When I got home Friday night, I retold the day’s events to Anna Kirillovna. I got to the part where Sophia, the librarian, said she’d received wheat today, and I stumbled over the word for “wheat” (it’s one of those tongue-twister words that makes you long for Pat Sajack to show up and sell you a vowel), and when Anna understood what I was trying to say, she said knowingly, “Ah, yes, she got her wheat today”, as if that somehow explained it all. Again, I thought to myself, this is a question for later.
After dinner, as we sat drinking our tea, with a full stomach, strength returning, and being a glutton for punishment, I asked Anna Kirillovna what exactly it meant that Sophia had received her wheat today. She took a deep breath, and I knew the explanation would be as complicated as I had expected.
The main industry, employer and power in Tvarditsa for many decades was the collective farm, aka “kolkhoz.” When perestroika started, around ’91/’92, the collective farm was privatized, sort of, and turned into a cooperative. Employees and retirees of the farm were each given a percentage of ownership, based on some complicated calculations I couldn’t really follow. Many people in the village were in one way or another connected to the farm, and the vast majority of residents of Tvarditsa own a “piece” of the farm now. The cooperative owners, every year, receive a sort of dividend for their “investment” in the farm, in the form of wheat. At the end of the season, the farm office figures out the calculations, who owns what percentage and thus who gets how much wheat. You don’t actually get bags of wheat (well, not usually; more on that later), instead there is a registry at the farm store in the center of town where they keep track of everybody’s “accounts.” It’s kind of like Mr. Olsen’s store on “Little House on the Prairie”, with exactly the same technology: a book that looks like it’s from 1850, a pencil, and somebody’s noggin’. The farm office converts how much wheat you “earned” this year into loaves of bread, and when you want some bread, you go to the farm store and get it. The clerk makes a notation in the registry of how many loaves you got that day, and it’s deducted from your “wheat account.” When you’ve used up your yearly allotment of wheat, No bread for you!
I tried to explain this system to a friend Friday night. We were both floored, and he joked that three thousand years ago people had decided it was too complicated so they invented money. That notion hasn’t really caught on here in Tvarditsa.
Of course, I’m joking (mostly). Currency exists here, and of course people want it, need it, and use it. Unfortunately, they don’t receive enough of it. Salaries are ridiculously low, and most people get by only because they have some land of their own on which to grow their own produce and raise their own animals. Many people also sell fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, meat, etc. to supplement their measly salaries, or in some cases, that’s their only source of income. Many men work at other jobs during the day, or are living and working abroad, or even worse are alcoholics and not useful at all to their wives and families, and thus much of this work is left to women. The market is full of worn down women who’ve hauled enormously heavy bags of goods from home for miles to stake out a spot along a row in the outdoor market.
Barter and trade is also a regular part of life here, though. Last year, the farm paid out dividends in actual bags of wheat (I didn’t really understand the explanation, either the price of wheat rose or dropped or something like that), and what exactly do you do with hundreds of kilos of wheat? Georgii and Anna had that very dilemma last year. In the end, Georgii made a deal with the Wine-Cognac factory here in Tvarditsa, and traded many kilos of wheat for many bottles of cognac. “What on earth will we do with all that booze?” Anna asked him. He had surmised, though, that cognac would keep longer than wheat or flour, so he traded the perishable item for one that could be stored indefinitely, which can be traded later for some other useful items, or can be given as gifts for birthdays and other occasions.
But back to the librarian and her wheat. So, when the collective farm became the cooperative farm, not every profession in the village was directly connected to it and thus there were some people who did not receive a percentage in the cooperative, such as librarians, doctors, and teachers. Thus, Sophia has to buy her wheat every year from the farm, as she does not have an account at the farm store for her bread. And yes, she buys hugs bags of wheat (or flour, which is produced by the farm’s mill), which will be stored all winter in her attic and she will make her own bread. Thus, Friday was the day she got her wheat, and she had to go to the farm to pay for it, receive the huge bags of it, arrange for it to be transported to her home, and carry it bag by bag up the ladder into the storage area. This amounted to the better part of the day, and was long hard work. Thus, the library was closed because Sophia received her wheat!
Anka in Kyiv 