In the summer of 2005, during an ethnographic study of religious life in the Mari El Republic, I visited the family of a friend who lives in a village 50 km from the capital of the Republic of Yoshkar-Ola. When I got ready to go back, my hosts arranged for me to get a ride - so I met the former chairman of the local collective farm, who was driving to his home in the suburb of Yoshkar-Ola. This man had been chairman since the early 1980s, and when we got into the black collective farm Volga (he sat next to the driver and I sat in the back seat), he told me that it was thanks to his efforts and influence that the road we were supposed to travel was paved. The teachers ' family, where I stayed, also spoke about the chairman as a person who did a lot for the village and continued to defend the interests of rural areas of Mari El in the government of the republic. However, much to my surprise, the memoirs of this successful champion of socialist modernization were not limited to such things as laying roads or implementing technical projects. Among other things, the chairman of the collective farm had to be able to work with paperwork; and this was a very difficult job, especially if it was necessary to report on the loss of cattle. For example, if a certain milkmaid showed clear success in fulfilling and exceeding the plan, other milkmaids "knew ways" to make her cows sick and die. The Chairman knew for a fact that the cause of death was witchcraft. But for an official report, he had to give other reasons that would be acceptable to you- page 485six-year-old bosses. The illness and death of dairy cattle could put the collective farm in an unfavorable light, and as chairman he was torn between the understanding that these cases were the inevitable consequences of inequality caused by socialist competition, and the biological and medical language of official reports. This story once again demonstrates what any researcher working with Soviet archives knows very well: writt ... Читать далее