ABSTRACT
Elena Ponomarenko is the only woman we interviewed who was still working. At the age of eighty-two, she was still heading the museum of labor achievements at the Sibelectromotor plant, a top manufacturer of large engines. She was the factory’s oldest worker. All large industrial enterprises once had museums such as the one that Ponomarenko established. Overlooking her lack of formal education, an exiled revolutionary gave her a start in a journalistic career in the small Siberian town of Maslianino, where she became a correspondent for a local radio broadcasting station. The interview with Ponomarenko is one of our longest. The fifty years she worked as a journalist evidently affected the way she remembered things. The intensity of Ponomarenko’s response may in part reflect the fact that she came of age in the late 1920s, when official attitudes toward sexual issues had already begun to move in a more conservative direction.
