Tag #130745 - Interview #87383 (Carol Margulies)

In my opinion, there was no communism in the past. You call that communism? What we had here wasn’t communism at all. There was widespread stealing and everyone knew it. Here’s a story I heard. A Russian man who had four children wrote to Stalin, ‘Comrade Stalin, I beg of you, give me a better job, so that we can get by; my wife isn’t employed, because we have four children and she has to look after them.’ Three months later or so an order came. The man was transferred to a guard’s position; the salary was even smaller than before. What could he do? Well, this is what he did: at night, when trucks would stop at the gate that he guarded, he would grab two or three pairs of shoes or anything else they carried. And his life took a turn for the better. This is how things went.