In recent evenings, I have been working through Solzhenitsyn’s novel entitled The First Circle. Even though I have regularly found myself falling asleep reading, I have found the book to be fantastic. It is about a group of intellectual prisoners that were put into “special camps” during Stalin’s time. I have not finished, but thus far it documents their struggles to build a voice scrambler (or copy an American model) and their worries (or lack thereof) about being gotten rid of. It is quite interesting to read Solzhenitsyn’s interpretation of what transpired.
Today at language lesson, we were talking to Marina (our teacher) about the book and her impressions. She talked about how difficult it has been for Russian society to maintain itself when many of the elite intellectuals were exiled and killed during Stalin’s time. She feels that music and literature have suffered the most and she hopes it is turning around. She has been trying to enlighten us as we (I) have been in the dark on most cultural issues. She has a very interesting, and seemingly informed point of view.
Being the son of an excavator/farmer, I am a bit more interested in machinery than in music and literature (I apologize in advance if the following paragraphs bore those of you who don’t have similar interests). Today I was astonished to see a Caterpillar excavator on tracks. It was the first modern piece of machinery that I have seen. I have seen countless excavators on rubber tires that seem to be circa 1970. Most of the backhoes look like 1970 International tractors retro-fitted with a blade and clankity old backhoe. And I have been told that they are new.
I have talked to several people and I am starting to put it together that Russian engineering was really done a disservice by Stalin’s special camps and purges (from an American point-of-view, a lack of competition probably hurt a lot as well). For example, I have been frantically searching for a rotary tiller and have come to the hypothesis that such an item does not exist here. Everything is done by hand because “labor is cheap.” It is a new point of view for me as my dad was very successful in convincing me that efficiency is everything. As I work to convince people at DCU that efficiency is a good thing, I am sure that my equilibrium may tilt in the other direction… I spent an hour and a half making a shovel handle today and another hour fixing another handle yesterday. Tools here also leave something to be desired, but I will leave that topic for later (possibly it will be even more boring).
-Dave
