Tag #114395 - Interview #92211 (Boris Girshov)

In our house there was a kitchen with a Russian stove [2], a dining room, a hall, some sort of sitting-room and a small bedroom. In winter we heated stove only for cooking, therefore it gave little heat. In each room there was a round furnace, and in the bedroom there was a small stove bench on which it was possible to lay and get a warm. The furniture was poor: an expandable square table in the sitting-room, ordinary chairs, stools, iron beds. Parents slept on wooden beds. There were also a wardrobe, a sideboard for plates and dishes, a table for me and my sister where we did our homework in turn. There was no water supply, so I used to bring water from neighbors’ well, or sometimes from the lake. Parents also brought water from the well.

We kept no animals. We had only a vegetable garden. Together with my sister we had to dig it up, take manure from neighbors’ cow and fertilize. We had 6 vegetable beds. We ate onion, carrots, beet, and cucumbers from our vegetable garden, and had to buy all the rest foodstuffs.