Cold Comfort Farming

Letavin: I don't like milking cows. It's not interesting.

State Farm Director: You are not only a traitor, you're an ideological traitor.

Letavin: . . . I'm not happy here on the Virgin Land.

State Farm Director: Don't you see what you are? You're a force in formation. You carry within yourself a Party vow . . .

--We Three Went to the Virgin Land

The "Virgin Land" is Soviet propaganda's term for an unsettled stretch of central Siberian steppe, about the size of the two Dakotas, that Party Secretary Khrushchev grandiosely planned to put under wheat in just two seasons. Ploughs and tractors were brought hastily from the Ukraine. Tens of thousands of Komsomols (Young Communists), most of them without farm experience, were dumped on the steppe and told it was their sacred duty to produce.

Many Komsomols bucked the bleak frontier job. Their complaints, leaking back to Moscow, deterred later volunteers. Last month Khrushchev conceded that "some husbandries were set up in a hurry and were not quite successful," admitted that the area lacked rainfall, was scourged by early frosts, the soil was saline, and that on some farms one out of every three workers was a bureaucrat. But Khrushchev stuck doggedly to his old line that the state farm was the solution to Russia's agricultural problem.

Khrushchev's propaganda push for the Virgin Land has made it a favorite front-page subject in Pravda, a heroic subject for Soviet moviemakers, and the inspiration for at least two Moscow plays. But since Russian playwrights have also been instructed to get more credible realism into their turgid propaganda drama, the exhortations have been marked by some surprising candor.

The New Life. Thus old-line Propagandist Nikolai Pogodin in a Moscow play, We Three Went to the Virgin Land, has his hero Marochka soliloquizing: "Now, tell yourself, why did you give such a lightning-like consent to go to the Virgin Land? Was it because of the fear of a [party] trial? I swear it is not only the fear of a trial . . . Over there in the wilderness I'll start a new life. The past will be buried. Everyone will be drinking; I'll not. I'll behave. I'll be almost a saint. No one will say that Marochka is almost a hooligan . . . I'll live alone without anyone, without cards. I'll be reborn within the Komsomol . . ."

But Pogodin's heroine Nelly, already in the Virgin Land, is less optimistic: "I just can't understand why all of us are not dead yet. Virgin Land, see that! It's a nightmare, I swear! No plumbing whatsoever anywhere . . . And I, fool, came to these lands! The little girl got caught. Ha! Ha! . . . And who asked me to come? No one. Not only nobody asked me, I was even warned against it ... And there is no toilet, just snow up to the neck . . . Between ourselves, one could have a nice zoo over here, because every night the wolves are howling, like in a movie. My darling idiot, you got caught. All my friends are now having their hair fixed in a beauty shop, and I, miserable girl, will spend my whole night on bare wooden planks. There are no virgin lands here, only wolves, snow, storms. Nelly is lost. Don't wait for me, dear girl friends ..."

But tough living is only one aspect of Pogodin's Virgin Land. In the background there is a character identified as the Unknown Man (obviously liberated from a still grimmer slave camp), who tempts the young Komsomols to give up work and live on their wits, as he does. There is also a cynical carpenter who asks: "Shall we build a bathhouse in a cultural or a noncultural way? If it is cultural, then it will be a cold one." There is a fight between boys and girls to get into the cultural bathhouse (won by the girls), and knife fights between young men over girls. And there are dreamers who wonder: "We always think about man in a concrete way, but we never think about his soul. We only see norms and norms. But a human being is something else also." From all .these horrors, Marochka and his pals are of course rescued, in the last act, by their better Communist natures.

Categorical Objections. But it was not the last act that brought audiences crowding into Moscow's Central Children's Theater to see We Three Went to the Virgin Land last November and December. As the word went around Moscow that We Three was something to see, an alert Communist Party stopped the play, roundly censured Pogodin. Commented Pravda: "Categorical objections are aroused by the new play . . . The three go to the Virgin Land to repair either their characters or their biographies, when in fact the Komsomol organization selected the best comrades, who were drawn into the uninhabited steppe not by cupidity or adventure or by a desire to rid themselves of their past, but by the high romanticism of a feat of good, by an unselfish service to the Socialist motherland." Said the Literary Gazette: "Pogodin's play lacks bright, optimistic feelings, a heroic mood."

Thus corrected, Playwright Pogodin last week was busily revising We Three.

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