Our Factory Has Changed
The factory door creaked open. I drew a sharp breath.
The rubber smell hit me first — a thick, invasive greeting that went straight for the nose. Every room in the Third Galoshi Factory was steeped in it. Day or night, the stench of raw rubber cut with sulfur seeped up through the cracks in the floorboards. Spend even a single day here and it clung to your clothes, your skin, everything you had.
I'd been reporting for work for nearly three weeks. I ought to have grown used to it by now. But the smell that met me each morning shifted in concentration from one day to the next, and I still couldn't adapt.
"Comrade Supervisor. We've repaired all the pechkas, just as you instructed yesterday."
At the word pechka I glanced toward the shabby masonry stove set into the wall. No — I should say the stove that had been shabby.
Summer was almost upon us, so they wouldn't be much use for the moment. But Russian winters were infamous for their killing cold, and work like this was best done while we still had hands to spare. Besides, this would be the first winter I'd face since waking up as Yakov. I couldn't help but take it seriously.
"Good. Shall we see if the repairs hold?"
At my words, the faces of the women workers who'd been shivering in the cold brightened. The Red Triangle district caught the wind blowing off the Neva River head-on, so even in early June, indoor heat was not a luxury. It was a necessity.
"Yes. I'll light one now."
Foreman Ivan fed wood into the stove, and before long a dry heat rose through the room. The rubber smell receded. The scent of charcoal crept in to take its place, and warmth seeped into my whole body.
"Whoa...!"
"I-it's warm!"
"This winter we'll have to apply for ration coupons just for the right to freeze to death!"
Who said that last one?
I'd just been treated to a vicious piece of Russian humor, and I lifted my head without thinking, hunting for the source. I never found the culprit. Then again, in this country, identifying culprits was the work of informers and the NKVD — not a production supervisor. So I decided to drop the investigation.
"Foreman Ivan. How is the banya installation coming along?"
Ivan nodded and said it was going well. Nearby, the women workers smiled brightly and murmured their approval under their breath. A bathhouse in a rubber factory might sound absurd, but it had all started with a single incident.
"It's sypnoy tif!"
"...What's that?"
"A fever accompanied by a rash."
A fever...?
The doctor who'd come to the factory rolled up a woman worker's sleeve as he spoke.
"Look at this!"
On the arm he pointed to, red spots had spread from her wrist all the way to the inside of her elbow.
"It's highly contagious. After an incubation period of about a week, the patient develops a severe headache, pain behind the eyes, and aching throughout the muscles. In serious cases, it can be fatal."
"D-die...?!"
The woman being examined, terrified, was scratching at the rash on her arm hard enough to break the skin. Even I could see that was the wrong thing to do. I quickly stopped her.
"Don't scratch. You'll only make the sores worse."
"But Comrade Supervisor... it itches so much... sob!"
I caught her wrist with my gloved hand and pulled it away. She made a miserable face and started to cry. I felt for her, but scratching would only tear the skin further. I couldn't give her what she wanted.
I was discussing the matter with the doctor, putting on a suitably grave expression, when I suddenly noticed something small wriggling inside the rolled-up sleeve.
"What's this?"
The doctor looked where I was pointing and spoke.
"Lice. Well now... this woman must be exceptionally lucky."
What was that supposed to mean?
I asked, curious. He explained that in Russia, lice had long been considered a symbol of good fortune — a person crawling with them was thought to be lucky, a bringer of good luck.
They're just vermin that show up when you don't wash... Wait. Red spots and lice...?
"Doctor. Is it possible these insects are what's spreading the disease?"
"...Excuse me? I've never heard of lice transmitting illness."
The doctor tilted his head as if this were news to him, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
This damned barbaric age...
In the twenty-first century I'd come from, countless diseases had already been identified and conquered. In this era, they hadn't even properly named the pathogens that carried them. Drawing on that future knowledge, I was certain I knew which epidemic this was.
This is typhus.
I asked the woman's permission, then rolled up her other sleeve to check for more lice. Sure enough, red spots mottled her body, and there were traces of lice everywhere.
"We need to — we need to start disinfection immediately!"
I stood up at once and looked at the women clustered in the corner of the workshop. Typhus was highly contagious. These women spent all day working in a galoshi factory, with no chance to keep themselves clean. There was no guarantee that terrible disease wouldn't spread to every last one of them.
"Foreman Ivan. This woman needs to be isolated immediately."
I went on, looking at the infected worker.
"Her clothes need to be boiled... no. While we're at it, let's disinfect the entire factory."
"W-what?!"
Ivan hesitated at the words while we're at it.
"B-but Comrade Supervisor. That'll disrupt galoshi production..."
It wasn't that I didn't understand his concern. But—
"We've already filled this month's quota, haven't we?"
If the factory stopped working, a warning would come down from the Trust. But we'd already met the quota. There was no reason for a warning.
"Yes. The Trust assigned us a target of five thousand pairs this month, and we've already produced ten thousand, but..."
At my words, Foreman Ivan opened the accounts ledger. One hundred percent over target. Excellent.
The production plan the Leningrad Soviet had issued to the Third Galoshi Factory called for a total of five thousand pairs. At the time, Foreman Ivan had reportedly been plunged into despair when he saw the figures the Party had sent down. And no wonder. When I'd first arrived, the Third Galoshi Factory had only fifteen women workers. To fill the quota, each of them would have had to produce an average of three hundred thirty-three pairs of galoshi in a single month — in theory. All by hand.
But once we'd used the money Zverev had coughed up to procure high-quality benzene and recruit new skilled workers, the situation changed. The newcomers picked up the existing process quickly. With decent benzene adhesive, they no longer had to slather glue onto each galosh three or four times. Their hands sped up, and output rose as a matter of course.
It got to the point that even after giving the women a ten-minute break every hour, the vulcanizing kilns that baked the galoshi never stopped running. Foreman Ivan spent more time outside the factory than in it, scrambling to find extra kilns and the laborers to install them. And so, with the ten new workers added in, twenty-five women in all had produced ten thousand pairs of galoshi in three weeks.
"Then there's no problem using the remaining time to build facilities for the workers, is there?"
"...That's right."
"Then please hurry the banya construction. There's nothing better for preventing typhus."
Foreman Ivan nodded, looking a little sour about it. But the idea of looking after the workers' welfare must have pleased him in its own way — a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Then a question occurred to me, and I asked him.
"Foreman Ivan. What happens to the extra five thousand pairs we produced over quota?"
"Well..."
He flipped through the ledger and scratched his head.
"By regulation, the surplus all goes to the Trust as well, and any remaining profit is held in reserve at the factory."
"And what do we do with those profits?"
"Mostly we buy raw materials for the next month, or pay the workers' wages, but..."
His voice trailed off. He clearly had something more to say and was holding back. I pressed him.
"When we exceed the quota, we sometimes distribute a portion of the profit to the factory workers as premiya — a bonus."
"Ah, premiya!"
So the factory system of this period wasn't so different from the one I already knew. The Soviet Union of 1925 was in the thick of pushing the New Economic Policy — the NEP. At the time, the Red Triangle factory operated under a Trust and maintained khozraschyot, economic self-accounting, from the state. The state assigned the factory a work plan and, beyond that, left it alone. The enterprise met the quota handed down from above, banked the profit, and spent it on business development or workers' wages.
In other words, they had bolted a capitalist mechanism onto a planned economy — a peculiar contraption that flew the banner of socialism on the outside while capitalist gears turned underneath. The most striking feature of the NEP period was that the old regulations capping workers' wages had been abolished, and each factory now ran on sdelshchina, the piece-rate system. Even the red banner had been forced to admit that if you wanted to keep skilled hands tied to the state, you needed a carrot.
And no wonder. However much a backward economy was supposed to be Russia's inheritance, the Soviet economy after the Revolution had been on the brink of bankruptcy. Lenin, working from the premise that communism could only be built once capitalism had developed to a certain point, had been compelled to let capitalism back in.
Capitalism inside communism. That was the essence of the New Economic Policy...
"Foreman. If our factory pays out a premiya, how many rubles would that come to per person?"
Ivan counted on his fingers.
"Let's see... after deducting the cost of raw materials and equipment installation from the remaining profit, and taking the share set by the collective agreement... the twenty-five women would each receive about half a month's wages."
Half a month's wages for a woman worker... roughly fifteen rubles, then. Fifteen rubles was no small sum. It was enough to buy dozens of herring — the staple of ordinary Soviet workers — or a full hundred kilograms of black bread. A small fortune.
"Then distribute it."
"...Excuse me?"
"I mean give the entire premiya from the surplus to the women workers."
Ivan, who had been studying the ledger, looked up at me.
"A-all of it, you mean?"
"It's a number we reached because everyone worked themselves to the bone, isn't it? The women have every right to a reward that matches what they did."
"Th-then how large a share will you be taking, Comrade Supervisor?"
"...What?"
Ivan's eyes went wide. He hurried on, flustered.
"By custom, the supervisor dispatched by the Party takes his premiya first. The factory director and the shop foremen come after that."
"I don't need it. Split it among yourselves."
"What?! Are you serious? Then we could put at least twenty rubles in each woman's pocket!"
Just how much were the supervisors skimming if cutting them out raises it by twenty-five percent?
Once the premiya payout to the women was confirmed, cheers erupted through the factory. The visiting doctor smacked his lips with undisguised envy, and the women threw their arms around one another, each of them overflowing with it. For a moment, we all laughed together.
Buying people's hearts with a handful of rubles was a somewhat bitter business. But for them, pressing a herring into someone's hand would always land closer to the heart than any speech about ideals.
Someone called my name again. It felt... not bad at all.
Joy and hope — things that until now had seemed forever out of reach — bloomed in every pair of eyes around me. And why wouldn't they? Every problem that had been strangling the factory had vanished, output had doubled the quota, and now there was a premiya on top of it. I thought that at this rate, I might just finish my dispatch assignment without a hitch.
That is, until Zinoviev threw another wrench in the works.
Heels snapped together.
"Congratulations, Comrade Svanidze! In recognition of this quarter's surplus galoshi production, a special directive has come down from the Trust!"