Life's Grand on the Collective Farm

I ended up staying home sick today (I'll spare you any graphic details of illness; let's just say this was all due to a bad plate of Hungarian ghoulash and leave it at that). Whatever I had, I knew was not serious enough to warrant a trip to the doctor, so I self-medicated with Sprite and plenty of Web browsing until, in the late afternoon, I felt well enough to venture outside in search of something to eat.

In retrospect, though, it was a good thing I did stay home, because it meant I was home when a woman in my school's central office rang about 4:00 to ask if I would be home at six. I told her I would and asked why she needed to know. And then I heard words I have been longing to hear ever since I arrived in Moscow four months ago:

"Alexei [the school driver and sometime handyman] is delivering a washing machine to your flat."

For the past four months, I have managed my laundry situation (if you can call it managing) through a method I call Ignoring the Massive Pile of Dirty Clothes on Your Bedroom Floor. Basically, I wash clothes every two to three days, on an as-needed basis, but always planning ahead to be sure I won't run out of clothes faster than air-drying can get anything dry enough to wear. I assume this to be about two days for a pair of slacks hung on a hanger in the hall closet, a bit less if I can get a bit of steam pipe in the bathroom free to clean them (trickier now that a new roommate has moved in and I must now share the steam pipe with him).

I guess that, in the modern age, we don't get much chance to be rhapsodically joyful about technology. The latest in digital television may get a few oohs and ahs at a trade show, but it doesn't seem magical the way television must have when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Even the Internet we take for granted. I finally have a great Internet connection that doesn't cut out every two minutes, and what do I use it for? Mostly, online Scrabble (and the occasional Blog post, of course).

But after living without a washer for four months, finally having one gives me a feeling I can only explain by describing, fittingly, a piece of retro Soviet art. All over Moscow, there are souvenir vendors selling reproductions of Soviet propaganda posters, I assume mostly to foreign tourists. One of them shows two figures in the foreground: a man in overalls and a cap and a woman with her hair in a kerchief, obviously farmers. In the background is a tractor, probably the first these people have ever had or seen. The woman has her hand cupped up to her mouth and is shouting, presumably, at the people of the 1930s who would have seen this picture. Underneath this scene is something in Russian that, while I can't translate it, probably means something like, "Ain't life grand on the collective farm?"

Okay, obviously this is a propaganda poster and a total distortion of life in Stalinist Russia (a more realistic poster would say something like, "ain't life grand now that Pop's been shot for having five kopecks more than our neighbor down the road"). But something like that excitement over a new piece of technology is what I briefly got to experience today. This machine will mean no more massive pile of clothes on my floor. It will mean no more having to hope to God that a pair of socks dries in time for me to wear it tomorrow, when I realize I didn't have quite as many clean pairs saved up on my dresser as I thought I had.

And so, for one shining moment at least, life is grand here on the collective farm.