Soviet Peasant's Home, 1927
Let us now look more closely at a farmer’s house and courtyard. We shall find him a hospitable man, and, if we are not suspicious characters, he will call off…
From: 1927 C.E. To: 1927 C.E.
Location: Russia
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Village Life Under the Soviets by Karl Borders, 1927.
Ivan Ivanich at Home
Let us now look more closely at a farmer’s house and courtyard. We shall find him a hospitable man, and, if we are not suspicious characters, he will call off the dog, or dogs, and invite us in. In the daytime the smaller gate will usually be unlatched. At night all gates will be securely barred and the master and his family will be entrenched in their castle, only to be roused after much knocking and shouting.
Then, if we are admitted, there follows a great rattling of chains and bars as first the door and finally the gate is opened. But it is best to visit in the daytime. Once inside the court we find ourselves in a compactly arranged quadrangle which encloses within its four sides the home, barns, granaries, tool sheds, and, if it is a home of any pretensions at all, the bathhouse of the family. We shall be invited into the house at once, and if we are interested, will be shown the out-houses later.
There is probably a little veranda running along the side of the house, which invariably turns its gable toward the street. Through this we enter by a door which is never high and may be so low, if it is a humble cottage and fuel is scarce, that even a short man needs to stoop. If our host is a middle or well-to-do farmer, he will have two rooms or even three, in which case we first go into either the kitchen or a dark entry hall and then into the large all-purpose room.
Three things strike the foreigner at once in a Russian home: the huge brick stove, the holy corner of ikons, which is still found in practically all the houses, and, in well-kept houses, an immaculately scrubbed floor on which you hesitate to tread. The stove is a wonderful institution, which by the variety of its functions somewhat compensates for the quarter of the room it occupies. The stove proper, which is operated by the simple method of stoking the large arched brick chamber with wood until it is very hot and then withdrawing the coals, serves for all the operations of cooking and baking, and in some parts of the country provides a very effective steam bath for the intrepid devotees of cleanliness who crawl into its maw.
In the winter the top of the stove provides a favorite sleeping place for the old folk and the children, and, if the family is not too large, the whole household may pile on its tropical crest. Steps are always carefully included in the architecture for facilitating this function. The cat prefers the corner of the ledge in front of the oven proper, while the most prolific cockroaches I have ever encountered find hibernation in various convenient cracks about the corners.
If the house boasts beds besides the stove top, they are usually home-made affairs of wood, springless, with a solid wooden floor and provided with a straw mattress. The chief problem with beds is to get them out of sight. For this purpose a curtain may be drawn from the stove to the wall, or as in the case of one house of a well-to-do farmer where I lived for sometime in Samara Government, a partition is built across one end of the room with a small door leading into the bedroom.
Windows in all village houses are built solely for the bit of light they provide, and since nobody wants to sleep in the light it is never considered necessary to cut windows in these sleeping corners. I once suggested such an innovation in the home of a worker on an American operated farm in the North Caucasus, but the worker simply laughed and replied, "I’m not going to read or write there. So why the trouble?”
The second room is also provided with a peculiar stove whose chief virtue lies rather in the conservation of heat than its production. Its principle is that of a simple brick box with an iron door which can be sealed tight and a damper for closing the box at the top when the fuel has burnt out. The idea is to heat the bricks and retain the heat.
The tight-fitting door also serves to keep in the “fragrance” of the fuel, usually dried manure brick which is made in the spring and summer from the stable cleanings. These are ordinarily made by the women who often tramp out the mixture of water and manure with their feet and mold it into the forms with their hands. The bricks are then piled at some convenient place near the edge of the village, where they are made, and when thoroughly dry are brought in and piled in the shed for winter. The stoves are usually built so as to provide heat for two rooms.
During the winter every window is carefully sealed tight with putty or strips of paper, and all better houses are built with double windows besides. The fresh air fiend has a small hinged pane in one of the windows which is opened when the stove is fired in the morning. This hermetical life retains in the room all winter a peculiar odor which smites the stranger as soon as the door is opened. It was a long time before I discovered that this is a perfume emanating from a combination of two sources; imperfectly tanned sheepskin coats and the smoke of a weed called mahorka, which claims some distant relationship to tobacco.
The furnishings of the house are extremely simple. A plain table or two, not more than two or three chairs, probably made by the village carpenter in a very severe and uncomfortable style, and a long bench or two around the wall. Some shelves on the wall or possibly a cabinet hold the few dishes and brass or copper cooking utensils. And a samovar, of course, for boiling water for the tea. The humblest of cottages is equipped with this indispensable "self boiler.” Some families have two or more of varying sizes to suit the number of cups needed.
The great Russian institution of tea drinking has perhaps done more to prevent diseases spread by bad water than any amount of education or official sanitary measures might have done. I remember hearing a citizen of one of the villages of Samara Government say that he had not tasted water in any form but tea for ten years.
Tea may possibly mean a flavoring of some savory bark or leaf, but it always means boiled water. And the traveler, too, is not deprived of his tea, for he invariably carries his teapot, and every railway station of importance has a huge free boiler of kipitok, or "boiling water.”
Another peculiar household convenience is the umivalik, a word derived from the verb "to wash.” It is a little tin tank suspended from a nail on the walk with a plunger in the bottom which acts as a valve. A trickle of water is secured by cupping the hands and pushing the plunger up. A basin of some sort is placed on a stool beneath to catch the waste water. If there is no such apparatus in the house, the host will pour water over your hands while you wash.
Russians abhor any form of bathing in still water if they can avoid it, as we shall see when we visit the bathhouse. A small kerosene lamp provides all the light that is needed for the evenings. The better homes will have a wardrobe for clothing, or even a chest of drawers. Practically every house has a huge chest, often bound with iron or brass straps, like a pirate's strong box. Certainly it must have a lock, with probably an additional padlock. Here the family treasures will be kept, from the master's savings to the daughter's best dress.
Borders, Karl. Village Life Under the Soviets. Vanguard Printings, 1927.
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