy region of Kursk Oblast.  There was terrible starvation there, too.  People died on their feet.

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