I was 9 years old when my grandmother, mother and I arrived in Minsk on August 7, 1947, from Rubtsovsk, where they worked in OSMCh15 (Special Construction and Assembly Unit) at the construction of the Altai Tractor Plant. After the war, recruiters often appeared there:  the devastated country had to be restored. One could choose: Stalingrad, Kharkov, Rostov, Saratov, Molotov, Minsk… Mother sent inquiries to acquaintances there. From Stalingrad, Kharkov, Rostov, we heard the same: there is work, there is no housing, there is famine… From Saratov – you can rent a corner or, at best, a room, commercial prices (without food stamps) for food: bread 1 kg – 40 rubles, 1 kg potatoes – 15-16 rubles, 1 liter of milk-10-12 rubles, ten eggs – 40-45 rubles, one kilo of butter -160-170 rubles. My grandmother received 945 rubles per month, my mother’s salary was less. 

We went to Minsk. Eight families arrived in two freight cars from Altay. The trip took 31 days. Over the Volga we saw with our own eyes what had to be reconstructed: ovens and chimneys stood where once villages used to be, and windowless walls, surrounded by brick rubble overgrown with grass and young trees, stood instead of towns. We were accommodated in an unfinished MTZ workshop, in huts with a roof and glazed windows, but without floors and partitions. Families were separated from each other by sheets on strings. Natalia Nikolayevna [Maklyatsova] writes that MTZ was built by German prisoners of war. But there were no fewer of our own – prisoners, disqualified, enlisted from the East, partisans, factory workers, residents of local villages. […] The first evening of our life in the hut had a horrible beginning: the bright sunset after the rain, outside the window there was barking of dogs and violent shouts “Lay down!”, we rushed to the windows, the column of prisoners was laying in a big puddle, guards were shooting over their heads with machine guns… I still cannot comprehend what it meant. Neither in Rubtsovsk nor in Minsk were prisoners treated like that.

Natalia Nikolaevna writes about panel barracks. We were then given a room of 12 meters with a solid fuel stove in the barracks No. 31. This was not merely a barracks, it was the so-called “socialist town”, just like in Rubtsovsk. It consisted of 32 barracks, where rooms were arranged along a corridor that you could enter from two sides. In the barracks where we lived, on one side of the corridor there were some offices of the trust, on the walls and doors there were orders, instructions, and a wall newspaper. In addition to the barracks, there was a post office (post office No.9), a savings bank, a store, and a school. Probably there was also a kindergarten, but I do not remember it. In other words, we had a full set of social and cultural amenities, only water was taken at the pumps, and there were garbage cans and latrines with cesspools between the barracks. The school that Natalya Nikolaevna writes about was school №11, I studied there for almost 1.5 years, then it moved to a new building in what now became a comfortable MTZ settlement […]. In the socialist town the school building was the focus of the architectural composition, proudly rising in the center of the city on a sloping hill.

…

On the last day before she died, my mother recalled her life (not an easy one). Remembering, she kept repeating after every half hour: “How did we work then! – At geological surveys before the war, at the collective farm “The Way to Socialism” and at the construction of the ATZ during the evacuation, at BTS, at Ortechstroy, at BPI [Belarusian Polytechnic Institute]. How happy I was then!” Happy in work, not in love, not in family, not in friends, but in work. That was their generation.

From K. A. Khachatryants, “Oni nachinali minskiy Renessans” [memoir of Xenia Khachatrants, the daughter of Iryna Khachatrants], Arkhitektura i stroitelstvo, No. 2, 2004: 34-35.