Oaks and Class Struggle

This autobiographical short story draws upon the author’s experiences as a Leningrad schoolboy in the early 1950s. It evokes the shortages and poverty of a post-war Soviet Union in which for many, only Communist Party membership and conformity yielded hope for protection and small advantage. Some of the forms by which the Party exercised control over schools, and the families of their pupils are described. The author and his classmates were drilled in conformity to Party “lines” of the time on Lysenko, Michurin, genetics, Darwinism, and religion. But more significantly, they were also inducted into early experiences of encouraged denunciation, collaboration, and shame. The title refers to an early failed experiment in engineered solutions to problems of climate change: the “Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature.” Since the story is set at a time when the author and his classmates were ready to graduate from The Young Pioneers, a Communist youth organization in which students were enrolled until the age of fourteen, the year in which the story takes place can be calculated as 1950–1951.