This story is from Anatole Lokshin:
In the Soviet Union, everyone was expected to help prop up the fiction that the system worked. One of the ways this showed up was in agriculture. Farming was inefficient, the harvest had to be brought in somehow, and so schoolchildren, university students, and workers were all sent out to do farm labor.
We lived in Leningrad, a northern city where the growing season was short. Mostly what could grow there were root vegetables: potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, and some cabbage. In the fall those crops had to be dug up and gathered, and every year students were sent to do it.
When we were in school, we went on day trips on weekends. Buses would take us out, or we would go by train to places not far from Leningrad, spend the day working, and come back. But when I entered the Polytechnic Institute, it became more serious. First-year students were expected to spend the first month or month and a half of the school year — roughly September and half of October — living on a collective farm and helping with the harvest.
In America, universities talk about team-building retreats. In our case, team-building meant digging potatoes in a kolkhoz.
My faculty was mostly boys. Out of twenty-five students, only four of us were girls. The living conditions on those farms were rough, so in our case only the boys were sent to live there. The girls still had to report every day to the institute and do whatever unpaid labor they assigned us: filing papers, helping in departments, working in the library, all the ordinary little jobs that needed doing. No one asked whether this made sense. You just worked for free where you were told.
But one year, in another harvest assignment, we did go out and stay there. We were housed in barracks like military barracks. It was already cold — September in Leningrad, with frost in the mornings and white ice on the grass.
I had always had a weak stomach and picked up stomach trouble easily. The place was filthy, so as a precaution I took the Soviet equivalent of Pepto-Bismol every day. I was careful. Other people were not so lucky.
After about a week, students started getting sick. One had stomach pain, then another, then another. Soon everybody seemed to be ill. Doctors arrived, and because this was not far from Leningrad — and because I studied at an elite institute filled with the children of well-placed people — the whole thing became a scandal.
They examined us and discovered that the students had contracted cholera.
That was not a small matter. Cholera meant isolation hospitals, infectious-disease wards, quarantine. Out of perhaps a hundred and fifty students, only a handful somehow turned out not to be infected. I was one of them. No matter how many tests they ran on me, I stayed negative.
So while almost everyone else was packed off into a special hospital for infectious disease patients, I found myself with four unexpected weeks of freedom. I had to report every few days for more tests, but otherwise I was left alone.
For me, that strange episode became almost a lucky break. I had exhausted myself preparing for university entrance, and suddenly I had an extra month to rest. For everybody else, it was a nightmare: bad food, crowded wards, confinement, fear, and the humiliation of having gone out to perform noble socialist labor only to come back with cholera.
That was another Soviet lesson. Even when the state ordered young people out to save the harvest, it could not manage the most basic conditions of health and sanitation. People were told they were building the future. In reality they were digging potatoes, getting sick, and being warehoused in infectious-disease hospitals.