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Joldosh Oskonbaev, who is Kyrgyz, was born in 1936. He grew up in the village of Orto-sas, in Naryn oblast [province]. He graduated from a university in Bishkek and spent much of his life working at the government garage in Naryn. “The cinemas were full of Russian movies in the beginning. But then, starting in 1960, Kyrgyz films started to appear, too. There were big lines for the Kyrgyz movies,” he recalled. Dovlet Hojamuradov and Gulzara Hayytmuradova interviewed him in Bishkek on March 21, 2009.

I had a very hard life. I have been through cold and hunger. I was in the first grade and, after nine months, the war [World War II] ended. We lived badly, because those were hard times. Starting in first grade, after classes, we helped in the fields. Everyone, including the women, harvested the grain by hand. There was always a little bit of grain left in the field and we gathered the leftovers. In Kyrgyz, we called the leftovers mashak.

We were given the assignment in school to gather a certain quantity of leftover grain every day. So we gathered it and brought it to the storehouse, where the deputy head of the storehouse accepted it. Then he checked to make sure we had fulfilled our assignments. If you did not gather the assigned quantity, you were punished. The punishment could include being expelled from class and school was important to us then so that was bad.

We lived in a two-room house instead of a yurt. We had a furnace to get us through the winter. We stoked the furnace with pressed animal dung and firewood. During the famine, we forgot the taste of certain foods. All of us just ate talkan [oats]. Sometimes we had bread. I guess, a person can get use to anything.

I had an elder brother. I also had three sisters: one was born in 1930 and another in 1932. I was born in 1936. Then there was a brother who was born in 1940 and died in 1942. My father died in 1944. He had been a shepherd. He was only 54 when he passed away. The rest of us were left with only our mother.

During the war we hated the Germans, because there was news on the radio and in the newspapers telling us about the devastating events of the war. I think the whole population hated them during the war. When we were children, our elders would even scare us by saying, “The Germans are coming!” But I was in East Germany back in 1966 and I found that Germans were very nice people. Later, I went to West Germany, too. I was invited by my relatives, who had stayed in West Germany after the war. So I took my brothers and went to visit my relatives in Germany and I found out that Germans were fine people. I think, even during the war, there were people who were fascists and people who were not.

When I was little, I liked reading the old Kyrgyz legends during my childhood. I read them in Kyrgyz: Kurmanbek, Jangysh-Bayysh, Erta Byldy, Ertushik, and also, later, books by Chingis Aitmatov. I didn’t read classics or Russian writers. The books were all written in the Latin alphabet back then. I don’t know how, but I knew how to read that alphabet. I had an uncle who made us read every evening, especially during the winter. I think I read a couple of those books two or three times.

During my childhood, I also read newspapers. In 1944, I was in the first grade and the war ended. During the war, though, there were lots of articles about the war. Those articles were in Kyrgyz and they told us everything: things about the Germans, about the events in the war zone, about the Soviet army’s advances, and so on.

We liked Stalin very much back then. Everyone, adults and young people alike, sympathized with Stalin. Our teachers used to tell us that Stalin was winning the war, Stalin was feeding us, Stalin was clothing us. People could not not like him, given the circumstances.

There were five children and our mother in our family. She was busy feeding, clothing and taking care of all of us. It was hard. Then, when my older brother became a bookkeeper, our life straightened out a little bit. He was taken into the army after two years, though. There was an earthquake in Ashgabat [Turkmenistan] in 1948 [1] and he served for a year there [rebuilding the city] and then he was transferred to Vladivostok and spent the rest of his service there.

I worked on the farm until fourth grade – 1948. After that, I was put to work transporting grain. The means of transportation was called a shine (in Kyrgyz). It was a horse pulled by a sledge. We loaded the grain onto the sledge, which looked kind of like a pair of skis. The grain was carried to one place and the hay, to another. There was no building, only a place surrounded by a fence. I did that until the seventh grade. Our school only had seven grades.

I helped on the collective farm during my free time and my vacations until the end of the seventh grade. We mostly sowed wheat and barley. The hay from them was used to feed the livestock. We also planted crops in our yard at home. Few people planted fruit in Naryn oblast [province], because it is one of the coldest places in Kyrgyzstan. There was no shortage of fruits, though. Dungan people brought them and sold them at the local bazaars. They were lots of them during the wartime and afterwards, but later – during the 1990s – most of them left Naryn.

In 1951, I finished the seventh grade. We had two schools in the city of Naryn. Our village was five kilometers from the city. We had no watches then, so we couldn’t keep time very accurately. There were times when there was a full moon in the early morning and we thought it was the sun coming up and started walking to school. When we got to school, we realized that it was too early for classes, that the school wasn’t going to open for another hour or so. After school, we returned on foot, too. I did that for three years.

The village school had seven grades. It was built in 1933 and it was very cozy. Then I studied in Naryn, which was a standard school. There were two schools there: the Russian school, named after Chikalova; and the Kyrgyz school, named after Toktogul. I studied at the Toktogul school and graduated in 1954. Boys and girls studied together.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. I was in the ninth grade in Naryn. On March 5, if I recall correctly, close to 2 p.m., he passed away. The news was broadcast on the radio. All the children, all the teachers – everyone – cried. It was a hard time when he passed away.

During my school years, groups of actors and singers from Bishkek would visit our village and perform in the local theatre. They would come once or twice a year. Their performances were in Kyrgyz and we enjoyed them. We also had a school choir. They performed from time to time, mostly during holidays. The rest of the time it was very quiet in the village.

After graduating from school, I started working on the collective farm. I could not get into university right after school because Russian was hard for me and I failed the Russian exams. The schools were fine, but we had no Russian teachers that could teach us effectively. The only Russians in the city were the military people. Well, the teachers tried to teach us, but we failed, I guess. There was a old woman teacher who cried because we were such bad students.

We had no tea back then. We had boiled water and talkan. Talkan is prepared by frying barley and then crushing it. So we put one spoonful of talkan into a glass of boiled water and that made our meal. We had this three times a day. Sometimes, at work, we had milk for lunch. It was skimmed milk – without the fat – and each person received a ration of half a liter each working day. Even after the war, in 1948 we still lived on this diet. We had this kind of hard life until the 1950s.

Back then, religion was prohibited. People believed in God anyway, though. There were one or two moldos [mullahs] in each village. Moldos read prayers during funerals or on Kurman Ait [Eid al-Adha], Orozo Ait [Ramadan], or other holidays. There were no mosques though. The moldos were just invited to various places when they were needed. A moldo is the same as any other believer, except that he should know more about Muslim law and about the Koran. But back then, there was no difference. For instance, in our village, the moldos were older people who learned Islam on their own. The youngest of the moldos was in his 40s.

There was a guy who worked as a tractor driver at the garage where I worked and he became a moldo. He learned about Islam on his own. No one expected him to become a religious person, because he liked to drink vodka and do other things that are not allowed in Islam. People say that he quit those kinds of things, though. All over Central Asia, there are people who like religion and learn about it on there own.

After a while, tractors started to appear and then combines. The first combines appeared in the 1960s. They were called Stanets and they were pulled by tractors. The first combines appeared in the 1960s. Before that, we prepared the fields with a horse and plow and harvested the grain by hand. It was such a pain to do everything manually. Life was hard then. But people didn’t object, because it was wartime. So everything was sent to the war zones. Even sheep were milked and that milk was used to make cheese and the cheese was sent to war zones. All this food belonged to the collective farm and people couldn’t steal the goods that belonged to the collective farm. If a person was caught stealing, he was sent to jail. So we lived a hungry life and we had nothing to wear.

I studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Bishkek. I was accepted in 1957 and graduated in 1963. I had not been able to get in for two years after high school, because of my Russian exams. Then I went to the army in 1955 and served in a construction battalion. There were 28 people in our group from Kyrgyzstan, including Chechens, Karachays, and Ingush. [2] We helped build factories in the Urals. There were job cuts after a year, so the government freed us in 1956. My Russian improved during my service. I got back home in October of 1956 and, by 1957, I had been accepted to the Polytechnic Institute. I studied in Russian there. It was hard in the beginning, but it got easier by the third year. By then, I knew Russian pretty well. But I forgot it after graduation, since I worked in Naryn, among Kyrgyz people for 34 years and everything was in Kyrgyz.

While I was a university student, we used to go the drama theatre [in Bishkek] almost weekly. We had no discos or night clubs then, so we spent time at the cinemas. The cinemas were full of Russian movies in the beginning. But then, starting in 1960, Kyrgyz films started to appear, too. There were big lines for the Kyrgyz movies. We had only one dance place, which was in Dubovy Park, and it had a band. They played Russian music and waltzes and tangos. So we would go there from time to time. I didn’t like dancing very much, so I rarely went there. But when I went, I used to dance the tango.

After graduation, I worked at automobile bases [government garages], as an engineer and, later, as the director of the automobile base in the city of Naryn. I was the head of the Regional Transportation Union for about 10 years. I also worked as director of the Automobile [Driving] School. My countrymen in my village turned to me when the reforms started and I worked there as head of the village government for four years. So, that was my career.

I got married in 1963, after I graduated from the institute. My wife was in her second year in the Medical Institute when we met in 1962. She is from the Issyk-Kul oblast [province] and I am from Naryn oblast [province], so two people from bordering regions got married.

Khrushchev came to power after Stalin. There was a meeting in Moscow and he presented himself in that meeting, praising himself, saying that there would be enough grain for three to five years. The year after his speech, 1963, there was a famine all over the Soviet Union. There was bread but not enough. Everyone stood in long lines to get bread. I was working in the city of Jalal-Abad back then. I remember standing in a long line, starting early in the morning, to get some bread. Khrushchev had lied to the people. He was not the best leader; he was just a braggart. Well, he was replaced in 1963.

Khrushchev’s successor was Brezhnev. People started to live better during Brezhnev’s time. People started to buy cars. In comparison to the Khrushchev era, the living standard increased. The reason is probably that he was a good leader and a good manager. He made our lives better

In 1963, my family was in Jalal-Abad with me. I was working as an mechanical engineer in the local automobile base there. My wife was working as a nurse in the Jalal-Abad Hospital. We were just recent university graduates, so we only got a two-roomed apartment when we came to Jalal-Abad. Our salaries were good, though. I earned 80 rubles and so did she. That was more than enough for us and the kids. We could cover, food, clothing, and expenses.

The minister of our republic [the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic] visited us in Jalal-Abad in 1964. So I signed up for the meeting and showed up. At the meeting, he asked me why I’d come and I told him I wanted to be transferred home to my region, Naryn. He told me to go and work in Naryn and signed the order for my transfer. Ever since then, I have stayed in Naryn and lived well. In Naryn, the government gave us an apartment and we lived there with our children until 1976. Then I built a house and we lived there.

Until the 1970s, we used to dry fruits and vegetables. However, starting in the 1970s, the technology of canning was popularized and soon it became part of the everyday lives of our people. People started to can jams and salads.

In the 1980s, Gorbachev came to power. He was the member of politburo, so we knew who he was. First he became the secretary of the TsK [Central Committee of the Communist Party]. Then he got to the top and started his perestroika. I think it did not work out. For example, he wanted to prohibit vodka. Russian people didn’t like that, so they started to make vodka on their own. Even Kyrgyz people started doing it. Kyrgyz people didn’t even know what vodka was before the Russians came. The Russians brought vodka to Kyrgyzstan. I think people in Issyk-Kul province started drinking it first and then the people of Naryn caught on and left them behind.

My wife and I have five children now: two boys and five girls. We had one more boy, but he was a brat; one day he fell from the roof and died. He was a good student, but misbehaved himself from time to time. Now we have only two sons. All of my children have higher educations. My oldest son graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University. My oldest daughter is a doctor. My second daughter graduated with a degree in economics. My youngest daughter graduated from Bishkek Humanitarian University. My youngest son got accepted to Slavic University, stopped his studies, and left for England. After he returned home, he graduated from that university with a degree in economics.

We moved to Bishkek in 1997. My eldest son brought us here a year after I start losing my sight. The local doctors operated on me, but they did it wrong. Then, in 2003, my youngest son took me to Germany for another operation. After that, I could see well – more or less. Then, in 2007, my grandson got sick and he used to cry a lot. On July 13, I got stressed out because of all the noise in the house – all the crying – and the next day I couldn’t see.