Living In a Small Friendly Town- Mikhail Arzumanyan
Mikhail Arzumanyan has recently moved to America from Russia, and lives with his youngest son’s family. Mikhail is a very hard worker and will do anything to make the lives of his family, which he loves tremendously, better. He is seventy years old now and enjoys reading, watching soccer, and going out to the park. He was born on October 26, 1937, in Martuni, a small town in Nagorno-Karabakh. Mikhail had a difficult childhood growing up without his parents. He grew up in a small town with about 300 houses and spent most of his time working on a very beneficial kolkhoz, or collective farm, where the products where divided among the people. Mikhail loved living in a small town where everyone was like family and he says that the best part about living on a small town is that, “Everyone knows you and respects you.”
I was born in 1937 in Nagorno-Karabakh in the region of Martuni. I lived there for twenty-two years. The town was small There probably 300 houses, no more than that. Everyone was kind. Everyone respected one another. There isn’t that, where someone doesn’t know everyone. It’s a small town.
Everyone helped one another. Whoever was building a house, everyone gathered, the young, and went to help build, pass bricks. In the town it is like brothers and sisters because everyone knew one another. And we worked and helped people.
In the town about everyone knows one another, because everyday we meet one another. We greet each other and work together on the collective farm. There is no town where one didn’t know everyone. I, from youngest to oldest, knew everyone.
The education was normal when I was little. There in the town I finished seventh grade. I was learning normally, but because I didn’t have my parents I couldn’t go to school. My father, I was one year old when they took him to war. After that I lived with my grandmother. My mother also, I didn’t see her. My grandmother took care of us. And there was no one to take us to school so that is why I left to work at the Red Bazaar. There the school was good, the students finished well. I didn’t learn I worked. There was no school during the war. Not a single notebook or pen or book.
In our town there was a big garden, and I was alone everyday worked the whole garden, planting what was needed. I, at five, six years already went to the woods to bring wood for heat.
I had good friends. A police chief, there was a chairman a good friend of mine. At the work place there were many good people, many friends of mine. My friends and I played volleyball, soccer. Everyday we went five kilometers to the Red Bazaar, there we also played.
There were always holidays and the whole small town always celebrated them together. At school, at work, any holiday, we all gathered together, family and friends. Everyone made parties and was together. For example if there was some kind of wedding or birthday, at the marketplace, people of forty, fifty gathered, we celebrated the holiday with music, happiness.
The news at that time was only one radio that talked about the war, World War II. I was six, seven years old when the radio was connected
In the town it’s not bad life, it’s good life. It was good life, normal, it’s just there was a kolkhoz, collective farm, and many people didn’t want to work on the collective farm. The young, were taken like in an army and they ran away, not coming back to the town, because they didn’t want to work on the collective farm.
There just all the men were taken into the army, and the children and women worked on the collective farm, to help grow crops and send to the war to support it. That’s how all the collective farms were in the towns. I even worked on the tractor there when I was small, ten, twelve years old. Worked with the plough, collected and planted grain. Before there was a combine we had to collect all the grain with our hands. We always took care of gardens and worked on collective farms. Even when we went to school and there was summer vacation, in the three months, we were forced to help on the collective farm. They forced us to work. The sun is coming from the top, we were seven, eight years old, and we had to follow the combine, when there was one, in the field picking up the dropped seeds in a bag and returning them.
In one town, there is a chairman, town soviet, every leadership. Party community, team leader, everyone. The day you worked they would write that you worked today, and at the end of the year after everything was collected they tell how much grain someone deserves, how much money each would get. That’s how the collective farm was. First, everyone worked to collect everything, and then it was handed out to the people and some percent went to the government. Products and money was given depending on how much, grain was given, butter was given, honey was given, wine, vodka. Whatever the collective farm collected was given to the people.
The people there worked on the collective farm and went to school. There were Azerbaijanis, Russians, and Armenians. There were different nationalities, and most of the people worked on the collective farm. There they worked with grain.
We build fences and there we kept pigs, sheep, and goats in the town. That way you benefited on that to. If you needed to, you would kill it to eat it.
In the town everyone gathered their animals and there was one guard that would take them to the field and look after them and at night they would come back and each animal went back to its yard. Not everyone would take their goats to the field, we would give it to one person who took them to the field and brought them back at night to their yards.
In the town life was better than in the city. People usually in the city would come to their parents in the towns in the summer and the parents lived better than their children in the city. Because the collective farm was good and beneficial.
Interviewed by Michael Arzoumanian