duties he was to take upon himself, he did not try to duly implement them. After the lapse of the declared time he sent a properly fabricated document to the commissariat, stating that [22] the collective of a given institution or factory had done excellent work, often exceeding the quota by a few hundred per cent (sic!). In one word, everything was wonderful …
Local newspapers printed photographs of the best strike (competitive) workers of both sexes.596 Yet inspections in such exemplary collectives often brought very sad results and ended in imprisonment of the management, exclusion from the party, etc. Here is one more example of how such a beautiful idea can be distorted.
Men born in 1918, 1919, and 1920 were drafted in the summer of 1940.597 I was exempted on account of having a sight defect exceeding minus five dioptres. Some of the conscripts were drafted into the Red Army a month after standing before the draft commission. My best friend was sent to a flight school in Engels, the capital of the Volga German Autonomous Republic but he did not stay there for long. The authorities did not trust him because he had [23] relatives abroad, which in the Soviet conditions constitutes a grave sin. My friend was detached to an infantry regiment stationed two hundred kilometres east of Kuybyshev598 with a group that had arrived from the recently seized territories. We exchanged letters until the outbreak of the war. Service in the Red Army is strenuous, as the Red Army introduced rigid wartime rules for its soldiers with the outbreak of the Winter War.599
My friend was hospitalised a few times. Immediately before the outbreak of the war he wrote to me that his regiment was leaving for a summer camp but he put those words in inverted commas. In the spring of 1941 many of my friends passed their finals, received their diplomas, and were assigned jobs.
