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Galina Timoshenko was born in 1933 in the village of Gryaznuha, near Novosibirsk, Russia. Her father, older brother and older sister died in World War II. Her mother got sick and “the doctors recommended she move to a warm country with a lot of watermelons. So we went to Kirghizia [Kyrgyzstan].” In Bishkek, she met her husband, built a house, worked in a factory, raised her children, and watched the fall of the Soviet Union. Kseniya Balybina interviewed her in Bishkek on Feb. 18, 2009.

My mother, Anastasia Efimovna Timoshenko, was born into a wealthy family. She was the youngest of 17 children. After the revolution in 1917, my grandparents were dispossessed because they had a mill, they owned a stable with horses and a lot of land. Why were they dispossessed, I still don’t understand clearly, because they had no hired workers and they didn’t need any because when my mom was born, her older brothers and sisters already had their own families. They all lived together and that is why there was no need to hire people, because they had their own labor force.

My mom told me lots of interesting stories about their preparations for the winter, when they canned a variety of things. I remember that when they made sauerkraut, the smallest children were put in tanks with cabbage and they stomped their feet in there. Also, in the beginning of winter they slaughtered livestock and then the whole family molded enough pel'menis [Russian tortellini] for all of them for several months. Then they put these pel’menis outside in the cold and then the frozen product was put in bags and put in the barns. We also stored hams, sausages, and other products in barns. Big pieces of ice were cut down on the river and lowered into a cellar, which was like our refrigerator. We stored food products there. The ice in a cellar only thawed at the end of the summer.

When my mother celebrated her sixteenth birthday, she married. Her husband was eight years older then her. He worked as a station inspector. My mother was a lucky woman because this man loved her and took care of her, although he only saw her a few times before the marriage. Their parents had talked about the wedding and decided that my mother should marry the station inspector. It was accepted in society back then that such decisions were made by parents. Two years later, my older sister, Tamara, was born and three years after that, my mother’s husband died under a train.

My mother met my father in 1930. My father was Stepan Timoshenko. He was a very handsome Don Cossack. He was a widower, and he had two children: a son, Vasily, who was older, and a daughter, Njura. He hid this from my mom and told her about it only when I was born. His children were brought up in his sister’s house at first, but as soon as my mother found out about them, they were brought to live with us. My mother accepted them as her own.

I don’t remember my father that well because I was only nine years old when the war began and he and my older brother, Vasily, were taken away from us on the front. In 1942, we received letters about their deaths. One year later, my older step-sister, Njura, also went to the front. Then we received a notice that said she was missing. When I grew up, I searched for her for a long time. I wrote to our village soviet in Gryaznuha and to the Novosibirsk city administration but, unfortunately, my search produced no results.

I ran to the railway station every week and waited for my father for more than two years after the war had ended. Many people came back, and I trusted that, in time, my father, too, would get off a train.

Life during the war was hungry; I wanted to eat all the time. It was very difficult for my mother to support my sister Tamara and me, so she attached us to our neighbors and friends, where we took care of their small children, and they fed us a little. I remember an incident from childhood that seems very amusing to me now. My mother’s friend Zoe Timofeevna asked me to look after her two-month-old daughter. I often helped them out. Their family had been evacuated from Ukraine and for some reason they always had a lot of bread, although our family could get only one loaf of bread and only with special coupons. One day, Zoe Timofeevna's mom treated me to a sandwich with red caviar. It was considered a luxury and a sign of prosperity. I’d never seen or tried caviar before. And this caviar seemed terrible to me. I brushed it away with my finger onto the table and then ate the bread and butter. I remember my mother’s friends were surprised and thought that I wasn’t hungry because I didn’t eat the caviar.

I went to school in 1939. There was no school in our village and so it was necessary to walk four kilometers every day to the next village. In our village there were seven students, so we gathered together and walked through the pine forest on the way, singing songs so that it would not be boring or scary. I was a good student and I had a very good memory. It’s a pity that I was only able to finish five classes because, to continue, I would have had to go to Novosibirsk, which my family could not afford.

I remember an incident from my school years: We had a shortage of cloth, so usually we had no extra dresses for school. One day, I sewed a dress from the striped cover of a mattress. It was the most elegant, beautiful dress that I could afford. My teacher, when she saw me in this dress, complimented me on my sewing skill. Later, the school gave me a coupon to get a new dress from Novosibirsk. The new dress was grey and not that nice, but I put red ribbons on it and buttons and it became very beautiful.

At this time, my mother worked as a nurse in a hospital. She had to wash bandages and linens in the Ob River and she chilled her kidneys badly. In 1939, she had to have one kidney removed and the second one started to hurt. The doctors recommended that she move to a warm country with a lot of watermelons. So we went to Kirghizia. It was 1948. Unfortunately, we couldn't bring any photos of my father with us and he remains only in my memory.

My first impression of Frunze [Bishkek] was that it was a clean, green, small town. There, I learned about things like irrigation ditches for the first time in my life; I found that pure water always flowed there. And also, I saw a red apple for the first time in my life. It was so big and beautiful. I had seen such apples only in my ABC book before.

When we arrived in Frunze, my mother got a job in the city hospital as a nurse, and my sister and I went to work in a factory named after Lenin, which made cartridges. Although there were many evacuated factories in the city, there was a real lack of jobs, and it was a big success to get a one. I was also accepted into the Komsomol. Every one of us believed in the ideals of communism, every one tried to work as well as possible and so as not to dishonor our positions as Komsomol members. We often went to various Komsomol meetings and community work days.

There were a lot of social activities outside of working hours in those times. We built stadiums, constantly planted new trees, and built kindergartens and houses. We watched the city grow. When we first moved to Frunze, it was very small town – the present Akhunbaeva Street was its southern border. There were the huge fields that stretched from there to the mountains where, in spring, poppies and tulips flourished. On the north side, it ended at Jibek Jolu Street; on the east side, it ended at Almatinskiy Street; on the west – Bakha Street.

That small town was half the size of present Bishkek. In the centre of the town, where the eternal flame is now, behind the present TsUM building, was a huge market with greens, fruits and vegetables, and the watermelons for which we had moved to the country. I saw watermelons for the first time in my life. They were very sweet and striped, with big black seeds. It seems to me that watermelons like those can’t be found anymore.

My mother, my sister and I lived in a tiny room on the second floor of a building until I got married. The heating system was the oven, the floors were wooden, and in the middle of the room there was a round table covered with a cloth and on this table, in the fashion of that time, there was a decanter of pure water and a glass on a white napkin.

At the Lenin factory, I got acquainted with my future husband, the father of my future children. His name was Anatoly Pavlovich. He worked in the same place as me. He started working at 14 and, since his family lived far from the factory and there was no public transport, he quite often had to spend the night at the factory. Along with his friends, he got into huge boxes with cardboard cartridge sleeves and slept there. He said it was warm and soft.

When we met, he was 20 years old. When he first started working, he was an apprentice to a turner. He was then promoted and operated a lathe himself. After that, he learned how to repair lathes. I remember he told me that he and his friends, to show that they had already become adults, didn't change their clothes after work and it was considered especially glamorous if there were traces of lubricating oil on their hands so that everybody could see that they worked at the factory.

I met with [dated] Anatoly for two years before we got married. Unlike my mother, I chose my fiancé by myself. I went with him to J. Fuchik Park for dances in the summer. They consisted of two, two-hour rounds. Anatoly would buy tickets for both rounds at once so that we could dance all evening long.

I had white canvas shoes and, before the dances I would polished them with tooth-powder so that they looked snow-white. To avoid getting them dirty, I walked to the park barefoot and then washed my feet in the irrigation ditch and only then put on my shoes. All my girlfriends did the same. Also, I had a fashionable dress with a pleated skirt and short sleeves. We never took any dance lessons, but Anatoly and I always won those dancing evenings – probably, because we liked to dance very much.

In Fuchik Park there was also an open-air theater. Celebrities from all over the Soviet Union came there to perform. Tickets were rare and they weren’t cheap, but Anatoly somehow managed to get tickets for every première.

On holidays, we had parades and demonstrations on the main square of Frunze [Bishkek], the one that’s now called the “old” square, where the parliament, the Jogorku Kenesh is. On the Day of International Solidarity of Workers, May 1, and on the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution, November 7, all of us gathered near our factory in the early morning. The mood was joyful, people brought accordions and guitars. We had demonstrations with songs and dances. We also held posters with photos of members of the politburo and the Supreme Soviet above our heads.

Now I watch TV and I understand that these parades were somehow similar to modern Brazilian carnivals, because each enterprise had its own float, on which it showed the results of its work. We carried, for example, cardboard models of the machine tools that were made by our factory. The workers from the fabric factory carried samples of fabrics. Everybody went home after the parade and we loaded our tables with food and people went visiting from house to house until morning. In general, people knew how to celebrate holidays in a good way: they drank a little bit and sang too much. There were no tape players or TVs back then, so we entertained ourselves in the way we only could.

Anatoly and I got married in the autumn of 1954. We lived in a tiny semi-basement room in an old wooden house with his mother. Our house stood at the intersection of Kiev Street and Soviet Street, where the Glavpochtampt [main post office] is now. My oldest son, Boris, was born there.

There were few apartments at that time so the factory would give young families a place and some building materials. On days off, we built our house. It was part of a long, one-story barracks that was divided into 10 separate flats, but we were very glad because it was our first house. We built it quickly. The foundation was laid in the spring of 1959, and in late autumn of the same year we celebrated our house warming. It had two small rooms. In one of them, there was an oven in the corner and nothing else. At our house warming, we got gifts including an iron bed, a table and two stools. We began to plant indoor plants so the place would seem cozy and not so empty. In a big wooden tub in the middle of one of the rooms, a Chinese rose grew. But anyway, there was so much empty space that Boris used to play football there.

Men played dominoes and cards in the evenings, and women had their own interests – we shared patterns for sewing clothes, or for knitting. There was a lack of clothes at that time and the clothes that were available were really expensive, so we made clothes for ourselves and for our children.

I had a daughter, Tamara, in 1960. Our family grew, our responsibilities increased, and the room didn’t seem big enough for us anymore. So we had to attach another room. Back then, there was no maternity leave so, two months after Tamara’s birth, I had to go back to work. To my pleasure, my mother took care of my children because the nursery only took children starting from three months.

People didn’t advertise pregnancy back then. Talking about pregnancy was not accepted. Even relatives only learned that someone was expecting when her stomach was too big to hide anymore. There were no ultrasounds, so nobody knew whether they would have a boy or a girl. So children's clothes were bought only after the child had been born. The choice was not big: blue for boys, pink for girls. And there were long lines for diapers so, basically, we made them ourselves. I only learned about Pampers when my first great-grandson was born.

And by the way, there were lines not only for diapers but for food stuffs and clothes. And luxury goods, like carpets, washing machines, refrigerators, and TVs – it was possible to buy them only with coupons. These coupons were distributed by various enterprises to their best workers. We, in due time, with coupons, got a carpet and a Kirghizia-brand washing machine. We were so happy!

I remember that a TV was a luxury good and everyone wanted one. Our neighbors first bought a TV in 1968. It was a small screen before which there was a huge lens on a leg, through which it was possible see something. There were not many channels. Actually, there was only one and it transmitted basically news, feature films, and cartoons for children and sometimes sports – football and hockey. The image was black-and-white, but it was very strange, as if you were looking though a window into another world. All the tenants from about 30 neighboring apartments jammed into one small room in the evenings to watch it.

And we bought a Spidola radio. We listened with it to the news and learned about everything that was happening in the world and we also listened to new songs. The electricity came back and then switched off as often as it does now. So when there was electricity, our radio was never silent. There’s no need to talk about street lights – there weren’t any. But near us there was Chapaev Park, where every weekend we walked with friends and their children and arranged – as they are now called – picnics.

I worked with my husband but our combined income wasn’t enough for our family and, consequently, when our children went to school, I had to moved to another factory – Tyajelectromash, which did heavy electromechanical engineering. I worked there as a press operator, making plastic cases for devices. The work was heavy and harmful, but it paid 300 rubles [a month] and that was much more than my husband earned. Working eight hours a day, he received only 160 rubles [a month]. We tried to earn as much as possible. Once, my photo was published in a local newspaper called Evening Frunze and it named me as the best woman worker

of my brigade. I was very proud of it. Now I show this photo to my grandchildren.

After I went to work in the other factory, we could get furniture and anything we needed. Every summer we went to Lake Issyk-Kul to have a rest in a factory boarding house. The family permit for 12 days cost 40 rubles. When the children grew up, my mother and I flew several times to see our relatives who had remained in Novosibirsk. The ticket cost 32 rubles. Now we can only dream about being able to afford that kind of thing.

I never would have guessed that I would have to remember how to buy products with cards, as we did in the war years. However, Gorbachev came to power in the 90s [sic] when the Soviet Union had collapsed and, in that period, I could afford 300 grams of flour, two bars of soap, a half-kilo of sugar and two bottles of vodka per month. There was a joke at the time, suggesting that it was necessary to either wash your hands with soap or drink your tea with sugar – because both those products were expensive and rare.

Nobody drinks vodka in our family, but we always bought it because all deals at the time were conducted not in rubles, but in vodka. For example, to repair boots or to buy coal, the payment was a bottle of vodka. And when Gorbachev enacted the “dry law,” everyone just began to make samagon [moonshine], including me. We had a lot of recipes for samagon. We purified it with charcoal, milk, and potassium permanganate and then infused it with cedar, added some vanilla, and got a beverage like cognac. Then payment for all services was a bottle of samagon.

Then we suddenly understood that until the fall of the Soviet Union, we had not been building communism, we had been living communism. The state had cared for us, we had been able to look to the future with confidence and plan our lives. We had work and our salaries were sufficient to live on. In 1982, when I retired, my pension was 132 rubles. I could provide for myself completely and even save a little bit. Later, my pension became 10,000 rubles, but it was impossible to buy anything with them. And after the national currency [of Kyrgyzstan], the som, was introduced, one som was worth about 20 rubles and my first pension payment in soms was around 30 soms. Here we have such arithmetic!

Coming back to my family, 26 years ago I was widowed – my husband Anatoly died. My eldest son, Boris, was married and his daughter Yulia was one year old. My children realized my dream – to get a higher education. My son finished the Agricultural Institute, and my daughter – the Polytechnical Institute. My husband and I saw everything in our lives: cold and famine and illiteracy. We tried to give our children everything that we couldn’t afford for ourselves.