Dacha

[zvuv]

My mom’s father was a turner, or a machinist, who spent most of his life working at the Luch Footwear Factory in Minsk. According to family lore, he started working at ten, to help support his family, and had to stand on top of a box to reach the machinery. I have no idea if this is actually true; this would have been sometime around 1929.

Comments

[zvuv]

my grandfather did it with some friends, and he hired some people to help with certain aspects, but yes, he was very clever at making things, despite an abbreviated education.

my mom tells me in the 1950s he used to run a "side business" making some sort of electrical appliances in his kitchen (hot plates and electrical adapters, things like that) and selling them to neighbors, which was pretty risky, but a factory job didn't pay well, and he had three daughters and the in-laws to support.

it was the norm in my parents' generation to have one or two kids. the popular explanation is housing. in a noncapitalist economy, housing was distributed by the government, which made moving complicated. people could basically wait for their "turn" through the waiting list at their place of employment (and then it varied based on where they worked) or they could "exchange" homes.

when people got married, the biggest problem was where to live. often one spouse moved into the other's family home, and lived in their childhood bedroom (if they were lucky enough to have their own).

in my parents' case, my dad wouldn't even consider living with his in-laws, he regarded them as a crazy, backwards household. (my dad is a misanthrope.) he lived in a shared apartment with an older lady who later remarried, and my mom moved there. then, they traded their room for a one-bedroom (no living room) apartment, and all four of us lived there. then, because my parents really needed privacy, we traded that apartment and my grandmother's two-room apartment for one three-room apartment, so that me and my sister got our own room, with my parents sleeping in the living room. the flip-side? it was dirt cheap, in the center of city, relatively safe (in a working-class neighborhood but with decent schools). for regular working-class people, this would be out of reach in a capitalist system. so there was a trade-off.

(re. privacy: whereas my parents got their own room, they lost a lot of privacy to having to live with my dad's mom and her third husband, who had just had a stroke and had dementia.)

[themooselet]

Wow! I never knew the problems with housing. Loving this series :).