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Introduction IULIIA’S HANDS1 * * * The story of memory in Solovyovo starts with a pair of hands—hands that have grown numb over time, wooden. She has to strike those hands against a chair or a leg or another hand just to beat some feeling into them. Iuliia2 has been beating her hands this way in the eight years that I have known her. Her small hands with their smooth, thick fingers have been her livelihood, wielding scythes and shovels and plows and rakes, pulling roots and carrying pails of water, and rinsing clothes in the icy waters of Lake Tikhonskoe. But last year, something changed. “It’s no use,” Iuliia told me last summer. “I can’t milk the cow anymore. We’ll slaughter Lushka once there is a solid frost.” Iuliia has been living in the tiny village of Solovyovo, about 300 miles north of Moscow, for over forty years. Born in another northern village in 1939, abandoned to an orphanage by age six, and working in the industrial city of Cherepovets by her late teens, Iuliia had a chance to leave rural life behind. In the Soviet Union, village life was not only very hard and poorly paid but—for all the backbreaking work villagers did so that their countrymen could eat—also demeaned and derided by city dwellers. In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev, in a quixotic flourish, ordered that corn be planted all over the Soviet Union as a part of his new, post-Stalin, post1 1. A first version of this preface was published in the Wilson Quarterly, in spring 2002. 2. All names of villagers and all local place names have been changed to help ensure the privacy of those who shared their lives and stories with me. Paxson.001-009 8/16/05 10:10 AM Page 1 famine agricultural policy. Young Iuliia joined a work brigade from her factory , and found herself on the shores of a lake on the edge of a pine-andbirch forest, where she caught the eye of a gentle man who quickly fell in love with her soft beauty. Her girlfriends in the factory thought she was crazy to accept a marriage proposal that would take her back to the countryside . But she did. Telling anyone who asked that she wasn’t afraid of hard work, she moved into a one-room cabin with her new husband’s parents and brothers and sisters. The village was beautiful then, as it is today— hills rolling down to the shores of a lake, nearby fields full of spring and summer wildflowers, horses roaming freely in the swampy lands beyond. Now, 40 years after making her choice, this is the life that fills the hours of her days. There is planting and haying and harvesting to be done, animals to be tended, and a cow to be milked three times each day. Meals must be cooked, the house cleaned, and firewood cut and hauled. There is no running water. There are almost no machines to help with the farm work. For most of Iuliia’s life, the work for the collective farm had to be done first; the work that kept the family alive was done at dusk or pushed to the end of summer. Always there was the race to finish before the autumn rains rotted the potatoes or spoiled the hay. This is the life that numbed her hands, twisted her back forever, and brought her groaning to her bed at the end of a long day. It was hard and sometimes brutal. There was war and famine and family violence. But most of all, there was work. In 40 years, Iuliia and her husband took only one vacation together , to distant Leningrad for 10 days. That was it. How could they leave their farm? How could they leave their cow that had to be milked three times a day? Farm life centers on the cow. It gives milk, and the milk is turned into cheese, butter, and sour cream. Every spring it gives birth to a calf, which can be slaughtered in turn a half-year later to provide meat for the long winter. In the symbolic lexicon of the village, a cow means wealth. (Indeed, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, two cows were enough for a villager to be considered rich, and therefore suspect.) Most heavy farm labor is done to keep the cow fed, and giving milk and reproducing . For the cow the hay is harvested...

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