The following, for example, is related by F. I Kalugina, an old-age pensioner, 78 years old, formerly employed at the Pyotr Alexeyev Textile Mill in Moscow, and now living in the home of aged working women organized at that enterprise: "I am an old textile worker. Under the tsar I lived in dire poverty and degradation. Since the mill owners and landlords were overthrown my life has been a happy one, and in my old age I am free from care and worry.
“We old folks here are quite a happy family, living in cleanliness and comfort. We cannot be grateful enough to our Soviet Government and to Comrade Stalin for all this-the good food and clothing, the bright, clean, warm rooms, with comfortable furniture-couches, wardrobes,sideboards, carpets, flowers-everything one could wish for.”
And how was the life of a worker under Tsarist rule?
In former Russia things were entirely different. Anna Maximovna Pavelyeva, a veteran worker at the Krasny Bogatyr Plant, relates the following:
“Happily, our children and grandchildren are not experiencing the burdens and privation that we old workers had to put up with in the old days before the Revolution. If any of us fell sick we dragged ourselves to work just the same. What else could we do? We got no assistance when we were sick, and if we stayed away from work for more than a couple of days we lost our jobs. The -old people had a particularly hard time. If a worker became too old to work there was nothing left for him to do but go begging. Nobody helped him, neither the state nor the factory owner for whom he had sacrificed his strength.”
These words, spoken from the heart, vividly reflect the inhuman and unbearable conditions of the working people of tsarist Russia. This life of torment and suffering was swept away forever in October 1917. The Great October Socialist Revolution,which established the Soviet regime in Russia, gave the working people not only freedom, but also material benefits, the possibility of leading a prosperous and cultured life.
This reminds me of a story I heard from a co-worker about some Russian grandparents he knew that would still sing the Soviet national anthem with the Stalin era lyrics. We had a good conversation about how you can generally tell whether someone came from a rich or poor background when they immigrated from a socialist/communist-led country