Contribution of rural women and children of Tatarstan to the Victory in the Great Patriotic War
The Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Republic of Tatarstan continues a series of publications devoted to the agriculture of the Republic of Tatarstan during the Great Patriotic War. Tatarstan during the war years acquired a particularly important role in the food supply of the army and the population. Moreover, women became the leading force in the agricultural sector of Tatarstan during the war. In the collective farms of Tatarstan, they produced up to 70-75% of the total number of workdays, they also made up 75% of the permanent workers of state farms.
Schoolchildren also kept up with the adults. Child labor was especially widely used in weeding, haymaking, threshing, harvesting, etc. The school year in rural schools began later than expected.
Amina Yunusova from Tenkovsky (now Verkhneuslonsky) district of Tatarstan recalled: "From the age of 12, when the war began, we worked on the collective farm for three months every year. We woke up at 3-4 o'clock in the morning. It was hard to wake up. We performed various jobs. I remember how we worked at haymaking: the boys mowed, and we first broke up huge piles of hay to have time to dry them before dinner, then turned them over, and in the evening collected them again in the piles. You get so tired during a day that you can hardly drag your feet home in the evening."
The disastrous situation in the agriculture of Tatarstan was observed with machine-building personnel. After the mobilizations carried out in the country, there were very few people left in the village who knew how to handle equipment. In these conditions, women who received machine-building specialties in the pre-war period provided significant support to the agricultural sector. However, only at the expense of previously trained personnel, it was not possible to cover the loss of machine operators, and therefore the regional committee gave instructions on the organization of short-term courses for machine operators. The wartime press widely covered positive examples of such initiatives. The share of women in the composition of tractor drivers in the Tatar ASSR during the war years rose from 21 to 73%, and combine harvesters-from 26 to 79%.
Another acute problem in the agriculture of the republic was the insufficient number of managerial personnel. Already in 1941, out of 3884 heads of collective farms of Tatarstan, 2586 people left to the front. This work was taken under control of the political departments recreated in the village by a special resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) in autumn 1941. For 1942, 2,760 people were nominated for the positions of collective farm chairmen, including women who were very actively nominated for leading positions. Their number among chairmen during the war period increased from 19 to 320, among foremen of field teams - from 150 to 6327, among the heads of livestock farms-from 747 to 2575.
The work of rural women and children of Tatarstan was really hard, but at the same time very important and necessary. For the most part, the food supply of the army and the population fell on fragile women's and children's shoulders. Their selfless work in the fields of the republic was a great contribution to the Victory in the Great Patriotic War!