This story is from Anatole Lokshin:
In the Soviet Union, students were expected to spend their summers working. Sometimes that meant the usual unpaid labor the state was always squeezing out of people. But there was another system too: student construction brigades.
The idea, at least on paper, was not entirely foolish. The Soviet economy was so inefficient, and there were so few workers available for small projects in remote places, that the government created student teams to go build things during the summer: schools, farm buildings, houses, whatever was needed. Think of it as a kind of compulsory Peace Corps, except not voluntary.
This work was different in one important respect: it paid. The government actually paid students, and for students it could be very good money, especially because it was tax-free. Just as important, it could take you to parts of the country you would otherwise never see.
The system had its own little ladder. In the first summer, you usually went somewhere local, did less interesting work, and earned less money. If you performed well, the next summer you had a chance to go much farther away, to some remote and half-forgotten place where the pay was better and the adventure greater. Competition for those spots was fierce.
My first summer, after my first year in college, we were sent north of Leningrad, maybe eighty miles away. Today that does not sound far, but at the time, with Soviet roads and transport, it felt remote. Before we could go, we had to learn an actual trade. We were mathematics students; we did not know how to build anything. So during the academic year I went, several nights a week, to a real construction site to train as a bricklayer.
It was winter. It was dark. It was cold. The men teaching me knew perfectly well I was not going to spend my life laying bricks, so they were not exactly inspired instructors. But because I was working on a real building, they had to correct me and show me how to do it properly. After months of that, I passed an exam and officially became a certified bricklayer.
When summer came, I went north not only as a bricklayer but also as one of the student leaders. In those brigades there were two key roles: the commander, who handled the finances, and the commissar, who handled everything else. I was the commissar. The team was effectively financially independent. If we wanted to eat, we had to earn money by completing projects. We did not make much, and we did not eat especially well, but for a group of young people it was tremendous fun.
What made that summer especially memorable for me was that I managed to pull off a little bit of bureaucratic mischief. Usually each university department formed its own separate team. I wanted instead to gather our friends from Tridtsataya Shkola — School No. 30 — even though they were scattered across different universities. It took some maneuvering, but I managed it. So in effect we had our own little School 30 construction brigade.
We worked, we laughed, we lived rough, and because it was the Soviet Union we were mostly cut off from the rest of life. There were no cell phones, of course, and in the places where we stayed communication was poor even by Soviet standards. Then, during a parents' visiting day sometime later in the summer, I learned something extraordinary: that my sister Tanya had been born. I had known my mother was pregnant. I had not known the baby had already arrived. That was how news traveled.
The next summer, because we had proved ourselves, I got the more interesting assignment. We went to Kazakhstan.
That was a different world entirely. This time we were in the middle of the desert. There were camels. People lived in yurts. We were building houses and a school in a place most of us never would have seen otherwise.
And the moment we arrived, we were told that there had been cases of bubonic plague in the area, so everyone had to be vaccinated.
That made quite an impression on me, since in an earlier student labor episode I had already lived through a cholera scare. First cholera, then bubonic plague: Soviet youth certainly had variety.
The plague vaccine hit me hard. I became so sick afterward that I slept for something like thirty hours straight. Then I got up and was fine. That remains one of my proofs that sleep is the best medicine.
Life there was harsh. After a few weeks, many of the girls in our group became seriously ill and had to be sent back to the European part of the country. Only a few stayed. But for all its hardships, the trip was unforgettable. When you are twenty, almost everything feels like an adventure, and this truly was one.
That, in miniature, was Soviet student life: the state took your summers, called it duty, wrapped it in organization and slogans, paid you just enough to make it attractive, and sent you to places where cholera or plague might be waiting. And somehow, because we were young, we still managed to have a marvelous time.