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When they heard in the village that I had studied at the Agricultural College for a year, they offered me a job as an agronomist in a neighboring village. I agreed. The chairman of the kolkhoz drove me to the field. He explained, ‘These are winter crops, this is a stubble field.’ I had no idea what this was all about. To cut a long story short: I returned to my parents and stayed there quietly. In Grigoropolisskaya I took three months’ training for combine operators at the Mechanic School, and after finishing it I began to work in the equipment yard. It was a cold winter. Huge sheds with tractors and combines. There were hardly any tools, but grips and files sticking to hands from the cold. I wrote a letter to the Ministry of Higher Education asking them where our college was evacuated. It was just incidental that the director of our college, Nikolay Vasilievich Nechaev, was chief of the department of agricultural college at the ministry at that time. I received their prompt response that my college had evacuated to Frunze [today Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan] and that if I wanted to continue my studies there, they would send me money for the ticket. They sent us money for the whole family.
Period
Interview
Bella Chanina