A story about the people and about the Murka cat

     (translated into English by Valery Kirillov)


     However, Natalia Leontievna - Zina's mother, loved to grow and harvest rare plants in their region for the winter. She grew tomatoes, cucumbers, and chicory. To plant onions and tomatoes with cucumbers in June, the whole family dug up the ground in the garden. Then they made trenches for the width of the bed and a depth of 1.5-2 bayonets of the shovel. The earth from the trench was carefully laid out on both edges of the trenches so as not to mix. Then everyone who could carried fresh (not rotted) manure from the backyard and poured it into the trenches. The trenches were filled with manure level with the ground level in the garden. After that, manure was covered with earth and beds were formed. Before planting seedlings, deep enough holes were made and onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage were planted in them. After that, they were covered with bags, floor woven paths, so that the seedlings would strengthen. And at the end of June, the beginning of July, the plants could finally "walk" - they removed the covers. As the plants strengthened, the holes were sprinkled with earth.
     Tomatoes, even almost green, were loved by Zina's older brother, Alyosha. Therefore, he actively helped Natalia to raise them. As soon as the tomato began to change color slightly, Alyosha announced that he forbids tearing this tomato, this one would be his. And soon he was walking around and enjoying an unripe tomato.
     But cucumbers were especially loved by their cat Murka. She was white with foxy spots. Zina found out about it one day. She saw from the high porch how Murka made her way into the vegetable garden and stopped in a bed of cucumbers. The lashes of cucumbers were already quite high. Alyosha built a wooden frame of slats over this bed so that it would be possible to tie up the whips of cucumber plants, and if it was cold, then it would be possible to cover them. Zina saw a Murka's tail sticking out of a bed of cucumbers high above the frame.
     What is she doing there? - Zina was interested. Slowly she got to the cucumber bed and saw a funny picture. The cat was gnawing a small cucumber hanging on the whip. And she did it with such pleasure. She could be seen waving her fluffy tail with pleasure. And the eyes and muzzle were smiling.
     Zina ran into the hut and called her mother, Natalia Leontievna, to the window. And they smiled together and watched the cat Murka happily eat fresh cucumbers. Then they observed a similar picture more than once. That's such an unusual cat-Murka Zina had as a child.
     Then came August. Fog was rising from a nearby river (three meters from the garden). Natalia saved her plants on the root for some time, covering them with all sorts of rags and rugs. But closer to the middle of August, she cut her tomatoes with branches and, together with Alyosha, hung them on the walls in the hut. They hung like grapes. The branches gradually dried up, and the tomatoes turned brown. Rarely ripened to red. But they never rotted. Either the varieties were different, or the earth and air were still clean, without chemicals.
     I remembered how during my childhood under Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, probably after his trip to the USA, we were told in newspapers, on radio and on TV that a new stage of "chemicalization" of the national economy was beginning in the country. Now Lenin's slogan "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country" had to be supplemented, and it began to sound like this – "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country, plus chemicalization of the national economy." It was somewhere in the early 60s. Although I later learned that chemicalization was proclaimed in 1928 with the creation of the chemicalization committee under the Council of People's Commissars. But in the early 60s, the program of building communism in our country was proclaimed in 20 years - by 1980. How we imagined then that in the 80th there would be so much that the deficit would disappear, there would be an abundance of food, everything would be free and you could take everything as much as your heart desires. Paradise, that's all! The slogan – "From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs" seemed to be the height of a dream.
     The people were inspired and achieved a lot. We have set up many houses and factories. Many institutes, technical schools and colleges have been built and opened in regional and even district cities. We have trained a huge army of engineers, technicians, and competent workers. Many engineers began to work not only in factories and design organizations, but also in research institutes, which usually had their own pilot production. This made it possible to quickly check the effectiveness of new developments of scientists and engineers, to bring successful developments to mass production. Gifted students began to participate in such developments already during their studies at institutes under the guidance of teachers. This is not fiction. My course project supervisor Georgy Vasilyevich Surkov and I, during my studies at the 4th year of the Polytechnic Institute, received an author's certificate for an invention for the development of an automatic device for laying nozzle housings in cassettes for their transportation between technological operations  production of diesel engines. Even for publishing an article in the USA about this device, I received a small fee. And this was in the early 70s in the USSR.  I am telling this not for bragging, but to confirm the level of the education system in the 60-70s of the 20th century in our country. It was the created education system, the organization of science and production, plus the inspiration of young people, that made it possible to create a huge reserve of developments, which are still used today by new engineers and scientists. Now this system is widely used in China.
     We have set up many houses and factories. We made a huge number of rockets, tanks, planes, spaceships, got to the Moon, on which our lunar rovers began to crawl, got to Venus and photographed the stones on its surface. I remember pictures of the surface of Venus in the newspapers. People have improved agriculture. Only heaven has not come. Hell has come again. But people have long learned to adapt even to the conditions of hell. And they began to live their normal life again. Other slogans have now been proclaimed for the youth. Like - "There will be a lot of money – there will be a lot of happiness." True, not everyone has a lot of money and happiness, but does it really matter?
     Foods is now beyond measure, there is a lot of everything, even in remote villages. There would be money to buy it. However, while the majority of the population has enough money for the necessary. Well, not quite a lot. Engineers and doctors are still taught a lot. But there are not enough factories and hospitals where they should work. Therefore, university graduates go to work in the field of trade and services. Doctors, teachers, engineers in villages and small towns or not, or there are few.
     There was also no work in the provinces and villages – not large factories were closed. Well, people don't have complete happiness. They still do not know how to live so that everyone on Earth can live equally well. Or maybe it should be.
     At the top (in the celestial office) it is more visible.
Otherwise there will be no desire to work well…
     Oh, something we have gone far from Murka - lover of young cucumbers!