Episode 3: A Grand Society

SPEAKER_03 0:01

In this chapter of Yasha's story, they brought us to a collective farm. And what kind of work they decided to give me? To take care of horses. I was afraid the horse will die. What it will do for me? And we decided what we'll stay here, we don't know what to do here. And the grandfather said, okay, come to our city in the mound. I saw how they treat women. It was terrible.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families were displaced when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Those who evaded Nazi death camps were faced with a perilous journey eastward in order to survive. This is the true tale of one of those families, told by the son who lived through it all. His Russian nickname is Yasha, and this is his story. Okay, so maybe you've never heard this one before, but trust me, it was a hit in Stalin's Soviet Union. In the dawn of the communist era, songs like this one painted idyllic pictures of Soviet farm life. The lyrics sang of golden wheat fields, bountiful harvests, and communal meals shared by joyous laborers, united in their patriotic endeavor to feed the motherland. When Stalin implemented government-run farming communities or collective farms in the late 1920s, they were put forward as the backbone of an ideal society. The vision was ambitious. Transform smaller, privately owned farms into vast collectives controlled by the state. This would unite individuals under a common cause, pool labor and resources, and create a self-sustaining society where every person has their needs met. A grand promise of the communist ideal. The work would be hard but fulfilling. The fields vast but fertile. Bountiful harvests would be distributed equitably among the population. Together, the tireless collective farmers would feed the Soviet Union. And then, after their hard days' labor in the fields, they could kick up their feet, ice their aching backs, crank up the gramophone, and swell with pride at musical reminders of how their hard work was paramount to building a prosperous nation. At least that's what they were told. As it turns out, the lofty promises of prosperity made by the state were nothing more than a mirage in a desert of never-ending labor. And as 11-year-old Yasha and his family were about to discover, the poetic scenes depicted in folk songs were far more reflective of the Soviet propaganda machine than of actual life on a collective farm.

SPEAKER_03 4:26

They brought us to a collective farm.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

The Caucasus Mountains stretched from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, straddling the southern border of modern-day Russia and extending into parts of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Don't worry, I couldn't point to those on a map either. For our purposes, just know that when Yasha stepped onto that collective farm, he was closer to the country of Iran than his native Petrikov. The German invasion had only just begun, and his family had already been displaced close to 2,000 kilometers from home in about a week. Roughly the same distance as a trip from New York City to the southern tip of Florida. They now found themselves at the very crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. And just like the plentiful differences between the sun-kissed Miami beaches and the concrete jungle of Manhattan, Yasha and his family would have witnessed a sizable shift in both the physical and cultural landscape. The Caucasus region is a historical melting pot, its native peoples influenced by the Persians, Ottomans, Mongols, and Russians, to name a few. Its rugged mountains have played a crucial role in shaping trade routes, cultural exchanges, and geopolitical dynamics throughout history. For Yasha's family, Slavic Jews from the flatlands of Belarus, they were strangers, entering a strange land. But even though the landscape, the people, and even the languages spoken around them would have been new and unfamiliar, the soil beneath their feet was still Soviet soil, and it needed tilling. They were still within the borders of the motherland, which means they were still required to do what all Soviets must do.

SPEAKER_03 6:35

As they took us out from the train and said, But here you will work.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Not to mention break labor laws. But in the Soviet Union and on collective farms in particular, the term labor law would have had an entirely different meaning. That to labor was required by law. Literally. Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution stated that work was a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle, he who does not work, neither shall he eat. See, the fundamental concept of work is pretty simple for most of us Westerners. It refers to a process of going to a place, doing a job, and getting paid. Or staying at home to record a podcast in your pajamas, in some cases. But work in the Soviet Union was a much deeper ideological construct. It was put forward as the great equalizer, a noble pursuit that bound citizens together in a shared struggle for the common good. Whether it was laboring in the fields, working in factories, or even fulfilling duties within the household, the labor of the people held a critical place in the system Stalin was trying to perfect. It was much more than just the physical act of doing a job for pay. It was the cornerstone of the collective spirit, embodying the aspiration that, together, the people could build a grand society. This is why work was a near universal expectation, and why, no matter the location, conditions, or hardships they faced, the capacity and willingness of Yasha's family to work would be central to their ability to survive. But then, sometimes, regardless of how hard you work, survival has its own ideas.

SPEAKER_03 9:16

My brother died. He got sick and he died very, very quickly. He got something. He got a cold. But the cold he got a cold. Complication went from the heart. From the cold. A small town, and in that time they didn't know what to do with him. And he died.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

One of the frustrating things about telling Yasha's story is accounting for all the characters who might have helped shape him, but who were on the very fringes of this vastly important but small span of Yasha's early life. I can dissect his words endlessly, trying to glean some understanding of people I never knew. But I often find myself wrestling with ghosts. Yasha's father was the first ghost, dying suddenly at the brink of his family's upheaval. Right before Yasha would need his strength and guidance more than ever. And now, Yasha loses his only brother. His name was Moisha, and he succumbed to a cold at the age of 12 or 13, sometime during the summer of 1941. Beyond that, I don't know anything about him. And with the decades that had gone by, it's understandable that even Yasha's memories of his brother's death were matters of fact. The emotional details likely blurred almost to oblivion. Moisha, along with his and Yasha's father, represent millions like them from their time. Just two more names in another story. Brief flickers of life swallowed by the unrelenting tide of history. But perhaps their lives, however abbreviated, are important because they stopped short. Perhaps their premature absence is where we can find meaning for both them and for Yasha. With his father and older brother no longer there to guide him, Yasha was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as the new man of the family. It signaled a shift in responsibility, a call for him to step up and take a more central role among his remaining siblings. The lessons of manhood would have to be grappled with alone. And as his family journeyed further into the unknown, there was no time to waste. But whoever ran that farm probably didn't have time for the punchline. And they surely weren't concerned with family dynamics. They couldn't be. They had quotas to meet, and all they saw was six perfectly able-bodied Soviet citizens and one useless infant being ushered toward the fields. They needed to contribute. They had to be put to work.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

And the horses worked very hard. For example, from six o'clock in the morning, just the sun came up, they start working till lunch. At lunch, they came for rest. And the horses was, because it was very hard work, they were so thirsty, they were running to the river to drink. And I was the boss, I need to keep them from the river because this guy, he said, you're supposed to know if a horse is very hot and will drink cold water, he can die. And you will be responsible.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Can you think of anyone more well equipped to wrangle desperate horses away from a cold river than an undernourished 11-year-old who knows nothing about horses or cold rivers? Yeah, me neither.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

But they give me a horse to run around. Because they couldn't give me a good horse, they could go horse supposed to work.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

You can hear Yasha chuckling a little here. It really is quite an amusing visual. Both struggling to handle each other, not to mention the other farm horses, who were themselves tired and grumpy from laboring all day in the fields, and just wanted some damn water.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

And during the day I was running so much that they got big wounds. Wounds like this on my ouch.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

Yasha's poor Tushy. Did you know the word Tushy actually has its roots in Yasha's native language? It originates from Yiddish, the traditional language of European Jews he grew up speaking. Tushy comes from Tulchis, a cheeky term for one's backside. And as it turns out, Yasha's Tulchis wasn't exactly farm fit.

SPEAKER_03 15:53

And I was never born in the field. I never saw a horse. No, I saw a horse.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

But not in this air of light-heartedness to Yasha's anecdote from the farm. But it's really a perfect microcosm of the Soviet system, where people were so often reduced to units of collective labor, and where an individual's capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and desires were disregarded in favor of what the state considered the common good. Yasha, a weary 11-year-old kid who had never worked in the fields, who'd barely ever seen a horse, was suddenly responsible for their lives. He was supposed to know how to handle them, that they could die if they drank too much cold water while exhausted. His difficult circumstances, age, and inexperience were irrelevant. When he was put on that farm, he was just another laboring body, a small square peg being shoved into a round hole, all in the name of sacred work. It's a great irony of Stalin's Soviet Union. A society where everyone was meant to contribute according to their abilities, share in the fruits of their collective labor, and live in prosperity. Yet, instead of promoting fairness and rewarding individual efforts, Stalin's system quickly warped into a mechanism for authoritarian control and forced labor, where people were compelled to contribute, often entirely outside of their abilities, very few receiving the fruits, not to mention vegetables, potatoes, or grain of their labor. By the time Yasha and his family arrived on that farm in the summer of 1941, millions in the Soviet countryside had already experienced this bitter reality firsthand. Instead of the promised land of plenty, people were met with widespread food shortages and brutal working conditions. Any sign of dissent or failure to meet the demand in quotas was ruthlessly punished by Stalin's regime. Its weapon of choice, hunger, wielded against the people on a massive scale. The state seized grain from rural areas, slapped harsh penalties on anyone perceived as hoarding, and failed to hand out whatever meager rations there were fairly. The result? Millions starved to death. Perhaps even more shocking, this human catastrophe didn't end Stalin's iron-fisted agricultural regime. Certainly not by the time Yasha's family landed there. But luckily for them, a family connection was about to give them a chance at autonomy.

SPEAKER_03 19:20

And we worked there for a very small period of time because very close to this area, my grandfather lived all these years. He was there. And we decided what will stay here. We don't know what to do here. My sister will work in the field to take care of some mates and parents, but it's under the sun, it's very hard work. And the grandfather said, okay, come to our city.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

This decision wouldn't have been made lightly. Despite the grueling labor and rigid controls of farm life, it did represent some sense of stability during a volatile time. Meager though it may have been, Yasha's family's work, food, housing, and medical needs would have been controlled for them. Leaving the collective meant stepping out of the entangling embrace of the government safety net, where the state's power depended on making the people reliant on it. They were venturing into the uncertain realm of self-reliance. And in the Soviet Union, that was a risky proposition.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

But it's already by ourselves. We couldn't. Nobody took us there. We need to buy tickets, we need to.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Apart from the challenges of finding transportation, paying for tickets, and finding a place to live and work, choosing to be by yourself, so to speak, wasn't easy in a society that didn't exactly champion individualism or freedom of movement. Every Soviet citizen had to have a passport and a valid reason to travel, even between cities. And every mile traveled alone was bogged down by bureaucratic scrutiny. If you think going to the DMV is bad, thank your lucky stars you never had to navigate the sticky web of paperwork and permissions, wary officials, and unspoken rules that characterize travel in the Soviet Union. And these challenges were only magnified during wartime. With German spies rumored to be everywhere, suspicion of everybody escalated exponentially. A misplaced passport, an unconvincing reason for travel, or any activity that might even remotely rouse suspicion. Could easily get you thrown in jail, or worse. During the war, Stalin's web of paranoia could ensnare anyone, performing the simplest of actions, like leaving a collective to go it on your own. For Yasha and his family, their choice would have been difficult. But the pull of a family member and the chance at a better life must have proven stronger than the risks. They took their chances and left.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

But we went to this town. This city it was called Or Jenikidze.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

I'll give you ten bucks if you can spell it.

SPEAKER_03 22:53

Now it is now it's there. It is this this everything. But there is beautiful in the mountain. We got a lot of ships and whatever, everything there.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

In case you still haven't pulled up a map, don't worry. As Grandma Lilia correctly interjects, we're still in the same general area in the southwestern part of modern-day Russia. But now, Yasha and his family were heading even closer to the heart of the Caucasus region. Nestled along the mountain's northern slopes, the city of Originikidze would have offered much more than just familial connections and picturesque natural scenery. It represented an oasis away from the ever-growing shadow of the Nazis. In the latter stages of 1941, as Yasha's family settled into his grandfather's city, Hitler's eyes were set firmly on Moscow. His desire to capture the capital and symbolic heart of the Soviet Union diverted substantial German forces from other fronts, including in the south. And, due to a combination of strategic mistakes by his high command, the setting in of Russian winter, and the sheer iron will that Stalin and his Red Army commanders had injected in their men, the Soviets began to turn the tide. In December of 1941, they made a desperate and heroic stand at the gates of Moscow and began a series of counter-offensives that stalled the enemy's momentum. As news of these developments reached Yash's family, they surely breathed a sigh of relief. For the first time since they left Petrikov, they had found some respite and stability in the country's secluded south, where towering peaks and deep mountain valleys acted as a physical and symbolic barrier between them and the chaotic world they had left behind. Perhaps they even dared to hope that this beautiful mountain city could become their home, where they could live in peace until the war's end.

SPEAKER_03 25:19

I remember this apartment. It was a yard with houses.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Based on Yasha's hand gestures here, I believe he's trying to describe a courtyard surrounded by houses.

SPEAKER_03 25:34

And the owner of this of this complex, it's a small house, it's not something that it is. The owner was an Ingush. Ingush. And he lived in the mountain. The mountains very close to this town.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Just in case you're a little rusty on the ethnicities of the North Caucasus, the Ingush are a distinct ethnic group native to the region, whose lineage stretches back thousands of years. They have roots in various empires and traditions, and their culture stems from their unique location at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, as evidenced by their fascinating language, which to me sounds a bit like a mixture between Russian and Arabic. Born far away from the Caucasus, the native language of Yasha's Ingush landlord would have been unlike anything he had ever heard.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

He will come and he'll be able to work with these knives. You know, these big heads and heals bullets or whatever it is and a knife. Everybody was scared of him.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

The Ingush are known for their strong tradition of hospitality, respect for their elders, and deep sense of community. However, if one were to judge a book by its cover, an Ingush man in traditional garb might more readily conjure his people's rugged warrior ethos, built up through centuries of survival in harsh mountainous terrain, which they so often had to defend against various invading forces. Even well into his senior years, Yasha was never one to turn down an adventure. It was usually at the tail end of family parties after everyone else was ready to go home. And granted, some vodka had been consumed, when he proposed some half-baked idea to go somewhere we had no business going, do something we had no business doing, to extend the party. When I was a teenager, and he was well into his 70s, he insisted on joining my father, uncle, and me on a camping trip in the Colorado Rocky Mountains that can only be characterized as a disaster, not least by the vicious thunderstorm that rolled through in the middle of the night, bringing torrential rain and lightning that made the hair stand up on our arms. As entirely miserable as we should have been, I can vividly remember Yasha's laughter filling the air between claps of thunder. Even as what could be considered a small lake formed in our ancient, entirely non-waterproof tent. If you asked him, that wasn't a freezing, totally sleepless, and terrifying night, but an adventure. I suppose then it won't come as a surprise that a much younger Yasha had no hesitation in accompanying a mysterious, knife-wielding mountain man on another such escapade in the mountains.

SPEAKER_03 29:17

I went there. they treat women. The game is said, okay, we will have dinner. I don't know. It's all all his wives, or maybe not, maybe his sisters, maybe I don't know. But the the women. The surface, this is the table, we sit his dinner, the men sit on the dinner. Even I because I'm a men, they sit in the two. And the women give us to eat your surface. What they remember. They have a lot of uh lambs. And they give pieces of limb even here in the restaurant. And the men would the limb to the woman and was throw to the woman. Throw up to give it. And they would catch and eat the rest of the meal. For me it was the first time I saw his.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Or there's the more pragmatic interpretations, like, home is wherever you lay your head, suggesting that it can be anywhere, really, as long as there's a place to take a nap. Many would merely describe it as the four walls and a roof where they share their daily lives with loved ones. It's all just our best attempts at describing a place that's impossible to place, one that dances somewhere between the head, the heart, and the world outside, and that differs in meaning for all of us. I can't pretend to know what home meant for a kid like Yasha. Whether it was Petrakov that he longed for, his childhood home, where his family's struggles, though plentiful, were free from the devastating hands of war. Or whether, after his adventure-quelling experience at the Ingush Mountain House, he simply wanted to escape to the familiar embrace of his family's nearby apartment, a temporary haven in a strange new world, and a place where his mother and sisters, from whom he now surely needed a hug, awaited. Soon, it would all prove to be a matter of semantics. By the time 1941 came to a close, it was already too late for Yasha's first home. In his native Belarus, cities were ravaged and villages burned, nearly the entire country having fallen under Nazi occupation. The situation was similar in neighboring Ukraine, where strategic cities, including the capital Kiev, and Nepropetrovsk, where Yasha and his family had stopped only months earlier, had fallen to German forces. In every place they'd been, tank divisions roared across the open plains, and the sky was filled with the drone of German bombers, reigning destruction on anything that stood in their path. For Yasha's family, there was no going back the way they came. And the brutal reality was that their newest home, too, was about to become just another pit stop.

SPEAKER_03 33:56

At the same time, the Germans, they progress. They came closer and closer, and people start to run from this city. It's already 42.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

After failing to take Moscow, Hitler and his high command began to realize that a prolonged war against the Soviet Union was inevitable. As the calendar turned to 1942, the Nazi war machine was in desperate need of fuel. And the lands further south had captured their attention, particularly the oil-rich region of the Caucasus. Soon, the distant rumble of artillery would begin echoing through the valleys, and the seemingly impregnable mountains would start to lose their sense of invincibility. The war had found them once again, but this time it bore a graver, more personal peril for families like Yasha's. What were once rumors had now become fact, and the unimaginable fate of countless Jews and other minorities in the Nazis' wake had begun to spread. The scope of the war and its depth of evil was about to shift, and the crosshairs were pointing directly toward Yasha. In the next chapter of Yasha's story, his family is once again uprooted by the advancing Nazis. But this time, survival comes with a new gauntlet of challenges on land and sea, traversing greater distances than ever before, into the bowels of a war-torn nation. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others and leave a rating or review wherever you're listening. And don't forget to follow to stay involved in the story. There's more to come. I hope you'll join us again.