[...] I learned without any teacher. When I was a child I did not go to school. My school year was the year 1917, and I was born in 1908. I was put down for school, went until November, and in November our woman teacher announced that the “Divine Law” had been abolished. I said this at home, and my father asked: “What are they going to teach you then – skipping and dancing?” And on the following morning he decided not to wake me up and not to send me to school.
And there were a lot more difficulties to cope with. He does not have anything to wear. Father is an illiterate person: Instead of signing with his name Agapychev he simply makes a cross. He is a 2nd degree invalid: He suffers from rheumatism in all joints caused by the bitter cold; his fingers and toes are curved and swollen, his knees and elbows chondrified. His foot looks like a paw, so that he is unable to put on boots or felt boots. The best footwear for him is big bast shoes. He usually wraps them with foot rags, every piece of cloth that is available, less thick in summer and of heavier material during the winter, and ties them together with strings. He cannot move. His back is crooked.
He has 11 children, which his little old wife bore him. I was the ninth. During my lifetime three of them died from hunger, cold, drought and revolution, from bad physical health, malaria, epidemics and scurvy. The cattle starved to death, as well. In the village there is no doctor, no veterinarian. Instead of 40 only five to six men come to attend the village gatherings in order to utter their discontent, but they are all helpless and destitute farmers. Some of them are even unable to dig a grave. There is no bread, no potatoes, no corn for the next seed, no salt. 40 verst they go by horse, where there is a salt spring. If one of them arrives back home safely, he often has not more than half a barrel. The horses are nothing but skin and bone. Each of the villagers is given a ladle of salted water, and a little bit of salt they keep for themselves, but what shall they use it for? There is no food to salt. Soon after, they impose a tax on foodstuffs called surplus-appropriation system. Nobody is able to pay it. Activists arrive from the factory in Nizhniy Novgorod, they are engaged in political educational campaigns; the farmers must pay. Production in the factory must not be paralyzed and we will not allow it to get paralyzed. It is true that we do not have ourselves the strength to survive, but they say that somewhere behind the river Volga there is bread. The men intend to go there. With the new Kerenski currency it is not possible to buy bread, and the money used at the Tsar’s times is not accepted anymore. Everybody is thinking about how and where to find clothes for bartering – caps or any kind of rugs.
Until 1922 we somehow managed to survive; Budyonyi, Klim Voroshilov then started to restore power and authority. There was nothing to sow. Everyone tried to survive. Father and mother also survived and brought up their children. They grew up. What were we to do?
We learned how to weave bast shoes. Our great-grandfather taught his two sons how to follow the blacksmith’s trade. They forged nails for barges, delivered bolts, metal crams and staples to the Volga, to Gorkiy. The barges were built there. Since 1900 they used to bring metal and iron from the river Volga and nails on their way back.
I no longer remember this, but the blacksmith’s workshop had attracted me from early childhood. No sooner had I awakened than I got ready to go to the forge, and my mother used to say: “You go there and collect all the dirt.”
In 1926 I started to work on my own, having to overcome lots of obstacles. I worked until 1937. Then I was arrested – no judicial proceeding, no interrogations. They put me into prison in Gorkiy and, four months later, sent me with a prisoner transport. On the 1 January 1938 we were loaded on freight cars. There was a stove, but no firewood. We arrived in the region of D.V. on the 20 February, at Magdagacha station. Everybody had a bad cold, running ulcers and other skin wounds. We were forced into the bathhouse, but in actual fact there was only ice-cold water up to the knees. We did not want to go in. But they forced us forward. We overturned the tubs in order to save ourselves from this ice-cold water; otherwise we would have all lost our lives.
At the same time they announced “Attention!” And then they read out the list of convicts, about who had been sentenced and who had pronounced the judgment. My surname starts with an “A” – Agapytchev, Flegmont Yevlampyevich, born in 1908, sentenced by a troyka of the NKVD in Gorkiy to 10 years, as from the 1 October 1937 until 1947, on section 58 of the penal code.
“This is only a temporary punishment,” they say, “imposed on enemies of the nation, parasites, saboteurs, those who undermine the state power. It would have been best to execute you all, but we will temper justice with mercy, trusting that we will be able to change you for the better!”
Then one of us said: “11 people have already perished on the way.”
“Silence!”
And they start throwing their firearms at us and seizing people. We resist and they seize us. Someone is screaming: “Arbitrary rule!” And they are all stark naked, shivering with cold. A shot.
Our clothes were completely burned. The lice looked big and white. They picked the clothes with big hayforks and took them to the fire. We were given new clothes. Our old things were now burned; they had had an unpleasant smell of lice and worn clothes. It was warm at the fireplace, and we were happy about that like a child at its mother’s breast.
Not far from the town of Rukhlov, at Skovorodino railway station, we had to chisel, with pick hammers and crowbars, a road to the town, build a heating and a water main, complete the construction of an electric power station. After everything had been finished, they took us further to Bam station on the Baikal-Amur-Mainline. Right in the swamp we built brickworks. We drained trenches and constructed walls with 20 millions bricks in a year. There were four steam locomotives, 120 kilowatt each, real power stations, drying sheds for the summer, for 400,000 stones each. In these sheds they placed burning kilns with a capacity of 400,000 stones and a PER press. A conveyer for the stones was working day and night, throughout all seasons.
We erected a building with 100 chambers, one drying-room for the winter and bad weather and a cableway; about 200 hand trolleys were operated in the chambers. These works were handed over to the civilians just before the war. We were taken to the cement repair works, administration of forced labor. All the technical equipment was being repaired there. By night they forced people to go to Kotlas for urgent scheduled work, and we, the experts, were kept in the works. They soon started to reconstruct the whole works and enlarged it for military production.
We supplied three tons per shift. Three tons per hour. They smelted metal all around the clock in two melting furnaces, the other two were either out of operation for cooling down or due to repair work. They provided 2,000 pieces per shift, working in two shifts for the production of mines, type EM 120.
The whole process ran through my hands. I was employed in the foundry as foreman for the control of the production process. I ensured the casting of metal; the foundry goods were transported by dump cars, and then put into the heat chambers by hand. From there into the mechanical department for metalworking. They supplied the metal on seven horse drawn vehicles, which later carried off all the rubbish from the mines. I worked in shifts day and night. Each shift, according to the schedule for convicts, comprised 10 hours, but the workshops did not even empty for a sole minute. The moulds were passed from hand to hand. I had to keep clean an area of 1,000 square meters and carry away the slag and waste from the furnaces.
The horses gasp with exertion, they do not want to go into the workshops, drop down. They are taken away on wheelbarrows, then, behind the gate, are reloaded on trucks.
Everything is steaming and burning, we are gasping for air, dripping with sweat.
From somewhere they had laid pipes into the foundry. Soda water is coming out, ice-cold, burning, without syrup. The people were capable of anything. No days of rest, no relaxation. Throughout the whole war we worked indefatigably. At the beginning of the war the guards abused us and called us “fascists.” We complained about that. In the course of time the head of the factory, a civilian called M.L.Kutosov, started to appeal to us in a polite way.
The fatherland was in danger. We were all responsible. This is what we understood ourselves. Our brothers, sisters, they were all at the front. Many ended up at the front since they were criminals, but those who had been sentenced on section 58 of the penal code, were not allowed to go, although many had asked for the permission.
As is generally known, the war was won at an incredibly heavy price. I had no relatives at liberty. Yet in the 1940s my father, mother, my oldest sister Matrena, born in 1901, her husband, born in 1902, died from typhoid fever in the prison of Gorkiy. So did A.J. Smirnov and his two children. But during the war nobody talked about this.
All relatives, more or less, were relatives on my father’s side: three brothers, four sisters. Their families all consisted of about six to seven members. My mother had seen sisters, all with families. Relatives: second cousins, brothers- and sister-in-law. Up to 40 people were at the front, either in a unit transport or in the trench. None could escape from death, except the nephews and four of my children; all the others did not survive.
It’s an amazing story: Who took such a care to remove my family from me? Two daughters and my wife remained and lived longer, and those informers died – either as deputies or at the front. There was nobody to be called to account in a confrontation.
When and where did I ever say that my comrades murdered S.M. Kirow? Where did I carry on propaganda in order to realize the dissolution of the kolkhoz, etc.? There was only one, who was the main instigator. For what he did, he should now get a taste of “how much costs a pound of raisins. In the “Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy” and “Izvestiya” newspapers they wrote:
“We want to think of the living persons.” The author of this text should be forced to pay the money for all these years in the Foundation of the Victims of Political Repression. This is, how it should be decided. They all want to become deputies, by hook or by crook, cost it what it may, to enrich themselves, to come into power and, seizing an opportunity, to get rid of all those, who are inconvenient to them.
Let us have a look at today’s elections. What a great fuss are they making about them, how much ado about nothing, how much waste? At the beginning of autumn they announced a pre-election fund: you could voluntarily pay in money to select from the best. And what is all this for? For being elected; it is not possible to take any person as deputy in the middle of the night, who has been authorized by the district prosecutor to carry our judicial inquiries, secretly, together with a security officer.
I myself experienced this twice. The first time in 1937, and again in 1949. On the 6 August they took me to the Bolshaya Murta district, to the Krasnogorsk kolkhoz.
Today I am not going to go to the polls. Already at Stalin’s times the deputy had compromised himself. He did not become a deputy of the people, but a protector of those who permitted the people to perish. I am sure they will manage to find a place with the same aim nowadays, too.
Please accept my apologies for my straightforwardness, but I cannot do otherwise; and I will do without a deputy, without a better State power; otherwise you will lose the last piece of bread. Such a bad feeling does not originate in sweet life.
Excuse me.