Work on the home front seemed routine, nothing out of the ordinary. No blood, no deaths. But daily heroism became part of everyday life. Peaceful life was a thing of the past. Special courage was required to preserve marks of peacetime in the trials and tribulations of war. In the autumn of 1941, when the Battle of Moscow was underway, wheat threshing continued several kilometers from the frontline. The freezing and starving residents of Leningrad, a city that had been cut off from the rest of the country for 900 days, went to work. The publishing houses of Leningrad, though in the absence of any heating, continued to issue the national newspapers “Pravda”, “Izvestia” and “Komsomolskaya Pravda”. Despite the bombardments radio broadcasts never stopped in the besieged city. The city that had come to a standstill continued to listen to music played by Radio Orchestra, the only one that had stayed on. Some musicians were starving to death, others continued to play Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. University students all over the country continued to study. Just as in the time of peace people defended their graduation papers, shot films, wrote music. And children went to summer camps on holidays.
But the war was rushing into the lives of people at an increasingly faster pace. In the capital Moscow factories were urgently reorienting to defense products. The “Rot Front” sweets-making factory began to produce concentrates and shells and to repair anti-aircraft guns. The trolley park’s compound served to produce grenades. Fizzy soft drinks factories organized the production of petrol bombs. A factory, which had used to make hair and tie pins, began to produce anti-tank grenades. A toy manufacturing plant in Odessa mastered the production of anti-tank mines. Tins bearing labels “Caviar” and “Halva”, as if coming from the remote past, served cases for the first mines produced.
Able-bodied men were leaving for the front. Factories were standing deserted. The number of workers reduced by half in the years of war. Hence, the most popular slogan among those working on the home front was “To work for yourself and for a comrade who left for the front”. A Moscow turner – Fedor Bukin – launched an initiative to overfulfil the planned output by two times. People of this kind were known as twohundreders, later on threehundreders and fourhundreders, and there were those called thousanders.
What people did for years before the war had to be done dozens of times faster in wartime. Instead of two years as planned, it took just two months to build a bridge armour transporter in Magnitogorsk. One month after the Battle of Stalingrad was over, the city razed to the ground was visited by George Davis, a US presidential envoy. As he looked at the ruins Mr.Davis doubted that the city would ever revive. A month later an American delegation was walked around a steel smelting shop in Stalingrad.
Those who had left to fight on the fronts were replaced by housewives, teenagers, men unfit for service and invalids. Women mastered men’s skills in the heavy industry: welders, wood-cutters, turners, smiths, engine drivers. Young women, who came to work as electric welders at the Uralmash engineering works, were greeted with a bitter joke by men: “You’d better keep boiling potatoes and stay away from welding aircraft hulls”. Any boy dreams of planes and cars. So higher grade students were honoured the privilege of assembling them. B.Sergeev, who came to work at the “Compressor” plant in Moscow as a 15-year teenager, recalls: “We were permitted to work 4 hours a day. But as I came in, I saw boys my age, all working on an equal basis with grown-ups. The shift lasted 12 hours. There was no heating in the shops. The lorries for carrying “Katyusha” multiple rocket launchers arrived covered in ice and snow, so to warm them up we ran to an iron barrel with burning coke… Shake fingers – and back to work. Sometimes we did not go home at all and worked until we could no longer hold the spanner for fatigue. So we just dropped asleep right on “Katyusha” covers that lay in the corner and slept for 3 or 4 hours”. They said what was the most difficult was to wake up a man who had worked 24 hours without a rest. In the nighttime the electricity was often off. After work women went to do night shifts at hospitals. “At night – near the wounded, at dawn – back to the factory”,- they remember. Men were sent to unload trains, stock up fuel.
In the countryside no men were left and the hard farm labour became the responsibility of women. One of the women recalls the harvesting time: “There were no men in the collective farm. We worked from dawn to 2 a.m. next morning. We never paid attention to the weather – rain or no rain we had to take in the harvest. 14-year-old girls worked as tractor drivers”. Farm lands reduced dramatically because of the occupation of western regions and every land plot and every ear of wheat were valued as gold. It happened that seeds had to be sorted by hand before sowing. After the crops were harvested, school students came to the fields and picked up the remaining ears from morning to late evening.
All crops collected on collective farm fields were given in to the state. The farm produce was then distributed to the people by means of ration cards. The biggest rations went to workers of the defense, fuel and chemical industries and also to builders and transport workers, who got 800-1000 grams of bread per day. In the besieged Leningrad workers received only 250 grams and blue and white colour workers, children and dependents – 125 grams. Though only one half of the Leningrad bread was wheat, it was considered a delicacy. Rural residents relied on private vegetable gardens. Since they could not grow wheat there, their second bread was potato. Meat was in short supply. And the villagers had to forget for several years about sugar, confectioneries and sausage. It was good luck if people living in the country managed to get a pair of shoes for two and half a meter of fabric a year. But those hardships were nothing as compared to the loss of their beloved ones. Grief was everywhere. But everybody who survived those days remember the overall spirit of mutual assistance, when strangers became closer than relatives or friends.
From The Voice of Russia
