Tag #144346 - Interview #78096 (samuel sukhenko)

And then everything began: no job, no money. Special food-confiscation units, for Bolshevik powers, took our cow, grain, horses - everything. Then an American aid society appeared and fed the Jewish children. They gave us rice and cocoa. My aunt had five children. Her husband died from the Spanish flu. What could that poor woman do? My father supported her. We lived in miserable conditions. There were two reasons. First, the food-confiscation units ate all our grains. The next year, we had a poor crop, so when spring 1922 came, we had nothing to plant. The authorities gave us some corn seed, and my father took me to plant it. He chopped a hollow in the ground, and I dropped the seeds. That autumn we had a fantastic harvest, but life still was very hard. Everything was incredibly expensive. For instance, a kilo of corn was 3 millions rubles, while a box of matches was 1 million. However, the same year, 1922, Lenin introduced the New Economic Politics. The next month the market was filled with various goods.