“And he was taken away for a ditty”: Memory about political folklore and repressions in a Northern village

Abstract

This essay is based on fieldwork and dwells on oral narratives about the performance of an anti-collectivization ditty. It will unfold on the political ditty in the 1920s - 1930s Soviet village. That era saw the rising interest in political ditty both among scholars and journalists and among Soviet repressive organs. The paper is focused upon a certain case of political prosecution for a performance of a ditty in neighboring villages (Ruchyi and Megra) of the White Sea Zimny Bereg (the Winter Coast) region. The case took place in 1938, when at haymaking a man and a woman performed an anti-kolkhoz ditty: “Cow was walking up a hill, / Tears were dripping on her nose, / Comrade Stalin has deceived us, / We are quitting the kolkhoz” (Shla korova po ugoru, / Slezy kapali na nos. / Obmanul tovarisch Stalin, / Ne pojdem bol’she v kolhoz). The man was sentenced to 10 years of labor camps and never returned home. The woman who performed the ditty with him was acquitted. The paper deals with archive materials, interviews with the relatives and neighbors of the persecution victims, the memoirs of the purged man’s son, a journalist from Mezen’ by the name of Sergei Domoroschenov. Even under the assumption that the local memory of persecution for the performance of political folklore was inspired or at least reinforced and legitimized by Sergei Domoroschenov’s publications, the people in the two villages interpreted this memory in different ways. In Megra, where the condemned man used to live, the woman was said to having had reported the case to the authorities, while this version is absent in oral narratives recorded in Ruchyi, the home village of the persecuted woman, where she is remembered as a good person who was falsely indicted “for a ditty”.