A Day in Her Shoes: Women on the Collective Farms, 1930s

What did a typical day look like for a Mennonite woman on a collective farm in Ukraine (note 1)?

She had to get up while it was still dark to milk the one cow the family was allotted—something Stalin specifically guaranteed kolkhoz “women” in 1933 (note 2)—together with one pig and a pair of chickens.

Then she would wake the children and quickly get them ready for school, prepare breakfast, bring the youngest children to kindergarten, and finally leave for the field.

Kindergarten was mandated as a form of childcare to mobilize more women for the workforce.

Women would arrive together with hoes over their shoulders, usually barefoot—though some had wooden shoes—each in a dress covered in patches. A collective farm might have five working groups of women, with about 20 to 25 women per group.

Many root crops were planted, and day after day, week after week, these women would hoe and weed the planted fields. Each woman was given a certain number of rows; whoever finished first could stay home one day to work their own garden.

Regularly the work apportioned far exceeded what they could reasonably complete, and so the fields were often thick with weeds. This made the work all the more difficult. Yet their need compelled them to meet quota, often without pausing, so as not to lose a portion of their meager pay.

A few years ago I interviewed Albert Dahl of Marienthal. Only seven or eight years of age at the time, Albert was responsible to bridle, harness, saddle and then hitch horse and wagon filled with infants from the nursery, and bring the babies into the fields for their mothers—each hoeing endless rows of potatoes—to take and nurse. He did this in tears; he knew he was much too young for what he was required to do (note 3).

There were many women—especially those forty and older—who were no longer strong or young enough to fully complete their work assignment and would simply break down. Eduard Allert (pseud.) recalls: “Before the revolution, our people had been using modern farm machinery and had done the threshing by engine power. All that was a thing of the past. We now had to return to the most primitive methods” (note 4).

In the kolkhoz crops were distributed according to a norm system, and all work was evaluated and timed. At the end of the year after government quotas were delivered, the remainder of the crop left for distribution was apportioned according to workday credits accumulated. If quotas were not met, there would not be sufficient food for the collective. No allowance was made for the children, the sick, or the old. All collectivists were poor in clothing and food, but families with many young children or with old parents were “desperately poor” (note 5).

“The small children received their meals in the kindergarten. For the working mothers of the collective a common kitchen was organized and the members ate their meals in a common dining hall. We, the public school children, also went to the dining hall where we had to wait until the adults had finished their meal and then we were given the leftovers. Those who could not work in the collective, the old or feeble, received no bread and no provisions. Working family members had to share their own meagre portions with them ... .” (Note 6)

Often there were not enough horses to transport the women to their fieldwork; many a day they would walk that distance and back again at noon, exhausted and burdened with sorrows to feed their children, the pig and the chickens.

Not to return to the field “could be seen as sabotage; everyone was simply frightened.” Many were routinely humiliated, publicly denounced as weaklings, laggards or liars. Towards evening the women returned to the village, “tired with thick heads, heavy hearts and empty stomachs” (note 7).

First, the youngest children were picked up from kindergarten, and then at home mothers had to milk, feed and water the cow, care for the pig and chickens again, and then prepare supper. After the children were in bed, the women typically baked bread for the next day, made butter from the cow’s milk, washed the day’s clothes, and mended (note 8). These women—especially after 1937 without men—were forced to hold all the needs of the family together.

John J. Neufeld described these scenes in a little memoir written for Der Bote in the 1990. Here he speaks of his former boss, Ivan P. Kovalenko, chairman of Elisabethtal, who would soon become the chairman of the sel-soviet agricultural unit of Alexanderthal, Elisabethtal, Schardau, Pordenau, and Marienthal.

Kovalenko “came to us in 1934 from the Russian village of Terpinnya, not far from Melitopol. He was a communist, just discharged from the Red Army ... As a rule, every evening a work plan for the following day was worked out, but this was never completed. … He was rarely to be found in the office, but was among the workers in the fields. ... He liked to talk to the women while they worked. It was usually a ladder wagon harnessed with four horses that took these women to their work and also home. Often on the way home he also got on the wagon; but when the women sang spiritual songs, he would silently get off and walk home. Once the group leader came to me and asked if Kovalenko had said anything about their singing. 'I never heard him say anything about it to anyone,' was my reply. ...

After the women had worked hard from 9 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock in the evening, they rode home singing. But they didn't do it for pleasure. They just didn't want to think about what was awaiting them at home. First, the children had to be picked up from the kindergarten; then they had to go to the end of the village to milk their cow... Then the milk had to be taken to the centrifuge, where a certain portion had to be handed over. Only then the housewife could go home. There she made supper for the family, washed the children and put them to bed. The women were not particularly forced to work, but all the food was distributed according to the number of days worked. There were many women whose husbands were in exile [most executed -ANF]. The care for the family was on their shoulders." (Note 9)

Kovalenko signed the arrest orders for many of the local men in 1937, including my grandfather’s (see pic, note 10).

For a few years, Helene Bräul—my grandmother—was assigned to work in the kindergarten, but this was not so easy. One woman who did laundry for the local kindergarten describes her assignment:

“It truly was hard work, for I had to walk two kilometres and carry heavy bundles of bedding and towels for forty people—children and workers. It required a lot of water which had to be carried from the well which was several building sites away. This water had to be heated so it required a lot of wood. I ordered loads of wood for a fee, but I had to saw and split it myself. Naturally all the laundry had to be scrubbed on the scrub board, wrung out by hand and hung out to dry ... I did this every two weeks, and it usually took four days to get it all done.” (Note 11)

The nearest store was in the village of Alexandertal, three-and-a-half kilometres west. Only seldom did the store have items for purchase, and when goods arrived, those in Marienthal were often not informed or not freed from work.

“People began to line up at 12 midnight because the need was so great. … The police would chase them away, but to no avail; by morning a large group was waiting again. When the store opened … typically there wasn’t enough for even half the people. Then the screaming and hitting would begin, and doors and windows would be pushed in. Those lucky enough to enter received five metres of fabric, while the others went home with nothing more than a heavy heart, and tired from standing so long.” (Note 12)

All institutions associated with the old Tsarist regime came under assault with Stalin’s First Five Year Plan, and this included the traditional family. The roles of these women shifted by 1930, e.g., from homemaker on a family farm to Soviet worker on a collective farm operation. Significantly, parents were increasingly removed from the lives of their children.

In Stalin’s own words to women collective farmers, “they must remember the power and significance of the collective farms for women … only in the collective farm do they have the opportunity of being on an equal footing with men. … Let our comrades, the women collective farmers, remember this and let them cherish the collective farm system as the apple of their eye” (note 13). 

Hans Rehan remembered his own mother Sara (my grandmother's sister) in similar roles: “She worked hard in the kolkhoz from early till late. … At night, tired, she asked us if we had prayed; ‘If not, then pray.’” While their influence on their own children diminished vis à vis "Father Stalin," many of these mothers were able to keep this thin thread of faith alive with their children (note 14).

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Pic 1: “Planting potatoes by hand at the Khortitsa state farm,” April 1932, Dneprostroy District, USSR, no. 5439805, 16433/52b, State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, https://goskatalog.ru/portal/?fbclid=IwAR2XwlS7T6rqdu8aGusbGV7RYcA6bUEmU_99qqZhN0IsVcng49KV3eQf2_k#/collections?id=5575195.

Pic 2: The scene is from a collective farm in Rosenthal in 1934, amalgamated with the village of Chortitza. Agricultural equipment was now a thing of the past, and these women were raking and hoeing root crops by hand. Copy in Gerhard Lohrenz, Damit es nicht vergessen werde. Bildband zur Geschichte der Mennoniten Preussens und Russlands (Winnipeg: CMBC, 2nd rev. Ed., 1977); also https://chort.square7.ch/FB/BF618.html.

Pic 3: From Mennonite Archival Image Database, https://archives.mhsc.ca/milking-crew-on-collective-farm-at-former-home-of-spenst-family-in-konteniusfeld-molotschna-1935.

Note 1: See Jacob A. Neufeld, Tiefenwege: Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse von Russland-Mennoniten in zwei Jahrzehnten bis 1949 (Virgil, ON: Niagara, 1958), 33–36; Eduard Allert (pseudonym for Eduard Reimer), “The Lost Generation,” in The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz, 9–128 (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1982), 32; Anna Buhler (Marienthal), in A. A. Toews, ed. Mennonitische Märtyrer der jüngsten Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart, vol. 2: Der große Leidensweg (North Clearbrook, BC: Self-published, 1954), 72–74.

Note 2: February 19, 1933, in Stalin, Works, vol. 13 (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1954) 259. Cf. R. W. Davies, “Stalin as Economic Policy-Maker: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1936,” in Stalin: A New History, edited by Sarah Davies and James R. Harris, 121–139 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Note 3: Albert Dahl, interview with the author, July 26, 2017, at Tabor Manor, St. Catharines, Ontario.

Note 4: Allert, “The Lost Generation,” 13f.

Note 5: Allert, “The Lost Generation,” 24.

Note 6: Allert, “The Lost Generation,” 18.

Note 7: J. Neufeld, Tiefenwege, 35, 39.

Note 8: Allert, “The Lost Generation,” 32.

Note 9: John J. Neufeld, “Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse aus den schweren Jahren 1936-1943 in Sowjetrußland,” 2. Fortsetzung,” Der Bote no. 20 (May 16, 1990), 9.

Note 10: “NKVD Case no. 314: Accusation of Bräul, Franz Heinrich,” from SAZR, NKVD Collection 5747, Inventory 3, File 4595. For a fuller examination of the arrests in these villages, see my published essay, “A new Examination of the ‘Great Terror’ in Molotschna, 1937–38,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (October 2021), 415–458. https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/handle/20.500.12730/1031.

Note 11: Cited in Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 23.

Note 12: Anna Buhler, in A. Toews, Mennonitische Märtyrer der jüngsten Vergangenheit II, 74.

Note 13: Johann Rehan, “Etwas aus der Vergangenheit” (1992/1995), 5. In author’s possession. For a less painful childhood perspective from Osterwick, Chortitza, cf. Victor Janzen, From the Dniepr to the Paraguay River (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1995), 13–17.