ABSTRACT
Before Posadskaya met Elena Dolgikh, she already knew that Dolgikh was a native Siberian, had worked most of her life as a teacher, had been a member of the Communist party, and had raised three children. In addition, despite her lack of higher education, Dolgikh had become an amateur ethnographer and published a unique book of riddles of the peoples of the Soviet Union, which she herself had collected. Dolgikh was the only one of our narrators who referred to the inferior economic status of Soviet women. At the teachers’ college she became an activist, editing the school’s wall newspaper, an instrument of propaganda that set out the party line as it applied to the school. Despite this evidence of loyalty, the “sword of Damocles,” her background, caught up with her: Someone denounced her by sending a letter to the school, declaring that she came from a family of kulaks.
