User:Gbot71/sandbox

Life in the Colony
In the early days of the colony, nearly all of the day-to-day aspects of residents' lives were communally based: food, access to medicine, and other daily necessities were distributed equally among the residents, and all labour was wageless. Ruth Kennell would describe its organization in her personal journal: "The food is plentiful and well cooked, though the diet is too starchy...those who prefer to do their own cooking are given payocks (rations) for ten days. Soap and tobacco are rationed monthly. All colony members except children and mothers of infants must do useful work. In return the workers receive food, shelter, and certain winter clothing such as fur caps and gloves and felt boots. A community laundry launders ten pieces weekly for each worker. A shoe shop repairs shoes. We get along very nicely without money in Kuzbas Colony."

Despite this commitment to equality, however, tensions and discrepancies still arose between certain groups in the population. Industrial workers were the political majority, and had little patience for the white-collar residents, at one point voting to increase the working hours of office workers from eight to nine [for flimsy reasons - either explain the reasons or delete]. Additionally, the gender roles which many of the women workers had hoped to escape would creep into daily life, as many were expected to take charge of household duties while simultaneously participating in colony work. There was also tension between the foreigners in general and the Russian residents, as each believed the other was receiving preferential treatment from the Soviet government.

Most of the communal aspects of colony life would come to an end with the institution of the New Economic Policy, as Kuzbass, along with all other Soviet enterprises, was expected to adopt a wage labour system in the name of increasing productivity. This would involve dividing the residents of the colony into seventeen different categories, a move which many of the [white-collar workers believed would only worsen the growing political power of the industrial workers - does this mean they thought it would increase their power, or diminish their power?]. Many of the foreign workers saw this as a betrayal of communist values, and would return to their home countries in protest. Two of the departees, Ruth and Thomas Doyle, would go a step further, accusing the Soviet government of having 'scammed' them and making claims that they had been pressured to participate in 'free love' with the colony, with its Russian leadership attacking the idea of monogamy (a statement which all of the remaining colonists would refute).